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wasn’t a little gentleman. He was a little lady. That was the trouble. He’d grown up around too many women. Papa treated him like his own, but Papa was always at the store or at a church meeting.
    â€œWill, stay to supper and talk Lorna out of it,” Mama begged. “Campbell Junior is petrified.”
    I knew that anything I said would just make Aunt Lorna more determined. “I’ll try to come back Tuesday, Mama, and talk to him.” I pulled out my pocket watch. “I really cain’t stay long now, but since supper’s ready I’ll eat with y’all.”
    Mama splashed some water on her face, blew her nose, told me to bring the sweet potato soufflé, and picked up the platter of fried chicken. “What with the shame of his daddy shootin’ himself dead and all,” she muttered, “that poor boy’s had more’n his share already.”
    ***
    The family gathered, and we hadn’t sat down at the table good before Aunt Lorna said in her put-on Northern accent, “You must have felt like a white knight this afternoon, Will, rescuing that poor maiden from those great big old mean yellow jackets.”
    Loma always did know how to get my goat. When she was twelve and I was six, she decided to make me call her Aunt Loma. Mama, Papa, Granny, and even Grandpa had backed her up. They said she was a young lady now and I must show her proper respect.
    Ever since I got grown, and especially after she got to be thirty, she’d been trying to make me go back to calling her just Loma. I could feel sorry for any woman worrying about getting old, even Aunt Loma. So I knew how to get back at her. Whenever I felt hateful, I’d stick my face in hers and say, “Ain’t you my Aint Loma?”
    That night around the supper table I said, “What I want to know, Aint Loma, is about this rich old Yankee you go’n marry. What’s his name, and just how old is he? And how rich?”
    â€œThat’s how rich!” Reaching across the table, Aunt Loma made a fist of her left hand and wagged that big old diamond ring at me.
    Campbell Junior interrupted. “Cudn Will, I don’t want to go up North,” he whined, and bit glumly into a drumstick. I was his last hope. “Tell Mama I ain’t go’n go to no military school.”
    â€œYou’ll like it once you get there,” his mother said, not unkindly. “But you might as well quit saying ‘ain’t’ right now. And start cutting up your chicken. New York people don’t say ‘ain’t’ and they don’t eat chicken with their fingers.”
    â€œNot even fried chicken?”
    â€œThey don’t have fried chicken. They flour it and brown it and then steam it awhile. That’s what they call fried chicken.”
    Campbell Junior stared at her, unbelieving, and slowly lowered the drumstick to his plate.
    â€œNever mind,” Loma said. “Honey, you’re going to have a daddy.”
    â€œI don’t want a daddy. Uncle Hoyt is my daddy.”
    Smiling very sweetly at him, Loma said in exaggerated Southern, “Honey chile, you just go’n love Mr. Vitch.”
    â€œMr. Vitch?” Papa repeated.
    â€œThe man I’m going to marry.” She rattled off a twenty-syllable last name that I couldn’t understand then and never could remember later. “Our friends call him Vitch. But when it’s just us, I call him Mr. Rich Vitch. He likes that.”
    â€œIs he a Bolshevik?” asked Papa.
    â€œDon’t be silly, Brother Hoyt. Rich men aren’t Bolsheviks.”
    â€œWith a name like that he could be anything,” said Papa.
    Campbell Junior just sat there pushing his black-eyed peas into a mound with his fork and a cornstick.
    â€œHow,” I asked, “did this man Itch make his money?”
    Loma’s face flushed. “I said Vitch.
Vitch.
I think he made it in the steel business. Or maybe coal.