Chapter Eight

      Cole Robert Payne lived in one of those nice houses on Candle Street. He was a big man, with dark wavy hair and bright green eyes. He had a wife, who was small, meek, and sickly. They had no children.

      Before Cole came to Candle Street, before he married Melinda, and before he took ownership of the only store here that welcomed both blacks and whites, he was a sharecropper’s son in a town not too far from me known as Sidon.

      As a boy, Cole lived with his family on the edge of a thin line that separated rich from poor and black from white. This line was as significant as the one that separates the sky from the sea. It was this line that Cole stepped unwittingly across.

      The Payne’s neighbors were a black family named Johnson. They had four sons and a little girl named Sissy.

      Sissy was a dark-eyed, lanky, smiling child with a space between her two front teeth. Cole and Sissy had been born months apart. Cole’s mother Catherine helped pull Sissy into the world, and when Catherine fell ill and was unable to nurse Cole, Sissy’s mother Ethel stepped in and did it for her.

      They were friends, these two families from opposite sides of the line.

      Sissy and Cole were two peas in a pod from the time they could walk. When they turned five years old, Sissy stole a hatpin from her mother, and beneath a tree in the Paynes’ front yard, she used it to prick Cole’s finger and then hers. They mashed the open wounds together and declared their eternal allegiance to one another.

      How could they have known that this promise would turn into love?

      Before I move forward, I think it’s only right that I educate you about spring.

      Spring has always had a female essence and will forever be a noxious season, choking the air with her scent, having her way with clouds—shaping them into all manner of impractical things. Even the crickets do not escape spring’s demands. To satisfy her wishes, from April through June they strum nothing but Francisco Tárrega’s “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.”

      Spring is lovely, but she is also a trickster! She can make you forget that you are the wrong color, old, ugly, or fat, and fills your head with foolish possibilities. She impresses upon your heart affections for people who will have nothing to offer in return.

      Her showers wash away the gray blotches of winter and everything may appear new. But be aware, there is nothing new, there is only the old shrouded in spring’s bright floral dress.

      Over time, Cole and Sissy grew up and apart, their two-peas-in-a-pod friendship dwindling down to just a passing hi.

      That changed one day when Cole strode up the road toward home. He was moving slow, his long arms swinging languidly at his sides like loose ropes. He was thinking about the fly ball he’d caught and the whipping he was sure to suffer for slipping away to play baseball instead of finishing his chores.

      Sissy was sitting on the wooden railed fence that encircled a wide field chock-full of colorful wild flowers. She was gnawing on a cob of corn when she spotted him.

      “Hey,” she sang.

      “Hey, Sissy,” Cole called back without slowing his gait.

      “Your mama made some johnnycakes. I had myself two. They taste like a little piece of heaven.”

      Her voice carried notes he had never heard before. The sound caught him by surprise and stopped him dead in his tracks. He turned around.

      “You want some company?”

      Sissy shrugged her shoulders indifferently and started on another row of kernels.

      Cole trotted over and hoisted himself up onto the fence. Sissy noticed the muscles in his arm rippling with the effort and her stomach did a little somersault.

      He looked out over the blanket of purple, pink, and orange blossoms and waited for something in him to stir. “What you looking at?” he asked.

      “Nothing and everything.”

      “Well, why you sitting here?”

      “I was here for the peace and quiet, but I guess now that you’re here, that’s all done with,” she chuckled.

      Cole laughed, leaned over, and bumped his shoulder against hers. “Fun-nee!”

      Sissy hushed him and with a nod of her head, directed his attention to the sky. “Look,” she whispered.

      For five full minutes they sat silently watching the sun slowly bleed into the horizon. When the miracle was over, Sissy let off a long, satisfied sigh and flung the cob across the field.

      Cole watched it sail through the air and disappear into the blanket of flowers. When he turned to look at her, Sissy was wearing an expression that was so serious, his heart skipped a beat. “What?’

      Her response was a broad, corn kernel–filled grin. They both exploded with laughter.

      Eyes leaking and sides splitting, the two friends fell into one another with merriment. Sissy doubled over and would have ended facedown on the ground if not for Cole’s quick reaction and strong forearm.

      “Grab on!”

      Sissy hooked her fingers around his arm and was tugged back to safety. “Thanks.”

      Her fingers were still wrapped around his forearm when the first twinkling star appeared.

      The sound of an approaching wagon shattered the magic and her hand dropped away. She hopped down to the ground. “I guess I should be getting home.”

      “I’ll walk ya.”

      “Okay.”

      Spring.

      That very night, Sissy began to think about Cole in the way she had only ever thought about Mac Gosling, a colored boy she was sweet on who lived two miles away. She found that the butterflies that invaded her stomach whenever she saw Mac also took flight when her mind stumbled on Cole. And it started stumbling on Cole often, so much so that if her mind had had ankles, those ankles would have had bruises.

      In