Darby Read Online Free Page B

into the air.
    “Evette,” I said, tears bubbling in my eyes, “I’m sorry I was dumb.”
    Walking on past the dairy barn, which is spread out and tall and jammed with mooing cows, I knew she was right about the
Bennettsville Times.
It was hard to admit, but I knew in my heart that Evette could be a more serious and expert writer than me. She was so smart, was why.
    Passing beneath the high pecan trees my granddaddy had planted when he first built Ellan, I began wondering if I was a good writer. I even worried that McCall might be right and my article was getting in the paper for being funny instead of good. I stomped a foot. Thinking that made me as mad at him as I’d been at Evette. For a little while, it even took the fun out of getting an article run in the paper.
    Nobody’s supposed to work on Sundays, even during the cotton harvest. So whatever time of year it is, following Sunday dinner, which commences at exactly twelve o’clock in the afternoon, we either go for a long walk around the farm or we get into the car and drive off to inspect faraway property and fields my daddy owns. Taking the car is what I like, because Daddy props open the trunk with a stick, and me and McCall sit inside it and watch the long straight roads of Marlboro County fall off behind us. Sometimes Daddy drives on and on, and me or McCall falls asleep back there. Other times we go rattling and flopping over potholey dirt roads so that we gotta hang on for fear we might get thrown clean out. Once, when I was little, the stick that holds up the trunk shook loose and the whole heavy flap came crashing down, barely missing one of McCall’s legs. Scared, I screamed as hard as I could till Mama and Daddy let us free. But I still like sitting back there. It’s exciting with the trunk always threatening to mash down.
    On the Sunday that me and Evette yelled at each other, my daddy decided that we should drive instead of walk, because Great-Uncle Harvey isn’t sturdy on his feet. So after me and Mama and Aunt Greer did the dishes, the grownups, who were still dressed in their Sunday best, took their places inside Daddy’s Buick while me and McCall got in the trunk. Daddy put the trunk-stick in place, and we flew off through the countryside toward a town called Blenheim, where a man named Dr. C. R. May invented Blenheim Ginger Ale, which is supposed to cure all nature of sicknesses but only makes my stomach churn.
    Where we were seated, the wind sort of wrapped around McCall and me, tugging at our clothes so that my dress and his shirt flapped like knotted-up flags. It was nice and cool back there, the only bad thing being that I was alongside McCall, who I was mad at.
    “You ain’t talking to me?” he asked as a dried and squished snake disappeared behind a lump in the road.
    I looked daggers at him. “It’s ’cause I’m thinking about how you said Mr. Salter is putting my story in the paper on account of it being funny.”
    Shrugging, he threw a piece of hay into the wind so that it flew up before swooping down and bouncing along the asphalt road top. “It’s Sunday,” he said over the loud, blowing air, “so I ain’t gonna say anything that’ll make you mad.”
    “That’s ’cause it isn’t so.” I slanted my eyes to show how annoyed he’d gotten me.
    Hanging his feet over the trunk, like we weren’t supposed to do, McCall didn’t say anything back.
    “If you keep doing that, you might get your legs cut off,” I told him.
    “I can snatch ’em back.”
    “No you couldn’t.”
    “Sure I could.”
    Irritated, I studied his face and a fiery, red scratch on his cheek that made me think of an electric bolt. “Why’re you so mean, McCall?”
    “Why’s putting my feet out mean?”
    I had to think. “’Cause . . . if your legs get clipped off, Mama and Daddy’ll have to treat you extra-nice.”
    Laughing, he told me, “That ain’t a good reason.”
    “I don’t care,” I told him. “And you know what? It isn’t