Tavvy is not her real name, but it's all U.L., or anybody else for that matter, have ever called her. We were the next house over, coming from town that is, and being such close neighbors, it was nothing new for us to get her J.C. Penny or Reader's Digest by mistake in the mail. That's the only way I ever knew her first and last names were Ouida and Rolan. Of course, I'd usually just call her Ms. Tavvy, you know, to her face.
Ring finger: she never had anything worth anything but one sister, Julette, who drowned while she was fourteen; I say "while she was fourteen" because according to U.L., Julette was sensitive about her age, and was not above reminding those around her when she turned half-ages, as in the following sentence: Julette received the Lord Jesus Christ into her heart at the Shabaha County-wide revival when she was thirteen and a half.
I would swear on a thousand Gideons that my friend Charlie almost drowned one time while he was visiting his aunt in Debalk. I wasn't there, I know, but he wasn't known to lie all that much. And he said it was about the best thing that had ever happened to him. It was soft and quiet and slow, his head full of Christmases and banana pudding which I think is gross and it would have depressed me even more if that'd been my last thought as I left this earth, but, then, at the final minute of what could have been his last possible breath, this Choctaw — they were always at Kemmy Lake, also in Debalk, sitting on the water in boats drinking can after can of Jax — pulled him up over the side into the boat with them, scraping a long, single scar down the whole length of his arm on this piece of metal jutting out from the boat, and so he lived. Plus, he'd been saved by a real live Choctaw which made me a little bit jealous. Charlie always got everything.
