“Why not?”
“Because we’ll be even more backwater than we already are. I’m surprised you can’t see that, Charlie Anne. Don’t you think we’re already backwater enough?”
I look back at Mrs. Ellis. She looks like a cross between Olympia and Bea. “Yes,” I say slowly, a smile starting. “I think we are.”
When I finally find Phoebe and Rosalyn and Old Mr. Jolly, they are standing by the fence talking to Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich about opening the school, and Rosalyn is saying she thinks they should go have a look inside and get things started.
“What are you waiting for?” Mrs. Aldrich says.
“Don’t worry about getting paid,” says Mr. Aldrich. “We’ve got a little tucked in an old jar and we’ve been looking for a good place to put it.”
“Backwater or not,” says Mrs. Aldrich, “we can pay a good teacher when we find one.” Then Mr. Aldrich takes her arm and they walk out onto the road.
“You were really brave,” I say, turning to Phoebe.
“You were, too,” she says, and then I remember how we are blood sisters and I put my arms around her, and then Mirabel is right beside us, pulling at me, brushing Phoebe’s fingerprints off my arm and saying it is time to go home.
Rosalyn notices and steps closer. “I hope you will send the children to school.”
“We’ll see,” says Mirabel, holding on to my arm and trying to steer me to the road. She already has Birdie’s hand in a firm grip.
“You know,” says Rosalyn, “it is against every law I know of to keep a child out of school who wants to go. Now that the school has a teacher and an assistant willing and able, you might want to send those children to school.”
“We’ll see,” says Mirabel again, really pushing me now.
“Charlie Anne especially wants to go,” says Rosalyn, stepping forward and blocking our path. “I understand she’s not reading well, but I’ve worked with children like her, and all she needs is a little time, a little confidence and a little practice.”
Mirabel’s frown is growing. “I’ve been helping Charlie Anne at home. Plus she’s learning manners at the same time. Lord knows she needs some.”
Then she steers me around Rosalyn and herds us all down the hill. We carry our shoes because our feet are hurting so bad. Even Ivy.
I learn that the cure for standing up for your friend in church is the same as when you are feeling down in the dumps.
“But it is Sunday,” I say. “Aren’t we supposed to be resting?”
“It is tomato harvest time,” says Mirabel. “There is no day like the present to get a chore done.”
This is what you do at tomato harvest time. First, you each get a big garden basket, even Ivy, and you rush through the hot grass to the garden, being careful of your blistering feet, because the clover is in full bloom and there are a hundred honeybees to every step you take. Halfway down the hill, you lift Birdie up and carry her, and she puts the baskets on her head to hide from the bees.
Anna May and Belle look up as we go by because they are wondering why we’re not all under the butternut tree, where they are enjoying the afternoon. “Mind your business,” I tell them.
When you get to the garden, you pick every last row clean of ripe tomatoes, slapping the gnats away from your neck and ears the whole time. You are very careful of touching a tomato hornworm because they blend into the leaves. When Ivy screeches, and starts jumping up and down and howling, Birdie and I don’t even have to ask what she is screaming about. Hornworms are the most revolting things God ever made.
“I quit,” says Ivy.
She storms away, but I am yelling after her, “You leave and Mirabel will make you do it all yourself. You know she will, Ivy.” Ivy is still walking. The sun is turning Birdie’s scalp red. A gnat has gotten inside my ear. “Come to think of it, Ivy, just go!” I scream. “Then you can do all the work yourself.”
Ivy stops where she is, and stands there. You can see her start to shake. You can tell she is crying.
She stomps back down to us. “I hate all this work. I hate it so much. Mama never made us do so much work. She took us on picnics. Remember?” The tears are falling terribly fast.
You can tell when Ivy is standing there looking at us, her face stained from all the sorrow, that she was loved once by someone who knew how to love. Just like me.
* * *
Mirabel is waiting back in the kitchen, getting the cookstove hot with who knows how much wood so she can get a huge pot of water boiling. While the sun is steaming and spitting through the windows, we are sweating at the table, washing the tomatoes, and then Mirabel puts them in the hot water. Then back they come, and we have to peel their skins off and cut them into quarters and toss them in a kettle.
Mirabel doesn’t want to can plain old tomatoes. That would be too easy. She wants to make stewed tomatoes, which are about one hundred times more work. We end up slicing so many tomatoes that tomato juice is running down our arms and making little tracks in the dirt still on our skin. It stings in all the places the gnats found.
Next, we cut up onions, so our eyes are stinging worse than our arms, and then we chop two dozen peppers, and finally, we add salt and sugar. This all simmers on the cookstove, which means the kitchen is now hotter than a fire pit.
For supper, Mirabel fixes cheese, bread and tall cups of fresh milk from Anna May. We bring it out on the porch, where it is cool.
“Charlie Anne, I want you to listen particularly,” Mirabel says as she pulls the manners book from her pocket. As soon as Mirabel starts, Birdie crawls over on my lap.
The young person who would
cultivate tact in speech and
manners will carefully guard
against obtrusiveness.
Mirabel looks over her glasses at us. “Does anyone know what that means?”
Ivy giggles. “It means don’t do what Charlie Anne did today at church.”
I glare at Ivy.
“Yes,” says Mirabel. “That’s right. We don’t need to stand up in church and get things all riled up.”
CHAPTER
34
The next day, Rosalyn and Old Mr. Jolly are loading mops, brooms, rags and buckets into the back of Old Mr. Jolly’s truck. I can’t help but notice them, and my feet tell me they can’t hardly stand still, so don’t blame them if they run over without me. I tell them I’m already running.
Old Mr. Jolly is picking up Phoebe and flying her around the driveway before hoisting her into the back of the truck. He isn’t so stooped over anymore, I notice.
Phoebe is giggling. “Want to come and help us clean the school?”
Then Old Mr. Jolly comes and asks me if I am going or not. I don’t want to go back to that school and see that place under Miss Moran’s desk, but I do want him to pick me up so I can laugh as loud as Phoebe, so I let him. I miss my papa very much.
The little white schoolhouse is tucked between two maple trees that are already turning scorched orange. Fall is coming early.
Old Mr. Jolly picks Phoebe and me up and flies us down to the ground, and we screech a little and beg him to do it again. But he says he’s getting too old for that sort of thing. I look at him, though—at how his hair isn’t hardly gray at all anymore, not since Rosalyn has been cutting all the gray out, and I think he could lift us a hundred times if he wanted to.
Then he hands us mops and brooms and everyone walks to the door, everyone but me.
“What is the matter with you, Charlotte Anne?”
I am remembering Miss Moran pointing to the words she just wrote on the blackboard, pressing her finger against the letters so hard her knuckle is white. “That is a d for dog and that is a b for ball.”
She tells me to write them on the blackboard, each twenty times. I do. Then she tells me to stand at her desk for my drill. “Hold your book up, keep your back straight, now read that column right there.”
She points to my book. I tell my belly to stop doing summersaults because it is
making everything worse. All the ds and bs are switching places, and I cannot tell which is which. “Ball.”
“No. That is doll.”
Miss Moran looks out to the class to see if this is a joke, if anyone is laughing, if everyone is in on my joke.
Becky is laughing. So is the oldest Thatcher boy. Sarah Morrell is already crying.
Miss Moran points to the door. “The woodshed. Go to the woodshed until the superintendent gets here.”
I am fighting back tears as I pick up my lunch bucket and my coat. The oldest Thatcher boy sticks his foot out into the aisle, but I step around it and go wait in the woodshed for Mr. Pritten and his paddle. It is going to be a long terrible wait.
Everything is the same, just as Miss Moran left it, that’s the funny thing. The desks are still lined up in five rows, and her desk is still in the front.
There’s a blackboard behind where she sat, and the words she was trying to get me to read are still written in her big printing.
There is a picture of Abraham Lincoln looking at me, and one of George Washington, too, plus a map of New England. The trash bucket is still sitting beside the teacher’s desk, and there is a stack of First Reader and Second Reader and Third Reader books.
Old Mr. Jolly comes in with an armload of wood and gets the woodstove started, and Rosalyn puts a box on the teacher’s desk and starts pulling out potatoes, butternut squash, onions, garlic, a big pot, plus a loaf of bread, a cup of butter, some coffee, cream, sugar, cups, bowls and spoons.
“We’ll make a soup,” she says while I am wondering what vegetables are doing in school.
“Learning takes a lot of energy, Charlie Anne. At this school, we’ll make a soup every morning and then we’ll have something hot for lunch.”
Phoebe and I get the job of getting water from the well, which used to be Peter’s job, back when Miss Moran was here. When we are back inside, Rosalyn wants us to peel and cut up all the vegetables, then she puts everything into the pot and sets it on the stove, which Old Mr. Jolly has gotten blazing.
We spend the rest of the morning sweeping and mopping and dusting and clearing cobwebs out of the corners and washing the windows. Old Mr. Jolly scrubs the blackboard, and I am happy to see Miss Moran’s sentences erased. Then he tells us stories about how he went to school here and how one day a bat flew around the school and the teacher fainted, and I think that if that ever happened to us, Rosalyn wouldn’t be afraid. She’d get the bat out. Then Rosalyn tells us her dreams for what kind of school she wants to open: a school for everyone, and then she writes a welcome to the students, and Phoebe has to read it to me because the letters are all jumbled up.
WHATEVER YOU ARE, BE NOBLE.
WHATEVER YOU DO, DO WELL.
WHENEVER YOU SPEAK, SPEAK KINDLY.
BRING JOY WHEREVER YOU DWELL.
When we are done cleaning, we each have a big bowl of golden harvest soup, and I wonder if Miss Moran ever once thought of filling us up.
* * *
“Do you punish the ones who can’t read?” It has taken me half the day to get to the question I really need to ask.
“Punish?” says Rosalyn. “What on earth for?” She stops sweeping under the teacher’s desk and looks at me.
“Like make them stand in the trash bucket or make them go out to the woodshed or sit under the desk. Stuff like that.”
“Is that what the last teacher did?”
I nod my head.
“We will not punish here, Charlie Anne. We won’t have time. We’ll be too busy growing readers.”
I breathe out very slowly and have another helping of soup. As we are leaving, Rosalyn tells Old Mr. Jolly she won’t be needing that trash bucket anymore and how maybe he better throw it outside.
Old Mr. Jolly flies Phoebe and me back up on the truck. Phoebe and I stretch out between the mops and brooms and buckets and let the sun shine all over us, and I watch Phoebe close her eyes. Then I hear Mama calling and I tell her I’m not listening, but she keeps calling and calling, and I tell her to stop, but she won’t. That’s when I see the shadow in the woods, and I hear Mama saying Watch out, watch out, Charlie Anne! and I duck as a rock flies out from behind a birch tree, but not soon enough. For just an instant, I see shards of glass inside my head and then about a hundred angry knives against my cheek, and I slump against Phoebe and everything goes black, everything except for the spot between the trees where I saw the oldest Thatcher boy step out.
Phoebe is screaming when I come to and Old Mr. Jolly and Rosalyn are climbing up on the back of the truck and Phoebe is cradling my head in her lap and then they are all trying to stop the bleeding. Old Mr. Jolly jumps off the truck and runs into the woods, but a while later he comes out shaking his head.
Rosalyn holds me as Old Mr. Jolly drives us slowly home. Rosalyn is keeping a cloth pressed against my cheek, and she sighs and tells Phoebe maybe they should forget the whole idea, how maybe opening a school here is too dangerous.
“Mama would be sad if we quit,” says Phoebe.
CHAPTER
35
This is how Mirabel’s face looks when Rosalyn and Phoebe and Old Mr. Jolly carry me into the kitchen: confused, like why isn’t Charlie Anne up in the upper field with Anna May and Belle, and then mad, like a hornets’ nest just fell on her head.
“What on earth happened?” she wants to know, pushing the flannel cloth I have picked for my new underpants (no rooster) onto the chair, and Old Mr. Jolly sets me down. Then I have to listen to Rosalyn tell her how we went and cleaned up the school all afternoon.
“She was supposed to be with the cows,” says Mirabel, her voice all flat and hard, and Rosalyn looks at me and tells Mirabel how I had told her it was all right to go with them, and then I start moaning really loud to get everyone to forget how I haven’t been too honest with anyone. Then Old Mr. Jolly winks at me.
“It was the oldest Thatcher boy,” I say, sitting up.
Mirabel grabs a cloth from the drawer, dunks it into the boiling water on the cookstove, and pulls it up with a spoon. You can see the steam flying.
“No,” I scream, “it’s too hot!”
Mirabel pushes my arm away and starts dabbing, and I am screaming because, all over again, it feels like shards of glass inside my head and then about a hundred angry knives against my cheek.
“Is that necessary?” Rosalyn asks, and Mirabel gives her the same icy look she gave me, and then Old Mr. Jolly clears his throat and says he better be on his way because he has some things he needs to be saying to the Thatchers.
“Wait,” I say. “I have some things to say to the Thatchers. Phoebe and I will come.”
Mirabel is making a paste of salt and flour. “You’ll do no such thing,” she says as she begins spreading it on my face. “You’ll stay right here where I can keep an eye on you.”
Then I am screaming so loud I forget all about how I wanted to go with Old Mr. Jolly in the first place.
“Why would that Thatcher boy do such a thing?” Mirabel asks as she brushes my hair into a ponytail and ties it up away from my face.
“Maybe he heard about the school and doesn’t want it to open,” Rosalyn says, reaching for Phoebe’s hand. “Maybe the rock wasn’t meant for Charlie Anne. We’ve been through this before.”
Mirabel looks at Rosalyn and Phoebe. “Nonsense. We’re not like that in these parts. We’re neighborly.”
“Then why don’t you let me play with Phoebe?” The words jump out of me so fast I don’t give any consideration to the consequences, as the manners book says I should. I am glad I say it, though, because next thing I know, Rosalyn raises her eyebrow at Mirabel and stares her flat in the face until Mirabel looks down.
Mirabel won’t let me out of her sight for the next few days. She keeps putting a thin coat of molasses on my face so I won’t bruise, and it turns out that I heal fast and I do not get a cheekful of pus.
She reads to me every night from the manners book:
There is a defect in th
e character
of any young girl who will go
around with buttonless or half-
buttoned shoes, with unmended
rents in her dress and uncared-for
hair, teeth and fingernails.
Especially offensive to refined
taste are spots or stains suggestive
of lack of napkins at table or of
aprons when they should be
worn.
I roll my eyes. Then Mirabel makes Ivy make me vinegar tea: one tablespoon vinegar, one tablespoon sugar, a cup of boiling water.
When my stomach’s upset from all the vinegar, she makes Ivy go out and pick some peppermint from the garden and steep me a cup of mint tea.
“Tea, tea, tea,” complains Ivy. “How much tea does one person need?”
“A lot,” I tell her.
“My goodness,” Mirabel complains when she sees Rosalyn and Phoebe and Old Mr. Jolly coming across the road, “here they come again.” But by the time they are on the porch, she already has water on for more tea. The curtains blowing at the window are mended and clean (thanks to Mirabel) and the table has a fresh cloth on top (thanks to Birdie). All the dishes are washed and stacked in the drainer and drying (thanks to Ivy, because Mirabel has noticed she hasn’t been doing enough chores). The floor is scrubbed (thanks to Mirabel), and there is another vinegar pie just out of the oven (thanks to me).
Mirabel cuts big chunks of pie and puts them on the table. Birdie hurries in from where she’s been playing down by the clothesline and goes over and climbs onto Phoebe’s lap. Mirabel turns a little red. “Get off of there, Birdie.”
“It’s all right,” Phoebe says, letting Birdie steal a piece of her pie.
“They like each other,” I say, taking a bite of pie so big my cheeks fill out like an old hornpout.
Mirabel stands there, not sure what to do. “Don’t fill your mouth so full, Charlie Anne,” she says, finally, and sits down. “Where are your manners?” I wonder if she has ever eaten at a table with a colored girl before. I wonder if she knows about drinking fountains and white-people library books.
The Wonder of Charlie Anne Page 12