by White, Ruth
“This is where I usta do my homework,” he said, and plopped himself down.
“Like old Abe Lincoln himself,” I commented.
It was just something to say, but once again Woodrow bristled and stabbed me with an icy glare. Was he going to take everything as an insult?
“Well, you see how old Abe turned out,” Cassie said brightly, trying to lighten him up.
Grandpa found a screwdriver and fixed the hinge on the front door so that it closed and opened proper. After that, he drew up a bucket of water from the well outside, and Woodrow hauled in the picnic basket.
“I guess we better go out and fetch some more firewood, Woodrow,” Grandpa said. “This here won’t last long.”
So the two of them went up on the hillside into the woods, which by that time were covered with a powdery snow, and Cassie and I set about making a picnic lunch on the kitchen table. Granny had fixed fried chicken, biscuits, potato salad, green beans, apple fritters, and iced tea in a jug. It was enough food for ten people.
We found plates, glasses, and forks in the cabinets, but no napkins.
“I’m not gonna ask Woodrow if there’s napkins,” I said. “He’s liable to knock my head off.”
Cassie chuckled.
If Woodrow didn’t change his ways, I thought, he would be the subject of my next New Year’s Revelation. I could see myself standing up in front of the family in the living room, saying, “The thing I want to get off my chest is about Woodrow. No matter who or what he’s mad at, he takes it out on me, and I’m sick and tired of it!”
That would fix him. I wondered if I could wait a whole year.
The snow was coming down fast and furious, and it took Woodrow and Grandpa an hour to find enough firewood. Most of it they piled in and around the woodbox, and the rest they stacked on the front porch. Only then were they ready to eat. Cassie and I were drooling by that time.
We gathered at the table, said the blessing, and filled our plates. Then we settled on the quilts before the fire, which crackled and flickered, making the room seem almost cheerful.
It was going to be quite the storm. You couldn’t call it a blizzard, because we didn’t have such things in our part of the country, but the wind had picked up considerable. I could hear it shooshing around the corners of the cabin, and I walked to one of the windows to look out at the wild white flurries.
I could barely make out the road, which wound up between the hills like a clean, white ribbon. There were no tire tracks on it, and I realized that we had not heard a vehicle going up or down the holler since we got here. Yeah, this was a desolate place all right, and it was going to be a long night if we had to stay, which was a real possibility.
I sat down again and stole a peek at Grandpa and Woodrow, who appeared unconcerned. Woodrow seemed like a small replica of Grandpa as they shoveled in their food, washed it down with tea, and wiped their mouths on their shirtsleeves, almost in unison. To a stranger Woodrow coulda passed for Grandpa’s own boy.
In the 1890s Grandpa had been a boy his own self, growing up on the top of Wiley Mountain, which was about as far out in the sticks as you could get. He had an old-timey, backwoods upbringing, but he always talked about it with warm looks on his face, like he’d go back if he could. So this was a return to childhood for him.
Right then Grandpa said, “Listen to that wind!” He grinned. “That’s a real snowstorm out there.”
Woodrow smiled in spite of himself. A person has to work hard at staying in a lousy mood when he’s having such a good time, I thought.
Drek’ly, Grandpa set his plate aside, rubbed his belly, and belched. Woodrow did the same. I figured if they’d had cigars, they’d a’ lit ’em up right then and there, and settled back for a contented smoke, like Grandpa sometimes did at home.
Yeah, they were both in their element. That was it. They were roughing it like the old-timers did, and they didn’t have to worry about good manners or appearances or anything else.
I nudged Cassie and said, “Let’s go to the bathroom.”
At which Woodrow exploded with laughter.
“Bathroom!” he managed to splutter.
Grandpa started laughing, too.
Cassie and I rolled our eyes at each other as we bundled up in our heavy gear again. We knew there was not really a bathroom. It was simply an outhouse there by the creek. I had been in people’s houses before who didn’t have bathrooms, so it was not my first time, for crying out loud. And Cassie Caulborne had been raised in a place almost like Crooked Ridge, so she had used outhouses most of her life. Then what was so funny?
“Don’t forget to flush!” Woodrow hollered as we went out the door, and we could hear them laughing until the wind drowned them out.
14
I took Cassie’s hand as we stepped into the storm and started toward the toilet by the creek, which was a short piece from the rear of the house. Snow lodged in my eyelashes and blinded me. To keep my bearings, I moved along the side of the building.
Unexpectedly, as we rounded a corner, the snow simply quit and the wind went away mysteriously to another place, where I could hear its distant echo as in a well. The air grew thick and warm, and a hundred voices whispered in whirling vapors around my head.
Talk about fey! I stopped in my tracks, and Cassie moved close in beside me.
“What in the world … ?” she said.
We clutched each other as the thing rolled over us again, and brought me a memory with it.
Almost a year ago Woodrow had told me about this place behind his house, where the air was thick and vibrating. He had said when you hit this warm spot, you could feel the air quivering, and you could hear noises. I had asked him what kind of noises, and he had said they were voices—funny voices.
So this was it! The place where the two worlds touch! Later on, he had told me it wasn’t real. He said him and his mama had made it up. But here it was. It felt real to me.
The whispers softened. You could not understand the words, but I thought I could feel puffs of breath on my cheeks and a pulsing of warm air. I trembled. And then it was gone. Once again the cold wind was pushing down my coat collar and the snow was blinding me.
Cassie and I hurried on to the outhouse.
By the time we returned, Grandpa had hung a pot of water on a hook over the fire to heat, for washing dishes. Woodrow was no place to be seen, so I figured he was in the bedroom, going through his mama’s things. I went in there.
“Woodrow,” I said. “I found the hole in the air you told me about.”
“Huh?” he said, lifting his eyes from a cigar box full of papers and photographs.
“You know, the place where the two worlds touch. I felt it! Cassie did, too.”
“Oh, that,” Woodrow said, unimpressed. “Aunt Millie said it was some kind of natural phenomena having to do with the air currents coming down the holler between the hills.”
“But you told me—” I tried to protest.
“Yeah, I know, I told you a lot of stuff,” he said irritably. “Something’s there all right. You can feel it. But it ain’t no place where the two worlds touch. Me and Mama made that up to entertain ourselves. I told you we made it up!”
He turned again to his chore like he was dismissing the whole subject, and me with it.
“You usta think your mama was in that place,” I said, hoping he would talk to me and not be so mad.
But my words had the opposite effect. He slammed the cigar box on the floor.
“That’s stupid, Gypsy,” he yelled at me. “You just don’t get it, do you? I told you what happened. She dressed up in my clothes and snuck out of here. My daddy said she left him and she left me on purpose, ’cause she didn’t love us anymore. And he’s right. Case closed!”
He continued to glare at me. I was vaguely aware of Grandpa and Cassie at the bedroom door, watching and listening, but I didn’t care. Now I was mad, too.
“Well, I don’t believe it!” I yelled back at him. “I know Aunt B
elle loved you and would never do such a thing! I don’t believe she’d just abandon you, and if you do, then you … you’re …”
I couldn’t think of what it was I wanted to say.
He crossed his arms and peered over his glasses at me. “I’m what?”
“I don’t know,” I finished lamely. “But I liked you lots better when you hoped for the best.”
“Well, I don’t hope for anything now,” he said bitterly. “Why should I?”
I could sense his tears just below the surface.
“I don’t know, Woodrow, but I still do.”
I charged past Grandpa and Cassie, into the main room, and found some soap flakes for washing dishes. Cassie, tying one of Aunt Belle’s aprons around her waist, came up beside me.
“I found this hanging on a nail behind the bedroom door,” she said quietly. “Maybe if I wear something that belonged to her, I’ll get a feel for her.”
We commenced cleaning up the kitchen area in silence. Later Cassie and I settled down in front of the fireplace again, while Grandpa sat near us and started whittling on a chunk of wood with his pocketknife. Woodrow stayed in the bedroom, poring over his mama’s belongings.
There was no talk at all about driving home. No doubt Grandpa and Woodrow had hoped to spend the night all along. Woodrow had left his new watch at home, and nobody else was wearing one, so we had no idea what time it was. We did know that dark crept over us much earlier than usual.
At suppertime we finished off the picnic food, and it was a’plenty. Woodrow ate in silence and stared into the flames, which threw dancing shadows into the far corners of the room.
“Don’t be blue, son,” Grandpa said kindly, placing an arm across Woodrow’s shoulders.
“Blue?” Woodrow said, raising his eyes to Grandpa. “Why’d you use that word?”
Grandpa shrugged. “It’s a good word.”
Woodrow glanced at me, then continued studying the fire.
“I’m whooped,” Grandpa said a while later. “I been up since five-thirty, and it’s time for old men like me to turn in.”
It was decided that Grandpa and Woodrow would take the bedroom, and Cassie and I could sleep in the loft.
“Now, you young’uns don’t stay up too late, you heah me?” Grandpa said as he went off to bed.
We said good night, and Woodrow lighted Grandpa’s way to bed with the lantern. Then he brought it again into the main room and sat with me and Cassie on the quilts.
“Hey, let me read y’all’s palms now,” Cassie said. “You first, Woodrow. Let’s see what we can see.”
Woodrow silently stuck out his hand, palm up, for Cassie. She studied it for some time, traced the lines with her index finger, nodded her head slowly like some wise old professor, and mumbled things to herself.
“Uh-huh … ah, I see … That’s not so clear … but oh, yes, this is good …” Finally she began her reading. “The Mount of Mars shows me that you have great vitality and courage. On the Mount of Luna I can see travel lines that indicate you are going to far places. The Life line is deep and long, yes, very long.”
They sounded like somebody else’s words, but Woodrow stayed perfectly still and listened close.
Then Cassie went into a fast spin, stringing sentences together almost like she was reading out loud in class, painting a muddled, fuzzy picture of Woodrow’s future accomplishments in school, job, and family. I don’t like to say it, but it sounded put on to me.
When she seemed to be done, he said, “And what else?”
“Not much,” she confessed.
“What about Mama?” he said.
“I can’t see anything about her.”
Cassie went through the same list of ahs and uh-huhs for me that she had for Woodrow. Then she began. She told me pretty near the same thing she had told him. I was wondering if everybody got the same reading from her, when suddenly she paused over a funny wee dimple near the beginning of my Life line. She touched it, and her face took on an expression of pity.
“Oh, Gypsy, this is sad,” she said.
“What is it?” I said, alarmed at her tone.
“When you were a real little girl …”
I jerked my hand away from her, feeling like she’d been reading my diary. Was it possible that Cassie had somehow tapped into the most dreadful event of my life?
“I didn’t see it all,” Cassie said.
“Somebody told you,” I said, glancing at Woodrow.
“Nobody told me,” she said. “But I’d like to know.”
I began massaging the palm of my hand as if the pain were there. I wondered if my wound had healed enough so that I could talk about it now. Maybe I could tell Cassie. She was plainly interested. People were naturally curious about things like this.
“My daddy took his own life,” I said matter-of-factly. Then, turning to the fire, I added with more feeling, “How could a person do that, I wonder?”
It was not a question you could answer, and we sat without speaking for what seemed like a long, long time. We could hear Grandpa snoring, but nobody laughed. The shadows on the walls no longer danced with the same energy. They seemed tired and hazy.
15
After a while Woodrow stood up and began to poke at the fire with the poker. Then he walked to a cabinet and pulled out a fruit jar full of popcorn kernels. Next he took an iron skillet from a peg above the cookstove, slapped a big dollop of lard into it, and set it into the hot coals at the edge of the fire. When the lard was melted, Woodrow threw salt into it, then about half a cup of the popcorn. He placed a cover over the skillet, and we waited to hear the popping begin.
Finally, the corn began to pop, first at slow intervals, then faster. Now and again, Woodrow would shake the skillet to keep the popcorn from burning. At last, when the lid started rising off the skillet, he set it on the hearth, and we had the best popcorn I had ever tasted.
“Being here in the snow reminds me of a story,” said Woodrow as we picked the popcorn hulls from our teeth with broom straws. “Wanna hear it?”
Of course we did.
“It’s the truth,” he went on. “It happened during the first snow of the winter. Matter o’ fact, I think it was the only snow of that winter. But it wadn’t no big one like this one. It was just enough to slick up the place.
“I was around eight or nine, I reckon, and I was spending the day with Uncle Russell ’cause Daddy was working, and Mama and Aunt Millie were gone to Richlands to see a doctor.”
Woodrow stopped talking and stared thoughtfully into the fire.
“It was good to see Uncle Russell again the other day. I usta see him a lot, and I’ve missed him,” he said.
Then he came back to the story.
“Uncle Russell had this horse that was old, swaybacked, and ornery as sin, but we were attached to that booger, both of us. His name was Thistle. That day Uncle Russell went to the barn and hooked him up to an empty sled. We were fixing to take him down the hill where there were some sacks of store-bought feed we needed to haul from the house, in the bottom, back to the barn, which was up the hill a piece.
“I’m not talking about a toy like you ride down the slope in the snow for fun. This contraption was about the size of the bed on a pickup truck. It was made of plain flat boards, and it had two runners, one on each side. It was just used for hauling stuff, with the horse pulling it.
“Well, like I said, it was slippery as butter out there, and me and Uncle Russell neither one had on boots. We didn’t have any. The bottoms of our shoes were slick, and we were having quite the time just staying on our feet, much less guiding the horse.
“We got Thistle headed in the right direction, and Uncle Russell hollered at him to giddy-yap. Thistle started off down the path at a trot, and no matter how hard we pulled on the reins, we couldn’t slow him down. Nearabout all we could do was hold on tight, and try to follow without breaking our necks.
“Then all of a sudden, the runners picked up some speed, and got going faster
than Thistle was going. First thing we knew, it had crashed into the horse’s behind and knocked his legs out from under him. Wham! Down he went right on top of the boards with his legs just a’pawin’ the air like he was running to heaven.
“That sled with the horse on top of it took off like a bullet, and picked up the momentum of a freight train! Me and Uncle Russell went running and falling, running and falling, and we couldn’t keep up! Next thing we knew, horse and all had rounded the curve and gone out of sight down the road.
“We were total breathless as we reached the bend. There we saw old man Leslie Matney, who was about ninety, and he said to us, ‘Lordy mercy, you ain’t gonna believe what I saw just now—a horse ridin’ a sled!’
“When we finally caught up with Thistle, we saw he had come to rest as pretty as you please against a bank. He was sitting there on the sled, looking around him, not hurt one bit.
“We like to laughed ourselves silly while we were hugging that horse and trying to help him up on his feet.”
Me and Cassie laughed hard, too, and when Woodrow would repeat parts of it, we’d get to laughing again, harder than before. When we were all the way laughed out, Woodrow went to the window.
“The snow’s stopped,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I think I can see a few stars.”
Cassie and I joined him at the window.
“Lookee, you can see the chim’ly smoke coming around the corner there where the two worlds touch. It don’t know which way to go,” said Woodrow.
We watched the smoke swirling one way, then another. I looked at the hills. It was really beautiful out there, but cold and remote. Once again, I felt isolated, like maybe the Russians had come over and blowed up the whole United States, except for us tucked away in this holler.
“It’s lonely,” I said.
“Yeah, and scary,” Cassie said. “Can you imagine being out there in the night with no house to go to, and being cold and afraid, and alone in the dark?”
We thought about that for a moment, then Woodrow said, “What’s the scariest place in the world?”