“Everybody is just walking along concerned with his own problems, his own life, his own worries. And we’re all expecting other people to tune into our own agenda. ‘Look at my worry. Worry with me. Step into my life. Care about my problems. Care about me.’” Gram sighed.
Gramps scratched his head. “You turning into a philosopher or something?”
“Mind your own agenda,” she said.
When I mentioned about Ben asking where my mother was and my saying that she was in Lewiston, but that I didn’t want to elaborate, Gram and Gramps looked at each other. Gramps said, “One time my father took off for six months and didn’t tell a soul where he was going. When my best friend asked me where my father was, I hauled off and punched him in the jaw. My best friend. I punched him dang in the jaw.”
“You never told me that,” Gram said. “I hope he socked you back.”
Gramps pointed to a gap in his teeth. “See that? He knocked my tooth dang out.”
And when I told Gram and Gramps about flinching when Ben touched me and about how I went home and found Dad in the garage, Gram unbuckled her seat belt, turned all the way around and leaned over the back of her seat. She took my hand and kissed it. Gramps said, “Give her one for me too,” and so Gram kissed my hand again.
Several times when I described Phoebe’s world of lunatics and axe murderers, Gram said, “Just like Gloria, I swear to goodness. Just exactly like Gloria.” Once, after she said this, Gramps got a dreamy look on his face and Gram said, “Quit that mooning over Gloria. I know what you’re thinking.”
Gramps said, “Hear that, chickabiddy? This here gooseberry knows everything that runs through my head. Isn’t she something?”
Just before we reached the South Dakota border, Gramps took a detour north because he had seen a sign advertising the Pipestone National Monument in Pipestone, Minnesota. On the sign was a picture of an Indian smoking a pipe.
“What do you want to go see an old Indian smoking a pipe for?” Gram asked. She didn’t like the term Native American any more than my mother did.
“I just do,” Gramps said. “We might not ever get the chance again.”
“To see an Indian smoking a pipe?” Gram said.
“Will it take very long?” I asked as the air screamed, hurry, hurry, hurry.
“Not too long, chickabiddy. We’ve got to cool off our car-bust-er-ators. These roads are taking the poop out of me.”
The detour to Pipestone wound through a cool, dark forest and if you closed your eyes and smelled the air, you could smell Bybanks, Kentucky. Pipestone was a small town. Everywhere we went, people were talking to each other: standing there talking, or sitting on a bench talking, or walking along the street talking. When we passed by, they looked up at us, right into our faces and said “Hi” or “Howdy,” and although it sounds corny to say it, we felt right at home there. It was so like Bybanks, where everyone you see stops to say something because they know you and have known you their whole lives.
We went to the Pipestone National Monument and saw Indians thunking away at the stone in the quarry. I asked one if he was a Native American, but he said, “No. I’m a person.” I said, “But are you a Native American person?” He said, “No, I’m an American Indian person.” I said, “So am I. In my blood.”
We watched other American Indian persons making pipes out of the stone. In the Pipe Museum, we learned more about pipes than any human being ought to know. In a little clearing outside the museum, an American Indian person was sitting on a tree stump smoking a long peace pipe. After watching him for about five minutes, Gramps asked if he could try it.
The man passed Gramps the pipe, and Gramps sat down on the grass, took two puffs and passed it to Gram. She didn’t even blink. She took two puffs and passed it to me. There was a sweet, sticky taste on the end of the pipe. With the stem in my mouth, I gave it two little kisses, which is what it looked like Gram and Gramps had done. The smoke came into my mouth, and I held it there while I passed the pipe back.
I held that smoke in my mouth while Gram and Gramps puffed some more. I was feeling slightly whang-doodled. I opened my mouth a wee bit, and a tiny stream of smoke curled out into the air, and when I saw that, for some reason I was reminded of my mother. It didn’t make any sense, but my brain was saying, “There goes your mother,” and I watched the trail of smoke disappear into the air.
In the shop attached to the pipe museum, Gramps bought two peace pipes. One was for him and one was for me. “It’s not for smoking with,” he said. “It’s for remembering with.”
That night we stayed in Injun Joe’s Peace Palace Motel. On a sign in the lobby, someone had crossed out “Injun” and written “Native American” so the whole sign read: “Native American Joe’s Peace Palace Motel.” In our room, the “Injun Joe’s” embroidered on the towels had been changed with black marker to “Indian Joe’s.” I wished everybody would just make up their minds.
By now I was used to staying in a room with Gram and Gramps. Every night when they climbed into bed, they lay right beside each other on their backs and Gramps said, every single night, “Well, this ain’t our marriage bed, but it will do.”
Probably the most precious thing in the whole world to Gramps—besides Gram—was their marriage bed. This is what he called their bed back home in Bybanks, Kentucky. One of the stories that Gramps liked to tell was about how he and all his brothers had been born in that bed, and all Gram and Gramps’s own children had been born in that same bed.
When Gramps tells this story, he starts with when he was seventeen years old and living with his parents in Bybanks. That’s when he met Gram. She was visiting her aunt who lived over the meadow from where Gramps lived. “I was a wild thing then,” Gramps said, “and I didn’t stand still for any girl, I can tell you that.” They had to try to catch Gramps on the run. But when he saw Gram running in the meadow, with her long hair as silky as a filly’s, he was the one who was trying to do the catching. “Talk about wild things! Your grandmother was the wildest, most untamed, most ornery and beautiful creature ever to grace this earth.”
Gramps said he followed her like a sick, old dog for twenty-two days, and on the twenty-third day, he marched up to her father and asked if he could marry her. Her father said, “If you can get her to stand still long enough and if she’ll have you, I guess you can.”
When Gramps asked Gram to marry him, she said, “Do you have a dog?” Gramps said that yes, as a matter of fact, he had a fat old beagle named Sadie. Gram said, “And where does she sleep?”
Gramps stumbled around a bit and said, “To tell you the truth, she sleeps right next to me, but if we was to get married, I—”
“And when you come in the door at night,” Gram said, “what does that dog do?”
Gramps couldn’t figure what she was getting at, so he just told the truth. “She jumps all over me, a-lickin’ and a-howlin’.”
“And then what do you do?” Gram said.
“Well, gosh—” Gramps said. He did not like to admit it, but he said, “I take her in my lap and pet her till she calms down, and sometimes I sing her a song. You’re making me feel foolish.”
“I don’t mean to,” she said. “You’ve told me all I need to know. I figure if you treat a dog that good, you’ll treat me better. I figure if that old beagle Sadie loves you so much, I’ll probably love you better. Yes, I’ll marry you.”
They were married three months later. During that time between his proposal and their wedding day, Gramps and his father and brothers built a small house in the clearing behind the first meadow. “We didn’t have time,” Gramps said, “to completely finish it, and there wasn’t a single stick of furniture in it yet, but that didn’t matter. We were going to sleep there on our wedding night all the same.”
They were married in an aspen grove on a clear July day, and afterward they and all their friends and relatives had a wedding supper on the banks of the river. During the supper, Gramps noticed that his father and two of his brothers were absent.
He thought maybe they were planning a wet cheer, which is when the men kidnap the groom for an hour or so and they all go out to the woods and share a bottle of whiskey. Before the end of the supper his father and brothers came back, but they did not kidnap him for a wet cheer. Gramps was just as glad, he said, because he needed his wits about him that evening.
At the end of the supper, Gramps picked up Gram in his arms and carried her across the meadow. Behind them, everyone was singing, “Oh meet me, in the tulips, when the tulips do blooom—” This is what they always sing at weddings when the married couple leaves. It is supposed to be a joke, as if Gram and Gramps were going away by themselves and might not reappear until the following spring when the tulips were in bloom.
Gramps carried Gram all the way across the meadow and through the trees and into the clearing where their little house stood. He carried her in through the door, and took one look around and started to cry.
The reason Gramps cried when he carried Gram into the house was that there, in the center of the bedroom, stood his own parents’ bed—the bed that Gramps and each of his brothers had been born in, the bed his parents had always slept in. This was where his father and brothers had disappeared to during the wedding supper. They had been moving the bed into Gram and Gramps’s new house. At the foot of the bed, wiggling and slurping, was Sadie, Gramps’s old beagle dog.
Gramps always ends this story by saying, “That bed has been around my whole entire life, and I’m going to die in that bed, and then that bed will know everything there is to know about me.”
So each night on our trip out to Idaho, Gramps patted the bed in the motel and said, “Well, this ain’t our marriage bed, but it will do,” while I lay in the next bed wondering if I would ever have a marriage bed like theirs.
13
BOUNCING BIRKWAY
It was time to tell Gram and Gramps about Mr. Birkway.
Mr. Birkway was mighty strange. I didn’t know what to make of him. I thought he might have a few squirrels in the attic of his brain. He was one of those energetic teachers who loved his subject half to death and leaped about the room dramatically, waving his arms and clutching his chest and whomping people on the back.
He said, “Brilliant!” and “Wonderful!” and “Terrific!” He was tall and slim, and his bushy black hair made him look wild, but he had enormous deep brown cowlike eyes that sparkled all over the place, and when he turned these eyes on you, you felt as if his whole purpose in life was to stand there and listen to you, and you alone.
Midway through the first class, Mr. Birkway asked for everyone’s summer journals. He flung himself up and down the aisles, receiving the journals as if they were manna from heaven. “Wonderful!” he said to each journal-giver.
I was worried. I had no journal.
On top of Mary Lou Finney’s desk were six journals. Six. Mr. Birkway said, “Heavens. Mercy. Is it—can it be—Shakespeare?” He counted the journals. “Six! Brilliant! Magnificent!”
Christy and Megan, two girls who had their own club called the GGP (whatever that meant), were whispering over on the other side of the room and casting malevolent looks in Mary Lou’s direction. Mary Lou kept her hand on top of the journals as Mr. Birkway reached for them. In a low voice she said, “I don’t want you to read them.”
“What?” Mr. Birkway boomed. “Not read them?” The whole room was silent. Mr. Birkway scooped up Mary Lou’s journals before she could even blink. He said, “Don’t be silly. Brilliant! Thank you!”
Another girl, Beth Ann, looked as if she might cry. Phoebe was sending me messages with her eyebrows that indicated that she was not too pleased either. I think they were all hoping that Mr. Birkway was not actually going to read these journals.
Mr. Birkway went around the whole room snatching journals. Alex Cheevey’s journal was covered with basketball stickers. Christy’s and Megan’s were slathered over with pictures of male models. The cover of Ben’s was a cartoon of a boy with a normal boy’s head, but the arms and legs were pencils, and out of the tips of the hands and feet were dribbles of words.
When he got to Phoebe’s desk, Mr. Birkway lifted up her plain journal and peeked inside. Phoebe was trying to slide down in her chair. “I didn’t write much,” Phoebe said. “In fact, I can hardly remember what I wrote about at all.”
By the time Mr. Birkway got to me, my heart was clobbering around so hard I thought it might leap straight out of my chest. “Deprived child,” he said. “You didn’t have a chance to write a journal.”
“I’m new—”
“New? How blessed,” he said. “There’s nothing in this whole wide world that is better than a new person!”
“So I didn’t know about the journals—”
“Not to worry!” Mr. Birkway said. “I’ll think of something.”
I wasn’t sure what that meant. I thought maybe he would give me a whole lot of extra homework or something. For the rest of the day, you could see little groups of people asking each other, “Did you write about me?” I was very glad I hadn’t written anything.
For a while, we didn’t hear any more about the journals. We had absolutely no idea all the trouble they were going to cause.
14
THE RHODODENDRON
One Saturday, I was at Phoebe’s again. Her father was golfing, and her mother was running errands. Mrs. Winterbottom had read out a long list to us of where she would be in case we needed her. If we heard any noises at all, we were supposed to call the police immediately. “After you call the police,” Mrs. Winterbottom said, “call Mrs. Cadaver. I think she’s home today. I’m sure she would come right over.”
“Oh sure,” Phoebe whispered to me. “That’s about the last person I would call.” Phoebe imagined that every noise was the lunatic sneaking in or the message-leaver creeping up to drop off another anonymous note. She was so jumpy that I began to feel uneasy too.
After her mother left, Phoebe said, “Mrs. Cadaver works odd hours, doesn’t she? Sometimes she works every night for a week, straggling home when most people are waking up, but sometimes she works during the day.”
“She’s a nurse, so I guess she works different shifts,” I said.
That day Mrs. Cadaver was home, puttering around her garden. We saw her from Phoebe’s bedroom window. Actually, puttering is not the best word. What she was doing was more like slogging and slashing. Mrs. Cadaver hacked branches off of trees and hauled these to the back of her lot where she lumped them into a pile of branches that she had hacked off last week.
“I told you she was as strong as an ox,” Phoebe said.
Next, Mrs. Cadaver slashed and sliced at a pitiful rosebush that had been trying to creep up the side of her house. Then she sheared off the tops of the hedge that borders Phoebe’s yard. She moved on to a rhododendron bush, which she was poking and prodding when a car pulled into her driveway. A tall man with bushy black hair leaped out and, seeing her, he practically skipped back to where she was. They hugged each other.
“Oh no,” Phoebe said. The man with the bushy black hair was Mr. Birkway, our English teacher.
Mrs. Cadaver pointed to the rhododendron bush and then at the axe, but Mr. Birkway shook his head. He disappeared into the garage and returned with two shovels. Then he and Mrs. Cadaver gouged and prodded and tunneled around in the dirt until the poor old rhododendron flopped onto its side. They lugged the bush to the opposite side of the yard where there was a mound of dirt, and they replanted the bush.
“Maybe there’s something hidden under the bush,” Phoebe said.
“Like what?”
“Like Mr. Cadaver—as I told you before. Maybe Mr. Birkway helped her chop up her husband and bury him and maybe they were getting worried and decided to disguise the spot with a rhododendron bush.” I must have looked skeptical. Phoebe said, “Sal, you never can tell. And Sal, I don’t think you or your father should go over there anymore.”
I certainly agreed with her on that one. Dad and I had been there two nights
earlier, and I had hardly been able to sit still. I started noticing all these frightening things in Margaret’s house: creepy masks, old swords, books with titles like The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Skull and the Hatchet. Margaret cornered me in the kitchen and said, “So what has your father told you about me?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Oh.” She seemed disappointed.
My father’s behavior was always different at Margaret’s. At home, I would sometimes find him sitting on his bed staring at the floor, or reading through old letters, or gazing at the photo album. He looked sad and lonely. But at Margaret’s, he would smile, and sometimes even laugh, and once she touched his hand, and he let her hand rest there on top of his. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want my father to be sad, but at least when he was sad, I knew he was remembering my mother. So when Phoebe suggested that my father and I should not go to Margaret’s, I was quite willing to agree with that notion.
When Phoebe’s mother came home from running all her errands, she looked terrible. She was sniffling and blowing her nose.
Phoebe said that we were going to do our homework. Upstairs, I said, “Maybe we should have helped her put away the groceries.”
“She likes to do all that by herself,” Phoebe said.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure,” Phoebe said. “I’ve lived here my whole life, haven’t I?”
“She looked as if she’d been crying. Maybe something is wrong. Maybe something is bothering her.”
“Don’t you think she would say so then?”
“Maybe she’s afraid to,” I said. I wondered why it was so easy for me to see that Phoebe’s mother was worried and miserable, but Phoebe couldn’t see it—or if she could, she was ignoring it. Maybe she didn’t want to notice. Maybe it was too frightening a thing. I wondered if this was how it had been with my mother. Were there things I didn’t notice?
Later that afternoon, when Phoebe and I went downstairs, Mrs. Winterbottom was talking with Prudence. “Do you think I lead a tiny life?” she asked.