Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man: A Novel (12 page)

So far the winner was Emmet Weaverly’s fish that weighed twelve pounds and eight ounces, not thirteen like that man had said.

When Daddy got in the room, do you know what he did? He handed me that trout and said, “Hey, folks, look what my little girl just caught.”

I couldn’t believe it. I said, “Oh, no, Daddy. You’re the one who really caught it.”

He said, “No, honey, you caught it. Run up there and have it weighed.”

If looks could kill, he’d be deader than that fish with the plastic eyes. I knew what he was doing. He was acting like he really caught it, but he was letting his little girl get all the glory. I tried to hand it back to him, but by then everybody thought the idea was so cute they pushed me up to where the scales were. I put the fish down on the scales very carefully. I didn’t want those plastic eyes making a noise if they hit anything.

Our trout weighed twelve pounds and nine ounces. I did some fast figuring in my head; that was seven ounces of BBs. Everybody started applauding and saying, “Bill Harper’s little girl won.” I looked around and there was Daddy, smiling, getting patted on the back, taking all the credit. Just then Mrs. Dot ran over and grabbed and kissed me and said how proud she was that a Jr. Debutante had won first prize and to come and have my picture taken for the paper.

I never took my eyes off the trout. Just as a judge was about to pick it up, I grabbed it in the nick of time. The official Speckled Trout Rodeo photographer started posing me for the picture for the paper. They said for me to hold it up by the tail and smile real big. It was hard to smile because if one of those plastic eyes fell out on the floor and they found out that fish had been dead for a month, I would go to jail. Mrs. Dot would die if one of her Jr. Debutantes became a jailbird. The more I thought about it, the worse it got. My heart started pounding
and my lips began to tremble. I couldn’t smile if my life depended on it. They made me stand there longer and said, “We’re not going to let you go until you give us a big smile. So smile big, honey.” My hands started to shake and that trout was shaking like crazy, too. I just knew those eyes were going to fall out. One had slipped a little anyway, but I needn’t have worried about the eyes because at that moment the BBs started coming out of that trout’s mouth one by one all over the floor. I was in a cold sweat, but you never saw anybody smile as big as I did.

I knew they had to get that picture fast! Mrs. Dot said, “Oh, look she caught a female fish, it’s just full of caviar!” I sure was glad she didn’t know the difference between BBs and caviar. Thank goodness Daddy came over and grabbed the fish out of my hand and turned it right side up and said, “I’m taking this trout home and stuffing it to make it into a trophy to donate to the Speckled Trout Rodeo as a gift.” Everybody thought that was a fine idea, especially me. He said he had to get it home right away before the trout went bad.

Momma was waiting up for us. Daddy said, “Look what Daisy caught,” and didn’t even give her time to look at it good before he threw it back in the freezer. He told Momma not to open the freezer until at least twenty-four hours because it would ruin the trout if she did. She believed him. She was so proud of me for winning, it was all worth it.

Daddy won’t have a hard time stuffing that fish. He’s already got the eyes in.

You should have seen that picture they took of me. The first time I have my picture in the paper and I look awful, not like Celeste Holm at all. In the “Dashes from Dot” column, Mrs. Dot said, “Jr. Debutante Daisy Fay Harper is the champion fishing woman,” and then she devoted the rest of the column to discussing the rules of etiquette for men and women while fishing. Did you know that a lady never baits her own hook?

My daddy has the outboard motor in the shack out by the side of the malt shop. He doesn’t have a boat yet, so I don’t know what good it is doing him. Momma and I want him to sell it. We need the money for the payment on the malt shop, but
Daddy says as soon as he starts stuffing his animals, he will have enough money to pay the note and buy a boat besides. Not one word about a pony. He’s already started stuffing the electric eel.

Mr. Romeo was right about this place being deserted after Labor Day. There is not a single person down here anymore and most everybody has left for the winter except Michael and myself and the shrimpers’ daughters. Kay Bob Benson has gone to visit her grandparents and to get another doll out of them, I guess.

Momma and Daddy went deep-sea fishing with Mr. and Mrs. Dot today, but I stayed home because they were afraid I would throw the fish back.

I was playing around by myself up by the highway when I saw a car parked a block up the road and there were two people in it, kissing and carrying on in broad daylight. Puke!

About an hour later they drove up to the malt shop and I went over to tell them we were closed. When I got there, guess who was in that car?
CLAUDE PISTAL
!!!! I almost fainted. He asked me where my momma and daddy were and I told him that they were right up the road and would be back any minute, which was a lie, they weren’t coming back until six, but he must have forgotten he hated me because he asked me if I would let his friend Ruby use our bathroom. No wonder she had to go to the bathroom, that car was full of empty Jax beer cans.

When I helped her around the side of the malt shop and showed her the bathroom, she asked, “Whose little boy are you?”

I said, “I am a little girl” … she must have been really
loaded, I have a ponytail and everything. She has long brown hair and isn’t bad-looking, but she must be pretty hard up to go out with someone as ugly as Claude Pistal.

After she finished with the bathroom, she decided to comb her hair and put on some lipstick. I figure she’s pretty rich because she had on the biggest, reddest ruby ring I have ever seen. I asked her if it was a real ruby and she said it was. She told me her name was Ruby Bates and she has a twin sister named Opal. Her daddy had given her that ruby ring and gave Opal a big opal ring when they were both twenty-one. Then she started crying over her daddy and said he had been the sweetest man that ever lived. I didn’t know what to say, but she must be a little crazy because she stopped crying just as fast as she started. She did a terrible job of combing her hair and put her lipstick on all crooked. My mother applies her makeup perfectly.

Ruby asked me what my name was and I told her Daisy Fay Harper. She acted as though that was the funniest name she had ever heard and about laughed her head off. I told her it wasn’t my fault that I was named after a vase of flowers that happened to be in my mother’s room. I didn’t have anything to do with it. When I got her back to the car, I told her, “Nice to meet you,” and took off. I wasn’t taking any chances with Claude Pistal. Now that I think about it I don’t think being named after a vase of flowers is any funnier than being named after a ring!

Jimmy Snow came down to see us and Daddy had to tell him that he didn’t have his half of the payment on the malt shop. Jimmy said that was OK, he didn’t have his half either. He is a
great guy. Momma is worried to death, but Daddy said he would figure out something.

He is busy stuffing that electric eel, but it has lumps all over it. Momma wants to know who in the world is going to buy an electric eel anyway. If Daddy can’t get the eel right, he will start on the flamingo.

That preacher Billy Bundy came down and tried to sell Momma a religious sewing machine. Daddy asked Billy what made that sewing machine so religious and Billy said, “Because if you buy one, God will bless you.” He’s sold a lot of them over the radio, but Momma didn’t want one and we can’t afford it anyway.

Last week was the last meeting of the Jr. Debutantes for the season, and Mrs. Dot put in her “Dashes from Dot” column that an hour of Mexican folk dancing led by Corky King of the Corky King School of Dancing was enjoyed by all. This is false reporting. I didn’t enjoy it one bit. Kay Bob Benson thought it was the grandest thing in the world. She claims she is Corky King’s best student and that Corky King told her she could be a professional dancer when she grows up.

Do you know what Kay Bob Benson called me when I accidentally stepped in the middle of that big hat we were dancing on? A beach rat! I didn’t say anything, but she was walking on a thin line. I could have called her an artificial incinerator, but I didn’t. And as far as that stupid hat dance goes, what good is learning a foreign dance? Just how many times do you think we’ll be going to Mexico anyway? Besides, I hate anything Spanish, especially Spanish mackerel. Momma and Daddy caught about 300 Spanish mackerel when they went deep-sea fishing. If I eat one more, I’ll throw up.

I’m glad it was the last meeting. All Mrs. Dot does anymore is talk about when she was a girl. She has told us the story of her coming-out party in Memphis at least ten times. I always enjoy it, but the rest of the Jr. Debutantes are mean and laugh at her behind her back. When Momma and Daddy went fishing with Mrs. Dot and her husband, all Mr. Dot did was make fun of her all day until she started to cry. He’s a jerk. She must be getting pretty upset because at the last meeting she didn’t even
have a thought for the day for us. She just told how happy she had been when she was a young girl, without a care in the world and going to party after party with so many nice young men. Then she looked at us kind of sad like and said “I wish someone could take all those days, hours and minutes and put them in an envelope and slip them back under my door.”

School has started and am I glad. All Momma and Daddy do is Fight Fight Fight … I usually don’t like school, but I am crazy about my teacher. Her name is Mrs. Sybil Underwood and she is beautiful, a real Gene Tierney type. And guess what? She is related by marriage to Mr. Roy Underwood, who raised the chicken with the ten toes.

The schoolwork is easy compared to the school I came from. These potato farmer children aren’t as smart as the fifth grade in Jackson. I won’t even have to do homework, but I am having a very hard time with shyness. Mrs. Underwood winked at me once and I turned so red that I had to put my head down on the desk. It’s terrible to have light skin that shows when you blush. I don’t know what’s the matter with me. If she calls on me to read out loud, I think I will die.

I almost always know the answers to the questions, but I can’t put my hand up at all. My arm gets as heavy as lead. People that put their hands up all the time are pushy and Yankeelike anyway.

Mrs. Underwood called Momma after the second day and asked her if I had always been so shy and Momma said no, I had never been that way before and that she and Daddy had had trouble
with me the other way around. Mrs. Underwood is concerned that I’m not talking to the other children, but I would rather talk to her than them. I don’t know anything about potatoes and shrimp and I don’t want to.

It’s still hot here. Kay Bob Benson’s mother brought a big electric fan to the classroom the other day and turned it right on Kay Bob. I was nearly dying of the heat, but I wouldn’t sit next to her if they paid me.

Michael got the surprise of his life this morning on the school bus. His momma packs him a lunch every day. He is such a pig that he starts eating it before we even get to school. This morning he took a hard-boiled egg out of his paper sack and broke it over his head, showing off the way he always does, but Michael’s mother must have forgotten to boil it because the egg was raw and it ran all over him. On top of that, it was rotten. He had the funniest look on his face I’ve ever seen.

I went up to Mrs. Butts, the bus driver, and told her she better stop because Michael was sitting back there with a rotten egg on his head.

Mrs. Butts stopped the bus and made us open all the windows because it stunk so bad. Michael had to sit in the back of the bus while she drove him home. Everybody was late for school, but I didn’t care. It was worth it just to see his face.

I went over to Michael’s this afternoon because he never did come to school. He said by the time Mrs. Butts got him home, the egg had dried hard as a rock and his mother had to wash his hair eight times with Halo shampoo.

Daddy had to give up on stuffing the flamingo. The neck was too long and he couldn’t get it to stand up right. He used a coat hanger and everything, but it still didn’t work, so he is working on the bobcat that Jimmy Snow brought him.

I’ve been in school three weeks now, and I still can’t look at Mrs. Underwood. I’m liable to get a double chin from looking down so much. She gave us a reading test and I made the highest score. I am only in the sixth grade and I am already reading at a ninth-grade level so I figure I can just coast until I hit the ninth grade.

Momma is mad at me. She doesn’t pack me a lunch to take to school because she says it’s very important children have a hot lunch, and since they have a cafeteria at school, she gives me lunch money. But someone with the initials K.B.B. told her mother, who told Mrs. Romeo, who told my mother that I was going over to the Pig and Whistle Barbecue Stand at lunchtime and getting me a barbecue and a Coke. First of all, this is a lie. I get cheeseburgers. Second of all, Mrs. Dot, who I admire, said she wouldn’t be caught dead in any cafeteria ever since her uncle, Willis B. Crenshaw, choked to death on a catfish bone in the Red Star Cafeteria in Selma, Alabama, in 1936. And third of all, here is the menu for the school cafeteria for this week alone that they print in the Magnolia Springs paper. You be the judge.