Читать книгу The Bernice L. McFadden Collection - Bernice L. McFadden - Страница 61

CHAPTER 5

Ten shows and three towns later, Rain’s ankle was healed, good as new. Easter was glad for it, because she was growing tired of playing the fool. The show was working its way down the Savannah River toward Elberton and Easter had fifteen dollars saved. A few more weeks and she figured she’d have enough to hop a train heading somewhere. Maybe, she thought, Rain would come with her.

But Slocum had other plans for Easter, and one evening as she sat eating her dinner of fried snook and boiled potatoes, his bloated, bow-legged shadow fell over her.

“What?”

Slocum grinned as he ceremoniously unfurled the burlap poster he held, revealing a colorful caricature of a cross-eyed, tongue-wagging, knock-kneed Easter.

Rain clapped her hands together and squealed, “You’ve arrived!”

Arrived where? Easter wondered. The bowels of life? The filthy heels of existence?

That night after the show, the moon sat low and full in the sky as Easter made her way to Rain’s tent. This was something she looked forward to all day. It was their time and their time alone in which they did whatever they wanted. Sometimes Easter would sit snug between Rain’s legs as Rain used the comb to carve fine lines through Easter’s thick hair and then braided it into neat rows. Other times Easter would paint Rain’s toenails or knead the knots in her neck until they melted away. Sometimes they’d play Bid Whist or just talk. Always, Easter waited for another kiss, but it never came.

“You never stop scribbling in that notebook, what you scribbling?” Rain had pressed until Easter broke down one day and began to share the stories she’d written about Waycross and the people who lived there. Easter read aloud the tales heavy with Southern dialect and folksy wisdom and Rain’s eyes rippled with the images Easter’s words created. “You should write a book like dem white folks. You just as good as they are.”