Besides, if I stopped writing you, how would you know what me and Tom got ourselves up to?
Three days ago I walked over to the settlement school to be neighborly, and who did I run into first thing but Ruth Wells? And didn’t I just wish I’d worn me some shoes and maybe a dress that didn’t have a spray of spots on it from the time Mama made me chop off a chicken’s head because she was too busy with Baby John? I am here to tell you that a chicken’s neck will spurt blood something fierce the second its head is removed, and it’s better to wear old rags to get the job done and not your second-best dress.
Ruth come up to me with her fine manners and said, “Arie Mae, I would like to meet Pastor Campbell’s wife, Sarah. Mother tells me she comes from Virginia and was educated at Hollins College. And now here she is, hidden away in this primitive place. I think she must be fascinating!”
Primitive? I have never thought of Stone Gap as being primitive, but maybe you can’t truly know the place you live in. Or maybe I don’t rightly know what primitive means. I can report that the post office has electric lights, which seems fairly advanced to me.
But that was neither here nor there. “If you’uns come up the mountain after dinner tomorrow, why, we’d be happy to make your acquaintance with Miss Sary. She’s about the nicest person I know.”
Ruth smiled at me like I was a little child and said, “Why, thank you, Arie Mae. I knew I could count on you.”
The more I thought about it when I got back home, the more I didn’t want to take Ruth to meet Miss Sary. I was afeared she would turn her sniffy nose up at Miss Sary’s humble home, even if she claimed she found her “fascinating.”
But the minute Lucille heard that Ruth Wells was coming up to our house so we could take her to Pastor Campbell’s, well, there was no turning back. Having heard me describe Ruth, Lucille could not wait to become her bosom friend. Lucille is drawn to ribbons and pretty gold lockets on thin gold chains, and bossy girls do not bother her in the least bit. It is girls like Lucille, the ones who are always trying to better themselves and other folks too, who are custom-made to be friends with girls like Ruth Wells.
I have to give Ruth one thing—she has pretty manners. She said, “How do you do, Mrs. Sparks,” in a very friendly tone when James introduced her to Mama, and then she commented on Mama’s piecework that was laying over the back of a chair. “Why, is that the Churn Dash pattern?” she wanted to know. “I hear that’s very complicated.”
“You know about piecework?” Mama asked, clearly amazed. “I didn’t know folks off the mountain pieced.”
Ruth smiled a gracious smile. “I don’t actually make quilts myself, but Mother has an interest in domestic handicrafts. She is writing a book about quilts from the Civil War.”
“Your mama’s writing a book about quilts?” Mama looked over at one laid across the chair, then shook her head. “That’s an everyday sort of thing to write about, ain’t it?”
“That’s why Mother finds them so interesting,” Ruth explained. “They are everyday things, but they’re also beautiful.”
Mama continued to look doubtful. “I reckon.”
As soon as Lucille got a taste of Ruth’s refined ways, she run into the bedroom and changed into her Sunday best. I knowed she was wishing her Sunday best was a lot better than it was. When she pranced back to the kitchen, Mama took one look at her and said, “Uh-uh, Miss Lucille. You go right back in that room and change into what you had on. You’ll ruin that dress tramping around in the woods.”
Tears sprung up in Lucille’s eyes, and I wondered how she was going to keep them from spilling over. But Ruth put her hand on Lucille’s shoulder and said, “That’s a lovely dress, Lucille. It would certainly be a shame if it got torn or dirty.”
Lucille sniffed a couple of times and looked shyly at Ruth. “Maybe we could stay here? I could show you my doll named Chandelier. Ain’t that the prettiest name? I heard it in a book.”
Ruth smiled, but she did not smirk, and that made me like her a little bit more than I’d been inclined to. “I would very much like to meet Chandelier. Why don’t you change your dress, and then you could bring her with us to Mrs. Campbell’s house? I do so want to meet Mrs. Campbell.”
So off we went tramping through the woods to Miss Sary’s, James and Harlan leading the way, followed by Ruth and Lucille dressed once again in her everyday clothes, holding Chandelier in her arms. I stayed to the back with Tom, who moved slower than the others on account of his leg.
“This is the greenest place I’ve ever seen,” Tom said, looking all around him in wonder. “Everywhere you look, it’s trees and leaves and bushes and vines. I wish I knew the names of things so I could write them down in my book.” He pointed to a bush with white flowers. “Like that!”
“That’s mountain laurel,” I told him, proud to have this knowledge, even though it’s common to everyone around these parts. “It grows all over the place. It’s nice, because the leaves stay green and shiny all year, and—”
Before I could finish, Tom quick put a finger to his lips, so I shut my mouth. He nodded his head in the direction of the left side of the path.
Well, maybe my eye caught a flash of light, like the wind had blown up the skirts of some low-hanging leaves, but I didn’t see nothing other than that. “I missed it, whatever it was,” I said.
“I could have sworn I saw somebody over there,” Tom said, but he sounded doubtful about it. “A little girl in a white dress. She was—well, she was shining.”
Oh, how I wished I could tell Tom I seen the exact same thing he did. I would have lied if I thought it would make him be my friend, but I’m an awful poor liar, so he might not have believed me. “I might have saw something,” I told him. “At least I think I might have saw something. Only I couldn’t say what.”
“It was probably just a bird,” Tom said with a sigh. “Not exactly front-page news.”
“If you saw something, then you saw something,” I insisted, and then I had a right good thought. “Maybe it’s Oza Odom you seen! They say she wanders up here. I ain’t never run across her myself, but it might could have been her.”
“Who is Oza Odom exactly?” Tom asked.
“Aunt Jennie Odom’s little girl. Well, except that she’s a ghost now. She died a long time ago. I don’t rightly know from what.”
Tom grinned, his spirits clearly lifted. “You didn’t tell me there was a ghost up here!”
I shrugged, like I was used to seeing such things. “There’s ghosts all over these parts. Dime a dozen.”
We started up the path, both of us looking left and right for another glimpse of Oza, and when we reached Miss Sary’s house, the others had just climbed the porch steps and were standing in front of the door.
“What took ya so long?” Harlan asked. “We was starting to think you got et up by a bear.”
“We was admiring the scenery,” I explained in my fanciest voice, trying to sound smart for Ruth. “There are so many lovely views in these parts.”
Harlan give me a curious look. “You sound peculiar, Arie Mae. You ailing?”
Lucille leaned over and pinched Harlan hard on his arm. “Arie Mae has put on her company manners, and I expect you best do the same, Harlan Boyd.”
Harlan spit off the side of the porch, like that was his answer. He seemed more interested in making an impression on the Baltimore children than staying in Lucille’s good graces, something I reckoned he’d regret once them Baltimore children went home.
Miss Sary come to the door and welcomed us in. “You couldn’t have arrived at a better time. I just made my special black walnut cookies.”
Once we was all seated at the kitchen table, Lucille kept her eye on Ruth, copying her every move, including shaking out her napkin and spreading it across her lap like a blanket. You could tell she was trying her best to be dainty and ladylike. This did not stop her, however, from kicking Harlan under the table when he crammed three cookies in his mouth at once.
“
What’d ya do that for, Lucille?” he wailed, spitting crumbs all over Miss Sary’s pretty tablecloth. “You ain’t supposed to kick when you’re company!”
Lucille just shook her head. “You are like to be the death of me, Harlan Boyd.”
That’s when Ruth took charge of the conversation, asking about Miss Sary’s people and her schooling and if she enjoyed mountain life even though she was an outsider.
“Oh, I don’t feel like an outsider at all!” Miss Sary exclaimed at that last question. “This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been, and everyone you meet is so welcoming and generous. People are always bringing us such wonderful things to eat. Pastor Campbell says we live among the salt of the earth, and I couldn’t agree more.”
“But don’t you find it difficult to talk to those so different from yourself?” Ruth asked, taking a bite of her cookie. “What could you possibly have in common with the people here?”
Well. My mouth fell wide open at that. Who was Ruth Wells to decide that Miss Sary wasn’t one of us?
Miss Sary looked thoughtful. “Well, I know at least two people who share my love of encyclopedias and world travel,” she said, smiling at me and James. “I had to come to the mountains to find friends who had that in common with me.”
Ruth seemed to consider this, but she didn’t say a word back, just took another cookie from the plate. You could tell she thought Miss Sary was merely being polite.
I decided to take this opportunity to seek out some news for our reporting project. “You ever see anything shiny out in the woods here, Miss Sary? ’Cause me and Tom, well, we saw something on our way up today.”
Before Miss Sary had a chance to answer, Ruth turned to Tom and demanded, “What’s this about?”
Tom looked like he’d rather not say, but Ruth kept glaring at him, so I reckon he felt like he didn’t have a choice. “I thought I saw a girl in the woods, and Arie Mae’s right—she was sort of shining. But then she disappeared.” He glanced over at Miss Sary. “Arie Mae said maybe she was Oza Odom.”
Miss Sary nodded. “Aunt Jennie’s little girl who died of a fever. I expect that’s who it was.”
“I heard she just wanders around night and day looking for her mama,” I said. “Is that the story you heard, too?”
“The very one,” Miss Sary agreed.
Tom reached into his back pocket for his book. “What can you tell me about Mrs. Odom?”
“Aunt Jennie? Well, she lives over near Pilgrim’s Gap,” Miss Sary said, “about a mile and half’s walk from here. She’s close to a hundred years old and stays by herself. I visit her the first of every month, and she’s always doing something interesting. Last time I was up there, she was writing down all her recipes—her receipts, she calls them. She said she’d heard tell of such a thing as a library, and she thought any library worth its salt would certainly want a collection of her recipes.”
“Ghosts,” Ruth said firmly, “are for weak-minded people.”
Miss Sary just smiled at her and held out the plate of cookies. “Have another, won’t you, Ruth?”
Me and Tom exchanged a look. We didn’t even have to say what we was thinking. We was going to track down Aunt Jennie Odom and find out about her daughter, Oza. If there was truly a ghost living in these woods, why, surely that was news worth reporting.
After we finished eating cookies, Miss Sary got out her atlas, and we had a time pointing out all the countries we wanted to visit. Ruth said she wanted to go to Africa and see the tigers, and James said he thought tigers mostly lived in India, and they argued about that for a while until everybody felt wore out and fidgety and we went home.
Oh, but didn’t I lay in bed that night with a grin plastered across my face? Me and Tom had us a story to report. We would track down that shiny girl, Oza Odom, and we would write up her tale just like real authors. Why, I could hardly get to sleep just thinking about it.
Tom and I have made a pact to go to Aunt Jennie Odom’s on Friday, three days from now. In between now and then he is hoping the cut on his hand will heal. When I asked him how he got it, he said it was from making a split-bottom chair. He was weaving reeds together real tight for the seat when one of the edges sliced his finger.
I never knowed anybody who made a split bottom chair before the songcatchers started their school, but Tom says they are a mountain crafts tradition. Sounds like an awful dangerous tradition to me. I think I’ll get my chairs from the Sears catalog, if it’s all the same.
Signed,
Your Cousin,
Arie Mae Sparks
Dear Cousin Caroline,
Mama and Daddy had the biggest quarrel this afternoon, and anybody could have told you how it was going to turn out. My daddy goes around acting like the boss of everything, but in the end Mama always manages to get her way.
We children weren’t meant to overhear, of course. We’d been out picking peaches for to make peach butter and weren’t expected home for some time yet.
It was on account of Lucille getting stung by a bee and having a fit that we come home early. Now, most folks will cry a tear or two when they get stung, as it hurts so awful bad, but Lucille acted like she was breathing her last. Since folks have been known to die on account of a bee sting, me and James decided we best not take any chances, even though we knowed it was probably just Lucille making much ado over a tiny thing.
By the time we reached home, Lucille seemed to have recovered, though she kept a hand over her eyes so we would know that she was still suffering in her soul. James and I helped her up the porch steps, but just as James was about to pull open the door, Daddy’s voice come out the window and froze us all in our places.
“Idy, I won’t have you singing for them folks. They have come up here trying to change our ways to their liking, and I won’t put up with it.”
“They say they’re trying to preserve our ways,” Mama’s voice come in reply. “That’s why they want me to sing for them Baltimore people, so that they can truly know what mountain singing is.”
“Oh, they’re fine with our ways from a hundred years ago. It’s our ways of today they don’t like so much. It’s like we’re supposed to be froze in time. Don’t ever turn on the radio, they say, don’t ever read you a newspaper that someone brung over from Asheville. You might get corrupted.”
“Miss Pittman said you could play your fiddle, Zeke. Wouldn’t you like to play your fiddle for a crowd?”
“Not that crowd,” Daddy said. “They don’t know enough about fiddle-playing to appreciate it. Besides, I’m tired of playing them old songs.”
“Yes, Zeke, but the songs you like so much are ones you learned off the radio. They ain’t our songs.”
“I make ’em mine by playing ’em,” Daddy argued. “They’re mine soon as they go in my ears and come out my fingers.”
“But you play the old tunes real pretty, Zeke. I bet folks at the songcatchers’ school surely would like to hear that. And maybe you could make some kind of trade with Miss Keller and Miss Pittman. Maybe you could play some new tunes after you got done playing the old.”
There was a stretch of silence after that, like Daddy was pondering. Me and James looked at each other. We was dying for Mama to sing, and it would make us proud to hear Daddy play in front of them Baltimore folks. Maybe if all went well, Daddy would let us go to the settlement school now and again after we got done with our chores.
“Idy, I will tell you what,” Daddy said finally, and by this time, even old Lucille was up and leaning her ear against the door. “I will make a trade. You can sing at the songcatchers’ school if them two ladies will come to a barn dance of a Saturday night.”
“Consider it done, Zeke Sparks!” Mama exclaimed, sounding livelier than I have heard her sound in some time.
I don’t know that the songcatcher ladies will be as enthusiastic about this trade as Mama seems to think. I can’t quite figure them out when it comes to things changing and things staying the same. At the settlement school, t
hey teach folks new ways of cooking and farming and cleaning up a home and tending to the sick. So they favor some new ways of doing things, and don’t mind changing us mountainfolk in those regards.
But I heard Miss Keller once say she wished the Sears and Roebuck catalog had never made its way to the mountains, because people were abandoning the homemade and traditional for store-bought.
I don’t know why this bothers Miss Keller so. Daddy ordered Harlan Boyd a guitar from the Sears and Roebuck catalog Christmas of last year, and you should have seen Harlan’s eyes shine when he come into the sitting room Christmas morn. He didn’t care a lick who had made that guitar or where it had come from. And Lucille got a pretty Sunday dress made from yellow fabric that Mama never could have found at the dry goods store. All them things seem fine and good to me. But to Miss Keller and Miss Pittman they are signposts on the path to ruination.
There are many things about the songcatchers’ way of thinking I don’t quite understand. Tonight, after supper, James’s friend Will Maycomb come for a visit, and he told us something that has troubled me considerably.
Will’s sister Thelma is one of them who attends the settlement school during the day and then comes home at night, so the Maycombs know about as much as anybody as to what goes on down there. Miss Pittman is training Thelma to be a secretary, which is one who helps out in a business office typing letters. Many an afternoon Thelma works in Miss Pittman’s office, helping her put papers in files and organizing her letters.
“Well, today, she was straightening out papers on Miss Pittman’s desk when she come across a carbon copy of a letter that Miss Pittman wrote when she was starting the school,” Will told me and James, the three of us sitting on the front porch steps. “Now, you’uns know Thelma and what a busybody she is, so of course she read it. Turns out, it was a letter asking someone off the mountain for money, and the whole thing was about how backwards folks are in these parts. Miss Pittman said she couldn’t believe the condition folks lived in, that people lived in filth and ignorance. That was an exact quote from the letter—‘filth and ignorance.’ ”
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