Free The Longest Road by Jeanne Williams Page B

hot. Ed, you look like you could use some coffee. Belle, fetch the pie plates and some forks and knives. Ev’rett, get some milk out of the cellar. Ernie, Billy, get a couple of crates for your—” She burst into laughter that began deep in her belly. “Almost said cousins! Well, Laurie and Bud, I think that’s what we’ll call you anyway. Plumb ridiculous for you to call kids younger’n you are ‘aunt’ and ‘uncle’!”
    Swept through a rickety screen door fringed with oilcloth to scare off flies, a device that didn’t seem to affect the population, Laurie didn’t dare say she and Buddy should wash their hands first. She didn’t want to hurt Rosalie’s feelings or provoke her grandfather’s wrath with what he’d call her mother’s persnickety qualms. He was likely to point out that washing her hands and brushing her teeth hadn’t kept his daughter-in-law from dying young.
    Sitting on an apple crate, Laurie, beneath the table, wiped her hands as carefully as she could on her underskirt, which was cleaner than her dress. Would Daddy say grace?
    He didn’t. Just like a heathen, he took a big helping of pinto beans, a hunk of fat side meat with the hog’s skin cooked soft enough to chew, thanked Rosalie for the coffee she poured him, and took three golden-brown biscuits.
    Everett, who must be about ten, came in with a jar of milk. Hair and eyebrows bleached white as cotton, he had deep blue eyes that looked strange with his sun-browned skin. Like all the children, he was barefoot. Two-year-old Babe, angelically blond and earthily dirty—the one Rosalie had been pregnant with last time Grandpa visited, was kilted in a low-slung diaper over which her belly button protruded. The other children wore ragged bib overalls without shirts, including Belle.
    There uniformity ended, except for skins tanned wherever the overalls didn’t cover. Pug-nosed Ernie, eight, had straight brown hair and hazel eyes. Billy, a year older, had sandy curls and gray eyes. Skinny little Belle, who darted around like a hummingbird, was dark of hair and eye like her mother. Laurie hoped she’d stopped wetting beds because most likely they’d share one. Babe’s odiferous, stained diaper testified that she was a long way from housebroken.
    When Rosalie was so nice, it was a shame she wasn’t more particular. Mama used to excuse her by saying she’d grown up the sixth of nine children in a cabin over in the Kiamichi Mountains, with a part-Choctaw father who didn’t do much but drink and hunt and a mother who died birthing the last baby when Rosalie was five so that the brood more or less raised themselves. Grandpa liked to joke that he’d had to chase Rosalie down and put shoes on her before they could get married.
    She was a mighty good cook, though. After plates and pie pans were cleaned with morsels of biscuit, she took a big pan from the warming oven and wedged it among the emptied bowls and kettles. Melted sugar left caramelly streaks where juice had oozed through artistic slits on the good-smelling crust of the plum cobbler.
    Spooning out big helpings, Rosalie said, “This is the last of the plums I put up last year. Ever picked plums, Laurie?”
    When Laurie shook her head, Belle bounced on her crate. “It’s fun! We go to the river and have a picnic and eat all the plums we want!”
    â€œYeah, and you get a bellyache and throw up!” jeered Ernie, who was closest in age to her. “Bellyache Belle! Bellyache Belle!
    He was sitting next to Belle. She grabbed as much of his brown hair as she could and gave it a wrench. He yelped and dragged her fingers loose, giving them a yank backwards that made her shriek and duck her head to bite him.
    â€œNo bitin’,” Rosalie said, giving each child an absentminded cuff. “You’re not wild critters. Anyhow, human bites swell up and get infected