Dovey Coe by Frances O'Roark Dowell

thing I remember.
    When I come to, Huck was licking my face, and my head felt like it were split in half. I scooted myself so I was sitting up and rubbed my forehead, trying to stop the pain that was pounding against me like a hammer. It took me a minute to remember where I was. Tom lay in the corner, so stiff that I could tell he was dead. The tears filled my eyes, and I let them fall.
    â€œHow’d you get in here?” I asked Huck,who’d gone over and laid next to Tom, little whimpers coming out of his mouth. I looked about the room, wondering how long I’d been knocked out.
    That’s when I seen Parnell.
    He was lying on the floor as stiff as Tom, one of them metal canisters a few feet from his head. I crawled over to him and passed my hand over his mouth. There weren’t a breath left in him.
    â€œOh, Lord,” I said out loud. “Oh, my Lord.”
    The bells tinkled on the front door, and a voice called out, “Parnell? Are you in here? I’ve been keeping supper on the stove for you for almost an hour.”
    It was Mrs. Lucy Caraway. She come to the door of the back room and reached in to flip on the light. That’s when she saw us. “What in heaven’s name?” she yelled, running over to Parnell. She put her ear to his mouth, and then felt his neck with her hand. “He’s dead! Oh, my God! He’s dead!” Then she turned to me. “You killed Parnell! You killed my son!”

chapter 13
    T hey let me stay at home while I was waiting for my trial to come up. Usually when a person’s been accused of a serious crime they make him stay in the jail lessen his kinfolks can come up with a right good sum of money. Bail, they call it. But the sheriff didn’t figure I was likely to leave town before trial day, so he let Mama and Daddy sign a paper saying they’d be responsible for me showing up to court. The only thing was that I weren’t allowed to cross the county line until after I was tried, and then only if I weren’t found guilty.
    They say it’s at times like these when you find out who your real friends are, and by my reckoning the only real friend I had outside my familywas Wilson Brown. Folks who’d always been right neighborly toward me, including them who were at Caroline’s party, avoided my eyes when they seen me coming down the street. Not that I headed into town too much. I mostly stayed to home, helping Mama around the house and tracking through the woods with Amos.
    Amos weren’t himself after they brought Tom’s body to him. It was like someone had cut off a piece of him and he weren’t sure he could make do without it. It might sound funny to say it, but after Tom died, Amos got real quiet. Just at the time he said his first word, he stopped making any noise at all. Usually he played the rascal around the house, jumping out from behind doors to give Mama a fright or drawing funny pictures and slipping them into my books for me to find unexpected. But now mostly all he did was hike up into the mountain with Huck and come back empty-handed, like there weren’t no use hunting things if Tom weren’t around to hunt them, too. At home he’d sit on his bed rubbing Huck’s head and staring out the window. I think he was hoping Tom might come running over the hill, him being dead just a bad dream.
    Wilson come to visit me now and again, and he always made the effort to be right nice toAmos, patting him on the back and one time bringing him a real fine piece of quartz crystal from his collection. Wilson would ask Amos to join me and him on the porch, but Amos never felt much like it. So me and Wilson would sit by ourselves, eating the cookies MeMaw kept bringing up to the house to make everybody feel better and looking through comic books. We’d occasionally pass a few words between ourselves, but mostly we were quiet.
    The only one who seemed his same old self was Daddy. After coming back