Ma always got upset during a thunderstorm; she would get to shaking, and she was doing this during the fight with Tootie. I remember the electric went out and I was lighting candles in the store when she and Tootie got into the fight about the Catholic Church. Ma was almost as upset as the time Pa pulled the pistol on her. The storm and the fight all at once. Ma’s cat was so scared it started tearing around the walls until it was running on the ceiling through the power of centrifugal force. Nobody believes me, but that cat was running on the ceiling, completely upside down, or so it seemed to me. Maybe I was wrong.

It began to hail the size of grapefruits. They always say when it hails that it was the size of golf balls or grapefruits, although if you were to see it, you would see that it hailed the size of BB’s. But I was there, and it hailed the size of grapefruits! Smashed up the roof on Mrs. Idoc’s house. Tootie left in her doctor’s Buick, which got dented on top from all that hail, and I had to help Ma upstairs and put ice packs on her head.

A week later we got a letter from Tootie—she had gone and joined the Catholic Church and they made her a nun. About a year after that we got a letter from her from Africa. All these beautiful stamps on an envelope that looked like wax paper. Tootie was a doctor in a leper colony. She said she was happy serving the Lord.

Because of Chunky, I left the Lutheran Church and became a Baptist. Chunky was a street-corner preacher. He worked odd jobs when he could. Then he died of heart trouble at thirty-one. The last thing he said to me was, “I told you I was sick, Junk. But now I’m going to a better place.”

After Ma died, blind with diabetes, and the money was split up, Tootie wrote a letter to Ma’s lawyer and said she wanted all of her money to go to the mission to buy medicine for all of them lepers. Mary Lou tricked the lawyer—she was smart and had a head for figures. Of all of the girls, Mary Lou was closest to Tootie and wrote to her in Africa every month telling her about her life with Monk and raising Pug and Barney and so on. It was a happy life. Mary Lou didn’t have to work because Monk made good with his welding and so on and eventually became the plant manager at the Durabilt. So Mary Lou wrote her happy news and told her what everyone in the family was doing, not mentioning the bad things that happen in all families. Mary Lou tricked that lawyer and held money back for Tootie, and it was a good thing.