Summer in the South by Cathy Holton Page A

lifting her chin. She and Will exchanged a long look, and Ava saw something pass between them. He leaned over and reached for Ava’s glass.
    “Let me get you another drink,” he said.

1919

    Woodburn, Tennessee
    Papa and John were in the stable killing rats. Papa had told Sissy and Fanny to stay away, so Fanny was sitting on the kitchen steps like he had said but Sissy was squatting behind a camellia bush spying on them. She had a big white bow in her hair that fluttered among the greenery like a bird. Tom Penny sat on Fanny’s lap. He was purring as she stroked him, his claws coming in and out against her leg. Cicadas droned in the heat. They were feeding castor beans to the rats, mixed up in bowls of suet pudding. Fanny knew not to go near the bowls. She knew not to go near the castor bean plants even though their flowers were like little India rubber balls covered in spikes, and their beans were speckled like tiny bird’s eggs. “Don’t ever touch them,” Papa had told them sternly. “They will kill you quicker than a cobra.”
    Across the wide lawn she could hear the thin wailing of her baby sister, Celia. Mother had gone to be with the angels not long after Celia came. The angels had brought Celia and taken Mother, and now Celia stayed in the house across the backyard where John and Martha lived with their dear little baby Clara. Martha took care of Celia and Clara. When she came to the house to cook for Papa and Sissy and Fanny, she brought both babies with her, laying them on a clean quilt on the floor.
    Sissy stood up and motioned for Fanny to join her but Fanny shook her head no. She always did what Sissy said, but Papa had said stay away with his face all sad and stern like it was these days since Mother went away, and Fanny could not bring herself to disobey him.
    She wondered if the angels would come for the rats like they had come for Mother.
    Fanny cried all the time for Mother but Sissy said, “Don’t be a baby.” Sissy never cried, but at night, in her sleep, she made little mewling noises like a kitten. This was in the nursery where they slept at the top of the stairs. They had always slept together, in two little spindle beds on either side of the long windows, and at night the big house creaked and moaned around them and the moonlight fell across their beds like fairies. Sometimes the fairies would lose themselves in Tom Penny’s fur, blinking wildly until Fanny giggled.
    “Don’t be daft,” Sissy said. “There’s no such thing as fairies.” Sissy was a Big Girl now. She was too big for fairies and grief.
    Sissy was eight years old, and she was turning into a boy. Any day now she would grow an appendage between her legs like a third arm. This is what she told Fanny. Any day now she wouldn’t have to sit down to pee.
    Sissy was too big for fairies and grief, but she wasn’t too big for magic.
    Down in the big kitchen Sissy liked to pour pepper into her palm and hold the hand out to Fanny. “Sniff it,” she’d say.
    “No, Sissy, I don’t want to.”
    “Sniff it.”
    She always did. Later, when she was snuffling and blowing her nose into a clean starched handkerchief, Martha would shake her head and cluck her tongue.
    Once, when they were alone together in the kitchen, Sissy pointed to the big cookstove and said, “I’ll bet you can’t do a cartwheel from the stove to the table.” It was a big thick farmhouse table with a marble slab top. Fanny almost made it, catching her forehead on a corner of the marble slab and opening a long gash that bled terribly while Sissy applied a makeshift tourniquet made out of a flour sack towel. Another time they decided to make a swimming pool out of an old iron washtub they found in one corner of the garden. They filled it with water and then made a diving board out of a cinder block and a pine board perched against the edge of the tub.
    “You first,” Sissy said, pushing Fanny out along the board.
    It teetered and dropped into the water,