prison.”
“Oh, Julie,” I said, leaning over to give her a hug. “I wish Ethan and his daughter had just dealt with that letter on their own and never let you know about it.”
She smiled gamely as I pulled away from her. “I’m okay,” she reassured me. “Honest.”
I opened my car door, then looked back at her.
“With regard to Ethan…” I began.
She waited, eyebrows raised, to hear what I was going to say.
“Grab some joy, Julie,” I said. “Grab it.”
Before going to bed, I spent an hour on Tanner Stroh’s Civil War Web site. It was undeniably excellent, a scholarly site overflowing with information and so little bias that I wasn’t able to tell if I would agree with his politics or not. By the time I turned off the computer, I had one overriding thought in my mind: maybe Shannon had actually found herself a winner.
CHAPTER 13
Grandpop and I were in competition. We stood a few yards from each other behind the fence in our backyard, the morning sun in our eyes and our fishing poles in our hands as we waited to see which of us could catch the biggest edible fish. I was wearing my purple one-piece bathing suit and after spending a few weeks in the summer sun, my skin was as dark as my grandmother’s. Grandpop was still pretty pale. He never seemed to tan. He wore his usual brown pants—he must have had six pairs of them—and a white short-sleeved shirt and sandals. I’d never seen him go barefoot.
By the time we’d been out there for half an hour, I’d caught absolutely nothing, while Grandpop had reeled in two blowfish, which we considered less than nothing because they were too dangerous to eat. Their organs contained a deadly toxin, and after Grandpop tossed the second blowfish back into the canal, I came up with a plot for an intriguing mystery: The colored fishermen on the other side of the canal would begin dying, collapsing right there in the reeds, and it would turn out they’d been poisoned by the Rooster Man, who had fed them fried blowfish livers. I loved the idea and nursed the story along in my mind as we fished.
After what seemed like a very long time, I felt something good and strong tug at my line. I reeled it in, only to discover a hideous sea robin on my hook. Grandpop couldn’t stop himself from laughing. There was nothing uglier in the universe than a sea robin, with its long bony fins poking out all over its body. I grimaced, watching the fish sway back and forth on my line. I was not squeamish, but the thought of holding on to that spiny creature while taking it off the hook was not pleasant.
“I bet Ethan would like that sea robin,” Grandpop said, nodding toward the Chapmans’ yard.
I looked over to see Ethan sitting in the sand, a huge pile of mussels in front of him. I had not even realized he was outside.
“Hey, Ethan,” I called.
He looked up, the sun reflecting off his glasses so that I couldn’t see his eyes.
“You want this sea robin?” I held my pole in the air, the fish flapping its tail and winglike fins.
“Keen!” Ethan said. He picked up a blue bucket from the sand and walked over to where Grandpop and I were standing.
“You have to take it off the hook,” I said.
“Okay.” Ethan seemed undeterred. He took the rag I’d stuck in the chain-link fence, grasped the fish with it, and extracted the hook with an ease I couldn’t help but admire. He looked at me, grinning as though I’d given him a chocolate bar. “Thanks,” he said. He dropped the fish in his bucket and walked back to his yard.
Grandpop and I began fishing again. We were tired of standing, though, so we pulled two of the Adirondack chairs close to the fence and sat down. I put my bare feet against the fence and slumped down into the chair, feeling very comfortable and at peace with the world.
“Looks like we’re on the wrong side of the canal,” Grandpop said after a while.
“What do you mean?” I followed his focus across the canal to where the colored people were fishing.
“I’ve seen them reel in a few keepers over there,” he said.
“Oh, they’re probably just catching blowfish, too,” I said. “Daddy said colored people eat them ’cause they don’t know any better.”
My grandfather stared straight ahead, not speaking for a minute. “Charles said that, huh?” he asked finally.
I nodded. “He said they’re not as smart as us. And they’re poor, so they have to eat whatever they can.”
There was a long silence that I didn’t recognize as anything out of the ordinary until Grandpop spoke again.
“Did it ever occur to you that, if they
There was a serious tone in his voice that was rare for my grandfather. “I don’t think Daddy would agree with that,” I said.
“Did you know that I lived in Mississippi until I was your age?” Grandpop asked me.
“I thought you grew up in Westfield,” I said.
“I didn’t move to New Jersey until I was fourteen,” he said. “When I was a boy, we lived with my mother’s family in Mississippi. We had a housekeeper and she had a son my age. He was my best friend. Willie was his name, and he was colored.”
“Your best friend?” I said, amazed. I couldn’t imagine it. I had never even spoken to a colored person.
Grandpop nodded, smiling. “Willie and I had some good times together,” he said. “We lived near a lake and
