“Emma can fend for herself,” she says. And from the way she stubs out her cigarette I can see the subject is closed.
“You better get the crack on with those dishes,” she says. “They ain’t gonna do themselves.”
So I go over to the sink and pull the can of soap slivers out from the cabinet below the sink and turn on the water to let the suds settle where they can in the canyon below the spigot.
One by one I wash each plate and fork and knife, setting them on the counter beside the sink for drying later. My old button-down shirt (minus the buttons, which Momma snipped off when I outgrew it) is the dishrag I use for drying. The crickets are so loud outside it’s like they’re singing along with my hands.
Slam!
The screen door bangs shut, footsteps stumble in.
“Aha! You a good girl, doin’ them dishes fo’ yo’ momma,” Richard says, working his mouth around each word with more than a little effort since the drink makes them slide into one another like a dream. “Tha’s mo’ like it.”
I’m almost finished stacking the plates, but then I’ll have to dry the silverware so there’s no escaping him.
“Wher’s yo’ momma at?” he slurs.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“You forgot to call me sir,” he says. “I deserve sir, don’ you think?” He’s feeling for a chair to fall into like he’s in the dark but the lights are on.
“Sir.”
“Wha?”
“I don’t know where my momma is, sir,” I say.
“Tha’s better,” he says, plopping into the chair at last. “Now I got to look at this shit?” he says, looking at the casserole in front of him.
I go over to it but he grabs my arm hard when it reaches out to take the glass container. I try not to wince when he twists it up to the ceiling.
“Give y’daddy a kiss,” he says, holding his cheek out for me to kiss.
“You mean my stepdaddy,” I say, real quiet-like.
“What did you say?” Richard’s head snaps straight.
“Nothing,” I say.
“You sassin’ me, girl?”
“No, sir.”
Then whap! The slap comes from the other hand that’s not grabbing onto my wrist.
Whap! Whap! The slaps come faster.
“Why you gotta sass me?” Richard’s voice is higher than I’ve ever heard it. But maybe it just sounds that way ’cause I’m holding my one free arm over my head to keep my face from being hit too hard.
“Why? Why you always gotta back-talk me?” His voice cracks, almost like a girl’s. “I feed you,” whap, “I give you a roof over yo’ dirty little head,” whap, “and whado I git? Sassin’ all the time,” whap. “Day an’ night, night an’ day.” The slaps let up and I look out from the space underneath my elbow and see that Richard is folded over, his shoulders heaving up and down, his sobs loud. He lets go of my wrist.
“Things are gonna change round here.” His arms dangle, tired from hitting. “Y’all won’t know what hit you. Things gonna change….”
I could run. I could. I could make it up to our room, crawl alongside Emma, who’s soft in sleep by now. I could even make it to the Diamond River if I wanted. But my feet won’t move. I’ve never seen Richard cry.
“Get out of here!” he hollers, even though he’s resting his forehead on the edge of the table. “Go on and get.” He cries and cries, not caring whether I do go or not.
And for once…just this once…I stay.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper into thin air. But it drifts away like Momma’s smoke.
“Go!” he sobs. The veins running up and down his arms look thick, like river lines on a map, squiggly. His hand is uncurled and limp when it waves out blindly in my direction.
And I do.
Emma’s breathing hard and heavy when I come in and I almost hate to have to move her but I have to; she’s sprawled out sideways on the bed, taking up the whole dang thing.
I crawl up along the one side that’s got a bit more room and shove her over some. Seconds later she’s back to snoring.
Lying on my back, blinking so my eyes can get used to the blackness of the room, I picture Richard crying at the kitchen table. Gammy’s just got to come out here and fix things. If she could make Auntie Lillibit live she could make things right here at number twenty-two, I just know it.
I cain’t fall asleep on account of the fact that I’m writing the letter in my head.
Dear Gammy,
It’s me, Carrie. How are you? I am fine. We’re wondering if you’d like to come on out here to visit us. It’s so nice and pretty here at our new house. You’d love it. There’s our own stream, for starters, and a whole lot of trees—too many to count. Momma really misses you and Emma and I do, too. Please come out to see us. Please? Okay, well, got to go. Love, your granddaughter, Caroline Parker.
She could even bring Auntie Lillibit! I just thought of that. With the two of them here things’d be even better. I know Momma’s gonna whip me good when she finds out I wrote Gammy, but it’s worth it if it works.
I must have fallen asleep ’cause the next thing I know Emma’s
shaking my foot to wake me.
“Carrie, c’mon,” she’s saying from the bottom of the bed. “We’re gonna miss the bus.”
I jump up and into the first clothes I can pull on and two minutes later we’re running out the front of the house, without even hollering bye to Momma and without anything in the way of lunch.
“There it is!” I can see the yellow top of the bus chugging toward Mr. Wilson’s path and I run faster than Emma so I can flag it down and tell it to wait on my baby sister. “Hurry!” I end up not having to do it, though, ’cause Emma keeps right at my heels the whole way.
“That was close,” she says, falling into the seat bench alongside me. She’s panting hard, too.
“Did you get something to eat?” I ask her.
“Just some bread.”
She’s lucky. It’s gonna be a long day. “Hold my books for a second,” I tell her. I have to tie my shoe.
“Hey, Carrie.” Orla Mae Bickett weaves past our seat and settles down in the one right behind, ignoring Emma like she always does. She ignores everyone but me, practically.
“Hey, Orla Mae,” I say back to her, once I straighten up.
“I brought you something,” she says, unhooking the two clips that keep her lunchbox good and tight. “My momma made it last night.”
It’s a piece of corn bread almost as thick as my flattened-out hand. The plastic wrap is stuck to the top of it, there’s so much butter—just the way I love it.
“Thanks, Orla Mae,” I say. The only thing keeping me from digging in right away is I sort of want to cry—I don’t know why. I guess it’s on account of no one ever bringing me corn bread before.
“Y’welcome.”
I balance it on top of my books and then pretend to be appreciating the scenery out the window. Inside my head, though, I’m figuring out how I can wait until lunchtime to eat it. I don’t think I can. My finger pushes into the top of the plastic wrap—the corn bread’s so soft it leaves a dent where my finger was and that just makes my mouth water.
The bus squeaks and lurches over the hills to school. Past a sign pointing to Johnson’s Farm tipped over onto one sign so there’s no telling where you’re s’posed to turn in. Past hundreds of pine trees, thousands, maybe. Up a long stretch of hill that promises something good’s gonna lay o
n the downhill side, but when you get up to the top there’s just more of the same, blacktop with double yellow lines, sometimes broken up, sometimes straight. Finally we slow in front of the long, low building where we go for learning. Donford Elementary School is carved into the stone above the single front door, which has a handle that’s worn from years of hill children pulling on it, dragging themselves in for a few hours each day. The windows on either side of the door show the backs of pictures taped up, no telling what’s on the other side, unless it’s your classroom you’re going into. Inside the dark hallway there’s a poster that reads “We’re yearning for some learning!” and has a smiley face dotting the letter i. I like coming in and seeing that smiley face every day.
“Carrie, wait up!” Orla Mae’s calling after me once we’re inside the door.
So I do.
“I hear you been shootin’ over at Mr. Wilson’s.” She leans in to me, her arms hugging her books into her chest.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“You kiddin’? My daddy says round here you can scratch your ass on one side a town and the ladies on the other’d talk about how many strokes you used,” she says. I keep walking, not saying anything.
“Well?” she keeps at me. “Is it true?”
“What if I said yeah?”
“’Tain’t no big thing, I’s just wondering,” she says, straightening up. “Mr. Wilson tole my daddy you the best shot he’s seen since Harry Maphis, and my daddy says that’s something since Harry Maphis could shoot a squirrel’s eyeball out from a mile away if’n you tole him to.”
“I ain’t shooting no squirrels, I can tell you that right now,” I say. “Hey, where’s the post office?”
“Whatchoo want with the post office?”
“I just wanna know, is all.”
“Just keep on the same blacktop school’s on and you’ll hit it on the right side of the road. It’s the general store. Same place. Hey—where you going?”
“I’ll be right back,” I call to her from over my shoulder. I’m walking one step slower than running. I can barely hold on till I get to the girl’s washroom.
Inside the first stall on the left, the one I always use, I test the metal latch that swings over and fits into the fork on the fixed part of the door to make sure no one can push the door open by mistake (I’ve done it sometimes, not meaning to), which is why I always choose this stall. The next stall down has no latch and the two other stalls on the other side of the bathroom have bent latches so that it seems like the door’s gonna stay shut, but then once when I was in the middle of going number one the latch came loose and I had to reach and hold the door closed until I could pull my pants up. I bend in half and scan the bathroom floor for feet in case someone was in a stall and I didn’t notice it when I came in. No one’s here. I’ve got the place to myself and about five minutes until I’ve got to be in the classroom. That’s plenty of time.
The plastic wrap on the corn bread is all tangled into itself so there’s no neat way to open it up. I tear into it from the top and break off a piece and drop it into my mouth, tilting my head back so I don’t waste any crumbs. Mmm. This is good and I know I’d think that even if I did have breakfast. Mrs. Bickett scrapes off real corn from the cob to put into the bread along with the cornmeal and that makes it nice and crunchy in parts.
When Gammy comes to see us I’m gonna ask her if she can make us some of this corn bread. She maybe could get the recipe from Mrs. Bickett, even. I hope I remember to ask her.
With my mouth still full I roll the plastic wrap up into a little ball and throw it out on my way out of the washroom.
Time for school.
“One, two, three…” our teacher, Miss Ueland, calls out while she switches the lights on and off above our heads.
“Eyes on me!” we answer her all together.
“Two, three, four,” she says back, leaving the lights on and walking to the center of the room.
“Close the door!” we say together again.
Now we’re all quiet, like she wants us to be. Miss Ueland picks one or two words out of a sentence and says them slower than the rest of the words, like she’s giving us all a chance to catch up to her. I didn’t mind it at first but now it drives me crazy trying to figure out why she chooses the words she does to slow down.
“I hope y’all did your homework,” says Miss Ueland. “We got a lot to do today so we won’t be going over it like we usually do, but I trust you’re ready to move forward.”
The blackboard’s all clean, the chalk beaten out of the erasers, and a new pack of white chalk waits in the long well that runs along the bottom of the board. Miss Ueland opens it up and breaks a piece in half, blows on it and writes presidents up on the board in pretty cursive.
“Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe,” she says, “Adams, Jackson, Van Buren. Now, I know you can’t believe this but you’ll be able to recite those back to me—and more after them—by the end of the day today! It isn’t all that hard, Oren, now don’t roll your eyes at me. The first thing we do,” she says, turning to face the board, “is break down each name to its first few letters. Like this.”
Now she writes wash then ad then jeff and mad and on like this and it hits me I can write all that down and write Gammy at the same time. That way when school’s over I can tell Emma to go on without me and I can run to the post office and drop the letter in the mail and still be home for supper.
“Caroline!”
The class laughs.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Nice of you to join us,” Miss Ueland says. The class laughs again and it occurs to me they’re laughing at me. “Now that I have your attention, Caroline, can you tell me what the next word in this pattern will be?”
I look up at the board and see all the words shortened below the whole names and a space still to go underneath “Tyler.”
“Um?” I’m buying time. Why do teachers always know when your mind wanders?
“I’m afraid ‘um’ is not the answer I was looking for,” she says. But before I can say what I think it is, she calls on Orla Mae, who gets it right away and then smiles at me like she did me a favor. Which she didn’t. ’Cause now I look even worse off that I didn’t get it right away, too. Thanks a lot, Orla Mae, I say back to her with my eyes.
“That’s right, Orla Mae,” but Miss Ueland says that to me, not Orla Mae. “‘Ty’ is correct. Carrie, will you tell us what comes next? What’s short for Polk?”
“Po?” And the class laughs again for some reason so I turn around in my desk and say “what?” to all of them. That quiets them up good.
“You’ve got the right idea, Carrie—” Miss Ueland’s being nice since she sees I’m really trying “but it’s ‘pol,’ like the north pole. That’s enough, class, now quiet down. All right, let’s keep going. Everybody got all this down or should I leave it up a little longer? Yes? Okay then.” And she erases the words before I’ve copied them down—I couldn’t tell her I didn’t have it yet or she’d know for sure I’d been daydreaming. I’ll just get it later from Orla Mae.
Miss Ueland writes the next batch of names on the board and this time I write them down as she does, but not as pretty. No one writes as pretty as Miss Ueland.
Pretty soon it’s clear I’ll be copying the whole dang lesson from Orla Mae after school, but I don’t care. I gotta write Gammy while the letter I wrote in my head last night is still fresh.
Dear Gam
my,
How are you? I am fine. Emma’s fine, too, in case you were wondering. We’re hoping you can come on out for a visit and soon. Momma really misses you and we do, too. I have a friend named Orla Mae, isn’t that a funny-sounding name? She’s real nice, though. You’ll like her a lot. There’s a dog down a ways named Brownie, only she’s black and has three legs.
Please come out to see us. We need you.
Love,
Your granddaughter, Caroline Parker
P.S. Maybe Auntie Lillibit wants to come on out, too.
I write all nice with the cursive letters I learned last year in school back home. I feel better already. When Miss Ueland turns to erase the board again I fold it up square by square until it’s real tiny and I can squeeze it into my pocket, where it’ll stay the rest of the day till I can mail it in town.
“Carrie? I need to have a word with you, hon,” Miss Ueland is saying to me while the others in class push past me on both sides to get out of the room for recess.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Where were you today?” she asks me once everybody’s gone.
“Ma’am?”
“I know you weren’t paying attention in class,” she says, looking down at me through her glasses, “so I’m wondering where your mind was today. It’s not like you to drift off so much.”
I shrug my shoulders. What’m I supposed to tell her? She wouldn’t understand I had to write my Gammy.
“Ahem.” Miss Ueland clears her throat. “I also wanted to inquire after your arm.”
Without even knowing for sure what she’ll say next I push my sleeve down, but it only goes halfway down the last part of my forearm. Momma always says long-sleeved shirts can be worn till they’ve become short sleeves, but mine’re not quite there yet.