by Anne Nesbet
“Look over this way, young lady,” said the oculist, louder now. He was gesturing toward that gray patch on the white wall that must be the dreadfully different chart. “Just tell me please, what is the largest letter you see there?”
“A?” she said, but the game was already up. The students were beginning to whisper — a whole line of whispers running all the way down the hall.
“Is that what you see?” said the oculist.
“What is there to see? I can’t see anything,” she said finally, and she was disgusted to feel tears of frustration welling up, uninvited, in her eyes. A fuzzy rectangle of gray against the white wall! Really, what magic did everyone else have that made them able to see things like that, letters and everything, from so very far away?
“Ah,” said the oculist, and Miss Hatch shook a finger at the murmuring students. “Have you worn eyeglasses before, young lady, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“No, no eyeglasses, never,” Gusta said. Her father didn’t believe in giving in to what he thought of as weaknesses. And they hadn’t had any money, of course, for glasses. Glasses were expensive.
Miss Hatch leaned forward.
“I think, Augusta, that you should go see Nurse Renfield now. She can go over the other points we’ve been discussing in class. Don’t be discouraged. Maybe there’s some way you can earn a balloon after all!”
It was a most miserable moment. Gusta stumbled back down the hall, following the unlucky girl delegated to take her to the nurse’s office, and as she walked past that endless line of students, some muttered those things people say about people who don’t see so well: “New girl’s blind as a bat! Couldn’t hit a barn door with a rock, most likely!” Things like that. Gusta tried to hold her head high, but it was a chore. And it was bitter when she had to overhear that girl Molly say to the girl standing next to her, “How are we ever going to get our hundred percent class certificate now? It’s just not fair. No Vision, obviously, and have you seen her teeth? Crooked old vampire teeth! Plus she looks scrawny, too.”
It was like walking a gauntlet, parading down that hall. At the end of it was an ordinary school nurse’s office, where the nurse tried to be comforting but kept missing the target slightly.
“Are you certain you’ve never had eyeglasses, dear?” said the nurse. “I don’t know how you can possibly have come this far in school with eyes as bad as yours.”
“I study hard,” said Gusta, because she did have the tiniest little chip on her shoulder. “I’ve been promoted every year.”
“Well,” said the nurse, “hop onto this scale now, dear, and we’ll see how your growth measures up.”
It did not measure up. Gusta’s heart sank when the nurse started shaking her head and clucking her tongue a little.
“And your poor teeth!” said the nurse. “I suppose you’ll probably need some of those pulled eventually. No, no, don’t look like that! No one’s going to be pulling any of your teeth today. Oh, dear. Sit right there a moment.”
Gusta could see that the nurse meant well. She did not mean to be making Gusta so unhappy that she just wanted to let her head sink down onto her arms and never look up at anyone again, never be asked to read their awful gray blobs of eye charts or have to open her mouth so they could laugh at her teeth.
The nurse had opened a door at the side of her cramped office — a closet, it seemed to be, full of junk in piles, as far as Gusta could tell. She had the vague impression of shoes, but maybe she wasn’t seeing that quite right.
“Let’s see what we have here,” said the nurse, coming back with a battered box.
Inside were glasses, all sorts of old glasses. Some were held together with twine or sticky tape, and all of them were more or less ugly, and a few were made for people even smaller than Gusta and would never fit her in a million years.
“Don’t tell the oculist,” said the nurse. “He doesn’t care for my slipshod half measures. But let’s just see if maybe one of these might help you out. I know how expensive glasses can be.”
In that box must have been all the glasses lost at Jefferson School over the last ten years. The nurse kept picking out pairs and making hopeful sounds, and then tucking them onto Gusta’s face.
None of them came close to being right. Those glasses just took the usual blur and twisted it in various unpleasant ways. Or did nothing much at all.
“Too bad,” said the nurse, scribbling something on a piece of paper. “Sometimes I’m lucky. Well, now, don’t worry too much — I’m sending a note home with you for your grandmother, asking for her to send in your birth certificate, and explaining that our screening has determined you need a follow-up appointment with the oculist, and probably a prescription for glasses.”
Gusta just stared at her. Where was her grandmother supposed to come up with the money for eyeglasses? (And that triggered a twist of guilt in her belly, of course. But she tried the thought out in her head, and she still could not stand the idea of giving up the horn.)
It was easy enough to tell that the school nurse had had dozens of students stare at her in just that way before, while she told them they needed glasses, or expensive dental care, or shoes that fit better, or just Pick Your Impossible Option Here. She looked at Gusta and sighed.
“I know it won’t be easy, but I’m going to have a nice talk with the oculist as soon as I can manage, and I hope we may be able to work something out for you. And of course I will talk with your teacher, too, so that things aren’t so hard for you in class while we’re all still figuring out what to do about the glasses. And meanwhile you just keep eating your vegetables and drinking your milk, Augusta, so we can get you healthy and hearty.”
“Springdale Dairy,” said Gusta, without even realizing she was speaking aloud. Then as soon as she did realize, her hand flew to her mouth, she was so embarrassed. But to her surprise, the nurse was laughing.
“Oh, my stars!” she said. “I forgot! You’re in Miss Hatch’s class, aren’t you? Right in the middle of the Dairy Wars!”
Gusta couldn’t help staring. What did the nurse mean by that?
“You’ve got George Thibodeau and little Molly Gowen in that one room of yours, don’t you?”
Gusta nodded: she remembered the names George and Molly, yes.
“They are always going on about their dairies,” said the nurse. “You know the Thibodeaus run the Springdale Dairy — and the Gowens have Sharp’s Ridge Farm. I’ve seen those children glare at each other like they were on two sides of a battlefield. Most ridiculous thing, isn’t it? But your grandmother will feed you well. Plenty of children come through here, starting skinny and wild-eyed as fawns and then plumping up nicely under Mrs. Hoopes’s care. So don’t worry too much, Augusta. You may not be able to qualify for that Seven-Point Certificate, but I hope we will be able to send you back home, when the time comes, haler and healthier than you are today.”
The first place she sent Gusta, however, was back upstairs to Miss Hatch’s 5A classroom with another little folded note, and that was not easy.
All the heads in the classroom turned to look at her as she came in, defeated, to take her seat below the reproachful army of balloon-wielding Scottie dogs.
She was never going to have many balloons to offer any of those eager paper dogs, that was clear. In one efficient day, she had already managed to bar herself from three of those seven possible points: Vision, Teeth, and Growth. (What were the other ones again?)
And then things got a notch worse: there was someone sitting in Gusta’s desk, and Miss Hatch was already gesturing to another seat, way up in the front.
“I hope you’ll be able to see better from up here, Augusta,” said Miss Hatch, and everyone in that room watched as Gusta gathered up the things in her desk and walked, fighting to keep her head up the whole time, to the dreadful, exposed front of the room.
Bess was waiting patiently on the front steps of the school building at the end of that disastrous day. What with a little extra lecture (mea
nt to be encouraging) from her teacher after the bell rang, Gusta was just about the last person out of the doors.
“Thought Miss Hatch might keep you for a while after,” said Bess. “Since you’re new. So I sent all the boys on ahead. And Josie came by while I was waiting, and she said she’d better scoot home for chores. Are you really blind?”
“No!” said Gusta, somewhat taken aback. “I’m walking along beside you just fine, aren’t I?”
“I guess you could be blind and still have feet that work, couldn’t you?” said Bess in her matter-of-fact way. “I mean, I’ve never met anyone who was blind before, that’s all. So when they all started saying in class did I know my new cousin is blind, I did wonder.”
“They said I need glasses, that’s all.”
“Oh,” said Bess. “Well, that’s not as exciting.”
Then she thought another moment. “I bet they cost a lot of money, glasses. What’s Gramma Hoopes going to say about that?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Gusta. She felt a little prickly about the whole thing, to tell the truth. “I’ve been doing fine without them. They were just fussing about nothing back at that school.”
“Mm-hm,” said Bess. It was a sympathetic sort of sound, and then they squished along together through the already ugly-looking snow, their footsteps slippery on the icy patches.
“Well, here’s my house now,” said Bess, giving Gusta’s hand a good-bye squeeze. “See you tomorrow morning, I guess!”
And she darted up the porch steps and through the slightly squeaky screen door.
For a moment, Gusta stood there, just savoring the feeling of having someone in the world who was already glad today about seeing her tomorrow.
It was good to have a cousin. It made this long, slushy stretch of Elm Street a better place, now that she knew Bess was living here. And just as Gusta turned to face the rest of the slog home, the porch door squeaked open again.
“Gusta!” Bess was pelting back down the walkway toward her. “Come in for a moment, can you? Mama-Liz says you should come on in.”
The blurry shadow standing by the door turned out to be a woman, with dark hair pulled back sharply from her tired-looking face.
“You’re Gladys’s girl?” said the woman. “Up from New York, says Bess?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Gusta. (She wasn’t quite sure what you called the woman married to the man who had been married to your mother’s deceased sister.) “I’m Augusta.”
“Seems like it might do Charlie some good, seeing you,” said the woman. “He always spoke highly of your mother. Quite the scholar, wasn’t she? And now she’s living in the big city. Going places. Might get him out of his mood, seeing you. He hasn’t been the same since his accident. He’s been right down in the dumps. Well, come on in, then.”
She held the door open for Gusta, and Bess leaned close so Gusta could see her encouraging smile. “He’ll be glad you’re here, Gusta. You’ll see.”
Tha-bump! That was Gusta’s heart saying hadn’t she met enough new people for one single day? But of course an uncle was something different. And in particular, an uncle who had been hurt in the mills. She obediently picked her way up the steps to the door.
“Right in here,” said Bess.
Inside that door was a room full of gloom and clutter. The shadows were blue. There were blurry objects all higgledy-piggledy on the shelves, and when Gusta put a hand on the couch for a moment, to steady herself in that sad space, she could feel how all the softness of the fabric had been worn away long ago.
The darker shadow in a great lump of a chair ahead moved its head: it wasn’t a shadow at all, but a person.
“Look who’s here, Papa,” said Bess. “It’s my cousin Augusta, up from New York.”
The shadowy person nodded, maybe — it was hard to tell.
“Well, hello, then, Augusta. Come over here so I can see you better,” said the shadowy one.
The atmosphere in the room had that peculiar smell rooms have when someone has been sick in bed for a while in the winter, like the room itself was crying out for all the windows in the world to be flung open, and for spring finally, finally to come.
But spring felt very far away in that place. Gusta made herself step closer, and then a little closer still.
“Well, you look like her, that’s for sure,” said Uncle Charlie. “Spitting image of Gladdy when she was just a girl. You a force of nature, girl? She sure was.”
Was it a good thing or a bad thing, to be a force of nature? Up close, Gusta could see the extra shadows pooling on Uncle Charlie’s face. He must not be eating right, she thought. He would certainly not earn many health certificate balloons for his Scottie dog, if he were in the fifth grade at the Jefferson School. One of his arms was in some kind of wrapping, too, she noticed. Bandaged up.
He must have noticed her noticing, because he raised that hand a little in the air and turned it this way and that.
“See that? They shoulda shut down the line so I could fix that loom properly, but guess what — they didn’t,” he said. “Now it’s healed up all wrong, and I’m useless. Can’t do anything with it because the skin’s knotted up so tight. Doctor says it’s scar tissue. Maybe some fancy surgeon could fix it for a pile of money. But a pile of money is what we just haven’t got, isn’t it? Anyhow, done is done.”
That made Gusta indignant. Done is done!
What would her papa surely say, about what they had done to Uncle Charlie? Her father wasn’t here to say it, so Gusta figured it was up to her.
“You know, Uncle Charlie,” she said, “it’s not right for them to leave you this way. It’s the mill that’s supposed to pay to fix your hand.”
Uncle Charlie barked out a bitter little laugh into that gloomy air.
“Sweet of you, Gladdy’s little Augusta, but it’s not the mill that got its arm hurt — it’s just me,” said Uncle Charlie. “And the mill doesn’t care a nickel’s worth about me. They don’t pay anything for anybody except for themselves.”
“Some places there are laws, though,” said Gusta. “That would make them pay. And that’s what the union does, too — fights for the rights of the Working Man.”
Uncle Charlie laughed, but the laugh faded into a cough. Even Uncle Charlie’s cough was ragged and worn out, like the furniture in this shadowed, gloomy room.
“You got a lot of big, shiny ideas in your head there, Augusta,” he said, “like your mother used to. I remember the way she went on and on about all sort of things. Anyway, no union yet in the Kendall Mills. And that’s that. How’s your mother been getting on, anyway, down there in the big city?”
“Fine, thank you,” said Gusta. Then she pressed her lips together for a moment so that her doubts wouldn’t show. If a mother were really “getting on fine,” her daughter probably wouldn’t have been shipped away to live with the folks in Maine.
“We’ll let Augusta get home now, won’t we?” said Mama-Liz, and she ushered Gusta back out the porch door.
Gusta was so glad to get outside again that she took a few deep, desperate gulps of cold air, just to get the sickbed smell out of her nostrils.
But as Mama-Liz held the door open with one hand, she used the other to reach out and grab onto Gusta’s wrist — not in a mean way, but like someone grasping at straws.
“You’ll put in a word with your mother, won’t you?” she said. “Now that she’s in the big city and all. You’ll let your mother know, how he is? You heard your uncle. We don’t have any union in the mills.”
It wasn’t until half the way to Gramma Hoopes’s house that Gusta realized Mama-Liz was hoping Gusta’s own mama might have money. That made her heart sink, right there.
That evening she gathered her curiosity and her courage together, and she said to Gramma Hoopes that she didn’t think it was fair, all that had happened to Uncle Charlie’s poor hand.
“Fair?” said Gramma Hoopes. “What’s fair got to do with anything, child, I’d like to know?”
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“He said the doctors looked at his hand and thought it could be fixed.”
“Mm, well,” said Gramma Hoopes. “Guess it’d be a hundred dollars if it’s a nickel, to get a surgeon to fix up that hand. Too bad money doesn’t grow in cornfields or on berry bushes, isn’t it? But no use crying over spilt milk.”
And that’s injustice, thought Gusta. A person’s actual life should not be treated like spilt milk.
Sometimes even a small and unimportant person can find herself facing injustice — Gusta knew that was so. Then you have to do what you have to do, or the world just will never get any better. (Right, Papa?)
Aloud, she said, as politely as she could possibly manage, “Gramma Hoopes, may I please have paper and a stamp? I was hoping to write a letter.”
She did not even have to tell a lie. Gramma Hoopes assumed Gusta must be wanting to write to her mother and handed over a piece of notepaper, an envelope, and a stamp, just like that.
Gusta wrote out the letter very carefully. She described what she knew about the injustice done to Mr. Charles Goodman, currently residing on Elm Street in Springdale. And she said she thought the Kendall Mills were about over-ready by now for a union, so could New York please send someone up to help with some organizing? She hoped the union would make things right for Charles Goodman and for all the other folks working at the Kendall Mills.
She signed it with a scrawled version of her name that didn’t give anything away, like for instance what her name actually was.
And she addressed that letter to Mr. Elmer Smith of the big textile union, all the way down in New York City. She was able to put the correct street address on the envelope, because she happened to have met Elmer Smith personally, not that he would remember her. She had been to that union building many a time with her parents. She knew what street it was on, and even what number the building had on that street.
And she sealed up that letter and went to the post office, the next day, to see it sent along to New York City.