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true about my newspaper story.”
    Looking real sorry, he nodded. “I think it is.” He stared at me. “It’s Sunday, and I ain’t trying to make you mad. You know how Daddy always says getting good jobs is who you know. Well, Mr. Salter knows you, and he was probably thinking it might make people laugh a little. What’s wrong with that? Making people laugh is a real good reason to do almost anything.”
    I sat motionless alongside McCall and could hardly speak without choking. Finally, I said, “I wish he’d taken it for how good it is.”
    “If it makes people laugh, that’s okay. That’s all right.”
    Sucking on the smoothness of a tooth, I dropped my head and thought about the way I’d been snobby to Evette. I wished I could run to her house and make up. I looked at my brother instead.
    “McCall,” I said, “why don’t you have any best friends?”
    Hanging a piece of straw between his lips, he answered, “I don’t know. I like people well enough. I suppose I just like being with me most of all.”
    “Even when you’re by yourself?”
    “Yup.”
    I stared at the straight asphalt road that my daddy said hadn’t been there when he was a boy. Back then, all the roads had been made of dirt. Out of nowhere, a gang of black birds dashed slantways past the trunk in a great twirling flash. Altogether, they raced away and across the wide, wide cotton fields.
    “Wish I could catch me one a them,” McCall declared, gawking at those birds.
    Whenever we’re driving near Blenheim, we’ve always got to visit my daddy’s family gravesite. After the cotton and tobacco fields come to an end, and patches of woods start up, there’s this tiny cemetery without a fence, and that’s where all of my daddy’s kin get buried. I don’t mind going there on account of my daddy telling stories about his granddaddy and how he went off to fight in the Civil War in Richmond and Antietam with General Stonewall Jackson. Daddy usually talks about how after the war his granddaddy came home and saved money for three years before starting Carmichael Dry Goods. Also, if Great-Uncle Harvey’s with us, he’s always got things to add. His favorites are how our family came from Scotland and how they got off the boat with nothing but determination.
    “Great-Uncle Harvey,” I said, leading him through the graveyard, “why do you wanna come here if you can’t see anything?”
    For a second, he moved his hand from my shoulder and straightened a sleeve of his fancy suit. “Sure enough, I can’t see nothing. That’s true. But I can feel my kin wrastling in my bones. I can feel us walking on top of ’em.”
    “Is that why you didn’t bring your rolling chair, so you could walk?”
    “Naw, child, it didn’t fit into your daddy’s car is why I left it with Jacob.”
    I nodded.
    We walked about some more, and Great-Uncle Harvey said, “Little Darby, when you gonna interview me about being blind?”
    “Maybe tonight, if it’s okay?”
    The truth was, since recognizing that my story on toads was in the paper for being funny, I didn’t wanna ask him anything. I kept imagining all of Marlboro County laughing at my article, and it was embarrassing, especially standing atop all my successful and determined kin.
    I stopped so that Great-Uncle Harvey would. “Here’s your mama,” I told him.
    “Touch my hand to the gravestone,” he said.
    So I did, and while he smiled, I looked across the little clearing to where my daddy and Mama and Aunt Greer were crouched near another marker. Behind them, I saw McCall riding a pine tree by climbing to the top and letting it bend to the ground real slow.
    Cold, I tucked my favorite nightgown, which Mama had sewn from our best window curtain, underneath my legs. Great-Uncle Harvey and me sat out on the screened porch, and there was a cool wind blowing, clacking the pecan trees and rustling the dried-up cotton plants in the field, which gave off a soft
shoosh
like my daddy’s new radio when