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Sometimes, when I was a child, I was downright evil – not evil like Linda Blair in The Exorcist where her head was spinning around as she was spewing out green split pea soup, but evil nonetheless. Take the incident with my cousin, Eloise, for example, when we were both about 12 years old. It was summertime and we were at our grandparents’ home in North Florida. They had an outdoor shower located a good 40 feet from the back of their house. The shower sides were covered with tarpaper and it was open at the top. Eloise decided to take a shower in the middle of the day, and this is where the evil side of me took over. Knowing that she was deathly afraid of “rain frogs” (small green frogs that sort of stick to your skin when they make contact), I decided to take full advantage of the situation. Once she was inside the shower, this is what I did when the bad girl in me took over:

            1.  Locked the back porch door

            2.  Grabbed nine or 10 frogs and put them in a Mason jar

3.  Quietly removed her clothes and towel from the top of the shower where they

     were hanging

4.  Climbed up on a ladder and poured the frogs on her.

Approximately 3 seconds later, all he— broke loose. Eloise ran screaming out of the shower, buck naked, and headed for the back door which was, as I said earlier, locked. She then threw open the lid on the wringer washing machine on the porch and grabbed some dirty towels, which she used to cover herself. I, meanwhile, ran around the side of the house and hurriedly got up on the front porch and sat quietly in a rocking chair. All the adults were busy running to the back porch to see what the screaming was about so I felt sure that I was in the clear. Little did I know that one of my other cousins, a little brat about 6, had seen what I had done and he ratted me out. My grandpa, a skinny, wiry little man who always wore gray seersucker pants and white sleeveless undershirts under his white nylon shirts, and who had a pocket watch on a chain, and who wore black high-top shoes, and who could run pretty fast for a grandpa, chased me and gave me a few good swats on the backs of my bare legs with a hickory switch. All the adults then went back to doing what it was that they were doing when the fun began: the women sat in the kitchen smoking cigarettes, drinking sweet iced tea and coffee, cooking good ole’ southern food and talking while little table fans made steady whirring noises, and the  men propped themselves against huge pecan trees to take advantage of the shade and smoked cigarettes, drank a little beer, and talked about whatever it was that men talked about in those days.  As for poor, traumatized Eloise, she laid down in one of the bedrooms and read love magazines the rest of the afternoon. What did I do? I calmly went back outside and showed that bratty little cousin who was boss. This time, I made darn sure there weren’t any witnesses.