“I could never be a doctor,” said Catherine. “I would hate being responsible for anybody’s life. I’d worry about making some huge mistake.”
“They do, sometimes. No matter what kind of work you do, you make mistakes,” Papaw said, pushing gently against the floorboards with his feet.
“Do you ever make mistakes in the mine?” Ivy June asked, not sure if she wanted the answer.
Papaw nodded, arms folded loosely across his chest. “Sometimes. So far I’ve been lucky. Either the mistakes aren’t big enough to cause trouble, or somebody discovers ’em before it’s too late.”
“Would you want your grandsons to work in the mine?” Catherine asked him.
“That’s up to them,” said Papaw. “I’d have no say in it.”
“Miss Dixon says we should figure out what we like to do most and what we do best, and then find a way to make a living of it,” said Ivy June.
“Well, that’s easy to say, girl, but it’s not always possible to do. When I was eighteen and saw my four older brothers scatter to the winds—my pa was doing poorly, and there was still a brother younger than me—I went to work in the mine to help out. I didn’t much like it, but the pay was good. Year or two went by, and I figured this was where I was goin’ to be, ’cause I didn’t see a future for myself anywhere else.”
“What part didn’t you like?” Catherine asked, and Ivy June knew it would probably all be recorded later in her journal.
Papaw smiled wryly. “All of it. Didn’t like the way it did my back, didn’t like the dark and the damp, didn’t like comin’ home all covered in coal soot. But the money helped out at home, and by then I had me a wife and a couple sons. I made up my mind that I would be the hardest-workin’ man on a job he didn’t like that the coal company had ever seen.”
Ivy June listened in silence and sadness at the thought of her grandfather’s going to work every day at a job he didn’t like. She tried to understand the mind of the strong, quiet man, whose skin was a map of small wrinkles around his deep blue eyes. But she also knew there was a certain pride in being a miner, and it wasn’t every man who had the courage and the muscle and the guts to go deep inside a hole every day, not knowing for sure whether he would walk out on his own two feet or be carried out.
“And that’s where I get my satisfaction,” Papaw continued. “Every day that the bell clangs and my shift is over, I tell myself I did the best work of any man in the hole. And I remind myself of it every morning. It’s easy to do a good job on work you love. Hard as paddlin’ up-stream to do work you don’t like and do it well. But I do it.”
Ivy June nestled against him, her head on his shoulder. “I’ll be glad when July comes and you never have to go down in the mine again. What will you tell yourself then when you get up in the mornings?”
Papaw grinned down at her. “I’ll tell myself that now I get to do just what I want, and I can do it every which way, won’t matter.”
The squeaky sound of the pump handle came again from the kitchen, and a minute later Dr. Grace appeared in the doorway.
“Well, Spencer, I had to lance that foot again, but I think we’ve stopped the infection,” she said. “She’s back there giving Emma the what-for ’cause you sent for me.”
Papaw smiled a little and stood up, and the girls followed him inside. Mammaw came out of the next room, wiping her hands on her apron.
Dr. Grace took a large bottle out of her medicine case and counted out fourteen pills. “I want Iree to take two of these a day for a week,” she said. “One in the morning and one at night.”
“What about a cup of tea now, Dr. Grace?” Mammaw said.
“I appreciate it, Emma, but I’ve got to see Mr. Gibbons this afternoon. I pray his leg doesn’t have to come off, ’cause I can’t do it, and the hospital’s full up.”
“You’ll put this visit on our bill?” Papaw asked.
“Of course. You make sure she takes those pills, Emma. It’s trouble, I know. If the pill’s too big, cut it in half, but make sure she swallows both halves. Don’t let her fool you. If I know Iree, she’s got a dozen tricks up her sleeve, and if she lives to be a hundred and one, she’ll have a dozen more.”
The next morning did not start out particularly well. Mammaw rapped on Ivy June’s door at six o’clock, and the first thing Catherine asked was where she could wash her hair.
Ivy June climbed off the cot and turned around. “We don’t have a shower,” she reminded Catherine.
“I know, but I could wash it in a sink,” Catherine said. And when Ivy June explained that both the pump on the back porch and the one in the kitchen produced ice-cold water, and that Mammaw used the kitchen sink in getting breakfast, Catherine asked, “But what do you do?”
“I do mine on the weekend when I take a bath,” Ivy June said. “Mammaw heats water for me in the kettle and we add that to the water in the tub.”
Catherine’s face wrinkled in disgust. “But mine’s all oily, and my scalp itches!” she said, running her hands through her hair. “I have to wash it every day.”
“If you want, you could stand in the washtub out on the porch and I’ll tip the teakettle over you, but I don’t think we can do that and still make the bus,” Ivy June said.
So Catherine just brushed her hair instead. After a bowl of Mammaw’s oatmeal with honey and raisins, the girls put on their jackets and backpacks and set off down the hill for the bus stop.
Shirl was already on the bus when Ivy June and Catherine got on. She had saved a space in the back beside some rowdy boys so that the two girls could sit with her, but Ivy June took one look at the boys and nudged Catherine into a two-person seat by the window. In the back, Shirl gave an exasperated frown, and Ivy June turned to go talk with her.
“Y’all sit down back there,” the driver barked, looking at her in his rearview mirror, his arms working to maneuver around a hairpin curve.
“We’ll sit together at lunch,” Ivy June called, and fell onto the seat beside Catherine as the bus lurched. Catherine had her face against the glass, trying to see just how high up the mountain went.
Forty minutes later, when they got off at school, Shirl and some of the other girls gathered around Ivy June and Catherine with polite but wary smiles and greetings. Ivy June introduced them.
“This is Angela; this is Mary Beth; and this is Shirl, the one and only,” she said.
“Oh, the infamous Shirl!” Catherine grinned.
“She been telling my life story?” Shirl asked.
“Oh, Shirl, what’s to tell?” said Mary Beth.
And Angela teased, “Eat, kiss, sleep. Eat, kiss, sleep.” The girls hooted, and as the bell sounded, Ivy June said, “Whoever gets to lunch first, save seats. Okay?”
Miss Dixon was the most welcoming of all the teachers, Ivy June felt. One or two of the others, perhaps, might have thought that Catherine was judging them, comparing them to the private-school teachers in Lexington. But as Catherine had once said of her own family, she was nothing if not polite. And that, in the end, seemed to win the teachers over.
“This is Catherine Combs, visiting us from Buckner Academy for two weeks,” Ivy June announced in each class.
“I imagine you find our school pretty different?” the substitute teacher in history asked that morning.
“No, ma’am,” Catherine replied. “I’ll have to study just as hard.”
At lunchtime, Shirl and Angela and Mary Beth had saved a table, and Catherine looked around. “Aren’t we supposed to pick up trays?”
“Don’t even think it,” Ivy June told her. “Mammaw would have seven fits if you ever told her you wanted school food from the cafeteria.”
Catherine looked longingly at the large slices of pizza some of the other girls were eating. But she changed her mind when Ivy June opened the paper bag Mammaw had filled that morning, and produced two thick sandwiches of homemade bread filled with slices of roast chicken; little slices of dried apple sprinkled with cinnamon; and two carefully w
rapped slices of chocolate cake.
“Oh, man!” she said. “I’ll be so spoiled when I get back to Buckner, it’ll never be the same.”
“Have you always gone to private schools?” Mary Beth asked.
“I guess so. I don’t remember much about kinder-garten, but I’ve been at Buckner since first grade. It’s where my mom went to school.”
“Bet it’s different staying at Ivy June’s grandparents’ place,” said Shirl. “You and her squished in that one tiny room.”
“Not that different,” said Catherine. “I have to share a bathroom with my sister.”
Some of the girls stopped chewing.
“A bathroom just for you and your sister?” one of them asked.
“How many bathrooms in your whole house?” asked Shirl.
Catherine appeared to be counting, and her cheeks had turned a faint pink. “Four, I guess,” she said. “I mean, counting the toilet in the basement.”
“Wow!” said Angela.
“So how do you like the bathroom at Ivy June’s?” Shirl teased.
“Oh, I’m used to outdoor toilets,” said Catherine. “I go to camp every summer.”
“Yeah? Wait’ll it gets warmer and the snakes come out,” said Mary Beth.
“A skunk got in ours once and we couldn’t use it for a week,” said another girl.
“Wait’ll she sees a bear some night between her and the outhouse,” said Angela.
“You can’t say you’re used to outdoor toilets until you’ve lived with one through a winter,” said Shirl. “Until you have to put on your coat and your boots to get through two feet of snow, and the temperature’s down around zero.”
“So I’ll use the pot!” Catherine retorted, and the other girls laughed. But Ivy June knew how Catherine felt just then. All she had to do was remember how she herself had felt, sitting in Jennifer Paine’s family room while Jennifer played the piano.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
March 31
I guess I’m finding it harder than I thought to live like the Mosleys. This is the second day I’ve gone without washing my hair, and already I can’t stand it.
It’s hard to tell about school so far. I think Ivy June’s friends are waiting to see me fall on my face. But I made them laugh at lunchtime, and after that they warmed up a little.
As for the teachers, some are better than others. The classes don’t seem to have the discussions we have at Buckner. It’s pretty much teachers doing the talking and students doing the homework. But here they know their part of the country better than we know Lexington. They can tell you the name of every river or school or church or valley–the owner of every house within miles of their own. Ask them when the river flooded or where was the last big fire, and they’ll tell you. I don’t even know the names of the people who live three houses down from us at home. In Lexington, we sort of belong to a bunch of separate communities. Like, the members of my basketball team make up one; the girls in choir, another. But here, each place is a community, it seems. A community of people from valley to valley or mountain to mountain.
I could hardly believe that an eighty-five-year-old woman doctor would drive her car all the way up to Grandpa Mosley’s place, then walk up the hill, to look at Grandmommy’s toe. Dr. Grace was so bent over that she had to lift her head to look you in the face. She seemed to know what she was doing, though, and I don’t think she thought much of Mammaw’s homemade salve, made of whiskey and turpentine and I-don’t-know-what-all.
This probably sounds like I’m starting to judge them already, and I hope I’m not. But I’m beginning to see ways we’re different. I have to be honest. Hygiene doesn’t seem as important to them, though just washing up is more complicated than you’d think. But Megan told me that Ivy June’s family probably keeps an old catalog in their outhouse and uses the pages for toilet paper, and fortunately that’s not true.
I’m more tired here than I am at home. Everything we do takes more energy. The long walk to catch the bus–that kind of thing. Ivy June’s grandfather goes to bed when the sun goes down, and he leaves before Ivy June and I get up.
At least the weather’s been warm, and that’s a help. “Warmest March on record,” Grandpa Mosley said last night at the supper table. He can hardly wait to start their garden.
I can hardly wait to wash my hair.
Catherine Combs
CHAPTER THIRTY
April 1
Catherine would have to be here on April first. You’d think it was a national holiday the way the fool boys at school carry on—seventh graders acting like a bunch of kids in elementary.
On the bus, Perry Lewis taped something on the back of Dennis Reed, and when everyone got off, kids started kicking Dennis because he was wearing a sign that read KICK ME HARD. You don’t dare sit down anywhere in school on April Fool’s Day without checking the seat for thumbtacks, and I had to watch out for Catherine the whole day. But I didn’t watch close enough, because one of the girls at our table—I don’t know who—stuck a flat rubber spider under Catherine’s milk carton. When she picked it up and saw the spider, she gave a shriek and scooted away—milk all over the place.
Everyone laughed then, and Catherine turned that funny shade of pink. But she laughed too, and I helped her wipe up the milk. I was sure glad when we got off the bus this afternoon. I don’t think it was Shirl who put the spider there, but I wouldn’t bet on it. She hasn’t said anything against Catherine so far, but she hasn’t said anything for her either.
I kept my eyes on Howard every step of the way home when I found him waiting for us at the bus stop. I told him yesterday he didn’t have to wait for us after school, I know the way home, but there he was. Catherine asked him what he liked best about living in the mountains, and he just shrugged. “Howard, you got a bone stuck in your throat?” I asked him.
All he did was smile and kick a stone, then kick it again, but finally he said, “I don’t know. Never lived anywhere else.”
That’s fair enough, I guess. How’s he supposed to know what he likes best if he doesn’t have anything to compare it with? That’s why I was sent to Lexington, I guess. To see what’s different.
I thought maybe he was getting a crush on Catherine, because he didn’t stay at Ma’s after we crossed the creek. Just followed us up to Mammaw’s, ate her ginger cookies, and took off. It was a half hour later when Catherine went to the outhouse that we heard the scream. Howard had dragged that caged raccoon to the side of the outhouse and watched for Catherine to make a visit. Soon as he saw her coming, he must have shoved that creature inside, and Catherine found it. How he trapped the fool thing in the first place or got it in the outhouse, I don’t know. But if it had been me found that animal, I would have held Howard by the heels and dropped him in the hole myself, I was that mad.
I went charging back into the kitchen, where he was laughing up a storm, and soon as I told Mammaw what he’d done, she reached for Papaw’s razor strop, but Howard was out of there and halfway down the hill before she could catch him, just whooping it up.
“That boy gets the prize for foolishness,” Mammaw said.
When Catherine’s heartbeat had returned to normal, she was still as polite as ever. “Brothers like to kid around,” she said, as though Peter pulled tricks like that on her all the time. I was about to ask if she ever got mad at anybody for anything, and then I remembered the time she was mad at me and let it go.
That night I asked if she’d been able to reach anyone on her cell phone. She said no, which means she tried. I just hope she wasn’t trying to call home and ask somebody to come pick her up. Wouldn’t blame her if she did.
Ivy June Mosley
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
When Ivy June and Catherine stopped by Ma’s house on the way back from school on Wednesday, Ruth Mosley was clearly upset. Daddy’s truck was gone, but he was there—out on the back stoop smoking a cigarette, strictly against doctor’s orders.
“What’s wrong?” Ivy June asked
.
“Russell’s truck broke down over near Cutshin,” her mother said. “The Prathers had to bring him home. And he’d just hired on to help build their extra room.”
“Can’t the pickup be fixed?”
“Transmission and I-don’t-know-what-all,” Mrs. Mosley said, one hand nervously stroking her throat. “First off it has to be towed somewhere a man can fix it, but Mr. Prather himself poked around and says it don’t look good.”
Ivy June didn’t have to be told just how bad this was. Not only was there the cost of repairs to consider, but also the fact that Daddy now had no way to get back and forth to work at Cutshin. He’d been told that the job would probably last two or three weeks, and he couldn’t afford to lose that income. Ma answered the question Ivy June didn’t ask:
“Ed Prather’s going to hire somebody else. Says he’s sorry, but he can’t drive fifty miles each mornin’ to pick Russell up and bring him back. And them with a new baby on the way, they need that extra room bad.”
Solutions swirled around in Ivy June’s head and were just as quickly rejected. Papaw couldn’t drive Daddy to work because he’d have his car at the mine. Jessie couldn’t do it; she’d need her car to get to the factory. Those were steady jobs they had to keep. Daddy only worked part-time at whatever he could find, and when Papaw retired, his pension would have to provide for them all.
Catherine stood by silently, concerned.
“I’m really sorry, and I can see he is too,” Ivy June said, watching her daddy through the window.
Mrs. Mosley let out her breath, and her hand dropped to her side. “Just can’t never get ahead, it seems. Take one step forward and you get two steps back. There goes that new refrigerator I wanted. Don’t look now like I’ll ever get it.”
On the way up the hill to Mammaw’s, Catherine said, “Since your dad’s health isn’t so good and … now this … why wouldn’t you … you know … apply for welfare? I mean, it’s not as though he’s not trying.”