A Mouth Full of Money

      Nancy saw him first, way up beyond where the heat rising from the surface of the highway made everything look wavy like water. But I told her it was just a large cow or maybe Wylie Knight’s young bull standing in the middle of Farm-to-Market Road 1276.

      “Nuh-uh,” my sister said, coming to a dead stop on the shoulder of the road. “That’s Weldon Overstreet, and I’m going back home.”

      She was wearing shoes, sandals I remember, and so could afford to stand in one place for longer than a second or two at a time while she thought about something other than her feet. But I was barefoot, like always in the summer, and I had to stay in motion to keep the asphalt from burning clean through the skin on the bottom of my soles, tough though they were by the middle of August in East Texas.

      “It’s not him, neither,” I said, lifting first one foot then the other like a soldier marching in place. “It’s just that Brahma bull, and he’ll go off in the woods when he sees us coming. Let’s get to moving.”

      “Stand in the gravel if your feet’re burning. Get off the road.”

      She knew I couldn’t do that because of the grass burrs up and down every roadside in that part of the country, so I didn’t even bother to answer.

      “I’m going back home,” Nancy said. “You can go on by yourself if you’re so sure it ain’t Weldon.”

      “No, you’re not,” I said. “You know Mama’ll just send us back out again, and we’ll have all this road to do over. Let’s just go on a little closer.”

      I reached over and took the empty two-gallon jug out of her hands to carry, and that got her going again, not nearly as fast this time, but at least my feet were spending more time in the air and less on the black asphalt after I took up the burden she’d been carrying. But I knew my doing that would make Nancy even more nervous because she would realize we hadn’t come to the halfway point between our house and Sleetie Cameron’s, and so we hadn’t yet passed the big longleaf pine with its top shaped like a chicken’s head. That was what we used to mark the spot where the other person’s turn to carry began. On the way back after Sleetie had filled the jug up with the skimmed milk, we would both have to keep a hold on the wire handle to be able to carry the thing home.

      “Weldon held Barbara Ann upside down in a tub of rinse water last Saturday,” Nancy said. “Mrs. Overstreet had to hit him on the back of the head with a bleach bottle to make him quit.”

      “He was probably just trying to worry her some,” I said and shifted the milk jug from one side of my chest to the other. I wasn’t wearing a shirt, of course, and I didn’t like the way the sweat felt between my skin and the glass of the jug. It would catch and slide against my flesh with no warning, and every time it did it made my skin crawl like I’d seen a snake.

      “He was trying to drown her,” Nancy said. “Not just worry her some. He was out to drown his own sister in a tub of rinse water that had done had several loads of clothes run through it.”

      “Well,” I said. “Maybe. But Maggie Lee got him loose from her with that bleach bottle.”

      “Had to hit him four times, Maggie Lee told Mama. Until Weldon forgot about Barbara Ann and looked back to see what was stinging him.”

      The chicken’s head-shaped pine was coming up on the left, and up ahead through the heat waves rising off the highway whatever it was that was standing in the middle of the road hadn’t moved a peg. It was there like it had been bolted to the ground by somebody with a big wrench, and he had leaned back hard and taken a couple of extra turns to make sure it was fastened for good.

      “It’s that young bull,” I told Nancy. “That’s all. See, I can tell it’s got horns on its head.” I turned my face sideways and squinted through an eye, and it did look like I could see something sticking up from the top of the dark bulk beyond the shimmering curtain of heat.

      “Could be a hat,” said Nancy. “Or some sticks tied to his head.”

      “Weldon don’t do that no more,” I said. “Tie things to his head with string. Not since Brother James told him it was what heathens did.”

      “He’d sneak off and do it,” Nancy said. “I know he won’t wear it to Sunday school or church no more, but he’d do it off in the woods or when he’s off by himself walking the highways and roads.”

      I knew my sister was right about that, so I didn’t say anything back to her. Weldon Overstreet would do one thing inside the Camp Ruby Baptist Church building and then another one just the opposite of it outside. Everybody knew that.

      Like the time he began praying out loud for the boys on the battlefield and kept that up for several months each Sunday whenever the preacher would call for voluntary offerings to the Lord. When we told Daddy about it, he said Weldon must have heard something about the war in Vietnam on the radio and it had caught his imagination.

      “I expect that’s not the last you church folks are going to hear from Weldon about the boys on the battlefield,” my father said. “He’ll be praying for them long after LBJ sends all those Vietcong back to their rice paddies. Weldon likes the sound of those words. Boys on the battlefield. It’s got a ring to it.”

      “If he cares so much about them,” I said, “why did he thump that soldier’s ears in the Fain Theatre in Livingston, then? He did that until the popcorn girl had to call the deputy sheriff to make him stop.”

      “He held that soldier from behind with one hand and thumped his ears with the other one,” Nancy said. “Delilah Ray saw him do it. Said that soldier’s ears was as red as fire by the time Weldon got through with them.”

      “That Fain Theatre has been a major drawing card to Weldon Overstreet,” Daddy said and laughed real big. “It seems to get him all excited and makes him want to do things. I think his daddy is still paying some every month for all those seat backs he sliced up that time in the Fain.”

      “You