The night she left, Daddy got on a real mean drunk. When I asked him to stop drinking so much, he told me to shut up and leave him alone and get on the bus and go to Virginia with my mother, he couldn’t stand the sight of me. He said he had never cared anything about me, which is a lie. He was saying that because he’s upset over Momma. It hurt my feelings anyway, but I didn’t let him see me cry. I fixed him the next day, though. Before I went to school, I left him a note that said, “Billie G. Thweatt called you up on the phone last night.”
November 16, 1952
Mrs. Underwood took me in the cloakroom today and asked me if my momma and daddy were fighting again. I said no, which was the truth because she’s in Virginia. She said, “I know something is wrong.” I said, “What has Kay Bob Big Mouth Benson been saying now?” Mrs. Underwood said Kay Bob Benson hadn’t said anything, she could just tell by the way I was acting. I don’t know how. I have been real funny lately and have cracked a lot of good jokes and made the whole class laugh, so she didn’t get it from me. It had to be Kay Bob Benson that spilled the beans!
November 19, 1952
I got a letter from Momma today. She is fine. She has got a job as a waitress and will send for me whenever she can. I am surprised that she hasn’t come home yet. She must have been madder than I thought. This is the longest she’s ever been gone, and I miss her.
Do you remember the little bald boy, Vernon Mooseburger, who came to the Halloween party as a mean potato? You wouldn’t believe how cruel people can be just because he doesn’t have a hair on his head. Kids call him ugly names like cue ball, Daddy Warbucks and Henry, after the bald boy in the cartoon funny papers. I call him Vernon. He is poor and got a disease when he was little that made all his hair come out, including his eyebrows. His momma bought him a brown leatherette hat with flaps that he wears even in summer. The only time I ever saw his hat off was when he was the potato. I always choose him to be on my side if ever we play softball because the other kids choose him last.
Mrs. Underwood made us all write an essay on what we would like to be when we grow up. I wrote one called “Why I Want to Be Bald When I Grow Up.” Mrs. Underwood picked it out with three others to go to the Harwin County Fair and compete with essays from children all over Harwin County. I said how great it would be in the summer to be able to put a cold rag on top of your head. You would never have to go to Nita’s Beauty Box and get a comb broken in your hair. When you went out, all you had to do was take a rag and polish your head a little; and if you got into a fight, nobody could pull your hair; and when you got old, you would never have to turn gray and dye your hair purple. Vernon didn’t know how lucky he was. Most of the essays were pretty dull, but wait until you hear what Kay Bob Benson wants to be. She wants to grow up and be Miss America, just like Yolanda Betbeze, or the mother of Jesus if He ever comes back. Oh, brother. You were not supposed to be two people, and if Jesus Christ ever does come back, I would want to be Him, not His mother. Daddy says always go for the top prize.
November 21, 1952
Get ready for this. This is even better than the HALL OF BLOOD AND GUTS … ENTER IF YOU DARE. Michael and I were on the beach after school, and he was shooting his .22 rifle at pilings and tin cans, like he always does. He got that gun for his birthday … which deep in my heart made me jealous because girls don’t ever get a real gun. Michael only let me shoot his stupid gun once, even though I am a mascot for the all-woman army. He pretends he’s Roy Rogers, which is all right with me, except that he always wants me to pretend that I am Dale Evans, which I can never bring myself to do. He says there can’t be two Roy Rogerses, so I have to be Hopalong Cassidy, second best.
He was shooting up and down the beach when he saw that something had washed up in front of Hammer’s Christian Motel. It looked like a sack of potatoes, but Michael ran over and found it was not a sack of potatoes at all. It was a dead woman with a bullet hole right between her eyes! Michael hadn’t meant to shoot her. We hadn’t even seen her. Who would have thought someone would be on the beach this time of year? Here I was, just eleven and already a witness to murder. Since there was nobody around, I decided Michael shouldn’t have to go to the electric chair because of one accident. I chose my friend against the law and I’m still not sure what that says about my character, but we made a blood pact that neither of us would tell.
So I went home and watched Our Miss Brooks with Eve Arden, Gale Gordon and Richard Crenna, and about an hour later some men banged on our door. It seems to be men that carry bad news, doesn’t it? They had found a dead woman on the beach by the pier. I didn’t know what else to do but to go with Daddy to see it. After all, a dead body is a big event and if I said that I was not interested, that would have made me look suspicious. I had a duty to protect Michael from the law.
When we got there, it was almost dark. The wind was blowing the sea wheat and it was making a weird noise. The moon was full and turning orange. The police had the place roped off and were looking at the woman with flashlights and were doing a lot of mumbling that police do at this sort of thing just like in the movies.
The Hammers, who were lording it over everybody because the body had been found on their property, have a vicious grandchild named Gregg. Do you know what he did when everybody’s back was turned? He ran up there and tried to get the dead woman’s watch and rings off of her before he was stopped. Personally, I think he had a lot of courage to touch a dead body in the dark. They should have let him go ahead and keep it, even though the watch probably wouldn’t run unless it was a Timex. They put one in a washing machine on television once.
Pretty soon the hearse from Magnolia Springs came. Right at that moment Michael and his mother and daddy came down. I found out later that Michael had run home and hidden under his bed and made his momma and daddy wonder about him. Michael was white as a sheet and he is an Italian person. He looked at me, but I kept a blank look. I was sticking to our blood pact. Michael, however, after being there three minutes fell down in the sand and started screaming and hollering that he was the murderer and had shot the woman dead that very afternoon. I kept my mouth shut. His confession, however, didn’t hold much weight with the police since they said she had been shot with a pistol and had been dead for about three days.
It was real sad to see someone confess like that when they didn’t have to. To make him feel better, I told him it could have been him, if she hadn’t already been killed. I looked over and little Gregg was getting the tar smacked out of him by his grandmother. She had to wrestle him to the ground to get whatever it was away from him. He let out a scream and tried to bite her in the leg. Mrs. Hammer marched right up to the police and said, “Here, my grandson took this off that dead woman,” and handed them a ring.
The minute I saw that ring I knew the dead woman was RUBY BATES! I hadn’t recognized her without her makeup. I yelled, “I know who that dead woman is. She’s Ruby Bates and she’s a friend of Claude Pistal’s.” This policeman said, “What did you say, little girl?” and I said, “That woman is Ruby Bates and she’s Claude …” but before I could get anything more out, Michael’s mother slammed her hand over my mouth so hard I saw stars. She told the police I didn’t know what I was talking about and was hysterical at seeing a dead body. I tried to tell them again, but she pinched me so bad that I couldn’t have said anything if my life depended on it.
She pulled me up the road and asked me where in the world did I get the idea that woman was a friend of Claude Pistal’s. I told her he had been parked in a car with her smooching one afternoon and I had taken her to the bathroom for him. She said, “How do you know that’s the same woman who was with Claude Pistal?”
I said, “I recognized the ring … I’d know that ring anywhere.”
She thought for a minute and then she said, “You didn’t see that woman with Claude Pistal.”
I said, “Yes, I did.”
She said, “No, you didn’t.”
I said, “Yes, I did.”
An
d then she said, “Daisy Fay Harper, believe me, you didn’t see any woman with Claude Pistal. Do you understand me?”
I said, “All right, but I did.”
She said for me not to mention his name under any circumstances because Claude Pistal is the meanest man in Harwin County and there was no telling what he would do if I said he knew that woman. I suddenly realized she had a point and that Peachy Wigham had called him mean as snake shit. Mrs. Romeo asked me if I thought he would remember me seeing them together. I said I didn’t think so, he was pretty drunk. She asked me who else knew I had seen them. I said, “Nobody.” I hadn’t told anybody, not even Daddy, which is a miracle because I usually tell everybody everything. She made me proimse not to open my mouth and to never say Ruby Bates’s or Claude Pistal’s name out loud again as long as I lived or she would call my mother and make her come get me and take me to Virginia.
Daddy asked me what Michael’s mother and I had been talking about and I said, “Female trouble.” That always shuts them up. Momma used that one all the time.
The papers are full of stories about the dead woman. The police said her name was Mrs. Ruby Bates. I told you so! She was from Meridian, the wife of a Mr. Earl Bates. She is survived by her sister, Mrs. Julian Wilson, who must be Opal, and a brother, Mr. Lee Halprin, who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada. She had been killed by a single bullet in the head and had been dead approximately sixty-eight hours when the body was found. They even knew what her last meal had been—peas and carrots. I sure wouldn’t want my last meal to be peas and carrots.
The police found the gun that killed her up on the beach about two blocks from where Harper’s Malt Shop used to be. She had taken a cab all the way from Meridian. I’ll bet she was surprised when she saw the malt shop had burned down and she didn’t have any place to use the bathroom. The police called it a suicide and said she had walked out in the water and shot herself in the head. Then her body had drifted down the beach in front of the Hammer’s Christian Motel. What I wonder is this. After she had shot herself between the eyes, how had she enough time to turn around and throw that gun way up on the beach before she died. Daddy pointed out if she had drifted down the beach from where the malt shop was, she would have had to pass under George Potlow’s pier. That pier has barnacles on the pilings that would have ripped her up, but she was in fine shape except for the hole between her eyes.
At school, Mrs. Underwood let me stand up and tell how Michael and I had found the dead woman. I did it great with gestures and everything. Afterwards, she let the class ask questions. You should have heard those questions! Some of them didn’t even believe that we found the dead body at all. And of course, Kay Bob Benson got up and told the story about how her mother had found the leg. So what! We found a whole body. Stay away from sixth graders if you can.
At recess I go across the football field to the high school and a senior boy named Marvin Thrasher gives me a Mounds candy bar every day and sometimes an Almond Joy. He is a big fan of the Peter Paul candy company. I talk to the high school teachers a lot, too. I am getting plenty of attention being a victim of a fire disaster and the product of a broken home at the same time.
November 23, 1952
Mrs. Dot comes down to see me once in a while and she sure has been acting funny lately. She wears the Jr. Debutante pink and seafoam green barrettes all the time now, and she made me sit down and listen to a talk called “Fun with Rayon” that I already heard her do in Jr. Debutantes. Sometimes she does baby talk to me. Mrs. Romeo said that her “Dashes from Dot” column last week didn’t make a lick of sense.
In school Mrs. Underwood told us a story about a little girl who had gotten rabies and gone mad. They had to feed her by putting a tray under her door. When anybody in her family got close, she said, “Don’t get near me because I’m liable to bite you.” Well, you should have heard the class just roar at that one, including Michael. Mrs. Underwood told them there was nothing funny about rabies. That little girl knew if she bit any member of the family, they would get rabies, too, and she died without ever having been petted. I cried so hard Mrs. Underwood had to take me to the school nurse.
When I was in the school nurse’s office, a high school girl came in and said, “Oh, Mrs. Smith. I feel awful. I’ve got my period and my stomach is all hot.” Mrs. Smith went over to a big icebox and got her a Coca-Cola. I wondered why I didn’t get a Coca-Cola. I told Patsy Ruth Coggins, the dumbest girl living, I knew a way to get us a free Coca-Cola. So at recess we went over and I said, “Oh, Mrs. Smith, my stomach is burning up something awful and so is Patsy Ruth’s.” She said, “Do you have real bad cramps?” I said, “No, we just have a period and I think I might have to have a Coca-Cola and Patsy Ruth wants one too.” Patsy Ruth said, “I would rather have a Dr Pepper if you have it.” I could have killed her. Sure enough, Mrs. Smith gave us both a Coca-Cola and two aspirins. I told her I didn’t want any aspirins, but dumb Patsy Ruth took the aspirins. We finished our Coca-Cola and thanked her and left.
Today I went back over there. Mrs. Smith said, “Do you still have your period?” I said, “Oh, yes, and now it’s worse than ever. My stomach is so hot I can’t touch it with a ten-foot pole.”
But she didn’t give me my Coca-Cola. She went over and looked at some papers and said, “You are going to the doctor right now. This is not normal, you having a period for a week.”
I said, “Listen, I don’t even go to school here. I was just passing through. I live in a school bus and I am on my way to Wisconsin.”
That lie didn’t do me a bit of good because she had my name and Mrs. Underwood’s name written down on a paper from the time I had been there for a crying fit. She took me right back over to the grammar school and told Mrs. Underwood I had my period for over a week and, not only that, it had gotten worse. Mrs. Underwood looked real surprised and asked me if it was true. I said, “Well, I didn’t know for sure if I had it for a week or not, but my stomach is hot.” Mrs. Underwood looked at me funny, thanked the nurse and told her she would take care of it.
She gave the class a longer recess and took me in the classroom, sat me down and said, “Now are you sure you have your period?” I said I couldn’t say for sure, but I thought so.
“What makes you think you have one?”
I said, “I was craving a Coca-Cola.”
Then she asked me if I knew what a period was. I said if she meant in grammar, I knew what a period was and I knew what a comma and an exclamation mark were. She said, “Daisy Fay Harper, didn’t your mother tell you what a period is?” I said, “I guess not or I would have remembered.” Caught like a rat in a trap in a lie in front of Mrs. Underwood!
She said, “Do you know what a Kotex is?”
“Sure, Momma has a box of them at home.”
She said, “Do you know what they’re for?”
“I sure do,” I said. “My momma told me they were for dusting in hard-to-reach places.”
Mrs. Underwood settled back, crossed her legs and said, “I guess I’m going to have to tell you about your period.” And she did. She told me all about it and it meant you were a woman and all. I thought I was going to die right there on the spot. I’ve never heard anything so terrible in my whole life. I hope she is wrong and I never get a period. I am eleven years old and entirely too young to hear about it. Can you imagine my mother not knowing what Kotex are for and dusting the house with them? Well, her mother can just tell her what they are for, I’m not getting into the facts of life. I haven’t heard one fact of life that I liked yet.
November 24, 1952
I AM IN BIG TROUBLE! Yesterday at school I was sitting there listening to Mrs. Underwood read us, The Clue of the Whistling Bagpipes, Chapter 14, “Trouble on the Mountain,” when someone knocked on the classroom door. Mrs. Underwood stopped right at the best part and went to find out who was there. She came back and said, “Daisy Fay, your aunt and uncle are here to see you. They’re waiting for you in their car.”
I got all excited because
it had to be my Aunt Mignon and Uncle Raymond all the way from Virginia and I just knew Momma was with them. They had brought her home as a surprise!
Mrs. Underwood said to get my things, I could be excused early and not to forget to do page 57 in my arithmetic book. I got all of my stuff, ran out and jumped in the car. And guess what? It wasn’t my Aunt Mignon and Uncle Raymond at all. I had never seen these two people before in my life. I said, “Hey, I think you’ve got the wrong little girl.”
The woman said, “You’re Daisy Fay Harper, aren’t you?”
I said, “Yes,” but by that time they had driven off with me. I said, “Wait a minute, I don’t know you.”
She said, “You were named after a vase of daisies that were in your mother’s room, weren’t you?”
I started to get nervous. I said, “How did you know that?” And then I saw that ring on her finger and I knew who she was, Opal, the murdered woman’s sister! I started screaming they had better stop and let me out of that car or I would tell the police. I tried to jump out, but the man had locked all the doors.
Opal said, “Don’ be afraid. We won’t hurt you. We just want to talk to you about my sister Ruby.”