On Emma's Bluff by Sara Elizabeth Rice, edited by davebccanada (comprehension books txt) 📖

"Hush" she told him. Emma did not move another muscle.

Finally, "Aunt Liz, can I fix anything for you?" Emma broke the spell.         

By this time Roy had deposited Liz on the cushioned glider that sat prominently on one side of the back porch. Roy had taken over the job of emptying the freezer of its catch.

"No, baby, just come over her and sit by me." Liz patted the faded cushion on her left. Then Liz commenced as if Emma already knew the full story. "I hope you never have to set eyes on anything as grisly as that. Just thank the Lord that Barbara Lee is away at college and wasn't in the car with me. Wasn't nothing but a little grey meat left, stringy and just barely clinging to the bones. And my Lord, her hands just a skeleton's hands, sticking up like they was reaching. Couldn't have recognized that as a face if I hadn't a seen the teeth."

Though this description was having it's effect on Emma, Liz paid no notice. She just kept right on rocking and talking, and talking and rocking, and relieving herself of the foul memory.

"Yeah, Momma, I know it was a rough sight for a woman like you, but it's over now. So try and put it behind you. They come and got the remains and all. Let's just get on with what's got to be done now. It's still Friday night, and I am suppose to be running the chain markers at the game, so let's just get on with it... that is unless you want to..."

"No, no we'll go. You just do what ever it is and get on to the game and Emma and I will meet you there. Just don't be expecting for me to do any cooking tonight."

The Bluff has a population of probably no more that 500 folks. From looking at the town itself that would seem to be an exaggeration. With one main paved street that consists of more closed and boarded over businesses than open, one would tend to think that the town was nearer to being a ghost town than an active, rooted community. But when the Friday night football games roll around this street is crowded with cars, pick-ups and farm vehicles.   This is when the citizens really come to town.

The only operating school in The Bluff proper is the East River Academy, and it caters to all the white families in a forty-mile radius, integration having caused the stubborn white cracker landholders to desert the county public schools. The children from such delta communities as Further Back, Gator, Beason's Fork, and Chinnasaw commute into The Bluff to attend to their education.

The county itself is all prime delta farmland, flooded up to the tops of its levees in the spring, and full of soybeans and cotton in the summer. A motorboat is a required second vehicle of the families in this county needed for navigating the bloated rivers and tributaries in order to reach commercial civilizations during rainy springs. Some say that it is during this season that the farmer truly earned his wealth by living through the harsh conditions brought by the floodwaters. It is during the uncomfortable floods that snakes leave the fields and rough waters to camp under beds and eaves. It is during this season that the gators and snapping turtles carry off the family pets. It is during this season that some homebound and isolated forget that one hundred fifty years had passed. It was during this season that the old superstitions take root again.

But, come harvest, fall, and the start of football, the locals take full advantage of the opportunity to congregate. And often with their year's crop's profit in their belts, they once again become the gentry of times forgotten.

Emma fondly remembered that once, as a child, she had travelled with her father, in his green, flat bottomed, fishing boat, to check on Uncle Roy and Aunt Liz. It had been a very rainy spring and many had been lost to record flood levels. They had found her aunt and uncle, not only high and dry, but in great spirits. Emma remembered finding their vacation like isolation magical and thrilling. Without the ability to maintain mundane obligations like chores the adults had been content to spend hours participating in games and in idle chat. The chasm between adult responsibility and play had been bridged, if not the flood waters.

Uncle Roy (Wilson) had been born and raised in The Bluff, the only adult living survivor of his parent's five children, his four sisters having succumb to childhood illnesses. Unlike the majority of his neighbors, Roy was not a farmer. Roy had learned to run the trotline before he had learned to read. His father had been a river-man, stringing the trotlines across the river to catch catfish and buffalo (a large, particularly ugly fish with a knot upon its brow). Papaw Wilson, Roy's daddy, had sold his fish from the back of his fishing boat, running from landing to landing like the old rolling store man; catfish to the whites, buffalo to the blacks.   Roy still made "house calls" on some of the old customers, but earned the majority of his money from toting his catch into the county seat to sell to the local markets.

With his trotlines, and Liz's job at the "Sewing Needle" they managed well enough to keep Liz in a new Buick every couple of years and to pay for Barbara Lee's baton lessons, which had helped to earn for her a majorette scholarship to Thomas Williams Jr. College.

The Wilson family scrapbook contained photo after photo of Barbara Lee, her baton, and her newest costume. From every conceivable color of sequins, to frills, lace, feathers, and bows, even wings: some with skirts, some with capes, the scrapbook was full of pictures of Barbara Lee and her baton. Emma sometimes wondered if the Wilson's might not have been able to pay for Barbara Lee's college themselves if they could only recoup the money they had spent on all of those costumes and photographs.

Born Emma Mae Lewis, Emma had grown up just outside the state capital, Jackson, Mississippi. Though some only seventy miles southwest of her birth place, The Bluff was and is a whole other world and time. As happy as she had been to move in with her Aunt and Uncle, Emma was finding it hard to blend. There were very few similarities between her old life style and this new one. Her sophomore class consisted of only eighteen students, her old ninth grade class numbered over sixty.

Aunt Liz had made a big deal about the importance of Emma being accepted and ‘popular’, like Barbara Lee had been. Emma's own parents had taught her to not be afraid to be different than the rest of the crowd.

"Well you know Barbara Lee was homecoming queen of her senior class." Liz would remind her over and over again. "Barbara was voted most beautiful two years in a row."

Emma was not one to enjoy looking at herself in the full length chifferobe mirror. Her hair was too straight and stringy, too yellow blond. The space between her eyes was too wide. "Moon face" one of her cousins had once used to call her.

Riding beside her aunt, Emma noted the way the rows of soybeans flickered by like pages in a book.

"You know she was married to your cousin Jesse before they put her away in Whitfield." That was one thing about Aunt Liz, the woman never lacked for gossip. "But, I think she was a crook, a real smart crook."

"Uh huh" Emma replied, wondering what her aunt said about her when she wasn't around.

They pulled up to the chain link gate and Liz rolled down her window to pay the attendant. "You know," Liz offered, "I liked it a lot better when they used to let you pull your car up to the edge of the field so that you could watch the game and not catch a chill. It was a lot more comfortable that way." The attendant, Mrs. Brown from Emma's third period home economics class just continued to smile pleasantly.

Emma tuned her aunt out as soon as they had parked the car. She was amazed at the crowd. There appeared to be people everywhere, men crowded around the cables that encompassed the field, lines at the concession stand, people just milling about. Emma searched the throng of people cheering from the bleachers. All she could seem to see were brightly colored new sweaters and green and white paper pom poms on a stick.

"I look so ugly," she thought in a panic. "I look like a baby in this old wool skirt and knee socks." Making her way through the crowd that were headed for the concession, the faces she knew bobbed past her along with the faces she did not know. "Okay I just need to climb into those bleachers and find a place to sit and just stay real unobtrusive." On the weathered wooden platform that marked the first tier of the bleachers she scanned for an open area hopefully near a familiar face. She caught sight of the auburn ponytail first. Like a novice ascending the high dive for the first time she made her way upward.

"Now you be back at the car right after the game," Her aunt's voice found her.

But Emma's eyes were trained on the ponytail and she neither acknowledged her aunt nor refuted her. Worming her way between field-absorbed fans, Emma made her way to the ponytail that belonged to Cindy Basset. Cindy was an undersized high school junior with an over sized wit and volume. It was Cindy who had sought Emma out the second day of classes in the school cafeteria. Emma had been sitting alone at the end of a long table pretending to be absorbed in her history book.

"Emma Lewis!!! Is Emma Lewis in here? I am looking for Emma Lewis," Cindy had bellowed from the doorway. Emma had shrunk from humiliation, as if her name were some ridiculing joke. From her hunched shoulders she glanced toward the source of her discomfort. Petite as a fifth grade boy Cindy had merely leaned further into the cafeteria door way and clamored even louder, "Emma, Emma, Emma, Emma Lewis!”

"Here," Emma managed to strangle out the words, her right arm raised, anything to stop this spectacle. It was in the same sotto voice with which she answered homeroom roll call.

"Well hell's bells," the redhead answered back, weaving between empty chairs to reach Emma's side. "I've been looking for you the entire lunch hour. Haven't you heard me yelling?"   The idea of this brassy headed waif shouting her name among the halls of education was enough to make Emma queasy.

"I've been right here studying my history." Emma offered as her reply.

"Perfect, because that is exactly what I am going to need help with," came Cindy's response, "they are making me take that stupid class again." Every word the redhead uttered was over dramatized.

Yet somehow from this awkward, mismatched beginning the alliance was formed. Emma knew that if nothing else she could be comfortable around Cindy. Who could possible notice