She was almost finished wiping the tears off her cheeks.
Chapter Eight
“Hush!” Momma hisses at us from across the kitchen table. “You be waking Richard up with all your chatter. Now. Look at what I’ve written. Two-hundred and fifty minus ninety-seven. How you suppose we get that?”
“Momma,” I whine at her. “That’s so easy! Take one from the five, making it a four and the zero a ten and then minus seven from the ten, which is three, and carry a one over from the two to make the four a fourteen and minus the nine from the fourteen. Then carry the one that used to be a two down and the answer is one hundred and fifty-three. See? Easy.”
Momma puts her forehead into the palms of her hands and doesn’t say anything. But then, from her bowed head she says, “Miss Caroline Parker, I have one nerve left and you have worked it to the bone.”
Her head tilts up and out of praying position. I know this look on her face means she’s starting to forget me again, starting to creep back into the world inside her head. So I talk fast while there’s still a chance she’ll hear me.
“All I need is for you to sign the sheet that says I did what I was s’posed to do,” I tell her. I swear, Emma has it so easy, all she has to do for homework tonight is draw a picture of our house and the four of us out front. Then she has to count how many chair legs there are in our whole house. That’s so easy.
Momma reaches for the sheet from the teacher. “Give it over.” And she signs it and I’m done for the night.
Donford Elementary School is about half the size of our old school, with half the number of kids there, too. Every morning since school started four weeks ago, we walk to the blacktop and turn left and wait for the bus in front of Mr. Wilson’s house. Brownie waits with us every day, rain or shine. I watch from the window seat of the second row while she turns and waddles back up like an old lady, hobbling on her wooden leg back to her spot at the foot of Mr. Wilson’s front stairs until we get home at the end of the day. Mr. Wilson says she knows the sound of the bus and heads down the path to wait until we step off.
“Carrie Parker? You pay attention, now. I saw that note you passed and I will not embarrass you by reading it out loud, but next time I won’t be so kind,” Miss Ricky says.
Here’s what I wrote: Orla Mae, do you like Johnny or what? He keeps looking back at you to find out. Check yes or no at the bottom. And then I drew two boxes, one with “yes” spelled out on top and the other with “no.” But now I’ll have to wait until after math class to find out what her answer is since I can’t risk Miss Ricky getting hold of it and reading it out loud.
Orla Mae rolls her eyes at me from across the row, but I can’t tell if that’s a yes or no. I hope it’s a no on account of the fact that I like Johnny but she knew him first so if she likes him then she has dibs on him.
“So that’s how we do long division,” Miss Ricky says, closing her teacher’s workbook. “For homework y’all need to do practice sections fourteen and fifteen all the way through. If you don’t show your work I will count off of your homework grade. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Miss Ricky,” we answer her.
The buzzer sounds and we’re free.
“So? Do you?” I ask Orla Mae while I pile my books on top of one another in order of their size—biggest on the bottom, smallest on top.
“What if I do?” she says.
“That means you do! I knew it!”
“I didn’t say that,” she says, shushing me so Johnny won’t hear on his way out of the room to the hallway where it’s loud and echoey. “I think you like him.”
“I do not!”
“Do, too.”
“What?” Emma scoots up to us outside of the main door to the outside. She always catches up to us when we’re in the middle of a conversation.
“Nothing,” I mutter to her, hoping she’ll scoot away. Now that I’m popular it isn’t so much fun having a baby sister tagging along everywhere I go.
On the bus Orla Mae and I sit together and Emma climbs into the seat right behind us so she can spy on everything we do and say. She sits by herself since there are only three other people on the whole entire bus and they spread out across the rows by themselves. Orla Mae and I are the only ones who sit two to a seat. There’s Starlie Tilford, who lives kindly close to school but not close enough to walk. And there’s Will Lawson, whose father is the big boss at the lumber mill. Finally there’s Oren Weaver, who smells bad and had to go to the principal’s office because he threw the chair that almost hit Coralie Coman in the head one day during snack.
Orla Mae’s daddy is one of the bosses at the mill on account of the fact that his own daddy worked there all his life. Turns out she was right about Richard having one of the worst jobs of all.
* * *
Richard leaves for work every night after supper. We’re careful not to say a word during the meal ’cause these days there’s no telling what’ll make Richard madder than he already is. Momma doesn’t sit with us. She’s at the sink or wiping the countertop or passing over some plate of vegetables that won’t get eaten by Emma or me but will get shoveled down by Richard. Then she’s packing up some food for him to eat later on at the mill.
“Don’t put that shit in there,” he says to her when he sees her wrapping up a tin of peas from the other night. “You know I hate them peas. Put the greens in from last night.”
Momma doesn’t turn around. “No more’ve the greens. I’ll find something else in the icebox.” She’s real quiet, too. Her eye’s healed up but her arm’s still not better. It feels like it’s been a month of her favoring it like she is, but it’s probably only been a week. One morning we came down for breakfast and there she was, her right eye swollen up, her left arm black and blue with a cut down the middle. (“Oh, Momma!” I said. “Don’t you ‘oh, Momma’ me. I’m fine. Got stung by a bee’s all. Eat your corn cakes.”) I just wish it’d go on and heal ’cause Richard gets all stirred up when he sees her wincing if she knocks it against something or if she has to lift something up with both hands.
Richard stabs another piece of chicken from the platter in the middle of the table and then lets it fall onto his plate.
“What’re you eyeballing?” he says to me.
Without even realizing it I’d broken the rule of not looking at Richard during mealtime. “Nothing,” I mumble to my plate.
“You didn’t want this last piece of chicken, didja?” he says with his mouth full. “Boy oh boy, is it tasty.”
I did want the chicken, but no way am I going to tell him that.
“Still hungry?” he asks me.
“No,” I lie. My stomach is still growling on account of the fact that Richard only let me have the chicken leg tonight and that chicken was pretty scrawny.
“No, what?” he says.
“No, sir.”
“That’s better. ’Smore like it. A few more sirs and ma’ams round here won’t hurt a bit.”
After he sucks all the meat and juice off the bones of the last piece, Richard pushes his chair from the table.
“Where’s my sack?” he says over his shoulder to Momma. He’s gulping down the last of his beer and when he finishes he drops the can on the ground and steps on it, making me and Emma jump in our chairs at the sound. He gets a chuckle out of startling us like that every time he does it.
“Ah,” he says. Then he burps real loud. “Aw-right then.” He takes the paper sack from Momma’s good arm
and leaves.
We didn’t hear about Richard’s job from him, of course. We heard about it from Orla Mae’s daddy one day when we were over at her house. He pays us a penny for every ten rocks we clear out of the front garden.
“Y’daddy does good work keepin’ that stack movin’ like he does,” Mr. Bickett says to us. We’re crouching down counting up the rocks in our three piles. I’ve got to be careful or Emma will steal one or two (or more) from my stack, but I want to know if Orla Mae’s fibbing about the pile catching fire all on its own so I look up at him. Not square in the eye, just in case he’s cranky like Richard.
“Does it really fire up if no one stirs it?” I ask him, careful to look beyond him to the woods.
“Sure does,” he nods, spitting the brown juice from his tobacca into a cup he holds up to his lower lip. “In fact, that’s why I come to let go’ve the last guy we had in overnight. Fell asleep right there with the iron stick in ’is hand. That pile of sawdust was so big you had to stand up and put both-a yo’ arms into it. Shouldn’ta let it get that big in the first place. I know that now, yessir. But there it was all the same and Chancey Dewalls asleepin’ like a baby when the flames swallowed up the dust faster than a hen picks feed.”
“What happened then?” Emma asks him. She’s crouching over her pile, too—like I’m gonna steal from her!
“What happened then is Chancey Dewalls went screaming outta the mill, half his body all burned to a crisp—” he spits again into the cup “—and it took a whole troop of us all night long to put out that fire. Lost a lot that night, mmm-hmm. Four cabinets for Asheville and thirteen chairs for a family over in Raleigh. Now, why you’d want thirteen chairs and not twelve or fourteen is a mystery to me, I’ll tell you what, but thirteen’s what we lost. Just like that. Took a while for us to find someone willin’ an’ able to keepa good watch over that pile. That’s how we come to your daddy.”
“Stepdaddy,” Orla Mae corrects her father. “Her daddy died when Carrie was little.”
“Hard luck,” Mr. Bickett says, patting me on the head with one hand and reaching into his pocket for pennies with the other. “Sorry to hear that, child. Now, here’s your pay. Good work, girls. Good work.”
Four pennies for me. I love dropping them into the china piggy bank I got from Gammy back in Asheville. The plastic stopper that keeps the money from dropping out of the bottom was lost a long time ago so now a heavy piece of tape closes it up, but the pennies clang in against the others down in there.
When Richard stumbles up the front path to the house with the hole in the roof, his hair’s the color of snow, there’s so much sawdust stuck to it. We’re just getting ready to leave for school so it’s a bit noisy what with Momma calling out for us to get moving faster than we already are.
“Y’all’re hollering all over the hill,” Richard says, dropping into the chair in the front room. Momma fetches him a beer out of the icebox while I stack up my books to carry to school. Social studies one is the heaviest so it goes on the bottom for the others to rest on top of.
“Go on and get yo’self outta here,” Momma says under her breath to me and Emma. “I’ll see you when you get back.”
“Bye, Momma,” we say one by one, taking our lunch sacks from her good arm. And then we race out the front porch door frame that still hasn’t got any screen tacked up in it.
“Jesus, look at you.” I can hear Richard starting on Momma back inside but there’s nothing we can do about it now. Brownie’s waiting and that’s all I can think about since I picked some leftover meat from the icebox to give her a treat this morning. I sneak that in whenever Momma isn’t looking.
Mr. Wilson’s waiting with Brownie.
“How’d you like to do some target shooting after school?” he says to us while we stoop over the dog.
“Target shooting?” Emma asks.
“Tin cans and all. You mean yo’ daddy never taught you target shooting? P-shaw,” he says to himself, looking out on down the blacktop to where it disappears over the hill. “You come on up after school lets out and we’ll be takin’ care o’ that.”
“But we ain’t never held a gun,” Emma says to him. I’m still petting Brownie, but she stopped the minute Mr. Wilson started talking.
“Don’t matter,” he says. “I teach you everything you need to know. Just do as I say and come on up offa the bus.”
“I don’t know,” she says, toeing the dirt. “Momma’s ’specting us right up after school. We got chores.”
“You gots time for a lesson or two, won’t take much.”
The bus is coming at us so I pick up my books out of the dirt and brush off the bottom so the crook of my arm stays clean.
“See you then,” I call out to him after Emma climbs up the first and steepest step. “Bye.”
He just nods and Brownie wags her tail across the dirt. As usual.
* * *
“My daddy says you’s nothing but white trash comin’ in here thinking you ain’t.” Fred Sprague spits in Emma’s path after he says this loud enough for her to stop in her tracks.
His friends laugh and that just makes him bolder.
“Y’all think you better than everyone else coming in from out East but you ain’t got two pennies to rub together to make fire,” he says.
“She can use her daddy to make fire since he’s gonna start one worse’n Chancey Dewalls did up the mill, he so drunk all the time!” Lex Hart says, slapping Fred, who’s bending over laughing hard like he’s in a play.
“Take it back, ’fyou know what’s good for you,” Emma says through her gritted teeth. She doesn’t spit but she might as well have from the way she says this.
“What, you gonna make me?” Fred taunts her.
“I’m so scared I’m wettin’ myself,” Lex says.
“Take it back,” I say to them. They have no idea who they’re dealing with.
Then, before anyone can say or do anything, Emma flies at them like a bat out of the attic, swinging punches at Fred and Lex both. Fred falls to the pavement with Emma attached to his neck and Lex is so surprised he takes some time before he realizes he should be pulling Emma off of his friend. When he does reach for her she turns her head and bites him. Hard.
“Ow!” he shouts, shaking his hand. “She bit me!”
“Get her offa me!” Fred’s shouting, trying to hold her back and protect his face at the same time. Emma’s still swinging. To buy her more time, I get behind Lex and pull him back so he cain’t reach Emma. This backfires, though, ’cause he whips around and wallops me so hard across the middle I gotta let him go. The wind’s knocked so far outta me I fold in half and gulp like a dog trying to get molasses out of his mouth. I look over at Emma’s hand and it’s bloody. Funny thing about Emma is even though she draws pictures with her right hand, she punches with her left. That’s the hand that’s all red.
“There!” she says. She pushes herself up and off of Fred and brushes the dirt off of the front of her shirt. “I took it back for you.” And, just like that, with Fred staring up at her through his one un-swollen eye, Emma marches off, paying no mind whatsoever to her crushed hand. I wish I could ignore my sore middle where I got hit but I feel it every time I take a breath in.
I run like a cripple but I finally catch up to her. “You’re gonna get it,” I tell her.
“I don’t care,” she sniffs. “’Sides, you were in there, too, so you’re gonna get it.”
“Why’d you stick up for Richard like that? Who cares what
they say about him?”
“They weren’t talking about him,” she says, “they were talking about us.”
“You’re still gonna get it.”
She shrugs and keeps on walking. “So’re you.”
By the time the bus stops in front of Mr. Wilson’s driveway, Emma’s punching hand is twice as big as the other one.
We both look down at it.
“Guess you don’t feel much like target shooting today,” I say.
“Yeah I do,” she says. “I’d use the other hand, anyway….”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Let’s just tell him we got to get back on home. He won’t care.” Truth is, I don’t feel like shooting anymore.
“Come on,” she whines to me like I’m her momma and not her sister.
Emma steps off the final step and pets Brownie with her good hand, holding the other one behind her back in case Mr. Wilson walks down to meet us.
“Let’s go home,” I say. “He’s not even here.”
But he isn’t so we walk up the blacktop a ways till we see the clearing that leads to number twenty-two. Emma takes in a deep breath and then follows me in. Just in front of the house is a pickup truck we never seen before.
“Who’s that?”
Emma sighs and shakes her hair out of her face. “It’s Mrs. Sprague.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s bound to be her.” She sighs again.
“Wanna go back to Mr. Wilson’s? We can wait her out over there and then sneak back when the truck’s gone. C’mon.”
“We got to get it over with,” she says, walking toward the house with the hole in the roof. “Let’s meet back out here after. We can go back over to Mr. Wilson’s.”
“You sure?” I cain’t believe she’d still feel like shooting after the whipping she’s about to git. But I wait for her, anyway.
“Well, well, well,” Momma’s saying as we march up to the steps in front of the truck. “What do you have to say for yourself before you get your whipping?”