Hannah curled up under the rock ledge by the slow-moving stream and watched the leaves tremble in the breeze. The new leaves on the sycamore tree let the light through like the stained glass down at the First Baptist Church. A Texas Hill Country stream bed is a friendly home for the big-leafed trees. The branches on the bank trees spread like a tent over the arroyo, while the smaller growth around their trunks made a screen from the pasture. Hannah was hiding.
Granny was canning spring chickens while the weather was still cool. Hannah didn’t mind the canning part, but she had to help Bubba kill and pluck the chickens. No amount of pleading got her off the ugly job. Bubba was her cousin, the result of her father’s sister running off to Houston years ago.
People said he was slow, but Hannah didn’t think so, just lazy and smart like a fox. Bubba had learned early on that playing dumb got him out of schoolwork and acting like he didn’t understand got him out of most work but not all. Bubba enjoyed killing chickens. He knew Hannah would cry if he made it painful for them. He liked to make her cry. Lately he’d taken to talking dirty while they’d be cleaning ’em. He’d talk about how the warm skin reminded him of Naomi Martha’s bottom. She was the preacher’s daughter and liked to have people think highly of her for teaching the Bible to the poor halfwit Ditwalter boy. Hannah had a feeling that it was Bubba teaching Naomi Martha a thing or two.
All the girls in the junior high Bible class at the Four-Square Pentecostal Temple knew that Naomi Martha and Bubba hadn’t been studying Bible when the girls saw them in the storeroom during the revival last October. Nadine Applewhite said it looked like something off one of those late movies she got to watch when she was babysitting for the county judge’s kids. They’ve got a satellite dish that gets the Playboy channel. She told them she had seen a lot of naked wrestling and what Bubba was doing to Naomi Martha looked a lot like that. Bubba had threatened them about telling anyone. He said nobody would believe them anyway.
When Bubba had to chase a hen that got away, Hanna ran off down to her secret kingdom by the creek. They had studied kingdoms in Bible class. Down here in her kingdom Queen Hannah made all the rules. All chickens were killed quickly and got cooked with gravy and English peas. Here she won the spelling bee and got to go to Brady for the UIL contest, not that hateful Ruth Abigail who was the younger sister of Naomi Martha.
Hannah sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. She didn’t bother to tuck her skirt under but let her bloomers show to the world. Granny would lecture for hours on temptation if she had seen. She would not let the girls dress like other girls. They had to wear long dresses, never jeans, and they couldn’t cut their hair. The sun had moved a little, so it shone on the white rock of the bank. Hannah scooted up the smooth stone, closed her eyes, and stretched her legs out to the warm sun.
“I thinked you’d be down here,” Bubba was on her before she knew he was there. He ran his hand up her bloomers and grabbed at her privates. Hannah was too shocked to move at first.
“You scream and I’ll tell Granny you asked me to touch you,” Bubba leered at her as his hand roughly explored her child-like bottom. “Hell, you ain’t no fun yet, you ain’t even got hair. You just wait, I’ll show you some fun when you gets hair, just like I funs Naomi Martha,”
Hannah kicked at Bubba and he fell back into the cold water of the stream. She rolled away and ran like a frightened colt up the far bank of the creek. She ran until the stitch in her side and the pulling of the dewberry vines halted her.
Bubba’s curses were not followed by the sounds of pursuit. She clung to the rough trunk of a hackberry until her breathing was no longer painful. Some way she would get back at Bubba for the indignity he had done her. Some way she would have revenge for his defilement of her kingdom, of her secret place.
Hannah got a switching from her daddy when she got back to the house that evening. Her dress was torn, and her face and arms were sunburned.
“Girl, what am I going to do with you?” Daddy was almost in tears. “Running off when there’s work to be done. Bubba claims you pushed him in the creek rather than come back and work. He said you was off with that Mesican boy, but I done checked and that boy been playing softball all day over at the deputy’s house. Your Granny wanted to believe Budda, but I knowd you’s a good girl.”
Hurting her daddy made Hannah all the more convinced she was going to get back at Bubba. Daddy was having a rough enough time without her hurting him more. When the market for angora fleece dried up, he’d lost his job at the store. Then her Mommy had run off to Houston with that salesman and he took to getting a government check to spend on whisky.
When Hannah thought about it later, she thought it pretty funny that the Bible had given her the idea for getting revenge on Bubba. The preacher would never have suspected that his teaching on the Proverbs and raising children was what got Hannah to planning how Bubba was going to get his. The preacher was carrying on about how parents had to be stern and keep a close watch on their daughters.
For her plan to work, Hannah had to make friends with Ruth Abigail. She knew the younger girl could not come over to visit unless her older sister was allowed to escort her, so getting Naomi Martha there was just a matter of convincing Granny to let them come. All she had to do was tell Granny that the younger girls had to study for something from Sunday school. Hannah told Ruth Abigail that she had gotten her hands on one of her big sister Helen’s notes from Wilbur Jones and she would let Ruth Abigail read it.
Now it was not quite a lie since she had a note. It was an honest-to-goodness love note but she had not planned to let anyone but her best friend see it. But, getting the preacher’s daughters over to the house on a Sunday when Bubba was excused from working was necessary to her plan. The girls got permission to come over and to make it even better, the preacher told Granny it was time he made a call on her family.
When the preacher and the girls arrived, Hannah and Ruth Abigail carried their Bibles and sat in the double swing in the live oak. Naomi Martha told her daddy that she was going to sit over at the well house with Bubba and see if he remembered his lesson from that morning. The younger girls could see them clearly as they slipped off down the hill towards the old shed where the wetbacks used to sleep.
“Ruth Abigail, how much trouble do you think Naomi Martha and Bubba would get into if your Daddy and my Granny knew they were sneaking down to the shed instead of sitting at the well house reading that Bible?”
“Lordy, lordy wouldn’t my daddy just turn blue and die,” Ruth Abigail’s face had a glow like a wood stove on a three-dog night. “How can we get them over there without letting them know anyone coming?”
Hannah hadn’t thought of that part. Her quick prayer was answered when her daddy stepped out on the porch and ordered the preacher to git. Granny sunk down in the rocker with her apron over her head praying like it was the devil himself and not her favorite son ordering the preacher out.
“Granny, maybe if you and the preacher were to walk out to the rock point and pray to the Lord for Daddy’s soul, the Lord might just hear you. I prayed there often, and it is a powerful place.” Hannah prayed that the good Lord Jesus would forgive her for lying but she figured he wanted the sinners caught as much as she did.
“Sister Ditwalter, let’s take the children aways from the house and perhaps the Lord will hear the prayers of the innocents.” Ruth Abigail coughed because she was about to burst out laughing. The preacher took Granny’s hand and led her from the porch.
“Just don’t go scaring the livestock Reverend. It’s hard enough to get milk out of that old cow without you curdling it with your caterwauling praying.” Hannah’s daddy was just a little drunk. He laughed and turned back to the house.
They set off along the path and about the edge of the hill, the preacher realized that Bubba and Naomi Martha were nowhere to be seen. About that time, you could hear Naomi Martha moaning and gasping and Bubba begging her to quit moving around so much or he spill his seed all over her dress. The preacher stopped dead in his tracks and ordered the girls and Granny back to the house.
“You send that son of yours down here Ms. Ditwalter, even if he is drunk. There is evil afoot here that is for men to deal with,” His face was pale, and his eyes bulged out.
Granny got pale and shooed the girls back to the house.
“I didn’t think they’d be doing anything like that. I only thought they’d be kissing or something,” Ruth Abigail clutched Hannah’s hand as they stood on the porch in the shade. “Lordy, Hannah, what have we done?”
Hannah hadn’t expected it would be so sudden. When all the hollering and crying settled down, the preacher took his girls home and pretty soon the sheriff came by and picked up Bubba. Weeks later, Daddy explained it to Hannah and Helen. Naomi Martha was just 15 and that made her a minor. Because Bubba was 19 and the doctor over at the state hospital in Kerrville said that he wasn’t afflicted, he had messed with an underage girl and that was against the law.
Naomi Martha turned up pregnant, but the preacher didn’t want Bubba for a son-in law, so she went to that home up in Ft. Worth. Besides, Bubba would be in jail for quite a spell and after had to check in with the sheriff every couple of months. The preacher and his family moved to a church in Mississippi mostly to hide the shame Granny said.
Hannah went down to her kingdom once or twice that summer, but it never seemed the same. Bubba had ruined it, but she had fixed Bubba. She was the Queen of the Sycamore Creek, and you had better not forget it.
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