Over the River Read online

  Nana stopped with a jolt, like she’d bumped into an invisible wall. Finally she said, “Baby Clark died,” and then she went on walking, leading me by the hand as if we were in a big hurry.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “That’s why he or she has been buried in the cemetery.”

  Nana shut her eyes, and I felt bad for being smart. But probably everybody knew except me.

  Sometimes I hated being wrapped up in a cotton candy cocoon, with people standing around waiting for me to turn into a beautiful butterfly like my mama.

  Chapter 2

  On the way home, Nana stared out the window, not saying a word. Aunty Rose had to crawl along in low gear because the REA machinery had cut up the road so bad.

  I’d heard Grandpa say the Rural Electrification Association board in southern Illinois had pledged to have highlines along all the roads by this time next year. I couldn’t wait. It would mean I wouldn’t have to help Nana clean the oil lamps every morning if we got the electricity that everybody was talking so big about.

  When we stopped the car under the hickory tree, Nana looked toward the machine shed, where we could hear Grandpa pinging and pounding.

  It was about time for our midday meal, so I wasn’t surprised when she said, “Help Rose start dinner.” She touched my shoulder. “I’ll be in directly”—which was Nana’s way of telling me not to tag along when she went to talk to Grandpa.

  Had she seen Grandmother Clark reading the letter to me? Had my question about the mystery baby upset her? Or was it just going to Mama’s grave and putting all those pretty flowers around it?

  In the kitchen, which always smelled of wood smoke from the cookstove, I hopped up to sit on the counter. I swung my legs like Aunty Rose had done when she was sitting on the fence by Joe.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Aunty Rose said. “Mom said for you to help.”

  “I’m practicing flirting,” I said, holding my feet out and staring at them through half closed eyes.

  Aunty Rose giggled. “You’re not doing it right. Sometime I’ll show you. But come on now. Dad’ll be wanting his dinner. You set the table while I start the potatoes.”

  She got six potatoes out of the tow sack under the washstand curtain, then dipped a pan of water from the bucket at the end of the counter.

  “I’ll set the table in a little bit. But before Nana comes back, I’ve got a question.”

  “Shoot,” she said.

  I think Aunty Rose expected my question to be about private girl stuff because her eyes widened when I asked, “Do you remember my daddy?”

  It took her a minute to get used to the question, but then she answered, “Well, of course I do.” Still holding the paring knife, she pushed away a lock of wavy hair with the back of her hand. “I was ten when…”

  She peeled a circle around the potato, and I hitched up my socks while we waited for the never spoken words your mama died to march past.

  “… so I remember your daddy pretty good.”

  She picked up the second potato. “What brings that up?” she asked.

  “Well, when we were at the cemetery, Grandmother Clark mentioned he might be getting tired of the navy.”

  “Well, that could be,” Aunty Rose responded. “Eight years is a long time.”

  I twisted around to look out the window, watching for Nana.

  “Where do you think he’d live?” I asked. “If he wasn’t in the navy.”

  Aunty Rose shrugged. “Anywhere in the whole wide world, I guess. I suppose Harold has seen a lot of it by now.”

  “Did he ever live here?” I asked.

  I thought I remembered something like that. All of us together in this house—Grandpa, Nana, Aunty Rose, Mama, and my daddy and me. But I might have dreamed it.

  “Of course,” Aunty Rose said. “Harold and your mama went through school together. His family has always lived on the old toll road.”

  Did Aunty Rose not understand my question? Or did she just not want to tell me?

  I fidgeted with the curtain tieback, keeping an eye out for Nana, who didn’t need to know how curious I was.

  “Well, did you like him?” I asked, then counted the ten robins pecking among the bean rows as if the answer didn’t matter much.

  “Well … yes. I liked him all right.” She glanced out the window too. “I liked Harold just fine.”

  “What was he like?” I said.

  “Don’t you remember anything at all?”

  “Shhh,” I warned, seeing Nana coming around the corner of the smokehouse.

  All I remembered about my daddy was how much I liked hearing him sing. But I wouldn’t have known him by sight if I’d met him on the street in front of Montgomery Ward.

  Aunty Rose started peeling the potatoes faster.

  “Hurry,” I whispered. “In five words or less. What’s he like?”

  Aunty Rose shrugged. “Nice,” she whispered. Then she added, “But different from us.”

  I slid off the counter and got four dinner plates from the sideboard and started setting them around the dining-room table.

  The screen door banged as Nana came into the kitchen.

  I gazed at my face in the smooth china before I put the last plate down at Grandpa’s place. I recognized Mama’s eyes in the reflection. Were any of my features like my daddy’s?

  When Grandpa came in, carrying a full bucket of water from the well, he was whistling. He held my hands between his over the granite washbasin, and we rolled the Lifebuoy soap over and around, tangling our fingers. The smell of tractor oil wafted off his overalls.

  Aunty Rose said I was too old to be washing up with Grandpa. But I didn’t care.

  Grandpa settled in the dining room to listen to the noonday news as Aunty Rose and I passed back and forth from the kitchen, setting things on the table. The rich, greasy peppered smell of frying potatoes filled the air.

  Grandpa stared at the curlicues in the blue wallpaper, not seeing a thing, his mind set on the announcer’s words coming out of the radio on the sideboard.

  We knew to be quiet so Grandpa could listen.

  When the war was still on, we’d all hunkered around the radio for the noonday news because that was when they said the names of any of the boys from around Huxley, Illinois, who’d been killed in action. Sometimes we’d hear the names of those who were home on leave for a few days before going back to the front. And as the war ended, we’d listened to the names of those who’d finally come home for good.

  I used to wonder a little about my daddy—wonder if I’d hear his name on the noonday news. But I never did.

  “Somebody better go down to the cellar and get a jar of lima beans,” Nana said. She was spreading leftover bacon from breakfast in a skillet to warm.

  For once, without complaining that her name wasn’t Somebody, Aunty Rose lit the oil lamp that we kept on the wood box by the cellar door.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said, knowing that Aunty Rose still got the willies going down in the cellar by herself.

  “Leave the door open behind us,” Aunty Rose said. Then she started down the steps, which were just warped planks nailed crossways. She held the lamp high, and I clutched her blouse sleeve, following close behind.

  “Don’t,” she said, shrugging my hand away. “You might make me fall.”

  We’d heard a thousand times about Nan Yarborough, who fell down the cellar steps and broke her neck.

  “Well, don’t go so fast,” I said as the planks wobbled under my feet.

  The damp concrete walls, the dirt floor, and vegetables aging in their bins gave off the cool smell of decay.

  When we reached the bottom of the stairs, my foot came down on something that spurted out a vile smell.

  “Oh, yuck!” I said, high stepping into the darkness. “I stepped on something!”

  “Show me.” Aunty Rose bent down with the lamp. “It was probably just a stinkbug.”

  “It was at least ten thousand times bigger than any old stink
bug,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s only a rotten potato.” She kicked it under the steps and flashed the light ahead. “Come on.”

  The shelves that Grandpa had built for Nana’s canned goods loomed in the shadows of the southeast corner. Quarts and pints of canned corn, green beans, yellow beans, lima beans, navy beans, tomatoes, peaches, blackberries, gooseberries, apples, applesauce, apple butter, cherries, chicken, mincemeat, and pear honey stood in dusty rows, two deep.

  “You can get the beans,” I told Aunty Rose, thinking of the silver-dollar-sized spiders that hopped around in the darkness.

  She held the lamp low to pick out the yellow-green shine of the lima bean jars.

  “You’re such a baby,” she said.

  From the bottom of the stairs, the kitchen doorway at the top glowed. We went up the stairs faster than we’d come down. Aunty Rose even let me hang on to her skirt.

  “What took you so long?” Nana said, looking up from turning the frying potatoes. “Are we getting low on lima beans?”

  “No, Mom. There’s plenty. We were just looking around.”

  Nana leveled her gaze on us, but she didn’t say anything. I went out on the back steps to clean the potato mess from my shoe with a twig.

  In a few minutes, Grandpa switched off the radio in the dining room, signaling that we should take up the food.

  After we sat down at the table, we bowed our heads while Grandpa talked to God. Every day he said the same thing, the mysterious semma, semma, summa table, ending with amen.

  Whatever Grandpa and God said to each other, it sure made the food taste good.

  “Did you get the harrow fixed, Dad?” Aunty Rose asked.

  “No. I’ll get one of Retus’s boys to come over and help me. They’re good hands at fixing machinery. I’m going to plow the bottom ground down by the creek this afternoon.”

  Nana frowned. “Are you fixing to plant in the bottom? The corn got washed out last year.”

  Grandpa didn’t say anything. Then, after a bit, he asked who we’d seen down at the cemetery. Nana told him about Wren Roberts and the Keifers and Mrs. Miller and her brood.

  I watched Nana’s and Grandpa’s faces, wondering if Nana had told Grandpa I’d been talking to Grandmother Clark. Aunty Rose caught my eye, and I knew she was reading my mind. I would rather have cut off my tongue and hung it on the clothesline than let Grandpa know I had been asking questions about my daddy.

  “Can I go with you, Grandpa?” I asked. “Down to plow the bottom?” The low ground lay along the edges of the creek where I liked to wade.

  “That depends on what your grandma says,” he answered, running a crust of biscuit left over from breakfast around his plate to sop up the last of the bean juice. But I could tell by the surge of light in his blue eyes that he was glad I’d asked.

  “I don’t want the girls going out to the field,” Nana said. “Not around machinery. They could get hurt.”

  “But I like the creek,” I protested.

  I loved wading on the sandy, pebbly bottom, feeling the cool water swirl around my calves.

  “Maybe I’ll take you down Sunday afternoon,” Grandpa said.

  After dinner was over, Aunty Rose and I washed dishes in the pan of water Nana had left heating on the stove. We heard the blasting of the tractor starting in the machine shed, then the sound disappeared over the hills as Grandpa pulled the plow down to the creek.

  Later, I felt butterflies in my stomach trying to get out for some reason, and Nana fixed me baking soda in water. Then she got a sick headache herself and had to lie on the davenport in the dim front room with a wet washrag over her eyes. And Aunty Rose nearly drove us nuts playing the windup phonograph and jitterbugging all over the house.

  I lay on my bed and paged through the Sears Roebuck catalog, memorizing the pages of girls’ clothing and marking the dresses I’d ask Nana to copy. I picked out some blue-and-white-checked material that maybe she would order and make up into a new Sunday dress, which I was needing, since it seemed like I’d shot three inches straight up since Christmas.

  I mused through the pages with electric lamps and electric irons, wondering if we’d ever need such things.

  Later on, I helped Aunty Rose wash her hair, pouring water from the gray-speckled granite pitcher through her waves as she hung her head over the washbasin. Then she washed my hair, circling her fingers on my scalp until I thought my knees would melt, it felt so good.

  We sat on a quilt under the hickory tree and combed out our tangles. Jacky lay beside us in the grass, and I petted him with my toes.

  “You’re a good dog,” I told him.

  As Aunty Rose’s long, thick brown hair dried, natural waves began to rise and fall in it.

  “I wish I had hair like yours,” I said.

  “You’ve got hair like your mama’s.”

  What I had was baby-fine light-colored hair that bleached out pale as silk in the summer.

  Every now and then we’d hear the tractor rumbling down in the bottom. Once we heard a car pass, then toot as it went over the hill.

  “I bet some of Dad’s sheep are in the road,” Aunty Rose said.

  There was no use in trying to get the sheep back in the pasture. They’d follow Grandpa like ducklings behind a mother duck, but they’d just run from the rest of us.

  The sound of the treadle sewing machine stopping and starting came through the open sunroom windows. I inched closer to Aunty Rose so I could talk quietly. Jacky whined and flopped his tail when I moved out of petting range.

  “Do I look mainly like my mama or my daddy?” I asked, holding my breath.

  “You don’t look a bit like your daddy,” Aunty Rose said, shutting her eyes as she tugged the comb through a tangle deep in her hair. “Not that I can see, anyway. Do you reckon Charles Michael will take me to Walnut Hill to the dance tomorrow night?”

  “Why does everybody act like my daddy doesn’t exist?” I asked.

  Aunty Rose bent forward, hanging her head between her knees and brushing her hair over the top of her head. I knew she was hiding under there.

  Jacky inched onto the quilt, back into the range of my toes, and I ran them through the thick fur on his side, leaving tracks.

  Aunty Rose sat up, flipping back her hair. Her face was red—whether from hanging her head down or from my questions, I couldn’t tell.

  “Your daddy isn’t a bad man,” she said. “He just doesn’t have anything to do with us. So why do you keep asking? All that was a long time ago.” She stood up, running the brush through her hair again. “I’m going in to cut out that new blouse.”

  Aunty Rose walked away, a damp towel draped over her shoulder. I rolled over on my back and looked up at the little triangles of blue sky dancing through the leaves of the hickory tree. Someday I’d be a grown-up, and I’d make them tell me things.

  “Fetch, Jack,” I said, sitting up and throwing a broken twig across the yard. But he just rolled over on his back too and squirmed in the grass.

  About dark, Grandpa came in from the field, and Nana had supper all ready. She’d baked a blackberry cobbler that still bubbled a little with steam, and we spooned Old Jerse’s thick, clotted cream over it. In the soft lamplight, I listened to two whippoorwills talking to each other across the garden and let go of what was worrying me. Aunty Rose was right. Who cared about that old stuff?

  Chapter 3

  We didn’t get to the creek that Sunday because a light rain started to fall right after church and kept on all day. And the following Sunday the preacher and his wife—Mr. and Mrs. Bradley—came to dinner, which required a mountain of work.

  On Saturday, Aunty Rose and I cleaned like hired girls. We polished furniture until the house reeked of lemon oil. We scrubbed windows with vinegar water until they sparkled. And Aunty Rose ironed the white damask tablecloth until the Blessed Savior himself could have taken a meal off it.

  Grandpa teased Nana that maybe he should build a new outhouse special for the preacher and h
is wife.

  While Aunty Rose and I were slaving away, Nana made an angel food cake and two mincemeat pies to cap off her meal of fresh fried chicken, peas and new potatoes from the garden, noodle kugel, biscuits, canned applesauce, and enough lemonade to float a battleship.

  And then, of course, after dinner on Sunday, the Bradleys stayed, talking on and on in the front room. I thought they might enjoy going down to the creek, but Nana said they wouldn’t.

  About three o’clock they went to rest on Nana and Grandpa’s bed until it was time to get up for a light supper and go back to the church for the evening preaching. We didn’t usually go to evening preaching. In the summer, if the skies were clear, we lay in the grass and studied the stars. Grandpa said we could see God in the Big Dipper better than we could see him at the church house.

  But when the preacher came to Sunday dinner, we went to evening preaching.

  From my point of view, the only thing good about the Bradleys’ coming was that they wouldn’t be back until February. We had just over thirty families in the Panther Fork congregation to feed the preacher on Sundays, so we could keep him nourished for about eight months without any repeats.

  * * *

  The third weekend in June, my hopes rose for finally getting to Panther Fork Creek. On Saturday, it didn’t look the least bit like rain. I studied the sky as we drove along County Line Road on the way to Lorrimer’s store to do our Saturday trading.

  “Remember about going to the creek tomorrow, Grandpa?” I said, pulling myself up to rest my chin on his shoulder.

  “I remember,” he said, shifting into low to get through the ruts.

  “Looks like they could be kinder to the roads,” Nana said. “We can’t hardly get through, the way those trucks and Caterpillars cut things up.”

  “But think of the electricity, Mom,” Aunty Rose said. “When we get it, we’ll be able to just switch on the light.”

  Grandpa’s blue eyes watched Aunty Rose in the rearview mirror. Grandpa wasn’t sold on electricity.

  “Think of having a refrigerator, Grandpa,” I said. “We could have ice cubes, and ice cream, and ice-cold lemonade.”