They rode almost a block before any more words were spoken. Ivy June wanted so much to ask why Papaw hadn’t come to pick her up, and cast sideways glances at her daddy to see if there was worry on his face. There didn’t appear to be, however, and she knew if she asked about Papaw, it would show her disappointment that it had been Daddy waiting for her instead of him.
She also wanted to see if her daddy would start the conversation, wondering if it was always going to be she who said the first words, consciously comparing him now to Catherine’s father. What would Catherine think of this quiet man who had never worn a suit in his life? Who had never praised her that she could remember, and who got so little praise himself? Who thought so little of himself, probably, for having to depend on his father to support the family.
Ivy June wondered how it could be that she and her daddy had so few things to say to each other. Was it because she was living at Papaw’s now, or had it always been like this?
He did, after a while, speak first. “So …”
Ivy June waited, her eyes straight ahead.
They drove another few blocks. When they came to a stoplight, her father mused, with a smile, “Don’t look any different.”
“Didn’t expect me to, did you?” she asked.
“Wasn’t sure,” he answered.
“Well, I saw different things … learned different stuff. Saw a horse farm, for one thing.”
He smiled wryly this time. “Got to go all the way to Lexington to see a horse? Never saw Sam Feeley’s?”
“Had to go all the way to ride one. Mr. Feeley never offered me a ride,” Ivy June said.
“Didn’t know you wanted one,” her daddy said.
“Guess you never asked,” she replied.
Still more silence. She was being unfair, she knew. Why should he have to guess at what she might feel or need? Did he have to do all the asking? When could his asking stop and her telling begin?
“Went to the opera house one night,” she told him finally. “It’s got a thousand seats, all of them red velvet. It was a musical, Oklahoma! You’ve probably heard some of the songs.”
“Don’t know,” said her daddy.
“Never heard ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’’?”
“Why don’t you sing it for me?”
Ivy June blinked. She could never remember a time in her life that her daddy had asked her to sing for him. She wasn’t even sure that this wasn’t the first time she’d ever been alone with him in a car, not even Jessie along.
“Okay,” she said, and began. “There’s a bright golden haze …” They had reached the state highway now, and Ivy June sang the chorus loud and clear. Sang to the trees with their feathery beginnings, the countryside, the long grass tinged blue. “Oh, what a beautiful morn in …” She sang two verses, forgetting whether there was a third.
“That’s a pretty song,” her daddy said when she’d finished.
Ivy June took a chance: “I missed you. Did you miss me? Even a little?”
The pause was so long she was afraid he’d say no. But finally he said, “I wondered if you’d be all right there in Lexington with folks you don’t know. But I guessed if anyone could figure out how to handle things, it was you.”
Ivy June recognized this for what it was—a compliment from her daddy. It might not have been all that she wanted, but it was a start.
Papaw, Ivy June discovered, had taken Howard and Ezra up near the ridge to get some pokeweed for a salad, and some sassafras bark. Ma was up at Mammaw’s with Danny, helping make supper.
Daddy parked the pickup at the footbridge and carried the suitcase across and on up the hollow to Mammaw’s. Tomorrow was Easter Sunday, and the Buck Run Baptist Church held a potluck dinner right after the service. Ivy June had been going to church with Mammaw and Papaw since she’d moved in with them, but her parents had stopped attending years ago, when Ma’s teeth went bad. Howard went to a Sunday school in the next hollow with a friend from school. A neighbor picked up both Howard and Ezra on Sunday mornings, and Ma was glad for some peace and quiet.
Since the family wouldn’t be together for Sunday dinner, Mammaw had decided to have the meal there this evening. No one called it a “welcome home” dinner, even though Ivy June suspected it was, because her family—all but Mammaw and Papaw—hadn’t thought she should go away in the first place.
Mammaw’s hug was warm, and the sparkle in her eyes was all Ivy June needed to know she was loved. But when Ivy June reached out for her mother, the hug Ma gave in return was a sideways sort of embrace on her way to the stove. If you’ve come back with a swelled head, you can forget it, the weak hug seemed to say.
“Jessie’s got promoted to the day shift at the factory” were her mother’s first words. “After three years, it’s about time. Now if I can just keep her away from Harlan on Friday nights.”
Jessie, Jessie, always Jessie, Ivy June thought.
“But you want her to meet somebody, don’t you, Ma?” she said.
“Not anyone from the Tic Toc, I don’t,” Ma answered. “She don’t need going to no bar.”
Danny ran in just then from the back room, and Ivy June swooped him up, giving him a loud smacking kiss on the cheek.
Grandmommy, of course, was all smiles, even though she couldn’t see; she kept her face turned toward the sound of Ivy June’s voice.
“She’s back from Lexington, Grandmommy,” Mammaw told her.
The old woman groped for Ivy June’s hand, and when she finally latched on, she said, “I’ve stayed all my life … right back in the mountains. I wouldn’t … live in Lexington … if you give it to me and made me keep it.”
“And everybody loves you being right here,” Ivy June told her.
Around four, Papaw came home with the two older boys, each carrying buckets of greens and some sassafras bark. Ivy June went out on the porch to meet them, her arms open wide for Ezra. Then she hugged Papaw, squeezing him tight, and finally—his face bashful—Howard.
“What you guys been up to while I was gone?” she asked as they trooped into the house and handed their buckets to Mammaw.
“I caught a fish last week!” Ezra told her. “Howie helped me put a worm on a hook and …”
“And we ate it!” Danny finished for him.
“Good for you!” Ivy June said.
Howard had stories to tell of all he had done during mud vacation, and how the creek had come within six inches of the footbridge, and how Kenny Holland’s go-cart had gone over the bank and gotten carried downstream.
“And Howard trapped a raccoon!” said Ezra.
“A raccoon!” Ivy June exclaimed.
“He’s got the fool thing in that rusty old dog kennel back of the house,” said Daddy, “feeding it scraps.”
“I find out you’re feeding it anything but garbage, I’ll take a switch to you,” Ma said to Howard. “You got one week to let that creature go!”
Howard only grinned.
At the pump by the sink, Ivy June’s ma was washing the pinkish sassafras roots and scraping off shavings into a pan. Before long, the water was boiling and the sassafras gave off its root-beer fragrance. Ten minutes later, they all held cups of steaming sassafras tea sweetened with honey and let the steam warm their faces.
Jessie came up the hill about five with a shopping bag from Walmart, tired from her shopping trip, and gave Ivy June a hug.
“You buy yourself a nice shirt?” her mother asked.
In answer, Jessie held up a pair of skinny stretch pants and, ignoring her mother’s exasperated look, slipped them back in the bag. “How’d it go in Lexington?” she asked Ivy June. “Where’d you go for the haircut?”
“Nowhere. Girls did it for me.”
Jessie looked surprised. “They don’t go to some fancy salon?”
“I don’t know. But that night they were trimming hair, so I let ’em do mine.”
Later, as the family gathered around the table and feasted on Mammaw’s white beans and ham and Ma
’s corn pudding, Ivy June told them about the one-thousand-seat theater with the red velvet cushions, how she’d walked inside the Capitol, set foot in the very house where Abraham Lincoln’s wife was born, and gone on a forty-five-minute ride around the Kentucky Horse Park, holding the reins herself, nobody in the saddle with her.
Jessie wasn’t much interested in the horse park. “What’s Catherine’s family like?” she asked. “They have a big house?”
Ivy June described it, not mentioning the number of bathrooms. She described each member of the Combs family, all but Rosemary, knowing that either Ma or Jessie would fasten on tight to Rosemary all the worst things they believed about city folk.
“I like Catherine’s friends, too,” Ivy June said. “Not all of them, but they’re just like girls here. I like her two best friends a lot, Hannah and Mackenzie.”
“Mackenzie!” exclaimed Jessie. “What kind of a name is that? Give a girl her mother’s last name and you know for sure she’s city. You’d never find a girl around here named Mackenzie.”
“Well, if there weren’t any differences, there wouldn’t be any point in goin’ up there, would there?” said Papaw, passing around the biscuits.
“We’re more alike than we are different,” Ivy June said earnestly, wanting her family to be kind to Catherine when she came. But inwardly, she hoped she could still say this after Catherine had been here for two weeks.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
At Buck Run Baptist, Pastor Gordon was a little late, having preached at another small church that morning, with still a third to go on his circuit. A six-foot-high wooden cross had been set up at the front of the room, held in place by a Christmas tree holder. And everyone knew that each car in the clearing out front had a Styrofoam ice chest or a plastic Playmate in its trunk, and that in those chests were casseroles and Jell-O salads and desserts, all waiting to be brought inside after the preaching.
No one dressed up much for Easter. Some of the older women, like Mammaw, came in their usual Sunday dresses, and a few of the men wore ties. There was a superstition, though, that if you didn’t wear new clothes on Easter, bad luck would follow, so many of the worshippers came in at least one thing new to them, though it might have been handed down six times from one relative to the next. But mostly the forty or so members of the congregation were simply well scrubbed and brushed and combed, with every member of their household in attendance. On Easter morning there were four persons to a hymnal, not three, but so many—Ivy June among them—knew the words, they didn’t even have to look at the pages.
When she and Mammaw and Papaw sang out the chorus of the final hymn,
Up from the grave He arose,
With a mighty triumph o’er His foes….”
Ivy June let her voice soar:
“He arose, He arose,
Hallelujah! Christ arose!”
She wouldn’t be surprised if people heard them all the way to Hazard, so enthusiastic was their singing.
At the final “Amen,” while the adults greeted and hugged each other, children turned their eyes toward the back of the room, where the two church deacons were setting up a long folding table, and a woman waited with a white paper cloth to cover it.
In and out the grown-ups went, and within minutes, the table was covered with platters of fried chicken, deviled eggs, sliced ham, navy beans, scalloped potatoes, and four layer cakes, so that almost every square inch of it was occupied.
Ivy June followed Papaw in line, and when she’d filled her plate, she took it over to the row of folding chairs along one side. Back at Mammaw’s house, Jessie was caring for Grandmommy, as she did every Sunday morning, so Ivy June and her grandparents could take their time.
Pastor Gordon went around the room shaking hands.
“Welcome back, Ivy June,” he said. “Did you bring some new and exciting ideas with you?”
“Don’t know about that, but I left a few myself,” Ivy June said, and Mammaw chuckled appreciatively.
At that moment Ivy June’s eye caught someone grinning at her from across the room. Jimmy Harris, a heaping plate propped on one knee, was motioning to the empty seat beside him.
Ivy June instantly felt the blood rush to her face, as it always did when the eighth grader noticed her.
What are you doing here? she mouthed in surprise.
What? he mouthed back, and pointed insistently to the empty chair.
“Someone from school,” Ivy June told her grandparents, and carried her plate across the floor. “Never saw you here before,” she said, sitting down by Jimmy.
“I heard they were having potluck,” he said, and grinned again as he took a bite of biscuit spread with honey.
She stared at him. “I’ll bet you didn’t even hear the sermon, Jimmy Harris!”
He laughed then. “Did too! My aunt said she’s seen you here, and asked me to come along.”
“Well, hallelujah for that,” Ivy June said.
“Figured this was one way to make you talk to me,” he said, and his skinny knee bobbed up and down, the plate held firmly in place by one thumb.
“What do you mean, I don’t talk?”
“Hello. Goodbye. That’s about it,” he complained.
“So what do you want me to say?”
“Heck! Didn’t they teach you any manners up in Lexington?” Jimmy said. “Polite conversation?”
Ivy June gave him a broad smile. “Why, Jimmy Harris, what a pleasure seeing you here this morning. I surely hope you enjoy my grandmother’s biscuits,” she said sweetly.
“Now, that’s better,” he told her.
“So what’s she like?” Shirl asked on the bus Monday, when Ivy June climbed on with one of Mammaw’s ham sandwiches in her lunch bag with some jelly beans that Ezra had been given at Sunday school.
“Same as us, not so different,” said Ivy June.
“Fancy clothes, I’ll bet. Brand-name underpants and all,” Shirl prodded.
“I wouldn’t know. I didn’t peek. What did you do on vacation?”
“Went to Earl’s store three nights!” Shirl said, her eyes twinkling. “You should have been there. Jimmy Harris kept looking around for you.”
“He did not. He knew I was away.”
“He was looking just the same.”
“Looking at you, probably!” Ivy June teased. “Bet you wore that sweater with two baseballs in your bra.”
Shirley’s lips stretched into a wide smile. “Danced with Fred Mason,” she said. “And we sat out behind Earl’s with a Mountain Dew and I let him kiss me. A kiss kiss, not the skim-milk kind.”
“I said that’s what you’d be doing,” Ivy June laughed as the bus stopped at Devil’s Branch Road, and three kids with their collars turned up climbed aboard.
“Bet they don’t do much kissing in Lexington, everything so prim and proper,” said Shirl, and glanced over at Ivy June. “Catherine have a boyfriend?”
“You’d have to ask her,” said Ivy June. “She goes to a girls’ school, remember.”
“Wonder who thought that one up! The whole point of getting out of bed in the morning is to flirt with the boys in your class,” Shirl said.
The teachers welcomed Ivy June back into their classes, but no one asked what she thought or felt about Lexington people or the way they lived. When Miss Dixon had first explained the program, she had told them that this discussion would come later, after Catherine had come to Thunder Creek. Instead, friends asked Ivy June about her teachers, her classes, her homework, what they were studying, and whether it was easy or hard.
“Did you take any of your drawings to show their art teacher?” Mrs. Sullivan asked.
“No, ma’am. Didn’t think to do it,” Ivy June replied, glad she had not.
But in music, she sang the Annie song for the class and wrote the words on the board. After rehearsing it a bit, the students divided into two groups and attempted to sing it. With hesitant male voices coming in too loud or too low, it didn’t sound as good as it had in
Lexington, but it was something Ivy June had brought back, as an ambassador should.
At Mammaw’s later, Ivy June worked to make the house more presentable for Catherine. Papaw had put up the old army cot in the small room that served as Ivy June’s bedroom, the room the girls would share. Of course Catherine would get the bed. But Ivy June began to worry how Catherine would feel about washing up at the kitchen sink in the mornings, or taking a bath in the tin washtub out on the back porch. How she might feel about tramping across wet grass mornings and evenings to use the outhouse or—worse yet—pulling the chamber pot (the slop jar, Mammaw called it) out from under the bed in the middle of the night, removing its white enameled lid, and squatting down over the pot to save a walk to the outhouse in the dark. Perhaps Ivy June should have warned her.
Strange, she thought, how you can be so used to something you just accept it. Used to washing up under your arms and around your neck while a teakettle whistled on the big iron stove to one side and the aromas of soap and oatmeal and flapjacks filled the room.
She wondered how Catherine would feel about the worn, food-stained pot holders Mammaw hung on one side of the stove. The coal-darkened fingernails of Papaw, his missing tooth, the sounds of his scrubbing or belching or sometimes cussing about something out on the back porch. In Lexington everything seemed so tidy, so formal, so clean, so perfect…. Then she remembered Peter’s antics and Claire’s curiosity and Rosemary’s biting comments and knew that it wasn’t—that families were imperfect in different ways.
“Missed you, granddaughter,” Papaw said one evening when Ivy June was singing as she washed the stew pan. “That Lexington girl—she sing like you?”
“She sings at school. I didn’t hear her much around the house,” said Ivy June.
“You get a taste of life you can’t forget?” her grandfather asked, giving her a sideways glance.
“You don’t have to work at forgetting something if you don’t want it in the first place,” she answered, and that seemed to make him happy.
But there were things she did want, Ivy June discovered as she lay in bed listening to the distant sound of the creek. She sure wouldn’t fight an indoor bathroom, for one. A pretty pair of shoes to wear with a dress. She’d like to have a class with as many computers as they had at Buckner, and she would love a ride to school in a car each morning instead of walking a mile or so to a bus stop, then waiting fifteen or twenty minutes for the bus to get there.