The Wonder of Charlie Anne Read online

  For my children—

  Daniel, Matthew, Kate and Laura

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  CHAPTER

  1

  Go do this, the new mama tells me, and I do it, just because.

  Look in that cupboard because maybe there’s something in there, maybe a mouse. Or maybe not, maybe it’s just a shadow from that old pee pot in there, the new mama isn’t sure. But I better do it, just because.

  I know just because. Just because means I am a girl, and a girl needs to know about things, like keeping whites from colors in the washbucket and why you sweep before you mop, and about keeping your legs crossed all the time and how to rub a skinny little chest with Vicks while you’re wiping a nose. Two things at once, that’s what you do. Keep your cow from running in the road at the same time you’re trying to get all these peas shelled for supper. And do be quiet while the new mama talks, on and on.

  “You better listen when I’m talking because I’m not going to say it twice, Charlie Anne. Put on some beans, and why don’t you mix up some biscuits, nice and high like your papa likes them, and how come these underpants aren’t ironed right? They’re rough as shingles. Don’t you listen to a thing I say?”

  I turn and look as far as I can see. No, ma’am. The new buttercups bloomed this morning. Can’t you hear them? They are singing, and I can hear their tiny voices calling out to me, and the bees are buzzing inside that apple tree so loud I can hardly think about the laundry that still needs hanging.

  But the loudest voice is the river that races right across our fields. It says, Hurry, Charlie Anne, hurry. It says it all the time.

  This is how we got so many babies around here.

  One morning when I am small I walk out to check on our cow, Anna May, and nestled up against her is a new little calf with eyes as dark as a full jar of molasses. I pull my milk stool over and sit and watch Anna May and how happy she is nuzzling her first baby calf and I get to thinking about how I would like to have little babies in the house for me to play with so I will have more than just Thomas, who is too old, and Ivy, who tells on me all the time. So I pray to the angels that they will bring my mama a baby. I pray awfully hard because Anna May’s calf is so gosh darn cute and he just about splits my heart like an old melon and before I know it we have two babies in our house, split, splat. First Peter and then before I know it another baby, Birdie, who will not eat anything but biscuits, blackberry jam and lemon drops. Mama gets all tired and worn out from her new babies and she gets a cross look when I ask if she wants to go to our favorite spot by the river.

  My prayers keep on strong as rock because, before I know it, there’s another baby, the one who takes Mama straight to heaven as soon as she is born. I stop praying to the angels after that. Prayers are powerful things.

  After lunch I stomp outside because the new mama says I have to go get all the laundry I just hung up. It is going to rain and I have to take it all down and hang it in the barn. I don’t want to take down everything I already hung up. The sun will dry it all over again tomorrow, and besides, I want to go to the river, I tell her. I have already been doing chores since I woke up. The new mama tells me to get the laundry, or else.

  The new mama is the cousin Mirabel from two towns over. Papa did not ask her, she just showed up one day after the funeral with her suitcases, all strapped up tight, and her shoes that snap when she walks. After Mama left us, Papa walked around like a horse kicked him in the belly, so he did not say much when Mirabel told Peter and Birdie to move up to the attic with Ivy and me. Since Thomas was already fifteen, he could sleep in the barn. I asked why couldn’t I do that. Why couldn’t I sleep with Anna May and our chickens, Minnie and Olympia and Bea, instead of Peter, who still wets the bed. Mirabel told me right then and there that I was going to learn some manners, or else. None of us like Mirabel, me especially. I think she has her eyes on Papa in a bad way.

  I stomp outside.

  Actually, I am afraid of me dying from all my chores. I reach up and check my heart. It is all skittering and I sit down on the clothes basket and let it rest. Mirabel tells me not to worry, I am strong as an ox. I hear the screen door bang, and before I know it, she is out on the porch with her hands on her hips yelling for me to help her with the lunch. I jump up and start pulling down all the laundry I already hung up, and when I do, I hear the river calling me again: Hurry, Charlie Anne, hurry.

  I believe it wants to be listened to.

  For a long time, I think it is the “Charlie Anne River.” My mama told me it was true, it was the Charlie Anne River even if no one else knew that.

  Everything has a song, a kindness, if you just take the time to listen, she told me one night when she was pushing me on my swing in the old elm tree by the barn. We were listening to the owls and the peepers and watching the bats flit across the sky right in front of us. That was back when she used to call me her singing butterfly. “Lots of people don’t know how to listen, Charlie Anne. But when you do, you know things that other people don’t.” After that I started putting my ear to the turnips growing in the garden, to the barn door, even to Anna May, and listening for their songs.

  That is how I know the river likes my name very much. I hear it singing Charlie Anne, Charlie Anne when I am sitting high on the ridge, watching it rush over the rocks and out of my sight. It is a name the wind likes, too. I hear it singing my name in the afternoon when it is sending a quiet little breeze big enough to cool me down after I have been carrying wood for our wood box all morning. There is a kindness to the river and the wind and to lots of other things, if you only take the time to listen, I tell Mirabel. She gets that cross look on her face when I say that, that the trees are singing and the clothesline is tired from its clothes from yesterday and it doesn’t want me to hang up that old rug.

  Back before Peter and Birdie came along, back before the last baby, who took Mama away forever, I used to pretend that I was the river. Sometimes I was the summer river, moving all slow and lazy, and singing to the blueberries that stretched almost halfway to the other side, and offering up drinks to the little fawns that still had spots on them. Now when Mirabel yells what is taking so long with the laundry, I am the spring river, b
ig and fast and in an awful hurry to get away from here.

  Wait, I tell the river. Wait for me. But it doesn’t wait. It rushes faster, off to someplace else, and I watch it go.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Papa wakes me early. He wants to walk down by the river because he has some things he wants to tell me. He is whispering. I feel my stomach start balling up. The last time Papa said he wanted to talk with me, the news was about Mama and it was very bad.

  I pull Peter’s skinny little wrist off my arm. It’s like sleeping with a rolling pin. He’s always turning over and turning around, and besides that, I never have any covers, and I always have to check and see if he wet the bed. I roll away from him and up against Birdie. She opens her eyes and lets out a holler, the way she always does when she wakes up fast, as if the wake-up world is too hard to be in. I tell her, “Shush, Birdie. It’s okay,” even though I know it’s not, because why else would Papa want to walk down by the river? Then Birdie falls back asleep, and I am the only one awake. Even our cat, Big Pumpkin Face, is sleeping, all curled up by my shoulder. I pretend I am asleep. I think about what my papa wants to tell me. My belly is a hard tight spring. Then Papa comes back and asks what I’m still in bed for.

  I believe my bed wants me to stay. I listen to it, and it tells me it does like my company very much. It starts humming that happy tune that makes me start to feel better about things. Then Papa is back and this time he says, “Charlie Anne,” and it is not soft, it is mad with a lot of hurry around the edges. I get up and tell him I can’t get dressed with him watching over me.

  “I’ll fire up the cookstove,” he says, and he is gone, shutting the door so quiet you can hardly tell it was ever open at all.

  I climb out of bed. I pull my nightgown off and take the dress I wear for chores off the hook. It is Ivy’s old dress, and there are new rips from when Birdie and I went out to check on the blackberries. Mirabel wants me to get another year out of it, so she cut off the sleeves and made it over so it would tie up on my shoulders, but now it hangs funny and looks like what it used to be: a feed sack for chickens.

  That’s when Mirabel talked the first time to Papa about Eleanor, my aunt from Boston, and how she and Uncle Will still had some money—even though most everyone else around here has lost all of theirs. Maybe they could give us some, she said. But that made my papa so mad he kicked the compost bucket off our porch, and Mirabel got that big frown on her face and told me I had to clean it all up, the beet tops and the old oatmeal and the carrot peels, plus I had to mop the whole porch and the stairs, just because.

  I have one other dress. It is the one I wore to my mama’s funeral at the little church over the hill last year. Now it is all balled up and hidden way at the bottom of the chest at the foot of our bed, underneath all the books Mama told me I would read someday.

  My boots are on the porch, where Mirabel makes me leave them. No dirt in this house. Not anymore. The door to the barn is open a little, so I know Thomas has already milked Anna May and let her outside. He gets boy chores. He plows and plants and mucks out the barn and fixes the fences and pounds nails that need nailing everywhere. The only outside jobs Mirabel gives me are hanging up the laundry and beating the rugs and looking for eggs.

  “I would be doing your mother a disservice if I didn’t help you become a young lady,” she tells me.

  Mirabel wants to know why I don’t know how to do more things. Like how come I don’t know the fork goes on the left? How come I don’t know about good manners and how girls are supposed to be quiet and generous and not boastful at all? I don’t tell her Mama never told me about those things. She told me to practice my reading, because one day all the jumbled words would sort themselves out and I would be the best reader she knew. “Don’t worry,” she told me, tucking an armful of someday books into the chest. “Everything takes time, Charlie Anne.”

  Mirabel teaches me different things. She brought a little book with her, The Charm of Fine Manners, and she keeps it in the pocket of her apron and she pulls it out at night after the supper dishes are done. “It is impossible for the selfish or ill-tempered girl to win love and friends,” she reads. A moth thrashes against the inside of our screen door, and I get up to let it out.

  Then Mirabel shows me how to make a vinegar pie that tastes almost like lemon pie because you need to know how to make things better when the hard times come, and Lord knows, they come. They come for everyone. That’s what she tells me. I want her to stop talking about bad things.

  “Are you listening?” Mirabel asks when she finds me on the porch, putting my boots on so I can go with Papa. “I want you to make one of those vinegar pies, the one your papa likes so much.”

  I am looking out at the river. It is all angry this morning. It is crashing over the big boulders. I wonder if it knows what my papa is going to tell me.

  The grass is wet from the rain last night. I am walking behind Papa. His footsteps are very big. I can fit two of my steps in one of his.

  For once, I don’t want to go to the river. My papa says the river is a good place to talk about bad things. The river pulls all the bad words into the deep part and lets them sink to the bottom and then it carries them away. For this reason, I want to go back to bed. I do not want to hear any more bad things.

  The river was Mama’s favorite place. That is why her grave is on the hill, under her favorite oak tree. You can see way down the river and the tree keeps you all shaded and sometimes an acorn falls on your head. Those are lucky days, the acorn-falling-on-your-head days. They make you wise, Mama told me once.

  Now I come here when Mama calls me. I tell her all about Mirabel and about how Ivy isn’t turning out so well, now that she is a teenager. Mama tells me to try and put up with Mirabel so things go better for me. She tells me to let Ivy look at her Movie Mirror magazine if it makes her happy. She tells me Ivy is very lonely. I tell her it is no wonder, since no one wants to be with her.

  A tiny grave stands beside us, for the baby who took Mama away. I try not to look at it much, seeing how that baby took Mama straight to heaven without time for any goodbyes at all.

  Papa picks some daisies on the way. I know what he is doing. Whatever he is going to tell me, he is going to tell Mama, too.

  CHAPTER

  3

  We stop in front of Mama. I ask her what Papa is going to tell me. She does not answer me. I think she is wondering, too.

  My legs are feeling like they are going to buckle right out from under me. I reach for Mama.

  Papa sits down beside Mama. “Have a seat, Charlie Anne.” He pats the ground next to Mama. I sit down. I know she is holding my hand, but I wish I could feel it better.

  “I want you to keep an eye on those chickens, make sure they get enough corn so they keep laying eggs, Charlie Anne.”

  I wonder what he is getting at. I look out at the river. It is racing and flying over the boulders, knocking them so hard they move, and when they do, they are thunder booming. The river is very angry this morning.

  “I noticed Bea was trying to hide her eggs under the blackberries.”

  He watches the river, but I am wondering why he is talking about chickens.

  I look at Mama’s grave, at the daisies, and then I notice Papa has put some daisies on Baby’s grave. I reach over and push them back to Mama. I think about how maybe they should not have put Baby’s grave so close.

  “And make sure the coop is locked at night. You don’t want that fox getting in there again. And keep Big Pumpkin Face away.”

  I sit back on my heels. I listen to the river pound. I hear my heart pound. I take a deep breath. Very slowly I ask, “Where are you going?”

  “Well, that’s the thing I am trying to get to, Charlie Anne. It will only be for a little while. I know you’ll be fine.” He doesn’t say anything else, and we both watch the river thunder past.

  “Where are you going?” I say again.

  “I took a job building roads up north, Charlie Anne.
There’s work up there, now that President Roosevelt is doing something. I’m taking Thomas with me. It won’t be for long.”

  The river crashes. My thoughts are all mixed up. I feel my heart get all worried and then mad and then start crashing inside of me like the river.

  “You can’t do that. You can’t leave. Mama won’t like that. She won’t like that at all.”

  “Charlie Anne,” says Papa. He rubs his hand through his hair the way he does when he does not know what to say next. Then he reaches up for me.

  I pull away, and turn so he cannot see the tears that are hurrying down my face. I wipe them away with the back of my arm.

  He watches the river. It is crashing and roaring and furious. He keeps running his hand through his hair.

  “Mama will be really mad. She told us our family was more important than anything, remember?”

  The tears are falling down my face so fast I can’t see anything. The boulders are thundering.

  Papa is watching the river, too. Then he shakes his head. “I am keeping this family together, Charlie Anne. Try and understand. We’re going to lose the farm if I don’t do something. There are whole families sleeping under bridges in the city, that’s how bad things are.”

  I can hardly believe it. I look at Mama’s stone, at the name Sylvie. “Mama will be mad. Mama would want us to stay together, through thick and thin. Remember how she used to say blood is thicker than anything and you don’t run out on one another?”

  Papa makes that thin line with his lips. He started doing it after the funeral. “There are all different ways of keeping a family together, Charlie Anne.”

  I jump up and face him. “THROUGH IT ALL, A FAMILY STICKS TOGETHER!” I am roaring. I can’t hear the river anymore.

  “I know it, Charlie Anne.”

  Papa is still sitting, and he looks out at the river, and I think he has run out of things to say. Bluebirds fly over our heads. The color of their wings is so blue it can make you stop breathing. They were Mama’s favorite birds.