Ghost Girl

by Delia Ray

  “So I bet you never did it, did you?” he whispered.

  I pretended I didn’t know what he meant. “Did what?”

  “Ask the Hoovers about the park.”

  “’Course I asked them,” I said.

  “Well . . . what’d they say?”

  With all his questions and my struggling to manage the magazines one-handed, I could feel the sweat beading up over my top lip. “Mrs. Hoover said she didn’t know what the devil you were talking about,” I lied.

  Dewey cut his eyes at me, but before he could get any further, I shoved the three best magazines into my bag and headed out the door. I was surprised at myself. After talking to Mrs. Hoover at the White House, I knew there was truth to what Dewey was saying about the park. But the lie had fallen out of my mouth as smooth as syrup. Still, I couldn’t worry about that now. I had to get Aunt Birdy well first.

  Daddy was in the front room waiting for me when I got back to Aunt Birdy’s. I stood in the doorway holding my bag of magazines, gawping at him.

  “Hey, April,” he said, taking a step closer like he wanted to hug me. But then he stopped short. “How you getting along?”

  I didn’t answer. A sharp metal taste filled my mouth, and I felt a wave of something black and powerful pushing up inside my chest.

  Daddy looked down at his shoes, shaking his head. “I know, April,” he said. “I know. It’s been so long. . . . But I think I’ve done right all this time, letting you stay with Miss Vest. I think you been better off with her, going to school and learning so much. I know what a fine student you are. Miss Vest, every so often she sends us your drawings and stories and those test papers of yours with gold stars on them.”

  I tried to keep my face blank, but I could feel the surprise widening my eyes. Miss Vest never told me she had been sending them my work all this time.

  Daddy went on. “I know your Aunt Birdy’s been real sick.”

  I bit down on my lip. Easy, April, I told myself. Keep still.

  “Where’s Mama?” I asked.

  Daddy took another step toward me. “I told your mother we should be here helping you and seeing to Aunt Birdy. And she wants to come, April. She knows school’s gonna be out soon for the summer and you won’t have Miss Vest here helping you once she goes back to Kentucky for her vacation. Your ma wants to—”

  I cut Daddy off, letting my words fly out like bullets. “Miss Vest’s not going anywhere. She says she’s staying right here with me this summer. Tell Mama I don’t need her help. Aunt Birdy’s getting better every day.”

  Daddy looked shocked. He had never seen me so angry before. We stared at each other. He needed a haircut. His hair was so long and shaggy in the back it touched his collar. And his eyes had new wrinkles at the corners. For a minute, I felt myself sinking—sinking back into the memory of sitting on his lap, with his big hands on mine, showing me how to hold the reins and guide Old Dean down the trail.

  Then all of a sudden Aunt Birdy was calling from the bedroom. “Apry? You there?”

  “You better be going,” I said, and even though I knew it wasn’t true, I added, “Aunt Birdy doesn’t want you coming round here.”

  Daddy reached in his pocket and brought out a crumpled lump of dollar bills. “Here,” he said, dropping the money on the table next to a stack of dirty plates. “You might be needing this. If you get in a fix and need more, just let me know.”

  Then I stepped out of the doorway for him to pass. I was proud of myself. Daddy had come and gone again, and I hadn’t cried a single tear.

  Twenty

  I didn’t tell Aunt Birdy about Daddy’s visit—even after two weeks in a row of finding an envelope full of dollar bills poking out from under the straw mat on the front porch. Then one morning I looked up from Aesop’s Fables to find Aunt Birdy staring toward Doubletop with a confounded look on her face.

  “I thought she would have come by now,” she said softly. “Do you think she knows? I mean, how poorly I been?”

  I laid the book on my lap. “I think she does, Aunt Birdy. But she’s so stubborn. She’ll never change.”

  Aunt Birdy fixed me with a pleading look. “But you’ve changed, Apry. Maybe you should go try to talk to her again. You’ve changed enough in the last two years for the both of you.”

  I shook my head. “She wouldn’t listen. It’s too late.”

  The words burned in my throat. I could see Aunt Birdy’s blue eyes welling up with tears, but I still couldn’t make myself tell her about Daddy’s coming and Mama’s offer of help. I couldn’t let them back in our lives so easy. For almost two years they had given up on me. Two years!

  Besides, it was like I told Daddy. I didn’t need their help. Just as she promised, Miss Vest called off her trip home to Kentucky that summer. Every morning she came down the hill to check on us, bringing some sort of treat—a couple of Florida tangerines, a new ladies’ magazine, or a packet of Mile High sunflower seeds to lighten up our long days. With Aunt Birdy watching and giving directions from her chair in the shade, Miss Vest and I tended her vegetable garden and pulled weeds around the porch where the snowball bushes and hollyhocks grew.

  Wit helped, too. He had a lot more time on his hands now with Camp Rapidan being so quiet for the summer. Miss Vest said the president was too busy fighting the Depression to spend many weekends in the Blue Ridge. And when the Hoovers did come, Wit told us, they weren’t bringing as many guests as usual. The president needed a chance to rest and think about something besides banks and businesses and farms going bust.

  At first I was unhappy about Wit spending so much time with us. I saw the way Miss Vest’s face turned pink whenever she heard his shoes clumping up the porch steps or how Wit held her hand under the table when he thought no one was looking. But I couldn’t stay mad at him for long. Wit teased Aunt Birdy and made her smile, and on top of that, we needed him. He put new shingles on the roof of the springhouse that summer, shoveled thirty years of old manure out of the storage shed, and built a sturdy chicken-wire fence around the garden to keep out the rabbits and the deer.

  Near the end of the summer, Wit showed up with a pair of clippers and said it was time to take my cast off. In five minutes, he had cut the plaster down the middle and cracked it back to bare my arm underneath.

  “Yuk,” I said. My arm looked as brown and shriveled as one of the old wisteria vines growing up the porch railing. Miss Vest ran to get a washrag and a basin of soap and water.

  “See?” she said when she had finished. “Looks better already.” I tested my arm, bending and flexing it back and forth. It felt light as a reed without the clumsy cast wrapped around it.

  “Now, Miss Vest,” Aunt Birdy said from her rocker. “You and Wit need to help me talk this girl into going back to school. She’s got no business sitting in this dark place with an old lady all fall.”

  Aunt Birdy didn’t talk me into leaving her side until October, when Miss Vest and Wit took the whole class down to the Madison County Fair for the day. The Hoovers had sent money for admission and tickets, and as soon as Aunt Birdy heard about the trip she started pestering me to go along. So the morning of the fair, I found myself climbing into the back of a marine truck piled high with kids and sweet-smelling hay.

  It was a perfect fall day, with the maples so red they looked like they had caught fire against the bright blue sky. Wit and Miss Vest drove our truck with one load of kids, and Mr. Jessup and Sergeant Jordan took another load. As we rocked and swayed down the mountainside, all the kids laughed and whooped at every pothole and horseshoe turn.

  I didn’t feel much like joining in. For the past week Aunt Birdy had been taking at least an hour longer to climb out of bed in the mornings, and I had noticed her biting her lip whenever she pushed herself up from her chair. “My joints are just a little stiff with the cold weather coming on, that’s all,” she told me. “You go on to the fair now and have a good time.”

  Mrs. Jessup and Little Elton had come over that morning to keep an eye
on Aunt Birdy while I was gone. I knew Mrs. Jessup would probably wear her out with all her gossip and prying ways. But by the time we hit the open stretch of highway down in the valley, I started to feel the knots in my stomach work loose.

  “Hey!” Vernon Woodard yelled. “Do this! It feels like you’re flying!” He was kneeling in the hay facing the wind with his eyes closed, his head flung back, and his arms spread wide. At first I ignored him, but when the other kids started flapping and hollering, I couldn’t help myself. I stretched out my arms, and the cool rush of wind lifted my jacket and whipped back my hair. It did feel like flying, like I was flying far away from long afternoons filled with worrying and chores and too much quiet.

  Then Dewey and Alvin and the Woodard brothers started shouting hello to folks we passed on the roadside. We waved at everybody—an old woman pushing a wheelbarrow full of potatoes, a little boy with a fishing pole, even cows grazing in a bean field and a sad-eyed coon dog that watched us from a rickety porch.

  At the entrance to the fairgrounds, a sheriff stood directing people where to park in an open field. We hooted and waved at him, too, and I turned just in time to catch Miss Vest staring at me through the back window of the truck. She was smiling, but she looked surprised.

  I knew I wasn’t acting like myself, but I couldn’t help it. I was free. I jumped down from the truck with hay still in my hair and pushed and skipped with the other kids toward the tinkly music and rows of tents. Already there were crowds of people at the fair—men wearing flashy ties and women in dresses and Sunday hats.

  “We’ll start at the carousel,” Miss Vest called out as she led us along. “Let’s stand over here while Wit buys our tickets.”

  The carousel was a sight to behold, with its pointed roof decorated in jewels and mirrors, and bucking horses charging round and round. Once Wit had passed out the tickets, the boys ran for the black stallions with wild manes, while the girls raced around trying to find the mares with the fanciest saddles or the prettiest eyes. Even Mr. Jessup took a ticket for the carousel. “You think it’s a sin to ride that thing?” I heard him ask Miss Vest.

  “No, I think it’s good, clean, wholesome fun,” she said. In the next minute, Mr. Jessup was sitting on a stallion next to me, staring up at the greasy gears and axles that cranked the horses up and down.

  After the carousel, we moved on to the tents full of prize-winning jams and pies and quilts. There were huge blue-ribbon hogs and rows of dairy cows and roosters with gaudy feathers. Then Wit and Sergeant Jordan led us over to a dusty corral, where cowboys in big-brim hats and pointy boots were showing off rope-slinging tricks.

  It wasn’t until the late afternoon, after we had worked our way through the dart-throwing and ringtoss games and a fried-chicken plate lunch and Cracker Jacks, that I remembered the medicine I wanted to buy for Aunt Birdy. I still had money left over from one of Daddy’s envelopes, and Mrs. Jessup had told me that at the fair they sold the best cure for rheumatism you could find. So while everyone else played another round of games, I hurried off to find Dr. Minthorne’s Miracle Liniment.

  After spending most of the day at the fair, I was sure I knew my way up and down the dusty rows of booths. But with dusk falling and the twinkling lights strung between the tents coming on, things looked different.

  I stopped at a stall where a man was selling brooms. “Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know where I can find Dr. Minthorne’s Miracle Liniment?”

  The man shook his head. “Never heard of it. But they’re selling some other remedies down the way.” He jerked his thumb toward a dark line of walnut trees at the edge of the fairgrounds.

  I was starting to feel jittery about getting lost and leaving Aunt Birdy for so long, but I wanted to bring her something. I couldn’t come home with nothing but a red balloon and a pack of chewing gum to show for my day down in the valley, so I headed in the direction the broom man had pointed.

  As soon as I reached the shadowy place under the walnut trees, I knew I had come too far. Some shifty-eyed older boys were standing in a circle, passing around a bottle in a paper bag, and the old woman who was selling home remedies from the back of a wagon didn’t even look up when I stopped to inspect her grubby jars full of roots and salves. She just kept grumbling to herself, pawing through an old burlap sack for something she had lost.

  I was ready to head back toward Miss Vest and the other kids when one of the boys broke away from the circle and came strolling in my direction. Even though he was about half a foot taller than when I had seen him last, I recognized him right off. It was Poke McClure.

  “Hey, ain’t that ghost girl?” he called. “Remember me, ghost girl? It’s old Poke. Remember? The one who broke your arm?” He stopped, looking me up and down, then let out a chuckle. “Well, would you look at that? I almost wouldn’ta knowed you. Least you got some meat on your bones now. Don’t look half bad.”

  He took a step closer—close enough so I could smell his hair tonic and the liquor on his breath. I glanced around. The old woman was still rooting through her bag, and Poke’s friends were starting to wander over.

  “What you doin’ way down here in the valley? I thought you’d be up on the mountain, setting under that old dead chestnut tree.” He glanced around and saw his friends coming. Then he snickered again and started talking louder so they could hear. “Ya learn to read yet, ghost girl?”

  I didn’t answer. I turned and ran. I could hear Poke bust out laughing behind me.

  “Aw, look at that,” one of his friends yelled. “You scared her so bad, she let loose of her balloon.”

  I ducked down a dark pathway between two tents, then scooted along a shed and a row of parked farm tractors. Maybe I was imagining things, but I kept hearing laughing—a low, mocking laugh drifting out from the dark corners behind me. I ran faster, expecting Poke to step out from the shadows at any second, and knowing that every step was taking me farther away from Miss Vest. But then I spotted a crowd of folks up ahead and I almost shouted with relief.

  I hurried toward them and squeezed in, trying to put a few bodies between me and the shadows behind me. It wasn’t until I had caught my breath that I looked up and realized what everyone was staring at. There was a man standing on the tailgate of a truck, shouting at the crowd. With his wind-burned skin and his thick, knobby hands, he looked like a simple farmer—not the type who was used to giving speeches, but he was so burning mad, the veins in his neck bulged and he was hammering his fist against his leg.

  “Do we plan on letting them get away with it?” he yelled. “Letting them take away our land just so some citified tourists can come spread out a picnic where our homeplace used to sit?”

  “No, sir!” a woman next to me hollered back.

  “And what about Herbert Hoover?” the man went on. “He comes up here, fishing in our creeks, bringing all them marines and building his houses and roads anywhere he damn well pleases. I heard him myself, couple years back, on these same fairgrounds claiming he cared about the people of Madison County. You heard him, too, didn’t you?”

  People all around me were nodding. I felt my heart start to thump again, like I had never stopped running.

  The man was settling into his speech now, feeling more sure of himself. He hitched up his trousers and smiled around at the folks gazing up at him. “Well, it’s kind of convenient, don’t you think?” he said, leaving his thumbs hooked in his belt loops. “Old Hoover gets to have his fishing camp up on the Rapidan while he sets back and watches us get shoved off our land. And I don’t know if you all heard yet or not, but it turns out the living ain’t the only ones gonna be evicted to make room for this here park. They’re gonna empty out the dead folks, too!”

  Everybody fell quiet. “You heard me right,” he went on. “Just the other day I find out they’re gonna be moving all our graveyards down to the lowlands. My poor daddy buried up at Thornton Gap, and his daddy, they’re all gonna be dug up.”

  For a minute I forgot where I was. I turned to
the woman beside me. “That’s not right!” I cried, forgetting to keep my voice down. “My brother’s buried up near Big Meadows and I know the Hoovers. They’d never let that happen. Mrs. Hoover says they’re gonna make sure—”

  I stopped. The woman was eyeing me like I was addled.

  Then she turned away to listen to the man on the truck. He was shouting again. “Well, now’s our chance to let old Hoover know what we think about how he’s been treating us,” he cried. “We’ll just show him next month in the voting booth!”

  I couldn’t listen anymore. As I turned and worked my way back through the circle of people, I could feel tears brimming up behind my eyes. There was no denying it. The park was coming. But if President Hoover lost the election, who would take care of us then? Franklin Roosevelt probably wouldn’t care one bit about the school and all the families living around it. What would happen to Aunt Birdy and to me if the Hoovers went away and the park came in?

  Dewey was standing at the edge of the crowd. I shoved past him, heading in the direction that seemed to make the most sense.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” he yelled as he tagged along after me. “Wait!”

  When I didn’t stop, he grabbed my elbow. I whipped around just in time to catch him smirking at me with that know-it-all smile of his.

  “What do you want?” I snapped. “Fine, I’ll say it. You were right about the park all along. You were right!”

  Dewey looked confused. “What are you talking about?” he asked. “I was just gonna tell you that you’re going the wrong way. Miss Vest sent me out to find you. She says we’re heading home soon.”

  “Oh.”

  “The rest of the kids are clear over at the outdoor stage,” Dewey told me. “Come on.”

  I followed him past a cotton candy and a fried doughnut stall, not saying a word. The fair had lost its magic for me now. My stomach pitched at the thick smell of frying lard, and the games and booths that had looked so colorful and lively an hour ago now looked rickety and cheap. Plus I still hadn’t found the liniment for Aunt Birdy.