Free My Drowning by Jim Grimsley Page B

watching. His eyes sparkled.
    â€œAll right Willem,” Aunt Tula said, “Get them younguns of yours in the truck and let’s get headed home.”
    SOMETHING HAPPENED to Uncle Cope while he stayed in prison. One morning Miss Ruby summoned Daddy to the Little Store to answer a phone call, and when he came back he told us the story. Grandaddy Tote had called him. Uncle Cope was cut up by a Mexican man, and he nearbout bled to death, according to Daddy, right in the prison yard. First the Mexican cornholed him, and then he cut him with a homemade knife. “He couldn’t run, because he’s crippled.”
    â€œDid they hurt him bad?” Mama asked.
    â€œWhat does it sound like, Louise? Jesus. They cut him across the stomach. Nearbout spilled his guts out. You can kill a man like that.”
    â€œWhat is a cornhole?” Joe Robbie asked.
    â€œIt’s when a man does it to another man in the ass,” Otis explained.
    We were in awe, Joe Robbie and I, and we watched one another.
    â€œYou younguns shut up asking them nasty questions,” Mama ordered.
    But Nora and Otis giggled, and Mama and Daddy hid smiles.
    â€œI’d ruther die,” Daddy said.
    â€œBut I’m sorry he got cut,” Mama said, still snickering.
    UNCLE COPE RETURNED to live with us when he had served his time. By then his stomach had healed up and his guts were back in place. I tried to see his behind where the cornhole was, because the word had stayed on my mind ever since I heard it, but nothing showed through his britches.
    We had been told to keep our mouths shut about what we heard, but the very first night Otis got mad about Uncle Cope taking the bed in the kitchen again, and he called Uncle Cope a gimp-legged cornhole shit-ass. The whole story was out after that, and Uncle Cope, redfaced, screamed at all of us and waved his crutches till he collapsed on the bed. Because the bed was in the kitchen we could hardly leave him alone, so we blinked as he lay there in a spasm of fury. Otis laughed and Uncle Cope hurled a crutch at him.
    Later we would tell the story this way: Mama laughed so hard she went into labor and had Corrine almost on the spot. The truth was close to that; Mama’s labor did come on her during the laughter and at once the pains became clear and intense. She told us to find the colored midwife in Holberta and Otis headed toward the community of black people on an old, half-repaired bicycle he used to get back and forth from the Little Store. We still owed the white midwife for Alma Laura.
    Uncle Cope’s humiliation lay forgotten in the confusion of Corrine’s birth. But I remember him, curled up like a ball of spite in his bed, red-faced, glaring at every shadow in the room.
    I SAW THOSE EYES again, years later, when he caught me bathing when we had moved to another house down the road. Carl Jr. was working on an egg farm and we lived in the house rent free, in front of four long chicken houses full of white feathers and rivers of turd. Uncle Cope had a narrow bed in the back room with the boys, and one day instead of heading into that room to lie down he lumbered into the bedroom where we girls slept. I was naked except for my step-ins and socks, washing in the washpan. He shoved open the door and peeped in. He saw me and ducked his head. I laid down the white bar of Octagon soap and pulled the towel over my breasts, afraid. “Get away,” I said, and Uncle Cope tottered a little on the crutches. His eyes were rimmed with red, a line of fire. He looked me all over with his tongue hanging onto his lower lip. I couldn’t breathe. He hung on those crutches like he meant to come in the room. But I said, “You get out of here, Uncle Cope,” and I held that towel against me. After a while, he backed out the door.
    I told Mama that he had peeped at me while I was washing, and she slapped me sharp across the face and told me never to mess with that one-leg bastard