When I Crossed No-Bob by Margaret McMullan

and stomping across our bare earth floor.
    There are plenty of greasy, smutty-faced O'Donnell children, some older, some younger than me, all of them—boys and girls—cussing like bad men. They smell like wet dogs and the dogs smell like them and the children don't care any more than the dogs do. Have O'Donnell children always been this dirty or am I just now seeing it? Was I like that? Am I going back to being like that, slipping back into old ways?
    But it is good to see all of us O'Donnells whooping it up the way we can do, the way we used to do. These are my people. This is my family, my kin. Pappy calls us a clan. He says you can never run away from your people.
    In the thick of the fun, Pappy introduces me to an O'Donnell who I know killed a man over a ten-cent bet in a game of cards. He goes by the name of Smasher. I don't know his real name.
    Me and Smasher, we dance the two-step.
    The tale of how Pappy got the goat is told again and again, all night long, with shouts of laughter and applause and "Black snout?" and "Tell it again, tell it again." All the while I'm thinking,
What of the farmer? What of the farmer's wife and children? What of the goat? When is a good story not nice? When does funny turn into just plain mean?

    I do feel sorrowful bad for that farmer, as dumb as he was. But I am powerful hungry and I can't think but to eat.
    Pappy, he drinks a might too much moonshine. He lies across a bed, turns weepy, and says he doesn't have but five cents to his name, and he runs his hand in his pocket and pulls out a silver dollar and says, "Where did I get that?"
    I tap him on the shoulder and say, "You got it out of your pocket, Pappy." I think everyone is happy. I tell him to put it back in his pocket and he puts it back in his pocket.
    "You don't want to be here," he says to me, his voice going hard and angry all at once.
    "You're wrong, Pappy."
    He turns to Smasher and says, "I won't let my girl go in any house in this county but yours."
    "You need to eat some, Pappy."
    "You," Pappy says, turning to me. I look at his face and I back away quick. "You don't tell me what to do. You will do as
you are told. I am your pappy, all right." He gets up as if to leave but recalls it is his house. He pulls out his knife and looks at me. Everybody goes quiet.

    This is what always happens—every Saturday the men meet up, stand around, drink, spit, and insult one another until the fighting starts.
    I give Pappy his fiddle. He looks at his knife in one hand and the fiddle in his other.
    "Go on and play something, Pappy," I say.
    Pappy starts to play.

    Late that night I am half-asleep, listening to the slow, low talk of Smasher and the other O'Donnell men around the burning and crackling fire, Pappy sharpening his knife with a rock he always carries in his pocket.
    I listen to them recounting Pappy's exploits, how he used to fight so long and so hard that the fighters had to stop and use a pocketknife to pick the knuckle skin from between their teeth, how Pappy tied up that man to a plow as though he were a mule and made him plow a field.
    "Wadn't that man your brother Garner?"
    And they all laugh even harder.
    Somebody says something that sounds like
Addy knows too much.
Then I hear Pappy say, "Addy?"—not
to
me but
about
me.

    "Yer wrong," he says. "Even if she knew, Addy would never betray her pappy. 'Member—she's an O'Donnell first and foremost. She's loyal."
    I fall asleep thinking how I
am
loyal and how now, out of the blue, I want to prove that to Pappy.
    That night I dream that all the women in No-Bob have bird beaks for noses and walk around with their beaks in the air, squatting every now and then to peck at their children. The men all have monkey faces that they try to pull off but can't.
    I wake up in a sweat, and when I get up to splash my face, the water in the washing pot inside has frozen and I almost break my knuckles breaking the ice to get to the water.
    At dawn I do what I did for Mr.