The Cotton Queen Read Online Free Page B

insisted. “Somebody left it in the plane’s engine. When they revved it up, the thing went flying out and killed your dad just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
    “You’re lying!” I screamed.
    He grabbed the wrench out of my hand and stuck it in his back pocket.
    “Am not.”
    I grabbed hold of the branch beside me and began wildly trying to kick Ned out of the tree.
    “Liar! Liar! Liar!” I screamed.
    My aunts heard the commotion and came running over.
    “What are you doing?” Aunt Grace scolded me. “Stop that right now, you’ll make him fall out of the tree.”
    I was crying by then. Crying because I was angry. Crying because I was scared.
    “What’s going on here?”
    Aunt Lurlene’s question was directed at Ned.
    “She’s...she’s just afraid to fall out of the tree,” he said. “I didn’t do nothing, she’s just a scaredy-cat.”
    “I’m not! I’m not!”
    I kicked him again and this time I caught him off guard and he did fall out of the tree. Fortunately we weren’t that high and Aunt Lurlene was right beneath us and caught him easily.
    When she did the wrench fell out of his back pocket and landed on the ground beside them. Both women gasped, as did the older children standing around.
    Aunt Lurlene grabbed the boy by the scruff of the neck.
    “Ned Hoffman, when your father gets home, he’s going to wear you out!”
    It was that instant that I knew it was true. It all made sense. Ned may have meant meanness, but he’d spoken in honesty. My father was dead.
    Suddenly I heard that terrible howl again. That awful sound that my mother had made. It had frightened me so much the day the men had come to the door. I could hear it again, only closer, louder, more intense than before.
    It was years later, looking back, before I realized that it must have been coming from my very own throat.

B ABS
    T HOSE MONTHS after I moved back home to McKinney are vague and unclear in my mind. Tom. I still cannot think of him without the sense of anger and injustice I felt at his happy, optimistic life being cut so cruelly short. He had all the hopes and dreams and aspirations that buoy the rest of us. But he saw almost none of them come to pass. It was so unfair. When so many, to my mind, utterly useless people continue to live and thrive in the world, it was unconscionable for a higher power to strike Tom down. It made me furious.
    But I couldn’t think about that.
    Having lost my mother at an early age, I knew that I didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on what had happened or what might happen. I had to concentrate on the moment that was presenting itself and live through it in the best way that I could. Then there would be another moment and another. It was the only way to keep going.
    It wasn’t easy.
    Tom’s family was in conflict with me, I felt, about everything. The Hoffmans held strong opinions about proper behavior. They thought they knew what and how things should be done and felt no hesitation in doing them their way. The Air Force had taken Tom away from home. They had seen him only rarely in the last four years. But they still considered him to be their son, to be just like them. And somehow Laney and I were relegated to the position of latecomers. We were related to the family only by marriage. The concept that Tom belonged to me and my daughter, perhaps more than he belonged to them, never crossed anyone’s mind.
    When I arrived in McKinney, all the arrangements had been taken care of, the funeral had already been planned. The only thing my mother-in-law asked me was whether I had an appropriate dress for the service.
    “Tom wouldn’t want a funeral,” I explained to them. “He never liked them himself and he knew how hurtful they had been to me.”
    My protestation was whisked away as if I’d never made it.
    “There has to be a funeral,” Papa Hoffman said. “Everybody has a funeral.”
    “No, everybody doesn’t,” I told him. “I’m sure a graveside service would be