Free Blue Willow by Deborah Smith Page B

other walls were covered in paper printed with trees and flowers. Lily had picked it out because it made her think of being outdoors.
    But she missed Grandma terribly. And she missed being a farmer. Mama and Daddy had more money, but they weren’t free anymore, and Lily knew it.
    A farmer was free. A farmer had to answer only to the land, Daddy said, and the land was a partner, not a boss. But a farmer with only one hand wasn’t equal to the land, so Mama and Daddy took jobs at a pet-food plant. They came home each night looking tired and smelling like hot cereal. Sometimes the foreman let them bring home burst bags of feed, for Sassy and the four cats. It all seemed uglyand like welfare to Lily, but she’d never hurt their feelings by saying so .
    The afternoons Lily had spent roaming the woods and fields with Sassy were over. After school each day she slunk unhappily off the bus at Aunt Maude’s grand white gingerbread house in town, and the only rambling she could do there was in the yards and rose garden out back. Not that Aunt Maude let her ramble much.
    Aunt Maude said Lily’s mind could wander like an Indian, but her fanny had to stay at the kitchen table, doing homework. And when the homework was done, Aunt Maude read to Lily from encyclopedias or the latest issue of Newsweek , or made Lily read out loud from books in Aunt Maude’s library The reading was fun, because Lily loved books, and Aunt Maude approved of that.
    And even if it was no fun to be trapped in town, Lily began to take Aunt Maude’s favorite saying to heart, once she figured out what it meant. The only helpless female is an ignorant one .
    Maude Johnson MacKenzie Butler was a general in a girdle, Daddy said. She owned half the buildings around the town square and ran for mayor every two years. Most times, she won. She wasn’t kin to Lily by blood, because she was a MacKenzie from marrying Daddy’s much older brother, Lawrence, and Daddy said Lawrence had gotten blown up by a mine in Korea before he and Aunt Maude had any children.
    Aunt Maude married Mr. Wesley Butler not long after, and they had twin boys, who were freshmen at the University of Georgia now. Wesley must be a lot older than Aunt Maude, because he had thin all-gray hair and hers was a big brown helmet with little sprinkles of gray at the sides. Uncle Wesley used to own grocery stores, but now he went fishing and hunting all the time, so Lily rarely saw him.
    Sometimes Aunt Maude’s two sisters drove up from Atlanta to visit, and then things livened up, because Little Sis—who was married to an important man who worked in a bank and had two girls in college—wore love beads and read palms, and Big Sis—who was a widow, withgrandchildren Lily’s age—spit chewing tobacco and worked as a volunteer for something called the Republican party.
    So when Aunt Maude and her sisters got together, there was a lot of palm reading and spitting and arguments about whether or not the country was going to hell. Lily loved it.
    Lily was spending Saturday at Aunt Maudes. Mama and Daddy had been called to work overtime at the plant. Springtime was in full bloom, putting clouds of white on the dogwoods and red on the giant azaleas along Aunt Maude’s front walk. Aunt Maude and the sisters were in the parlor, sipping whiskey and fussing at each other.
    Lily sat on the front steps by the sidewalk, letting Sassy lick chocolate-cupcake icing from her knees. Her knees were always skinned from climbing the willows at home or falling off the old bicycle Daddy had bought secondhand for her eighth birthday. Sassy’s tongue felt good on them. Lily curled her bare toes under Sassy and rubbed her stomach, which Sassy liked.
    Lily wiped chocolate-smeared fingers on her T-shirt, then drew a handful of dry dog food from the front pocket of her cutoffs. Somewhere in the distance she heard a car coming up the side street that turned onto Aunt Maude’s. She ignored it, because people drove slow in the