of which we were already certain, and to ask you if you would care to accompany your wife to the police station where she will be charged with the murder of Miss Brenda Goring.”
JOYCE HARRINGTON
Joyce Harrington, a former actress who follows theatrical tradition in keeping her exact age a secret, started strong as a writer of crime fiction. Her very first short story, “The Purple Shroud” (
Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, Harrington was trained for theater at the Pasadena Playhouse. She told
Army Quartermaster Corps’; she later had a successful career in advertising and public relations.
Harrington has written three remarkably varied and well-received novels—
One of her attributes is the ability to write in a variety of styles, including the rural dialect narrative of “Sweet Baby Jenny.”
Inever had a mother, leastways not one that I can remember. I must have had one sometime, ’cause as far as I can tell I didn’t hatch out from no egg. And even chicks get to snuggle up under the hen for a little space before she kicks them out of the nest. But I didn’t have no hen to snuggle up to, or to peck me upside the head if I did something wrong.
Not that I would ever do anything wrong. Leastways not if I knowed it was wrong. There are lots of things that go on that are pure puzzlement to me, and I can’t tell the right from the wrong of it. For instance, I recollect when Ace — that’s my biggest big brother and the one who taken care of us all after Pop went away — I recollect when he used to work driving a beer truck round to all the stores in town and the root cellar used to be full of six- packs all the time.
I said to him one day, “Ace, how come if you got the cellar full of beer, I can’t have the cellar full of Coke- Cola? I don’t like beer.”
Guess I was about nine or ten years old at the time and never could get my fill of Coke-Cola.
Well, Ace, he just laughed and said, “Sweet Baby Jenny”—that’s what they all called me even after I was well growed up—“Sweet Baby Jenny, if I drove a Coke-Cola truck you could float away to heaven on an ocean of it. Now, just drink your beer and learn to like it.”
I wasn’t ever dumb, even though I didn’t do so good in school, so it didn’t take much figuring to catch onto the fact that Ace was delivering almost as much beer to the root cellar as he was to Big Jumbo’s Superette down on Main Street. So it didn’t seem fair when I got caught in the five-and-dime with a lipstick in my pocket for him to come barreling down and given me hellfire and damnation in front of that suet-faced manager. I just stood there looking at him with pig-stickers in my eyes until we got out to the truck and I said to him, “What’s the difference between one teensy-weensy lipstick and a cellar full of beer?”
He says to me, grinning, “Is that a riddle?”
And I says, “No, I would surely like to know.”
And he says, “The difference, Sweet Baby Jenny, is that you got caught.”
Now I ask you.
It was different, though, when he got caught. Then he cussed and swore and kicked the porch till it like to fallen off the house all the while the boys from the beer company was hauling that beer up from the root cellar and stowing it back on the truck. When they drove away, I says to him, sweet as molasses, “Ace, honey, why you carrying on so?”
And he says, “Dammit, Jenny, they taken away my beer. I don’t give a hoot about the job, it was a jackass job anyway, but I worked hard for that beer and they didn’t ought to taken it away.”
“But, Ace,” I says, hanging onto his hand and swinging it like a jumping rope, “ain’t it true you stolen that beer and you got caught and you had to give it back just like I did with that lipstick?”
Well, he flung me away from him till I fetched up against the old washing machine that was resting in the yard waiting for somebody to fix it, and he yelled, “I ain’t stolen anything and don’t you ever say I did! That beer was what they call a fringe benefit, only they didn’t know they was givin’ it. They don’t even pay me enough to keep you in pigtail ribbons and have beer money besides. I only taken what I deserve.”
Well, he was right on one score. I didn’t have anything you could rightfully call a hair ribbon, and I kept my braids tied up with the strings off of Deucy’s old Bull Durham pouches.
Deucy, you maybe guessed, is my second-biggest big brother and a shiftless lazy skunk even though some people think he’s handsome and should be a movie star. Ace’s name in the family Bible is Arthur, and Deucy is written down as Dennis. Then there’s Earl, Wesley, and Pembrook. And then there’s me, Jennet Maybelle. That’s the last name on the birth page. Over on the death side the last name written in is Flora Janine Taggert. It’s written in black spiky letters like the pen was stabbing at the page, and the date is just about a month or so after my name was written on the birth page. I know that’s my mother, although no one ever told me.
And no one ever told me how she died. As for Pop, there ain’t no page in the Bible for people who just up and go away.
Deucy plays guitar and sings and thinks he’s Conway Twitty.
Says he’s gonna go to Nashville and come back driving a leopardskin Cadillac. I’d surely like to see that, though I don’t guess I ever will.
That Deucy’s too lazy to get up off the porch swing to fetch himself a drink of water. It’s always, “Sweet Baby Jenny, get me this and get me that.” Only thing he’s not too lazy for is to boost himself up to the supper table.
That don’t keep the girls from flocking round, bringing him presents and smirking like the pig that et the baby’s diaper. They all hope and pray that they’re gonna be the one to go to Nashville with him and ride back in that Cadillac. And he don’t trouble to relieve their minds on the subject. You ought to hear that porch swing creak in the dark of night. They are just so dumb.
Now, Earl and Wesley, they try. They ain’t too good-looking, though they do have the Taggert black hair and the Taggert nose. I remember Pop saying he was part Cherokee and all his sons showed it. But while Ace and Deucy came out looking like Indian chiefs, Earl is crosseyed and Wesley broke his nose falling out of a buckeye tree and lost most of his hair to the scarlet fever. So they try. They are always going into business together.
Once they went into the egg business and we had the whole place full of chickens running around. They said they would sell their eggs cheaper than anyone around and make a fortune and we’d all go off to California and live in a big hotel with a swimming pool and waiters bringing hamburgers every time we snapped our fingers.
Well, people bought the eggs all right, but what Earl and Wesley kind of forgot about was that 200 chickens eat up a lot of chicken feed and they never could figure out how to get ahead of the bill at the feed store. I could have told them how to do it was raise the price of the eggs and make them out to be something special so everyone would feel they had to have Taggert’s Country-Fresh eggs no matter what they cost. But Earl and Wesley just shoved me aside and said, “Sweet Baby Jenny, you are just a girl and don’t understand bidness. Now go on out and feed them chickens and gather up them eggs and let’s have some of your good old peach cobbler for supper. Being in bidness sure does make a man hungry.”
