Ghost Girl

by Delia Ray

  Mama whirled around to face Miss Vest. She gritted her teeth like she was chewing dirt. “I . . . don’t . . . care . . .” she said, spitting out each word, “what that corpsman or whatever he is has to say. He’s wrong—and this should never have happened in the first place. What kind of school are you running here, where kids are fighting and my daughter gets her arm broke and then doesn’t come home all night?”

  Miss Vest opened her mouth to answer, but Mama turned away. “Now, come on April,” she said. “Get dressed. We’re going home.”

  “But Mama—” I cried.

  She shook her head hard, cutting me off. “Where are your clothes?”

  “Here,” Miss Vest said quietly, lifting the stack of my folded things from the dresser. My heart sank as she turned and went downstairs.

  There was nothing I could do to calm Mama down. She wouldn’t hear a word—not about Camp Rapidan or the ice packs or Wit, nothing. While I sat on the bed floppy as a rag doll, she yanked on my stockings and my boots and my sweater, keeping her mouth set in its hard little line. I let my arm hang limp at my side, not even wincing when Mama kept bumping against my splints.

  Miss Vest was at the front door of the schoolhouse, waiting to meet us. She held out my sling and the bandages along with the bottle of white pills. “This medicine is for the pain,” she said. “April should take two pills every four hours. I’m sure if she keeps to that schedule, she’ll feel well enough to come back to school tomorrow.”

  Mama took the sling and bandages, but she wouldn’t touch the pills. “We won’t be needing those,” she said. “And April won’t be coming back to school tomorrow, neither.”

  Miss Vest forced herself to smile. “Well, the next day, then,” she said.

  Mama let out a heavy sigh, and I knew, with a panic rising in my throat, what was coming. “No, not the next day,” she said slowly, like she was talking to a baby. “Ma’am, I thank you for your trouble, but April won’t be coming back to your school after today.”

  Miss Vest blinked. “What do you mean?” she asked, trying to reach for my mother’s sleeve. Her voice was climbing higher. “Mrs. Sloane, we can always decide about school later, but April—she needs medical attention soon. We need to make sure she gets a cast and . . .”

  I didn’t hear the rest. Mama was herding me through the front door and down the porch steps. It was a fine day, with a gaudy blue sky and a morning sun so bright it seemed to be throbbing, just like the pain in my arm.

  Mama kept pushing me along, saying, “Come on now. You’ll be better off at home.”

  I looked over my shoulder at the schoolhouse just once. Miss Vest was standing on the front porch, staring after us, with the tie on her robe flapping in the breeze.

  As we passed the chestnut tree, I noticed my little reading book still lying in the dirt. For a second I was tempted to jerk away from Mama, to run and pick it up. At least it would give me something to hold on to. Then I changed my mind. I wouldn’t ever want to set eyes on those pages again. All I would see were words I couldn’t read and a sister and brother looking so much happier than me.

  Eleven

  Miss Vest let a week pass before she came knocking. It was awful to sit inside the cabin not making a sound while my teacher pleaded and banged on the rough boards of our door long enough to scrape her knuckles raw.

  “Please, Mrs. Sloane,” she called out again and again. “Just let me see April for a minute. I won’t try to make her come back to school. I just want to see if she’s all right. Please!”

  Still, Mama wouldn’t let me open the door. Somehow, with her stare, she forced me to sit frozen like a scared jackrabbit. The second time Miss Vest came, we were in the middle of mucking out the shed when we heard her calling. Mama had been shoveling up manure into a cart while I scattered fresh hay with my good arm.

  “Don’t you move,” Mama warned through her teeth, and I leaned against Old Dean’s warm flank, praying for Miss Vest to just give up and go away.

  Maybe if Daddy had been around, he could have stopped Mama from acting so crazy. But he wasn’t due back from his latest job for another two weeks. And the truth was, if I had really wanted, I could have run yelling from the shed. “I’m here!” I would have screamed. “My arm’s still hurting bad, Miss Vest. What should I do?”

  I can’t say for sure why I didn’t do it—probably because for the first time in months, Mama was paying attention to me. We didn’t talk much, but she was always close. She brewed comfrey leaves and other herbs for poultices to press against my arm. Every morning she checked my sling and my splints, and during the day, when I fumbled through my chores one-handed, I could feel her watching me, worrying.

  With Daddy gone, we lit the lantern and sat together at the kitchen table every night, keeping each other company. Mama mended clothes while I tried to cut out scraps of cloth for a crazy quilt that I wanted to make once my arm healed.

  One night when Mama was fishing around in the rag bag searching for a piece of cloth to patch Daddy’s overalls, I saw her pull out an old shirt of Riley’s. I remembered him wearing it buttoned up to the neck on church days. It was soft and faded plaid and looked tiny lying across Mama’s lap.

  She stared down at it for a minute, her scissors frozen in the air. I held my breath, waiting to see what she would do.

  “Don’t cut it, Mama,” I finally whispered, half expecting her to slice into it anyway, just to get rid of it so she’d never have to look at it again.

  But when Mama turned toward me, her face looked almost peaceful in the dim light of the oil lamp. “All right,” she said, holding the little shirt out. “You take it. Might be nice to work a patch or two into your quilt.”

  I smiled. It was the first time Mama had ever shared a piece of what she remembered with me. So a week later, when Miss Vest came knocking and pleading again, I decided not to open the door even though I was in the house alone. After that, she didn’t come back anymore.

  Summer took me by surprise. I had stayed so close to our hollow all spring, I was amazed when Daddy came home saying work was hard to come by with the farmers in the valley so worried about drought.

  Then I remembered it hadn’t rained since that day in early May when the Hoovers came to the Sunday prayer meeting. But living in our hollow under Doubletop, with the mountain blocking out the sun most of the day, the ground around our cabin still felt damp and spongy under my bare feet. And the spring was running fine, plenty enough to water our vegetable patch up in the clearing.

  Still, Daddy stood on the porch, shaking his head and saying it was going to be a long summer. That’s when it hit me. “Do you know what the date is?” I asked in a rush.

  Daddy gave me a strange look. “June. The twentieth,” he said. “Why?”

  “Just wondering,” I told him, trying to keep my voice calm. But inside, I felt my stomach turn queasy. June. I remembered Miss Vest telling the class that school let out in June. We’d all have a break from our lessons, she had said, and she planned to spend her three months of vacation with her family in Kentucky. What if she had left already?

  The next day Mama was so busy lining up chores for Daddy, she barely noticed me heading out the door. “I’ll be weeding up at the clearing,” I called as I grabbed the hoe next to the back step. I started up the path toward the garden, then veered off into the woods, leaving my hoe in the crook of a tree. Then I ran, not even stopping to check the stones in the creek for Aunt Birdy like usual. I wasn’t wearing the sling anymore, but my arm still ached sometimes and I had to keep it bent against my side while I ran, like a broken wing.

  By the time I started up the last slope toward the schoolyard, sweat was trickling down between my shoulder blades. At the top of the hill, I stopped, hugging my arm and squinting against the baking sun.

  I was too late. With the blinds drawn down, the schoolhouse looked naked and lonely. The yard had been swept clean of lunch pails and balls and jump ropes. It was so still, I could hear a squirrel scrabbli
ng through the bare branches of the chestnut. Off in the distance, the mountains stretched out in quiet green waves.

  I wandered up to the front steps and stared at the clumps of pink petunias Miss Vest must have planted before she left. They needed watering. I knelt down and yanked at a couple dandelions that had pushed their way up through the drooping flowers. The tops kept snapping off in my hands.

  Miss Vest had given up on me, all right. She must have planted her flower bed with Ida or Luella or one of the other girls. Now she was off in Kentucky for the whole summer, maybe for good, and I hadn’t even told her goodbye.

  I found Aunt Birdy back behind her house, hanging out washing. As soon as she saw me, she dropped her clothespins and ran over to give me a squeeze. “I’ve been waiting for you to come round,” she said, pressing her wrinkled cheek against mine.

  “I can’t stay long,” I told her. “Mama thinks I’m out back weeding.”

  Aunt Birdy shook her head. After I had broken my arm, she had come to visit me a few times. But whenever she told Mama what she thought of me quitting school, Mama had pressed her lips together tight and refused to answer. On her last visit, Aunt Birdy got so disgusted, she left, not even pulling the door closed behind her.

  Now she was staring at my arm. “Still hurting you, ain’t it?”

  I looked down and realized I had been rubbing at the sore spot without even knowing it.

  “Not much,” I lied and just to show her, I used my bad arm to pull a wet apron from the basket at her feet and pin it on the line with the wooden clothespins.

  Aunt Birdy fastened one of her faded cotton dresses next to the apron. “Barely need to hang these up before they’re dry,” she said. “If it doesn’t rain soon, I’m gonna lose my corn. Can’t seem to keep anything watered long enough to do any good.”

  I bent over the basket again, trying to keep my face hidden. “It looks like school’s let out,” I said.

  “That’s right. Miss Vest left near a week ago. They took her down to catch the train in Charlottesville.”

  I couldn’t stand it. Aunt Birdy sounded almost cheerful. She chatted on about Miss Vest inviting her over to hear the radio before she left. Then, while we pinned the rest of the clothes up, she started telling me the whole story of the Amos ’n’ Andy program they had listened to together.

  Finally, I couldn’t keep quiet anymore. I cut right into the middle of her tale. “Didn’t Miss Vest say anything before she left? I mean, anything about me?”

  Aunt Birdy stopped and gave me a sad little smile. “Why, sure she did, honey. I was just getting ready to show you.” She took the leftover clothespins from my hands and dropped them into the basket. “Here, come with me,” she said and I followed her through her wilty garden back to the house.

  Aunt Birdy’s place felt like a cave after the glare outside. For a minute I had to stand in the doorway blinking until the corners of the room came clear with their dusty bunches of herbs and ginseng root hanging from the ceiling. Aunt Birdy fished around on a cluttered shelf by the fireplace. When she turned back to me, she was holding out a plain cardboard box.

  “She left this for you,” she said quietly.

  I took the box and stood for a few more seconds, pressing my hand against the smooth lid, trying to make the tingly feeling in my chest last a little longer.

  Aunt Birdy squirmed like she had an itch. “Apry,” she huffed, “go on and open it.”

  I laughed, and careful as I could, I pulled off the lid, then pushed aside a rustling layer of tissue paper. Underneath was a pair of beautiful boots, soft leather with low heels and thin laces tied up to the ankle. My breath caught in my throat.

  “Lady’s slippers!” I said.

  “What’s that?” Aunt Birdy asked.

  “Oh, just something Daddy taught me.” I hurried over to the rocker to try on my new shoes. But before I could yank off my sweaty old boots, Aunt Birdy said, “Wait. There’s something else.” Then she handed me another package wrapped in brown paper and tied with white string. It was heavy.

  “There’s more?” I said. How could I have thought Miss Vest had forgotten me?

  I pulled one end of the string and there on my lap was a thick Sears, Roebuck catalog, along with a pad of clean white paper and a silver ink pen.

  I looked up at Aunt Birdy, full of wondering. She shrugged before I could even say anything. “I don’t know, Apry,” she said. “All she told me was to remind you about your wish list. She said you’d remember.”

  I sat puzzling for a minute. “I do remember,” I said. “I remember telling her it might be fun to write out an order, just for pretend, and she called that a wish list. But I thought we’d be doing it together. She knows I can’t read and write good enough to make one on my own.”

  I flipped through the catalog, feeling the excitement drain out of me again. There was row after row of tiny black print and numbers. I searched for little words I could recognize, but the more pages I turned, the more the letters seemed to swim together in one long black line.

  I slammed the catalog shut. “Even if I could read, Mama would never let me keep this catalog. And what about those?” I glanced down at the beautiful new boots peeking out of their nest of tissue paper, suddenly realizing how useless they were. “Remember how mad Mama got that day when Miss Vest came here and asked about ordering new shoes? She won’t let me step foot inside the house with those fancy boots on.”

  Aunt Birdy sighed. She reached over and pushed a piece of hair out of my eyes.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I know Miss Vest didn’t mean to make you feel any worse off than you are.”

  “Then why?” I asked. “Why did she leave me here wishing for things I can’t ever have?”

  Twelve

  When I heard the regulars down at Taggart’s trading stories, I knew the drought must be even worse than I thought. I overheard Silas Hudgins say it had gotten so hot in Arkansas, corn kernels were exploding into popcorn right out in the field.

  Then another man cut in, saying the fishing holes at Camp Rapidan had all gone dry. “Old Hoover might as well forget about catching any trout this summer,” he went on. “He’d be better off staying in Washington anyhow, taking care of the sorry mess he’s gotten this country into.”

  “What sorry mess?” I wanted to ask. I was standing at the counter, waiting to pay for a sack of flour and some spools of thread. But Mr. Taggart didn’t even look at me as he took my money, and pretty soon all the men were talking at once. So I pushed past their shoulders and elbows, leaving the buzz of their voices behind me.

  I couldn’t help feeling like a ghost again. With Mama and Daddy so caught up in when the next rain or the next paycheck was coming, I slipped in and out of the cabin without anyone noticing, like a puff of breeze or a shadow along the wall. But for once, I didn’t mind being ignored. As soon as I finished chores every morning, I stole off through the woods for Aunt Birdy’s, never stopping for breath until I was sitting on her front porch with my new boots laced and tied and the catalog resting in my lap.

  At first I stayed on the front porch each morning, flipping through the catalog until my fingers turned black from the newsprint. Every so often I took little breaks to admire the fine fit of my boots as I stretched my legs out on the steps or walked along the railing, touching Aunt Birdy’s stones. Aunt Birdy tried to leave me alone most of the time. She tinkered around the house, talking to herself and trying to nurse her roses and wisteria through the dry spell.

  After a few days of studying, I managed to memorize the order of the catalog—hats and dresses were first, then corsets and gloves, then tires, guns, cookstoves, furniture, toys, baby buggies, and on and on. I turned to the end of the book, to the page full of houses. A new house for Mama—that would be number one on my wish list. I wanted the one Miss Vest had called a bungalow. The word sounded just like the house in the picture—neat and cozy, with flower boxes under the windows, just right for three people.

  I
leaned down until my nose almost touched the page, squinting at the teensy print, but there were numbers and letters all mixed together. I knew enough to write down a B for bungalow, but what came after that? I rolled the pen back and forth between my sweaty fingers, waiting for something to make sense enough to write down. The empty square of paper gawked up at me.

  It was too hard. Too hot to think out on the porch steps with the flat sky pressing down on me like a heavy hand. And whenever Aunt Birdy walked by, I kept imagining she was peering over my shoulder, checking to see if I had written anything yet.

  “I’ll be back after a while,” I finally told her, gathering up my notepad and the catalog.

  She gave me a funny look. I had never left before without changing back into my old boots or stacking up the presents from Miss Vest on the shelf by the fireplace.

  “Where you going?” she asked.

  “Not far.”

  I didn’t know where I was going—just someplace cooler, where I could think. I headed for the trees, down an old deer path and across a drying creekbed, and pretty soon I found myself near the little graveyard where Riley and Grandpap Lockley were buried, over on the far side of the mountain near Big Meadows.

  I knew Aunt Birdy visited all the time to put flowers on the graves, but I hadn’t been there since Riley’s funeral. It made me too sad to think of my brother buried in the ground with nothing but his initials chiseled on a piece of rock to show he had ever been alive. His whole life whittled down to those three little letters.

  RJS

  1921–1928

  Mama had wanted to order a fancy marble headstone from the funeral parlor down in the valley. But there wasn’t enough money, so Daddy had worked for days chiseling a slab of stone he found near our cabin.

  When I came up on the worn path leading to the graveyard, I didn’t stop. I walked all the way to the wrought-iron gate and stood with my hand on the latch. My new boots had scuffs on the toes, and the heels were mucky from crossing the creekbed, but beyond the gate, the cemetery looked so peaceful and shady. Even with the drought, the ground was still green with moss and periwinkle. Slowly, I pushed open the squeaky gate and headed for Riley’s grave, winding my way through the stone slabs and whitewashed planks of wood that people had used for markers.