“Well, I promised your father that if he had any more messages for you, I’d drive up here just as soon as I could and deliver them,” Miss Dixon said to Catherine. “I just didn’t want you to worry all weekend.”
“Thank you,” Catherine said, and smiled a little when Danny slid off his mother’s lap and came over to hug Catherine’s legs in sympathy.
As the girls went back up the hill later, Catherine said, “Please don’t tell anyone at school about Mom, okay?”
“What’s so shameful about being sick?” Ivy June asked.
“I don’t want people asking about her when I don’t have any answers yet. I don’t want them treating me any different because of her.”
“All right,” Ivy June agreed.
There was chicken for dinner that evening, with noodles that Mammaw had made by hand. Ivy June fed Grandmommy at the table, mashing green beans into mush, and keeping a dish towel tucked in the neck of the old woman’s dress to catch the spills.
Mammaw dished up the applesauce and the green beans she had canned the summer before. She took a fresh pan of biscuits out of the oven and served the stewed tomatoes and okra, all the time telling about a squirrel that had got in the crawl space under the roof once, and the trouble Papaw had trying to get it out. Catherine listened, eating sparingly, but at least she ate.
Later, Catherine and Ivy June washed themselves at the kitchen sink and put on their pajamas in front of the woodstove. The rain that had begun around dinnertime came down heavier now, and the house creaked as the wind picked up. After they got into bed, Ivy June noticed that Catherine reached for her mother’s locket on the backless chair and, enclosing it tightly in one hand, put her head on the pillow.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
April 6
House is still as a morgue, except for Grandmommy’s whining. She’s all confused about who went to Cleveland and “where that new girl’s off to now.” If she says “last spring for somebody” one more time, I’ll scream. Catherine will, anyway.
We didn’t go to church with Papaw and Mammaw; Catherine didn’t want to, and Mammaw didn’t insist. So I went down to the house and told Jessie she didn’t have to sit with Grandmommy, I’d do it. Daddy’s out smoking again. Ma says he’s going to drive Jessie’s car to the man in Cutshin this afternoon, see if he thinks the truck is worth fixing up or does Daddy have to buy another one.
I came back to Mammaw’s to eat my breakfast. Catherine stayed in the bedroom doing her math problems. It’s so quiet you can hear the skitter of a squirrel on a limb near the outhouse.
When Mammaw got back from church, she made an A+ Sunday dinner. This time we had ham with the fried chicken, potatoes with giblet gravy, boiled eggs pickled in beet juice, and biscuits with rhubarb preserves.
Papaw folded his hands at the table and said, “We pray the Lord that he look down on Catherine’s mother in Cleveland, and that the doctors feel his presence in the operating room. We ask that she be blessed with health, so that she can be a testament to the Lord’s handiwork. Amen.”
That set Grandmommy off again, asking about Cleveland, but one bite of Mammaw’s biscuits, she got her mind on other things.
The weather turned cold, so we didn’t sit around on the porch like we did yesterday. After Catherine and I cleaned up the dishes, Mammaw let us have the table to do our project for social studies. Everybody in seventh grade was assigned a report about life in Kentucky. Some got environment for a topic, some got air quality, roads, natural resources, or about any other thing you could think of, but Catherine and I got festivals and celebrations, comparing the county where she lives with what we have around here.
I could see that her list was about five times longer than mine. I only had two festivals I could think of—the Daniel Boone Trailblazers Festival in the spring, and the Mountain Herb Festival in the fall. Catherine had the Bluegrass Classic Dog Show and the Champagne Run Horse Trials and the Clog Fest and I-don’t-know-what-all. Her heart wasn’t in it, though, and I noticed she kept reaching up to finger the gold locket around her neck.
It helped some that Ma sent Howard to bring me and Catherine down for a taffy pull. That’s something Ma gets in her mind to do when somebody needs cheering up bad. Howard, of course, was all quiet and politeness, and Ezra and Danny’d already forgotten about Catherine’s mama, just wanting to get their hands on a piece of that cooled syrup, laughing and giggling as they pulled it back and forth until it started to turn white and lose its shine.
I liked my family tonight. Even Daddy turned away from the TV, laughing at us. Sometimes I get to wondering, if we were to have just enough of what we need, not any more—if Daddy’s truck could be repaired and Ma could get her teeth fixed and we could have us a new refrigerator and even a bathroom—would everybody be different? Or would there be a whole new list of complaints? Some of each, I’d guess. The rich folks on TV have problems we never even heard of. Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure can make life a lot easier.
Ivy June Mosley
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
April 6
I wish I were anywhere but here. How could the doctor not have known about Mom’s heart problem? Or confused it with her pneumonia? Aren’t we supposed to have the best in Lexington? Hasn’t Dr. Wilson been with us forever?
All I get from Ivy June’s family is old-fashioned reassurance. “There’s always calm after a storm,” “Trust the Lord,” or “It’s going to be okay.” None of them know a single thing about what’s going to happen to Mom. But then, I guess nobody back home does either.
How can people live this way-shut off up here in the hills without a phone? They’ll spend their money on a satellite dish but go without a telephone. Why don’t they form a protest and demand that the phone company put in a line? How can I stand not knowing what’s going on all the time over in Cleveland? That’s just the way we live,” Ivy June says. The phone company’ll get around to us by and by.” They just accept things. Well, I don’t!
And yet … at the taffy pull down at her mother’s place, I was thinking how lucky it is that our family has health insurance. Her mom needs her teeth fixed and her dad has some kind of asthma. The only things they have to depend on are Jessie’s paycheck and Mr. Mosley’s dad, and he’s sixty-four. If I were in that family, I think I’d be planning my escape as soon as possible. Go somewhere I could get through college and find a job. But there I am, judging again
One thing though. Even though I don’t want to talk with them about my mom, because none of them say the right thing-and I don’t even know what the right thing would be-I still want Ivy June near me.
I wonder how Claire and Peter are taking this, really. Wonder what Gramps has to say, and whether Rosemary says anything helpful at all. Tonight I’ll hold Mom’s locket and think good thoughts, and tomorrow Dad will call me at school. Meanwhile, at least I have Ivy June.
Catherine Combs
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
On the bus Monday morning, Shirl was sitting with one of the girls this time, but in front of the row of boys, so that they were still reaching around the seat to tickle her or to snatch the baseball cap she liked to wear.
“Hi, Shirl,” Ivy June said. “Why don’t you sit with us at lunch?”
And Shirl looked her right in the eye this time and said, “Looks like you already got company.”
“Got room for you!” Ivy June said, but Shirl grabbed at the boy who had taken her cap and never answered.
Ivy June wished right then that the bus wouldn’t stop at the school. Wished it would just keep going on down the highway—four miles to the junction, past the turnoff to the mine where Papaw worked, on past the textile mill—and angle right down to Harlan. Not let anyone off till she and Shirl made up.
“She’s mad at you because of me, isn’t she?” Catherine asked Ivy June later.
“Oh, she’ll get over it,” Ivy June said, not really wanting to discuss it.
“Like you and me and Mackenzie,” Catheri
ne observed. “It’s like Mom said once: ‘Some friends are more fragile than others.’”
“She’ll come around,” Ivy June told her, and tried to think of other things.
The call came during English. Miss Dixon had been talking about Kentucky authors and the different types of writing they did, from mysteries to nonfiction, essays to novels. She wrote a few names on the board—Carolyn Gordon, Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Penn Warren, Sue Grafton, Barbara Kingsolver—and assigned the class to come up with at least twenty more. Anyone who read a book by one of these authors by Friday would receive three extra points.
A speaker clicked on, and the school secretary said, “Miss Dixon, sorry for the interruption, but would you send Catherine Combs to the office, please?”
Everyone turned to look at Catherine, but she was out of her seat almost before her name was mentioned. Ivy June gave her an encouraging smile.
Five minutes went by. Then ten … twelve … Catherine still hadn’t returned when the bell rang, and Ivy June headed toward the office. She met Catherine halfway down the hall. Catherine was smiling.
“Dad said she came through the operation okay,” she said. “The doctor thinks it went well, and Dad said he’ll call me again tomorrow.”
“That’s great!” Ivy June gave her a hug. “Oh, Cat, that’s wonderful news, isn’t it?”
“I hope so. I asked if this meant she was going to be all right, and Dad said that so far it looks good. Everyone’s optimistic.”
“Then so am I!” Ivy June told her. “Now don’t you feel better?”
“Heaps. And I’m starved. I’m glad it’s lunchtime,” Catherine said.
“I wish you felt you could tell the other girls,” Ivy June said.
“Maybe I will—now that I can talk about Mom without crying,” Catherine said.
Ivy June hoped that this would help Shirl see Catherine in a different way. But Shirl didn’t even walk by the table where Catherine and Ivy June were eating lunch, and when Catherine told the other girls about her mom’s operation, Shirl wasn’t there to hear.
“You must have been so worried!” said Angela.
“I’d be a basket case,” said Mary Beth. “I’d want to be home in the worst way.”
“I do,” said Catherine. “Except that nobody’s home. And Dad didn’t want me sitting around in Cleveland.”
Howard was waiting at the bus stop when they got off that afternoon. He was standing with his hands in his jeans pockets, his shoulders hunched against the wind. His eyes shifted from his feet to the girls and back again, and when he finally spoke, it seemed he was forcing himself to focus on Catherine.
“I … I hope your mom’s okay,” he said, his voice almost inaudible.
Catherine smiled. “She came through the operation all right. Dad called me this morning, and we talked for a long time.”
Howard smiled shyly. “That’s good,” he said, and tagged along a couple of feet behind them as they started home.
They stopped off at Ma’s to tell her, too. Ruth Mosley seemed genuinely happy for Catherine. “Nice to hear somethin’s going right around here,” she said. “That’s good news for sure. I can guess you’ve been right worried. You girls want some sweet tea?”
Ivy June started to say that they wanted to get on up the hill to tell Mammaw but changed her mind: “Yeah, that would be nice, Ma.”
“Got some sheet cake left that Jessie made,” said her mother, and that brought Danny and Ezra running to the table.
Mammaw had prepared a good dinner that evening for whichever way the operation went, and gave Catherine a wide smile and a hug.
“Why, your ma may be better’n ever once she’s recovered,” she said. “Sometimes it takes a bad turn in life to bring the good. You take her back some of that sarsaparilla tea, Catherine, and it’ll help keep her pressure down.”
Grandmommy seemed to know that a celebration was in order, because she fingered the embroidered pocket of her cotton dress and said, “Got me my new dress on.” When the girls told her how pretty she looked, she said it again.
The girls took over the table when it was cleared of dishes and attacked their homework assignments once again. They had used the computer in the school library for most of their social studies research, but would have to wait for the bookmobile to come around to get more books by Kentucky authors.
“I don’t think I’ll have time to read a book,” Ivy June said. “I’m still trying to catch up on work I missed while I was away.”
“We read a couple of Bobbie Ann Mason books last year,” Catherine told her. “She wasn’t on the list. And we read one of Barbara Kingsolver’s books.”
“Then you get three credit points not even trying!” exclaimed Ivy June.
“What’s that you’re workin’ on?” Papaw asked, coming out to the kitchen to get another dish of bread pudding. He peered down at the papers scattered about the table.
“Catherine and I have to write a paper on festivals in her county and mine,” Ivy June told him. “What kind of festivals did you have growing up, Papaw?”
He chuckled and dipped his spoon in his bowl. “Well, we got together whenever we could, but nobody called it a festival. Maybe it’d be after a camp meeting in summer-time, or neighbors coming together to shuck corn, or maybe we’d go to a hymn-sing. Any time the grown-ups got together was an excuse for the younguns to have a good time. And sometimes us kids got together for pure mischief.”
“Like what? What did you do?” asked Catherine.
Papaw put the spoon to his mouth and savored the pudding on his tongue.
“Well, I never did this, now—lived too far from the rest—but on Halloween there were all kinds of ornery. In the middle of the night, they’d go get somebody’s cow and lead it down to someone else’s barn—git the other cow and bring it on back. Man would git up in the mornin’ and find a strange cow waitin’ to be milked. Swappin’ cows. That was a favorite.”
Ivy June and Catherine laughed loudly. “What else?” they asked.
“Well, the girls were always hangin’ round to see what the fellers were up to, you know. Corn shuckings—why, the boy who found a red ear when he pulled off the husks, he got to kiss the girl of his choice. On the mouth, too. And that sure kept everyone busy. But if there was a new boy, we just weren’t so nice. What was done to him was done to all of us, one time or another, but of course he didn’t know that.”
“What did you do?” Ivy June asked curiously.
Papaw gave her a guilty smile. “Us boys would invite him to a snipe hunt, and he’s eager to fit in, see, so of course he’d go along.”
“A what hunt?” asked Catherine.
Papaw just winked at her. “We’d wait till it was gettin’ dark, and then we’d all go out in the woods, down in a gulley or somethin’. Give the new kid this big sack and tell him to stand real still and hold it open between his feet. That we were going to drive the snipe birds right down into the gully, and he was to collect ’em and bring ’em home.”
“I never saw a snipe bird,” said Ivy June.
Papaw chuckled. “Neither did we. That’s the point. The boy, he’s all eager to help on account of wanting to be one of the crowd. And then we’d go off, back to the house or the church or wherever the grown-ups were talking. We’d leave him standin’ back there in the woods, holdin’ the sack. And how we’d laugh when he’d finally come in, all sheepish-like, figuring out the trick.”
“That was mean, Papaw,” Ivy June said with a grin.
“Suppose it was. But any fella pass the snipe test, then he’d be in on the joke like the rest of us, and eager to try it on the next poor soul who come along.”
“Did you ever have a bike? Anything like that?” Catherine asked.
“Hardly make it up these mountains if I’d had one,” Papaw said. “Somebody made me a wagon once, I remember that. And we put a goat to it. Now, that was fun. For us, anyways. Not the goat.”
Ivy June studied her list of festivals. ??
?Did you ever take part in a greased pig contest or a terrapin race like they have over in Hayden? A coon-on-a-log competition, or a mudbog?”
“I expect there were things like that goin’ on there-abouts, but we were pretty much left to our own devices.” He grinned. “Anyone have a spare pig around, it would probably end up a ham on somebody’s table, not a greased-up pig to play with.”
That made Ivy June and Catherine both laugh.
“I don’t expect you do much pig chasin’ and snipe huntin’ up your way,” Papaw said to Catherine.
“Well, I never heard of any. But we’ve got the Bluegrass Classic Dog Show.”
“Just a difference in animals, I guess,” said Papaw.
Ivy June was worried about Shirl. She’d always liked the boys, Shirley had, but this time the boy craziness seemed to be something more. Seemed to be aimed right smack at Ivy June, like it was both for real and for show. As though she was saying, See what I got, Ivy June? I don’t need you.
Ivy June decided she should have given Shirl more warning of what it would be like when Catherine came to Thunder Creek. Should have explained that after Catherine went back to Lexington, Ivy June probably would never see her again. She was only treating Catherine Combs the same way she’d treat any kind of company, didn’t matter where they were from. But Shirl could have figured that out for herself.
The problem was, if Ivy June and Shirl lived in Lexington, like Catherine did with her friends, Ivy June could have called Shirl on her cell phone and straightened things out. Sent her an e-mail message. Here in the hollow, there was no messaging back and forth. If the day ended and you weren’t speaking, you couldn’t set things right again till the next morning. And if you got on the bus and your best friend ignored you and sat back with the boys, then you somehow had to corner her during the day if you could and ask did she have something on her mind. And she’d say so, and still be mad for a while longer, till finally you both got sick and bored with it and made up.