What Happened on Fox Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

ask how in the world had Itaught Monette to read when she was only three. But not Gertrude. Tidy as she was, with all her life arranged in nice, orderly columns, it seems she couldn’t figure out where to classify us Walcotts. So there the two of us were, night after night, keeping to our own sides of Fox Street, for all the world as if we lived on the banks of a crocodile-infested river. Well. One night, didn’t she up and nod. And the next, go so far as to call out good evening. Finally Gertrude actually crossed Fox Street to inform me boiling water poured in the sidewalk cracks would kill the ants. It was the first and last complete sentence I ever heard the woman speak.”
    Da rearranged her toe coffins. Her look grew faintly puzzled, as if a student had written her a good essay but left off the last lines.
    â€œNeither one of us is the warm fuzzy kind,” Da said. “There was never a chance we’d be best friends.”
    Across the street, Mrs. Steinbott thumped her big yellow canister down on the porch.
    â€œI’ll never forget the night I went upstairs and found that devil Monette luxuriating in a rose-petal bath, like a princess in one of those fairy tales she loved. The perfume about knocked me over!She’d snipped off an armload of Gertrude’s American Beautys and carried them home. I chased her, naked as a jaybird, all around the house.” Da’s fan paddled the air. “When she told me Gertrude’s son, Walter, egged her on and told her to take as many flowers as she wanted, I had to scold her all over again. I knew Gertrude didn’t like those two playing together.”
    All at once, she’d commanded Mo’s attention.
    â€œMrs. Steinbott had a son?”
    Da raised her eyebrows. “Why, I’m disappointed in you, Mo Wren. I thought you were the historian of Fox Street!”
    â€œI know she had a husband. Who got killed in some kind of terrible accident at some kind of factory.” Fell into a vat of boiling sauce at the Chef Boyardee tomato sauce plant. Or doused in molten ore at Republic Steel. Or, if you asked the Baggott boys, it was no accident at all—he was poisoned at his own dinner table, a pinch of arsenic in his mashed potatoes every night, till he keeled over onto the floor and she collected his million-dollar life insurance policy.
    â€œIn fact,” said Da, “it was a car accident.”
    Mo sank back in her chair.
    â€œOvernight she became a widow alone with a babyboy. Walter Henry Junior. His eyes were like little chips of sky. Next to Monette, he was the smartest child on the street.”
    Da chuckled, but then her fanning slowed. Across the street, Starchbutt had sat down in one of her porch chairs and folded her hands in her lap. She couldn’t possibly hear what Da was saying, yet she stared as if mesmerized. As if she couldn’t wait to hear the end of the story, either.
    â€œAfter her husband died, Gertrude started getting seriously peculiar. People stayed away from her.” Da raised her fan like she wished she had something to swat. “Walter Junior was such a good son! I can’t tell you how many black eyes and bloody noses that boy endured, sticking up for his mother when other kids made fun of her.”
    â€œBut…how come her son never visits Starch…Mrs. Steinbott?”
    â€œHe joined the military directly out of high school.” Da pressed O GRAVE, WHERE IS THY VICTORY? to her heart. “He wasn’t there but two months before he was killed in a training exercise. Lord give me strength.”
    Mo collapsed back in her chair. Unpleasant revelations were coming at her one right after another, like a nest of yellow jackets run over by a lawn mower.
    â€œGertrude’s hair turned pure white overnight. She took to that house and barely came out for a year.” Da rested the fan in her lap. “That was the year you were born, Mercedes Jasmine. I