The Cotton Queen Read Online Free Page A

looked sad.
    “Yeah, you should probably wash up and get dressed,” she said. “I’m going to have to go somewhere this morning.”
    “You’re leaving me here?”
    She nodded. “I’ll only be gone a few hours,” she said. “You’ll stay with Aunt Grace and Aunt Lurlene. And you’ll have lots of cousins to play with.”
    She was right about that.
    My Hoffman cousins were, as Grandma would have said, numerous as ticks on a dog. I didn’t actually know any of them. But as things often are with kids, after only a few minutes I was having a very good time.
    The Hoffman farm had a very strange yard. It was bigger than any I’d been in in California with lots of small buildings and sheds and fences. There were contraptions made with pipe that you could walk on or hang from like a monkey. There were chickens and guineas running loose everywhere. A big old dog lay bored and unconcerned by the back-door step. There were a half-dozen cats in the barn. And an outside water trough with huge goldfish in it.
    Two girls about my age, Cheryl and Nicie, were my immediate playmates. Nicie, Cheryl explained to me, was an “only child,” which meant she had lots more toys than Cheryl. But Cheryl was bossy, so she decided what we would play and which of Nicie’s toys we needed. That seemed okay to me.
    The older kids had all gone with the parents in the cars. So the games that were usually mostly theirs, like “kick the can” and “tag,” could be played by us younger kids without the usual fate of always being IT. We were running and shrieking, laughing, having a great time. We took our turns, each of us chased or were being chased.
    I was standing against a tree catching my breath when Ned, Cheryl’s brother, came up.
    “Do you want to climb that tree?” he asked me.
    Ned was two years older than me and being noticed by him felt like a very big deal. I’d never climbed a tree. The ones in our yard in California had been just sticks with leaves.
    “It’s too high,” I admitted.
    “I can lift you up,” he told me.
    I said okay and a minute later I was on the first big bough of the giant catalpa. I found a safe perch where I could see everything and didn’t feel like I was falling. I could see the roof of the house and the cotton fields beyond the barn and the dirt road that went out to the highway.
    “This is great!” I told Ned.
    He nodded. “It used to be a good place to hide,” he told me. “But now Grandma always looks here first.”
    I didn’t know why anyone would want to hide from Grandma, but I made no comment.
    “Look what I brought,” he said.
    He held out a shiny silver tool.
    “Take it.”
    I did. It was very heavy, a long piece of shiny metal with what looked like open mouths on each end. My daddy had a big box of tools that he carried with him to work. I was never allowed to play with them. But Ned was older than me, I thought maybe it was okay for him to have tools.
    “What is it?” I asked.
    “It’s a wrench.”
    “Wrench,” I repeated.
    “They use it to tighten up screws,” he said. “You just fit the head of the screw in here.” He showed me with his finger. “And then you turn it.”
    I nodded.
    “My daddy has some like this,” I told him.
    Ned nodded sagely. “I know,” he said. “It’s what killed him.”
    I glanced up at him sharply. I don’t remember one person saying to me, “Your father has died.” Nobody had told me, I’m sure of that. I’m not sure when my mother had been planning to. But Ned had beaten her to it.
    “My daddy’s not killed,” I told him.
    “Of course he is,” Ned said. “Why else would we all be here? Why else would your mama come to the farm without him? All the grown-ups are at his funeral right now. That’s what they do for dead people. They have a funeral. He’s dead all right. And this is what killed him. Uncle Carl told my dad. Just a common wrench.”
    I tried to hand it back to him.
    “It’s not true!”
    “Is so,” Ned