Spitting Image

by Shutta Crum

  “Scouting trip?” I asked. “Like a Girl Scout trip?”

  “No. You know, scouting around for a new husband—one with a new car.”

  “Grandma!” I put both hands over my mouth. “You wouldn’t!” I giggled, and she started laughing, too. I realized that I felt comfortable with her, something I couldn’t ever remember feeling before.

  We were quiet together for a while. It was good. Mr. Perkins, in his glass tank, was awake. He blinked his eyes as his gaze followed Grandma’s foot, up and down.

  Suddenly, Grandma looked kind of watery-eyed. Never in a million years would I have believed that my grandmother knew how to cry. I thought she must be recollecting something. “What is it, Grandma?”

  She looked away from me and said in a soft voice, “Lord, what I wouldn’t give to have that old footstool back.”

  That was when I felt it—a sudden shift. It was like the world itself had taken a deep breath, expanded its sides, and opened up to make a little more room for me, for us.

  My Grandpa Bovey had had green eyes and loved African violets, kids, popcorn, and fixing things. I did have a whole history that had its own place in the wide world. There was a part of me back there just banging its head to get out and be known. And I had a tiny, flashy grandmother who carried it with her wherever she went.

  I got up on my knees, scooted across the bed, and hugged Grandma. She sputtered, snorted, and then put her arms around me. “No need to go getting all wally-mushed on me,” Grandma said, patting me stiffly. “I have to say, though, that I was proud of how you handled yourself in an emergency, Jessica.”

  “I was proud of you, too, Grandma. Boy, you nailed that snake, first shot. Bang!” I pretended to sight down a gun.

  “That? That was nothing. We Bovey women may be ladies, but we’re tough,” she said.

  “We Bovey women,” I whispered. Yes. I was a member of a long line of Bovey women, tough Bovey women, and green-eyed Bovey men like Grandpa Henry. There was a long, long line of Boveys, with me right at the end. I liked that.

  When Mama came into my room a little later, Grandma was showing me how to polish my toenails—once she’d made me wash them. There was no way I was going to let her put Rebel Red polish on my fingernails where everyone would be able to see it. Mama shook her head, sighed, and closed the door.

  I told Grandma all about Robert and his glasses. And she listened really well for a change. Then she nodded her head, reached into her pocketbook, and gave me four dollars. I told her it was just a loan. I think she would have given it to me, but I insisted that I would pay it back.

  Grandma understood about being beholden to folks, even family. She said maybe Robert and I could work it off, that she’d like to have somebody give her car regular washings—once she figured out if she could get the Thunderbird fixed up. She reminded me that you never know who you’re going to run into, and it did a girl good to have a shiny car. I clucked my tongue at her.

  Then she made me call Mama into my room and tell her about the challenge.

  Mama was impressed. “You saved twenty dollars all on your own? And it’s for Robert’s glasses?”

  “Yup, I worked for most of it. Except the five dollars Robert and I won in the raffle. And Grandma loaned me four that I’m going to pay back.”

  I knew it wasn’t right, but I didn’t mention that Mr. Henry had wanted me to give some of the money to Baby Blue. In my mind I saw Doyle’s face as he slapped Robert, trying to get our raffle money. So I tried not to think about that part at all and added quickly, “I’m going to give it to Miss Woodruff as soon as I see her again. She’s trying to get the government to put in the rest of the money through that War on Poverty.”

  “I see,” Mama said. “Does Beryl Ann know about this?”

  “No, ma’am. I was just gonna give the money to Miss Woodruff so she can make sure Robert gets his glasses. I was afraid that if I tried to give it to Beryl Ann, she’d be embarrassed and say ‘No, thank you.’ Or . . . or Doyle would try to take it away from her.”

  “I don’t think you need to worry about Doyle now. But Beryl Ann likes to do for herself, if she can.” Mama thought for a minute. “Everybody needs help once in a while. Lord knows where we’d be without help from our friends,” she said.

  “I’d like Beryl Ann to know that I don’t always cause trouble,” I said.

  “She doesn’t think that,” Mama said. “But if this is done through Miss Woodruff, it might be better not to let on where all the money came from. I think Beryl Ann would be more comfortable with that.”

  In the end, even though Mama was still upset with me for taking Baby to Dickie’s house, she said I’d done a good thing about the money for Robert’s glasses and that she was proud of me for being so industrious. She told me to be sure to get the money to Miss Woodruff as soon as I could.

  I didn’t get grounded. But I had to tell Mama where I was going and exactly what I was going to be doing every day. If there was a change of plans, she made me promise about a million times that I would let her or another adult, like Grandma or Lester, know about it.

  She said I had to do this for the rest of the summer because I had to earn her trust back. And if I failed even once to do that, she’d have Mrs. Boyd or Grandma over here to baby-sit, like I was five years old again.

  So I did the Girl Scout salute, hoping I’d remembered how to do it right, and I promised over and over to be as good as good can be. After that scare with Ol’ One Eye, even I was sure that I’d do my best to stay out of trouble.

  thirty

  SHACKLETON’S VALIANT VOYAGE showed up early one morning a few days later, tossed up against our kitchen door so hard I thought it would dent the screen. Some of the pages were bent over and the cover was a little dirty. But after I wiped it down and bent the pages back, it didn’t look too bad.

  I had been staying close to home and wasn’t up for a whole lot of excitement. Besides, Mama and Beryl Ann had decided that since Doyle wasn’t around to help keep an eye on Baby, all of us kids had to come round to whoever was at the Gas & Go every couple of hours and check in with them. Worse than that, we were pretty much confined to Baylor. No playing along the river or up one of the hollers or going into Hiram.

  I deserved it, but I didn’t think Robert did. So as soon as I could, I went to the Ketchums’ to apologize to Robert for getting him confined to Baylor, too. But Robert didn’t seem to mind too much.

  “That’s OK,” he said. “I wouldn’t like walking to Hiram or playing somewhere unless you were there.”

  “You don’t think I was plain crazy for going after your library book?” I asked.

  Robert shook his head. “No. Besides, you were trying to help,” he said. “Dickie was the crazy one for playing with his daddy’s snake. You were doing what you thought was the right thing to do. Sometimes a person just has to do that.”

  I smiled. Except for getting mad at me whenever I got grounded, Robert hardly ever made me feel bad.

  So the day the book showed up, I was anxious to get it back to him. I took it, and the twenty dollars, over to the Gas & Go.

  Mama hadn’t let me go to the Weavers’ to give the money to Miss Woodruff because she hadn’t had any time to go with me. And the Weavers didn’t have a telephone. So I had been spending a lot of my time helping Lester at the Gas & Go. I figured Miss Woodruff would stop by sooner or later and I could give her the money. If not, Mama said she would drive me up there as soon as she could. That would be one big thing accomplished. And it was something I was proud of.

  I knew Robert would be checking in sometime in the morning, after Beryl Ann had gone off to the Piggly Wiggly. Then I could give him the book.

  I stayed at the Gas & Go counter a good part of the day. Around lunchtime Lester went back to his house to get something, and while he was gone, Missy Salyer walked in. I smiled at her as she came through the door. But then I saw DeeDee’s blond curls bouncing into view behind Missy.

  “Hi, Jessie!” sa
id Missy.

  Missy could be OK, when she wasn’t bragging. But DeeDee was always impossible to get along with. She didn’t say a thing; she just kind of smirked at me over her shoulder and then floated over to the candy racks in a fog of pink and white.

  Missy turned toward me and whispered, “Our daddies are at a meeting and Mama made me invite her to the picture show in Bartlettsville. Ugh!” Missy crossed her eyes. I smothered a giggle.

  Then I noticed that Mrs. Salyer was waiting by her car out at the gas pump.

  “The movies!” I whispered back as I started around the counter. “What are you gonna see?”

  “Born Free. They’re showing it again.”

  “Boy, I wish I could see that.” Then I said loud enough for DeeDee to hear, “I’ll be right back.” The bells on the door tinkled as I went to pump the gas for Missy’s mama.

  We never had many gas customers—maybe one or two each day as folks traveled south to Hiram—but I’d grown up knowing how to work the gas pump.

  “Why, hello, Jessica,” said Mrs. Salyer. She seemed a little surprised to see me. “Are you working today, child?”

  “Yes’m. What grade gas do you want, Mrs. Salyer?”

  “Premium, Jessica. Please.” I had to admit, Mrs. Salyer had some of the very best manners in Beulah County. She was from Mississippi, and now that I wasn’t in the scout troop I kind of missed her Deep South accent.

  Mrs. Salyer kept looking at me a little strangely as I went about filling her gas tank. I thought maybe she was remembering that pomander ball with the dead spiders stuck to it. We hadn’t talked much since, and I wondered if I should apologize again. But I figured she’d rather not have to think about spiders any more than she needed to.

  I was almost done pumping the gas when Robert and Baby showed up. Mrs. Salyer looked startled. Now, I know that sometimes Baby can look startling if he has dressed himself and Beryl Ann hasn’t had a chance to run him down and clean him up. But from what I could see, he really didn’t look so messy.

  “Hello, Mrs. Salyer,” Robert said, offering his hand.

  “Why—why—why, hello, Robert,” squeaked Mrs. Salyer, pausing and then shaking Robert’s hand.

  “It’s Robert Edison right now,” Robert said.

  “How . . . how nice for you,” Mrs. Salyer said, clutching her purse.

  I rolled my eyes at Robert and tried to warn him with a shake of my head that I didn’t think Mrs. Salyer was feeling so well. She really was starting to act very funny. It was not like her to almost forget her manners. I began to wonder if I ought to go get Missy.

  “That’ll be two dollars, Mrs. Salyer,” I said.

  She quickly unsnapped her little pale blue purse and paid me. Then she called out toward the store, “Missy! Missy, dahling!”

  Robert and Baby and I watched as DeeDee came running and giggling out of the store, trying not to look at us. Missy followed with a very strange, kind of quiet look on her face. Maybe she was mad at DeeDee or still upset about having to go to the movies with her. “See you later,” said Missy under her breath as she got into the car.

  “Bye!” I waved and walked back to the door with Robert and Baby. “I’ve got Shackleton,” I told Robert. “Dickie must have tossed it up on my porch this morning.”

  “Great!” he said. “Was it damaged?”

  “Nah, not much,” I answered as I pushed open the door.

  When I walked over to the counter to get the library book, I found out why DeeDee had been laughing. There on the counter lay the Louisville Courier-Journal and the Bartlettsville Bugle. Both were opened to a big article about Beulah County, Kentucky, and a big picture of Baby asleep on Cooch’s belly in the dirt with a half-eaten peach in his hand.

  Robert came quickly around the counter. “That’s Baby,” he snapped, and tried to snatch the papers.

  “Yeah. Let me read it!” I snapped right back. It was easier for me to read the article out loud than for Robert to try to hold the papers up close to his face. The picture was of Baby Blue, all right.

  The article said that everywhere in Beulah County these reporters had traveled there was evidence of the deepest poverty. That President Johnson’s War on Poverty was trying to bring relief to the county in terms of jobs, clothing, education, medical attention, and food. Then there was more about the miners in Greasy Ridge.

  Finally, it talked about how some communities were helping their own poor by pitching in and seeing that hungry children, at least, got a little to eat. “In one case, Baby Blue, as he is known locally, doesn’t know the whereabouts of his father, and his mother is often away from the home. Local resident Jessica Bovey confirms that he makes the rounds of the neighborhood picking up bread or fruit. Often food is left out for him.”

  As I read that out loud, and a bit more about Baby’s real name and approximate age, the skin on the top of my head started getting red-hot and my cheeks started throbbing. The heat spread all down my throat and over my shoulders until my chest felt like it was shrinking up and getting too small to hold my heart and my lungs. I wanted to scream out before it all got closed in too tight to make a sound.

  Beryl Ann wasn’t often home because she was out working to make enough money to support her family. And Mr. Birchfield had made Baby sound like some stray dog that the whole neighborhood had decided to help keep alive by giving him table scraps!

  I looked up at Robert’s face and swallowed hard. His mouth was closed tight and his eyes were swimming behind his glasses.

  Baby had pulled over a stool and had climbed up to see the newspapers. “That’s me,” he said and smiled as he pointed at the picture.

  Just then, Lester walked back in. He took one look at us, put on his glasses, gathered up the papers, and started to read. Robert and I stood there like we were nailed to the floor.

  “Great balls of fire!” Lester muttered, slamming the papers down with disgust and looking at me over the rim of his glasses.

  “I—I never said it that way, Lester,” I stuttered, pointing to the paper. “I just said Baby goes in and eats when he’s hungry and folks don’t mind. Everybody knows that! But the paper makes it sound like . . . well, they don’t make it sound the way I meant it.”

  “No, I’m sure you didn’t mean it this way. The problem is, everyone that doesn’t know us here in Baylor is going to take it the wrong way.”

  Suddenly, Robert seemed to come out of a trance. Lifting Baby off the stool, he turned and marched to the door, saying over his shoulder, “We better go home in case Mama comes back.”

  “I just saw your mama headed over to Jessie’s,” said Lester. “I wondered what she was doing home so early. I expect she’s talking to Mirabelle about this. You stay here while I go check up on—”

  “No,” Robert interrupted him. “Mama might need me. I better go.”

  Lester looked Robert up and down. “OK, Robert. You go see if your mama is all right, son. I’ll keep Baby here with me. Jessie—”

  “I’m going, too,” I said, before Lester could get any further. “I’ve got to, Lester. It’s all my fault. I’ve got to explain to Beryl Ann.”

  thirty-one

  ROBERT DIDN’T SAY A WORD to me as we crossed the road to my house. I practically had to run to keep up with him. “The newspapers, they’ve got this all wrong—all wrong!” I wished he would say something. “Robert, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It’s all wrong. I’m sorry.”

  I pushed the kitchen door open, and we came to an abrupt halt. Mama and Beryl Ann were seated at the table, with the newspapers spread out in front of them. Beryl Ann had her head down on her arms and was just sobbing her heart out. Mama was squeezed up as close to her as she could get on a kitchen chair, and was trying to get her arms all around Beryl Ann.

  “What are folks at work going to say?” sobbed Beryl Ann. “I’m so ashamed, so ashamed. How am I gonna show my face . . .”

  “Hush, hush,” Mama consoled her. “People don’t believe everything that’s written in the newsp
aper. You know that.”

  “I don’t know. And—oh, Lord! Doyle’s going to hit the roof. He . . . oh, Lord,” Beryl Ann shook all over as she cried.

  Then Mama noticed us standing silent just inside the door. She gave me a jaw-locked look, but her face softened when she turned to Robert.

  “Robert,” she said, “your mama’s going to be OK. She just needs to cry this out a little bit, honey. She’ll be fine soon.”

  Robert gulped and nodded.

  “Can you go over and stay with Lester while your mama and I talk?” Mama went on. “She needs you to take good care of Baby right now. And can you ask Lester to call the Piggly Wiggly and tell them that your mama won’t be coming back to work today? Can you do that for me?”

  Robert nodded numbly.

  Beryl Ann looked up all streaky-eyed and snuffled, “Go stay with Baby. I’ll . . . I’ll be all right.” Then she got up and, teetering around the table, came over to give Robert a big engulfing Beryl Ann hug. “OK?” They hugged for a long time.

  Robert left without saying anything to me. He barely even looked at me.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but Mama caught me quickly with a warning glance. “Please, just go to your room, Jessie. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  I sat on the edge of my bed, feeling sick to my stomach. I dragged my pink plastic wastebasket over and cradled it between my knees, just in case, and stared blankly at Mr. Perkins. He blinked back at me.

  I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want people to make fun of the Ketchums. They were my friends. So what if they were poor? Beryl Ann did her best.

  I hadn’t thought that my talking with Mr. Birchfield and Mr. Henry was going to turn out like this. I’d explained to them that Baby was just Baby and that his going into people’s houses to eat was no big deal. I didn’t think they’d really use any of those pictures of him. And even if they did, I’d thought that might be a good thing. Like Lester had said, sometimes the news could get folks riled up to do good things, to help others. But when I’d seen Baby’s picture and read the article, it didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel good.