"School sounds more interesting these days than it was when I was young," Grandpa Bigelow said, puffing on his pipe. "What were your school days like, Sweet Hosanna?"
Sweet-Ho looked somewhat rueful. She stood up and began to collect the dessert plates. "I didn't go very far in school, Mr. Bigelow," she said. "I liked school, but I got married when I was very young."
Veronica's father was looking at her. "WTiy don't you tell everyone, Sweet-Ho, what you've decided?"
Sweet-Ho stood there for a minute with the plates in her hands. She smiled. "Well, I was going to tell Rabble first. I didn't plan on an announcement or anything. But since it's Thanksgiving, and everybody's here together, and I guess Rabble won't mind if I didn't have a chance to tell her in private—"
"I don't mind," I said, puzzled. "What did you decide?"
Sweet-Ho leaned over and took Millie Bellows's plate, real quiet, so as not to disturb her nap. "I've decided to go to college," she said. "Only at night, so I can still get my work done, of course. But Phil talked to the people at the community college for me, and helped me fill out the application, and—well, it still makes me nervous, thinking about it. But they've said I can start in the new semester after Christmas. I can study literature."
She stood there, smiling, looking at all of us. "Maybe someday I can be a teacher," she said, kind of shy.
Me and Veronica and Gunther all clapped our hands. "Yaaayyy!" Gunther said, forgetting Millie Bellows's nap. But she didn't wake.
Grandma Bigelow stood up and said, "I declare, if I hadn't drunk all of my coffee, I'd make a toast. You just put those plates right back down on the table, Sweet Hosanna, so I can give you a kiss."
And she did. A big kiss on Sweet-Ho's cheek first, and then one for me, too. "You can be real proud of your mother, Parable," she said.
I was. I am.
Veronica's father helped Grandma and Grandpa Bigelow get their suitcases into the trunk of the car the day after Thanksgiving. They was going on from Highriver to Baltimore to visit a niece.
Grandpa Bigelow was leaning over the kitchen table where he had a map all spread out. He was following the road with his finger, peering at it through his glasses. "Look at this, Parable," he said. "She wants to take this scenic route through the mountains. But you look here, now, how much shorter it would be if we just went on the interstate like normal folk."
Well, he was right, of course. Anybody could see that. But I kind of liked the way them little roads curled through the mountains. One of them went real close to Collyer's Run, where I lived with Gnomie when I was a little girl.
"See this here?" I told him. I pointed with my fingertip. "Right here is where Sweet-Ho was born, and where I lived when I was little."
"Is that a fact?"
I nodded. "It surely is pretty there. Even this time of year, when the trees is mostly bare. I bet anything you'd see deer if you went that way."
"Antique shops, too, I suppose. She always wants to go where the antique shops are," he said in a gruff voice, pretending it made him mad.
"I expect you're right. There's antique shops. When Gnomie—that's my grandma—died, somebody came and bought some of her old stuff. We didn't even know it would be worth money. Some quilts, and a table, and some of her kitchen stuff she'd always had, and nobody in the family wanted it, it was all so old-fashioned. So I expect it ended up in an antique shop."
He folded up the map. "Well, I'll humor her and go the scenic route, on your advice, Parable. Where do you suppose she's gone to now? We'll never get on the road at this rate."
We found Grandma Bigelow in the living room with her tape measure out, measuring skinny old Gunther so's she could knit him a sweater. None of us told her that he was allergic to wool, and even Gunther was polite and said he wanted a blue one.
Grandpa Bigelow gave Veronica and me each a fivedollar bill, and a crisp new dollar to Gunther. We all hugged goodbye.
"You give Alice our love, Philip," I heard Grandma Bigelow say to Veronica's daddy, and he nodded his head. Then they were gone.
Mr. Bigelow went every Saturday to Meadowhill. Every Saturday when he came back, he said that Veronica's mother was a little better. I always smiled and said, "That's nice," and so did Sweet-Ho. But it got so's it was just something we said with no meaning, something like you might say politely to the mailman, and two minutes later you would forget you even said it. She's a little better. That's nice. She seems better. That's nice. Somewhat better. That's nice.
It got much colder, and Norman Cox put salt on the steps and front walk at Millie Bellows's house, where sometimes it was icy in the morning. Millie didn't go out none, though, not in the cold. She sat huddled up in front of her TV, watching game shows, drinking tea, and dozing off. Mr. Bigelow checked her furnace now and again to be sure there was always plenty of oil, and Sweet-Ho brought her groceries a couple of times a week.
We invited her for Christmas dinner, but she said no, she wasn't feeling real good. So it was just us, just our family, at Christmas. Gunther played like he believed in Santa Claus even though he'd spied his train set in its box on the hall closet shelf the week before. So when Veronica and me opened up our biggest boxes and found velveteen bathrobes, we pretended that Mrs. Santa Claus had stitched them up on her sewing machine, and we said we was amazed that she even got our sizes just right.
We decorated the whole downstairs, with popcorn strings and holly and pine boughs on the mantelpiece. Veronica hung mistletoe from the ceiling light in the hall, and we all grabbed Gunther and gave him big juicy kisses every time he walked through. After a while we noticed that he was hanging about the hall a whole lot, just waiting and hoping.
Christmas night me and Veronica went to bed early because we both had got new books and we wanted to curl up in our beds to read. My book was called The Yearling, and lord, when I opened it up and began to read I found that it had another Jody, same as The Red Pony. But this Jody was different. He lived with his mama and daddy in a place that was all woods and swamps, and when I read I felt as if I was right there, too, where it was quiet but for birds and growing things. I began to see Jody's home as being somewhat like Gnomie's, not fancy or nothing, but so filled up with hard work and hopes and haves and haven'ts all tangled there together in ways that tugged and ached.
I was in my new green bathrobe—it was as soft as the moss that grows down by the creek in summer—and after a while I marked my place in the book and got up to go brush my teeth. In the hall, all of a sudden, I felt an urge to go and peer over the stair railing, just to look one more time at the decorations and the lights on the tree, just to see it again while it was still Christmas, before the time was past. Each year it goes by too quick, and you got to try to make it last however which way you can. My way was to take one more look before I went to sleep.
So I tiptoed over to the place where you can stand against the upstairs railing and look down the curving stairs and beyond, into the hall and through the archway into the living room.
There was only the light of the fireplace, the Christmas candles in each window, and the lights on the tree. There was the sound of Christmas music coming from the radio. And there was the smell of pine.
Then I seen something that was supposed to be private. I didn't mean to. I only wanted to make the feeling of Christmas last for one more long look that I could store in my memory.
But then I had this, to store in my memory, too, and it was so private that I knew I couldn't even tell Veronica, though I had always told her everything. Mr. Bigelow and Sweet-Ho, while I watched, they was standing there beside the Christmas tree, and he was fixing one of the little lights. Then he turned around to her—she was laughing in her low voice—and all of a sudden she was quiet, and they kissed for a long time.
16
Millie Bellows died the day of Sweet-Ho's first exam.
Me and Veronica found her, huddled there in her afghan with a cup of tea on the table not even touched. We thought she was asleep, same as
usual. The TV was blaring. It was the middle of The Newlywed Game. The guy was asking all the wives: "What farm animal best describes your husband on your wedding night—a stallion, a chicken, or a jackass?" and all the wives were giggling while they tried to answer.
"Mrs. Bellows," I said in a loud voice, "that's downright trashy, and you should switch channels."
She didn't move or look up, and then I realized. Her eyes was partly open, with her glasses tipped a little crooked, and one hand was just dangling down beside the chair. I knew she was dead. I picked up her hand real gentle to put it back in her lap, and it was cold.
Veronica started in trembling and she backed away.
"It's nothing to be scared of, Veronica," I told her. "Turn the TV off and then call your daddy on the phone."
I sat beside Millie while Veronica did those things. I wondered should I do something else, maybe try to lay her down and close her eyes. But I just sat and patted the cold hand.
"Now call Norman," I said, after Veronica told her daddy and he said he would come right away. "Because he's supposed to come over and start working on fixing that loose cellar step. But there's no need for everybody in the world to be here now. Millie wouldn't like it any."
When she had done that, I said, "Now make some tea."
"What for?" Veronica asked. Her voice was still shaky. "She can't—"
"Of course she can't. She's dead as a doornail," I told her. "Make some for you and me."
Mr. Bigelow got there in no time, and he hugged Veronica and me. He said we could go home, and he would take care of everything else.
Before we left Millie's house, I asked Mr. Bigelow something. I asked him if Veronica and me could take a souvenir to keep.
He hesitated. "Did you have something special in mind?" he asked.
I pulled out the old photograph album, the one we had looked at so many times with Millie Bellows. "Just a photograph," I said. "Could we each have one, from when she was a girl?"
He looked at the little stacks of photographs stuck in every which way between the pages. He nodded his head. "One each," he said. "She wouldn't mind."
So we each chose one. It seemed odd to be turning the pages of the album without her grabbing at our arms and interrupting to say what each thing was, to tell about all the people in her past. I chose one of her all alone, with a big bow in her hair, when she was staring straight into the camera with solemn eyes. She was just my age in that one, and not knowing at all what her future would be, any more than I know mine right now.
Veronica cried some on the way home, and I don't fault her none for that. But I didn't cry. I felt sorry that Millie's old age wasn't real pleasant, and there was times when I liked her okay, and even sometimes when I liked her a whole lot if she forgot her crabbiness and talked about old times. But I didn't love Millie Bellows.
We found Sweet-Ho in the kitchen with her college books all spread out around her on the table. She'd been worrying all week about her very first test, and we'd all been teasing her, Mr. Bigelow and Veronica and me, and even Gunther some, though Gunther didn't understand about college.
When we came through the back door, she looked up and smiled. "You're home early," she said.
"Millie Bellows is dead," I told her. "She died watching game shows, and Mr. Bigelow is taking care of everything, and don't you dare stay home from school and miss that exam or I'll never forgive you, ever."
Then Sweet-Ho cried some, too. But that night, after supper, she put on her coat and grabbed up her books and went and took the exam, her first one ever since she was thirteen years old. And she got the second highest grade in the class.
Not many people came to Millie's funeral. We were there, of course, and some of the other neighbors, and a nephew from Parkersburg. Mrs. Cox was there with Norman, and Mr. Cox did the service, telling some about Millie's long life and about how helpful she was in the neighborhood, some of which was a lie. But I did think back on the melty Jell-O she brought over the day Mrs. Bigelow went crazy. She meant to be helpful sometimes.
It was a cold, murky day, with a gray sky smudged like a chalky blackboard. When we left the church—there was no cemetery to go to, because her nephew was taking her to Parkersburg to be buried there—I marched right over to where Norman Cox was standing with his mother and I asked him could I speak to him private.
He looked some surprised, but he followed me where I led him, over to the edge of the parking lot where there was an icy old mud puddle with a piece of newspaper frozen into it.
"You probably don't even remember that Millie Bellows's brother Howard died when he was fourteen years old because he acted stupid and show-offy, and she felt bad about it all her life," I told him.
"So?" Norman said. "So what?"
"So here," I said. "I'm going to give you this."
I took the mashed-up old choir hat out of my coat pocket and handed it to him. He took it, but he looked at it like he didn't know what it was.
"It's the hat you was wearing Halloween night, when you acted stupid and show-offy and chunked the stone that blacked Millie Bellows's eye," I said.
"I didn't mean to hit her," Norman muttered. "I was only—"
"I know," I interrupted. "You was only trying to call attention to yourself. But it was stupid and show-offy."
Norman stuffed the hat into the pocket of his jacket. He didn't even look at me. He didn't say nothing. I didn't expect him to.
"By the time she died, she thought you was a nice boy. She told me and Veronica so," I said. "I was just thinking that probably she never got around to telling you."
He still didn't say nothing.
"So I'm telling you on her behalf," I said. "The newspaper said she was ninety-three years old. I hope you don't ever forget that once you blacked the eye of a ninety-three-year-old lady. But at least I think you ought to know she never realized it was you who done it, and before she died she said you were a nice young man.
"That's all I wanted to say," I told him, and I walked away.
Just before our February school vacation Mrs. Hindler took down the family trees from the classroom wall and gave them back to us. The colors in them had begun to fade, hanging there in the sunshine all those months, though there was a small new brighter spot on Corrine Foster's where just after Thanksgiving she had climbed on a chair to paste up a new apple for her newborn baby sister. "Sarah Hope," it said, "born November 29."
I stood mine up on my dresser, right next to Millie Bellows's girlhood picture.
"Sometimes I remember Millie Bellows with a kind of fondness," I told Sweet-Ho one night while I was getting ready for bed. "But I really love my memories of Gnomie."
"Me too," Sweet-Ho said. "When I think of her I always think of the smell of cinnamon cookies."
"I think of big blue delphiniums."
"And her aprons. I remember the aprons, all starched and ironed."
"Once," I said, "when I was little, there was a big rainstorm at night. Gnomie and me was watching it through the window. And then she got the idea to go outside and stand right in it. So we did that, laughing and laughing. The wind was blowing the trees every which way, and our nightgowns, too. When we came in she dried my hair in front of the wood stove."
Sweet-Ho smiled. "Sometimes I miss all of that, just a little."
"Me too, I guess. But it doesn't make me sad, because I love our life now. Anyways, I expect it wouldn't be the same if we was to go back, not with Gnomie gone."
"And not with us so different now," Sweet-Ho said.
"Are we? Are we different now?"
"Of course. Nobody stays the same."
"Especially not you, Sweet-Ho. Shoot, you're a college student now! Isn't that the most amazing thing?"
"It surely is," Sweet-Ho said. "And I'd better go and get some studying done. You get to sleep, Rabble. Dream of wind and rain."
"I will," I told her, as I snuggled down. "If I set my mind to it, I can dream anything I want."
17
One evening Veronica's father said that it was time, next Saturday, for Veronica to go with him to Meadowhill again, and that this time Gunther was to go, too.
Veronica didn't say nothing, but old agreeable Gunther, he looked up and said, "Sure thing!" Then he hiccuped and grinned. He didn't know nothing about Meadowhill, what it was, what it meant.
Saturday afternoon me and Sweet-Ho went off together to the movies. We ate popcorn and ice cream sandwiches and laughed at a dumb old comedy, and we didn't talk, neither one of us, about Meadowhill at all.
They got back late in the afternoon, and that night me and Veronica took a walk after supper, all bundled up against the cold. We walked over to where Millie Bellows's house stood empty. In the spring they was to paint it and sell it.
"They'll have to cut all them old vines down before they paint," I said.
"They'll grow back good as new. I hope they paint it gold."
"I hope white," I said, just to be ornery. Something inside me was making me feel fretful.
"Well, white would be nice, too. When the yard is all cleaned up, it'll be pretty. By next summer maybe there'll be a new family living here. I wonder if they'll have kids."
"I hope not," I said, knowing I was acting just as grouchy as Millie Bellows used to. "There's enough kids in this neighborhood."
Veronica started in to laugh. "Rabble, that's silly! There's only you and me and Gunther and Norman! And before long, you and me and Norman won't even be kids, we're all growing up so fast."
"How's your mother?" I asked all of a sudden. Not knowing about the afternoon at Meadowhill was what was making me so crabby.
"She's getting well," Veronica said. She leaned down and picked up a broken shingle from Millie Bellows's yard, where it had fallen from the roof.
"How can you even tell, if she don't talk any, or even comb her hair?"
Veronica looked startled. "Rabble, that was way back in the fall when she didn't comb her hair! That was months ago! This afternoon she looked just as pretty as anything, and she talked a whole lot. She sat with Gunther on her lap and we talked about all sorts of things, all four of us."