Gone Crazy in Alabama

  The Spider Has Landed

  The lunar module separated from the command module and landed on the moon’s surface that Saturday afternoon. We saw a simulation of the landing but we heard the real thing. The minute the lunar module touched the moon’s floor, all of us watching TVs and listening to the broadcast became earthlings, waiting for the two astronauts in the lunar module to step outside and onto the moon. I had a time getting Vonetta and Fern to stay inside to watch the landing, let alone wait for the two astronauts to climb out and walk on the moon. Vonetta and Fern had been good earlier, watching and listening as the space shuttle orbited around the moon, taking its time to fire off another rocket to land. When the spacecraft finally separated into two ships, one landing and the other one staying up in space, we all cheered. Big Ma and Ma Charles prayed. But that seemed to be all there was to it. The spacecraft sat on the moon for hours and Vonetta and Fern wanted to go outside and run around with the chickens before the sun went down.

  “Call us when Martians come.”

  “Martians are on Mars.”

  “Call us when the Moonies come.”

  “There’s no such thing as Moonies.”

  “If there’s Martians, there’s Moonies.”

  “Just call us when something happens.”

  Off they ran.

  The only thing happening was a lot of radioing between mission control and the astronauts. JimmyTrotter took a chance and ran through the pines and over the creek to check on Butter and to get whatever afternoon milk Sophie was willing to give. He came back by six for supper, which Ma Charles was only too glad to have Big Ma heap on his plate. We told him he’d missed the little silver men that came to greet the lunar module, but he pulled out his transistor radio and laughed in our faces.

  It was long after our bedtime and still nothing had happened. I didn’t have to ask. Ma Charles told Big Ma, “Let ’em see it,” and Big Ma fussed and went to bed. We cheered our little victory, but Vonetta and Fern had drifted off on our mountain of pillows and sheets spread out on the floor.

  I glanced at my Timex. If the astronauts planned to climb out of the Eagle, they had to do it soon, or the only thing we’d be seeing at midnight would be the picture on the TV screen of the American flag or the Indian chief posted at the end of the broadcast day. I wanted my sisters to see the astronauts on the moon almost as badly as I had wanted them to see the Jackson Five on TV for the first time. I knew they shouldn’t miss any moon walking but I found myself, like Mr. Lucas and Ma Charles, drifting off to sleep.

  Around ten forty-five that night, JimmyTrotter poked me in the shoulder. “Cousin Del, it’s about to happen.”

  “You sure?”

  “Any minute.” Even Walter Cronkite’s voice had that quiet excitement of a sportscaster announcing a big-deal golf putt. It was about to happen.

  JimmyTrotter tugged on Mr. Lucas’s sleeve and Mr. Lucas pretended he’d been awake. He gently nudged Ma Charles and then called out, “Ophelia. Come on out. Ophelia, come on before you miss it.” Big Ma took to hiding in her room when Mr. Lucas stayed to watch the moon mission.

  Even Big Ma wanted to witness the astronauts walking on the moon. She joined us in the living room, but wouldn’t sit in the empty chair next to Mr. Lucas.

  I tried to get Fern up while Jimmy pulled Vonetta’s ear. Not hard, but playful. Light. I’d never thought of anyone besides our parents, Fern, and once, Uncle D, really and truly liking Vonetta. JimmyTrotter not only liked Vonetta, he adored her. She woke up smiling at him.

  Fern stretched and opened her eyes. She saw the simulated spacecraft and sleepily sang, “The itsy-bitsy spider dropped on the yellow moon.” Even on the color television screen, the moon wasn’t yellow or silver. It was whitish gray. And dull. But Fern did get the spider part right. The lunar module looked more like a four-legged spider than an eagle. But I’m sure it wouldn’t have been the same if the astronaut had said “The Spider has landed” when they first touched down on the moon’s surface.

  Finally, we were watching the real thing. The real-live broadcast and not a simulation with actors playing the parts of the astronauts. Finally, the words “Live from the surface of the moon” showed up fuzzy but readable on the television screen, and we were seeing the real moon. We all cheered. Big Ma said, “May God have mercy,” and Ma Charles shook her tambourine. The snowy figure of an astronaut in a padded white suit with a bubble helmet and backpack climbed down the ladder of the Eagle in what seemed like slow motion and did what I never thought I’d see. He stepped foot on the moon. The words “Man on Moon” flashed before our excited and astonished eyes.

  Big Ma gasped. From the corner of my eye I saw a motion from Mr. Lucas to Big Ma. He reached over to touch her hand. I didn’t look on but I noticed my grandmother hadn’t snatched her hand from Mr. Lucas the way she wiped away kisses and shooed off hugs.

  The television console speakers crackled. JimmyTrotter lifted up his hands and asked everyone to be quiet so we could hear Walter Cronkite and the astronauts. Cronkite said, “Armstrong is on the moon. Neil Armstrong—thirty-eight-year-old American—standing on the moon!”

  JimmyTrotter shouted, “We won the space race!”

  It wasn’t long before gunshots went off in the air from miles away.

  Two things sprang to mind as I watched one astronaut on the moon, and then another astronaut running, hopping, and frolicking on the moon. That there was a third astronaut hovering above in the command module far above the hubbub. While the two below tested their weightlessness, picked up samples of whatever moonie-eyed lovers looked up to, and marked up the moon’s surface with moon boot tracks, the third astronaut was left behind holding everything together.

  The other thing that sprang to mind was that the moon was beautiful at night from a distance, but it surely was a lonely place up close.

  Got Milk?

  Once the two astronauts had walked on the moon the excitement seemed to die down for everyone except JimmyTrotter, who listened to updates on his pocket radio and watched Apollo 11 news on our television set when Big Ma’s programs weren’t on.

  Soon everything would go back to normal. The astronauts would return to Earth to their families and we’d forget we were all earthlings. I thought it was funny when one of the astronauts called their space capsule a “happy home.” If that tight little spaceship was a happy home, then that astronaut’s real home must have been a sad one.

  A happy home had nothing to do with three men in a bubble eating sawdust food and watching pencils floating in the air. A happy home meant having everyone under one roof, sitting around the table, eating a peach cobbler or pecan pie.

  I thought about Pa and Mrs. Then I thought about the baby. Having a little brother wouldn’t be so bad. Or maybe another sister.

  Uncle Darnell came in that morning from having worked an all-night shift. He gave Big Ma the local newspaper with her gossip paper folded within it and Big Ma went back to her room and left the television to JimmyTrotter.

  Vonetta, who wasn’t speaking to Uncle Darnell, poked Fern.

  Fern poked her back, but asked, “Uncle D, did you buy a quart of milk?”

  “Depends,” he said. “Who’s asking?”

  Vonetta gasped, her eyebrows raised high. “You got it?”

  “Got what?” he asked. If ever I missed my uncle’s dimples, it was now that he didn’t smile at this perfect opportunity to tease his favorite niece and let his dimples show.

  “Milk,” she answered.

  “Did you ask me to bring home a quart of milk?” No dimples.

  She was silent.

  Ma Charles stood up, her finger pointed. “No milk but cow’s milk straight from the cow! Not in this house.”

  I spoke up. “But Ma Charles, store milk comes from cows. At the dairy farm.”

  “I know what I said and why. They don’t have grass at the dairy factory,” Ma Charles said. “And if they do, believe me, those factory cows don’t graze on grass that springs out of
dirt. I’m not ignorant,” she said. “I’ve seen ’em penned and chained worse than convicted killers. No, sir,” she declared. “You won’t pour a bowl of prison milk in this house.” As ludicrous as she sounded, she meant it.

  “I’ll stop at the McDaniels’ farm this evening. Bring home some milk,” Uncle D said.

  “Shouldn’t have to drive six miles out of the way when we got fresh milk over the creek,” Ma Charles said.

  “Auntie, I can’t help that Sophie’s drying up before Butter’s ready,” JimmyTrotter said.

  “Course you can’t,” she said. “It’s that great-granny of yours that put something on that cow to keep her from milking. She’d kill a calf to see that my great-grands stay deprived of milk, and no one needs milk more than Rickets here. Bones just as weak and puny.”

  Jimmy smiled a little, the way Pa looks away and smiles when Big Ma says something crazy, and there was no shortage of craziness down here in Alabama. “Auntie . . .”

  “Oh, I know she does it to spite me. She sees all my kin are here. It’s nothing but pure spite and you can tell her I said so.”

  I opened my mouth to say whatever Big Ma would have said if she wasn’t squirreled away reading her gossip paper, but JimmyTrotter gave me a head shake. Like, No. Let her go on.

  “I know how that sister of mine is. You tell her, I know about the curse.”

  Only Ma Charles and Miss Trotter could get themselves riled over things that made sense only to them. There was such a thing as being too much alike and equally stubborn.

  “As long as I have milk for my cornflakes,” Vonetta said, “I don’t care about anything else.”

  Pure T Spite

  Maybe spite was catching. Uncle Darnell had left for school and returned without the milk he had promised. Furthermore, regardless of what Ma Charles had said, JimmyTrotter came over the next morning with far less than the two quarts of milk that he normally brought.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do about Sophie,” JimmyTrotter said, probably hoping Ma Charles would take pity. “I might have to take her to town for beef.”

  I prayed Fern didn’t catch on and that Vonetta wasn’t mean enough to explain what JimmyTrotter said about taking Sophie to town.

  “You tell your old great-granny: no milk, no eggs,” Ma Charles said. “An understanding is an understanding.”

  “Auntie, I brought all that Sophie gave.”

  “And it don’t fill a bottle,” Ma Charles said.

  “It’s just enough for one bowl of cereal, and I called it,” Vonetta said.

  “I refuse to take the insult,” Ma Charles said. “Take those three drops of milk on back to her.”

  “I want it!” Vonetta wailed.

  “You’ll take nothing,” Ma Charles said.

  JimmyTrotter said, “I don’t know about Sophie. I expected at least another two months from her.”

  “It’s because they sold her boy calf to the butcher. For hamburgers,” Vonetta said to Fern. I could have smacked Vonetta. Smacked the smile off her face.

  “Vonetta!”

  “Stop treating her like a baby,” Vonetta snapped back. She had no idea of how close I came to popping her. “You love to baby your baby.” To Fern she said, “And you stop acting like a baby. Pa and Mrs. can’t diaper you and the new baby.”

  I reached out to snag Vonetta but she was quick and leaped away, laughing.

  “Don’t let me catch you,” I told her.

  “Stop picking on Vonetta,” JimmyTrotter said.

  Fern began to cry for Sophie’s calf. I held out my arms and she stepped into them. I sniffed the top of her head, which was sweet from coconut oil and tangled from no combing. I rocked her as she cried.

  Vonetta rolled her eyes and mouthed, Baby. Big Ma used to say there wasn’t a human being as unfeeling and selfish as Cecile. I could say the same thing about Vonetta.

  JimmyTrotter pleaded to let him have a few more eggs but Ma Charles sat up straight in the pine chair her father made, looking every bit as “onchee” as her sister. “She’s doing this to pay me back because all my folks are living and all hers—but one—have gone to glory. I never heard of anything more spiteful.”

  “Auntie,” JimmyTrotter said, “Miss Trotter wouldn’t do anything to keep Sophie from milking. That’s just—” He was too respectful to call an elder crazy but it was Alabama crazy. “She wouldn’t do anything like that.”

  “Heaven knows what she dropped in the grass. Plenty of weeds around to kill a cow or dry her up,” Ma Charles said. “Pure T spiteful.”

  “Auntie, you know that’s not true. We depend on Sophie and Butter too,” he said. “There’s no cowbane for miles. I always check where they graze.”

  Big Ma had heard all the spite and evil going on and emerged from her room. “Mama,” she scolded, “the Lord don’t like meanness.” Then she said to JimmyTrotter, “Son, you take as many eggs as you need.”

  Ma Charles shook the milk bottle. “That’s two eggs and no more.”

  “Delphine,” Big Ma said. “Go in the coop and get a dozen eggs.”

  “A dozen?” Ma Charles said. “A dozen?”

  For once, JimmyTrotter didn’t want to be around for the fussing between his aunts. “I know where everything is.” He got up and was out the back door before it would start.

  “Should be ashamed of yourself,” Big Ma scolded. “You’re no better than these children.”

  “It’s you who should be ashamed,” Ma Charles said. “Setting the wrong example for your grands. Showing them they don’t have to live up to their word. Being disrespectful to your own mother. Raising my pressure.”

  “Let’s help JimmyTrotter,” I told Fern, although he didn’t need our help. I didn’t much care what Vonetta did but she trailed behind us. JimmyTrotter had already taken what he needed and was crossing the field, heading into the pines.

  He’d left enough eggs for us to gather and bring inside.

  “I want my milk for my cornflakes. It’s all that stupid cow’s fault.” Vonetta pouted.

  “Don’t call her that,” Fern said. “She’s not stupid. She’s sad. She wants her baby cow and her baby cow is gone for good.”

  “If you call dead gone,” Vonetta cackled in Miss Trotter’s voice.

  “Vonetta!”

  She stood there with cow eyes.

  I didn’t have to beat Vonetta. I knew exactly how to get her. I planted one hand on my hip and pointed with the other. “That’s why you don’t have real friends. Just sometime-y, fake friends who take your things. But you’re too chickenhearted to stand up to your fake friends so you jump on your little sister every chance you get. And your sometime-y, fake friends must laugh at you behind your back and in front of your face because they know you’re too chicken to do anything about it. Serves you right. You’re selfish, a show-off, whiny—”

  “And mean to your little sister!”

  “That especially,” I said.

  Vonetta seemed to bask in our insults, wearing each one proudly. “I don’t care what you call me. I’m getting my milk.”

  “Then get it,” I said.

  “I can and I will. And it will be for me and my cornflakes.”

  I turned to Fern. “Let’s play Old Maid.”

  “Let’s.”

  I pulled out the cards and Fern and I sat on the rug with our legs folded. Then I dealt cards to Fern and me, Fern and me, until we had our hands.

  Vonetta turned on her heel.

  That night, as the Apollo 11 spacecraft continued on its journey back to Earth, Uncle D came home from school and work at the mill. Vonetta didn’t speak to him, but she watched him. Saw that he had nothing but his lunch pail, coffee thermos, and college books. She grunted hard and angrily and marched into the room.

  “No milk?” I asked.

  He slapped his head. “I knew I forgot something. Look, I’ll go—”

  “You’ll go lie down, son,” Big Ma said. “The world doesn’t spin and stop on a bowl of cornflak
es. And we’ll be lucky the earth keeps spinning like it’s supposed to—with men poking through space, hopping around on God’s moon. Son, you been working and going to school. You go lie down.”

  When we walked over to Miss Trotter’s the next day, Miss Trotter was quick to shoo us away. “Get on back.” She muttered something about Ma Charles and said, “Don’t you feel this cold in the air?”

  I was sweating from tramping through fields and trees in the heat. The steamy, hot air.

  Miss Trotter raised a finger to the air and nodded. “You don’t feel this cold? Get back over the creek before you get caught in it.”

  “Caught in what?” I asked.

  “The storm,” JimmyTrotter said. He looked up.

  “Dern astronauts, ripping through space, tearing holes here and everywhere.”

  Then Vonetta said in Ma Charles’s voice, her tambourine-shaking voice, “Cast not thy rod through the clouds,” and then added in Big Ma’s voice, “A mercy, Lord.”

  “Hear that?” Miss Trotter said. “Even that old sister of mine knows a storm’s coming. Don’t know why she let you out. Now get going.”

  “Can I take the bike, cousin JT? You know I’ll bring it back.”

  JT?

  And he let her rename him with a shrug and a nod.

  “Sure, cuz.”

  “Tell her,” I said. “Like you told me since the day Papa and I came over. Come on, tell her.”

  “Tell her what?”

  “‘Call me JimmyTrotter or don’t call me.’”

  JimmyTrotter smiled. “JT’s all right between Vonetta and me.”

  “See, meanie?” she said to me.

  And she rode the bike while Fern and I skipped over the creek.

  Maybe there was something to what Miss Trotter, Ma Charles, and Big Ma had to say about man sending things out of this earth poking holes in the sky, and having wrath hurled back down at him. When the astronauts broke through the atmosphere and splashed down in the Pacific, we were repaid with an electrical storm. Every outlet was unplugged from every socket and the house stayed dark, except for the lit candle in a few rooms, including ours.