by Ruth White
We were quiet, each in our own thoughts. At one point Woodrow took off his glasses to clean them on his shirttail, and I saw his profile clearly against the night sky.
Why, he looks for all the world like Prince Valiant! I thought.
Then Benny sang again:
From this valley they say you are going,
I shall miss your bright eyes and sweet smile;
For they say you are taking the sunshine
That has brightened our pathway awhile.
Won’t you think of this valley you’re leaving,
O how lonely, how sad it will be,
Do you think of the sad heart you’re breaking,
And the grief you are causing me.
Come and sit by my side if you love me,
Do not hasten to bid me adieu;
But remember the Red River Valley,
And the one who has loved you so true.
“It’s so sad,” Woodrow said. “It reminds me of Mama.”
“And it reminds me of Amos,” Benny whispered. “I miss him every day still yet after all this time. He was the best friend I ever had.”
“Me and Gypsy will be your friends, Benny,” Woodrow said sweetly. “You just call on us the same as you did Uncle Amos whenever you need anything.”
I thought I heard Benny sniffling.
About 2:00 a.m. we were dragging up Residence Street toward home, me and Woodrow worn to a frazzle. We had dropped off dogs one by one along the way. So the only one left was our beloved Dawg.
Benny was “working” our street then and his pouch was nearly full.
“This has been the most fun I ever had,” Woodrow said.
“How ’bout you, Miz Beauty?” said Benny. “You had fun?”
Impulsively I stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek right beneath his eye. I reckon nobody was more surprised than me.
“When I’m allowed to come back and live one day over again exactly as it was,” I said, “this day will be considered.”
We left him standing there in the moonlight with Dawg still by his side, and with one hand Benny was touching the spot I had kissed.
Sometimes impulsive is okay.
Twenty-two
“Therefore,” Woodrow concluded the reading of his English assignment, “it is my belief that Blind Benny, even with his poor sightless eyes, is the only person I know who can see with perfect clarity. Because Benny is able to see beyond appearances.”
“Excellent! Excellent!” came from Porter and Doc Dot as everyone applauded.
“A very wise observation” came from Granny.
“Wonderful, wonderful!” came from Mama and Irene Dotson.
“I would give it an A,” said Grandpa.
“Keen!” came from me.
The twins, Dottie and DeeDee, just grinned and clapped.
It was another birthday dinner at our house—this time for Granny, and a somewhat special occasion because Porter had promised a couple of surprise announcements.
It was a Saturday night, still in September, and mine and Woodrow’s confinement would be ending next Tuesday. We were given a temporary reprieve for this dinner. I suspected none of the adults cared if we observed our confinement rules anyway.
In school Mr. Collins had given us the assignment of writing a paper about a person we admire and why. I still had not done mine. Grandpa, having proofread Woodrow’s paper, was so impressed he had insisted Woodrow read it at the birthday dinner.
Then Porter stood up, holding a glass of blackberry wine.
“I want to propose a special toast to Mother Ball, my good mother-in-law and granny to these children. Then I have an announcement. The toast first: Here’s to a fine woman, wife, mother, homemaker, and a talented music teacher! We salute you, Mother Ball,” he said.
“Hear! Hear!” the adults said, and drank a toast to Granny.
The little girls and Woodrow and I had cherry pop.
Granny blushed and thanked everybody.
“And now for the announcement,” Porter went on. “It concerns your finest piano student, Mother Ball.”
“Oh, Gypsy, of course,” Granny said, beaming at me.
My ears perked up. What was this all about?
“We think it’s time for Gypsy to have a formal recital.”
“A recital?” I screeched. “What for?”
“What for?” Porter said. “To show off for us and for Coal Station.”
“Show off?” I repeated like a dummy.
“Yes. Show off not only how good you are but to honor your teacher as well.”
A recital? I was speechless. That meant just me all by myself playing the piano for about thirty to fortyfive minutes in front of a bunch of people.
“I think your thirteenth birthday would be a perfect time,” Mama said, looking very pleased. “That’ll give you about two months to prepare.”
“Who will we invite?” I asked.
“Everybody!” came from everybody at the table.
“Yeah, the whole town,” said Woodrow.
They were all waiting for me to react. And surprisingly, I felt a thrill of excitement beginning to grow. I could show off all those tricky finger things I had learned, and all those beautiful Mozart pieces, the popular stuff, too, and the folk songs, and of course the jazz! A program was taking shape in my head.
“Joe Palooka!” I said breathlessly, unable to hide the excitement.
Then everybody laughed and applauded.
“We’ll lay our plans tomorrow,” Mama said.
“And now for that other announcement,” Doc Dot declared, and stood up. “Regarding Woodrow.”
“Me!” Woodrow said, and his voice broke.
He looked startled, and the rest of us tried not to notice.
“Is it about my mama?” he said.
“Oh no, son, I wish it were. But it’s still something good. Sometime back, friends, I examined Woodrow’s eyes. Since that time I have been in correspondence with a doctor friend of mine who is an eye specialist in Baltimore. So after some long discussions with Porter and Mr. Ball here, we have decided to take Woodrow to my friend in Baltimore and see what can be done for him.”
“You mean an operation?” I said.
“Probably. We can’t give any guarantees,” Doc went on. “But from what I understand, the chances for a successful operation look promising.”
Woodrow was speechless.
“Cat got your tongue, cousin?” I said, poking him playfully.
“No,” he said at last. “I was just waiting to hear Granny holler, It’s time to wake up now and get ready for school. ’Cause I know I’m dreaming.”
What a night! What a party! It was by far the best one we ever had.
Twenty-three
On October 11, the one-year anniversary of Aunt Belle’s disappearance, Woodrow came scratching at my window at 4:45 a.m. We had planned it all out the night before, but when I opened my eyes, I couldn’t remember what I was supposed to do.
“The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you,” Woodrow whispered through the screen.
I sat up. Oh yeah, we were going to the tree house to watch the dawn come.
“Don’t go back to sleep,” he went on.
“You must ask for what you really want,” I said sleepily, and swung my feet to the floor, pulling a blanket after me.
“People are going back and forth across the doorsill/ where the two worlds touch,” he continued.
“The door is round and open,” I whispered as I eased the screen to the floor.
He helped me out the window, and I pulled the blanket after me. He had one of his own. We headed for the tree house.
“Smell the apples?” Woodrow whispered.
We paused and breathed deeply. It was a wonderful thing to feel the dew under our bare feet and the wet leaves brushing our cheeks and to smell the sweet aroma of apples at the peak of their ripeness.
Grandpa didn’t even have to try to sell the apples. They sold themselves. They were famous in our n
eck of the woods, and folks would come by with their own baskets and pokes to buy the best Golden Delicious apples in Virginia.
“It’s true what they say about appearances being deceiving,” Woodrow said as we continued through the orchard.
“How’s that?” I whispered.
“When I first came here, the trees were all in bloom. I never had seen anything so pretty, and I thought nothing could ever hurt people who lived in such a beautiful place. Now the summer is gone. The apples are ripe, and I have learned … well, I have learned a beautiful place can’t shelter you from hurt any more than a shack can.”
We climbed up onto the tree-house porch, wrapped up in our blankets, lay back on the raw lumber, and listened to the birds just beginning to come awake. There was a touch of pale lavender on the tops of the mountains.
“Think of all the millions of dawns this old world has seen,” Woodrow said. “But it will never be this same one again … or that same one when she left.”
We could hear Blind Benny somewhere down the street singing “When the Moon Comes over the Mountain.”
“It was exactly one year ago today,” Woodrow said, “and I still wake up every morning wondering where she is waking up, what she is seeing. What is she thinking about? What will she eat for breakfast? What is she planning to do today? I miss her so much.”
“I wish I had known her better, Woodrow,” I said.
“Yeah, you woulda liked her lots, Gypsy. We made up that place I told you about. That place in the air behind our house. Mama and me, we made up lots of places and things. We used to talk about where the two worlds touch, and we told stories to each other about it. One day it was a world of fairies and unicorns, and the next day it was a place where giants and dinosaurs would eat you up. And sometimes it was a magical place where all you had to do was ask for what you really wanted. But I knew all the time it wadn’t real.
“When the sheriff investigated, he asked if any of her clothes were missing, and they weren’t, but some of mine were. I didn’t tell him that. She took a pair of my pants and a shirt, and …”
“She couldn’t wear your clothes!” I said.
“Yeah, she could. If you’ll remember, for the last few years I wore some of my daddy’s and Uncle Russell’s hand-me-downs and they were always too big. She could’ve wore them easy. And some of my socks and shoes were gone, too. And a cap. She could have put her hair up under it. And the thirty dollars we had saved for my eye operation—it was gone, too.
“I believe she went over the mountain to Grassy Lick dressed as a boy. That’s why nobody noticed her over there. She probably hitched a ride with the carnival, which I know was pulling up and leaving that day. Maybe she got a job with them as an errand boy or something. It was just the kind of thing that would appeal to her.”
“Woodrow, don’t you think you should tell Mama and Granny and Grandpa all this just to set their minds at ease that nothing awful happened to her?”
“Yeah, I reckon I’ll do that today, Gypsy. I couldn’t do it before.”
“And Uncle Everett,” I said. “He should know, too.”
“Yeah, I’ll tell Daddy, too. But I don’t think he cared as much about her as he let on. He was like the farmer in the golden-hair story. His conscience bothered him more than anything else ’cause he wasn’t always good to her.
“I kept thinking she’d send me a message through the ads. Just to let me know she was okay. She could’ve done that. She knew I’d be watching those ads every week. We always said it would be fun to send messages through the ads.
“But she didn’t. I didn’t miss a one. I read them every Sunday, and there never was one that looked like it might’ve come from her to me. Not one!”
“She still might do it, Woodrow.”
“No, she won’t. She’s gone. She won’t ever look back now. I’ve known it for a long time, but it don’t hurt as much as it used to.”
Woodrow fell silent.
It was a moment, I reckon, when we both faced the truth. Aunt Belle had left Woodrow on purpose just like my daddy left me. Not because they didn’t love us. They did. But their pain was bigger than their love.
You had to forgive them for that.
Far away we could hear a mourning dove. It was crying for us.
There were streaks of gold on the horizon, throwing an eerie glow into the orchard.
“We are in that in-between place,” Woodrow said, “that fascinated Mama so much.”
“Between what?” I said.
“Well, first we’re between being kids and grown-ups, you know? Then we’re in that time between summer and winter. And we’re also in that moment when a new day is just peeping over the horizon.”
His voice was fading away from me. I was in an in-between place of my own—that lucid place between sleeping and waking.
And I was watching my daddy come riding over Cold Mountain on a black horse. Tall and straight in the saddle he was. Dark and rugged as the hills. Nobody in Coal Station had ever seen the likes of him.
ALSO BY RUTH WHITE
Sweet Creek Holler Weeping Willow
Copyright © 1996 Ruth White
All rights reserved
eISBN 9781429934244
First eBook Edition : May 2011
First edition, 1996
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
White, Ruth, date.
Belle Prater’s boy / Ruth White.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When Woodrow’s mother suddenly disappears, he moves to his grandparents’ home in a small Virginia town where he befriends his cousin and together they find the strength to face the terrible losses and fears in their lives.
ISBN 978-0-374-30668-7
[1. Cousins-Fiction. 2. Mother and child—Fiction. 3. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Identity—Fiction.] 1. Title.
PZ7.W58446Be 1995
[Fic]—dc20 94-43675
Excerpt from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, copyright © 1943 and renewed © 1971 by Harcourt, Brace & Company, reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Excerpt from Open Secret: Versions of Rumi, translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks, copyright © 1984 by Threshold Books, RD 4, Box 600, Putney, VT 05346, reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Lyrics from “When the Moon Comes over the Mountain,” by Harry Woods, Howard Johnson and Kate Smith. Copyright © 1931 (renewed) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. Rights on behalf of Harry Woods for Extended Renewal in U.S. controlled by Callicoon. Music administered by Songwriters Guild of America. Rights on behalf of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. assigned to/controlled by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission. Warner Bros. Publication U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.
Lyrices from “Wings of a Dove” by Bob Ferguson, copyright © 1959 by Husky Music, Inc. And Larrick Music, Copyright renewed. All rights for the U.S. and Canada administered by Unichappell Music Inc. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.