Katie's Dream

by Leisha Kelly

  THIRTEEN

  Julia

  “Is he gonna be okay?” Sarah asked me for the tenth time as we dragged rugs out of the house.

  Busy work. Something to tax my muscles but not my brain. “Of course, he’ll be okay. He may have to stay in bed a while, but he’ll be okay.”

  I shook out every rug as the girls watched. Then I sent them to go and make whatever they wanted with that clay before it dried out entirely. I threw the rugs over the clothesline and retrieved Emma’s rug beater. It was new in 1911, she’d told me once. It didn’t look new now.

  I wondered if Emma had ever beat her rugs just to have an excuse for beating at something. Grandma Pearl had told me once about making beaten biscuits, where you pound the dough with a wooden paddle till you’re nigh exhausted. I couldn’t do that. I’d lost the recipe clear back in Pennsylvania. But I could get the dust out of these rugs if it killed me.

  I beat and I beat, tears streaming down my cheeks. I was so mad I scared myself. I could scarcely imagine Emma or my grandma or any other woman feeling so mad as I was. It wasn’t like me. Not even with all we’d been through.

  I knew it was different because it was Edward, shaking Samuel in ways I didn’t understand. Making me doubt my own love and trust in him. And now hurting an innocent little boy without even the decency to admit his mistake or say he was sorry. I could have whacked him as easily as one of those rugs.

  It took me a minute to realize I wasn’t alone. I’d thought Robert was back in the barn and all three girls under the apple tree with that clay. But I turned, feeling eyes on me. And I found Katie, her face full of question.

  “Why are you doing that?” she asked, looking fearful.

  “To get the dust out.” I whacked at the nearest rug again, but not so viciously.

  “Seems like you’d tear ’em all to pieces.” She was looking at me with her eyes wide, but she had to turn her head to cough for a minute, I was stirring up so much dust.

  “Rugs are sturdy,” I told her. “Or they wouldn’t bear walking on. They can take a beating. Best way to get the dirt out.”

  “Mama only shook hers,” she said after a pause. “She only had one, an’ we took it with us every place, rolled up in the bottom of Mama’s bag. But it was stole in Newark ’long with the other stuff, and Mama cried.”

  I stopped and looked at her. “Why would your mother travel with a rug?”

  “’Cause her grandmama made it. She said it was a keepsake.”

  I couldn’t help wondering how a woman who would abandon her daughter could get sentimental over a throw rug. “Your mother’s grandmother?” I asked. “Did you ever meet her?”

  “Don’t think so. Only my own grandma. Not Mama’s.”

  “Do you know her name?”

  Katie smiled. “Pearly. Just like pearly gates in the sky.”

  I almost dropped the rug beater. Katie’s mother had a Grandma Pearly? Lord, this is too much! Doing things with my Grandma Pearl had been the dearest part of my childhood. Where had this girl come from? Finding such a coincidence startled me.

  “Lacey Pearly,” Katie continued. “Mama told me once she should have named me after her. ’Cause it sounds so much like a wedding dress. Lacey Pearly. Ain’t it pretty? But she’s dead now. That’s why I didn’t tell that sheriff her name. He won’t find her, unless he goes to the pearly gates.”

  The name wasn’t the same after all. Pearl had been my grandmother’s first name. Pearl Evan Carlton. But I wondered why this grandmother had been so special to a woman like Trudy Vale. Why did Katie even know about her when she knew so little about her mother’s mother, who, hopefully, was still living? “Katie, did your mother talk about her grandma a lot?”

  “Sometimes. ’Specially when she was sad.”

  “Well, the sheriff ought to know. You might have some other relatives named Pearly. Wouldn’t it be nice to find them?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause Mama said none of ’em care about her.” She glanced up at me and then quickly down at her shoes. “An’ I wanna stay here.”

  I leaned the rug beater against the clothesline pole. “But we don’t know yet how long—”

  “I—I mean all the time.” She took a deep breath and let the words roll out. “I promise I’ll be good every single day. I’ll help you with everything all the time, just tell me what to do. I can be quiet too, I promise, only . . . only . . .”

  “Katie—”

  She was looking at me with pleading in her eyes. “I’m sorry what happened to that little boy, Mrs. Wortham. I—I’ll do his chores. I’ll help you, I promise. You don’t have to be mad. Not at me or Mr. Wortham, ’cause I’ll be good. I promise.”

  I stared at her, stunned for a moment. “Honey, that accident was not your fault.”

  “I know,” she said as a tear slid to her cheek only to be wiped away furiously.

  “I’m not mad at you. It’s just that you’re bound to have family somewhere else who cares for you—”

  “I don’t think so. I think Sarah’s daddy is the only daddy I got. It’s just like Mama said—he’s got two other kids. And I promise I won’t be no extra trouble.”

  For a moment I was speechless. “Edward told you we had two children?”

  “I dunno. Mama said my daddy told her, before he left the last time, because she asked him if he had family someplace else.”

  Suddenly my heart was racing. “How old are you?”

  “Six. Didn’t I tell you?”

  “Yes. But . . . but when is your birthday?”

  “I was six in winter. In January.”

  Sarah’d been six in August. She was less than a year old when Katie’d been born. But we’d had two children.

  Suddenly I thought of the picture. Stolen with the rug and who knew what all else. But a picture. My eyes filled with tears. “He really does look like your daddy?”

  She nodded, and I reached my hand to the clothesline above me, just to steady myself.

  “Please don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not.” I managed to choke out the words. “I’m not . . . mad.”

  FOURTEEN

  Samuel

  Only one leg was broken. The other was bruised and sore, but they didn’t find a break. The right leg was broken just below the knee. Painful. More than one nurse told us how brave Franky had been not to scream when they had to touch it and try to set it.

  He was clinging tight to Lizbeth and me both. They thought I was his father at first, until we told them different. George just stood looking on.

  “Be strong, now, boy,” he said once or twice. “Don’t fuss no more’n you have to.”

  I knew it touched George to see his child in pain. I could see it in his eyes. But he didn’t move to touch him, even when I tried to get him to Franky’s side.

  “We’ll have to keep him here awhile,” Doctor Hall told us. “I believe we have it set right, but I’ll want to check him, and he shouldn’t be moving it.”

  George clenched his hat in both hands. “How long’s a while?”

  “Weeks. Three at least. Maybe he could go home then. If you can get him there easily enough and he can stay in bed.”

  The doctor left us, and George shook his head and paced the floor a while. “I don’t like doctors,” he finally told me. “Don’t like hospitals. Can’t pay ’em. You know that.”

  “I don’t think you have any choice right now,” I said. “And they haven’t asked for money, but we’ll find a way.”

  “You’re still sayin’ we, Samuel. Still claimin’ us all?”

  “Why wouldn’t I? I guess you claim us too.”

  “We’s more trouble than you ever been.”

  It was strange to hear George admit something like that. Finally he went to Franky’s bedside and touched the boy’s hand. But by that time, the medicine they’d given Franky for the pain had put him to sleep. He looked peaceful, and more like George than I’d ever noticed.

 
; “He’s a good boy, George. Way smarter than you know.”

  “You always did think that. He oughta been your boy. At least you unnerstand him.”

  “You could. If you talked to him more.”

  “Nah. Tried that. He’ll say stuff like he’s a grain a’ wheat or he’s wonderin’ what’d happen if some storybook character was to show up in our backyard.”

  “All children have a strong imagination.”

  “But he’s differ’nt! You know that! He’s clumsy an’ awkward. He ain’t normal, staring off into space and thinkin’ ’bout how come the sky’s blue an’ dirt ain’t. It don’t make a lick a’ sense to me. He asked me the other day what the world’d be like if there weren’t no trees an’ the cows weren’t no bigger’n m’ arm! He can’t milk without tippin’ the bucket. He can’t read a lick. Only thing he can do right is whittle wood an’ hammer an’ saw with you when you got the time. An’ now this! I dunno what’ll come of him, Samuel, don’t you see? What if he’s cripple on top a’ ever’thin’ else?”

  At Franky’s bedside, Lizbeth was watching us and listening but not saying a word.

  “I see he’s a thinker, George. And he is good with wood. But he knows what he’s talking about with a lot more than that. He’ll be all right, one way or another.”

  George was shaking his head, and it bothered me.

  “I happen to know that you don’t read, either,” I said quietly.

  “Well, it weren’t ’cuz I failed at tryin’!” George snapped. “I didn’t go to school like Franky goes! Never went but one day, so it ain’t the same a’tall!”

  Maybe he was a little too loud. Maybe we both were. A nurse came in, looking at us rather sternly, and asked again which one of us was the boy’s father.

  “That’d be me,” George said, suddenly looking timid.

  The nurse told us I’d have to leave in a little while. Only Franky’s parents could stay with him after visiting time.

  “He don’t have a mama livin’,” Lizbeth told the woman. “So can I stay an’ take her place?”

  “You’re the sister?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The nurse agreed. And I wondered how any of us would manage to get back home. Me tonight. But then Lizbeth and George and eventually Franky. Barrett Post would come in after them, if I could get to his house to tell him about it. But if Edward hadn’t stayed, how was I going to get across the miles back home? A long walk, I guessed. Or hitchhiking, the way my family had done to get out here from Pennsylvania.

  Juli would be wondering about Franky, I knew. And she wouldn’t be the only one. So when the time came to leave, I made my way to the door. George wanted to go too, but I told him he ought to stay. Franky needed him more than the kids at home did right now.

  “Most of ’em is fine, sure,” he said. “But Emmie Grace’ll be fit to be tied without Lizbeth there. An’ it ain’t just that. There’s the milkin’ to do—”

  “Your boys are well capable. But I’ll check on them. They’ll be wanting to know about Franky, anyway.”

  I knew Lizbeth was glad to stay. And glad her father was staying too.

  I walked outside in the evening sun, expecting to start looking for a stranger headed to Dearing. But Edward was still there, in the same place we’d left him, only he was sitting on the front of his car with a bottle of something and a cigarette. He stood up when he saw me coming.

  “I thought you’d left,” I told him.

  “You didn’t need me in there. But I thought I better stay long enough to see how he’s doing.”

  It was a surprise, a pleasant one, to find that maybe he cared. “The one leg’s broke pretty badly, but he should be all right. He’ll be here a while. On bed rest a while.”

  He threw his cigarette down in the street. “Was hoping you’d be bringing him right back out.”

  “Things don’t always work the way we hope.”

  “You can say that again, little brother.”

  For a moment he looked younger, softer, like the boy who’d shared pickle loaf with me once in the middle of the woods on the edge of Albany.

  “What do you think we’d have been like if Mother wasn’t a drinker?” he suddenly asked.

  “I don’t know, Edward. Seems like our choices are our own, regardless of Mother.”

  “Yeah. I might expect you to say something like that.”

  “What are you drinking now?” I asked him, knowing I was risking his anger.

  But he didn’t seem upset. “It ain’t alcohol, if that’s what you mean. I ain’t stupid enough to pull out any of that out here in the open. It’s Pepsi-Cola. You ever have one?”

  “No.”

  “It ain’t bad.” He took a long swig.

  “I need a ride,” I told him. “I can’t pay you, but if it’s not too much bother, could you take me home? They’ll be wanting to hear about Franky.”

  Edward was looking down at his boots. “Just you? The rest are staying?”

  “Franky can’t go. And they’ll let immediate family stay with him. That’s all. I’ll have to tell our pastor and friends about this so they can check in on them.”

  He lifted his eyes and gave me an uncomfortable look.

  “I know it was an accident,” I told him. “You weren’t watching, but I know you didn’t mean to.”

  “Well,” he said with a sigh. “Good of you to say it. Thought maybe you’d think I did it for spite. The little hammer boy was trying to run me off yesterday. Brave little cuss.”

  For a moment his words rankled me, as I thought about him laying his hand on Juli and Franky having to rush to her defense. Why had he come back again today? He’d never even bothered to explain. Lord, I prayed just to calm myself, maybe he’s trying to be different. Maybe. At least he’s not being so hateful right now.

  “I didn’t hurt him on purpose, Sammy,” he said. “If there was anybody out there I’d want to hit, it’d be you.”

  There was no great malice in his eyes. No laughter.

  I wasn’t sure the reason for such a confession, or how to respond to it. “Well,” I finally said, “I guess I’ll walk downtown. There’s bound to be somebody over there heading back to Dearing.”

  “Get in the car, you fool,” he told me. “I’ll take your sorry hide home. And you don’t have to pay me a cent.”

  I got in. But I knew we were in for a face-off. I knew that whatever was eating at him was bound to come out when we were alone.

  It took a while—most of the ride we sat in stony silence. But as we passed close to Delafield, he finally started talking.

  “Sammy, your wife knows what you did,” he said with a smirk. “She’s just being such a sweet little Christian that she doesn’t want to look at it.”

  I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t want to talk. But here it was. “She knows everything I do. I tell her everything.”

  “Sure. Maybe now. But not before, I’d bet. And the poor thing’s trying to tell herself how wonderful you are—”

  “Will you shut up?”

  “This is my car, little brother! I don’t shut up unless I feel like it. What do you think, huh, about her callin’ you a good provider?”

  I looked over the rolling fields beyond the road. Edward was driving slow now. Maybe he liked that I was stuck having to listen.

  “Don’t feel like talking, huh? That’s all right. I’ll just tell you what I think.” He glanced my way, and I could feel my stomach tighten. “That little old lady was the good provider. You got yourself a real farm. All that land. I never stole anything that big in all my life! Never could talk as smooth as you, I guess.”

  He was egging me on, I knew he was, trying to get me upset. But why? I didn’t plan on saying much of anything in response. What would be the use? He’d only believe what he wanted to. And God knew I hadn’t stolen a single thing from Emma Graham. God knew how hard it had been for me to receive the gift when she offered it. I hadn’t even been able to, not completely. Not until she died. />
  “You’re really something, that’s all,” he continued. “Never seen a better liar. Not in all my life.”

  “I haven’t lied, Edward.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot.”

  “Your turn’s up ahead.”

  He glanced at me and laughed. “Too much a coward to belt me, aren’t you, Sammy? You need the ride and you’re not knowing if I might pound you into the ground if you try anything.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He turned the corner, suddenly looking more like my father than I ever remembered. Something about the set of his jaw. “I s’pose you’re mad about yesterday,” he said. “Hard telling what your wife and that little boy told you. Guess I’m some awful villain.”

  I hadn’t expected him to want to talk about it, or to push me for a reaction. But he was right. I was mad. “You could try telling your side.”

  “Why bother?” His words came out hard. “You wouldn’t listen. Wouldn’t matter what I said.”

  “Yes, it would. At least Julia told me you didn’t hurt her.”

  “What do you think? Do you think I would?”

  “I haven’t seen you in a long time. We haven’t talked. I don’t know what’s motivating you right now.”

  “That’s pretty! Oh, Sammy, that’s rich! You know good and well I came here telling the truth, don’t you? You know all about it.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  He stole one glance at me and stopped the car so suddenly that I was thrown forward and had to catch myself against the dash. “What are you doing?”

  “Just you and me,” he said real slow. “I figured we could quit the games. There’s nobody else to hear. It’s not going to hurt you to tell me the truth.”

  “I have.”

  “Hogwash! There’s no way Trudy was lying. How could she tell me your name?”

  “I don’t know, Edward.” I felt like getting out of the car and walking away, but I had to at least answer the charge and let him know I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. “It does look like you’re telling the truth, so far as you know it. But so am I.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”