Free Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man: A Novel by Fannie Flagg Page A

die anyway if she couldn’t smoke her Camels and play bingo.
    Grandma has some old man as a boyfriend and Momma thinks she is going to get married again. According to Momma, he is so decrepit he can hardly stand up and Grandma is acting like a silly, old woman. The only problem is that she can’t find my real granddaddy so she can get a divorce. Grandma is trying to have him declared legally dead because it’s been nine years that the Bureau of Missing Persons have been looking for him and they gave up. If Grandpa isn’t dead, he sure is going to be mad when he finds out he is dead in the eyes of the law.
    Grandma sent me a letter and said for me not to worry about her but to be sweet to my momma because she thought Mommawas headed for a complete and full nervous breakdown and no wonder, being married to that little worm, Bill Harper. She also sent me a head scarf with the map of Mississippi on it.
    The biggest news around here, besides my daddy getting his head busted, is that I am a real bona fide hero. I may get a medal from the VFW. Last Sunday, Michael and Angel and I decided to go fishing in the lagoon. We were sitting in the boat, fishing for toadfish so we could blow them up and hang them in our rooms when all of a sudden Michael hooked something on his rod and his hair stood up on end. He started hollering and jerked the biggest, blackest snake I’ve ever seen right into the boat. As soon as that snake hit the boat, all three of us jumped out into the lagoon. I was so busy yelling at Michael for pulling a snake in the boat I must have forgotten I didn’t know how to swim because I made it to shore in NO time. When Michael got there, we looked around and Angel wasn’t anywhere in sight. Then I remembered she couldn’t swim either. I was so scared at having to tell her momma and daddy their little girl had drowned that I jumped back in the water.
    Michael and I were diving and looking for her, but we couldn’t find her anywhere. Finally I saw her standing on the bottom of the lagoon, and I dove down and went under her and grabbed her feet and pushed her straight up in the air so her head would stick out of the water.
    I was standing on the bottom and sinking fast, knee-deep in the mud. Michael saw the top of her head and grabbed her by the ear just in time. When I tried to get back to the top, I was stuck in the mud and couldn’t move. Michael was so busy saving Angel he forgot about me. Some junior lifeguard he is!
    I thought I’d just have to go ahead and drown at an early age, but then I remembered that black snake. When it hit me that some more of them might be in the water, I must have got the strength of a hundred, because I got loose and saved my own life.
    Angel was real sick. I never saw somebody throw up so much in my life, and we had leeches all over us just like Humphrey Bogart in
African Queen
. Ugh! We took Angel back up to the Blue Gardenia Lounge and told her momma and daddy what had happened.
    Claude wasn’t there, thank goodness. He’s crazy about Angel. He probably would have killed Michael and me for almost getting her drowned. Mr. and Mrs. Pistal hugged her and were so glad she was all right that it didn’t seem to matter I could have been drowned myself.
    Michael and I took Mr. Pistal and showed him that black snake. And guess what? It wasn’t a snake at all. It was a big electric eel. That was why Michael’s hair had stood up on his head.
    Mr. Pistal took me home and told Momma and Daddy I had saved Angel’s life and he would never forget what I had done. Momma and Daddy acted proud of me in front of him, but when he had left, Momma pinched me real hard and wanted to know what in the world I was doing, jumping in the water like that when I couldn’t even swim. She was about to hit me when Daddy said, “Well, Fay, she can swim; she isn’t drowned, is she?” He had a good point. So we finally did prove Daddy’s theory that small children can swim if they are scared enough.