by Ruth White
Table of Contents
Title Page
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTY-NINE
Also by Ruth White - SWEET CREEK HOLLER
Copyright Page
To Garnet, Gipsy, Roberta, and Vicky, and to the Grundy High School Class of 1960
ONE
I rolled over and opened my eyes and a sudden thrill went through me. It was like the rush you get in the movies when the cavalry comes charging over the horizon blowing their bugles to save the settlers. Something wonderful was going to happen today. I could feel it.
It was real early on my first day of high school in the fall of 1956. I got up, careful not to wake my half sister, Phyllis, and tiptoed out into the hall, and into the bathroom. Nobody could have heard me, but as soon as I started running water the whole house came alive. The next thing I knew, Vern, my stepfather, was pounding on the bathroom door, telling me to get a move on. Then Beau and Luther, my half brothers, who were trying to act like their daddy, did the same thing.
I hurried back to the bedroom, where Phyllis turned over in our big double bed, mumbled something, and hit the floor. She wandered downstairs, where Mama was fixing breakfast for everybody. Mama always did that on the first day of school to show her good intentions. When we were gone, she could go back to sleep, undisturbed, for the first time in three months.
I had my school clothes neatly laid out on a chair—a dark plaid dress with a straight skirt, and black-and-white saddle oxfords with bobby sox. I slipped a pair of shorts on under my dress because I had absolutely no hips at all, and the shorts rounded me out some.
Then I took the bobby pins out of my brown hair and brushed curls around my face, dabbed on a bit of lipstick and compact makeup, and stood back to look at myself in the mirror. I saw no chance of ever being beautiful. First of all, I was too small. I weighed only ninety-five pounds after a long drink of water, and I was only five feet tall in thick soles. My complexion was kinda sallow and my eyes pale blue, like Mama’s. I was plain, and that’s all there was to it.
I put my perfectly pink lipstick into my genuine plastic pocketbook along with my compact. Then I picked up my five-subject composition notebook and two number-two pencils, and I was ready for high school.
Downstairs, Mama had made pancakes and sausages. As we sat there all crowded around the table with the smell of coffee and the clatter of dishes, it was like we were a real family as normal as any other. Only I knew better.
My own daddy, who was not married to my mama, had gone off to the war in Europe in December 1941, and was never heard from again. Five months after he left, I was born on the top of Ruby Mountain.
Then, when I was three years old, Vernon Mullins, a coal miner for the Ruby Valley Coal Company, started courting my mama. Her daddy, my Grandpa Lambert, nearly had a fit because he said there had been bad blood between the Lamberts and the Mullinses for a hundred years. No, he didn’t remember why, but he knew there was a good reason for it, and if Mama persisted in marrying that no-account Mullins, then she’d better take me and everything she owned—all of which could fit in a paper poke—and never darken his doorway on Ruby Mountain again.
So she did. And I hadn’t seen Grandpa Lambert since.
Mama and Vern got married, and the two of us moved into Vern’s house down here in Ruby Valley. Now, you would think with such a pretty name, the place would have to be a real jewel, but Ruby Valley was only a holler, and a holler is nothing more than a glorified gully between two mountains. There was a creek and a road side by side, both of which ran to the head of the holler and Ruby Mountain. The road ended right up there at Grandpa Lambert’s place.
Vern’s house was a big, shabby thing with a bathroom, which was a new convenience for me and Mama. The house was left to Vern by his grandfather, who had built it but never really finished it right. The floorboards in the hall and bedrooms upstairs were still raw lumber, and you could get splinters in your feet if you weren’t careful. One time Vern decided to put in a whole new fireplace in the living room. He tore out all the old bricks and hauled them off. Then he bought all new bricks and stacked them by the hole in the wall. There they had stayed for years.
The house just hung on the hill with a skinny dirt road, edged by a rock wall leading up to it, and ending under a high porch on stilts. Vern parked his pickup truck under that tall porch.
When Mama and I moved in, Vern was working third shift in the mines, which meant he worked nights and slept days. Mama always had been a night owl herself, and pretty soon she was staying up all night, too, and sleeping during the day with Vern. I spent more and more time alone, and had to be quiet so Mama and Vern could sleep. To pass the time, I called Willa to me and we would play. She taught me to count and to sing—softly.
Mama cooked one meal a day, and that was supper. I ate with Mama and Vern, then I’d go to bed. I don’t know what Mama did all night while Vern was at work. One time I went downstairs to get a drink of water and I saw her sitting in the dark smoking a cigarette.
When Vern started working days, Mama couldn’t break her old habits. She went to bed very late, and got up and fixed Vern’s breakfast if he made her; then she went back to bed. She still cooked only one big meal in the evenings. Other than that she did very little. It didn’t take a grownup person to figure out my mama was awful unhappy.
Then the stairstep babies started coming. First there was Beau when I was five, then Luther a year later, and Phyllis a year after that. Those babies wouldn’t cooperate with Mama to save your life. They never ate or slept when she wanted them to, so she had to stay awake, and she was real grouchy. After school, on weekends, and in the summertime, she tried to make me mind the babies, but most of the time I couldn’t make them hush, so Mama had to stumble around, half-asleep, and tend them her own self.
It seemed everybody in our house was either grumbling or blubbering, and that’s when I missed Willa the most. But Mrs. Skeens had taken her away from me.
Vern grew fat and drank more than his share. I don’t think he and Mama even liked each other anymore. The only person Vern would turn a hand for was Phyllis. He showered her with attention, and she was spoiled rotten.
But that first day of school, when I was fourteen, everybody seemed to be in a good mood for a change. Vern was teasing the boys about not recognizing them with their faces clean, and he was bouncing Phyllis—“Daddy’s little girl”—on his knee. Beau was nine and just entering the fourth grade. Luther was eight and in the third, and Phyllis was seven and in the second.
Vern turned to me and looked me over good.
“Well, Tiny, now you’re going to be a high school girl, and a pretty one, too. Just don’t get too big for your britches.”
I managed a smile.
“Me and Hazel never had a chance to go to high school, you know.”
“How come?” I said, though I had heard this one a dozen times.
“’Cause I had to go to work when I was thirteen, and your mama lived up on that mountaintop. It was too far to the high school, and they didn’t have buses back then. You’re a lucky girl.”
He wen
t on talking about how hard things were in the old days, and how easy I had it, but I wasn’t listening. My mind was racing ahead into the day. What would high school be like? Would my teachers be real mean? Would I make friends this year? I never had before. Every kid in Ruby Valley Grade School had known me and I had a reputation for being a loner. Maybe this year, with a larger school and all those strangers, things would be different.
Vern left for work and the kids went back upstairs to finish dressing and get their stuff together. Their bus would come later than mine. Mama and I were alone at the table.
“You really do look pretty, Tiny,” she said.
I was surprised. She smiled a sad kind of smile. She was only thirty, but she had bags under her eyes, and she was thin and small like me.
“Thanks,” I mumbled, blushing.
I was trying to finish a cup of coffee just because I thought it was a grownup thing to do. I really didn’t like it.
“And you remember one thing, girl,” Mama went on.
She never could leave well enough alone.
“You’re just as good as any of them—better than most. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”
I knew she was trying to be nice, but that bit of advice made me mad. I had almost talked myself into thinking I could make friends this year till then. What made her think about saying that? Maybe it was because I really wasn’t as good as the rest, and maybe I didn’t look pretty either.
“I gotta go!” I said, and left the table abruptly.
I was out the door and on my way down the hill before she could do any more damage.
TWO
It was a perfect September morning. The sky was a still blue above the hills, where some of the trees were just beginning to turn. I could smell smoke, and bacon frying somewhere.
Cecil Hess was down by the roadside, the first as always, waiting for the bus.
“Hey, Cecil,” I said breathlessly.
“Hey, Tiny,” he said and grinned at me.
Cecil was one of those boys everybody liked. You couldn’t help it. He was friendly and good-natured, with freckles and a turned-up nose. He made you laugh, and he was dependable. In the last year he had shot up a head taller than me.
“I was so excited I was up at 5 a.m.,” he said, laughing. “I saw the sun come up.”
That was another thing about Cecil—he was an open book. You knew you could trust him because what he thought he said. What other boy would admit to looking forward to the first day of high school?
Cecil and I had grown up together and we were used to each other in a brother-sister kind of way, but you couldn’t call us friends because he was a boy. We had missed only one year being in the same room at school, which was the previous year, and that was because I took beginner’s band and Cecil didn’t. I played the clarinet. Mr. Stewart, the county band director, came to our school every day to give us music lessons, and the eighth-grade band members had to be in the same room.
Cecil lived across the road and the creek with his parents and four little brothers and sisters. Next door to them were the Combs family. Beside our house on the hillside lived the Horns. Behind us, farther up the hill, was Aunt Evie Delong’s shack, and closer to the road on our side were the Boyds. These six houses in a cluster made up our neighborhood here in the bend. There were plenty of other houses scattered throughout the holler, but no more in sight of us.
The high school bus appeared around the bend. Mrs. Stacy, the driver, waved as she drove by. She would go up the holler first, then pick us up on the way back down.
J. C. Combs, Dolly Horn, and Joyce Boyd came out of their houses and joined us at the bus stop. They were all seniors, and they talked about things like guidance counselors and class rings. Cecil and I felt inferior, so we didn’t say anything.
Directly, the bus came back down the road and stopped for us. We climbed aboard and I glanced around quickly at the girls. I groaned because nobody else had on a plaid dress or saddle oxfords. They were wearing skirts and blouses and white bucks. Last year, when I was still in brown lace-ups, they had saddle oxfords. So I got me a pair of saddle oxfords, and now they were sporting white bucks! How did they know these things? Nobody ever said, “Hey, let’s get together and buy white bucks.” No, it just happened by instinct or something, and I was the one who never was tuned in.
Cecil and I settled down in a back seat, perfectly still, but taking in everything.
After making frequent stops to pick up more students, we left the mouth of Ruby Valley and went over a big steel bridge and onto the main highway, which followed the river into Black Gap. The whole trip took about twenty minutes.
Black Gap High School was a large two-story redbrick building with a white steeple over the front entrance. Behind it the hills rose dark against the sky.
Mrs. Stacy told us to go to the auditorium for instructions. I was grateful for Cecil’s presence. Together we found the auditorium, where sheets of paper were tacked along the wall listing the homerooms and who was in them. They were done alphabetically, so that once again Cecil and I were assigned to the same room.
We followed the white bucks down the black-and-white-tiled hallway and found the right place—Mrs. Yates’s homeroom. There we settled in again and watched and listened and waited.
Some of our classmates from Ruby Valley were there, along with many strange faces from other hollers, and of course the town kids dominated everything.
Mrs. Yates gave us our schedules for the year. I was to have English, algebra, history, science, home ec., and band. I could hang on to Cecil most of the day, since his schedule was the same as mine until fifth period, when he had shop instead of home ec. Then sixth period he had phys. ed. and I had band.
That first day we spent only thirty minutes in each class, being introduced to our teachers and the subject matter. I tried to take careful notes, but by third period it occurred to me that all the teachers were saying the same things I had heard for eight years in a row. Maybe they were just like me—all fired up the first day, then gradually fizzling out by the end of the week, making the rest of the school year just as boring as every other year.
Fifth period, I followed a strange girl to the home ec. room when I heard her say she was going there, and after that Judy Snead, a band girl from Ruby Valley, helped me find the band room.
That’s when my whole life changed. I didn’t know it right away, but that’s when it happened—that very moment when I stepped into the band room. It was a very large room on the second floor overlooking a graveyard smack on the hill outside the window. Around the room were semicircles of chairs and music stands clustered around a podium on a platform front and center. That’s where Mr. Stewart would stand and direct. Each section of the room was labeled—woodwinds, percussion, brass. I settled down in the woodwinds section. I didn’t see the band director come in and take his place on the platform because other students were milling around me. But when my section was seated, and I looked up, it was not pudgy little Mr. Stewart I saw—oh no. Here was a creature wonderful in proportion and appeal—a joy to behold right there in front of me. He was tall, tan, blond, and blueeyed, but it was his marvelous arms that held me spellbound. With a baton in one hand, the arms were raised, perfectly poised. Did I say he had blond hairs on his arms? Well, he did. Then he lowered those arms and tapped the baton on his music stand.
“Attention please,” was all he said.
And he had us in his back pocket.
“I am Mr. Gillespie.”
He did not talk like people in Black Gap, Virginia. He did not move like somebody who grew up in a holler, and I could not picture him as the son of a coal miner. You could be sure he was from elsewhere—Hollywood, California, maybe.
“I am your band director. As you probably know, Mr. Stewart resigned during the summer. I am a recent graduate of the University of Virginia, and I feel very fortunate to be here with you.”
Then he smiled.
I snapped a photo of that
smile into my brain so that, afterward, I could close my eyes and see him standing there with his golden arms, smiling down at us.
The girl beside me giggled and poked me.
“He’s cute,” she whispered, and I glanced at her briefly.
She was petite, blond, and green-eyed.
“I’m Bobby Lynn Clevinger,” she said.
But I was lost in Mr. Gillespie’s spell. Already I had forgotten Bobby Lynn Clevinger.
“What’s your name?” she insisted, poking me again.
“Tiny Lambert,” I said, irritated.
“I mean your real name,” she came back.
“Tiny Lambert!”
“We have to play for all the football games,” Mr. Gillespie was saying. “So we have to practice on the field. Starting tomorrow, you must bring your instruments every day.”
“Tiny is not a name; it’s an adjective,” Bobby Lynn whispered.
“And Bobby is a boy’s name!” I shot back.
She giggled again.
“It’s short for Roberta. So what’s Tiny short for? Teenie Weenie? Little Bitty?”
That was the first but far from the last time Bobby Lynn started me giggling in band.
“So where do you live, Little Bitty?” Bobby Lynn teased me after we left the band room.
“Ruby Valley. Where do you live?”
“In town.”
And that was the final remarkable event of that most remarkable half hour when I was giggling with a town girl while falling in love with a god.
THREE
Climbing up the hill to home after getting off the bus was always the worst part of the school day. But since that day had been only three hours long, I was home by twelve forty-five, and I practically ran up the hill. That was a big mistake because when I got to the porch steps I ran smack into them and bumped my shins. I was always doing stupid things like that.
I rubbed my legs and glanced around to see if anybody was looking at me, and right next door, in the Horns’ fenced-in front yard, was the most beautiful collie dog I ever saw. I about fainted because I’d always wanted a collie, and Vern wouldn’t let me have a dog at all. I walked around and knelt beside the fence.