If she met any playmates and they asked her to stop and play cross-tag or jackstones or all-around-the-mulberry-bush or the-green-grass-grew-all-around or drop-the-handkerchief, she told them, “My fingers are crossed and I am running to the butcher shop for a soup bone.”
One morning running to the butcher shop she bumped into a big queer boy and bumped him flat on the sidewalk.
“Did you look where you were running?” she asked him.
“I forgot again,” said Shovel Ears. “I remember worse and worse. I forget better and better.”
“Cross your fingers like this,” said Pig Wisps, showing him how.
He ran to the butcher shop with her, watching her keep her fingers crossed till the butcher gave her the soup bone.
“After I get it then the soup bone reminds me to go home with it,” she told him. “But until I get the soup bone I keep my fingers crossed.”
Shovel Ears went to his father and began helping his father open oysters. And Shovel Ears kept his fingers crossed to remind him to pick out the pearls.
He picked a hundred buckets of pearls the first day and brought his father the longest slippery, shining rope of pearls ever seen in that oyster country.
“How do you do it?” his father asked.