Free Mississippi Cotton by Paul H. Yarbrough Page A

said.
    That sounded good to me, even if it was the same show. Taylor sat on the bed, his back against the wall, his hands clasped behind his head. “Naaa, I don’t think we can go tonight. That’d be two nights in a row. Even havin’ company, that isn’t likely. You know, Daddy’ll say that’s too much money for something you already saw. Momma will agree with him like she always does.”
    “I know, I know,” Casey said, lying on his bed, punching his naval with his finger.
    “Anyway, I think we might be havin’ homemade ice cream. I noticed the bucket was out of the closet. It was sittin’ on the back porch when we came in,” Taylor said.
    “I wish we didn’t have to crank so much,” Casey said. “That’s a lotta work.”
    “Whadayamean ‘we’? I do all the work anyway. You always start whinin’ that your arm hurts.”
    “Well, it does! Crankin’ that thing is hard.”
    “Aww baloney! You’re jus’ lazy.”
    “So? Lazy’s okay, if you’re a gentleman about it. That’s what momma says: ‘Anything you do, do it like a gentleman.’ ”
    Taylor just shook his head.
    Eating homemade ice cream sounded good, and just sitting around the porch was always kind of fun. Maybe swinging in the big swing; maybe playing Chinese Checkers or something; even climbing the windmill and looking at the sunset—not because it was pretty like Mother and Cousin Carol would say, but just because you could see it longer from high up. It was stuff we didn’t do at home.
    A full stomach and a warm room had made us sleepy. We were lying on our beds when Cousin Carol called out, “Y’all better come on down and get back to your fishin’ spot, before something happens to your fish.”
    She gave us a thermos full of lemonade and put it in a brown paper sack with three small jelly glasses. She admonished us to not get back too late. Supper was at six and maybe we should get back by five. She might have a surprise. That told us for sure we were going to have homemade ice cream.
    We left our bikes at the house since we had worked our way up the branch close enough to the house to walk. And it was easier to carry everything walking. It was hotter now, and we kicked up dust between the rows of cotton. In the morning the dew hadn’t dried, and the rich soil was still matted and would stick to your Keds. The stalks of green with their white bolls were dry and taking in the sunrays. I almost felt sorry for the little white bolls facing the sun. We picked up little clods of dirt to throw at the dragon flies circling. You had to be pretty accurate to hit one. To my knowledge, no one had ever hit a dragonfly with a dirt clod in midair.
    Taylor tried to tell a joke while we walked. He said he hadn’t heard all of it, but it was one that he had overheard in the seed and feed one day. It was something about a farmer’s daughter and a salesman, and how they ended up in her daddy’s barn one night and fell out of the loft. Taylor said maybe when we were older we would know what it meant, and then maybe it would be funny. I told him if he had heard all of it, maybe it would be funny. He had heard Cousin Carol say one time that some of those men at the seed and feed store were lazy and had nothing better to do than play dominoes at the café and tell dirty jokes. She had said they ought to be careful when children were around—telling some of the jokes they told—and they were the same men you never saw in Sunday School, either. The farmer story must have been a dirty joke.
    We passed through the field, then turned through the trees toward the spot where we had been earlier. We sat under the cottonwood tree and put down our poles and our sack with the thermos. The first thing we wanted to check was our fish. Casey screamed when he saw the snake; a great high-pitched scream, like a girl.
    “Oh, man alive, look at that,” Taylor said. Casey had retreated almost all the way up the bank. “Is it dead?”
    I was about five feet away