A naked toddler wearing only red shoes moves from one group of adults to the next; none of them looks down, but each one honors the child’s round head with a down-stretched hand, as if it were a ripe melon that had rolled itself up from the field. Sugar stares at Boma, whose eyes are clear, light brown, and undisturbed. “I don’t want anyone here to die,” she tells her at last.

Boma blinks. “It’s a big tribe. Somebody’s always dying.”

Sugar looks at the people gathered in this single green place and understands the price of love.

“All right then,” she says. “Just so it’s not one of the children.”

“No,” Boma says. “We’re going to keep these children on.”

20

THE WAR OF THE BIRDS AND BEES

IN ALICE’S OPINION, HEAVEN HAS gone to pigs and whistles.

She has no idea what promise the town held in days gone by, but on the morning someone named it Heaven there could not have been, for example, a mess of mean dogs holed up under the Post Office porch.

“Watch that one pup with the stump tail,” Sugar says, dancing a little on the stairs and swinging her purse at the dogs. “His name’s Choppers.”

Alice can’t pick Choppers out of the lineup of his yellow brothers and sisters; they are all leaping up as if they’d been caught by the mouth on fishing lines. The two larger dogs merely stare, considering whether the food value in this pair of old women is worth the bother. “Why wouldn’t somebody rout them out?” Alice asks, framing the question as tactfully as possible as she skirts sideways up the steps with her hands on her pants legs, watching her blind side.

“Oh, honey, they live here,” Sugar explains. She pushes open the screen door and introduces Alice to her daughter Quatie, postmistress of Heaven, before Alice has quite finished looking out for rear-guard attacks.

The Post Office sells cigarettes and notions and smells a good deal like tuna fish. Quatie has a Camel going and a sandwich in one hand, which she wipes before holding it out to Alice. “Pleased to meet you,” she says, once she has licked her front teeth. Quatie has her father’s broad, brown face but her mother’s eyes, sloped faintly down at the outside corners, giving a touch of sadness to her smile.

“Our cousin from way back when,” Sugar tells Quatie, raising her hands to show it’s been more years than she can count.

Quatie rolls her eyes at Alice in a friendly way. “Mama talks about Mississippi like it was kingdom come.”

“Well, sure I do,” cries Sugar. “Me and Alice were the belles of the ball. This morning we decided we’d come on downtown and paint the town red.”

Quatie winks. “Reckon that took about a quart.”

“Pardon?” Alice asks, still nervous.

“Of paint.”

“Oh. Well, I’m used to small towns. Small is nothing new to me.” But Alice is being polite. She thinks, as they leave the P.O. and head up the road toward Sugar’s house, that this place has problems beyond being small. It looks like everybody here has been out of work for the last forty years, and in fact Sugar says that’s about right. In the past, she claims, the eastern end of the state was a reservation, and fairly prosperous. But the federal government cut up the land into small packets and gave one to each family; since the people here had no thoughts of land as something to be given or taken permanently, they were persuaded by clever investors to trade their allotment papers for a mule or a stove or, in one case Sugar knows of, a crate of peaches and a copy of The Leather-stocking Tales.

Since then, most of eastern Oklahoma has been more or less looking for a job. Sugar came here freshly married to Roscoe in 1950; it seems to Alice that they’ve lived mainly off Sugar’s local fame as the “Welcome to Heaven” poster girl, though it wouldn’t have paid any bills.

Roscoe dropped Sugar and Alice downtown on his way to repairing a pump for some relatives in Locust Grove; Alice happily agreed that they could walk back. She wanted to get her bearings. Now she has got more bearings than she cares for. They pass houses that Alice only hopes have seen better times; front yards where chickens run free and cars with no wheels enjoy the rich, rust pelt of eternal life. They stop to rest a minute at the spot where Main crosses what Sugar calls

“the uphill road” (which, Alice thinks, must surely run downhill for someone), in the shade of big oak trees whose limbs dangle vines like Tarzan’s jungle.

“How’d that husband work out?” asks Sugar, politely avoiding the more obvious question of why she is here. Alice wants to mention Turtle, but can’t. She’s not yet at home with Sugar. They haven’t seen each other for a lifetime. The cousin she’s just met is a thin, humpbacked woman in canvas shoes and a blue cotton dress that hangs empty in the bosom.