Chapter I
Hershel Williams lived at the end of our road in a shack that Mama said wasn’t fit to keep hogs. She often added that he had enough sense about him to fix his place up, if he was of a mind to, but he’d let the whole place fall in before he did a thing about it.
Once, Hershel broke his finger opening a jar of moonshine. Not only did he get drunk after he got the jar open, but he also started carrying on that he couldn’t work anymore because of his crippled finger.
I know he was drunk, because he came rolling up the road singing about “trollops” and “wicked ways, always pays.” I wasn’t quite sure what a trollop was, but the “wicked ways always pays” part, I understood. It was an opening for another lecture from Mama. As I wasn’t partial to her sermons, I was hoping Hershel would shut up before she got wind of him. No such luck. I know he broke his finger because he wanted Mama to fix it. She could, because she was a midwife.
That morning, I was hanging over the porch rail watching him stagger up the road. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen him walk that way, but it was the first time I’d seen him do it before nine in the morning. Hershel wasn’t fat, but he was tall, and he always wore overalls. I can’t say I ever saw him wearing anything else. Overalls and work boots. A working man’s clothes. Even if he didn’t work.
Chapter II
Like I said, Lovelady Road starts someplace else and ends up just beyond my house. At the other end, the gravel gives way to a blacktop road, and all the houses up there have fenced yards. That is where Cousin Cletus lives, right next door to his Mama and Daddy.
Cousin Cletus’ Mama is Daddy’s sister. Her name is Eula, but I’ve never heard Daddy call her anything but Sister. Everybody in the family calls her Sister, and for the longest time, I didn’t know she had a name like regular folks. Daddy and Sister didn’t look anything alike. Sister was a zero while Daddy looked like a pencil.
Cousin Cletus, however, did look like his Mama. Every time I saw Uncle, Sister, and Cousin Cletus standing next to one another, I always thought of a dollar. Uncle was the one. Sister and Cousin Cletus were the two zeroes.
Anyway, Cousin Cletus is a lot older than me. When he got big enough, he went away to school, but as I heard tell, it didn’t last long. Mama said he came back so quickly because he couldn’t find a girl that’d have him or wait on him hand and foot like his Mama did. Daddy agreed.
I never took much interest in Cousin Cletus. Every time I saw him, he was eating, sleeping, or watching television. Not much about him to be interested in. On the other hand, Mama fussed that Sister’s only job was minding the business of others.
