Saltypie. Tim Tingle

      

      A bee sting on the bottom! Who could ever forget a bee

      sting on the bottom? Not me. I felt the sting, slapped my

      pants, and ran to a wooden bench in the grape arbor.

      I sat there crying till Mawmaw, my grandmother, came and

      sat beside me. “Didn’t you hear the bees?” she asked.

      “No,” I said, wiping my eyes. We sat still as dawn, and

      after a moment I could hear the bees, buzzing and humming

      in those white gardenias.

      “That was some kind of saltypie, that bee sting,” Mawmaw

      said. She smiled her sweet smile and laughed her sweet

      laugh till everything hurtful went away.

      A soft breeze blew in. Mawmaw stood up and in that shuffling

      way she had of walking, she moved towards the chicken house,

      calling over her shoulder, “Chickens need feeding.”

      “Chick-chick-CHICKENS!” Mawmaw called out. Hundreds of

      chickens came running and we tossed the feed into the air.

      We filled a tin bucket with eggs and carried them to a small

      room in the back of the garage, where my Pawpaw had built

      a light board. He had replaced a porcelain tabletop with glass

      and wired four light bulbs under it. When Mawmaw flipped the

      switch, shafts of yellow light rose to the ceiling.

      Mawmaw placed the eggs on the table. I rolled them over

      and over, looking closely for blood spots on the yellow yolks.

      “There’s one, Mawmaw!” I shouted. I handed the egg to my

      grandmother. She held it close to her eyes.

      “You’re a good boy,” she said, laughing her quiet funny laugh,

      like there was so much more to laugh at than you would ever

      know. “That’s some kind of saltypie for those chicken eggs,

      boy,” she said, tossing the bad eggs in the trash bucket.

      My grandmother was a strong and special woman. Everyone

      who knew her knew that. When my father was not quite

      two, the family moved from Oklahoma to Pasadena,

      Texas, to a white wooden house on Strawberry Lane. The

      first morning after the long trip from Choctaw Nation,

      Oklahoma, to her new home, my grandmother stepped

      quietly on the front porch to greet the dawn.

      She never saw the boy who threw the stone that cut her

      face. It sent her stumbling inside the house, slamming the

      door behind her. The blue cotton dress she wore slid against

      the surface of the pine door and she crumpled in a heap on