As we waited, I got real dizzy, so I sat down on the ground behind Eula.
The raggedy curtain on the window next to the door moved. Two little heads with tiny braids sticking out all over peeked out and looked down at us—little colored girls. I was glad; we weren’t gonna have nastiness toward Eula from some cranky white person. A bigger head showed up over them in the top pane. Then they all disappeared. We waited for the door to open.
It didn’t.
Eula knocked again. “Sorry to bother y’all so early,” she called through the door. “We be needin’ a little help.”
There was a space between the door and the floor where the yellow light from inside showed. I could see the shadow of somebody’s feet on the other side. “Please!” I said, the word tearing up my throat. Then quieter I said, “Please help us.”
The door swung open. A man stood looking down at us. “Sorry. We got nothin’ to spare.” He started to close the door.
Eula surprised me when she reached out and pushed against it and kept it open; especially since this man was every bit as big as Wallace. “We don’t need money . . . or food. Truck broke down and the child is sick. If we could just have a couple of aspirin to bring her fever down, we’d be mighty grateful.”
A woman came up behind the man and peered around his shoulder. She put an arm out to keep her children back. “What’s wrong with him?”
Eula said, “Nothin’ catchin’. And she’s a girl.”
“How you know it ain’t catchin’?”
“We don’t need to come in. If you could just spare the aspirin, we’ll be on our—”
“That child white?” The man was leaning out the door, squinting at me.
“Yes,” Eula said. “She in my care.”
The door closed . . . hard.
I saw Eula’s shoulders rise and fall with a deep breath. Then she turned around and walked toward the other house. I stayed sitting where I was.
There still wasn’t any lights on over there. When she knocked on the door, it squeaked right open.
“Hello?” she called. “Hello? Anybody ’t home?”
A small voice called out from the door of the house with the lights on, “Nobody live there.”
Just as soon as I turned my head, the girl disappeared from the door with a little squeal, like she’d been pulled away.The door closed up with a bang.
I was so cold; I brought my knees up and wrapped my arms around them. It didn’t help. I was shaking so hard my muscles started to hurt. If the sun would just get up, I knew I’d be warmer.
Eula pushed that squeaky door all the way open. Before I figured out what she was doing, she and baby James disappeared inside.
“Wait!”What if that little girl wasn’t telling the truth? What if somebody got surprised and shot her? Everybody on a farm had a shotgun.
I jumped up. Pain shot though my head. I was so dizzy that I stumbled forward and landed on my knees.
“Eu-Eula!”
She didn’t come back. She didn’t call out. I didn’t hear no gunshot.
I tried to get up again, but slower. My head pounded, but I didn’t fall over from dizziness. I started for the open door and realized something wet was on my cheeks. I musta been crying from being so miserable. I sniffed and wiped my face dry on my T-shirt sleeve.
This house had a porch. Thinking of the rotted step on the other house, I stepped up on it real careful.
“Eula?” I started in the dark doorway.
Eula was headed back out at the same time and we ran smack into each other. I don’t know who screamed the loudest, me, Eula, or baby James (since he was tied on her front, I slammed right into him). My own scream felt like it came out of my throat with bear claws.
“Oh! Oh, my! Oh!” Eula sounded like she couldn’t catch her breath. “Goodness!” She put her arms around baby James and started to jiggle him. “Shhhhhh. Shhhh, now. It’s all right.”
It wasn’t all right. I bit my lip to keep from crying again.
“Place is empty, but I checked in case there was somethin’ left we could use. Been picked too bare even for mice to bother. We keep on down the road a piece. Next house can’t be far.”
“Why can’t you go back there?” I pointed to the house with the lights on and the little girls inside. “And make them give us some aspirin.”
“Because that ain’t the way Christian folks behave. C’mon, now, let’s go.”
I stomped my foot. “Is it Christian to let a kid be sick and not help? Why do we care if we treat them Christian-like if they won’t help us?”
She leaned down so she was looking right in my eyes. “You hear me, child. You can’t use other folks’ bad behavior to excuse your own. When we got a choice, we keep Jesus in our hearts and don’t do nothin’ that would make him ashamed.”
“Why won’t they help us?” I sounded like a crybaby, but I couldn’t help it. “Why did he slam the door when he saw I was white?”
“Same reason some white folks slam the door when they see I’m colored. Some folks don’t see nothin’ but your skin. It ain’t right, but it’s the way people are.” She bundled me close to her and started us back toward the road. “C’mon now. Sooner we start walkin’, the sooner we get you some aspirin.”
When I looked back toward the house with the lights, those two little colored girls were back at the window. One of them raised a hand and waved.
The sun was coloring the sky orange and blue when we come to the edge of town. I heard a train somewhere on up ahead. The street was lined with houses that looked a lot like Eula’s, some a little better, some closer to the shacks we’d just been to. There wasn’t any sidewalks. Some of the yards had grass, some didn’t. Two or three houses had folks on the front porches. All of them colored. All of them stared at us.
Disappointment near choked me. What if all colored people hated me? I mean, before Eula and Wallace, I hadn’t really knowed any that wasn’t obliged to be nice on account of they was working for whites . . . and Wallace sure hated me. I was tuckered out and felt so rotten, I didn’t think I could walk any farther to get to the white part of town.
Eula was seeing inside my head again. “Not all colored are like that man; just like all white folk aren’t like the man who run us off the road.” She led me right up to a house covered in dark green shingles, the kind that usually go on a roof. An old man was sitting on the porch in a rocking chair smoking a cigarette.
“Excuse me, sir,” Eula said. “Could you spare us some aspirin? We travelin’ and our truck broke down. We’d ’preciate knowing a g’rage for a tow, too.”
The man blew smoke out through his nose and fixed his eyes on me. The whites was yellow and he looked like a dragon with that smoke shooting out of his nostrils. “Got no aspirin. The Lawd does my healin’.” He picked a bit of tobacco off his tongue, then he pointed down the road with his cigarette between two knotty fingers. “Three g’rages in town. I recommend Polsgrove’s. Least likely to steal you blind.”
I didn’t know why Eula was bothering asking about a garage. We didn’t have money to fix the dang truck anyhow.
“Thank ya kindly,” Eula said, and turned us back to the street.
The man called after us, “If y’all’re lookin’ to doctor, there’s a drugstore four block on. But I’d recommend prayer.”
Eula looked over her shoulder. “I think we could use both.”
There had been a woman with a baby on the porch of the house catty-corner across the street when we’d stopped to talk to the old man. She’d gone inside. Her front door was closed.
The lady at the next house said she was sorry she couldn’t help us— right after she gave me that same squinty look the man in the shanty had—and closed the door.
My knees was starting to get wobbly again. A couple of times things got a little gray around the edges. I didn’t tell Eula ’cause while she looked for help, I didn’t want to be left alone where folks all looked at me like I was one step above a worm. What if there
was a colored like that white man who run us off the road? One that did more than just look at me hateful?
“Maybe we should just go on to the drugstore,” I said—or at least I thought I said it.
Eula stopped and looked at me funny.
“What?”
“Maybe we shouuuuuld . . . ?” she said; so I guess I only said half. “Go on to the drugstore.”
“Someone’ll help. We need a place for you to rest. It’s too far back to the truck. And we need milk for James.”
Just like he was listening, baby James started to make little fussing noises—the ones that come before he got to be a red-faced screamer.
No one came to the door of the next two houses. My feet got tangled up and all three of us nearly fell down the steps of the last. Baby James was crying serious now.
When we got back to the street, I sat down and held my head in my hands. “I can’t go no more.” I didn’t care anymore if colored folk went by and said all sorts of hateful things to me. I didn’t even care if they did worse.
“You there!” a lady’s voice called from across the street.
“Oh, no,” I said, not even looking up. It was bad enough when they ignored us, but now somebody was yelling for us to get on.
“Y’all need some help?” When I looked up, a white-haired colored woman was coming down off her porch and heading our way. She was little but moved like she meant business. Everybody we’d seen so far was either half-dressed or wearing a housecoat, but she was dressed and her hair was pulled up nice and neat. She wore wire-rimmed glasses that flashed in the morning sun.
When she got closer, she looked at me. “That child is ill.”
“She is,” Eula said. “Fever. We’d be obliged if you could spare some aspirin and maybe some water?”
The woman made a tut-tut noise as one of her hands came my way.
I ducked. Pain shot through my head and I squeezed my eyes closed.
“It’s all right,” she said real kindly. “I just want to help you up. We’ll get you inside and see what we can do to make you feel better.”
I gave her my hand and she hauled me to my feet. She looked at Eula. “Baby sick, too?”
“No. He hungry though.”
“I imagine you are, too,” the woman said. “I can’t imagine what brought y’all here in such a state, but it doesn’t matter. We’ll get all that sorted out later.”
Now we were walking toward the lady’s house. I wondered what Eula would tell her when they sorted it all out, ’cause it couldn’t be the truth. But right then all I wanted to do was to lay down and die.
Once I was on the lady’s couch with a cold cloth on my head, I began to think maybe I wanted to live after all. That was the last thing I remember thinking as the darkness pulled me under.
15
t
hunder woke me; the long, rolling kind that comes from far away, then goes over and rattles the windows. Angels bowling. When I opened my eyes, the window I saw wasn’t home. Things started to get untangled in my head, one kinky string at a time. I’d run away from home. The law was after me. Wallace the bear was dead. Me and Eula and baby James were going to Momma in Nashville.
I wondered if Mamie’d already got used to me not being “underfoot.” I wondered how long it’d be before Daddy come home and found out I was gone—they only radioed out to the oil rig was if there was an emergency, and I didn’t think Mamie considered my running off an emergency. She probably wouldn’t want Daddy to get started looking for me, neither. The longer I was gone, the harder I’d be to find. I didn’t want Daddy to be upset. By the time he got to come home again, I’d be with Lulu, and she could tell Daddy to come on up and live with us in Nashville. That way he wouldn’t have to worry at all.
I looked at that unfamiliar window again. It was tall and wide and had lace curtains that moved with the breeze.
Un-uh. Not breeze. A fan was sitting on the table near my head; it moved from side to side, the hot, sticky air dragging across my skin. Outside was the calm that sat in front of a July storm, the kind of cloudy stillness that said you’d better get you and your bicycle on home before a gully washer let loose.
Lucky I was safe inside, but inside where?
I tried to sit up, but was weaker than a baby bird. My mouth felt cottony and my lips were all cracked and sore.
I got myself up on my elbows, which was hard to do with spaghetti arms. The couch I was on had been covered with a sheet. I wasn’t wearing my clothes, but had on a white cotton nightgown that was too big for me. Oh, no! I looked at my wrist and found my Timex was still there. (Thank you, baby Jesus.)
I was in a strange living room with a turquoise-painted piano against one wall. When I tried to call Eula, my throat was too dry to make a noise.
My head got fuzzy, so I laid back down.
“Starla?” The voice came through the doorway before the lady did. She was almost as short as me. Her skin was smooth and dark, like the buckeye Momma had sent me from Nashville for good luck. The lady’s hair was pulled back tight from her face in a bun. She wore a bright yellow skirt and blouse and a yellow bracelet; she reminded me of a white-haired bumblebee. She even had a kind of buzzing energy bouncing off her, like she was used to being busy all the time and didn’t like being still.
She looked kinda familiar. But I didn’t know many colored folk up close—except Eula, Patti Lynn’s Bess, and Ernestine next door with the LeCounts.
“You’re awake!” she said, smiling like I’d done something special. “Thank the Lord.” She put her hands together like she was praying and looked up toward heaven. Then she walked a little closer and looked at me real close. “Your eyes have lost that glassiness, too.”
I opened my mouth to talk but only got out a choked whisper that didn’t sound like a word at all.
“Let me get you some water. You have to be parched.” She went back the way she’d come.
I listened for some sound from baby James or Eula, but the only thing I heard was the refrigerator door open and close, a glass clinking on the counter. And more thunder.
The woman came back, helped me sit up, and handed me a glass of cold water. It was the best water I’d ever swallowed, even better than from Eula’s mason jar out on that hot road. I gulped it until the lady reached out a dark hand and tipped it away from my mouth. I noticed her palm was as pink as mine.
“Best not to take too much at once.” She took the glass from me and set it on the table with the fan.
I swallowed down what was in my mouth and wanted more. When I tried to talk this time, something came out. “Where’s Eula and baby James?”
The lady sat down on the coffee table right next to Eula’s wore-out Bible. She put her hands on her knees and smoothed her skirt. “James is napping in the bedroom bureau drawer. We had to make do since this house has never had a baby.”
“You don’t have grandkids?”
She shook her head. “No children, so no grandchildren. My students are my children.”
I looked at the piano. It was so old the keys were yellow; one of them didn’t even have the white cover on it anymore. “You give piano lessons?”
“I teach elementary school; grades three, four, and five. Our school is so small, they’re combined.” She tilted her head. “You look to be about that age.”
“I’ll be ten in September.” Then I realized I couldn’t just blurt out things without thinking. My age wasn’t a secret, but plenty else about me was. I didn’t want to get to spilling my guts or spinnin’ tales until I knew what story Eula had told. “Where’s Eula?”
“Well now, she’s found some employment. She’ll be home in time for supper. She didn’t like leaving you, but I assured her you were in good hands with me. I understand your truck needs fixing before you can resume your trip.”
“How’d she find a job so fast?”
“Oh, child, it’s Saturday. You’ve been buried under a fever for nearly a week.”
A week? “I don’t re
member anything, ’cept camping in the truck, then walking and walking . . . Oh! You’re the lady who come out of the house to help us!”
She nodded. “Cyrena Jones. You may call me Miss Cyrena instead of Miss Jones since you’re living right here under my roof. And your name is Starla. Lovely, just lovely.” She reached over and fluffed my pillow. “So tell me, how did you and your brother come to be traveling with Eula?”
I smelled a rat. This was just how Mamie got me to tell her things that she already knew the answer to, checking to see if I was telling the whole truth, nothing but the truth. I think she learned it from Dragnet. And if this lady thought James was my brother, then Eula must have told her some story. “I’m so tired.” Which was the truth. I yawned just to make sure she believed me and put my head back on the pillow. “Eula pro’bly told you ever’thing anyhow.”
She looked right square at me, using her teacher eyes. I think all teachers learned that look in teacher school and used it to draw kids out of a lie. “You’re very fortunate to have had Eula helping your family—and lucky she’s so devoted that she embarked on this trip alone with you children. Things are . . . unstable. And in this town . . . well, it’s very bad at the moment. I can think of all sorts of things that could go wrong—considering.”
She didn’t know the half of what had already gone wrong.
“Yes, Miss Cyrena.” I wanted to be agreeable and polite, her taking us in and all, but I’d never heard of white folk calling a colored woman miss. Bess was Bess, and Ernestine was Ernestine. “We’re real lucky havin’ Eula—me and James.”
“James and I,” she said in her teacher voice. Guess the coloredteacher school taught the same things as the white-teacher school.
“James and I are real lucky.”That just sounded wrong, like I was trying to be hoity-toity like Patti Lynn’s sister, Cathy.
Miss Cyrena sighed a little. “I’m so very sorry about your grandmother.”
“Thank you.” I put on a sad face. Whatever Eula had told her, I was surely supposed to be sorry, too. Had Eula told her Mamie was dead, like I’d said when we were in the truck? Or had she invented a story of her own to explain why she was travelin’ with two white children and no money.
Whistling Past the Graveyard Page 13