Read The Mighty Miss Malone for Free Online Page B

sis, that ain’t chocolate, that’s a haystack.”
    He said it like
I
was the one who was crazy.
    “And why is my toe so …?”
    A light went on in my head. A epiphany!
    When I was littler I used to have accidents all the time. Jimmie joked that even if it hadn’t snowed for years I’d find something as small as a puddle of frozen bird pee and would slip on it and spring my ankle. And my feet were like magnets for every rusty nail, broken bottle or jaggedy tin can lid in Gary.
    I had been six years old and remember Father holding my ankle tight. Mother’s reading specs were on his eyes and a straight pin was between his thumb and pointy finger.
    Jimmie was squeezing my hand and had given me a folded-up washrag to bite down on. He’d seen that in a Western movie when someone was digging a bullet out of a white cowboy who got plugged by a Indian. I didn’t have a bullet in me, just another splinter.
    Father said, “Deza Malone, looks to me like you’re doing something that only a few of the smartest professors at a few of the best colleges have ever done.”
    A little pinch of pain made me squinch my eyes shut.
    “Sorry,” Father said. “That’s right, you’re going to be responsible for a change in the King’s English. Another archaic saying is doomed to bite the dust due to Daddy’s Darling Daughter, Deza!”
    He dug the straight pin around in my foot to make the sliver show its head so he could tweezer it out.
    I pulled out the washrag for a second and said, “How could I change the language?”
    “Well,” he said, grabbing the tip of the splinter with the tweezers, “because of you that old saying that something is as hard to find as a needle in a haystack won’t be used anymore, it will become moot.
    “Folks will learn if they want to find that needle all they need to do is have you stand within thirty feet of the haystack. That needle will come flying out of the hay at you like it was an arrow shot out of an itsy-bitsy bow and your rusty old foot was the bull’s-eye!”
    I felt the sliver slide out.
    Father said, “Wow, that’s a beauty even for you, Dar Dawt!” That was what he called me when he didn’t feel like saying “Darling Daughter Deza” all the way out.
    Jimmie’s plan was to trick Dolly Peaches into standing by a haystack where my crazy brother had emptied two big boxes of needles, which Jimmie spelled “N-I-T-U-L-S.” Then I’d walk to the haystack until I was close enough for the needles to shoot out at my big toe. They’d come so fast and hard that Dolly would be run through by a hundred needles and would drop dead.
    I said, “I get most of it, but why’s it raining in only one spot?”
    Jimmie said, “Pa told me about this thing called lockjaw or tendunus, it’s where if you step on something rusty you might think you’re OK once the wound heals up, but you aren’t. The rust puts a bunch of germs in you and they come out later and make it so your jaw gets locked shut, then you starve to death.”
    “So?”
    “So? It’s raining so the needles will get rusty. Then, once they go through Dolly Peaches, they will kill him in a couple of weeks when the lockjaw germs get strong.”
    I gave the drawing back to him. “If you studied as hard as you plot murders you’d get all As.”
    “Sure, sis. What’s in the bag, goose?”
    I showed him my dress and shoes.
    “Wow! Are you going to show Ma?”
    “Of course I am.”
    Jimmie said, “Hold on, Deza.”
    I wish I could rewrite my essay about my family, ’cause there’s a trait that Jimmie has that’s even more annoying than his napoleon complex. It’s when he imitates Father.
    He always pretends he’s smoking a pipe even though Father has a little asthma and has never smoked anything. But Jimmie’s voice and acting
are
a whole lot like Father’s.
    Jimmie pointed the invisible pipe at me and said, “Let’s look at this clearly.”
    He crossed his legs and looked off over my shoulder, something Father does when