by Delia Ray
She glanced up at us. Her face was flushed and her dark eyes glittered. “Not that one?” she asked, pretending to be surprised. “Well, how about this one from the Washington Herald?”
She cleared her throat and began to read: “Deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, where snow now sifts through the wild oak branches, President Hoover’s trim little school for mountain children opened its doors to more than twenty education-starved people last Monday. The First Lady will find ample outlet for her well-known humanitarian sympathies in the ragged little mountain children who have trooped from their mud-chinked log cabins scattered through the wooded depressions of the hills. Some of these sad little wraiths are as shy as wild rabbits. They have never ridden on trains. Some have never even seen one. The biggest excitement in their lives has been ‘hog-killin’ time’ at their mountain homes—”
“Hog-killing time?” Ida cried. “They think I like hog killing?”
But Miss Vest barely took a breath. She flipped through the stack and found another article to read, and then another. Why wouldn’t she stop? The newspapers were all the same. All of them made us sound ignorant in one way or another, more like dumb farm animals than just regular folks without much money or nice clothes.
Finally, Miss Vest finished reading. She sat back on her desk with her shoulders drooped like all the life had just run out of her body.
“They’re wrong,” Ida shouted. “They didn’t get nothing about us right.”
“I know, Ida,” Miss Vest said in a tired voice. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” somebody called out.
It was Poke. I jumped at the sound of his voice. Like me, he had barely said a word since school started, but now he was talking faster than ever, spitting out words like he was trying to get rid of a sour taste in his mouth. “You must think we’re just a bunch of hillbillies, too,” he said. “Must be why you keep giving us all these fool exercises. How you reckon we’re gonna learn real reading and writing, copying them baby words off the blackboard all day long?”
Miss Vest looked shocked. “Poke, of course I don’t agree with those reporters. I hate what they wrote. The only reason I read those silly articles out loud was to get your attention . . . everybody’s attention.”
She took a deep breath and went on, using her hands to talk again. She hit the air with her fists. “I know we can prove all those reporters wrong. But it takes work, and we all have to start with the basics. It wouldn’t matter if I was teaching in the Blue Ridge or New York City, I’d still use the same methods to teach you. Learning to read and write takes time and patience and—”
“Well, I don’t have that much time,” Poke cut in, his jaw muscles working. “I reckon my pa would sooner have me home clearing stumps than sitting here making this hen scratch.” He glared down at the paper on his desk with an evil look. Then before we knew it, he had shoved himself out of his desk and started scuffing up the aisle.
“Wait, Poke!” Miss Vest called out, her voice sounding panicky.
But he was already out the door. Miss Vest dropped her hands to her sides. “Don’t worry,” she said softly, almost like she was trying to comfort herself. “He’ll be back tomorrow.”
But the rest of us knew better. Poke was gone for good.
Six
I was leaning against my chestnut tree at the beginning of recess a few days later when Dewey started whistling again. It was that same song he always whistled—“Let Me Call You Sweetheart”—and as he started the tune over and over, I could almost hear the man’s voice from our old record, singing the words so waltzy and slow.
Dewey was pitching a baseball back and forth with Vernon Woodard. Every time the ball smacked his stiff leather glove, his whistling seemed to get louder. For a while I huddled down into my sweater, trying to block out the cold wind and the mournful sound of Dewey’s high-pitched tune.
If they had given me half a chance, I would have joined Ida and Luella and the other girls sitting on the porch steps. They were bunched together looking at the new Sears, Roebuck mail-order catalog. Ever since Ida had spotted it on Miss Vest’s desk the week before, she and her friends had met at recess every day to flip through the pages and ooh and aah over all the fancy things for sale.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Stop it, Dewey!” I yelled.
It seemed as though everybody in the schoolyard turned at once to look at me. Even the girls on the porch tore their eyes away from the catalog to stare.
“Stop what?” Dewey asked with a smirk.
“That whistling,” I said, trying to keep my voice down. “You’ve whistled that song four times through already.”
Dewey looked confused for a second, then his eyes lit up. He walked toward me, tossing the ball up and catching it in his glove. “I know why you want me to quit,” he said with a sly smile creeping across his face. “I’m singing one of your old records. You’re just sore ’cause we got the Victrola now instead of you. . . . Well, too bad, ghost girl, you better get used to it.”
Then he started singing the words to the song in a loud, mocking voice. “Let me call you sweetheart, I’m in love with you. Let me . . .”
I closed my eyes. “Stop, Dewey,” I said.
But he kept singing, and I could hear my voice getting louder and turning shrill. I clamped my hands over my ears and the next thing I knew I was screaming, “Stop! Stop! I said stop it!”
When I opened my eyes again, Dewey was staring at me like I had sprouted horns.
He opened his mouth to say something, but I didn’t wait to hear. I started running for the schoolhouse, pushing past all the kids, who stood frozen, gawking at me.
The girls on the porch barely scooted out of the way as I raced up the steps.
“What’s wrong with ghost girl?” I heard one of them say behind me.
When I burst into the classroom, Miss Vest was at her desk, looking over her lesson book.
“What’s wrong, April?” she asked, springing up from her seat. She ran over and put her hand on my cheek. “You’re shaking!”
“No, it’s just—” I gulped for breath and swallowed down the quiver in my voice. “It’s just a little cold out there, that’s all. I just came in for a minute to get warm.”
“Poor thing . . . Come stand by the stove. Maybe we should see about getting you a good winter coat and some warm shoes. Even though spring’s around the corner, we’ve still got plenty of chilly days left.” Miss Vest bustled about for a while, dragging a chair closer to the stove for me and putting more coal on the fire. She draped her sweater over my shoulders, and I hugged the sleeves around me, breathing in the smell of paste and chalk dust in the quiet classroom.
“Actually, I’m glad you came in early,” she said after a few minutes. “I was just getting ready to start a project in the kitchen. Want to help me?”
I nodded and hung her sweater on the back of the chair, then followed her toward the door in the far corner of the classroom. The door to the kitchen. I had been itching to peek into Miss Vest’s apartment ever since school started, especially when I heard Dewey and Ida carrying on about what it was like inside. Supposedly, Miss Vest had invited their whole family to come over one evening and listen to the radio. The next day, Ida had spent half a recess telling everybody what a fine time they had had—about Chubby Parker singing on the radio show and the spotless linoleum in Miss Vest’s kitchen and the cookstove with four burners and the Frigidaire with the little ice chest inside.
Now that I was finally seeing the kitchen for myself, I just had to stand there blinking. I had never laid eyes on such a stretch of gleaming white. The counters were smooth and shiny, and there were rows of creamy-painted cabinets with little cut-glass knobs and blue-and-white gingham curtains hanging in the windows.
Miss Vest closed the door behind her. Then she turned to me and said, “Tell me, April, have you ever had hot cocoa?”
I shook my head, trying to keep my mouth from hanging open.
“Now . . . we’ll need cocoa and sugar,” Miss Vest said, choosing a few things from the shelves. “And lucky for us, Sergeant Jordan delivered some fresh milk this morning.”
She hurried to the Frigidaire, and I took a couple steps closer, waiting to see what was inside. When she yanked open the door, a little light came on and a rush of air, cold as winter, hit me in the face. “Lordy,” I whispered before I could stop myself. Miss Vest pulled out two big glass jugs of milk, pretending like she hadn’t heard me. She pushed the door closed with her hip.
Then I saw her sneak a quick look at my hands. “Why don’t we wash up a little before we get started?” she said. I looked down. My hands were grubby, all right. I always tried to clean up after chores every morning, but the light was so dim in our cabin, sometimes I got to school before I noticed ground feed corn under my fingernails or mud on the hem of my dress.
Miss Vest showed me to a deep sink underneath the kitchen window. Then she turned the silvery knobs and the faucet started spurting water. She laughed when I jumped back. “It’s a lot easier than the hand pump outside, isn’t it? Here . . . See if that temperature is all right.”
I crept my hands under the water and held them there. “It’s warm,” I said.
“That’s right.” Miss Vest reached for a cake of soap by the sink. “We have a tank that heats up the water for washing.”
She held the soap out for me and I took it careful as I could. It didn’t feel coarse like the lye soap Mama and Aunt Birdy made out of cow fat. And it smelled a sight better, too—like a whole basketful of rosebuds. But the best part of all was the bubbles, handfuls of them shining in the sunlight streaming through the window.
All of a sudden, the soap shot out of my hand. I chased it around the slippery sink for a while until I finally grabbed hold of it, but then it shot away again. That’s when I found myself laughing—giggling, really. And the laughing kept coming up and getting bigger, just like the soap bubbles in my hands.
It felt so good. I could barely remember the last time I had been that tickled. It was probably the summer before Riley died, when we used to run away from Mama and her long list of chores and head up for Big Meadows. We’d stretch out on our backs in the grass, with Riley using my stomach for a pillow. Pretty soon he’d say some silly thing to get me going, then he’d start giggling at the way my laughing made his head bounce up and down on my stomach. And that was it. The harder he bounced, the more we laughed, until we were so wore out, we’d have to roll over and take a nap right there in the tall grass.
“April? What are you thinking?”
When I looked up, Miss Vest was staring as if she didn’t know what to make of me. She handed me a soft towel to dry my hands, and all at once I felt the color rush to my cheeks.
“Oh, just about my little brother, Riley,” I managed to say.
Her eyebrows shot up. “I didn’t know you had a little brother.”
“Oh—I mean, I don’t. He’s dead now. . . . He died a while ago.”
Miss Vest made a sad sound in her throat and I could tell she was getting ready to ask me more questions, so I turned away, searching for something else to look at. My eyes landed on a small picture in a gold frame on the windowsill.
“Who are they?” I blurted out.
“My mother and father back in Kentucky,” Miss Vest said in a quiet voice.
“Kentucky?” I asked. “But I thought you were from Washington, D.C. Where the Hoovers live.”
“Oh, no,” she said proudly. “I was born and raised in the green hills of Casey County, Kentucky.”
I leaned forward over the sink, peering closer at the photograph. I couldn’t help being surprised. Miss Vest’s mother and father were plain-looking folks, standing in front of a wagon of some sort, the woman wearing an apron over her long dress and the man in baggy overalls. Their smiles were bashful. Truth to tell, they didn’t look much different from folks I was used to seeing every day.
Miss Vest picked up the photograph. “This was taken a few years ago during harvest time. See . . . you can just make out the tobacco leaves in the wagon behind them. Daddy had a good crop that year.”
“Your daddy was a farmer?” I asked.
Miss Vest nodded. “Mmm-hmm. Still is,” she said. “He’s getting a little stiff in the joints these days, but somehow he makes it out to the fields every morning.” She gazed down at the picture, her face turning softer. “He wrote me a letter this past summer, saying that he wished he still had me around to pull budworms off his tobacco stalks.” She smiled, wrinkling up her nose.
Now I was the one staring, trying to picture Miss Vest as a young girl, moving up and down dusty tobacco rows, plucking at mushy old worms. Who would have ever believed it? Miss Vest, with her fine voice and swirly skirts and graceful hands.
“There was a time,” she went on, “when I couldn’t wait to leave Casey County. I promised myself that I would leave and never look back.” She shook her head in wonder. “But here I am . . . right back in a place not too much different from where I grew up.”
“Are you sorry?” I asked. The room was so quiet I could hear the shiny metal clock ticking on the wall.
“No,” Miss Vest finally said. “It’s just that—just that now that I’m here, I expected to have more answers.”
She let her eyes roam around the kitchen, and for a minute she seemed to forget I was even there. I watched the worry flitting back and forth across her face like shadows. “I spent years going to a one-room schoolhouse a lot less fancy than this one,” she said. “I went to school back in the hills. . . . I should know how to do a better job of teaching all of you—of teaching older boys like Poke without humiliating them—but that’s something they really don’t prepare you for in teachers’ college. And now Poke’s gone. I missed my chance to help him.”
Miss Vest stared out the window over the sink as if she could see down into the hollow where Poke had disappeared. If I had had enough nerve, I would have told her. It wasn’t all her fault. Poke’s daddy spent most of the day drinking, and if the McClures wanted to eat, it was Poke who had to do most of the plowing and planting. With spring coming, he didn’t have time to be patient with all those letter exercises. He had to learn now, so the next time he went down to Taggart’s he could add up his own figures and sign his name on the credit slip.
Miss Vest gave herself a little shake. “I’m sorry, April.” She sighed. “I don’t know why I’m rattling on like this. I’ve just been worried about losing more students, I guess.” Then she looked me straight in the eye. “You’re not going anywhere, are you?”
Mama’s tired face, all her questions about when I would start reading, flashed into my head. But I couldn’t tell Miss Vest those things. “I’m not going anywhere,” I told her, trying to sound sure of myself.
“Gracious!” Miss Vest cried all at once. “Look at the time, April! We better get this hot chocolate going before everyone comes in here after us.”
So we went to work. Miss Vest showed me how to measure cocoa, sugar, and milk into a big pot on the stove. Then I stirred with a wooden spoon while she lined up rows of tin cups on two big trays. When we were done pouring the cocoa, Miss Vest reached up into the cabinet and brought out something wrapped in waxed paper.
“The most important ingredient of all,” she announced, reaching up into the cabinet again and tossing more bags onto the counter, one by one. “Marshmallows! We’ve got a whole year’s supply, courtesy of Mr. Jeremiah Hickock, owner of the Hickock Confection Company. He wanted to send something special to President Hoover’s school.”
&n
bsp; “What’re marshmellas?” I asked.
Miss Vest ripped open a bag and handed me one. “Here . . . go ahead and try it.” But I was too shy to taste it in front of her, so I smelled it instead, grinning over how it puffed back into shape when I squeezed it between my fingers.
Miss Vest smiled and glanced at the clock again. “How about if you put one of those in each cup while I go and bring everyone inside.”
I nodded. When she was gone, I looked around, just to be sure no one was spying through the kitchen window, then I stuffed a whole marshmallow into my mouth. Then another and another. It was like eating clouds right out of the sky, clouds made of spun sugar. I could have sat in that bright white kitchen forever, tasting marshmallows, dreaming of Miss Vest as a girl, maybe just my age, working up and down the dusty tobacco rows.
Seven
The first Saturday in April, I woke up feeling happy. The sun had finally found its way to our hollow, melting the last dirty patches of snow and filling the air with the smell of the mountain turning green again. And Daddy was home for a change. He had finished his logging job down in the valley and had a few days off before it would be time to look for more work.
He was splitting wood out back when I woke up that morning. I hurried through my breakfast and washing dishes so I could help him.
“Happy birthday, Apry,” Daddy said when he saw me coming.
I let out a little laugh. “I won’t be twelve for another week, Daddy.”
“I know. That’s why I’m telling you now. I might be off on another job next week. . . . Come over here. I want to show you something.”
Daddy led me around behind the woodpile to a little boggy place in the trees. He stopped under one tree and gently pushed at a clump of damp leaves with the toe of his boot. I smiled. Curling up from the dark earth was a perfect white blossom. I could have sworn I saw it trembling on its pale green stem.