“A long time ago when I was eleven,” she said, leaning a little against me, “I was staying with Aunt Etta and Cousin Peter. But then Mama Jo called up and told Aunt Etta that she needed help because this man had pneumonia and Mama Jo wasn’t strong enough to move him around like she had to . . .”

I tried to imagine how large a man would have to be to need both Jo and EttaMae, the two strongest women I knew, to drain him of fluids by witchcraft and gravity.

“. . . so Aunt Etta told me to stay with Cousin Peter . . .”

Peter Rhone was a young white man I once proved didn’t commit a murder. He’d been blamed for slaughtering the young black woman he loved. After the case was over he left his wife, deciding to live with Mouse and Etta as a kind of atonement. He slept on their screened-in porch, cleaned, cooked, shopped, and, I suppose, took care of my daughter when EttaMae had errands to run.

“. . . but then Uncle Mouse came and told Peter that he was gonna take me to the park . . .”

Peter would have been sorry to let Feather go, and he would have called Mama Jo to tell Etta, but Jo’s only means of communication was a phone booth about half a mile from her Compton home.

“Did Mouse take you to the park?”

“Uh-huh, yeah. He met this man named Maxie and they talked about somethin’ I didn’t understand. But there was these other girls there and we played jump rope and talked about boys and school and stuff. And then this big man came up and said something I didn’t really hear, and Wanda, one of the girls, said he should just leave. And the next thing I knew Uncle Mouse was there. He told the big man to go over with him to the other side of the park and Maxie bet us that we couldn’t do a hundred skips with double skip ropes. He said that he’d give us two dollars each if we could.”

Feather sat there remembering the contest for a moment.

I was about to ask her what happened in the park when she said, “We won and everybody got a two-dollar bill from Maxie and then Uncle Mouse came back and we went to his car.”

“What about the big man?”

“I didn’t see him again, but when we got to the car Uncle Mouse took a rag out of the glove compartment because he had a cut on his finger and he wanted to wipe it off. And that reminded me that Wanda said Mouse was probably gonna kill that man because he wasn’t nice to me.”

We sat there for a few moments.

When I put my arm over her quavering shoulder she asked, “Do you think Uncle Mouse would have killed that man?”

“Never,” I said.

“How come never?”