Free Keeping Secrets by Sarah Shankman

maids, mistresses, masters, children, dogs, cats and even the lowliest rattlesnake would creep through the middle part of the day, moving as if underwater, the elongated sounds of their conversation becoming even more monosyllabic and languorous. Naps were a necessity rather than a luxury for children to avoid afternoon fits of frazzle. Long cool baths, morning and evening, followed by blizzards of talcum powder helped stave off heat rash, heat stroke, and malodorous realities that Southern ladies didn’t like to think about.
    But the Louisiana summer sun is no respecter of class, burning down through airborne oceans of humidity to steam and stupefy the brain of the cotton chopper in the field and the clerk behind the counter in the airless store, as well as the lady reclining on her chaise behind drawn curtains, sipping iced tea from a sweating glass. The heat is something you simply have to live with, Rosalie would say. There’s no use in trying to fight it, wasting electricity. It happens every year, just like death, disease and taxes. Wait till evening, and it will cool off.
    The man on the radio was saying it was going to be near 100 degrees. Rosalie hurried Emma to put on her blue-and-white seersucker sunsuit and sit down to breakfast.
    “It’s too hot to stand here in this kitchen. I’ve got to get in the store and help your father. A delivery’s coming this morning.”
    Already the backs of Emma’s legs were sweaty, sticking to the green chair. She liked the little flowers’ patterns on the chair’s back and turned to trace them with her finger.
    “Here, now, don’t dawdle. Eat your breakfast.”
    Her mother plopped her plate in front of her, a fried egg, biscuits, and bacon. Before Emma could stop her, she poured a big puddle of Log Cabin syrup over it all.
    “Momma!” Emma shoved her chair back. She hated sweet on the same plate, even in the same room, with her egg.
    “I swear,” her mother said, wiping her brown hair off her damp face with the back of her hand. “I don’t know why a five-and-a-half-year-old child is so finicky. You should be grateful that you have food.”
    “But every morning I say—”
    “No sass from you, young lady. Or you won’t go swimming later.”
    Emma’s bottom lip was still out, but she was thinking. Mrs. Cloutier next door had offered to drive Emma with her children to the pool across the river in Cypress late that afternoon. There she could play in the water—a welcome respite from lying out in the backyard under the fig tree panting for breath. She didn’t want to miss her chance; Momma hardly ever let her go, because she said that was where kids caught polio.
    Emma loved splashing in the baby pool, the one with a statue of a mermaid in the middle. It lay outside the bathhouse that led to the big pool, the one that Anne and Wayne, the older Cloutier kids, had to go through where they washed their feet in chlorine. Emma didn’t know whether the chlorine was supposed to kill the polio or not. But she was glad little kids didn’t have to do it. She and Mike Cloutier just pulled off their shorts and sandals and jumped right in in their underpants. Maybe kids too little to go into the big pool didn’t get polio, so they didn’t need the foot-washing. Just like Baptists in town didn’t wash feet like the foot-washing Baptists out in the country did. That was the kind of church where her Uncle England preached—foot-washing Baptists. In Sunday School at West Cypress Baptist she’d heard something about Jesus washing the feet of the disciples. Probably they lived out in the country like Uncle England. Probably they got their feet dirtier there. Was that what caused polio? She’d have to ask Momma.
    They’d been to Uncle England’s church once last year, and she didn’t remember any washing at all. She did remember that Uncle England let her stand up in front of the whole church and sing “Abide with Me” accompanied by Aunt Ida Lou on the piano. Everybody