Gone Crazy in Alabama Read Online Free Page A

ask.”
    â€œYou’re a grown man, right?”
    â€œGrown enough.” He squinted against the sun and tilted his head my way. “Go ahead, Delphine. Ask.”
    â€œAre you . . . all right?”
    He knew what I was asking. Were the drugs gone for good? Did he sleep and moan all the time? Did his sniffling cold go away? And the hollering out in the night. Was that gone too?
    â€œMostly.”
    â€œMostly?”
    Mostly wasn’t enough for me or what I wanted to hear. He said, “I did a lot of healing in the army hospital, Delphine. Some on the way down here.”
    â€œBut you’re better, right?”
    His eyes went from the road to me and back to the road. Even though I loved him, I had been hurt by him. Underneath it all I was unsure and Fern was probably a little frightened. But only Vonetta was mad enough to stay mad. I asked him again if he was better. I had to tell my sisters to not be afraid and to not be mad. I had to tell them that it was all right. That he was all right.
    â€œMostly.” His voice was flat and old. Like Pa’s. “That’s all I can give you.”
    We drove for a little less than three hours. I dozed off, but for how long, I didn’t know. When I awoke, the Georgiapine trees had become Alabama pine trees. I knew we were getting closer as every other town name had creek in it. We passed this creek town only to enter that creek town. The memories of driving past trees, ponds, lakes, creeks, and rivers flooded back to me from the last time we had driven down three years ago. Ponds and lakes were in Georgia. Rivers and creeks in Alabama. What did it matter? We were far from Brooklyn.
    Then Uncle Darnell began to sing Stevie Wonder’s “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” but he jumbled the words and sang “Everything is everything.” That was how I knew my old Uncle D was still in there.

Moon House
    Can a bloodhound remember you from years back and smell you coming from half a mile away? Caleb’s welcome grew louder as we drove along the sparsely tree-lined road that would bring us to Ma Charles’s property. Uncle D winked at me as if to say, Girl , you were surely missed , and my heart clanged worse than when I got my first kiss from Ellis Carter. I wanted to be with my grandmother and my great-grandmother more than anything. I wanted us to all be together. As many of us under one roof as could fit. I needed to know we weren’t all falling apart.
    I could see Ma Charles’s yellow aluminum siding house as we wound around the road. It seemed to have grown larger, and not only as we neared it: its size appearedto have doubled. The girls must have seen the house as well. They sang at the top of their lungs, “I’m Going Back to Indiana” even though we were in the heart of Alabama. I sang along with them. Finally, in the seconds that seemed longest, the truck bounced, shimmied, and slowly trailed up the dirt and gravel driveway of our great-grandmother’s house. Even the hens, fenced in by the wire chicken run, clucked and fussed in our honor. Their fussing and squawking went on for as long as it took one hen to spot something tasty on the ground and the others to join in the scuffle to get a piece of it.
    Caleb, sturdier than when I saw him last, didn’t stop singing his dog song, which was neither a true howl nor a bark. Then Big Ma stepped out on the front porch and scolded him for raising a ruckus. Ma Charles, who had been sitting on the porch in the pine rocker her father made, called out to the bloodhound and joined the noisy welcome, shaking the tambourine that she always kept nearby. Knowing my great-grandmother, she probably told the dog, “Go on, boy. Wake the dead.” One of the funniest things about being down home was that when Big Ma said, “Stop,” Ma Charles said, “Keep on.” All the pieces of down home came flooding up to greet me.
    Uncle D stopped the truck