All Over Creation Read Free Page A

truck from the hook in the kitchen, and creeping down the porch stairs, out into the frigid night, careful not to slam the door behind you.

cass

    Every year in November, as Thanksgiving approached, Cass Quinn would find herself wondering about Yummy Fuller. There was a reason for this. When they were growing up, Liberty Falls Elementary School put on a yearly Pilgrims’ Pageant. It was supposed to represent a big feast, and every kid had to play a different food in it. Cassie had started out as a pea. Up through the third grade she was content in this role, but by the time she got to fourth, she had gained so much weight they made her a potato. She said it was fine, said really she didn’t mind—that’s just the kind of girl she was—but inside she minded a lot. You’d think in Idaho playing the potato wouldn’t be so bad—in fact, might even be an honor, but it wasn’t. Everyone knew that the side dishes were typecast. The carrot was a tall redhead named Rusty. The green beans were a pair of skinny twins. The cherry tomato went to a rosy second-grader with shiny cheeks. The corn was a tawny kid named Kellogg. Face it. What is a potato? A potato is a fat, round, dumpy white thing, wrapped in burlap, rolling around on a dirty stage.
    Some kids never had to be vegetables at all. Some kids got to be human beings—Pilgrims or Indians—and eat the rest of the kids for dinner.
    Like Yummy Fuller. As Cass recalled it, Yummy was always the Indian princess, even in first grade, when everybody else in their class was still playing gravy.
    â€œNoble Pilgrims,” Princess Yummy used to say, “my people and I welcome you to our land. We know that your journey has been a hard one, and we will help you. Pray, take our seeds and plant them—”
    It wasn’t like they didn’t have real Indians in school. They did. But back then even the Shoshone kids didn’t seem to mind, or maybe they just knew better than to care. Year after year Yummy’s lines stayed the same, while slowly she grew into her role. Tall and slim, wearing love beads, a buckskin miniskirt, and a headband with a jaunty hawk feather stuck in the back—by the time she entered ninth grade, Yummy made a luscious ambassador.
    â€œPray, take our seeds and plant them—”
    From her position, curled on the dusty stage in her burlap sack, Cass listened to Yummy recite her lines and tried not to sneeze.
    That year Yummy started wearing peasant blouses to school, and hip-hugging jeans that she’d turned into bell-bottoms with wedges of upholstery fabric. Sometimes she wore a gold dot, the kind you stick on filing folders, in the middle of her forehead. “It’s my third eye,” she told Cass. “It’s called a bindi. Indians wear them.”
    Cass didn’t recall any of the Shoshone kids with filing dots on their faces, and she said so. Yummy rolled her eyes. “ Real Indians. The ones from India. ”
    She would lean against the mailboxes at the end of their road, smoking an Old Gold Filter. They used to meet there after dinner when the summer sun lingered at the edge of the fields, low in the sky. Dump their bikes in the dirt at the side of the road and smoke, while the sun’s oblique rays stretched their shadows out long. Cass used to love her summer shadow. Even next to Yummy’s it was tall and slim, with legs that just went on and on forever.
    It was safe there at the crossroads. The fields spread out in all directions, as far as the eye could see, some dark green with potatoes, some light green with wheat. There was nobody around, and if someone did show up, you could see them coming for miles by the dust they raised. Plenty of time to stub out a butt and flick it into the field, unless it was a truckload of Mexican farmhands, in which case you usually didn’t bother. Yummy would squint at Cass and offer up the cigarette, filter first, and Cass would take