Page 32 - The Geography of Women

18 Jack Fritscher

“Why not?” I asked. “She still bleedin?”
“It’s not her body,” Jessarose said. “Girl, it’s her head.”
She circled her right hand aside her right temple with her
index finger pointin through her skull into her brain.
We walked away from the house, under the clothes
lines, past the barn filled with cooin pigeons, an took
the path that led out toward the cornfields Mister Apple
leased out to Checkerboard Bob, but that’s another story.
We were headin toward a pasture chewed close as a minia-
ture-golf puttin green by one Guernsey cow, an then on
toward the banks of the crick sheltered by scrub willows
where Indian arrowheads’d wash up on the sand after the
spring rains.
“Corn’ll be knee-high by the Fourth a July,” Jessarose
said, lookin out across about a gazillion miles a flat Illinois
cornfields. “Mizz Lulabelle....” She hesitat ed.
“Mizz Lulabelle what?” I asked. “Tell me!”
“Walk faster,” she said. “Why I ever left St. Louis an
came up here, I don’t know. That old cow’s makin to charge
toward us. We don’t have cows in Forest Park in the High-
lands where there’s amusement rides an music playin, an
actresses singin in the outdoor Muni Opera plays where
cows are just chorus people in costumes. Cows just know
I’m afraid a them. That’s why they always come after me.
If you came out here alone, Laydia, that cow would never
notice you.”
“Less, like Mizz Ava Gardner, I dared it like one a
them toreadors,” I said. “Here, Bossy bossybossy!”
“Stop it.” Jessarose ran on draggin me through the
pasture toward the crick. “You’re not afraid a anythin, are
you,” she said.
“Nope.”
“I am,” she said.

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