I try to focus my eyes. Miss Celia, she’s got a snarl on her lips. She raises her rod andka-wham! across the back of his knees.

This ain’t happening, I decide. This is just too damn strange.

Ka-wham! She hits him across his shoulders, making augh sound every time.

“I—I said you got him now, Miss Celia,” I say. But evidently, Miss Celia doesn’t think so. Even with my ears ringing, it sounds like chicken bones cracking. I stand up straighter, make myself focus my eyes before this turns into a homicide. “He down, he down, Miss Celia,” I say. “Fact, he”—I struggle to catch the poker—“he might be dead.”

I finally catch it and she lets go and the poker flies into the yard. Miss Celia steps back from him, spits in the grass. Blood’s spattered across her pink satin nightgown. The fabric’s stuck to her legs.

“He ain’t dead,” Miss Celia says.

“He close,” I say.

“Did he hit you hard, Minny?” she asks, but she’s staring down at him. “Did he hurt you bad?”

I can feel blood running down my temple but I know it’s from the sugar bowl cut that’s split open again. “Not as bad as you hurt him,” I say.

The man groans and we both jump back. I grab the poker and the broom handle from the grass. I don’t give her either one.

He rolls halfway over. His face is bloody on both sides, his eyes are swelling shut. His jaw’s been knocked off its hinge and somehow he still brings himself to his feet. And then he starts to walk away, a pathetic wobbly thing. He doesn’t even look back at us. We just stand there and watch him hobble through the prickly boxwood bushes and disappear in the trees.

“He ain’t gone get far,” I say, and I keep my grip on that poker. “You whooped him pretty good.”

“You think?” she says.

I give her a look.“Like Joe Louis with a tire iron.”

She brushes a clump of blond hair out of her face, looks at me like it kills her that I got hit. Suddenly I realize I ought to thank her, but truly, I’ve got no words to draw from. This is a brand-new invention we’ve come up with.

All I can say is,“You looked mighty . . . sure a yourself.”

“I used to be a good fighter.” She looks out along the boxwoods, wipes off her sweat with her palm. “If you’d known me ten years ago . . .”

She’s got no goo on her face, her hair’s not sprayed, her nightgown’s like an old prairie dress. She takes a deep breath through her nose and I see it. I see the white trash girl she was ten years ago. She was strong. She didn’t take no shit from nobody.

Miss Celia turns and I follow her back to the house. I see the knife in the rosebush and snatch it up. Lord, if that man had gotten hold of this, we’d be dead. In the guest bathroom, I clean the cut, cover it with a white bandage. The headache is bad. When I come out, I hear Miss Celia on the phone, talking to the Madison County police.

I wash my hands, wonder how an awful day could turn even worse. It seems like at some point you’d just run out of awful. I try to get my mind on real life again. Maybe I’ll stay at my sister Octavia’s tonight, show Leroy I’m not going to put up with it anymore. I go in the kitchen, put the beans on to simmer. Who am I fooling? I already know I’ll end up at home tonight.