by Ruth White
Samuel has gone to one of the stores and bought a monkey on a string for Charles, and a rubber baby doll for Jewel. He has also bought a hunk of baloney and a chunk of bread, which we practically inhale. Mack treats everybody to a bottle of pop from his own pocket, and I feel happy as we drive back through the hills on this lovely day. We tell Mommie and Samuel about the movie, and Samuel says next time he and Mommie will go along with us to the show. Next time? Oh, I hope with all my heart there will be a next time.
In the dead of night I am wide awake again remembering it all. The automobile. The town. The people – maybe a hundred of them. The picture show. Trula and Mack holding on to each other. That man touching my hair. He called me Curly Locks. I know that nursery rhyme.
Curly Locks, Curly Locks, wilt thou be mine?
Thou shalt not wash dishes nor yet feed the swine.
But sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam
And live upon strawberries, sugar and cream.
And I know it’s the biggest lie ever was in the world. Trula knows it too.
Five
September, 1920
Luther finished eighth grade last year like Samuel and Trula did before him, and that’s as far as you can go in Deep Bottom. If you want a highschool education you have to go all the way to Granger, and that’s eighteen miles.
Roxie is now in charge of taking the eggs to Mr. Call in the mornings, and handling the money for school supplies. She starts eighth grade this year and Nell starts the sixth. I am in fourth and Charles is in the second. Jewel will start next year. I like my new teacher, Miss Mays. She is so pretty, all the boys are in love with her. She brags on me for how good I can read and write. I’m good in grammar too. I like to say things right. Such as saying brought instead of brung.
Most days before going home, we walk over to Mr. Call’s store to pick up our mail, if we have any. Mrs. Call is an official worker for the U.S. Post Office, and she puts all of our mail in a wooden cubby hole marked W. STARR. Once in awhile there’s a letter from Mommie’s kin, the Browns, who live over at Stormy Ridge, or there might be a catalog or a calendar from a farm supply, or a newspaper from Bluefield or Richmond when Samuel has the money to buy a subscription.
Mack Call works for his daddy doing this or that, and most of the time he is in the store when we go in. He’s been real chummy with us since he drove us to Skylark. He gives each one of us a piece of penny candy to munch on the way home. Then he has a private talk with Nell.
I ask Nell, “What’s Mack Call got to say to you?”
“Mack? Oh, he just likes to talk. You know Mack.”
But she won’t look me in the eye. Something sneaky is going on.
October, 1920
Samuel answers an ad in the newspaper calling for workers to help build a road in Richmond the capitol of Virginia. They write back and tell him to come on out and give it a try. So he does. I will miss him awfully, but I know he’s happy to be making good wages. Before long we get two letters from him. One is addressed to everybody. Roxie reads it to us as we walk home from school. He tells us he is working hard and eating so much he’s liable to get fat. He is staying in a boarding house with some of the other workers. Before Christmas, he says the road building company will quit working for about three months and commence again in the spring. He can’t wait to see us in December. He sends a dollar for Mommie, a dollar for Dad and a quarter to buy us kids some candy with.
A second letter is addressed to me – Lorelei Starr, Starr Mountain, Deep Bottom, Virginia. It’s the first letter I ever got in my life, and I look at the envelope for a long time. It has passed through strangers’ hands all the way from Richmond. It’s got a stamp on it and everything. Samuel knows what a thrill this is for me, and that’s why he sent it. Nobody ever had a sweeter brother.
In the letter I find that Samuel has another thrill for me. He wants to confide in somebody, and I am the one he picked. He tells me that next door to the boarding house there lives a girl named Lucille who is as pretty as a rose. She is eighteen and went all the way through highschool. He says lots of girls in Richmond do that. He wishes that I had that chance. He might take Lucille to a picture show if he can find somebody to give them a ride. He asks me not to tell anybody. He wants it to be between him and me for now. I kiss the letter and hug it close to my heart.
November, 1920
It’s the first frost of the season, and I wake up in the chill of night to a full moon shining into the girls sleeping loft, lighting up the room nearly bright as day. Nell and Jewel are breathing heavy in the bed with me. I look over to the other bed and see that Roxie is by herself. Trula is not there. A sick feeling comes over me because I know where she is. She’s with Mack, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the first time she has met him in the middle of the night.
I sit up in bed and look out over the mountaintop. I can see somebody running there. Somebody with a bag slung over her shoulder. I know it’s Trula. And there is Mack running to meet her. She jumps into his arms in the full light of the moon, and they hug and kiss. He swings her around and around, and I can tell they are laughing together. Tears come to my eyes. They are so happy – and so wrong. Then they step over the curve of the world and disappear.
If it wasn’t for Mack’s wife and babies I’d be glad for Trula, but there you have it. I lay my head back down and touch the yella ducks that Trula embroidered on my pillow case when I was little.
Trula is not back in the morning, nor at night, and not the next day either. I know now the bag I saw on her shoulder held all her belongings. When Dad understands what has happened, the rest of us just stay out of his way. He kicks things and hollers at Mommie that it’s all her fault.
“I knew no good would come of y’all riding around in automobiles,” says he, “and going to doctors when you don’t have to. It wouldn’t happen like this if Trula had stayed home where
she belongs and not been sucked in by modern ways. Carrying on with another woman’s man is worse than stealing. And I didn’t raise no thieves!”
Now our Trula is the talk of Starr Mountain and the valley too. She and Mack were seen leaving Deep Bottom in Mr. Call’s car, but nobody knows where they went.
In the last of the evening light I find Nell sitting on the bed that is now hers and Roxie’s, counting pennies.
“Where did you get that money?” I ask her.
She does not answer me.
“I know,” I say. “Mack Call gave it to you for passing messages to Trula.”
Still she says nothing. I just stare at my sister. She is a stranger to me.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” I ask her.
“What I have done?” she says, sitting up straight and putting one hand on her hip. “I’m not the one who’s messing around with a married man! She’s the nasty one!”
She glares at me, and for the first time in my life I feel like slapping one of my sisters. But I don’t. Instead I leave the loft and don’t speak to her for days. Mommie has nothing in the world to say about Trula, but I notice she has stored some more white streaks in her hair and some new pleats in her face.
All the work Trula used to do now falls on Roxie and Nell, and I have to do some of what they used to do. I don’t mind it and Nell deserves it, but not sweet Rox. She should not have to work so hard. Dad makes Luther milk the cows, but I have to churn the butter. Jewel can carry the butter to the little cooling house in the drinking spring, but she’s still too little to help more than that.
December, 1920
Samuel comes home to us sick. Mommie says it’s bronchitis. He stays in the boys’ loft coughing like his weak lungs are giving out on him. He says he will be good as new after he rests up. Mommie bathes his feverish face in cool water and doctors him with groundhog grease, until he begs her NO MORE PLEASE! I don’t blame him. Groundhog grease is the nastiest taste you ever had in your mouth. I’d rather be sick than take it.
On Christmas Day he is feeling better. I go and sit by his be
d, and we talk about Lucille. Oh, she is really something, he tells me. She’s light-complected and has blond hair, and the daintiest feet you ever saw. Her cute little nose wrinkles up when she giggles, so he tries to make her laugh as often as he can. Her brother is a school teacher. Fancy that. A school teacher in a big city like Richmond. What a fine family it must be. But with Samuel being so handsome, I am not surprised Lucille favors him.
While we are alone, Samuel gives me two dollars. I have never had so much money at one time, and I ask him, “What in the world am I going to spend it on?”
He says, “Don’t waste it on something useless like candy. Put it away in a safe place, and one of these days you’ll see something special you want. Then you’ll be glad you didn’t spend your two dollars.”
Later he gets dressed and comes downstairs for Christmas dinner where he gives Mommie and Dad some money too. I don’t know how much. Dad tells him it’s a fine son that obeys the most important commandment to honor thy father and mother. Not like another one of his young’uns, and we all know he is talking about Trula. This makes me cry, and Dad tells me to hush up or he’ll give me something to cry about.
Then he turns to Roxie and makes her promise she will never do a thing like her prodigal sister did. Roxie just nods her head. I know she can’t bring herself to say such a thing against Trula out loud.
Dad says, “That’s my sweet Rox.”
January, 1921
We have not heard a word from Trula, and my heart is sore with missing her. She took care of me till I was big. Now she is gone. Dad won’t even let us mention her name, so if Mack deserts her, she’s got nobody to fall back on.
Mommie is still as thin as a weed, and her face is all washed out. I wonder if Samuel wasted his money on the doctor. To make matters worse Nell has taken to coughing pretty bad, and she’s getting skinny too. At school she rests her head on her desk a lot, and when she’s home she has to lie down in the middle of the day.
Most of the work falls on me and Roxie now. I hate doing the washing. You have to haul buckets and buckets of water from the spring to the kitchen to heat on the cooking stove. Then you have to scrub the clothes on a scrub board, and your knuckles get red and blistered. It takes me and Roxie most of the day on Saturday to do the laundry. Jewel is learning to look after Daniel, which is a help.
March, 1921
Samuel is healthy and happy when he leaves us on a fine Sunday morning. We won’t see him again till Christmas. I will miss him, but I think he is the lucky one to get to leave here and have something else besides Starr Mountain to look at from his window, and to have his own money to court his pretty sweetheart.
The county nurse comes to the school house to give hygiene lessons to the girls. She tells us how to keep ourselves clean all over. Trula has already taught me and Roxie and Nell this stuff, and I am thinking that the boys are the ones who need hygiene lessons. For instance, somebody should tell them about sneezing into their hands and wiping it on their overalls. Or coming to school with so much dirt in their ears you could grow corn in there.
Nell starts coughing during the nurse’s lesson. After a while she quits, but before the class is over she starts again. This time the nurse stops what she’s saying and looks at Nell.
“Does blood ever come up when you cough like that?” she asks.
“Yes ma’am, it does sometimes,” Nell says.
It’s the first I’ve heard of this.
“And do you ever wake up sweating in the night?” the nurse wants to know.
Nell says, “Yes ma’am,” again.
The nurse says, “Tell Willy and Gertrude I’ll be up to see them soon.”
The next Saturday Roxie and I are doing the washing in the kitchen and Nell is resting her head on the kitchen table when we hear someone come into the house. Then we hear the nurse’s voice. We stop what we are doing and listen.
We hear the nurse saying, “I want to take Nell to a doctor in Granger.”
We three go into the big room where Dad and the nurse are sitting in chairs, and Mommie is perched on the side of the bed.
“’Cause I’m pretty sure she’s got consumption,” the nurse goes on.
Roxie starts to cry and puts an arm around Nell.
The nurse says to Roxie, “Dry up! Nell is a lucky girl. These days the doctors can cure some cases of consumption if they catch it soon enough. And if this doctor says to do it, we’ll send her over to Roanoke to the Catawba Sanitorium right away.”
“I don’t have money for sanitoriums,” says Dad.
The nurse says, “It’s no skin offen your nose, Willy Starr. The state pays.”
Things happen fast after that. The county nurse takes Nell to the doctor and he says that she does have tuberculosis, as he calls it. That’s the proper name. She should be taken to the
sanitorium right away, and we will not be allowed to see her again until the doctors say she’s not contagious anymore – if that ever happens. The nurse tells the rest of us the signs to look for in case we might have T.B. too.
On a cold windy Saturday our Nell is fixing to leave us. She has placed all her belongings in a feed sack. She has had little to say since the nurse’s first visit. She seems stunned, like she’s had a lick on the head. Before she goes I hug her tight and tell her I love her no matter what, so she understands that I forgive her for helping Mack like she did. Dad tells her to behave herself, and Mommie tells her to do everything she’s told so she can come home soon.
Nell manages a scared smile for me and Roxie as she goes out the door. Luther is going to haul her down the mountain on the flat bed wagon with Barney pulling. In Deep Bottom they are to meet a strange man and woman who will drive Nell in an automobile to Granger. There they will put her on a train to Roanoke all by herself. We have been assured that somebody will meet her at the other end of her trip.
When Luther comes home, I ask him if Nell was upset being left with strangers.
“What do you think?” Luther answers me in a grouchy voice, exactly like Dad’s. “Yeah, she was upset. She cried and begged me to bring her back home.”
He unloads supplies he has brought from Call’s, and doesn’t say another word about it.
At nightfall, when I lie down in bed beside Jewel, I see that last smile of Nell’s before she left us. I see it over and over again. I know she is probably safe at the sanitorium by this time, but she must be terrified out there alone in the world with none of her family near for the first time in her life. I hear Roxie tossing in the other bed all night.
Samuel gone. Trula gone. Nell gone. How did we get so scattered to the wind?
April, 1921
At first we get heart-wrenching letters from Nell: Please don’t make me stay here. I hate this place. They make me sleep outside. I want to go home. I miss the mountains. Please come and get me.
Roxie and I write encouraging things back to her: Don’t give up. Do everything the doctors say. It won’t be long. You’ll come home to us. We love you.
More hopeful letters follow: I feel better. I have a friend. Her name is Helen. We’re the same age. We have a sleeping porch all to ourselves where we can talk. The sleeping porch is for cleaning out our lungs in the night air.
Then her tone turns almost happy. The food is good. We have socials on Saturday night. They are lots of fun. Me and Helen go together. We play games. We laugh. We sing. Singing strengthens the lungs.
May, 1921
Aunt Clara who is married to Uncle Artemis, tells Mommie that cousin Pearl told her that Mack and Trula came back from wherever they went off to, and Trula’s belly is big. Mack has let a house for Trula over at the mouth of Gordy’s Branch, between Deep Bottom and Skylark, and he has gone back to live with his wife and kids. At least he lives with them part time and with Trula part time.
Mommie does not repeat this news to Dad, but I hear her telling Luther.
Luther says, “I don’t care one way or the other. Trula has shamed the family, and she’s no l
onger my sister.”
Trula is only fourteen months older than Luther, and she never did mother him like she did me. I know he would not talk that way if he had the memories I have of Trula – of how she carried me out of the frozen forest, plaited my hair in pigtails for school, told me fairy tales, gave up her orange to Grandpa so I didn’t have to give him mine, and how she helped Mommie bring Daniel into the world. I know these and a million other memories will go on living somewhere even after my body becomes an empty shell.
June, 1921
Mommie is going to have another baby. She’s not sure when. Her belly is starting to bulge, but her arms and legs are still like twigs. She does not feel like lifting a finger to do anything. Roxie, Jewel and I carry food to her and do all the work and take care of Daniel.
Dad has brought home a new dog. He calls him Mutt. It’s the first dog we’ve had since Dixie, and I don’t go near him. I won’t even feed him. I make Jewel do it. I don’t want to love him.
Our meanest mule, Barney, is getting old and slow. Back in the early spring the younger mule Abe had to do all the plowing without Barney’s help, but he got the job done. Then Roxie and I had to stay out of school for a few days to help Dad and Luther with the planting. It’s hard work planting and hoeing and weeding. Your palms get grimy and rough like a boy’s.
The things we canned last summer are nearly gone, but we are getting spring lettuce now, and tiny cucumbers and green onions. We mix them up as a salad and put strips of fatback in it. It is good to eat with soup beans. I pick the fatback out of my salad and give it to Jewel. She’s so tiny. She will be six in August, and going to school in the fall. I’m afraid she’s not ready for it. She spends all her time alone talking to imaginary friends. She tells me their names are Randal, Doris and Willa, names I’ve never heard before. If I don’t know people with those names, how could she? She draws pictures on used school paper that Roxie and I save for her. For a five-year-old she is pretty good. I study her pictures and look at her sad, perfect little face and wonder what is going on in there behind those Starr blue eyes.