Whistling Past the Graveyard Read online

  Eula walked back toward the woods, but stopped as soon as she was standing in the shade. Her eyes stayed on me like a momma hen’s.

  “We thank you kindly for your help,” I said to the man as he pulled a chain from his truck bed.

  He just stood there staring at me for a spell. “How’d you get those marks on your throat?”

  Uh-oh. I hadn’t thought about Wallace leaving marks along with the soreness. “A bear,” I said quickly. “I was runnin’ from a bear. Got hit in the neck with a limb.”

  “A bear?”

  Dumb! Dumb! I shoulda waited till I thought of something better. Course the man didn’t look like he believed me. Who would believe a little girl could outrun a bear?

  I laughed a little and put my hand over the marks so he couldn’t study them too close. “Well, we was playin’ bear. My friend was the bear.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  I held my breath for a minute. Then he knelt down behind Eula’s truck and I was pretty sure he was done asking about my neck.

  “This your momma’s truck?”

  My heart jumped. Why couldn’t he just pull us out without all the questions? After a second, I decided there was no law against a colored owning a truck. “No, sir. Belongs to our maid. She been with us my whole life. Momma don’t . . .” I looked down at my feet like I was trying not to cry. “I mean, Momma didn’t drive.” A good lie needs particulars.

  The man sent a look over at Eula. I was afraid she’d do something to ruin my story, so I started making crying sounds and snifflin’ real hard. For a second, the man looked like he didn’t know what to do. Then he patted me on the shoulder (I could tell he wasn’t used to kids ’cause he did it like he was slappin’ a watermelon) and then crawled under the back bumper with the chain. When he come back out, it had been hooked on something under there.

  Two minutes later, Eula’s truck was back on the road and pointed toward Nashville.

  “Tell your colored woman it doesn’t look like any real damage,” he said. “But I’d have it checked at a garage first chance you get, just to be sure.”

  “Yes, sir. We will.”

  He looked toward Eula again. “Y’all be careful.” He looked down at me, right deep into my eyes. “Things are mighty touchy right now. Mind that you don’t go lookin’ for trouble by takin’ your maid where she’s got no business bein’, you understand?”

  Trouble seemed to find me well enough on its own, but I just nodded.

  “And get to your aunt as quick as you can.”

  That one gave me goose bumps. I stood up taller. “Thank you, sir.”

  I watched him drive away, his words shootin’ around in my head.

  I remembered the news stories on the TV. Somewhere in Alabama a colored crowd had been blasted with a fire hose by the police because they wouldn’t leave the streets. President Kennedy sent soldiers with guns to Ole Miss last fall when a Negro was trying to go to school there.There’d been lots of talk and whisperin’ by the grown-ups beforehand. Then riots started and some people got killed. Grown-ups wasn’t whisperin’ anymore after that. They was yellin’.

  Mamie had explained that some coloreds were stepping out of their place, stirrin’ up trouble; that everybody—colored and white—was happy with keeping things separate, and it wasn’t the president’s business to tell Mississippi what to do. It had all made sense then. But after hearin’ about Shorty and that man puttin’ us in the ditch, I wondered. Eula hadn’t been doing anything but driving down the road.

  “Things are mighty touchy right now.”

  Once the man who helped us was gone, I waved Eula back toward the road. I decided not to tell her what he had said. His warning was for me. It was my job to keep Eula safe.

  12

  e

  ula kept letting the truck drift from one side of the road and to the other, like someone who didn’t know how to drive. The further we went, the worse she got. Tick, tock, right, left. We was like the tail on the cat clock in the Sunday-school room.

  She gripped the steering wheel so hard her skinny arms shook. “There’s no cars. You don’t need to be so scared,” I finally said. I was getting tired of rocking like a boat. Baby James seemed to like it though ’cause he was sleepin’ like a log. “Maybe I should drive.” I never had, but I couldn’t be worse than Eula.

  She shot me a look. “Now that just what we need, gettin’ stopped by the sheriff ’cause you behind the wheel. Travelin’ invisible, remember? And I ain’t scared. Somethin’ wrong with the steering.”

  We went on like that for a while; swing and rock, tick and tock, Eula driving slower and slower. She even stopped dead when a car passed us going the other way—which was probably good ’cause it kept us from ticktocking smack-dab into its side.

  “Keep your eyes peeled for a service g’rage,” she said.

  “Ain’t been nothin’ but trees since we got out of the ditch. I think I’ll see a g’rage easy enough.”

  She looked over at me and laughed. The minute she did, the truck headed toward the ditch. “Whoa!” She jerked her arms and snapped her eyes back on the road.

  Finally I saw something other than trees. A marker for Copiah County. Right after that there was a sign with a cartoon man wearing a string tie

  and a white hat: COL. CLEAN SAYS—KEEP MISSISSIPPI BEAUTIFUL. It was

  getting to be against the law to be a litterbug—which was a person who throws trash and whatnot out their car windows.

  And right after Col. Clean was a rusted metal sign with letters so far gone I couldn’t read but a shadow of the biggest, Quigley’s. I pointed. “There’s a g’rage!”

  Eula huffed. “I see it.”

  “Well, you told me to watch!”

  “Reckon I did.” Eula slowed down—which I woulda thought was

  impossible and still be moving—and pulled into the dirt lot. Even though we rolled in real slow, a cloud of dust popped up behind us.

  Quigley’s wasn’t like the service stations in Cayuga Springs, with their shiny buildings, bright red Coca-Cola machines, and big, round lights with green dinosaurs or blue-and-white PURE on top of pumps. This one was bare wood gone silver. Just one rusty gas pump sat in front, and it didn’t look like it would spit out a drop of gas. It was the really old kind that you had to hand-pump the gas into a big jar at the top before you filled your car. There used to be one like it at the closed-up filling station out on the edge of town, near the haunted house. Last year some kids broke the glass jar and beat dents into the metal. I think it was Patti Lynn’s brothers.They used that filling station as a clubhouse where they smoked cigarettes and looked at magazines. Patti Lynn and I knew about it because one day we followed them like Nancy Drew. It was one of our favorite things to do.

  Eula shut off the truck and waited.

  The place looked empty, but the front door was open, so I guessed someone must be here. On one side of the building was a big pile of old tires; on the other there was a bunch of wrecked cars with missing parts and broken glass. Both sides had tall weeds that had caught every scrap of trash dropped by a litterbug and brought by the wind. I wondered what Col. Clean would say about his sign being right in front of this place.

  A droopy, brown hound dog came from behind the building and stared at us. His face was gray and he looked like he had the mange.

  “I don’t think anybody’s here,” I said, hearing nothing but the dog panting and bugs buzzing.

  Just then, somebody came out of the door. I expected a man just as old and run-down as this place and the dog. But a tall, skinny teenager with a giant Adam’s apple and a good crop of pimples come out. He walked past the dog that had flopped down right there in the sun like he couldn’t go another step.

  He walked up to my window, not Eula’s. He peered past me with squinty, soot-colored eyes, then looked back at me. “We don’t sell gas no more.”

  Eula just kept looking out the windshield, so I spoke up. “You fix trucks?”

  “Some.”


  “Can you fix this one?”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Well, that’s what we need you to tell us.”This boy was dumber than a stump.

  “I mean,” he said, real snotty, “what’s it doin’?”

  “Actin’ broke.”

  He rolled his eyes like I was the dumb one. “Makin’ noise? Fartin’ smoke? Chuggin’?”

  “Eula says it’s the steering. Goes this way and that.” I fished my hand back and forth in front of me.

  He didn’t say anything else, just dropped down on the ground. I leaned out my window and watched him use his heels to scoot under the truck. He didn’t even have any tools with him.

  Wasn’t half a second later he scooted back out and stood up. He knocked the dust off his backside with one hand. “Nope. Can’t fix it.”

  “You didn’t even try!”

  “Got a bent tie rod. Need a new one. I don’t got one.”

  “You ain’t bein’ very helpful,” I said, working to keep polite. Mamie always said you get more flies with honey than vinegar—which meant be nice and folks will be nice back.

  He shrugged. “Don’t got the part.”

  “Can you get one?”

  “Maybe I could.” He looked at Eula again. “Cash money only.”

  Eula finally spoke up, but she kept her eyes faced forward. “How much?”

  He scratched his head and I expected cooties to fly out. “Prob’ly round ten dollars—plus puttin’ it in.”

  Ten dollars! I sucked in a breath and looked to Eula.

  “We just keep drivin’ on this one,” she said as she started the truck again. “Thank you, sir.”

  I wondered how she could carry on a conversation and never once look at the person she was talking to. Mamie always told me that was rude.

  “Suit yo’se’f.” He looked at me with his sooty eyes; truth be told, he looked kinda sooty all over. “It’s gonna break though.”

  “How long we got?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  Eula ground the truck into gear and nodded at the boy, then pulled away.

  “Wait,” I said, but Eula kept going.

  The boy shouted after us, “Sounds like you got a bad clutch, too!”

  “Mmmm-hum.” Eula’s answer wasn’t no more than a sound deep in her throat.

  “Maybe we can get him to fix it for four dollars and seventy-five cents,” I said. “We can promise to send him the rest later.”

  She was back to fighting the steering wheel. “He say, ‘Cash money.’ Won’t give credit to a colored,” she said as if it had come down off the mountain in stone.

  “But we’re gonna get stuck broke down out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  Eula dipped her chin, real determined again. “We see how far we get. The good Lord will provide.”

  I didn’t see how the good Lord, or baby Jesus, could fix a broke truck. “We won’t make it to Nashville.”

  “We will,” she said, like there wasn’t a bit of doubt.

  “Not if the truck is broke!”

  “Might as well be broke if we can’t buy gas to make it go down the road.”

  I got a little hiccup of panic. “Do we even have enough money to buy the gas to get to Nashville?”

  She looked over at me. “I get you to your momma.”

  “But—”

  “Might have to find me a little work on the way, but I get you there.”

  Eula finding work meant mixing in with people—not being invisible. I thought about all the sheriffs and police in every town between here and Nashville. There had to be hundreds.

  “Like a job?” Then the questions just kept coming and I couldn’t stop them. “How long will it take to get enough money? What will me and James do while you’re working? Where we gonna stay? What if the police are on the lookout for me? What if Shorty comes by and finds Wallace dead before we get to Nashville?”

  The second I said Wallace’s name, the stiffness and determination run out of her like water out of a knocked-over glass. Her face crumpled up and she started shaking all over. Why did I have to say it?

  By the time she pulled over on the side of the road, she was crying like a baby. She jumped out of the truck and ran a ways before her legs looked to give out and she sat right down in the weeds.

  I got out of the truck and ran after her. I went to my knees and put my arms around her. “It’s gonna be okay. Please don’t cry.”

  But she did. For a long while her shoulders shook in my arms. I wished I could take his name back, let Eula go back to the place inside her head that made it so she didn’t have to think about her killin’ him.

  “You only did it to save me,” I said real soft as I rubbed her back. “I was gonna be dead.”

  A sob come from somewhere down around her toes. She fell to the side, sinking out of my arms, covering her face with her hands and making the most pitiful sound I’d ever heard.

  I leaned my face close to hers, even though she couldn’t see me with her hands in the way. “Please, Eula. Please. Stop crying. We’re gonna be okay. We’ll get enough money. We’ll get to Momma and she’ll fix everything.”

  Eula curled into a tighter ball and didn’t even seem to notice I was there anymore. She was broke again and I wasn’t sure I could get her back. And even if she did come back, she was so mad at me for making her have to kill Wallace that I bet she’d never ever talk to me again.

  I sat down, looked down the empty road, and wondered if this was the end of Eula and me and getting to Nashville.

  13

  w

  e sat there a long time. Eula stopped crying after a while, but then just laid there staring at the sky like a dead person. Nothing I did made her look at me—not talking or touching or jumpin’ up and down or hollerin’ that my hair was on fire. First I thought it was just ’cause she was so mad at me. But then not even baby James’s crying got inside her head. I had to change his diaper myself and couldn’t figure out how to fold it right, so it ended up kinda wadded up between his legs.Then I fed him another bottle. We only had four left, so I knew some of our four dollars and seventy-five cents was gonna have to go to buy milk for him.That was if we ever got to a place that sold milk. Eula had picked her road for travelin’ invisible real good. There hadn’t been one car go past since we left the garage.

  I’d eaten some of our food and tried to feed some to Eula, but she’d kept her dead-person eyes, even when I held a bit of corn bread right to her lips. Baby James was sleeping again under the trees ’cause it was too hot in the truck. I’d taken Eula’s suitcase and emptied it so he could have kind of a bed that would keep the ants and whatnot off him.

  Finally, the sun went below the trees, but I knew there was still a lot of light left in the day (thank you, baby Jesus). It was less hot, but the air started to fill up with buzzin’ skeeters. I went back to the truck and got Eula’s spare slip and put it over the suitcase to keep them from bitin’ on James. I was careful to make sure it stayed up off his face so it didn’t smother him. Then I was left to smackin’ and swattin’. I didn’t know there was this many mosquitoes in the whole of Mississippi. I wondered if the skeeters eating Eula up would wake her. I decided not to cover her up so they could find her faster.

  All of the sudden Eula sat up and blinked, kinda surprised, like she was just now seeing she was still in the world. I don’t know if a skeeter was what done it, but I was real glad for whatever made it happen. I held still and waited, not wanting to scare her back inside herself.

  She sucked in a big breath, then blew it out. After that she looked up at the sky and frowned.

  I kept holding still.

  She sat there for a long bit. Finally, I walked over to her, real slow and easy. Then I said real soft, “Eula?”

  She looked at me and I could tell she was back to being herself.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I reckon we’d best be goin’.” She said it like she’d only been sitting there for a
minute and not disappeared into herself for half a day, not giving two shakes about what happened to me and James. I know I shouldn’t have said Wallace’s name, but we coulda got ate by a bear while we was sitting out here and she was . . . gone.

  She stood up and brushed the grass off her dress.

  I was half-mad. The other half of me was just happy she wasn’t acting dead anymore. I didn’t know which one would come out if I opened my mouth. So I didn’t.

  She looked at me, then her eyes went to the truck, where the door was hanging open and baby James wasn’t inside.

  “Where the baby?” Her eyes showed so much white I thought they was gonna pop out of her head.

  I pointed over to the suitcase.

  She hurried right over there like she was saving him from a fire and snatched the slip off. She let out something between a hiccup and a laugh. Then she looked back at me. “He good.”

  That’s when I realized that she’d been thinking he was covered ’cause he was dead or something.

  I was just starting to tell her that it was no thanks to her that he was okay, but before I got out the first word, she asked, “You cover him up like that?”

  I nodded.

  She came at me, real purposeful. She was already mad at me about Wallace. Maybe now she was madder thinking I coulda smothered baby James.

  She grabbed my head between her hands before I could duck away. Then she pulled my face close to hers, like Mamie does when she’s real worked up scolding me.

  My heart got faster. “I was careful about—”

  Her grip tightened. She put a big kiss right in the middle of my forehead, then kept my face between her hands and smiled at me. “You are a gif ’from God, child. A true gif ’from God.”She glanced back over at the baby. “You done real good takin’ care of him, Starla. Real good.”

  I was so surprised that I almost asked if she’d got over being mad at me for making her kill Wallace, too, before I remembered I’d made up my mind not to say his name again until after we got to Nashville.

  Instead, I said, “I fed him, too. He burped real nice.”