Singing Hands

by Delia Ray

  After dinner, I washed our bowls and spoons, then wandered into the dining room to see what Mother was doing. She was putting together church bulletins at the long table. Even assembling bulletins was better than going upstairs to face the typewriter again, so I sat down to help her fold and staple. I was glad to see a trace of a smile flicker across her face.

  For a while we worked in silence. Then Mother sat back in her chair and reached up to rub a sore muscle in her neck. "Have you packed for Talladega?" she asked out loud. "Daddy wants to leave right after lunch tomorrow."

  I sighed and shook my head. "Not yet. I will."

  I stopped folding and signed, "Have you ever had to do something that you knew was for your own good ... but more than anything, you didn't want to do it?"

  "Sure," Mother said, her hands and face coming alive. "But sometimes those things that you dread turn out better than you ever expected. Sometimes they turn out to be just fine." For emphasis, she made the sign for "fine" again, touching the tip of her thumb to the center of her chest with her fingers outstretched.

  "Huh," I grunted. I could tell Mother thought I was asking her advice about my trip to ASD with Daddy. Still, I tried to apply her wisdom to the sense of doom I felt whenever I imagined making my confession to Miss Grace.

  "Huh," I said again. There was no possible way that owning up to stealing somebody's love letter could turn out to be "just fine."

  "But what if," I started again, "what if deep in your heart you just have a bad feeling about that thing you don't want to do? What if you know there's no way it can turn out for the best, even though grownups are telling you different?"

  "Well, sometimes you don't have a choice. Sometimes you just have to go through with it and wait to be surprised." She thought for a second, and then her mouth stretched into an odd little smile. "Did I ever tell you what my mother and father did to try to make me hear again?"

  "No," I said with an incredulous laugh. Mother hardly ever told me stories about her childhood.

  She raised her chin as she signed, her eyes focusing on some far-off place. "I was about your age, maybe twelve or thirteen. Father had read a story in a newspaper about a little deaf boy who went up in an airplane. There was a storm and the plane dropped in the sky—a long way—before the pilot was able to bring it up again."

  Mother made an airplane shape with her hand and with a whoosh of breath, quickly dropped it down toward her lap. "Altitude," she spelled out with her fingers.

  I nodded, and she went on.

  "My father couldn't get over it. The newspaper said that when the plane landed, the little boy could hear. The next thing I knew, my father had hired his own pilot."

  I let out a gasp. "He wanted you to go up in a plane?"

  "That's right. The pilot was based in New Orleans, so we took a train there. My mother and father and me. Then we took a taxicab to the airfield." Her face grew serious.

  "You didn't want to go?"

  "Oh," she sighed with the corners of her mouth tugging down. "I was terrified. I had never been in an airplane. Few people had in those days. All I could think of was that newspaper story of the storm and the plane dropping out of the sky. All the way to New Orleans, I cried and begged not to go."

  "And they still made you?"

  She nodded. "My father was determined."

  "What happened?"

  "We went up. The pilot dropped altitude." Mother clapped her hands to the sides of her head. "My ears! Oh, how they hurt! Then the plane came down."

  "And?" I asked breathlessly.

  She gave a little shrug. "And ... I was still deaf."

  I opened my eyes wide and snorted. "I thought this was supposed to be a story about something that turned out just fine."

  "It did turn out fine," Mother said, her voice rising. "Wonderful."

  "But how? You were still deaf."

  Mother shook her head as if she pitied me for not understanding. "You know Miss Grace's parents?"

  I nodded, squirming a little at the mention of her name.

  "My father was like them in a way. Until that plane ride, he couldn't believe that his daughter would never hear. He just wanted to cure me. To make me better."

  "And after the plane ride?" I asked.

  "After," Mother said, "my father accepted me for what I was." She tapped her fingertips to her ears triumphantly. "Deaf!"

  Miss Grace was exactly where I expected to find her at noon the next day—in the park outside the library. She was eating her lunch and reading a newspaper on the bench under the poplar. When I sat down beside her, she looked so happy to see me, I wanted to cry.

  "What a nice surprise!" she signed, then pointed to the sandwich wrapped in cellophane in her lap. "I just walked over to the Tutwiler to get this. Would you like half? Or I could get you another tamale...."

  "No, thanks," I signed back. "I'm afraid I don't have much time."

  That was an understatement. At that very minute, Mother was probably packing Daddy's bag for Talladega, and my father was attending to last-minute details in his office. He still wanted to leave for ASD right after lunch.

  Miss Grace touched my knee. "Is anything wrong?" she asked.

  I closed my eyes, trying to summon up a sudden burst of nerve. Go on, I told myself. It's just like Mother's story. Like Mother going up in that airplane.

  "I have to tell you something," I signed.

  Her blue eyes clouded over with concern as she watched my hands hang in the air for a few seconds too long. My fingers felt fluttery, like leaves quivering in the wind.

  "I took something of yours." I reached into my pocketbook and pulled out the letter. "I took this."

  At the sight of the blue paper, Miss Grace jerked as if she had been jabbed by a pin. She took the letter and unfolded it. Her eyes darted across the page, then up at me. "Where did you get this?" she whispered.

  "From your closet. Mother has a copy of your key, and I used it to let myself into your room a few weeks ago."

  I swallowed hard, blinking back a hot wave of tears. "It was so stupid of me," I rushed on. "I was just looking for a pair of shoes to play a silly trick on Margaret. Then I came across the letters. I only read that one...."

  The rest was a jumble. As I rambled on about how wrong I had been and how sorry I was, I kept Mother in my mind, losing altitude, falling through the sky, waiting for the worst.

  Once she landed, Mother had said, everything was fine. But already I could tell my landing wouldn't be nearly so Smooth. When I finally finished explaining and let my hands fall to my lap, Miss Grace didn't pat me on the arm or say it was okay. She wouldn't even look at me.

  "I need to get back to work," she signed stiffly. Then, with her pale skin flushing and her lips pressed into a pinched line, she refolded the letter and stood up to go. She was already hurrying away by the time I noticed she had left her sandwich and the Birmingham News on the bench beside me.

  A boldfaced headline on the front page of the newspaper snagged my attention, "KIDNAPPER COLLARED IN CAROLINA." They had finally caught him. Hiding in a tenement house in Charleston. Gloomily I studied the grainy photo of Birthmark Baines looking out the back window of a police car.

  "This never would have happened in the first place if it wasn't for you," I whispered back at his sullen stare. "I'm glad you're going to jail." Then I crumpled the front page into a messy wad.

  I knew I should be heading straight home to meet Daddy, but I stayed in the park for a while longer, throwing bits of Miss Grace's sandwich to the pigeons at my feet. That morning I had gone into Margaret's room to look up the definition of "integrity" in her Webster's—just to make sure I wasn't going to all this trouble for Mrs. Fernley for nothing.

  "Uprightness of character and soundness of moral principle," the dictionary said. "An undivided, unbroken state; completeness."

  The dictionary was right about the completeness part. So far, integrity felt completely awful.

  Chapter 19

  I was surp
rised when Daddy didn't turn the Packard toward Highway 78 as we started out for Talladega. Instead, he was heading down to the south side of town.

  "Where are we going?" I signed as we pulled up to a stoplight.

  "To get Abe," Daddy said.

  "What?" I cried. "What do you mean?"

  But we were moving again, and I had to wait until the next red light for Daddy to answer. "It's good news," he finally explained. "Mrs. Johnson has decided to let Abe enroll in ASD. We're giving him a ride there, and we'll help him get settled."

  "But—" I bit my lip and turned away to glower at the shabby row houses lining the corner. Could things get any worse? Miss Grace hated me, and now this. But I knew better than to argue. Daddy needed to watch the road. And how typical of my father that this one and only trip with me was actually a mission to help somebody else.

  They were in the parking lot at the back of Saint Simon's when we arrived—Abe's mother with her same red handkerchief knotted in her hand, and Abe with a wide grin on his face, waving furiously. Although it was another hot day, Mrs. Johnson had dressed her son in stiff new trousers and a long-sleeved plaid shirt buttoned to his neck. His wiry hair was slicked down, glistening with hair tonic, and a worn canvas duffel bag sat at his feet.

  Abe ran up to grab my father's hand as we got out of the car. "Well, I declare," Daddy said out loud. "Don't you look fine?" Daddy hooked his thumbs into imaginary suspenders and struck a dandified pose. Abe squawked with laughter. As soon as he turned to me, though, he scowled and forced his mouth into a fierce frown. I could tell he was mimicking the grumpy expression he had seen on my face the first day we met. He frowned a little more, then burst into his heehaw again and trotted around to the driver's side of the Packard, where Daddy had left the door open.

  While Abe slipped behind the wheel and pretended to steer, Mrs. Johnson hurried over to talk to Daddy. She made small, worried noises as she struggled to tell him something important. Her signs were makeshift, half proper and half her own invention. She fingerspelled to fill in the rest. Gradually, I realized what she was trying to say. Abe thought he was only going on a short trip with Daddy, for a visit to see a school for other children just like him. He didn't know he was going to be staying at ASD, away from home and his mother until his first vacation at Christmas.

  "If he knows," Mrs. Johnson told my father, "he won't go. He'll be scared." Her dark face filled with fear as she tried to explain.

  Daddy seemed concerned, but not as anxious about the situation as I expected him to be. He kept nodding calmly to Mrs. Johnson, and several times he skimmed the edge of his right hand across his left palm, like a boat gliding through water. "It's all right," he was saying. "It's all right. He'll be fine."

  I eyed Abe doubtfully. He rammed his fist against the horn in the middle of the Packard's steering wheel, making me jump at the sudden blast of noise. When he saw my surprised reaction, he laughed and honked again, then a few more times for good measure. A woman passing by on the sidewalk shook her head in disapproval.

  Oh, brother. What was my father thinking? Obviously, Abe had never been in a car before, never left Birmingham or his mother's side, never attended even a single day of school. How was he supposed to fit in at ASD among all those strange new people and rules and signs he couldn't understand?

  But it didn't matter what I thought. Soon Daddy had stowed the lumpy duffel bag in the car and Mrs. Johnson was holding her little boy's face between her hands. She stared for several long seconds, as if she was soaking up his funny grin—missing teeth and all. Then she kissed him hard on his forehead and pushed him toward the back seat, to a spot next to his satchel. She shook her finger and smiled at her son before she shut the door, probably telling him to be a good boy.

  Abe didn't wave goodbye. He was too excited about fiddling with the door lock and the handle for rolling his window up and down. It was a good thing he was distracted, because when I turned back to look, Mrs. Johnson was standing in the middle of the gravel parking lot with her face buried in her red handkerchief.

  Within five minutes, I realized what a long ride it was going to be to Talladega. Daddy didn't drive faster than thirty-five miles an hour. As we snaked through the scrubby pine forests and rundown farms on the outskirts of town, there was barely enough breeze to blow my sweaty hair off the back of my neck. And cars began to back up behind us on the old two-lane highway heading east, their impatient drivers probably itching for a rare chance to pass on the winding road.

  To make matters worse, something smelled. At first I thought it was just a swamp smell rising off the marshes as we neared the Cahaba River. Then I realized the odor was coming from the back seat, from Abe's duffel bag—something mysterious and sour that I couldn't identify. Maybe dirty socks, maybe a musty old stuffed animal that needed tossing...

  Neither Daddy or Abe seemed to notice. Abe was busy gazing out his half-open window, soaking up the sights. He pointed and laughed and even kicked the back of Daddy's seat whenever he saw something the least bit interesting. A muddy pen full of snuffling hogs, the long drop down from the bridge over the river, a skinny-legged crane fishing in the cattails—all of it tickled him silly.

  Daddy ignored the kicking for a while. But after ten minutes of the bumps against his seat growing more lively, he slowly braked and pulled over on the shoulder of the road. A half-dozen cars roared past us.

  I was surprised when he turned to me. "Augusta, I want you to get in the back seat with Abe." I felt my mouth dropping open.

  Daddy went on, unmoved by my vexation. "Whenever you see something special," he instructed me, "show Abe the sign for it. He needs to start learning. And maybe this will help keep him occupied."

  "Jeeeeeeez," I grumbled through my teeth as I heaved myself out of the car and climbed in back next to Abe and his smelly satchel. His brown eyes lit up as Daddy pulled onto the highway again and he realized I was going to be his traveling companion.

  I jabbed my finger at a lone cow in a passing field. "Cow," I signed angrily.

  Abe let out a guffaw, then copied me. With a big scowl, he held his thumb to his temple and extended his pinky like a cow's horn.

  From then on, he would probably think an outraged expression was a basic part of signing, but I didn't care. I frowned harder and pointed at a giant oak in the middle of a pasture. "Tree!" I signed, with my arm held up like a sturdy trunk and my fingers wiggling like leaves.

  Abe grimaced back and made his own tree.

  "Truck!" "Dog!" "House!" "Man!" "Mailbox!" "Flowers!"

  For the next twenty miles, past Leeds and Cook Springs and Chula Vista, past acres of nothing but kudzu, I glared and made angry signs. Abe would have gone on imitating me forever if my father hadn't decided to stop at a roadside station to get gas. Once we were parked next to the pump, a scruffy attendant sauntered over to fill our tank. I sighed with relief as Abe turned away to watch.

  But then he was facing me again. "Man!" he signed excitedly. "Man! Man!"

  I knew I should smile and congratulate him for being such a quick learner. I could hardly believe he had managed to recall that single sign from all the others I had flung at him. But it was so hot, and I felt sick to my stomach from breathing in the fumes of gasoline along with the nauseating smells from the duffel bag. The most I could do was give Abe a curt nod.

  At least Daddy was bringing us two Coca-Colas from the drink machine in front of the station. "How much farther?" I signed when he leaned down to hand our Cokes through my open window. Abe gripped the cold glass bottle with both hands and bounced up and down in his seat.

  "About another hour," Daddy said. "But I'm sleepy. I didn't get to bed until after midnight. Before we head on, I need to pull over there and close my eyes for a little bit." He waved his hand toward a scraggly grove of cottonwoods at the far corner of the dusty lot. "Just fifteen minutes or so. You can practice signing with Abe."

  Daddy didn't wait for me to reply. I gaped at the back of his head in disbelief as he slid
into the driver's seat again and maneuvered the Packard into his chosen napping spot.

  This was it! The last straw! Margaret and Nell were probably diving into the Cascade Plunge at Aunt Glo's club this very minute. In utter misery, I flopped my head back against the scratchy upholstered seat. Beside me, Abe was smacking his lips against the mouth of his soda bottle, taking one sloppy swig after another. Daddy took off his glasses and laid them on the dashboard, then wearily rubbed the bridge of his nose. In five minutes, he was snoring softly.

  I closed my eyes, pretending to sleep, too. If I could just get through the next hour and fifteen minutes without exploding ... just an hour and a quarter ... I could hear Abe beside me rummaging in his duffel bag: there was an unzipping sound and a rustle of a paper sack, and in the next few seconds, a fresh wave of that same nauseating, vinegary odor filled my nostrils. I was afraid to look. I sucked in my breath and held it.

  I felt Abe tap me lightly on the knee. I didn't move a muscle.

  He only tapped harder. Cringing, I opened one eye. He was holding it out to me proudly—a pickled hard-boiled egg, glistening and glowing greenish yellow in the sunlight filtering into the car. A slice of mushy white bread and a slab of ham lay on a grease-spotted piece of waxed paper in his lap. Mrs. Johnson must have been worried that her son might get hungry on the drive to Talladega.

  Abe nudged the egg closer to my face, sweetly offering me the first bite.

  "Ugghhh!" I declared, and shrank back until I was wedged against the car door. I squeezed my nostrils shut between two fingers and with all the dramatic flare of a stage actress, cried out, "Peeee-ewwwww!" making sure my mouth was in full view for lip reading.