Catherine Combs
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Person Who Influenced My Life
by Ivy June Mosley
His name is Spencer Mosley, but he’s Papaw to me. He’s my grandfather, on Daddy’s side, and he’s sixty-four years old. I live with him and Mammaw now, because our own house got too small for the seven of us, and Papaw asked could I live with them. Ma says that after children get shoulder high, they just take up more space, and we only have two bedrooms.
Papaw Mosley is a miner. There aren’t that many deep mines left where we live, but Papaw’s one of those miners. If you lined him up with the other men, he wouldn’t stand out particularly except he’d be older than most, which is why he’s retiring this summer.
He’s got ears that stick way out the sides of his head, and a large enough nose to suit his face. His eyebrows have turned gray like his hair, and there’s not much left of that, but he’s got a strong chin. It’s his eyes I like, though, because they’re always smiling, even when his mouth isn’t. The little crinkles in the skin at the corners fan out when he smiles, like his lips and his eyes are connected by the same string. He’s got the biggest hands and feet of any man I ever saw.
What I learned from Papaw is that every single thing you can learn to do makes you feel that much better about yourself, even something as small as frying an egg.
Papaw stays busy, whether he’s at the mine or not. He used to take Howard and me out in the woods to dig roots—bloodroot and ginseng. Taught us how to dry it so we could sell it when we got a pound. Taught us how to plant corn and beans on the new moon, and to catch crawdads in Thunder Creek.
Here are some more things I’ve learned to do: skin a squirrel if I have to, shoot a rifle, build a fence, sew a quilt, tell starroot from stoneroot, make corn bread, feed Grandmommy, wash clothes, cut hair, change babies, and name the books of the Bible. If I was to find myself alone in the mountains for a year, I could take care of myself.
“Learn to do for yourself, because that’s all you can really depend on,” Papaw says.
I wonder sometimes what Papaw thinks about when he’s in the mine. If it wasn’t that he’s helping support my family back at the house, he and Mammaw would have an inside toilet and maybe even a bathtub by now. “We don’t have much, but we’re rich as the Lord wants us to be,” he says.
Papaw also says the secret to life is wanting what you have. The thing is, when you grow up without knowing what you don’t have, you don’t miss it. Once you know about it, though, you keep remembering. I do want what I have, but if you don’t reach for something more—I don’t mean things, I mean more from yourself—how can you grow? And you won’t ever reach for it if you don’t start wanting it in the first place.
Papaw is the person who has influenced me most, because he sees in me what I can’t even see myself. He knows what I can do before I learn to do it. I guess that gives me confidence—enough to come to Lexington and see how other people live. And he’ll be the first one I tell about it when I get back.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
There was one two hour art class each week at Buckner, and it met on Wednesdays. Ivy June had been secretly looking forward to this class, eager to have someone outside of Thunder Creek recognize her talent. When she followed Catherine into the studio, however, and looked at the sketches and paintings there on the walls, she felt she must have walked into an art gallery.
There were drawings of faces so real that they looked like black-and-white photographs. Paintings of flowers so feathery that she didn’t quite see how a brush could make such a mark on canvas. There were still lifes of apples and pears, each done in a different artistic style, so that while you were looking at the same plate with the knife and the fruit and the cheese, you could tell that each artist saw a different image in her mind.
Miss Lorenzo greeted Ivy June warmly and asked the girls to arrange themselves in a circle around a small raised platform. When the desks had been noisily rearranged, she asked if one of the girls would volunteer to be their model.
“Do I have to take off my clothes?” Mackenzie quipped, and everyone laughed, including the teacher.
“No, I’d just like you to sit in a relaxed position—one arm thrown over the back of the chair, maybe,” the teacher said. “Try that, see if it’s comfortable. See if you can hold it for an hour and a half.”
While Mackenzie tried out different positions on the platform, Miss Lorenzo talked about how each student would be drawing the model from a different angle. The same girl, in the same chair, but each artist would see her from a different perspective.
As the teacher moved about the room, commenting on the strokes, the shading, Ivy June knew that she probably had one of the easiest angles. She was drawing Mackenzie from the side, and it was a lot easier drawing the profile of a forehead, nose, and chin than it was to draw the face full front and get the shading just right.
“Excellent!” Miss Lorenzo said to some. “Great foreshortening there, Maria,” or, “Take another look at her left hand, Courtney. Check the proportions.”
When she came to Ivy June’s sketch, she studied it a moment, then said, “Your details are good, but look at the figure as a whole—the relaxed slump of the shoulder, for example. You’ll want to see the shape of the whole in your mind before you concentrate on details, but keep working.”
Ivy June stared hard at her sketch. The teacher was right. The whole pose was wrong on paper. In her drawing, the girl’s posture was stiff, unnatural, but she had great pleats in her skirt.
At the end of the period, when all the sketches were collected and propped along the chalk tray beneath the blackboard, Ivy June realized that while a few of the other drawings were as amateurish as her own, most were far more artistic, more natural, more original. Miss Lorenzo pointed out the features of the best work, and it was what she didn’t say about the others that said it all.
She was subdued over the lunch hour, and was glad for free time in the library later, when she could write home on the stamped postcards Mammaw had given her.
Dear Ma and Daddy (and Jessie, Howard, Ezra, and Danny),
I’m going to drop this myself in a mailbox I saw at the corner because I don’t want anyone to read it but you. I’m here, no car wreck or anything, and I have a bed to myself in the Combses’ big house. They’re nice people for the most part and we went to church on Sunday. The choir sang fine, but nobody opens their mouth very wide. Peter and Claire, the ten-year-old twins, are pretty funny sometimes. School is hard in some classes, easy in others. Hope the creek didn’t rise too much.
Love, Ivy June
Dear Papaw, Mammaw, and Grandmommy:
I’m here without a car wreck, but I miss you a lot. Mrs. Combs thanks you for the preserves and says blackberry’s her favorite. She has someone do the cooking for her because she’s been sick, but it’s nothing as good as yours. I’ve got a bed to myself and it’s a right big house here. Everybody’s nice to me except Catherine’s step-grandmother, Rosemary, but Catherine doesn’t like her either. I’ll mail this postcard myself so no one else will see it. Hope the creek didn’t rise too much.
Love and kisses, Ivy June
Despite her disappointment about the art class, Ivy June fell into the rhythm of the school day and the Combs household. Taking turns in the bathroom each morning with Catherine and Claire, riding to school with Catherine’s dad, or sometimes Mackenzie’s. Classes till three, then the ride home again—a snack in the kitchen, shooting baskets over at the clubhouse with Catherine, then dinner, and homework till almost nine. Ivy June treated herself to a bath each night, luxuriating in the hot water.
At Buckner she was in the general math class, not the advanced. The teacher was talking about interest rates. If the list price of a new car was $20,000, she said, and the dealer gave you eight years to pay it off at $350 a month, what was the rate of interest? How much would you actually end up paying for the car? The girls busied themselves with calculations at th
eir desks and gasped as one by one they discovered that they would be paying $33,600 for a $20,000 car.
Ivy June tried to remember if anyone she had ever known had bought a new car at any price. Most of the cars that belonged to people in Thunder Creek had been sold and resold, so that by the time it got to you, you were maybe the third or fourth owner.
The last class of the day was science, with its unit on geology. Mrs. Baker was talking about the age of rocks—about carbon dating and how it helps tell how old a fossil is.
“Think about this, girls,” she said. “Some people dismiss geology as nothing more than the study of silent, un-moving rock…. What’s wrong with that statement?”
“Rock does move over centuries,” answered one girl.
“And when volcanoes erupt, you can hear it,” said Hannah.
Ivy June slowly raised her hand. “But there doesn’t even have to be an eruption to hear a mountain,” she said. “My grandfather works in a coal mine, and he said that when you’re deep down, you can hear the mountain groan and shift.”
There was complete silence in the room.
“Tell us about it, Ivy June,” the teacher said.
Ivy June worked hard to get it right. “There was this day that Papaw was working a tunnel and the roof caved in,” she continued. And in the minutes that followed, she found herself telling how the miners had been trapped by a huge slab of slate. How they’d listened that whole night for rescuers, but all they could hear were the sounds of rock itself. “Like a handful of marbles rubbing together,” Ivy June finished, remembering the way Papaw had described it another time.
No one moved.
“That’s something we wouldn’t have known if you hadn’t been here to tell us,” Mrs. Baker said.
“How was your grandfather rescued?” one girl asked.
And Ivy June told how the team had kept drilling from the other side of the rock fall until finally they could break through and reach the miners.
“Imagine it,” the teacher said, “working six hundred feet below the surface, surrounded by rock that had been changed from ancient flowers and ferns to peat. The pressure of the water above squeezed it down until it formed coal.”
On the board she wrote, Five to eight feet of rotted plants = one foot of coal.
“If you look closely at a piece of coal,” she went on, “you may be able to see the markings of plants and ferns. In some mines the workers have no light except that pro-vided by their helmet lamps. No air except that which is pumped through their ventilation system. I want you to think about this over spring break, about all the ways coal makes our lives better. Think of the risks that miners take to get it for us.”
On Thursday in Mr. Kirby’s music class, the girls sang the Annie song again, and now that they knew the words and the melody, it was all the more beautiful. But Ivy June was astounded, as the period was ending, to hear Mr. Kirby say, “Ivy June, it’s been a real pleasure having you in this class, and I think I’ve found the voice I’d like to record for our hymn of the year. I hope the rest of you will agree with my choice. Would you sing the third verse again of ‘Amazing Grace,’ and this time I’ll record it?”
There was polite applause from some of the other girls, but not, Ivy June noticed, from either Jennifer Paine or Megan Murkoff.
“Um …,” Ivy June said, embarrassed.
“You’re our first exchange student, and you’d be doing us an honor by being our guest singer.”
“Okay,” Ivy June said, and her face felt warm.
She tried not to look at Jennifer or Megan when she sang the solo, but her voice was thin this time, and didn’t carry the expression she had felt the first time she had sung it.
“Let’s do it again,” Mr. Kirby said. “Take some deep breaths, Ivy June, and really let it out when it’s your time to sing.”
Catherine seemed to know what the problem was. At any rate, she leaned over Ivy June’s shoulder and whispered, “Let’s hear it for Thunder Creek!”
Ivy June remembered that she was the ambassador. Whatever she did or didn’t do would reflect on Miss Dixon and the people back home. She fixed her eyes once more on the sky beyond the window, and when it was her time to sing, she let it out, just as Mr. Kirby had said.
“Wonderful,” he told her as he played it back and they all listened. “That’s a wonderful gift, Ivy June.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
It was only seven days ago in Thunder Creek that Ivy June had celebrated the last day before vacation, and now she was doing it again here with Catherine. Spring break at Buckner came the week before Easter, and teachers didn’t give assignments to be done over that period. The sun was out for the first time since her arrival, and Ivy June looked forward to doing something fun.
At the start of school on Friday, Jennifer Paine stopped by Catherine’s locker.
“Hey, are you guys going to be around tonight? Thought I’d have a sleepover in honor of Ivy June before everyone takes off for vacation.”
“Oh!” Catherine looked at Ivy June uncertainly. “Sounds fun. I’ll have to call Mom and see if she’s got anything planned. I’ll let you know.”
“Tacos at seven!” Jennifer said, and made her way through the throng of girls to another locker.
Catherine hung up her jacket and turned to Ivy June. “I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure if you’d want to go.”
Ivy June wasn’t sure either. She’d only been on an overnight once, and had shared the room with Shirl and her two sisters. She’d known what to expect there, however, and had no idea what it would be like at Jennifer’s.
“What about you? Do you want to go?” Ivy June asked. “She’s a friend, right?”
“Not a close one,” said Catherine. “Tell you what. If she’s invited Hannah and Mackenzie, we’ll go. If not, I’ll make an excuse.”
It seemed strange to turn in work she would never see again, in classes she would never come back to, Ivy June thought as they went from class to class that morning. She was glad, actually, that she would never have to see what grade she got on her math paper, though she knew she’d done well on the quiz about the Civil War.
At lunchtime, Catherine called her mom on her cell phone and found there was nothing special planned for that evening. And because Mackenzie and Hannah were also going to the sleepover, she told Jennifer that she and Ivy June could come.
The halls were filled with excited chatter about the coming week, with lots of goodbyes, as though the girls were parting for good. A few even hugged Ivy June. Back home, all she had said to Shirl that last day was “Have a good time with Fred Mason.”
As Catherine, Ivy June, Mackenzie, and Hannah waited for Hannah’s mom to pick them up that afternoon, Catherine said, “We’ll see you guys at Jennifer’s tonight. We probably wouldn’t be going if you weren’t. You can never tell about Jennifer.”
“Our family’s flying to Washington tomorrow afternoon,” Hannah said. “We’ll be spending the week visiting the Capitol and stuff.”
“We’re just going to Cincinnati for a couple of days,” said Mackenzie.
Ivy June listened in amazement. People talked of driving to Cincinnati or flying to Washington as easily as Daddy might talk about driving to Hazard—did anyone want to come along? And even that didn’t happen very often.
Hannah’s mom pulled into the school driveway, and the girls edged toward the curb.
“What did you mean, Catherine, that with Jennifer you never can tell?” Ivy June asked, still puzzled about the sleepover.
Catherine and Mackenzie exchanged looks.
“Just that … Jennifer … well, Jennifer’s Jennifer,” Catherine said, not very helpfully.
“She’s fine as long as she’s the star of the show,” Mackenzie explained. “But don’t worry. The sleepover’s at her house, so she’ll be the star of the show.”
Jennifer’s house was half again as big as Catherine’s, with tall white columns on the porch and an entrance hall two stories h
igh.
A sleek blond woman in great jeans and a blue shirt greeted the girls when they stepped inside.
“I’m Jennifer’s mom,” the woman said, extending her hand to Ivy June. “I hope you’re enjoying your stay in Lexington.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Ivy June.
“And how’s your mother, Catherine?” Mrs. Paine asked.
“A little stronger, I think,” Catherine answered just as the doorbell rang again and Jennifer came skittering down the curving staircase to pull her guests inside.
All the girls dropped their bags in the large family room at the back of the house, then trooped into the kitchen, where Mrs. Paine had left all the taco ingredients on the counter. Guests helped themselves to the meat mixture and toppings, then sat down on the couches and floor of the family room to eat. Ivy June looked about her. This space was probably as big as all the rooms in Mammaw’s house put together. A huge stone fireplace covered the wall at one end; a grand piano sat at the other end. The bank of windows along one wall stretched from floor to ceiling.
“So tell us about Thunder Creek, Ivy June,” Megan Murkoff said. “What do you do for fun? Do you have sleepovers like this?”
“Not very often,” Ivy June answered. “Our houses are pretty far apart, and there’s not always someone around to drive us.”
“Do you have best friends?”
“Shirl’s my best. ‘Best pest,’ I call her,” Ivy June said, and the girls laughed. “She’s a cutup.”
“Where do you go when you go out?” asked Courtney.
“Sometimes we go down to Earl Parker’s store on Friday or Saturday nights. Anyone with a fiddle is welcome to stop by and play. Or Earl puts on a CD and plays it over a loudspeaker, and we dance out in the parking lot.”