“Yes, ma’am,” I replied. Lucille give me a worried look and I give her a look that said, Don’t you never mind.
“It’s nice to finally meet you, dear,” Mrs. Wells said after Ruth and Lucille left. She leaned over the table to neaten a row of radish slices on one platter, then straightened a line of carrots on another. “You and my Tom have become friends, I understand. I’m very happy that you children have accepted Tom with such open arms. Sometimes people find it hard to overlook his—his difficulties.”
“What difficulties would those be, ma’am? Do you mean his leg?”
She nodded. “His leg, his limp, the fact that he can’t run and play like other children. For a boy his age, it’s quite a handicap.”
“I don’t mind none. None of us children do. Everybody’s happy for Tom to be here.”
“You don’t mind any,” Mrs. Wells corrected me. “You must learn to speak properly if you’re to advance in this world, Arie Mae. Now, Tom tells me you two plan to hike through the woods tomorrow to a place called Pilgrim’s Gap.”
“That’s right,” I told her. “We aim to find Aunt Jennie Odom. Tom wants to collect some of her stories.”
Mrs. Wells frowned. “Yes, well, I’m afraid such a journey will not be possible. You see, it’s not only Tom’s leg that bothers him. Tom had scarlet fever as a young child and it weakened his heart. Therefore I must ask that you not overtire him. He wants to do things that normal children do, but he simply cannot.”
My knees got a little bit wobbly when she said that, and my fingers and toes went cold. I have knowed children with weak hearts, and they ain’t often long for this world.
“Arie Mae, this is strictly confidential.” Mrs. Wells leaned toward me and put a hand on my shoulder. “You mustn’t tell Tom I’ve told you this. He doesn’t know how damaged his heart is, because he’s never been one to overdo and I haven’t wanted to worry him. But since we’ve come to the school, I suspect he’d climb a mountain every day if he had the time. But he can’t, and he mustn’t. Do you understand what I’m saying, Arie Mae? You must keep him to quiet activities when the two of you play together.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’ll be careful not to wear him out.”
“Good,” Mrs. Wells said with a nod. “Now carry these things outside. I believe Miss Pittman is about to lead the children in a game of Mother May I, and when that’s over we shall eat.”
Well, I carried that bread and butter tray outdoors with a heavy heart. I had never felt sad about Tom’s leg, at least not too sad, because it seemed to me he made do right well on one good leg. But a weak heart was another story. A weak heart was not to be messed with. Now I’d have to come up with lies to tell Tom about why we could not go to Aunt Jennie Odom’s or even trek up to see Miss Sary. I ain’t as strict about the truth as James is, but to lie to Tom seemed to me a terrible thing.
When I got to the yard James had all the children, even the ones from Baltimore, tied up in a game of Green Man’s Garden. Now, Green Man’s Garden is a right good game if you have enough children to play, so I could see why James done it. What you do is divide into two sides. One side starts the game by calling over, “Where are you?” and the other group calls back, “In the green man’s garden!” First group says, “What are you doing in the green man’s garden?” and the second group might reply, “Eating the green man’s grapes!”
To that the first group calls out, “The green man will get you!” And everybody starts running around then, the first group of children trying to catch the ones in the garden. If you get aholt of somebody, you throw them into the soup pot.
Now, what James had done was get the mountain children and the Baltimore children all mixed up, so it wasn’t one group against the other. And everybody was laughing and a-running and having a jolly time. But Miss Pittman was standing to the side, next to Ruth, and I could tell from the way her lips was pressed together in a thin line that she did not like this game one bit! You could see she thought it was a low-down, mountain children’s game and that Mother May I was the game we all should be playing.
Part of me had been itching to get into that game myself, but then I seen Miss Pittman’s face and also I seen Tom sitting off to the side, wishing like anything he could play too, and it about broke my heart.
“James!” I cried out. “Put a stop to this right now! This is not the game Miss Pittman is wanting us to play!”
But James didn’t listen, nor Harlan nor Will Maycomb. Them Baltimore children didn’t listen either. Well, that got me angry as a wasp trapped in a jar. Did they think they didn’t have to listen to me? So I run straight into the middle of the crowd and grabbed James by the arm. “You are a rude, ignorant boy! Quit this game and show some manners!”
James’s face got still and white, which is how you know he’s angry something fierce. “You let go of me, Arie Mae,” he said in a quiet voice. “Or else I’ll make you wish you had.”
I dropped his arm, but I stood there glaring at him for a good, long minute. “You show some hospitality to Miss Pittman,” I hissed at him finally. “This is her picnic, not yourn.”
James shook out his shoulders like he was getting shed of me and walked away. “Game’s over,” he called to the crowd. “Miss Pittman wants us to play her game.”
The children moaned and groaned, the Baltimore children loudest of all. Miss Pittman clapped her hands and smiled grandly. “Line up in two rows for Mother May I,” she commanded. “And after that, luncheon!”
I looked over to where the table was loaded down with platters of olive sandwiches and sliced cucumbers. I’d not yet carried the apple stack cake from the kitchen, and now I couldn’t bear the thought of them Baltimore children laughing at it, the way I was sure they would. And so I run back into the kitchen, and I shoved Mama’s cake in the cold stove.
I hated to do it, but I hated worse the thought of them children turning up their noses at Mama’s cake that she worked so hard to make.
The worst thing? Later, when James asked me where the cake had got to, I told him I didn’t know, but I bet one of them Baltimore children chucked it out the window! That got him and Harlan riled up, and they left even before the ice cream was served, without saying a word of good-bye or thank you.
And even worse than the worst thing? James lied to Mama about it when we got home and said her cake had been everybody’s favorite. I knowed he hated to lie, but he would have hated hurting Mama’s feelings even more than lying.
I write this with such a heavy feeling inside of me. And on top of all the other things plaguing my mind is how I’m going to tell Tom tomorrow morning that we can’t take our trip to Aunt Jennie Odom’s. That’s all he talked about at the picnic, me just a-nodding and a-smiling, even though I knowed we weren’t ever going to go up to Pilgrim’s Gap.
Oh, James ain’t the only liar living in this house.
Signed,
Your Cousin,
Arie Mae Sparks
Dear Cousin Caroline,
By the time Tom got up to the home place this morning, I had worked up a terrible story to tell him. I had thought about saying I didn’t feel well, but then he would have said that we could go tomorrow or the next day, and then I’d just have to act sicker and sicker until I was lying in bed pretending to be half-dead.
So I decided the only thing to do was tell him I had no interest anymore in Aunt Jennie Odom or ghosts or the stories Tom wrote in his little book the size of a deck of cards. It killed me to even think about saying that, but what else was I supposed to do?
Oh, it made me so mad that I finally had a true friend and he was living at death’s door!
When Tom showed up, I was sitting on the front steps shelling crowder peas, the last of my morning chores. “I fear we have to call off our trip,” I said as soon as I seen him, wanting to get it over with. “Mama and I had a long talk last night, and she don’t want me believing in ghosts. It goes against the Bible.”
Another lie. They was sta
rting to pile up like the stacks of apples in Mama’s cake, and my stomach hurt with each new one.
“Still, don’t you think it would be interesting to meet Aunt Jennie Odom?” Tom asked, limping up to the porch. “Mrs. Campbell said she must be nearly a hundred.”
I threw an empty seedpod into the yard. “Sounds dull as dirt to me. I bet her brain is addled.”
“That’s not how Mrs. Campbell made her out. She sounds fascinating.”
“If collecting recipes sounds fascinating, then I guess so. But it don’t to me. I think we should stay here and sit for a while, and then we can walk down to the post office to see Miss Ellie. She’s always got a good story to tell. We could do some good reporting down there.”
Tom give me a funny look, and then he just shook his head. “No, I plan on going to Pilgrim’s Gap. If you don’t want to go, then at least tell me the way.”
I looked at my feet. “Don’t rightly know.”
“Fine then,” Tom said, turning on his heel. “I’ll find the way myself.”
Well, Pilgrim’s Gap is a good two miles from here, through rough woods. I threw down the bowl of peas I’d been holding in my lap and headed after Tom, who was moving fast for a boy with a bad leg. “You’ll get eaten up by a bear,” I called out. “Or a wasps’ nest will fall out of a tree and land right on your head, and then where will you be? All stung to pieces is where!”
Tom kept on walking. “If you’re not going with me, then at least stop yelling. I can’t hear myself think.”
Tom’s back was turned to me, like he wanted nothing more to do with the likes of Arie Mae Sparks. Well, I just couldn’t bear that for a second! Without even thinking, I yelled, “Your mama says you ain’t supposed to!”
I swear I didn’t mean to say that, it just come out. Tom whipped around.
“What has Mother told you? Some story about my heart, I’ll wager. She tells everyone the same nonsense. Father says it’s because she was so worried about me when I was a baby that she can’t break the habit.”
I ran to catch up with him. “So you know about your heart?”
“I know that Mother tells everyone it’s weak and that I’m not to move a muscle, but my heart is fine. Even Dr. Hatcher says so! Maybe a bit weaker than other boys’ hearts, but I can do whatever I want. It’s this bad leg that holds me back, not my heart.”
I looked at Tom’s leg and wondered again how it got bad in the first place. I studied on Tom’s face. Was he telling me the truth? There was a nervous edge to his tone, like he was testing out those words for the first time. But I had never knowed Tom Wells to be a liar, and I thought if you had yourself a true friend, you ought to believe him.
“So it won’t kill you to walk to Pilgrim’s Gap?”
“Not unless a bear eats me,” Tom said with a grin.
And so I decided to go with him. I even decided to tell him the truth about my lies. “My mama didn’t really say I couldn’t believe in ghosts,” I admitted as we entered the woods. “Fact is, she believes in ghosts more than anybody I know. She’ll scare you to death with some of her stories.”
“My father likes to tell ghost stories,” Tom said. “He claims to have seen the ghost of his dead grandmother when he was a boy. She leaned over his bed in the middle of the night and said, ‘Tell your mother not to worry.’ ”
“About what?”
Tom shrugged. “She didn’t say.”
I found that a satisfying reply. “That’s what makes a story sound real, when there’s some mystery in it,” I said. “Stories in books have explanations for everything, but real-life stories don’t so much.”
Well, that’s how it went the entire way up to Pilgrim’s Gap, me and Tom talking about interesting things the way we do when we’re together. He told me some more about his daddy, who is a lawyer and spending the summer in Baltimore working on a big case about property lines that Tom said made him want to fall asleep every time he heard about it. I told him the story about Harlan Boyd and another one about the time James and me got caught on the wrong side of Cane Creek when it flooded and had to spend the night with Mama’s great-aunts, three ancient old ladies who don’t never go to bed and smoke pipes all night long so that you can’t hardly breathe to sleep.
Even if we’d never found Aunt Jennie Odom’s cabin, I would have said it was a fine trip. But when we reached Pilgrim’s Gap, we saw the chimney smoke swirling in the air and knowed we had found the place we was looking for.
“You’uns see Oza on the road?” Aunt Jennie asked us matter-of-fact when she opened the door, looking for all the world to me like a dried apple doll. She was more wrinkle than smooth, like the shell of a walnut, with a backbone bent like a question mark. “That’s what brings strangers here, Oza stirring up trouble.”
“Is Oza your—your daughter?” Tom stammered out, and Aunt Jennie nodded.
“She wanders the woods the livelong day, and ever’ once in a while she asks folks to show her the way home,” she told us. “Only, she knows the way already! That’s why I get so wore out with her. You see her over to the pastor’s place?”
Tom nodded, and Aunt Jennie give out a little “Hmmph!” before saying, “She does it to irritate that man, I swear. Baptist preacher don’t want nothing to do with no spirits. The Bible’s a-gin it. Well, you two children come on in and I’ll feed you’uns. You ought to get something for your troubles.”
Aunt Jennie’s cabin was tiny, but it was cozy how I like, with everything in its place. There was a bed made up with a pretty coverlet tucked in neat, and a table with two chairs, and a coal-black stove in the corner, with a pot of soup beans cooking on top. Baskets filled with potatoes and dried roots and all manner of things hung from the walls.
“You’uns sit over to the bed and tell me something about yourselves. Even with Oza scarin’ up folks, I don’t get as many visitors as I’d wish to. It’s a joy to me especially to see young’uns. I had me twelve babies, but they’ve scattered into the world like the tribes of Israel.”
When Aunt Jennie heard that Tom was from Baltimore, Maryland, she got all excited. “I knowed me a woman once from the place called Chesapeake Bay!” she exclaimed. “You ever heard of it?”
“We stay there for a month every summer,” Tom told her. “My grandfather has a house there.”
Aunt Jennie nodded. “Oh, I heard it’s a fine place to be. This lady I knowed, she was what you call a missionary woman. Rode up on a roan mare to preach the gospel to us, then come to learn we’d already been saved! But she was a sociable thing, and we talked and talked the whole week she was here. Got a letter from her once a month after that, all the way until her death back in 1892. She come up here in—well, let’s see. I expect it was after the war—1867 or thereabouts. Mary Louise Murdock was her name.”
She looked at Tom. “I don’t reckon you know any of her kin.”
“I don’t,” Tom said, sounding sorry about it. “But when we go in August, I’ll see if I can find anyone related to her.”
“Well, ’fore you leave here today, I’ll write down where you can send me a letter, and then you can write me and tell me if you find any of ’em. I sure would like to know. She got married late and had one baby before her change of life come. Boy named of Woodrow.”
Then Aunt Jennie went about making us dinner. She peeled up five Irish potatoes, sliced them, and set them to frying in the skillet, and she got out cornmeal and mixed it with buttermilk, and poured that into another skillet to make the cornbread.
“Only animal I keep anymore is my old cow, Silvie,” she told us. “Wish I had me a pig, but the last one I had run away and I didn’t have the breath to go after it. Name of Joseph. Oh, I could eat about every part of a pig excepting the ears. I’ve heard of some who even fry up the ears, but I couldn’t abide that, could you?”
Tom and I shook our heads and said no, ma’am. Aunt Jennie stirred the soup beans and cut an onion into the potatoes. “Now, every other part of the pig tastes good to me, even the fee
t, though Lord, it takes a year and a day to get them pigs’ feet clean. I like the souse you get from the head, don’t you? But the last time I had a pig’s head, why, I lacked the strength to cut out the eyes. Now, some eat the eyes, but I have never been favorable toward that.”
I looked at Tom, who was turning green around the edges, and I thought it best to change the direction of the conversation. “My mama makes head cheese,” I told Aunt Jennie. “But I was never sure if’n that was the same as souse.”
“Pert’ near the same,” Aunt Jennie said, pulling a jar off the shelf above the stove. “Souse is when you make head cheese and then add some vinegar to it, sort of like to pickle it. Now this here is sausage that my friend Nellie Oakes brung me last time she was to the house. She cans a right plenty every fall when they butcher their hogs.”
I glanced at Tom, who still didn’t look quite settled. “Do you have head cheese and such in Baltimore?” I asked, trying to reel him back into the conversation.
“We have the sort of cheese you make out of milk,” he replied in a shaky voice. “But I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about.”
“You just tell your mommy to get aholt of a hog’s head, and I’ll write down a receipt for the cooking and send it your way,” Aunt Jennie promised him. “I like to mail me a letter. Don’t happen but once or twice a year anymore. Might surprise you to know that I can read and write, but I most surely can. My daddy believed in it. Taught all us young’uns, boy and girl alike. You children remember the first time you looked at a word on a piece a paper and all the sudden the meaning of it just popped into your head?”
Tom said yes and told the story of when he was lying in bed recovering from getting his leg broke in five pieces from falling off a horse. His mama had left him with a stack of books two foot high, so he could look at the pictures inside to keep himself amused. One day he was flipping through a book and the word “stop” jumped out at him like a rabbit hopping off the page. “It was like I’d been struck by lightning,” he declared to us. “I was five years old, and from that moment on, I read every book I could get my hands on.”
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