Whistling Past the Graveyard Read online

  When I’d asked Eula if our four dollars and seventy-five cents would be enough to get us there, she’d just looked real determined and said we’d make do. Which sounded like we was gonna come up short. I wish we’d found the rest of her and Wallace’s money. But Wallace kept it hid away and we couldn’t find it anywhere. I think maybe he’d been lyin’ to her about having it at all ’cause we even looked in the woodbox and the attic.

  As we traveled old, worn-out roads with no traffic, Eula spent as much time looking in the rearview mirror as at the road ahead. Her body was so tensed up she looked like a spring wound a turn or two too tight.

  “We ain’t seen but one car since we left,” I said. “You can pro’bly relax some.”

  Her eyes jerked to the rearview again. She sucked in a breath.

  I spun around and looked out the cracked back window. “It’s only a man in a car, not the sheriff.” The car was coming up fast—well, fast compared to how Eula was driving, so he was likely going regular speed. It didn’t slow up at all until it was almost on our back bumper. The road was narrow, but if Eula got as far to the side as she could, it could pass. “Wave him round,” I said.

  Eula shot a look at me like I’d asked her to give him the finger. “He white.” Her hands tightened on the steering wheel and she sunk down into her shoulders like a turtle. She ran a nervous tongue around her lips and fixed her eyes straight ahead.

  “He just wants to go faster,” I said, looking over my shoulder. “Pull close to the side.”

  Eula slowed down more and edged closer to the ditch.

  The car behind us got even closer. We were driving into the sun so I could see the man behind the wheel real clear. He had slicked-back hair and a hateful frown on his face. He leaned his head out the window and shouted, “You and your pickaninny get off the damn road!”

  Eula hunched deeper into herself.

  My red rage snapped on. I shot up out of my seat and perched myself in the open window, hangin’ on to the wing vent to keep steady. I raised a fist and shook it at the man. “We got as much right to this road as you!” I pointed in front of us. “Go on round!”

  “Starla!” Eula hissed. “Get yo’self back in here!”

  “No!” I waved the man around again. “He’s got plenty of room to go round.” Just then there was a thud and we jerked forward. I almost fell out of the truck completely. Before I could get myself slid back in, it happened again. That man was running right into us!

  Eula grabbed the hem of my shorts and I was planted back in my seat. “Stop provokin’ him.”

  “He’s the one provokin’!” I started up again but Eula grabbed my shirt. I swatted at her. “He can go round.”

  “You get us killed,” Eula said, soundin’ so desperate that I stopped trying to get away. “We gotta be careful if I gonna get you to your momma.”

  I felt a little bad, letting my red rage get going and forgetting about how Eula had said we were supposed to travel like we was invisible.

  The car rammed us again, just enough to jerk my neck. “Why won’t he just go round?”

  “Let’s hope he do.” Eula’s eyes kept shifting to the mirror. “Let’s hope he do,” she repeated in a breathy voice that warned me things could get a whole lot worse.

  I felt a little nudge as the man’s bumper touched ours.

  Then we started to go faster.

  Everything swirled up after that. Eula crying. Me hollerin’. The truck’s nose tilting into the ditch. The sight of the man’s laughing face. His shout of “Little nigger lover” as he passed.

  Even before I could yell back at that man, we thudded to a stop. I hit the dash. Muddy water splashed the windshield.

  Thank goodness I had my feet braced on the floor and didn’t land on baby James, who was full awake and screaming.

  I looked down. He was flipped over onto his belly. I didn’t want to turn him over. What if he was hurt?

  Eula squeaked, “The baby! Get the baby!”

  I looked over at her. Blood was running from a gash over her eye.

  “Baby!” She sounded so sharp I reached down and grabbed him up. I wasn’t careful like I should have been and his head flopped some, but he looked okay to me.

  Eula reached over and took him from me. After she looked him over, she asked me, “You okay?”

  I nodded. “But you’re bleedin’.” I pointed to her forehead.

  “No matter. Long as you and James all right.” She ran her hands over his arms and legs again like she was making double sure.

  “What was wrong with that man?”I asked.“Why’d he do this to us? We weren’t hurtin’ him.”

  Eula just lifted a shoulder and wiped the blood off her eyebrow with the back of a wrist. “Don’t need no reason.” She sounded more sad than angry.

  I sat there for a minute, gatherin’ up my thoughts and discovering I’d bit my tongue when we crashed. Jimmy Sellers didn’t seem to have any reason for his meanness either. But Jimmy was a kid.

  “Why ain’t you mad?” I asked.

  “Might as well get mad at the wind for blowin’. Some things just be what they be.”

  I crossed my arms and felt the hot pricks flair up again. “Well, I’m mad as a hornet. And I think you should be, too.”

  Eula just shrugged and fixed on soothin’ baby James. Once he settled a bit, she held him in the crook of her arm and pushed the driver’s door open. It was hard to do ’cause it was uphill now. It clunked into place and she shoved herself and baby James out. When I opened my door, it only went about eight inches before the bottom corner dug into the ground. It was enough for me to squeeze out though. I was up to my ankles in muddy water before I realized it. When I lifted my foot, it sucked my sneaker right off.

  I fished around and found my shoe and was more careful when I lifted my other foot. Muddy shoe in one hand, I climbed out of the ditch and onto the road next to Eula. Too late I remembered it was bad luck to walk around with one shoe on and one shoe off. Not that I really thought my luck could get much worse.

  We stood there looking at the truck for a long minute with the sun beatin’ down on us and the sound of the cicadas whirring in the air.

  “Think you can back it out?” I finally asked, not taking my eye off the rear tire that looked to be at least two inches off the ground.

  Eula said, “Don’t look like it.”

  I looked up at her. “Maybe if I push?”

  Her eyes turned to me and she busted out laughing like I’d told the best joke ever.

  “I’m strong!” I crossed my arms and frowned at her.

  She kept right on laughing. “Oh, I know. Must come from that red hair.”

  Now I was even madder. “How can you just stand there laughin’ when that man did this to us and we’re stuck?”

  “Sometimes laughin’ is all a body can do, child. It’s laugh or lose your mind.”

  I narrowed my eyes. She had lost her mind once already since I met her. Considering the choice, maybe I shouldn’t be so mad about her having a laugh.

  I sat down on the road and put my muddy shoe back on.

  11

  w

  e’ll just wait a spell,” Eula said. I held baby James while she climbed up into the back of the truck and got the brown grocery bag holding our food. We hadn’t had breakfast. But with Wallace’s bashed-in head still in my mind and us just being run off the road, I wasn’t hungry. She stepped off the back bumper. “Someone’ll be along.” I looked down the long stretch of empty road and doubted it. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure I wanted anyone to come along after what that man did to us.

  “Too bad we’re hidin’ from the law or we could get that man into some trouble for what he did.”

  Eula made a sound like she was choking.“Oh,child,the law wouldn’t do nothin’. A white man can do pretty much whatever he wants to a colored woman and a little girl—even if the little girl is white. It the way things are round here.”

  “He wrecked us! That’s gotta be against
the law. It don’t matter if you’re colored and I’m a kid.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “You think what you want. We can’t go to the law anyway, so no sense in gettin’ all worked up over it.”

  I was so wound up I wanted to break something . . . like that man’s nose. I gritted my teeth and felt like I was gonna come out of my skin. “Maybe we should just walk.”

  Her head snapped up and she looked like she was disappointed in me. I was used to that look, but for some reason it felt particular bad coming from Eula. “Child, I done told you it’s two days’ drive to Nashville,” she said, not sounding prickly like I thought she might. “Walkin’ won’t get us there. We wait.”

  Baby James started to fuss for his bottle, so I gave him a little jiggle until Eula had it ready. I think he liked me ’cause he sounded like he was trying not to cry.

  “What if—?” I cut myself off and fixed my eyes on the road. “What?”

  I was all shook up inside. And even though I still wanted to scratch that man’s eyes out, there was something hopeless inside me, too. “What if the next person comes along is like that man in the car?” She stood in front of me with a frown on her face.“It ain’t right that you had to see such hatefulness. Ain’t everybody like him.”Then she set her shoulders square. “We just trust the good Lord to send someone kind and respectable our way.”

  It was plain Eula had more faith in the Lord than I did. Which was a wonder; from what I’d seen, she had plenty of reason not to. We sat down in the shade. We fed baby James one of the bottles Eula had wrapped in towels soaked in springhouse water and waited for the good Lord to do his work.

  I spent some time splitting long blades of grass plucked from the ground, my mind asking a whole string of questions that was probably best left alone. I was most curious about Eula’s change since we drove away from her house. While we’d been there, she’d been skitterjittery about killin’ Wallace. She’d never stopped talking. Once we left in the truck, she went more inside herself. Now she was acting almost normal, like Wallace was just back home and not dead. I wondered why. Did she figure out Wallace needed killin’ and wasn’t feeling so bad about it now? Was she still set on going to the law once we got to Nashville?

  I found a foxtail grass and pulled it from its skin. As I chewed on the soft, green stem, I watched Eula feed baby James. I couldn’t ask about Wallace, but I couldn’t keep all of my questions plugged inside my head any longer. “Who do you think baby James’s momma is?” Eula tilted her head to the side and looked at that baby with so much love it made my throat hurt. I wondered what it would feel like if someone looked at me like that.

  “Someone young and scared, I imagine,” she said.

  “Why scared?” It seemed to me that anybody old enough to have a baby ought to be grown-up enough to leave scaredness behind—unless they lived with a man like Wallace, that is.

  “Maybe all alone,” Eula said. “Maybe too many mouths to feed already.”

  There was a girl in my class who said she didn’t have a daddy, just a momma. I’d asked her if her daddy died, but she pinkie-swore she’d never had one, that her momma never even got married. When I’d asked Mamie about it, she’d said ladies didn’t ask those kinds of questions. She was in a mood, so I knew not to argue that I didn’t want to be a lady. Wish I had, maybe I’d know now and have one curiosity taken care of. I almost asked Eula about it now, about how a woman can have a baby and not a husband, but considering Eula done killed her own husband today, I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea.

  Then I thought on her other idea about James’s mother. The LeCounts next door had five kids. They weren’t rich like Patti Lynn’s family and they all got plenty to eat.Truth be told, their dinners always smelled a whole lot better than what Mamie cooked up.Then I thought about the Pykes; ten kids, all black haired and gray eyed. They was all skinny and pale, kinda like I imagined that ghost would have looked at the haunted house. The Pykes I knew always had snotty noses, even in the summer. Mamie said the ladies auxiliary did a lot to help out the Pykes because they was dirt-poor.

  I wondered if James could maybe be a Pyke. He was too little and wrinkly to tell if he looked like one. Then I wondered if the Pykes had throwed away other babies before him.

  Eula had told me it was better if I didn’t know where James come from, but things had changed considerable since then. I decided it was worth a try to narrow down if maybe he was a Pyke. “You find James in Cayuga Springs . . . where you was deliverin’ pies?”

  Maybe if she still didn’t want to answer about James, the pie question would get it out of her by accident. Mamie had got plenty of things out of me by asking two questions at once like that. Eula looked at me with her eyes all squinty. After I’d almost given up on an answer, she said, “I did.”

  I looked at baby James again, trying to see if his hair looked like it was gonna sprout in black like a Pyke. “But you don’t know who his momma is?”

  She shook her head. “Suppose we’ll know soon enough after we get to Nashville.” There was a little shimmy of her shoulders right then, like she’d shivered even though it was hot enough to boil a bullfrog in a pond.

  I stopped asking about James. But my mind didn’t want to stop thinking about him. It seemed impossible, someone throwin’ away a baby, no matter how dirt-poor they was. Baby James was noisy and a pain in the be-hind, but I wouldn’t just leave him on a church step and not know what was gonna happen to him or who was gonna take care of him.

  Something Eula had said come back into my head. She’d said she’d been nothin’ but a throwaway before she met Wallace. I knew she wasn’t throwed away as a baby ’cause she knew her momma and daddy. But was being a throwed-away person why she was so fixed on keeping James even after she’d seen he was white?

  “You got any brothers or sisters?” I asked.

  She gave me a look like I’d asked something I shouldn’t have. She swallowed and looked away before she turned it around on me. “Do you?”

  I shook my head. “Wish I had a brother like one of Patti Lynn’s— she’s my best friend back home. Those boys can pull a real good gag and they got some of the goriest stories. Patti Lynn thinks they’re awful, but I think they’re funny. I wouldn’t want her sister, though.” I frowned. “Even with her record collection. She thinks she’s hotsytotsy.” I made like I was patting my fancy hairdo. “Not to mention she gets hair-pullin’ mad when Patti Lynn and I snoop in her stuff. The boys don’t care.”

  Eula made a little grunt in her throat. “Sister might be better. Even a hair-pullin’ one. Not all brothers are like Patti Lynn’s.” Eula’s eyes got far away.

  “You got one? A brother?”

  Her eyes came back from whatever past they’d been busy seeing. She curled her nose and snorted. “Charles. He just like Pap. No-account. Ain’t seen him in years. Might not even be alive no more.” Something in her voice said she hoped he wasn’t.

  Right then, she stood straight up, looking down the road. “Here come!”

  I jumped up and looked. A truck was coming from the direction we’d been headed. It was lots better’n the one in the ditch; it looked to have all of its red paint and it didn’t shout out rumbles and rattles.

  Before I could stop her, Eula walked out into the bright sun that was blisterin’ the road, shading her eyes with the hand not hanging on to James. My stomach balled up tight as the truck slowed down and stopped.

  Careful.

  She stopped just like she could hear my mind, keeping the ditch between her and the truck. Her shoulders got acting all turtley again. She stood quiet and still.

  The man’s arm resting on the door was so brown I couldn’t tell right off if he was light-skinned colored or suntan-skinned white. Maybe Eula couldn’t either. When he stuck his head out the window, the shade of the straw hat hid most of his face. He was wearing overalls and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His brown chin and cheeks were covered with white stubble. Then he tipped his hat back on h
is head and showed he was white—which before this morning would have been a comfort.

  I held my breath and got my feet ready to run and help Eula if he got ornery.

  “That your truck?” he asked.

  Eula nodded real slow, keeping her eyes down.

  “Y’all okay?” he asked in a voice that didn’t sound like it yelled hateful things. “Nobody hurt?”

  She nodded again.

  Well, that wasn’t any help, her not talking like that. What was that man to think, we were okay? Or we were hurt? We didn’t need extra questions.

  I hurried out of the shade and stopped beside her. “We’re fine, sir.”

  He looked surprised to see me; right before he got all squinty, that is. “I seen you before little girl?”

  Eula got stiff beside me.

  I shook my head, real definite. “No, sir. We ain’t from around here.”

  Eula made a little sound in her throat and I bumped my shoulder into her as a warning to keep quiet. I went on, “We’re on our way to live with our aunt in Nashville.” Then I hung my head and looked real sad. “Me and James’s momma died last week.”

  That sound came from Eula again, a little louder this time, like words was about to pop from her mouth. I bumped her again.

  “Oh, a shame to hear that. My sympathy,” the man said, touching the brim of his hat. “How’d y’all end up in the ditch?”

  I didn’t need to lie about that part. “Some man run us off the road ’cause he hates coloreds.”

  The man just nodded.

  “Can you get us out?” I asked.

  “Reckon I can give it a try.”

  He moved his truck around so its back was at the edge of the road, facing the back of Eula’s truck. As he was doing this, I said real quiet to Eula, “Since you got no stomach for truth-stretchin’, you’d better go back to the trees and wait until we’re ready to go again.”

  “Can’t leave you alone with a stranger.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t ask you to go back to Cayuga Springs, just get too far away for bein’ asked questions. I’ll tell him James can’t stay in the sun. Go. ’Fore he gets out.”