Mississippi Sissy Read Online Free Page B

Carnation. I looked out the dining room’s picture window. Cars were now parked all along the dirt road’s sloping shoulder. There was no more room for any in the yard around the countless pine trees that had shed their brown needles into a prickly fawn-colored carpet that completely covered the ground. The needles were great for making walls of forts, and I yearned at that very moment to build one that was impenetrable by all the in-coming pity.
    The family’s menfolk had gathered out there around the lawned cars, the lacelike autumn shadows softening their faces as the sun filtered down through the bare and long-limbed pines. Two older male cousins tossed a brown pine cone back and forth with Kim who pretended he was Charlie Conerly, an old quarterback for the Ole Miss Rebels. Karole, always at Kim’s heels, begged to toss the pine cone, too. A few of the men were in that one-foot-on-a-fender stance that I always saw my uncles take when talking about deer hunting, Goldwater’s loss, or “all these outside Commie agitators,” who seemed continuously to be invading our state through my childhood, especially during those compressed and awful months that joined 1963 to 1964. Those months when both my parents died. When JFK died. When Medgar Evers died. When those three civil rights kids—Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman—died up in Venomous Mae’s beloved Neshoba County. I watched the breath from the men’s mouths fog the chilly air with conversation. A car radio was blaring the news that someone named Horace Barnette had confessed to the FBI about the murders of the three kids and was going to tell them exactly what took place back during the summer.
    (That was the summer when my mother was the sickest she had ever been while she lay up in a hospital—Lackey Memorial—which had been built to resemble, rather risibly, an antebellum mansion. As I walked out to the parking lot after visiting my weakened motherone particularly hot, sticky evening, my grandmother tried to explain how life was unfair at times. “We’re not gonna tell Kim and Karole nothing. Only you,” she said. “We figure you’re old enough to take it. You’re certainly smart enough to understand the situation. You do understand? God just needs good people with Him up in heaven so He’s calling your mama to be with your daddy. She’s only got another month or so to live, sugar. God’s calling her name. He knows what’s best. Listen to me. Listen up. I’m more serious than I’ve ever been in my whole life: You got to be a man about this. A little man. You can’t be no child no more. That’ll suit you right fine, won’t it? You never seemed to like being one anyway.” We reached the car, a black tank-like ‘57 Buick, all grillwork and hubcaps and headlights the size of Cyclopian twins. “So God did this?” I asked my grandmother. “Yes, sugar. You do understand. I knew you would.” She touched the tiny bristles of my flattop. To me God was no better than Horace Barnette. Murderers. Both of them. “Then I hate God,” I said. My grandmother gasped and slapped me right across my eight-year-old face. She gasped again. She placed her hands on the hood of the Buick and steadied herself. She began to cry. I comforted her for hitting me. I was—she was right—no longer a child.)
    The radio next door in the kitchen’s window that November day of the funeral was tuned to the same station as the one out in the parked car. The women surrounding my grandmother in the kitchen stopped their banter. The men in the yard leaned in, listening. “Who’s this Barnette fellow?” someone asked. Uncle Benny, the husband of Aunt Lola, my grandfather’s no-nonsense hulk of a sister, decided to speak up. A cotton farmer and contractor, Uncle Benny always wore overalls, even when he deigned to wear a tie as he had that day. He