Autumn Street Read Online Free PDF Page A

added, And Tatie, Gawd bless Tatie too. Amen again.
    Before I fell asleep I realized that I had forgotten to mention the turtles lurking in the woods at the end of Autumn Street. As long as I was saying prayers anyway, I probably should have asked Gawd to do something about the turtles so that they would never eat me. But by then, I thought, he was probably listening to someone else's prayers, and Grandmother had told me often enough: Elizabeth Jane, it is very rude to interrupt.
    In the morning Mama was not there; Grandfather had taken her to the hospital during the night. It was Grandmother who checked distractedly to see if our teeth were brushed and our shoes tied; and it was Tatie, in the kitchen, who held me on her lap and rocked me after breakfast as I sucked my thumb and said the long prayer again and again, silently, in my head.
    In the middle of the morning, Grandfather came to the kitchen and told us that the baby had been born, that it was a boy, that Mama was fine, and that a telegram had been sent to Daddy out in the Pacific.
    "Praise God," murmured Tatie. "Praise the Lord." I wondered briefly if I should correct her pronunciation, but Tatie didn't like to be corrected. Instead, I climbed from her lap and asked her to make me some oatmeal cookies. That night, I forgot all my promises, all my prayers, and went to bed without washing; Grandmother would have scolded me for that, but Grandmother didn't bother coming to our room to say good night.

6
    M AKING FRIENDS WITH Charles wasn't difficult. I stuck my tongue out at him while he peered at me from behind the pantry door. He stuck his tongue out, even farther, in reply. I giggled. He giggled. We stuck our tongues out simultaneously.
    "You two no-accounts stop that," ordered Tatie.
    "If you gave us each a cookie, we couldn't stick out our tongues," I suggested.
    "Yeah," said Charles, poking his head around the door.
    We took our cookies to the backyard and talked with our mouths full, spewing crumbs.
    "How old are you?" he asked me.
    "Six."
    "Me too," said Charles. He chewed for a while. "When was you six?" he asked.
    "In March. My birthday is the first day of spring."
    "Ha," said Charles. "I'm older than you. I'm almost seven."
    I chewed for a while. "Can you read?" I asked slyly.
    "Course I can't read. I don't go to school till September."
    "I can read even though I don't go to school yet," I told him loftily. "My sister showed me how. Every letter has a sound, and if you put the sounds together they make words, and..."
    But Charles was bored. "I can stand on my head," he said. "Can you stand on your head?"
    "No," I admitted. "But your hair is like a pillow. That's probably why you can do it."
    "Look, I'll show you." Charles tipped himself upside down on Grandfather's grass and waved his bare brown legs in the air. "Now you try," he said, righting himself.
    I tried, and my dress draped itself around my head. Charles roared with laughter, as I fell over into a somersault.
    "I see London, I see France, I see Elizabeth's underpants," he chanted.
    No one had ever found my underpants particularly interesting before. Jessica's were better—she had some with rosebuds—but mine were ordinary white cotton. I grinned uncertainly at Charles.
    "If you pull yours down, I'll pull mine down," Charles suggested.
    "Underpants?"
    "Yeah," he said.
    I shrugged. I didn't mind, though I had a feeling we shouldn't do it in the middle of the yard, with Tatie glancing through the kitchen window now and then. "Out behind the lilacs," I said.
    So we did it there, and it was no more interesting than I had anticipated. I watched Mama change the baby's diapers several times a day. Charles was no different, except in color. I seemed something of a disappointment to him, as well, but we were both polite, and thanked each other as we pulled our pants back up. It was a curiously pleasant way to seal a friendship.
    Charles had no father. I asked him, after we were friends, if his father