Free Unraveled by Reavis Z Wortham Page B

I’m on the other side of the pasture. Daddy cain’t run over to tell me every time sum’m happens.”
    â€œYou’ll know if there’s trouble.” Hollis finished his tea.
    â€œHow, Daddy?”
    â€œYou’ll know.”
    Ned worried at that statement all the way home.

Chapter Thirteen
    Mark and I were finishing breakfast Monday morning when a car pulled up our gravel drive. Miss Becky was washing dishes and humming her favorite sacred song, “In The Garden.” The wooden kitchen door was open and the candy-apple red ’67 Impala I saw through the screen almost took my breath away. Hootie barked a couple of times before slipping under the porch.
    â€œUh oh.” Grandpa took one last sip of coffee from his saucer and rose from the table.
    Miss Becky dried her hands on a flour sack dish towl. “Who is it?”
    â€œFrank Clay’s brother, Donald Ray.” Grandpa took his hat from the rack beside the door and set it just so on his head. He stepped onto the porch. “Shut up, Hootie! Get out Donald Ray.”
    â€œDoes he bite?”
    â€œNaw. The worst he’ll do is histe his leg on you.”
    â€œMy lands.” Miss Becky cleared the table around me. “He don’t have to talk like that.”
    Mark and I snickered ’cause we’d heard worse up at the store. Miss Becky raised an eyebrow. “ You watch what you say when you get older, Mister Terrence Orrin Parker, and you too, Mr. Lightfoot. Hurry and brush your teeth. The school bus’ll be here any minute.”
    Grandpa and Donald Ray were talking in front of the Impala when we came out, spitting Pepsodent. We sat on the porch to wait for the bus.
    Mr. Donald Ray was about half mad. His horn-rimmed glasses had slipped down on his nose and he pushed them up with a finger. His voice rose. “What are you gonna do about it?”
    â€œI don’t see much to do, Donald Ray. It was a car wreck and we’re looking into it.”
    â€œShouldn’t you be trying to find out why he was in the car with a nigger gal?”
    Grandpa flicked his eyes at us, and I pretended to be interested in the ink scribbles on the brown paper cover on my math book. I probably should have been paying attention to the contents, because I was lost as a goose in “new math.” I’d been pretty good at arithmetic, but all those sets and unions got past me on the first day and I was still having trouble catching up.
    Mark didn’t have any books because he wasn’t even enrolled yet, so he just studied his feet. Grandpa promised to come up to the school before classes took up so he could sign the papers.
    â€œI don’t believe there was any laws broke, him riding with her.” Grandpa’s hands were in the pockets of his overalls. “We’re thinking she was giving him a ride home and lost control and went off the dam, or maybe somebody might have strayed into her lane.”
    â€œHe was in the car with a jigaboo and somebody got mad about it and ran ’em off the road. It’s clear as the nose on your face.” His glasses slipped again, and this time he looked over the top of them.
    â€œWe don’t know any such thing.”
    â€œYou should be investigatin’ or something instead of hanging around here at the house.”
    I figured that was one of the worst things anyone could say to Grandpa. He hated for people to tell him his job, the one he’d been doing since World War II. He was good at it, too, catching moonshiners, drunks, and even a murderer or two.
    â€œTend to your own business, Donald Ray, and don’t tell me what I oughta do.”
    I knew more about the Clay family than the Mayfields. It was a pretty good sized family, and all of them were used to giving orders. A couple of ’em were the most well-to-do folks in Chisum with money earned from cattle and crops raised by sharecroppers. Grandpa said others always operated right