The old Colt revolver, a smaller version of the ones cowboys drew from their hips in the Saturday Westerns, was at the ready, just in case. “In case of what?” I asked again and again with a child’s insistence. The gun nestled beside a small square cigar box, the repository for each and every silver dollar that came sliding across the smooth wooden counter. When the box was full, Momma and I would, with great ceremony, take it to the bank, where the heavy coins were translated into numbers carefully inscribed in purple ink in my savings book. Both the cigar box and the Colt were off-limits to my small hands—and loaded. “In case of trouble,” Momma said. Before Daddy and I had come to town, Momma, who was my stepmother actually, had run the tiny corner grocery store in West Cypress, Louisiana—a burg in the northeastern corner of the state—all alone. She’d worked twelve hours every day but Sunday through the bone-hard years of the thirties and early forties. She’d opened for business early and never closed until after dark.
