Journey With the Comet

by Dana Wayne Haley

  Then Margaret went to her bedroom and returned with a small book in her hand.

  “Here, Leona, you read this and it’ll explain everything you need to know about being a woman. Martha—Doctor Gifford’s wife—recommended it to me. If you have any more questions after you read it, I’ll try my best to answer them. Okay?”

  “Okay, Mama.”

  And, with that, Leona took the book from her mother and was off to bed. She read the detailed, fully illustrated book with fascination that night and could hardly wait to visit Jill the next morning to talk about what she read.

  —1—

  “Have you become a woman yet, Jill?” Leona asked her friend that next morning.

  “What? Oh Yes, about 6 weeks ago.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I was too embarrassed, I guess.”

  “But there’s nothing to be embarrassed about, Jill. Every girl becomes a woman sooner or later, so my mother says.”

  “I know, but I just wish it had been later. Much later!” Jill said, causing the two friends to laugh.

  “Did your mother explain everything to you?” Leona asked.

  “Not everything. She said she’d tell me another time. Did your mother tell you everything?”

  “No, but she gave me this book to read and it explains everything. It’s amazing, Jill. Do you want to read it?”

  “Do I!”

  While Jill read the book, she and Leona discussed its contents.

  “Boy, being a woman sure is complicated,” Jill said after finishing the book.

  “I’ll say,” Leona agreed. “In fact, I think I’ll put off dating boys for a while.”

  “For how long?” Jill asked.

  “I’m thinking about forever,” Leona replied, making the girls laugh.

  “How about you, Jill?”

  “Well, after what I read and saw in this book, I’m thinking forever and a day is more like it. And even that might be too soon for me,” Jill said; again they laughed, more hysterically this time.

  “Do you feel any different about boys now, Leona?”

  “Not really. As far as I’m concerned they’re still a pain in the butt.”

  “Oh, you don’t really mean that, do you?”

  “I guess not. Most of the boys in our school are pretty nice, but there are a few jerks.”

  “Tell me about it. Did you see what Jake was doing the other day?” Jill asked.

  “Yeah. It was disgusting. But most things he does are. Now that his brother isn’t around, he’s got to be the biggest jerk in our school. I wonder if he and his brother got that from their father?”

  “I don’t know, but if they did, then I sure feel sorry for Mrs. Comeau.”

  “You and me too, Jill.”

  For no apparent reason Jill began laughing, and Leona wondered why.

  “What’s so funny, Jill?” she asked.

  “I was just thinking of something my father said about Mr. Comeau.”

  “What’s that?” Leona asked.

  “It was when we were watching him trying to get his wagon out of the ditch. He tipped it clean over, and even I could tell that was gonna happen. Anyway, Papa looked at me and said, ‘Mr. Comeau is dumber than a box of rocks’.”

  Leona burst out laughing. “I guess his sons are a lot like him then. I’m sure glad my dad’s normal.”

  “What’s your father like, Leona? I mean, when he talks about girl things.”

  “Papa’s real helpful. He answers our questions truthfully. I can’t think of one thing he’s told me that’s turned out to be wrong. He’s real open about things too. I once heard him tell my mother that ‘if they’re old enough to ask the questions, they’re old enough to hear the answers.’ I like that.”

  “Yes, that’s a good way to be,” Jill agreed. “I often wonder what my father would be like when it comes to that stuff, but now I’ll never know.”

  “Well, Jill, from what you’ve told me about your Pa, I suspect he’d be very much like mine.”

  —2—

  During the remaining 10 weeks of school Jill and Leona began to fill out, but the change was so gradual that none of the boys really noticed it. However, over the summer vacation the girl’s bodies changed considerably and when school started again in the fall, it was a different story.

  “Well, look at Leona,” one of the older boys said as loud as he could. “What happened to you, Leona? You take a lot of vitamins over the summer, did you?”

  “Oh, grow up, Jake,” Leona said.

  “What do you mean? I’ve grown up quite a bit in the past few months. Why don’t you go out on a date with me sometime and I’ll show you just how much.”

  “Dream on, moron. I’d date a monkey before I’d go on a date with you.”

  Jill looked at Leona and started to giggle.

  “What are you laughing at, Jill?” Jake asked.

  “Oh nothing. Nothing at all.”

  Now it was Leona’s turn to laugh.

  “Don’t you laugh at me,” Jake said. “Or I’ll….”

  Just then, the bell rang and everyone ran into the schoolhouse.

  “What do you think Jake was gonna say?” Jill asked Leona as they hurried toward the schoolhouse door.

  “Don’t worry about him, Jill,” she answered. “It doesn’t matter what he says or thinks; he’s all talk. That’s all jerks like him can do.”

  Although the two girls were the butt of a few nasty jokes by Jake and three of his friends, they were also the recipients of more friendly attention by most of the other boys their age or older. That attention was definitely appreciated and certainly warranted, and it wasn’t just because of their more womanly bodies. Jill was far from being an ugly girl. She could even be called beautiful, and her figure was typical of a girl of thirteen, though slightly on the thin side. And to top it off she had long blonde hair that hung down to the small of her back. Leona, on the other hand, had shoulder length black hair and she was one of the more beautiful girls in Glenburn, even more beautiful than Jill. She also had a good figure, with not an ounce of fat on her athletic looking frame.

  The two friends were discussing their newfound maturity while sitting outside during lunch break, three weeks after the start of school, and they were being very candid.

  “I like the way the boys look at us now,” Jill told Leona. “And they are finally talking to us. It was like we didn’t exist before this fall.”

  “They were probably too shy to say anything to us before,” Leona speculated.

  “Maybe so, but it didn’t hurt that we matured a little bit,” Jill joked.

  “I guess your right. But we’re not the only ones maturing, Jill. Did you notice that some of the boys voices are starting to squeak?”

  “Yeah, it’s so funny.”

  “Well, my mother says that’s what happens when they go through puberty. And she says that it only last for a little while and then their voice become deeper, like a man’s. You know, like what happened to some of the older boys.”

  “Oh, that explains it! I thought maybe they ate something funny and it damaged their vocal cords,” Jill said. “So, boys have to go through puberty too, huh?”

  “Yup, but according to my mother, it’s a lot easier for them. Although she says it isn’t easy on anyone else in the family.”

  “What does your mother mean by that, Leona?”

  “Well, she says boys all of a sudden become very obnoxious, temporarily anyway.”

  “If Jake and his three goofy friends are prime examples, I don’t think it’s too temporary,” Jill said.

  “No, I guess it can’t be,” Leona laughed. “Fortunately, those four morons are not the norm. And you know what else my mother told me about boys when they reach puberty?”

  “No, what?”

>   When a boy passed within earshot of the girls, Leona giggled and whispered into Jill’s ear.

  “No! That’s so weird!” Jill said in astonishment.

  “Yup, that’s what Mama says. And she’d never lie to me.”

  Upon hearing all that Leona had to say, Jill had a strange look on her face and said: “You’ve gotta be kidding!” and when it finally sunk in, she laughed hysterically. After stopping, she said: “Oh, that’s so great! Now I don’t feel so bad.”

  —3—

  As time went on, Jill increasingly became the butt of jokes from Jake and his friends. Despite her passage into womanhood, Leona’s best friend was still extremely thin; and although she was quite attractive she had to start wearing glasses, and that made her appear much less attractive than she was. As a result some of the boys would make fun of her—calling her geek-face and pencil-legs—and it was the same four boys who had teased Leona and her before, only now they were much bolder and a lot more obnoxious. Jake, a stocky redhead, was the ringleader of the group and its biggest bully. The others were Jake’s best friend Billy, a small dark haired boy; Mike, a tall skinny boy with brown hair; and Justin, a small boy with blonde hair. Jake and Billy were always instigators of the trouble, while Mike and Justin obediently went along with them. All lived on the School Road, two miles from the school.

  “Jill, how come you don’t look like your friend Leona? Are you a girl, or a boy?” Jake asked cruelly.

  “She’s so ugly it doesn’t matter,” Billy added.

  When this group first began picking on Jill she would cry and run away. Leona, of course, would run after Jill and try to comfort her friend by telling her how pretty she looked.

  “Those boys are just jerks. They have nothing better to do than to pick on others. You have to ignore them, Jill. They’re just big bullies.”

  But, deep down, Leona knew that she wouldn’t be able to ignore their insults, any more than Jill could. Still, she tried to alleviate her friend’s pain by joking about the boys.

  “Don’t worry about what they say, Jill. You’re really pretty. And those boys are just jealous because every one of them looks like something the cat dragged in. And from the way they smell, the cat must’ah dragged them through a big ole manure pile, and a fresh one at that.”

  That did the trick. Jill started laughing so hard that her new glasses almost fell off. Not being one to stop with just one successful joke, Leona continued her verbal assault on the boys, for Jill’s edification.

  “If you put them all in a lineup with the ugliest boys on this planet, they would still be the ugliest ones around,” she laughed.

  Jill laughed too, even harder than Leona; and for the next twenty minutes the two giddy friends tirelessly made up ugly jokes about the four obnoxious boys.

  “Okay, let’s go talk to those jerks and ask them to apologize to you. And if they don’t then we’ll make them wish they had,” Leona told her friend.

  The emboldened girls sought out the boys and gave them a chance to apologize for hurting Jill’s feelings. Of course, just as Leona expected, the “jerks” refused and started to belittle the two of them. But this time no one ran away. Instead, the resolute young ladies countered the boys’ insults by repeating the jokes they had made up about them, and they did it in front of all the other students who were gathered around. The four boys tried to counter with their own clever quips, but they were no match for the more intelligent and quicker witted girls.

  “You know what, Jill?”

  “No. What?”

  “Since these boys prefer picking on girls maybe we should even things up a little and bring them some of our old dresses to wear. Don’t you think they would look good in dresses?”

  “Are you kidding, Leona. The only way they would look good is if they wore potato sacks over their heads.”

  “You’ve got that right,” Leona said.

  It wasn’t long before the boys’ faces started to turn beet-red, and they were squirming for a way out of the difficult situation they had found themselves in. They had entered unarmed into a battle of wits and now needed to find a quick retreat. If Jill and Leona had been alone they knew that the boys would have gotten rough, but not even these rowdy boys would dare hit a girl in front of the other boys in their school. It was a taboo that would have brought into question their manhood and likely resulted in them being the ones to suffer a beating. When Leona sensed that the four bullies could take no more, she decided that “enough is enough.”

  “How does it feel to be picked on?” Leona asked. “You made my friend feel awful, just the way you are feeling now. I hope you’ve learned your lesson and will stop picking on kids who are smaller or weaker than you. Now, if you apologize to Jill we’ll forget about what you did and we won’t make fun of you again. How about it?”

  Grudgingly, the boys apologized, one by one. And from that day forward they never picked on anyone else; at least, not while Leona was around. Murdock always taught his children to never be afraid to stand up for what’s right, and in Leona’s mind that’s all she was doing.

  After the boys walked away, Jill and Leona sized them up.

  “It too bad the other boys got mixed up with Jake,” Leona said. “If they had become friends with the nicer boys instead, they probably would have turned out okay, especially Mike.”

  “I know,” Jill agreed, “he was such a shy, sweet kid before he got mixed up with those three. Even now you can tell that he’s uncomfortable around them; he’s just acting the bully.”

  “Yeah,” Leona said, “maybe we can lure him away from them.”

  “Let’s try,” Jill responded. “He was so nice before; I’d like to see him that way again.”

  Unfortunately, the girls never got the chance to do that, much to their regret and to everyone’s misfortune.

  —4—

  Leona learned a lot about the complications of becoming a woman that year, but her lessons were really just beginning. Lillian had been dating steadily since the age of 16 and she saw the effect it had on her older sister, both physically and emotionally. Then, in October of ’22, 18-year-old Lillian married a man who worked as a lumberjack with her uncle Bill Carver. His name was Ausmon, but everyone called him Aussie.

  “Lillian’s pregnant,” Leona told Jill in early November. “I hope she has a boy or a girl; and not an it.”

  “What!?” Jill said with a confused look on her face. “What’s an it?”

  “You know, Jill: like the Comeau boy.”

  Jill started laughing and couldn’t for the life of her stop. When she finally was able to, it was only for a few seconds, and then she started laughing again; and Leona couldn’t keep from laughing either.

  The following spring, on May 25th of 1923, Margaret and Murdock became proud grandparents. Lillian gave birth to a boy she named Roland. Jill was joking with Leona the day it happened.

  “How’s it feel to be an aunt, Leona?”

  “Kinda strange.”

  “Lillian sure put on some weight,” Jill said.

  “Yeah, she sure did. I heard that getting pregnant will do that to you. And Mama was certainly right about her breasts. Do you see how big they’ve become?”

  “How could I not?” Jill said. “They’re hard to miss. I don’t know how she keeps from tipping over when she walks.”

  “I suppose someday we’ll have breasts like that,” Leona joked.

  “God, I hope not,” Jill exclaimed. “Can you imagine how the boys would tease us if we did.”

  “I don’t think we’ll have to worry about being teased again, Jill; if those boys know what’s good for them.”

  Chapter 44

  A Friend in Need

  Jill felt obligated to Leona for helping her regain her self-respect after being teased mercilessly by Jake and his friends. Because of that, she wanted to do something for her frie
nd, something that was comparable to what Leona did for her, and the only thing that she knew Leona needed help with was her fear of water. So during the early part of the summer of ’23 Jill decided that she was going to help her overcome that fear, or at least try. It was June 14th of that summer and Jill was having lunch with her mother.

  “I’m gonna ask Leona to go fishing with me tomorrow,” Jill said.

  “That’s wonderful, Jill. I bet she’ll be thrilled, what with loving to fish the way she does. Are you gonna go swimming too? If you do, you be sure to be careful.”

  “I will, Mother. Don’t you worry; I’m a good swimmer. Daddy taught me real good; and besides, the place I swim is safe enough. The water barely makes it up to my chest.”

  “Well, okay. I guess with Leona being there too, I don’t have much to worry about.”

  “Actually, Leona doesn’t know how to swim.”

  “She doesn’t? Good Lord, that’s hard to believe. She’s so athletic, and always so fearless at doing things.”

  “She is, about most things, but she almost drowned when she was little and now she’s deathly afraid of goin’ in the water.”

  “Well, I guess I can’t blame her for that; once a person gets fear into them it’s doubly hard to overcome it.”

  “I know what you mean, Mother. But I’m gonna try my best to help Leona conquer her fear. It’s the least I can do after what she did for me.”

  “How are you gonna do that, dear?”

  “I’m not sure yet, but I’ll think of something.”

  Jill thought long and hard about how she could persuade Leona to go into the water, and after a while she had a plan. That evening Jill walked to the Haleys’ home to put her plan into action.

  “Leona, do you want to go fishing with me tomorrow?” Jill asked.

  “Can I, Mama?”

  “I don’t see why not,” Margaret said.

  “Thanks, Mama. What time are you going, Jill?”

  “How about we leave around 9:00. I’ll make a picnic lunch, and we can fish and talk and just have fun.”

  “Great,” Leona said. “I’ll bring a deck of cards so we can play Old Maid. On second thought, do you know how to play Cribbage, Jill?”