Guests on Earth: A Novel

by Lee Smith

  Miss Lily Ponder

  Summerlin Grove

  Greenville, Mississippi

  Virginia Day had gotten better and had gone to a boarding school named Chatham Hall, though Mrs. Hodges told me privately that she wasn’t sure Virginia was quite ready for this, and she was quite sure that Chatham Hall was not ready for Virginia. Melissa had been transferred to another hospital back home in Tennessee. “Cheaper,” Mrs. Hodges said succinctly. Always discouraged by Mrs. Carroll, my friendship with Ella Jean Bascomb had now become nonexistent. An occasional hurried wave across the hospital grounds was about it, now that my activities at Mrs. Grady’s kept me so busy. Before I knew it, Ella Jean had disappeared from my life.

  CHAPTER 4

  IT WOULD BE TWO years before I saw her again. I was walking down the path toward Brushwood on a changeable, windy August day. I was almost seventeen, and had already been accepted into the Peabody Institute of Music, in Baltimore. I was to leave in a few weeks’ time.

  “Black is the color of my true love’s hair . . .” Suddenly Ella Jean Bascomb’s high, unearthly voice floated out on the fragrant breeze. Nobody else in the world sang like that. I stopped walking and shaded my eyes as I looked all around. Groups of patients and staff were walking up and down the paths, as always. “The prettiest face, and the neatest hands, I love the ground whereon he stands . . .” I got chill bumps on my arms, but I couldn’t see her anywhere. Then I noticed the long lines of flapping sheets on the hillside out behind the Central Building, where the hospital laundry was located. I left the path and ran across the grass. “Ella Jean!” I called. “Ella Jean!” I couldn’t see her yet. The sun was in my eyes, and all I could see was the sheets, like a company of cheerful dancing ghosts.

  “Evalina?” Here she came, running out barefooted between the rows, wearing a long white utility apron over her dress. “Lord, have mercy! Why, you have growed, girl! I wouldn’t have hardly knowed you.”

  “Well, I would have known you anywhere,” I said, which was true, though her thick black hair was pulled back now into a ponytail, and she had grown considerably taller and sturdier, with breasts. But her big dark eyes and wide grin were just the same. “Why didn’t you come find me?” I asked her. “Are you just working over here for the summer? When did your school get out?”

  She frowned, digging her toe in the grass. “I ain’t in school no more,” she said. “Mama had us some twins, and then she took real sick, and she liked to never got back up on her feet. So I stayed home to help out, and hit’s been just one thing after another. You know.”

  I didn’t, having no such family experience of my own to draw upon. But I felt embarrassed to realize that I hadn’t even noticed that Ella Jean’s mother was gone from her place at the stove. Living now at Homewood, I scarcely ever got over to the cafeteria in the Central Building anymore. “So, your mother must have gotten well, then?” I asked. “Or you wouldn’t be over here working now, I mean.” I had never been able to understand Ella Jean’s family situation very well.

  “I reckon,” she said noncommittally, flashing that big quick grin.

  “Ella Jean, why didn’t you come find me?” I asked again.

  “Lord, I figured you’d be too fancy for the likes of me, now,” she said. “You being a town girl and all.”

  Am I a town girl? I wondered. Sometimes I feel like a town girl, and sometimes I feel like an impostor, I wanted to say.

  “Hey, what was that song you were singing just a minute ago?” I asked her instead. “That was pretty.” I hummed the lines back to her.

  “Oh, hit’s just one of them mournful old songs from up on Sodom, one of them old tunes that Granny sings,” Ella Jean said. “Hit’s a girl what loves this man with black hair, but he’s dead and buried in the ground. Somebody is always dead, and somebody else is always singing about it.”

  Just like opera, I thought. Recently, Mrs. Carroll and I had been studying Aida. I was very glad to see Ella Jean again, who stood out there in the sunshine grinning at me just like old times, her big apron pocket filled with wooden clothespins.

  “I got me a banjer now,” she announced. I was struck by her mountain accent, especially after talking to all those girls at Mrs. Grady’s, where we were given “elocution” lessons as a matter of course.

  “Ooh, I’d love to hear you play it!” I clapped my hands.

  “Ella Jean? Ella Jean Bascomb!” the short fat woman in charge of the laundry called from the back of the building. She stepped out the door and peered over at us. “Oh, I’m sorry! You take your time then, honey,” she yelled, seeing who I was, for everyone at Highland knew my special status.

  “I’ve got to go,” Ella Jean said to me. “Coming!” she hollered as she started back up the hill.

  I couldn’t stand to see her leave. “When do you get off?” I called after her. “Can’t you come over to Homewood sometime and we can sing some more? Nobody is ever in the music room after about four thirty or so.”

  “Tomorrow,” she yelled back down to me. “They can’t pick me up till real late tomorrow anyhow, so I reckon I could come then.”

  I did a quick calculation: I would have to cancel a shopping trip with Stephanie Patterson and her mother. I would say I had cramps, I decided. “Okay. I’ll see you over there.” I waved and Ella Jean waved back before she vanished into the billowing sheets.

  THE NEXT DAY she had the banjo. This was a primitive-looking long-necked thing with a rawhide face and a leather strap on it. I took my seat at the grand piano at Homewood while Ella Jean stood behind me, tuning the banjo and plucking at it.

  “Slow or fast?” I asked.

  “Fast,” she said. “You know me!”

  I started right in on Camptown Races, which we had done together years before. “Camptown racetrack’s five miles long, doo-dah, doo-dah,” we sang as one. Other people suddenly began to appear from everywhere—the art room, the practice rooms, the open door from outside, drawn by the music—especially the banjo, I believe, for a banjo has a naturally happy sound that no other instrument possesses. Everybody joined in lustily on “Oh, doo-dah day!”

  A WEEK LATER, Ella Jean held the banjo carefully between her knees as we jounced about on a pile of old tobacco sacks in the back of the most beat-up truck I had ever seen, heading toward Sodom Laurel, Ella Jean’s hometown up in Madison County, north of Asheville. Finally, after much pleading and bargaining on my part, Mrs. Hodges had agreed to this overnight visit, so that I might “hear Granny sing” myself. I am sure she would not have done so had Dr. and Mrs. Carroll not been off on one of their “jaunts”—this one to Chicago, where he was to address a worldwide conference of psychiatrists, as I recall.

  I still wasn’t exactly sure who our driver, Earl, was—relative or neighbor, I supposed. He had not yet spoken. A little old man in a shapeless black hat, Earl hunched so low in the seat that whenever I looked ahead through the cab’s cracked window, it appeared unnervingly as though no one was even driving. The smoke from his cigarette floated out the window of the truck past my face, almost sweet, and somehow intoxicating. The wind blew my hair into my eyes. I had to give Ella Jean credit, because somehow she had had the sense to get Earl to park down by the gate, out of sight. Mrs. Hodges would never have let me get into that truck if she had seen it. The last thing I saw as we left was Mrs. Hodges standing out in the middle of the road in front of Homewood with arms akimbo, a worried frown on her face, as the two of us raced down the hill. Ella Jean grabbed my overnight case and hoisted it up over the side of the truck, then the sack she’d been carrying, then finally the banjo, before jumping up herself and leaning back down with hand extended to pull me up. I had clambered over the top to land sprawling among the sacks and straw and old cans and boxes and trash that filled the back of the truck.

  “Lord!” Ella Jean exclaimed. “I never thought I’d see this day come, did you?”

  “No,” I said honestly, trying gingerly to make myself a little nest, for I feared we’d go flying
out once the truck picked up speed.

  “You ever been in the back of a truck before?” Evalina asked me over the rattling.

  “No,” I said.

  She grinned her jack-o’-lantern grin at me as Earl turned out of the Highland grounds and into regular Asheville traffic. We headed north, out of town.

  “You wanna dope?” Ella Jean rummaged around in her sack.

  “What?”

  She held up a strawberry Nehi pop. ”Hand me that there church key then,” she directed, at my nod.

  “What?” I asked.

  She pointed at a kind of bottle opener hung on a screw at the back of the truck with twine; I grabbed it and passed it over. That sweet hot soda was the best thing I had ever tasted, the carbonation going straight to my brain.

  “Here, now.” Ella Jean was down in the bag again.

  Next came saltine crackers in little cellophane packages, filched from the dining hall. They were delicious, too, and we ate them up ravenously. Ella Jean still had that special quality about her; she was simply more alive than anybody else. We rumbled on through Asheville past tall office buildings, then houses with yards, then farms and open road.

  Up and up we went, into that far countryside I had only seen as framed by the windows of Highland Hospital and the literal frames of the landscape paintings in the Art Room, where several of my favorites were watercolors by Mrs. Fitzgerald. First we came to the little farms and pastures and churches on knolls, each with its own graveyard, then the piney foothills, and finally those high, solemn blue mountains themselves, traveling up and up on roads so twisting they took my breath away and caused the truck’s engine to sputter until I thought it would surely die. Earl turned off the main road into a forest so thick and dark it was like a tunnel, then steered us back out into the sunshine, where the gravel road narrowed to a scary ribbon as it hugged a cliff side. The drop on our right was perpendicular. I could not even see what lay beyond the miles of empty air below. I shut my eyes and clutched Ella Jean’s brown arm.

  “Aren’t we almost there?” I asked.

  “No we ain’t,” she said, with evident satisfaction. “You just hold your horses.”

  I shut my eyes. The truck climbed to the top of that mountain, then another, and crossed a creek on a rickety wooden bridge with no guardrails.

  “Now?” I asked.

  “Yep.” We had come to a high narrow valley—or “holler,” as Ella Jean called it, looking out upon yet another range of rolling blue peaks. A dirt road ran up the holler, where several cabins were visible back in the trees, with their outbuildings.

  “But where’s the town?” I said.

  “Ain’t none.”

  I smiled to imagine Mrs. Hodges’s reaction to this news.

  The truck turned, forded a smaller creek, and made the last steep, short drive up into a clearing, where stood a large misshapen boy—or was he a man?—leaning against a kind of small barn to watch our approach without any emotion at all on his wide, flat face. Several little dogs were playing at his feet.

  “That’s Wilmer, he’s real sweet,” Ella Jean said. “He lives in that there barn.”

  “Hey Wilmer,” she called. A smile broke over his whole face. Earl stopped the truck and people came running out of the log house like the figures in Mrs. Carroll’s Austrian cuckoo clock. In addition to Wilmer, there were two little blond twins named Billy Ed and Mister. “He’s the one that was so sickly when he was borned,” Ella Jean explained, “so we just called him Mister instead of give him a name, that’s what we always do, in case they up and die on you, but he didn’t, and this time it stuck.”

  “Sissie, Sissie!” the twins ran to Ella Jean and hugged her legs.

  “Now this here is Evalina,” she said. “Can you say that? Eva-li-na.”

  “Ev-a-li-na!” they chorused, and I had to kneel right down and kiss them. I was very startled by their presence somehow, though I’d been told there would be children up here. They were wriggly and dirty and very real, like Ella Jean was—certainly more real, I felt suddenly, than my own life at the hospital. I knelt and hugged them tight, along with an older girl, maybe seven or eight, named Baby Doll, though she certainly did not look like a baby doll, dish-faced and sallow. Nobody here looked anything at all like Ella Jean.

  “Y’all come on.”

  I glanced up to see a tall, long-faced woman standing at the open door, holding a pie pan. She crossed the porch and threw the contents of the pan out into the bare “yard” below, where the dogs began yapping and fighting over it.

  “Them’s little fice dogs,” Ella Jean said. It seemed they would tear each other to bits over this food, which did not look all that good to me anyway, mostly bones. Why were they fed like this? Where were their dog bowls? The woman threw the pan itself out in the yard and they fought over it, too, and licked it clean.

  “This is Aunt Roe,” Ella Jean said of the woman, who did not look any too pleased to see us. Probably because I am one more mouth to feed, I realized, resolving to eat as little as possible.

  “Very pleased to meet you, ma’am,” I said.

  She nodded at me curtly but said nothing. Her nose was sharp, her eyes too close together.

  We trooped up onto the porch, where I was surprised to find that the pile of quilts in the corner actually contained Ella Jean’s Granny, the one she was always talking about. “Granny has got the sight,” she had said. Surely this was the oldest person I had ever seen, the oldest person in the whole world.

  Ella Jean pulled me over there. “Granny?” she shouted. “Granny? This here is Evalina, the one I’ve been telling you about.”

  The old eyes opened, bright as buttons. She reached out a skinny claw to grab me. Her hand was warm, and as she stroked my own, I felt a warm sense of well-being flow throughout me.

  “I’m so glad to meet you,” I said sincerely.

  “ ’Bout time,” she said in a voice surprisingly clear. She continued to look straight at me while holding my hand, now smoothing my palm again and again with her light, papery touch. Ella Jean stood uncharacteristically still, watching intently. I found myself closing my eyes for a minute, completely at peace. I opened them just in time to see a change come over Granny’s face, a grave sort of settling as she leaned back among her quilts. “Honey, honey,” she whispered fiercely then, balling my hand up into a fist and squeezing it so hard that I almost cried out in pain before she released me. Ella Jean grabbed me and pulled me back. I felt relieved, and a little scared.

  “Is she your grandmother or your great-grandmother?” I asked, jealous because I had neither, but Ella Jean just laughed at me. “One or t’other,” she said. “I don’t reckon it matters, does it?”

  “I don’t reckon it does,” I said.

  Inside, the log house was a jumble, with no regular furniture in the front room save for a giant handmade wooden wardrobe and Granny’s iron bed, pulled right up to the only window. Homemade mattresses—bedticks, they called them—were scattered across the floor beyond, along with several wooden chairs, trunks, and haphazard piles of clothing. A calendar from a funeral home and a long rifle hung on pegs above Granny’s bed. I could see why Wilmer might prefer to live in the barn! We threaded our way through the clutter, following Aunt Roe’s summons into the added-on “kitchen,” such as it was. She stood at the black cookstove dishing out food from two black pots and a skillet; Baby Doll already sat at the big wooden table, reading a comic book while she ate from a battered tin plate before her, along with the little boys, Billy Ed and Mister, who perched together on a sort of high homemade bench and ate their beans and cornbread with their hands from a single plate, literally shoveling it in. Longhaired, sweet-faced Wilmer appeared at the back door to receive a heaping plate of steaming food, then stumbled back out with it. Or at least I thought he stumbled—later on, I would realize that this was the way he walked.

  “Isn’t he going to eat with us?” I asked Ella Jean.

  “He don’t never eat with nobody,”
she said.

  Aunt Roe did not even look at us as she handed Ella Jean and me our plates of green beans, cornbread cut from the skillet, and something mysterious from the other pot. I had a special plate—blue and white china. Ella Jean grabbed us two dishrags for napkins and we took our seats at the bare wooden table just as Baby Doll got up. Aunt Roe gave her a plate to take out for Granny.

  “She won’t eat hardly a thing, though,” Ella Jean remarked to me. “Lives on music and air.”

  I, on the other hand, found that I had turned into a glutton; this was the best food I had ever put into my mouth, and suddenly I was ravenous. Ham and onions had been cooked along with the beans, for hours it seemed, by their smoky, salty taste. The cornbread was crisp and crusty outside, chewy and moist within. “And what’s this, exactly?” I asked, eating the other dish, a piece of something with thick gravy on it.

  “Meat,” Aunt Roe said.

  I did not pursue this topic, but ate every bite.

  “It really is good, Roe,” Ella Jean said, confirming for me that this was indeed a special supper.

  “Everything is just delicious!” I added sincerely, and Aunt Roe nodded, once. She herself ate standing up, though there were chairs at the table. I sensed that she preferred to take her meals this way.

  Suddenly we were joined by a barefooted girl in a flowing sort of nightgown, I believe, and a fringed, flowered shawl that dangled almost into my plate as she stood behind me and stretched her arms out over the table. She was very pale and very beautiful. Her eyes were shut; her silvery hair cascaded all down her back.

  “Mama, Mama!” the little boys chanted, pulling at her gown. Without her kitchen uniform and hairnet, I would never have recognized her.

  Never opening her eyes, their mother began, “May the Lord bless this food before us, may He bless and keep us every one, especially these sweet little children, and make His face to shine upon us all the days of our lives, so that we may go forth and do His bidding in the wide world, and live each day in such a way that we may enter into His kingdom, where we shall all be blessed to eat His heavenly food forever, and sing with His heavenly angels and say with them this heavenly prayer, ‘Our Father, who are in heaven, hallowed be Thy name . . .’ ”