Alvin Junior couldn’t help himself. Her dire threat just struck him funny. And even though he knew he was taking his life in his hands, he opened up his mouth to laugh. He knew that if he laughed he’d have Mama’s thimble hard on his head, or maybe her hand clapped hard on his ear, or even her hard little foot smashed right down on his bare foot, which she did once to David the time he told her she should have learnt the word no sometime before she had thirteen mouths to cook for.

This was a matter of life and death. This was more frightening than the ridgebeam, which after all never hit him, which was more than he could say for Mama. So he caught that laugh before it got loose, and he turned it into the first thing he could think of to say.

“Mama,” he said, “Measure can’t sign no petition in blood, cause he’d already be dead, and dead people don’t bleed.”

Mama looked him in the eye and spoke slow and careful. “They do when I tell them to.”

Well, that did it. Alvin Junior just laughed out loud. And that set half the girls to laughing. Which made Measure laugh. And finally Mama laughed, too. They all just laughed and laughed till they were mostly crying and Mama started sending people upstairs to bed, including Alvin Junior.

All the excitement had Alvin Junior feeling pretty spunky, and he hadn’t figured out yet that sometimes he ought to keep all that jumpiness locked up tight. It happened that Matilda, who was sixteen and fancied herself a lady, was walking up the stairs right in front of him. Everybody hated walking anywhere behind Matilda, she took such delicate, ladylike steps. Measure always said he’d rather walk in line behind the moon, cause it moved faster. Now Matilda’s backside was right in Al Junior’s face, swaying back and forth, and he thought of what Measure said about the moon, and reckoned how Matilda’s backside was just about as round as the moon, and then he got to wondering what it would be like to touch the moon, and whether it would be hard like a beetle’s back or squishy as a slug. And when a boy six years old who’s already feeling spunky gets a thought like that in his head, it’s not even half a second till his finger is two inches deep in delicate flesh.

Matilda was a real good screamer.