Ellie was partly relieved. She asked her mother.
“Fits in the family?” her mother repeated. “Well, seems to me your Aunt Bessie had a few in her lifetime. In fact, I believe it kept your Great-uncle Charles on edge to his dying day. But Bessie lived to be almost ninety, so I reckon they knew when one was coming.”
“But how would they know, Mama?”
“Shoot, I don’t know nothing about them things. Never had to worry with it myself.”
Ellie, though, was worried. She wanted to tell somebody what was troubling her, but who, but who? Somebody who would know the answer and wouldn’t laugh at her.
She spent most of the night thinking about it. As she lay in bed, her tongue felt too big in her mouth and her stomach still wasn’t right.
The next morning Harvey wasn’t at school. Ellie wondered if he’d finally died, but Mrs. Richmond said he was resting and would be back in a day or two. That was all she said.
So Ellie didn’t get her answer.
Where could she find out? She was too afraid of Mr. Woodrum to talk to him. Who would know?
Finally, in the afternoon, in the middle of the Civil War, she got an idea.
When she got home from school, she pulled the telephone cord as tight as she could and hid herself in the bathroom to make a call. She got the number from the yellow pages.
She listened to the phone ringing.
“Emergency Room,” answered a woman’s voice.
“Uh …” Ellie couldn’t start. “Uh …”
“Hello?”
“Are you a nurse?” Ellie asked.
“Yes, can I help you?”
“Well, I was wondering … if you … if you could tell me … uh … what causes fits.”
“Fits?” echoed the nurse. “Do you mean epilepsy? Is someone having a seizure in your home?”
“Yes, ma’am. I mean, no, ma’am. No, ma’am, no one’s having one in my home, and yes, ma’am, that’s what I mean.”
The nurse didn’t answer.
Ellie whispered, “I’d appreciate it if you could tell me what causes it.”
“Have you had a seizure?” asked the nurse.
“Oh, no! It was a boy at school. I was just wondering …”
The nurse was quiet a moment. “Are you afraid you’ll have one, too, honey?”
Ellie blushed.
“Yes, ma’am. Sort of.”
“Well, dear, I can’t tell you for sure you won’t ever have one in your lifetime, but most of us never do. It’s an illness that has to do with the brain. Do you feel well?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Do you faint often?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well, dear, I think you are probably in perfect health and have nothing to worry about. Most likely that boy has had his illness since he was small. And because of what happened, he’ll be given some medicine to control his seizures.”
“Yes, ma’am,” answered Ellie. “Uh, I thank you for talking to me. Very much.”
“You’re quite welcome, dear.”
“‘Bye.” Ellie softly replaced the receiver. She felt around the inside of her mouth with her tongue. It felt normal. She didn’t believe anyone could swallow his tongue anyway, since it was all hooked up in there.
She stood up and looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She looked all right. She didn’t figure rotten teeth qualified her as unhealthy.
She decided she wasn’t going to have any fits. And she was glad about it.
When Harvey came back to school, he seemed shy and embarrassed, and Ellie felt sorry for him. None of the kids really talked to him, and nobody mentioned his fit. Mostly they all seemed embarrassed, too.
If she hadn’t been so sure she wasn’t going to have any fits, Ellie would have kept away from Harvey like the rest of them. And if she hadn’t known he’d been given some medicine to stop any more fits from coming, she would have kept her eyes on him like a hawk.
But she knew he was all right. And she was, too.
So she surprised him—and herself—and especially Carolyn—when she invited him to sit with the two of them at lunch. Carolyn wasn’t talking, and Harvey was still shy, so Ellie talked the whole time about Bullet.
A Lovely Night
ELLIE HAD TO GO TO CAROLYN’S BIRTHDAY PARTY, and it was there that she got kissed.
Ellie was scared about going. Her mother had sewn up a pretty white dress with a blue sash for her. Okey said it would have to get her through every party for the next seven years. But that’s all he said.
On the day of the party the whole house took to making Ellie beautiful. The older girls knew that it would be Ellie’s first boy-girl party, and they remembered things Ellie didn’t know about. Since Ellie was youngest, they seemed to feel obliged to do all they could for her.
Right after breakfast Eunice made Ellie wash her hair then sit at the kitchen table while Eunice rolled it up with Dippity-Doo. Ellie’s hair had never been rolled up before and she worried she might look like her mother’s friends when it came down—all puffed out and stupid. Eunice pulled on Ellie’s hair too hard and brought tears to her eyes. The Dippity-Doo began to remind her of Vaseline. Then she wondered if the hair would stick like glue to her scalp.
“You better not make me look foolish, Eunice,” she warned.
“You look foolish enough already. You don’t need no help there,” her sister said. “I’m trying to make you look like a girl, Ellie.”
Ellie made a face. Eunice’s idea of looking like a girl was looking like a beautician, and Ellie didn’t trust her.
Once her hair was set and covered with a net, Ellie was handed over to Wanda. Wanda brought out a tray of fingernail polishes and spent thirty minutes fixing up the skin around Ellie’s nails—which Ellie didn’t know ever needed fixing—and putting a coat of three different kinds of polish on them.
“Now sit there and blow at them a while,” Wanda instructed.
Ellie blew for a few seconds, then stopped. Her head had started itching and she stuck a finger underneath a roller to get at it.
“No!” Wanda screamed. Ellie jumped, Wanda grabbed her hand, took one look at the wandering finger, then screamed again.
“Ellie, you fool! Look! You smeared all the polish. You even got hair in it!”
Ellie looked at her lumpy nail.
“Does that mean I’ve got pink hair now?”
Wanda groaned and did the nail all over again. Then she blew Ellie’s nails dry and even scratched Ellie’s head for her when it itched. Wanda was clearly serious about her work.
Linda loaned Ellie her heart locket and Martha gave her a bangle bracelet. Ellie’s mother had agreed to let her wear nylons, so the sisters checked and double-checked their panty hose and found the pair in the best shape. But they belonged to Eunice and the material gathered in big folds around Ellie’s ankles, so they had to look again through Linda’s and Martha’s, because those girls were shorter.
The party was set for seven o’clock, and at six o’clock Ellie was sitting quietly on the edge of her bed, her hair all fat and curly (pressed down with barrettes as far as possible), her nails pink, her neck bearing a locket and her wrist a bangle. The white dress with the blue sash lay beside her.
Ellie’s mother put her head in the room. The other girls had already gone off to their Saturday night events, and the house was empty but for the two of them and Okey.
“You’re gonna be late, you don’t hurry,” Ellie’s mother warned.
Ellie nodded.
“You need some help?”
Ellie shrugged her shoulders and kept looking at the floor.
Her mother came into the room.
“Well, stand up and let’s get that dress on you. Okey’s waiting to drive you on over there.” She picked up the dress, but Ellie didn’t move.
“Well, Ellie, what is it?”
Ellie bit her lip, keeping her eyes down, and said, “I’m nervous.”
“About what?”
br /> “Oh—just nervous.”
“Ellie, there’s nothing in the world to be nervous about. All them kids are your friends. Won’t be nobody there you don’t know. It’s time you started going to parties.”
She tapped Ellie’s head.
“Come on now, put your dress on. Okey’ll start spitting if you’re late.”
Ellie stood up and slipped into the dress her mother held. The sash was tied. She stood in front of the mirror, seeing in it nobody she knew.
“Now, if that don’t look mighty pretty,” her mother said. “Don’t know what you’re worried about. You got to grow up sometime, Ellie.”
Ellie pulled on Martha’s nylons then buckled up her patent leather shoes.
“Mama …” She looked at her mother with begging eyes. “Do I have to go?”
Her mother raised one eyebrow and put her hands on her hips.
“If you don’t go to this party after I made that dress … well, you sure won’t be going to any parties, girl, while you’re living in this house. Now get your tail on out of this room.”
Ellie did it. Okey hardly looked at her as they climbed into his truck. They rode together and didn’t talk.
When he pulled in front of Carolyn’s house, Okey reminded her to get a ride back with Debbie Meadows’s mother. Ellie nodded her head. She looked at Carolyn’s brick house, all lit up and scarier than any place she had ever been.
“Well?” Okey said.
Ellie didn’t move.
“Go on, girl,” he said. “I reckon Carolyn’s itchier than you.”
Ellie’s eyes lit up.
“I bet you’re right!” she answered. And she climbed out of the truck and went to rescue Carolyn.
The living room was full of boys and girls sitting stiff on chairs along the walls. A record was playing. Balloons hung everywhere. And Carolyn stood biting her nails by the refreshment table.
It was a mystery to Ellie later how everyone finally started having fun. But they did. They started dancing. They ate cake and potato chips and triangle sandwiches. The boys took off their jackets. And some of the girls in heels even took their shoes off so they could dance better, and so they wouldn’t be a foot taller than every boy in the room.
And many of them played their first game of spin the bottle.
It was Carolyn’s older brother, who was helping with the party, who brought out the bottle. There was a lot of blushing and giggling and sweaty hands. But everyone was willing to play. Even Ellie, though she knew she’d allow only a cheek kiss to anyone.
She had gone through three or four cheek kisses when Harold Johnson spun her. Harold had taught Ellie how to swim at the lake the past summer, so she wasn’t worried when they went into the other room alone.
But Harold grabbed her and headed for her mouth. Ellie’s eyes got big and she pushed him away.
“Wait a minute! Come on!” Harold said.
“No!” Ellie pushed him again.
“Lordy, come on, Ellie.” Harold grabbed both her arms so she couldn’t push him.
“Harold!”
And he kissed her. Right on the mouth. Maybe for five seconds. He let her go and grinned at her.
“See?”
Ellie was dizzy for the rest of the party. Her insides were floating and she found she couldn’t take her eyes off Harold. She hoped they’d play another kissing game, but everyone wanted to dance.
When Ellie got home, her sisters were still out, but her mother was up. Ellie knew not to ask her where Okey was on a Saturday night.
“Well, how was it?” said her mother.
“Okay.”
“Your curl all fell out.”
Ellie put her hand to her hair. She’d forgotten what she looked like when she left home.
“Well, Mama, I was dancing.”
Her mother looked surprised.
“Dancing?” she repeated.
“Uh-huh.”
“Well.”
Ellie went into the bedroom and closed the door. She didn’t want to take off her dress just yet. And she especially didn’t want to wash her hands. Because Harold had been wearing some kind of cologne and somehow the smell had got on her hands. She lay back on her bed and covered her nose with them.
She was still dizzy. Her insides were still floating.
Ellie never before had such a lovely night.
Summer
The Accident
ONE SATURDAY AFTER LEAVING THE STARDUST TAVERN shortly after midnight, Okey went over a mountain.
They all knew it would happen sooner or later. They knew Okey would drink one glass of whiskey too many and not make it home some night.
But when it finally happened, when the call really came, telling them he was at the county hospital, telling Ellie’s mother to get there and quick, they knew they were none of them ready to lose Okey. Ellie most of all.
Okey’s red and white pickup lay over the side of a mountain, smashed and defeated, and Okey lay in a hospital bed in much the same condition.
They called a neighbor and the six of them went to him.
The nurses wouldn’t let the girls in to see him. Only Ellie’s mother. Ellie waited with her sisters in the glaring light of the waiting room, pacing around the leather couches, reading the names of the candy bars in the vending machine, wishing she smoked so she could have a cigarette or drank so she could have a drink.
Ellie had always thought Okey could never be hurt. He had survived tons of rock falling around him deep in the mines—there should not be anything else he couldn’t survive. Everyone worried about Okey driving drunk in his Chevy, even Ellie, but she was the one who was certain he would never die in it. Or because of it.
But when they had pulled in front of the doors of the hospital emergency room, when Ellie had seen the parked ambulances and the white shoes and had smelled the odor that belongs only to a place filled with the sick, she felt she had already lost him. She could not see Okey surviving in such a place.
When Ellie’s mother returned to the waiting room after seeing him, she was crying in great heavy sobs that seemed to drag their way up from the very center of her, and they escaped in sounds that made Ellie hurt inside. And she felt more certain she would lose her father.
Eunice and Wanda gathered their mother into their arms and the three of them collapsed on the couch, crying into each other’s necks and shoulders and bosoms. Martha slid down onto the floor beside their feet. Linda sat shivering in a nearby chair, with tears running down her cheeks and into the corners of her mouth. And Ellie stood staring at her own reflection in the glass of the vending machine.
Okey was not dead. He was unconscious, his condition was critical, he was fighting for his life, their mother said—but he was not dead.
Ellie stared at herself in the glass and remembered she had not thanked Okey yesterday morning for unscrewing a honey jar for her.
It had been hard for him, with his bad arm, but he had sat down in a chair, put the jar between his legs to hold it and had used his good strong arm to give it a determined twist.
She had taken it from him and not said thank you.
And now she could not tell him.
“Can’t I see him, Mama, please?”
Her mother stuck both her thumbs into the corners of her eyes as if to clog the tears that wanted to flow. She gave a ragged sigh.
“No, Ellie, they said nobody but me. You don’t want to see him, Ellie. You don’t want to see him.” She buried her face against Eunice.
Daddy, don’t you die on me, Ellie thought.
Don’t you die on me.
She left the vending machine and began pacing again, her fingers twisting in and out of each other, her eyes wide and wet.
And she thought, Must be something I can do. Must be something a girl could do for her daddy who might be dying.
Please Jesus don’t let him die.
Our Father don’t let him die.
God don’t let him die.
None of it sounded good
enough. It wouldn’t work. She wished she smoked. She wished it was yesterday. She wished … and she saw it.
On one of the coffee tables beside a green leather chair. A Bible. Not like her own, since it had somebody named Gideon on the front of it. But it was a Bible.
She dropped into the chair and picked it up. The pages were thin and slick.
Don’t die, Daddy.
Using her thumb to flip the pages, she searched. Something good to say to God. That’s what she wanted. What you are supposed to say when your daddy might be dying.
A page said: WHERE TO FIND HELP, WHEN.
Ellie slid her finger down the words on the page.
AFRAID. Yes.
ANXIOUS. Yes.
DEPRESSED. Don’t know.
DISASTER THREATENS. Yes.
FACING A CRISIS. Yes.
OVERCOME. Some.
SICK OR IN PAIN. Daddy is.
SORROWFUL. Not yet.
TROUBLE, IN. Maybe.
WORRIED. Yes.
And she wondered where to turn first, because under AFRAID there were four different chapters she’d have to look at.
But SICK OR IN PAIN made the best sense to her. So while her sisters and her mother huddled together in the middle of the room, Ellie stayed in her chair in the corner and read every verse for someone sick or in pain. She read in Psalms and in Matthew and in Romans and in both Corinthians and in First Peter.
And she didn’t understand any of it.
Daddy, don’t die.
The night passed. The girls, one by one, fell asleep on the couches in the waiting room. Ellie slept in her chair.
And in the morning, their mother woke them. She told them that Okey was stable.
Did that mean he would die, Ellie asked.
Her mother said no. He wasn’t going to die. At least not until he drove that blame fool truck over another mountain.
Ellie cried.
Old Lady Epperly
OLD LADY EPPERLY LIVED UP TOWARD THE END OF THE road from Ellie’s house, so the Farleys didn’t see much of her because they were always headed out in the opposite direction.