by Leah Weiss
Before I answer, my belly squirms. Lying does that to me. So I say, “I don’t see no odd-looking man. Maybe he come to the river in a different place than here,” and my belly calms down cause it’s true; Jerome Biddle won’t odd looking to me no more. When I look at the little man, I see goodness and a tender soul.
• • •
The first time Jerome Biddle saved me, I was seven and fell down a old well shaft, mostly dry. Landed in soft mud and scattered bones of critters who fell in and can’t get out. The scariest was finding a human skull bashed in. I thought I was a goner for sure. I twisted my ankle and don’t have a prayer for climbing up the slick walls. Still, I yelled and cried and screamed till my voice quit on me, thinking this might be my bones’ final resting place, too. Then I prayed real hard for a real live miracle, and Jerome Biddle’s head leaned over the well.
He say, “Tattler Swann, hang on to hope, gonna tie me a knot and throw you my rope.”
And he did.
Jerome Biddle looped his end of the rope round a tree trunk and pulled till I popped out the top of that well, muddy and wore out. I fainted is what I done. My friend carried me home to Mama.
The next time he saved me I was ten and broke my leg when I fell through a rotten tree stand, hunting on Scooter’s Ridge. The end of my broken shin shot clear through my britches. The sight of it made me want to faint and got me to bawling like a sissy girl. It was shameful is what I remember most.
Along come Jerome Biddle like my savior-in-waiting again. He don’t pay no mind to my crying. Just went to work tying my broke leg to a straight branch, made me a crutch from another branch, and then hobbled with me all the way back home cause I was already too heavy for him to carry.
When Mama saw us, she said, “Jerome Biddle, you done it again. My boy used up one more of his nine lives, and you the one to bring him back to safety. You a angel and that’s a fact.”
Mama got a soft spot for Jerome Biddle, and when he shows up at mealtime, he’s got a place. The next day or two she finds rabbit or possum or a mess of pigeons hanging from the nail on the porch post, and she knows Jerome looks after us. He’s the best kind of friend.
• • •
The three men turn to leave and head to the riverbank when I think to ask, “What he do?”
Boss Man spit a sharp stream of tobacky juice toward my shoe. He misses by a foot. “You not worth the breath I waste on you.” He shakes his head sorrowful-like. “Come on, boys. Let’s catch us a baby killer.”
They head on downriver where the dogs lead, determined, and I drop to my haunches and watch em go.
Baby killer? Jerome Biddle don’t have a baby. He don’t even have a hunting dog. He’s got friends like me, Birdie, and Miss Sadie, and that teacher lady…and the Stoner boys who keep him in moonshine. The only thing he can call his own is a trailer that leans to the left, and a leg too short for normal.
The pack of hounds get to where Jerome Biddle waded in, and they beat up on top of one another when the scent runs out at water’s edge. I can tell none of the posse wants to enter the rolling river from the way they back away from the water. They point fingers and flap arms that go on for a minute or two with nary a foot put in the water. I glance at the heartless rock that holds Jerome Biddle and his bloody sack, and wonder how much air is left for him to breathe. I look back at the men who don’t know how close they are to Jerome Biddle. God must feel like this all the time—to know more than regular folks do and keep it to his self.
The men are in a fix. Boss Man grabs two dog leashes from one of the fellas’ hands and pushes him into the water. He must be the one who can swim. He holds his hands high—to keep em dry, I guess—and makes it to the middle before he gets bowled over by the current and floats downstream with his head dancing like a bobber.
Boss Man don’t look happy. He spits tobacky and walks on down the riverbank and looks for a easy place to cross. Him and the other men go, dragging the yelping dogs. They don’t look happy neither. Their ruckus echoes off the stone walls of the mountainsides. A heap of frustration is pulled down that riverbank. They take their sweet time. I watch, hunkered down on my heels. I lean on my fishing pole to keep from tumbling downhill.
Soon, the sun falls behind the ridge and cold crawls out the ground, and the three layers of cardboard in my shoes go damp clean through. The posse’s still in sight when my knees cramp and make me stand and lean on a poplar tree. Even when the hoot owl calls out close and a slice of moon climbs overhead and throws down stingy light, I wait for the men to go home.
They do when night comes.
• • •
I’m ready to leave my spot and hurry to the river to pull Jerome out of that heartless rock when a specter floats through the woods in a white dress and pale skin. It heads for that riverbank.
Though I don’t believe in spirits, I hang back and watch it. My heartbeat is on the rise, and I lick my lips a time or two cause they dry. The ghost slows its pace when it gets to the rocky shore and wrings its hands. It looks at the rock like it can see the secret buried in the heart of that stone. Then the phantom, with arms and legs as white as bone, wades into those whirling waters. Sheer cloth rides on the surface, and long hair streams behind, and thin arms paddle.
Then it sinks outta sight!
I can’t help it. I start downhill to get close. I part fall and part slide. A shoe comes off and gets left in the leaves. My sock’s got a hole big enough for three toes to come through. Before I know it, I stand on the damp chill of the riverbank and pray in earnest, holding my breath to see what’s likely to happen and what’s not. When my lungs about burst from worry, a small white head pops up. Then comes Jerome Biddle pulled by its pale arm.
The ghost calls out above the din of the water, “Help me, Tattler.”
It shocks me! It knows my name!
“Who are you?” I ask, fearful.
“Sadie. Sadie Blue. Sadie Tupkin.” Her teeth rattle from the cold.
I wade in fast and grab holt of Jerome Biddle and Sadie’s icy arm. We pull our friend up on the bank away from the strength of the current and lay him down. The poke tied round his waist is flat.
Sadie moves Jerome’s soggy beard to the side, puts her ear on his chest and listens, then says, “Build a fire, Tattler. I hear a tiny beat under his ribs.”
We get dry twigs and leaves stashed under rocks and logs, and right next to Jerome Biddle’s cold body, we coax a little starter blaze. Then some heat comes, then serious comfort. I pack a wall of evergreen branches and moss behind his back to keep the warm from wandering up the hillside. Sadie’s lap is Jerome Biddle’s pillow. She lays her small hand on his bald head and keeps it there. In the golden flames, she don’t look real. She looks like the porcelain doll Mama’s got on a shelf to keep away from breaking.
Eyes steady on Jerome Biddle’s face, she asks me, “I scare you, Tattler? Think I was a haint?”
I cannot tell a lie. “The thought crossed my mind.”
I ain’t seen much of Sadie Blue since Roy Tupkin up and married her on a bet back in late summer, her carrying his baby. That’s what I hear rumored some months back, and don’t believe it’s true till I hear it again. Sadie don’t belong with Roy and his meanness. I think I see bruises on her skin. It could be from the fire glow casting shadows. I don’t wanna look close. Don’t wanna know, but I am curious; Roy don’t seem the kind that would take favorable to his wife running off in the night to save Jerome Biddle. Maybe he’s off on mischief of his own.
My head is stuffed with questions that need answers but I bide my time. We won’t go nowhere fast. We gotta wait for a froze man to thaw.
I try to think what else Boss Man could have said besides baby killer. The churning water made it hard to hear. Broken tiller. Basic miller. Nothing makes sense.
When the fire cracks and shifts and a column of sparks flares up in the air like
a little celebration, Jerome Biddle flutters his clumpy eyelashes, snorts a little air, and farts. Then he opens his eyes and talks a rhyme that’s off. He says “Hey, Miss Sadie, lady. Hey, Tattler, baby” like it’s natural for the lot of us to be on a riverbank, in the middle of the night, beside a fire, with his bald head in Sadie’s lap.
“Hey, Jerome Biddle,” I say, feeling kind of foolish, and wonder why he called me a baby.
He sits up straight and cracks his back and shakes his head and gets back to his kinda normal fast. Even his matted beard dried and now flutters in a breeze like usual.
He pulls the soggy sack up on his lap and holds it tender. His lips hardly move, and he riddles, “I tried, Miss Sadie, and failed you bad; and now you got nothing and my heart be sad.”
“This ain’t your fault, Jerome. You my good friend. I’m sad Roy sent them scalawag men after you. He done it for spite, like everything he does. He wanted to scare you and get back at me. I’m sorry for your hurt.”
I look back and forth from face to face for clues; I’m bout to pop with curiosity.
“It’s a good life I dragged to shore today. With Tattler’s help, you was resurrected.” She reaches over and pats the back of my hand.
I puff up for no particular reason.
Then Sadie says, “We best get going.”
“What? Wait!” I shout louder than I want. I got questions.
“How’d you know he was in the heartless rock, Miss Sadie?”
“He told me.”
“Nobody knows that secret place.”
“You know.”
“Well, yeah, but how’d you know he was here today?”
“He told me.”
She stands and pulls a shaky Jerome Biddle to his feet. He still holds on to that flat sack that’s not bloody no more cause the raging river washed it clean. He leans toward the riverside on his short leg.
“You okay?” she asks Jerome Biddle with a tender tone.
The man nods and stares somewhere over her shoulder into the night. The fire’s dying, and our forms are turning darker under the meager light of the moon.
“Where ya’ll going?”
“Home. Jerome will walk me part way.”
“I wanna go with you.”
“You go on home, Tattler. Dottie be fretting.”
I can’t help myself so I blurt out, “What bout the baby? The one what got killed? Was that your baby?”
“There won’t no live baby,” Sadie says as she works her way across the stony shore, heading back up the hill. “Just a pile of hope.”
“That what’s in that sack there? A pile of hope?”
“Not no more.”
They move on and get folded into the night.
“Well, tell me this,” I shout with a tinge of annoyance that I’m not proud of. “Is Jerome Biddle a baby killer or not?”
“Tattler Swann!” Sadie stops in her tracks, turns, and in the final glow of the fire, I see her put her hands on her hips. She’s more grown than I know her to be. It feels like Mama there scolding me, but Sadie is but a handful of years older than me.
“No baby got born today. No baby got killed today.”
“Well then, why’d those men hunt after Jerome Biddle and call him a baby killer? Tell me that,” I yell to her narrow back as she walks away.
“Roy was being spiteful. There won’t no baby to talk of,” she says, sad and tired. “It’ll grow clear when the sun comes up.”
The last thing she say is, “Don’t be spreading falsehoods, Tattler. You hear?”
Jerome Biddle and Miss Sadie get swallowed by the inky black. I kick at the coals and make the fire go out.
What started as a regular day of fishing turned into commotion that don’t usually live here. Usually things are pretty much like they supposed to be, cept today.
Today, a bloody sack, a posse of mean men, and a friend who almost drowned but come out alive made it different.
Today, I went to catch supper and hooked a mystery.
I head uphill. Gotta find my shoe.
Sadie Blue
I never knowed a woman like Miss Kate. She’s book smart but mountain dumb. If it won’t for me and Birdie and Jerome Biddle looking after her, she’d be in a pile of trouble, not knowing seasoned wood from green, a black snake from a copperhead, or buckeyes from chestnuts. She’s got her a puny tree she watches over that won’t worth the time, and a pile of books that’ll take a hundred years to cipher. Found her a wild dog she tamed with a look and a need. She liked me from the first. We gotta good start her teaching me to read.
I go to Miss Kate’s place last week when Roy beat me extra and I lose my baby. It was on Saturday, October 10, this happened. I put a little heart on the wall calendar so I never forget. After that day I lose my baby, I find strength enough to save Jerome Biddle from Roy’s meanness, then go to the trailer and grieve on my own.
Preacher Eli brung me a Hershey bar from the Rusty Nickel. Miss Kate comes and reads till she stops, then marks the page with a turkey feather. Aunt Marris and Birdie brung soup and tea. They don’t talk but brush my hair, wash my face, and change my dress. They wrap me in a blanket like I’m the baby that got lost. Words and doing don’t matter to me yet. I’m in a empty place, and bit by bit the days and nights spin, and I start to knit back together.
Roy stays away.
From the first, Miss Kate said, “I see potential when I look in your face, Sadie Blue.” I think my baby was my potential, but I don’t carry it no more. Now I try to wrap my thinking round something big with only me in it. Miss Kate can help cause she lived for a long spell in the valley, then come up here to live different. I need to know how to live different.
So Sunday morning, when Roy Tupkin is still off somewhere, I get up from my bed, throw on a thick shawl Birdie give me, and walk over to Miss Kate’s to talk. Some weeks back she ask a question that buffaloed me. She said, “What do you plan to do with your one special life, Sadie Blue?”
I think it’s a trick question. I might plan to go to church, or plan to go to Granny’s, or plan to put up jelly. I’m working on a plan so Roy don’t beat me, but that’s a lotta planning things that don’t make my life special.
When I get to her cabin, I see through the window Miss Kate sitting at the table, writing in that leather book of hers. She must hear the leaves crunch under my shoes cause she looks up, sees me, and runs to open the door to give me a hug, careful not to squeeze me tight.
I take off my shawl and say kinda quick, “If I got a special life to plan, then I’m in a pickle cause nobody told me and I don’t know the first thing bout how.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. She laughs and says, “Hello to you, too, Sadie Blue,” and goes to fixing tea.
“Hey,” I say back, remembering my manners.
She says, “You look stronger today, and that’s wonderful. You’ve even got a little color in your cheeks. Now take a deep breath and we’ll sort this out.” Miss Kate’s face is tender as she takes mugs off the shelf, sets them on the table, then slides her writing book and pen to the side before she sits down.
“So…you want to know how to plan your special life?”
I nod, kinda ashamed to blurt out like that.
“Okay.” She shifts her bottom in the chair and holds up a finger. “First truth. Everyone is born with talents, with gifts and the ability to dream.”
“Everybody?”
“Yes. Without exception. A person may choose not to use them, or may ignore them, or never even look for them, but they’re there. Some talents are obvious. People are born craftsmen and build wonderful furniture and homes. Some women make quilts with exceptional patterns and fine stitches. Someone else may have a beautiful singing voice—”
“Like Miss Loretta.”
“Yes, like your Miss Loretta. Or somebody can take squirrel
or possum and turn it into a delicious stew. Birdie’s talents are unraveling the healing gift of plants. Preacher Eli guides and comforts weary souls. I teach.”
“And me?” I say what brings me to my real worry cause I fear I got left out.
“My friend, my friend,” Miss Kate says and shakes her head.
When she calls me friend, my heart flips.
“You have talents you haven’t begun to understand. Once you do, the rest will come easily.”
Miss Kate’s cowlick in front sticks straight up like she’s surprised. There’s a deep crease on her cheek. She musta slept on her face funny.
“Name some?” I ask, not to be pushy but cause I can’t think of nary a one.
The tea has steeped, and she fills two mugs, drops two sugar cubes in hers and two in mine, and takes a sip. Steam fogs her eyeglasses, then clears when she puts her mug down. She takes her time, puts an elbow on the table, chin on her knuckles, and looks me in the eye like I’m somebody. Nobody ever looks me in the eye this way cept Aunt Marris.
Miss Kate says, “That first day I went to the schoolhouse. You came to see me, an outsider, and you offered to help a stranger from the valley. You do realize no one else came to welcome me except you and Preacher Eli. That was my first hint about your gifts and strong character.”
I don’t say that I come to ask a favor. I won’t just being polite.
Miss Kate looks at her mug and turns it round and round on the table. I wait, and she goes on to say, “You are welcoming. Generous. Unafraid when faced with a goal. You want to learn to read, and the desire to better yourself is a marvelous gift. That talent alone will make you a good student of life. Sad is the person who stops being a student. She misses out on the best parts.”
She points to the windowsill. “And you knew how to sort out the mystery of the treasures Birdie left me. I saw things, and you saw the messages.”