Alice speaks abruptly from her thoughts: “Do you know anybody named Fourkiller?”
“Oh, honey, you can’t hardly walk around here without stepping on a Fourkiller. There’s Ledger Fourkiller, he’s a chief, just the nicest man you’d ever meet. He does the ceremonies over at Locust Grove and lives on a shantyboat. He’s lived down there on the lake since the second war, Roscoe says. He’s got a landing built all out of old tires. It’s a wonderful thing to see.”
They walk in silence, until Sugar asks, “Do you remember the maypoles in Jackson?”
“Oh, sure. The kids in white shoes, walking circles. The boys would go one way and the girls the other.”
Sugar touches her hair. “The State Fair,” she says. “Them parades. I never will forget. And remember that carnival?”
“The cow with a human face!” Alice cries.
“Rubber man! The hypnotist!”
“The Siamese calves, two bodies eight legs!”
“You wanted your money back on that one,” Sugar says,
“because it turned out to be dead and stuffed.”
“I got it, too,” Alice points out.
“You had spunk, I’ll say that.”
“Well, think about it. Dead and stuffed, they could have just sewed two regular ones together.”
“I’ve been thinking about that for forty years, Alice.”
“That dead calf?”
“No. You. Telling the man you wanted your nickel back.
I wisht I’d had more of that. I feel like I didn’t show my girls what I was made out of.”
Alice is surprised to hear this admiration from her lively cousin. “Seems like they turned out all right.”
“Oh, sure. The boys are a peck of trouble, but the girls, they’re fine. You didn’t meet Johnetta yet. She’ll come over after she gets the bus drove. She’s something, she’s the type to get her money back.” Sugar laughs. “She would have climbed over the rope to see if it was two cows sewed together.”
Alice has on her jogging shoes, and she is used to getting where she needs to go, but she has to shorten her stride for Sugar, who seems to get winded easily. “You could get a big bowl of soup for five cents,” Alice argues. “You couldn’t just throw away a nickel.”
“No. Still can’t.”
The two women walk through the shade, their elbows occasionally touching. Whenever they pass a little house and yard mowed out of the woods, Sugar waves at the people on the porch. They are liable to be of any age: a grandmother plucking greens from a bucket, or a man in his twenties with black, greased hands, kneeling over an engine as if he’s about to deliver a baby out of it. And kids, by the score. They all wave back, calling Sugar by name. She has already introduced Alice to dozens of people, who seem to know already about Alice. Their names stilt and lean in her head like pictures from an old-time children’s book: Pathkiller, Grass, Deal, Stillwater, Doublehead. Often she can’t tell first names from last, or where the grandmother’s name let off and the children’s began. The young man with the engine is Able Swimmer. All of them seem to be related to Sugar through marriage or some catastrophe, or frequently both. Sugar is telling her right now, for instance, “Flossie Deal and I were at the courthouse in Tahlequah the day her son fell off the hotel they was building and busted his insides. Her other boy married Quatie’s husband’s sister.”
Sugar slows her pace even more as they head uphill, and sighs a little. “I loved that State Fair. Seems like ever time we went and sat in them bleachers, there wouldn’t be a cloud in the sky.”
“They had two fairs. First the State Fair, and after that the Black State Fair.”
“Really? I never knew it was divided up.”
Alice recalls that she used to find her beloved cousin sometimes naïve and in need of protection. “We only went to the second one. We liked it best, there was more music to it.”
“There was. And the church floats.”
“People dressed to beat the band, with hats and all. I liked all the hats.”
“Remember those children that dressed like angels?”
Alice thinks. “No. I remember women dressed like blue-birds, in blue high-heeled oxfords. And I remember when they’d turn on those streetlights that were like light bulbs under fluted pie plates, and we’d dance in the street.”
“Don’t you remember those children? They’d sing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In.’ I just loved that.”