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chanting mumbo jumbo?”
    “No sir.”
    “That’s better. You been to school, ain’t you?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “How much?”
    “Seven or eight years’ worth.”
    “Sir.”
    “Seven or eight years’ worth. Sir.”
    “So you familiar with the concept of being sent home with an assignment?”
    “Yes sir. Sir.”
    Frank considered the possibility that he was being made fun of, then rejected it. The boy was so scared now that he’d probably developed a stutter.
    “I’m gone give you an assignment,” he said. “Call it a chance to further your education. What I want you to do, when you get through with your route, is to tell Mr. Alvin Timms, ‘Sir, I been sitting on that big yellow bus chanting mumbo jumbo. And a gentleman by the name of Mr. Frank Holder done seen it and corrected me.’ Think you can do that?”
    For just an instant, the boy looked away. Then, as if he realized his answer would be disallowed unless he was staring at an appropriate spot, he aimed his gaze below the man’s eyes but above his waist. “Yes sir,” he said.
    “That’s good,” Frank said. “Keep improving that comportment and you can’t never tell, maybe one day you’ll make janitor at the Piggly Wiggly. Ever nigger loves the city.”
    To send the boy on his way, he slapped the fender again and kicked one of the tires, but even that brought him no pleasure.

SEVEN

    SATURDAY NIGHT. There had been a time—not so long ago, either—when those two words, linked together, had possessed magical qualities. Shirley remembered one time in particular. It must have been 1936, because by then they’d quit renting from the Stancills and were living on their own place. Jimmy Del had gone into town that morning to see old man Gaither for the purpose of requesting that year’s furnish, but the banker came very close to saying no. As it was, Jimmy Del told her, he’d loaned them enough to get the crop in the ground, but not nearly enough to buy any of the new fertilizers that might actually have made cotton grow on land as poor as theirs. When she asked him what they were going to do now, he tipped his hat back and grinned at her. “Why don’t we invite some folks over and build us a big old bonfire?”
    They came from all over the community—the Youngs with their hand-cranked Victrola and a bunch of hard-pressed 78s, Luke and Noonie Baker, the Washington brothers and their wives, the Blanchards, Alvin and the store clerk he was seeing. They ate molasses candy with parched peanuts, the kids used a tin can to play stickball and later on, when the young ones had been put to bed, those not opposed to drinking sipped wine made from possum grapes. She got drunk and danced with every man she knew, and Jimmy Del sat there on the porch steps, master of the ball, grinning and cranking that Victrola.
    Then the war started—“Yet another of those bastards” was the way he once put it—and he turned morose and brooding and couldn’t get along with her or Dan or Alvin or anybody else, either. He’d sit on the back steps for hours at a time, whittling a piece of wood, watching the shavings pile up around his shoes.
    And Saturday night came to mean no more than any other.
    “You mark my words,” Alvin said. “When they look back on this year, they’ll say there wasn’t a single good movie made. Not a one.”
    This Saturday night, they were walking down the street past the darkened Western Auto, where several lawn mowers stood on display behind the window. She’d been seeing the same stuff in all the store windows for the longest time, and knew the lack of variety wasn’t due solely to a shortage of new products. Most folks had stood all the change they could take and weren’t looking for anything new, whereas Shirley had weathered so much change that she wanted a lot more of it. If she’d had her way, she would’ve torn down every building in town, replacing all of them with bigger, modern-looking structures made of glass and steel. She