When the Crickets Stopped Singing

by Marilyn Cram-Donahue

  I looked at Geraldine. She lifted one shoulder. “He’s still a sinner because of the philandering.”

  Reba Lu wrote down his name. We were quiet a minute. Then Geraldine gave a big sigh and said, “We forgot somebody.” She gave me a gagging kind of look, and I knew right away who she meant.

  “Dodie Crumper,” I said. I sat back and waited for the explosion.

  “Dodie Crumper!” Geraldine agreed. “I can’t stand her. She’s a disgusting human being. I hate everything Dodie Crumper does.”

  I said I did too, so we talked a while, educating Reba Lu about how Dodie picked her nose when she thought no one was looking and popped the pimples on her chin.

  Reba Lu turned red. “I do that sometimes.”

  “So do we,” Geraldine said, “but Dodie does it in public.”

  That made all the difference, so we hooked little fingers and swore to love Dodie and just hate the nasty things she did in public. I didn’t even want to think about what she might do in private.

  “Aren’t we going to love anybody else?” Reba Lu asked. “There must be lots more sinners all around us.”

  Geraldine frowned. “Would we have to love them all?” She sounded like that might be more than she could handle.

  Reba Lu turned to a fresh page and drew three columns. “How about if we start with a few of the worst ones and practice on those?”

  It hadn’t been so hard to come up with the names and the bad things people did. What stumped us was how to show love. I thought this was what my dad had meant when he said the preacher should have given us some hints. We finally came up with something to do for everyone except one person.

  SINNER

  SIN TO HATE

  HOW TO SHOW LOVE

  Willie Jack Kelly

  Drinks whiskey from a paper bag.

  Bring him apples and bananas.

  Miss Emma

  Loves that evil snake.

  Visit her and teach her to crochet.

  Miss Hallie Harper

  Gives terrible grades.

  Tell her she is a good teacher.

  Jefferson Clement

  Philanders.

  Help him find a hobby, like collecting stamps.

  Dodie Crumper

  Picks her nose in public. Pops her pimples, ditto.

  ? ? ? ?

  I put one finger on that empty space in the last column. How could we find a way to love Dodie? How could we find a way to like her? “This isn’t going to be easy,” I said.

  Geraldine reached across Reba Lu and poked me. I poked her back. We both looked at Reba Lu. She looked exasperated. “We could start by being nice,” she said.

  “How?” Geraldine and I said the word at the same time without much enthusiasm.

  “Honestly!” Reba Lu exclaimed. “We say ‘Hi!’ or ‘How are you?’ or ‘What’s new?’ That’s what my father would tell us to do.”

  “No offense,” Geraldine said, “but your father hasn’t met Dodie Crumper. Last time I spoke to her, she threw a rock at me.”

  “Why did she do that?” Reba Lu asked.

  Geraldine looked down and shuffled one foot like she was squashing a spider.

  “Could be because I called her fat-headed and stupid.”

  Reba Lu nodded wisely. She seemed to like to play it up that she was a few months older than Geraldine and me. “This has gone too far to be solved by saying ‘Hi!’” she said. “Not only do you hate Dodie, but she hates you right back. There’s only one thing to do. We have to go all the way.”

  I had a bad feeling about that. I knew Geraldine did too because she said, “Just how far would that be?”

  Reba Lu folded her arms across her chest and looked serious. “We have to include her.”

  “Include her in what?” I asked.

  “In something kids really like to do. Something so special it only happens once a week.”

  Geraldine looked horrified. “You don’t mean … !”

  “Yes.” Reba Lu nodded. “The Saturday matinee.”

  “You only go to the matinee with your best friends!” I protested.

  “Exactly,” she answered. “With the people you love.”

  Geraldine made a gagging sound. I know how she felt. The matinee was sacred. It meant popcorn and Royal Crown Cola, the exciting fifteen-minute Buck Rogers serial before the main feature, the intermission, when we climbed the stairs of the Ritz Theater and visited the restroom with its red brocade drapes and velvet padded stools where ladies could sit and powder their noses.

  It meant the twenty-minute bus ride from Messina to San Andreas, the bus ride back, the independence and grownup freedom, the tingling fear of what might happen if you missed the bus or got off at the wrong stop. The possibilities for excitement were endless. San Andreas was a big town, with two picture-show theaters, a Woolworth store, and Rexall Drugs, where you could get a cheeseburger, fries, and a cola for twenty cents. All this would have been fun to share with Reba Lu, her being a newcomer and all. But now we would have to share our fun with Dodie Crumper.

  Later, when the three of us went up the street to her house to invite her, I was hoping she would refuse. I crossed my fingers behind my back and said to myself, Say no! Say no! Say no!

  We found her on her front steps, bouncing an old tennis ball with most of the fuzz worn off. She had on an old pair of shorts with the hem coming out of one leg and a man’s sleeveless undershirt several sizes too big. Her hair wasn’t combed. It looked dry and scruffy, as though it belonged to a stray dog.

  She looked at Geraldine and me, then at Reba Lu. “Who are you?” she asked her.

  Reba Lu didn’t even blink. “Reba Lu Adams. The new preacher’s my daddy.”

  “I don’t go to church,” Dodie said.

  She began to pick at a brown, crusty scab on her knee. A big piece came off, and she examined it carefully before putting it on the step next to her. Then she gave a long, wet sniff.

  It was quiet, except for the sound of Dodie sniffing. “So …” Dodie looked at us one at a time. She had an expression like she was cleaning out a junk box and figuring out what to throw away. “What do you want?”

  Geraldine turned her head and looked at me. I turned mine and looked at Reba Lu. After all, this had been her idea. Reba Lu cleared her throat.

  “We’re going to take the bus to San Andreas and see the matinee at the Ritz Theater on Saturday. Do you want to come?”

  Dodie squinted the way people do when they’re taking aim before shooting at a row of bottles on a fence. “Why should I?” she asked.

  Reba Lu squinted right back at her. “Because it will be fun,” she said.

  “Oh,” Dodie said. She started picking at what was left of that scab. She picked at it for what seemed like a long time. Finally, she looked up at us, her pale blue eyes squinted half shut against the sunlight.

  Say no! Say no! Say no!

  I thought the words so hard I was sure Dodie would get the message.

  “Well, I guess that would be OK,” she said.

  We three turned and made it down the street in record time. We sat on my front porch swing and looked at each other. I, for one, wasn’t sure we had done the right thing. But at least Reba Lu hadn’t lied and said because we like you and want to be friends.

  CHAPTER SIX

  That Saturday, we put our nickels in the slot on the bus, rode to San Andreas, and got off at the corner nearest the Ritz Theater. We each bought hot, buttered popcorn in a paper sack and Royal Crown Cola in a paper cup. Except for Dodie, who said she wasn’t hungry.

  We found our seats and waited for the lights to dim. Maybe this wasn’t such a bad idea after all, I thought. I was beginning to get a warm feeling inside about making the effort to like someone when I glanced over at Dodie sitting beside me. She put her hand in my popcorn bag and stuffed some in her mouth without even asking.

  She kept on eating, and I let her have the whole thing. I didn’t want to put anything in my mouth that Dodie Crumper
had touched.

  She began to crack her knuckles while Buck Rogers and his Rocket Rangers were rescuing Wilma Deering from Killer Kane and his mob of space gangsters. The cracking got louder and faster as Buck snatched Wilma from a moving conveyor belt just as the jag-toothed chopping wheel was about to slice her down the middle. Crack, crack went Dodie’s knuckles.

  I stood it as long as I could, but when the Fox Movietone News came on, I leaned over and whispered, “Cut it out.” She gave me a dirty look and crossed her arms so she could put her hands in her armpits. I tried not to stare, but I couldn’t help it. Even in the dim light, I had seen that Dodie’s hands were red and sore-looking, and some of the skin was peeling off.

  Dodie had gone to school with Geraldine and me since kindergarten. But I didn’t have any idea how she spent the rest of her time. I never talked to her if I could help it. Sometimes I even crossed the street when I saw her coming.

  Now that I couldn’t hate her anymore, I wondered how I was supposed to act. Did I have to feel sorry for her? Should I ask her what she did to make her hands look like that?

  I decided not to think about Dodie and focused on the news report, which was mostly about the war in Europe. The film showed Hitler giving speeches in Germany. At first, I thought he was funny, the way he yelled and threw one arm in the air, but when I saw trucks full of sad-looking people being driven to the trains, where they would travel to places called concentration camps, I didn’t see anything funny about that.

  I thought back to that morning when I was lying on the floor waiting for the fan to blow cool air on me. The voice on the radio had talked about the war in Europe, and said, “… only a question of how long America can stay out of the conflict.”

  Did that mean Hitler could come here and try to put Americans in trucks like he did in Germany? Did it mean people in my town would have to fight him? I kept telling myself that Europe was far away, and he wouldn’t bother to come all the way to Messina. At the same time, I wondered how he was getting away with the things he was doing. And if he was so bad, why was America staying out of the conflict? Why didn’t our president stand up and say, “That’s enough!” It was what my dad said when he thought Eddie and I were getting out of line.

  I took a long drink of Royal Crown Cola. I was glad when the Porky Pig cartoon came on. We laughed right up to the end when Porky said, “Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!”

  The main feature was Days of Jesse James with Roy Rogers and his sidekick, Gabby Hayes, who needed a haircut and shave real bad. When Roy Rogers finished singing “I’m a Son of a Cowboy,” Dodie started to clap. I gave her a poke and said, “He can’t hear you.”

  She put her hands in her lap. “I know that,” she said. “I’m no dummy.”

  When I sneaked a look at her a couple of minutes later, her sore-looking hands were balled up into fists. I didn’t know if it was to keep from cracking her knuckles or if she was mad and felt like punching something. I leaned a couple of inches away to give her some space.

  After the show Geraldine said, “Let’s ride the streetcar.” It seemed like a good idea, especially since it was free on Saturdays. We rode it all the way north to the end of the line at Hill View Pioneer Cemetery. Just because we had never done it before, we got off and walked around among the gravestones.

  We were in the middle of a heat wave, but black clouds formed over the mountains to the north and nosed across the valley, casting dark, creeping shadows over the withering grass. It was covered with mounds that were sure signs of gophers. I had stopped to count them when thunder sounded off in the distance. Hot as it was, I felt a shiver in the middle of my back, and I made up my mind not to miss the next streetcar out of there. I hurried to catch up with the others.

  The graveyard was really old. Most of the gravestones were in bad condition, with big chunks broken out of the marble and the words hardly readable. Miniature pink and white cemetery daisies grew close to the ground, almost hidden. They were the only fresh flowers I could see in the whole cemetery.

  “This is a disgrace,” Reba Lu said. “Look here at poor Jessie Ann Watkins 1865–1910, with weeds growing all over her.”

  “It says Eternal Peace,” Geraldine said. “I guess she isn’t bothered by a few weeds.”

  “That’s not the point,” Reba Lu snapped.

  “Look, there are lots of words on this one,” I said, to keep Reba Lu from getting carried away.

  She shrugged. “They’re too faded to read.”

  But Dodie got right down on her hands and knees with her nose almost touching the old marble. “I can make out most of it,” she said.

  Carolina Mary Clarke 1871–1883

  Beloved daughter

  Here lies our angel, taken away

  From her earthly home to sing

  In the heavenly chorus.

  “Twelve years old,” Geraldine said.

  My age, I thought. I wondered what the stone would say if I were buried there.

  Here lies Angelina Wallace

  Who got a D in geography.

  I felt a raindrop on my arm and shivered. Maybe it would rain hard and wash the dust from all these old stones. But the clouds moved eastward, taking their shadows with them.

  We were quiet until Dodie said, “I sure wouldn’t want to be buried in this place.”

  “It probably looked a lot nicer all those years ago,” Reba Lu told her.

  “Nobody gets buried here anymore,” I told them. “This place is all full up. My daddy said so. Anyway, our church has its own burying place in that land out back under the elm trees.”

  “Do you have to be a member to get put there?” Dodie wanted to know.

  I looked at Reba Lu, then at Geraldine. They both shrugged. “What’s the difference?” I asked. “None of us is going to be dying anytime soon.”

  “She did,” Dodie told me, pointing to Carolina’s gravestone.

  Suddenly, visiting the cemetery didn’t seem like such a fun thing to do.

  “Let’s go,” I said, and nobody argued. We caught the next streetcar on the corner and opened the windows so the breeze would blow through our hair.

  “I hope we get back to town in time to stop at Walden’s drugstore for some ice cream before we have to catch the bus,” I said. “I still have a dime to spend.”

  “I’d rather have a root beer float, and it only costs a nickel,” Reba Lu said.

  Geraldine began to count her money. “I think I’ll have enough to buy a couple of comic books. They last longer than ice cream. I can read them over and over.”

  We all looked at Dodie, who was taking off one shoe. She turned it upside down and shook out two nickels and a dime. She put the dime back in her shoe and the nickels in her pocket. Then she stared out the window and didn’t say a word.

  I sneaked a poke at Geraldine. She made a sound in her throat that sounded like “hmm-hmm.” Then she said, “Dodie, how’d you get so much money?”

  Dodie gave her a quick look. “I earned it,” she said. She went back to looking out the window.

  The rest of us stared at each other. I’d heard Mama say that Mrs. Crumper did a load of clothes for ten cents, and she ironed for fifteen cents an hour. Mama said she could buy a pound of ground round steak, a bunch of carrots, and four baking potatoes for that much money.

  But nobody was going to get rich taking in washing and ironing. Especially since rumor had it that Mrs. Crumper drank up most of the profits. So it was a pretty sure thing that Dodie didn’t get her money from her mother. Yet here she was with an extra dime in her shoe. It just didn’t add up.

  By the time we got back to Walden’s drugstore, I had a headache from all that thinking. “I’ll have a peppermint cone,” I told the soda jerk. “Two scoops.” I figured I’d earned them.

  I sat next to Reba Lu at the counter. She was already sipping root beer through a straw. Dodie sat next to me and ordered a lemon phosphate. Now and then she blew into it through her straw so that the bottom of the glass filled
with big bubbles.

  “That sounds like someone passing gas,” said Geraldine, who had chosen her comic books and sat on a stool next to Reba Lu.

  I knew if we were back in Messina, Geraldine wouldn’t be talking about gas or thumbing through comic books. She would be leaning with one elbow on the counter, smiling at Johnny Henderson, and getting an extra squirt of chocolate in her cherry coke.

  “What a rude thing to say,” Reba Lu said.

  Geraldine leaned forward and gave me a grin. For a minute, it was just the two of us, the way it had always been. Then Dodie started blowing more bubbles, and Reba Lu offered Geraldine a sip of her root beer.

  When we climbed on the bus that would take us back to Messina, I made sure that Reba Lu sat next to Dodie. Geraldine and I took the seat across the aisle from them. Reba Lu began asking Dodie what Mr. Crumper did for a living.

  “He’s a geological engineer,” Dodie said.

  Geraldine and I nudged each other. “I wonder where Dodie got big words like that,” I whispered.

  Everybody in town knew that Mr. Crumper had come upon hard times and had to travel around the county digging outhouse holes for people who couldn’t afford septic tanks. And the reason Mrs. Crumper took in washing was because the outhouse holes didn’t put enough food on the table to feed the backyard crows.

  I waited until the bus blew out a belch of gray exhaust fumes and started to move. Then I leaned over and whispered into Geraldine’s ear.

  “Have you seen Dodie’s hands?”

  She gave me a surprised look. “I’m not blind.”

  I took that to mean that everybody in the world had noticed but me. And that I should have noticed. And that I was actually a little slow for not noticing. Geraldine really made me mad when she said things like that.

  “Well then, what’s the matter with them?” I asked.

  “My gosh, Angie. Everybody knows what Dodie does at home.”

  “What? What does she do?”

  “She does all the washing and ironing that Mrs. Crumper would do if she was sober.”