by Ruth White
“Betty Rose.”
He sits perfectly still while he stares a hole through me. He does not move a finger or an eyelid. He’s like a statue. And a thought comes to me. No, it couldn’t be him, could it?
“Now it’s your turn,” I say, and my voice trembles a bit. “Who are you?”
But he does not answer my question.
“How old are you?” he asks, with so much seriousness it’s scary.
I am rattled, but I answer him. “I’m fourteen, but I’ll be fifteen in December.”
“December?” he croaks again. “What year were you born?”
“Nineteen forty-two.”
He goes on staring at me. And now I can see it in his eyes. They are my eyes. They are the eyes in the photo on the mantel. It was the beard that threw me off.
“I’m August Rose,” he says.
I don’t recognize these feelings that charge through me. They are all so different and some of them hurt, and some of them feel good, and some of them are mean, and wild as a wolf.
So I run. Through the dining room, past the log room, up the stairsteps, and into the safety of Garnet’s room, where I curl up in a tight ball on my bed.
19
Maybe a half hour passes, and there’s a knock at my door. I stay still. The door opens.
“Garnet,” Aunt June says.
I don’t answer.
“I know you’re not asleep,” she says.
I hear rain.
“Garnet, you should talk to him.”
I don’t move, and I hear her closing my windows.
“He really wants to talk to you.”
Go away. Go away. I don’t say it out loud. I would never say that to Aunt June. But she does go away. I hear the door closing softly. I hear pattering against my windows. Outside the air is cooling. The mountains are rejoicing with the summer rain.
After a while I get up and look out the front window. There’s a brand-new white ’57 Chevy in the yard beside the porch. And it’s a convertible. Well, lah-de-dah. It must belong to him—the Happy Wanderer, Aunt June calls him. I reckon he just wandered in this morning, from God knows where, and soon he’ll wander away again. But I don’t care.
I pull my vanity chair to the back window and look at the rain. It’s good for the garden, but we’ll have to weed again real soon. There’s another knock on my door. I don’t move. The door opens. I don’t look around but I know it’s him.
“April,” he says.
“Garnet!” I correct him sharply. “Mom always calls me Garnet, and now I know why.”
“And why … is that?” he says uncertainly.
“Because the month names were the Rose family tradition, and she was mad at you.”
“Oh. All right then—Garnet. Will you talk to me?”
“You deserted us,” I say.
“I did not know about you,” he says, and I hear him sitting down on my bed.
I finally turn to face him. “How could you not know?”
“I left in April, 1942. At that point, she probably didn’t know herself.”
I am more than a little stunned. He didn’t know? All of these feelings—the hurting ones, the good ones, the wild ones—are fighting each other inside me.
“April Garnet is the name we picked out in the event we ever had a girl,” he says. “When you told me your name, I knew the truth. And I never even suspected before that moment. I swear.”
Could this be true? He didn’t know that I was expected? Why would Mom lead me to believe he knew? That he walked out on both of us?
“And what about a b-boy?” I stammer.
“What?”
“What would y’all have named a boy?”
“Oh.” He smiles a little. “August Second.”
He wants me to think that’s cute, but I don’t.
“Where have you been?” I snap, sounding like Mom used to sound when I came in from playing too late.
“Everywhere, but the last six months I was in Bristol working.” He touches his face. “I don’t usually look like this. I heard about the centennial celebration, so I grew this beard before coming back. I hate it.”
“Me too. Why don’t you shave it off?”
“I will on the Fourth of July, along with everybody else.”
I can’t believe it. Here I am talking to my father for the first time in my life, and what’s the subject? His beard.
“How long are you staying?” I ask.
“Indefinitely,” he says. “I’m thinking of coming back here to live and work.”
“Mom and I are going to live in Florida,” I say real quick.
“So I hear,” he says.
I turn back to the window and watch the rain.
“Garnet,” he says.
But I don’t answer.
“Garnet, I don’t blame you for being hurt and angry.”
“Who says I’m hurt and angry?”
“You do. You say it with every move, every word you say, and every word you don’t say.”
I shrug.
“Do you think your mother will let me come and visit you in Florida?”
I don’t respond.
I hear him sigh. “Garnet, now that I know I have a daughter, do you think I can forget about you? I’m sure I’ve missed a lot, and now I want to be a part of your life.”
“Mom and I have been doing extremely well, thank you very much, without you.”
I cross my fingers, because that was a whopper.
“Will you tell me about it?” he asks.
“About what?”
“About growing up. What it was like. I want to know you.”
“No.”
He is quiet, and I’d like to turn around and see his expression, but I can’t look into his eyes again. They are warm eyes, and I know that’s how he fooled Mom for so long—with his deceitful warm eyes. Maybe he didn’t know about me, but he deserted her!
“I have been all over the South,” he says. “From the oil fields of Texas to the cotton fields of Georgia. I’ve been to the Ozarks and the Smokeys, the sand hills of South Carolina, and the bayous of Louisiana. From Virginia Beach to Miami Beach.”
“Well, I’ve never been anywhere, except to come here!”
“That’s too bad,” he says sympathetically, but then he goes right on talking. “I think I liked the ocean almost as much as the mountains. Can I tell you a little story?”
I don’t say yes or no.
“It was one night maybe a year ago. I was sitting in my car in Virginia Beach.”
He acts like I have agreed to hear his story.
“I was watching the ocean waves rise and fall, rise and fall. There was a full moon and about a zillion stars. And suddenly I had this overwhelming sense of loneliness come over me. I guess I was feeling sorry for myself.”
In all my thoughts of August Rose, I never did imagine him feeling sad.
“I finally fell asleep,” he goes on. “I often sleep in my car. And in my dream I could hear the roar of the ocean. I was walking on the beach at the end of the world at the end of time. There was nobody left but me.”
I finally turn around again to look at my daddy, and his eyes don’t leave my face as he continues his story.
“Then above the roar of the ocean, I clearly heard my own voice saying, ‘Go home.’”
He is quiet for a long time, and I don’t interrupt his thoughts.
“I woke up alone on an empty beach in the early morning hours,” he said, “but that experience haunted me, Garnet, and you know what I think now?”
“What?” I say almost breathlessly.
“I think the dream was calling me back here, maybe because of you.”
My eyes are stinging, but I won’t cry! I’m not a pushover for sentimental stuff.
“On the conscious level, I didn’t even know about you, but maybe, just maybe, on some other level I did know. Understand?”
“Yeah, I do. But why did it take you a whole year to get back here?”
Again we sit in silence. Then he leans forward and grins at me.
“And what kind of welcome do I get? A wild girl threatens me with a gun!”
He reminds me of Poppy now, and I can’t help smiling.
“You look like your mom,” he says. “I don’t know why I didn’t see that right off. She was the prettiest girl I ever saw.”
“She’s still pretty,” I say as I go to the drawer and produce the snapshot of her. Proudly, I present it to my dad.
I watch his expression as he studies Mom’s face. Something flickers there in his blue eyes, but I can’t quite read him yet. Then without commenting, he tucks the photo into his shirt pocket. I start to tell him I want the picture back, but for some reason I don’t.
I sit down again in my vanity chair.
“I’ll bet she never told you that she ran me off,” he says.
“Who? Mom?”
“Yeah, she told me to pack my things and get out. She never wanted to see me again—but I’ll admit I was relieved.”
“Well, she says you ran away with a carnival singer.”
“That was not true.”
“Mom never lied to me.”
“I’m sure she didn’t. She told you what she believed to be true. But she was wrong.”
He does not look away as he tells me this. I heard on the radio one time that when someone is lying to you they can’t look you straight in the eye.
“I met that carnival singer and I joked around with her a bit and teased her. I guess some people would call it flirting. But my only purpose was to get free tickets for Betty and me to the carnival.”
“And Mom quit you for that?”
“Yes and no. It got all blown up out of proportion and turned into a big ugly thing. It was the last straw, you know, in a long list of … stuff.”
“Stuff?” I say. “Did you do that kind of stuff all the time?”
“No. Once I met Betty, there was nobody else. She just couldn’t take my word for that. She was too insecure.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, I guess you know that when she was five or six years old, her mother died. Her dad dropped her off at the house of a distant relative and never came back for her. She couldn’t believe that I would not leave her too.”
The shock of Dad’s words renders me speechless for a moment. No, I didn’t know that about Mom. She would never talk about her childhood.
Her dad dropped her off at the house of a distant relative and never came back for her? But no, it was too cruel. So cruel I can’t even let it enter my head that she planned the same fate for me.
“And I did leave her,” Dad goes on. “We just couldn’t get along. It was at the point that I was ready to leave, and when she told me to get out, well I did.”
“If y’all really loved each other,” I say, “it seems to me like you would have tried to work things out.”
“First of all, we were both hot-tempered and hardheaded.”
Hardheaded? That’s what Mom called me in her last letter.
“And second we were just kids—and really dumb,” Dad says.
“Hot-tempered and hardheaded does not sound like Mom.”
“I reckon she’s grown up, and so have I,” Dad says.
“She’s done her best by me,” I tell him.
“I’m sure of it,” Dad says.
20
Now we are at the kitchen table and Aunt June is making her special recipe pancakes and sausage. She has poured coffee for us, and I sip at it, liking it better than I did the first time.
Dad can’t get enough of staring and grinning at me, the way Poppy did that Sunday when we met. I guess I do my share of staring and grinning too.
Aunt June places an arm across Dad’s shoulder and kisses him on the head. Her cheeks are glowing and her eyes are shining. In fact, she strongly resembles a person who is healthy as a horse. She and Dad obviously had a talk this morning during the time I was cowering in my room after meeting him in the kitchen, so I wonder if she told him then that she has been healed of cancer.
“I’ve missed you, big sister,” he says to her.
“Now tell the truth, you missed my cooking!” she teases him.
“Yeah, especially your cooking.”
Aunt June places a pitcher of cold milk, a crock of hot syrup, and a mound of butter on the table, then serves up the pancakes and sausage. She joins us at the table, and we feast.
The rest of the day is hectic. First, Emory and Avery come down to breakfast, and they are both tickled pink to see their uncle August. Later Uncle Otis comes home to take Aunt June to the doctor, and then Poppy comes home from his trip to Bluefield, and there’s a lot of hugging and backslapping.
Around five o’clock I manage to slip away from everybody and go to the October room to wait for Silver to call, which he does, and I can’t get the words out fast enough. Of course I tell him about Dad first.
“And you’re not mad at him anymore?” Silver asks.
“No. He didn’t know about me. How could I be mad?”
Then I tell him about Mom calling, and that I will be leaving for Florida soon.
“How soon?” he wants to know.
“I’m not sure. I’m hoping Mom will give me some more time to visit with my dad.”
“And what about me?”
Is Silver feeling left out?
“I want to see you as much as I can,” I assure him. “But when do you think we can get together again?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll ask Dad.”
I’m thinking it would be cool if his dad brought him up here. Then I tell Silver about the second important event of the day.
“Now, this is really, really weird,” I warn him.
“Yeah? Well, tell me something weird, April Rose.”
“Aunt June went to the doctor, and he could not find a sign of the tumor that was growing in her—not even a trace. It’s gone.”
“Hmm-mm” is all that Silver says.
“Don’t you think it’s peculiar?”
“Dad will be overjoyed to hear it,” Silver says.
“How do you explain it, Silver?”
“I can’t really, but maybe it’s like those firewalkers in India when they place their bare feet on hot coals and don’t get burned.”
“I’ve heard of that.”
“Well, it’s something like that. They do it with their minds. It’s a simple case of mind over matter.”
What an evening we have in the big friendly kitchen, with its gigantic fireplace, leather sitting area, and its dozen chairs around the wooden table! We are celebrating Aunt June’s healing and Dad’s arrival and our first day together. I am sitting between Aunt June and Dad on the couch. Old friends drop by to chat, to reminisce, to laugh. And to every single one of those people, Dad presents me proudly as his daughter.
“Can you believe it?” he says.
Or, “I never dreamed.”
Or, “Isn’t she beautiful?”
Through all this, there is music—of sorts—pouring from the kitchen radio, because my dad wants it on, no matter how disturbing the racket. Uncle Otis’s brother, Dewey, and his family are here; Mr. Richards has left his store to pop in for a moment; and a black-faced coal miner who went to school with Dad has stopped by on his way home from work.
The room has become a dictionary picture beside the word “chaos” when Aunt June can stand the hysterical singing on the radio no longer. She throws up her hands, yells, “Eee-gads!,” slaps the radio knob to Off, and sits back down.
Thunderous silence falls over the room for only a moment; then the laughter and talking erupt even louder than before.
“That’s the spirit you’ve been missing, my girl,” Poppy says to her. “That’s my spunky girl.”
Aunt June grins.
“August, hanging around you and your people is still as much fun as ever,” the coal miner says. “Go
t any new jokes for us?”
“Speaking of jokes,” Uncle Otis interrupts, “this girl of yours, August, can tell a good one.”
All eyes turn to me, and I feel my face go warm with the praise and attention.
“Well, tell one then!” Dad says to me.
But I feel shy. “I can’t think of one right now.”
“I got one! I got one!” Avery cries out. He is on the floor with Madge, helping her color a page in her Mouseketeers coloring book.
“Oh, Avery, your jokes are dumb,” Emory says.
“Well, jokes are supposed to be dumb!” Dad says, and smiles at Avery. “Tell it, partner.”
“Okay.” Avery stands up and tells his joke, like he’s as big as anybody. “These two cannibals are eating a clown, and one cannibal turns to the other and says, ‘Does this taste funny to you?’”
We all laugh heartily at Avery’s “dumb” joke, and he beams.
“Now it’s your turn, August,” Poppy encourages him.
“Okay,” Dad says, and looks around the room at his audience. “I heard this one in Mobile, Alabama. A woman gets on a bus with her baby, and the bus driver says, ‘Lady, that’s the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen. Ugh!’
“And the woman, fuming, goes to the rear of the bus and sits down. She says to the man next to her, ‘That driver just insulted me!’ And the man says to her, ‘Well, you go right up there and give him a piece of your mind. Go ahead, and I’ll hold your monkey for you.’”
As everybody laughs, I look around at all these happy faces and think about how my life has changed in such a short time, how much I love it here in this house beside the road with all its joyful people.
And I realize it’s always been just me and Mom getting by with no male persons in our life at all. Now, I have not only a daddy and a grandpa, but also an uncle and two boy cousins. And of course, there’s Silver! My heart aches now for Mom, who, except for me, has been alone forever and a day. As all this goes through my mind, I admit that I really would like to stay here forever, but how could I leave my mom? First Dad, and then me? No, it would break her heart. And I would definitely miss her.
It seems I can’t have it all, no matter which way I look at it. So I shrug away the thought and get back to this precious moment. The television is forgotten as we carry on far into the night. When we finally are ready to turn in, Emory and Avery double up so that Poppy can have Avery’s room and Dad can have his old room back.