time until I began to get uncomfortable. I wondered why she was telling me all this.
"What kind of movies did they show?"
"Oh, you know. You've seen old movies on television. When I was a child the war was on, and we mostly saw movies about that. People were very patriotic."
"I've heard that word, but I'm not real sure I know what it means."
"It means they talked a lot about how great our country was— and how bad our enemies were. We had to, you know, support our soldiers in the war. We grew Victory Gardens in our backyards and saved tinfoil and cooking fat for the war effort. And the ladies all knitted socks and gloves for the soldiers. My daddy served on the draft board."
"Well the town sounds neat. I wish it was still that way— except for the dressing up part. The war sounds cool."
"The war wasn't cool at all. People were killed, J.R. And there were other bad things as well."
"Like what?"
"Well, for starters, the colored people all had to sit in the balcony when they went to the picture show— and they couldn't go in any of the cafés on the square."
"Why?"
"That's just the way things were in those days. And something else, you know that water fountain on the courthouse lawn?"
I nodded. "It doesn't work anymore."
"I know, but that's not the point. The point is there used to be two there, and they were marked with signs that said COLORED and WHITES. They tore the colored fountain down sometime in the seventies."
"Yeah, I know all about segregation. We studied civil rights and Martin Luther King Jr. in school. I know one thing, I'd a darn sight rather drink after Willie Mae than Cooter McNutt." Cooter McNutt lives in a cabin out on the banks of the creek. When he's in town, you can smell him coming a block away.
"I doubt if you know all about it. You had to be there. Someday, I'll tell you more. But that's not what we're here to talk about right now. Today we're going to talk about me. Did you know my father was once mayor of Job's Crossing?"
"No, ma'am. I thought your daddy was a farmer like Mr. Sontag. Didn't you grow up out on the farm?"
"Where did you get that idea, honey?" Biggie patted my knee.
"Because you're all the time talking about what fun you had out in the country."
"J.R., it was my grandparents who lived on the farm. I did spend a lot of time out there, but I grew up in this very house." She looked at the crepe myrtle tree covered with pink blooms outside my window. "In fact, this was my room. I used to look out at Ruby Muckleroy's house from this very window. She was Ruby Morris then, and we grew up together. Now you can't see the house anymore because this tree has grown so much. I remember when my daddy planted it here. It wasn't more than six feet tall…."
She continued to look out the window not saying anything. Finally, I cleared my throat, and she looked at me like she'd just come back from somewhere far away.
"When I entered high school the war had been over for a number of years, but the veterans, those who made it through, were still coming home. Some had signed up for extra hitches in the service; some were injured and had to stay in service until their wounds healed. A few, those who quit school to join up, tried to go back to high school, but that never worked very well. How can you go by high school rules when you've seen people die on the battlefield?"
I shrugged my shoulders, wondering what this had to do with her wanting me to go out to that ranch with her.
"By the time I was a sophomore, most of the veterans had drifted away to go to college on the G.I. Bill or to take jobs at the steel mill. One stayed though." She smiled. "A good-looking fellow with coal black hair and light blue eyes. He had one little curl that kept falling down over his forehead no matter how much he combed it back with the little black comb he kept in his shirt pocket." She looked out the window some more then shook herself and spoke again. "He seemed so glamorous to all us girls. Most everybody had a crush on him at one time or another, even though our mothers