The diamond bikini - By Charles Williams Page 0,29

“he ain’t exactly had any to sell yet. The first batch didn’t turn out so well. It all come apart in the tubs.”

We didn’t say anything for a little while, and then I remembered about all that sugar Uncle Sagamore had bought.

“What do you suppose he’s going to do with that much?” I asked Pop. “And why did he tell the sheriff he’d bought it for me?”

“Oh,” Pop says. He took another puff on the cigar and it glowed. “Well, it’s like this, Sagamore told him that so he wouldn’t have to say what it really was. He’s kind of proud, and he don’t like to talk to outsiders about infirmities in the family. You see, your Aunt Bessie’s got the sugar diabetes, and the doctor’s put her on this diet where she has to eat six pounds of sugar a day. But I wouldn’t say anything about it to nobody. They don’t like it spread around.”

“Oh, I won’t say nothing,” I says.

I thought it sure seemed like a place, though, for people having things wrong with ‘em. Dr Severance had the heart twinge and the sheriff had the high blood pressure and Miss Harrington had the anemia and there was the typhoid going around and now Aunt Bessie had the sugar diabetes. I hoped we didn’t come down with anything like that ourselves.

* * *

The next day was really fun. I found a cane pole behind the house that had a line and hook on it and a snuff-bottle cork for a bobber, so I dug some worms and me and Sig Freed went fishing. And the funny part of it was there was real fish in the lake. I caught four. Uncle Sagamore said they was red perch, and Pop fried ‘em for me for supper in the baloney grease. They was sure good.

Right after noon I wanted to go swimming, but when I went up to the trailer Miss Harrington was lying stretched out in a long canvas chair having a drink and said we couldn’t go until just about sundown. Dr Severance was lying in another chair having a drink too and he says to her, “Hey, what’s with all this swimming, anyway? Don’t tell me I’m being back-doored by a kid that ain’t even old enough to start smoking cornsilk.”

And she says, “Oh, shut up, can’t you think about anything else for at least five minutes?”

He says, “Well, there’s gratitude for you. I save your goddam life for you, and now I got to move a seven-year-old kid out of the way every time I want to collect a little on account.”

Then she says, “Gratitude? Believe me, buster, the next time anybody says we’re going up in the country and lay around for a while, I’ll know what he means.”

They kept on talking like they’d already forgot I was there, so I went back and waded around in the shallow edge of the lake just below where Uncle Finley was working on his boat, and tried to catch crawfish. The water was only about waist deep and I could see lots of ‘em on the bottom but I never could catch any. They scooted backward too fast.

Uncle Sagamore and Pop just sat around in the shade all day and talked and had a drink out of the glass jar now and then. I remembered Uncle Sagamore telling the sheriff how he had to work eighteen hours a day to pay his taxes, and I asked Pop if he was on vacation. Pop said it was kind of a slack season on farms right now, and that things usually picked up a little later on in the year...

About sundown Miss Harrington went up to the point with me and we had another swimming lesson. She had a shower cap with her this time so her hair wouldn’t get wet, and she could get her face down in the water and really swim. A crawl, she called it.

I got a little better, too. I could go six or eight feet before I went under. She said I was trying too hard to keep my face out of the water, though, and that was making me sink.

* * *

The next morning bright and early Uncle Sagamore and Pop took the truck and went down in the woods back of the cornfield and brought the tubs up to the house. The smell was even worse than it had been before. They set ‘em right in the same place, along