Fleetie's Crossing Page 13

  But even our neighbors’ best efforts didn’t put much of a dent in the hardship. The days moved by slowly, covered in a blur of work. The corners of each room seemed draped in gray shadows. All laughter receded far away. It seemed to slip out the windows and down the mountain. Little sister and baby were good beyond reason, but play for them was much too quiet, and for me, there was no time for play with them.

  For all the trouble packed behind that red quarantine sign, nothing matched the black hole of misery caused by the separation from Leatha and her family. I felt as if laughter had been scraped off like dead skin, and there were few places on me that did not ache. My feet hurt, my lips were chapped, and I was hungry most of the time.

  The Sargeants had no phone, and both Leatha and I were too scared to sneak off up the mountain to one of our hiding places. I was scared the baby would swallow some deadly poison or Jane would set the house on fire. Leatha was scared she would die of diphtheria. There was small chance of that, as full of DPT serum as we both were. We stayed apart, even though we were actually close enough so that a good, strong rock throw could have alerted either one of us.

  March always had a surprise or two tucked into its long stay. On one of those special days, the sun found itself in a blue sky. Soft breezes and cotton-candy clouds crowded around to enjoy the winter break.

  That glorious morning, Mother called me to her room. “Rachel, I want to put on my clothes and get out of this bed. It is time for me to be well.”

  “Mother, you have to be careful. Dr. Parks said you could hurt your heart.”

  “My heart is fine. The very best medicine I could have is to stand in my kitchen and see about things. My legs are bound to wobble at first. That’s why I need you to help. Will you be my big girl and help me get dressed so I can surprise everyone?”

  “Why don’t you put on your robe first? I’ll help you get in the tub after breakfast, and then you can get dressed. Will that feel good?”

  “It will be delicious. Just don’t let me fall flat on my bottom. The last thing we need around here is for me to get my bad ankle bummed up.”

  She walked alone with me close behind her as we surprised Daddy in the kitchen. He was struggling with the blackened coffee pot and about jumped out of his socks when she spoke. “I’m up, and I am not going back to bed.”

  “Lord have mercy, Katie Bell. You scared the fool out of me. Look at you. You’re skinny as a stick! That robe wraps twice around your middle.”

  He didn’t see that her slender feet could not control the floppy slippers. She kept walking right out of them. Dark circles made her eyes look huge behind the wisps of her hair that escaped the ribbon. Daddy wrapped his arms around her and held her as if she had been away for weeks. He helped her sit down at the kitchen table.

  “Rach, fix your mother a cup of tea. See her pretty hands back on the table? It won’t be long now before she’ll be good as new. Are you sure you’re ready? Parks said diphtheria could damage your heart. We can manage for a while longer. I’ll stop by and see if Roberta won’t come back now. She will love to give you a hand.”

  “I am sure. I haven’t had any fever for several days, but I’d love to have Roberta just for the company if nothing else. Do you think she’ll come?”

  The long illness had been hard on all of us, and for Mother, being separated from Aunt Roberta might have been the hardest. She was such a part of our lives, an irreplaceable relative who cemented the relationship with her common sense and good humor. Almost without warning, the entire family had fallen into her territory, and she didn’t plan to let us escape—nor did we want to.

  Two years back, Aunt Roberta accompanied her son James to Daddy’s office to attend to a property dispute. The process proved to be long and costly. To save James’s dignity, Daddy asked if either of them would be interested in lending the family a hand on our hillside farm. James said yes, but Aunt Roberta was silent. Daddy told us later that he knew she wasn’t sure how two women in the same house fussing over the same children would work. He started working his people magic.

  “Sister, my girls need someone to help teach them to be ladies. Would you consider sharing your time with them?”

  He told Mother that Aunt Roberta, rising to every cubit of her considerable height, answered, “I suppose I can give the children some attention for a spell.”

  That was the contract, and for all the years that Aunt Roberta lent her considerable talents to our household, there was never any definition of the word spell. No one in their right mind would have ever considered her anything but Aunt Roberta—Burba to Logan—and she was as integral a part of the composition of the family as the other five of us. If Aunt Roberta said it in the household, it was truth. If she requested it, it was accomplished. If she was happy, things glowed. If she was irritated, we drooped.

  There would never be a time in Mother’s life after Aunt Roberta agreed to “help out” that she didn’t cherish her friendship. The two women, far from being as different as a mountain-born and a city-born might suggest, were cut from the same cloth—regal, sensitive, intuitive women who dominated their families’ lives.

  It would be good to have her back with us, and no one in the family would appreciate her more than I would. I had found out that caring for a family was hard, never-ending work, and I was not yet old enough to appreciate the finer aspects of the craft. It was all just hard. Praise be for Aunt Roberta.

  Chapter 17

  BUSES AND TRAINS

  I finally went back to school. While Daddy was adamant about living in the country, he was equally determined that his children go to school in town. The rural schools were poorly funded in the large coal-mining county, and the city school was not much better, but at least indoor bathrooms were standard. Equalized funding was as yet nonexistent.

  Daddy reasoned that the children from the homes of merchants and professionals might ensure more classroom stimulation for us. None of this reasoning occurred to me at the time. I would have much preferred getting to walk to school with Leatha, her sisters, and the other kids from the valley. The two-room schoolhouse, with its outdoor privy and hand-dug well, was much more fun. The recesses were longer, we ate lunch under the trees, and if you asked first, you got to go to the well and bring in a bucket of water. I only got to do that once, but I remember how deliciously cold the water was out of the metal dipper right after I pulled it up. The only times I got to go with Leatha was when the city school had a teacher day, and they were held in the early fall or spring. The weather was perfect, and no one expected me to answer questions or read aloud or do math problems on the board. I hated math, and at the Ross’s Point school, I was allowed to completely ignore it.

  Daddy’s struggle to escape the coal camp left him branded with a fanatical appreciation of education. No sacrifice of transportation, time, or money was too great if there was even the slightest chance it would ensure a better education.

  There were days when the trip to the gritty county seat for school and work was an adventure. Before Daddy bought the old car, we had a long trek across the valley to catch the VTC, a bus line proudly named for its owner, Vester Transportation Company. The shortest distance to the state road was down the steep road to the railroad crossing across the county road, a short walk through Burl and Fleetie’s yard, past the grapevines, through the back gate and garden, and to the river path. That path led to Burl’s little fishing boat, which had to be poled across the river. Then the traveler had to climb up the steep bank on the far side of the river and walk along the Hensley cornfield, through Hiram Wilson’s back gate, and up their steep driveway to the road.

  It never occurred to me that there might be an easier way to get to school or the office. Being on the trip with Daddy legitimized it. Something about the morning trip always put Daddy in high spirits. He used the time for delicious stories about when he was a little boy. Sometimes, the stories were about us when
we were babies, and these were Jane’s favorite.

  Only after I was a grown woman would I realize that Daddy’s high spirits and invented fun was a cover. He hated for his family to have to traipse across the valley like wandering gypsies. He was silently angry at forces that prevented him from providing better transportation. I never knew if Daddy ever understood how much I cherished the gift of those early mountain mornings or if he always just felt ashamed at not having the car he felt we needed.

  But the car did not save me from the afternoon trip home. I was forbidden to use the boat without Daddy. That meant I left the bus two miles further up the road, at the river bend. There, it curved enough for walkers to cross on dry land to the railroad. Rain, snow, blistering heat—the school children plowed through it all. While the morning journey was fun because Daddy was there, the afternoon walk home was nothing but a tiresome trudge. It took all my ingenuity to kill the boredom of the two-mile hike. I walked the rail, stretching the time. I stayed on until no balance-beam gymnast could have beaten me. I threw rocks toward the river, scaring up flutters of birds. I practiced taking longer steps by skipping a crosstie. On the rare occasions when the valley kids were walking at the same time I was, we raced one another, dug lead out of the railbed gravel, and laid doomed pennies on the tracks.

  Once in a while, I walked the county road that nearly paralleled the tracks, even though that too was forbidden because of the rare car or truck that might pass by. The road seemed shorter because walking the crossties forced me to shorten my steps.

  But none of the tricks I devised rivaled the delicious thrill of grabbing the iron handholds on the side of a slow-moving freight and riding all the way to the crossing. The noise of the train gave clear warning of the danger I was courting. I remembered too well Tuck, Daddy’s beloved English setter, left in two pieces beside the track. The horror should have warned me of the danger, but I reasoned I could hold on to the moving train and poor old Tuck couldn’t.

  What actually saved me was the scarcity of slow-moving trains. By the time the coal trains reached Ross’s Point from the railhead at Lynch, they had worked up a good head of steam and were making good time. I might ignore the danger of hitching a ride on a slow-moving freight, but I wasn’t suicidal. I knew better than to try to catch a ride on a train clipping along at thirty-five to forty miles an hour.

  The changing mountain scenery got no more than a passing glance from me. Scenes of the tinges of bloom skirting the mountain in spring, the wild disorder of autumn color, or stark contrasts of winter was as commonplace to me as rocks. The day would come when the very marrow in my bones would ache to see that sight again but not when it was all there for the taking. The two-mile walk always loomed as the enemy and never more than on the first day back after being quarantined.

  I had basked in the unaccustomed curiosity and attention at recess. Lunchtime brought on an orgy of sandwich swapping. For once, my lunch seemed especially attractive. The teacher spent extra time piling on past assignments. The head teacher even welcomed me back. But when that day was over, I dreaded the long traipse before I would be home again.

  Near the end of the railroad walk, I took a shortcut and climbed up the steep bank, using the half-buried boulders as handholds. It was an old cattle path that circled and twisted itself up to the gate that opened to our driveway. Walking between the boulders and around the trees reminded me of the Saturday cowboy movies I sometimes got to see in town. It was a dream place to play imaginary scenes of desperate pioneers, masked robbers, and hungry mountain lions. At the top, I opened the picket gate and climbed up the eight front steps. When I opened the screen door, there, standing right in the middle of the living room, was Aunt Roberta. I fell on her neck. Neither one of was able to outhug the other.

  “Just look at you. You must be all of five-foot-four now.”

  “No, just five-three, but Mother says I will grow more and be as tall as she is pretty soon.”

  “Well, pretty, I say. You have Pappy’s hazel eyes and Mamaw’s brown hair. When did you lose all those blond curls?”

  “Back a while. I keep trying to bleach it back out with lemon juice, but it looks like the brown is here to stay.”

  “Well, good, it goes with those sun-tanned cheeks and freckles.”

  “I hate freckles, and buttermilk doesn’t do a thing but make me smell like cornbread.”

  Aunt Roberta laughed her deep, down-to-the-bottom-of-the-belly laugh, “Cornbread or lemon juice, you are a pretty sight for these eyes.”

  On that bright March day, I knew that the tall blond woman standing in our front room made the house different. It was beyond the scope of my experience to know just exactly how different, but I knew that home was finally in one piece again.

  Chapter 18

  DECORATION DAY

  It had been a month since the flood, and the earth was busy healing itself. Leaves surrounded the tattered debris left hanging from tree limbs. Wild grasses and plants pushed up to cover eroded banks. Each flooded house had been made livable again, with yards swept clean and white laundry flapping on rebuilt clotheslines. The early flood opened spring’s gates. Mules and plows turned the earth from morning till dark. Lloyd Willis, with his two mules, worked the wide twenty-acre fields just across the river from our house and the Sargeants’ until the wide brown swath of land lay deep and fertile and ready for seeding.

  Sarvis dotted the mountains with their tiny white blooms, soon to be followed by the blossoming white dogwoods and wild crab apples. This explosion of white ran together until you might swear you were looking at a late snow. Added to that display, clusters of violets along with the pale yellow daffodils began to push out of the ground. First one and then another seemed determined to win the spring race. At every house, there was a field, a garden, or a vegetable patch, and the valley from a distance might have resembled the inside of a beehive. There were people everywhere you looked working at small flower gardens, big vegetable gardens, cornfields, and fence lines. The long bitter winter, the coal miners’ continuing strike, and the flood left every family ready for gardens and fields.

  Decoration Day almost slipped up on Poor Fork. The miners’ strike, the flood, and the hard work in fields and gardens had just about squelched any thought of a day off. But Decoration, for all its somber origin, was an annual highlight for all of us. As busy as the valley was with planting, spare moments had been stolen for crafting bushels of crepe paper flowers for each family to carry to their small cemeteries. Few of the men spared any time for the actual care of the graves, but they could usually manage to find time to target shoot, drink beer, and gather around for man talk. They probably nursed the same family memories the women clung to in the cemetery gatherings on the mountains, but the men had to protect their manliness, and so they were forced to use bluster and beer to celebrate their past.

  I loved Decoration, but as sure as it came, Mother had a contrary opinion, and this year was no different. I had spent the last three nights down at Leatha’s covering the wires with green crepe paper to serve as a base for the blooms that the older women would fashion. I loved to watch their fingers mold and crease each petal. There was almost a magic to it. But Mother clucked her disapproval of crepe paper flowers. I dreaded to hear her start fussing about them year after year. Poor Daddy got the brunt of the complaint. It hardly seemed fair since I was the one slipping off to help make the flowers. He wouldn’t know the top from the stem of any of them.

  I heard her ask Daddy, “Ed, why on earth do they spend all those hours spinning out paper flowers when the mountains are alive with real beauty—growing free for the taking?”

  “That’s the point, Katie. What kind of gift is it for their dead if the flowers are free for the picking?”

  “So real beauty doesn’t count? Is that it?”

  Daddy gave up on the argument early, grabbed his brief case, and took off to the back of the house.


  I was still sitting at the dinner table and grabbed my chance to ask her once again to go with us. “Mother, if you look close, you’ll see there’s a real art to it,” I said. “You can’t imagine how much hard work it takes to make them. You have to really pay attention to learn how to fold, bend, and twist so the flowers turn out pretty.”

  “Well, who would want to? It is just cheap, garish paper that will bleed and fade in the first rain.”

  “Paper flowers are just part of it. A lot of the fun is that everyone works together. We grub out weeds, scrub the stones, right the ones that have fallen, trim tree branches, and make the cemeteries straight and clean again.”

  “Sounds to me like you are doing a lot of hard work that I could use around here to keep this place running.”

  “But, Mother, doing the work is the way to honor the kinfolks that have gone on. If you go with us once, you’ll see for yourself.”

  “Don’t think you’re fooling me. I know you have been down there messing with that stuff for days. You and Jane can go, but I can just see me piling that stuff on graves of people I never even knew. I need to go to Richmond so I can place real flowers on my family graves. But Richmond might as well be on the moon.”

  “Mother, the train stops in town every day. You can get on it and ride to Richmond. I promise I’ll work hard and help Daddy take care of the kids. We’ll get along.”

  “You might get along, but the two little ones would starve or turn green from eating peas, which is the only thing your Daddy can think to buy from the grocery. I can’t go, and I’m not going up on that godforsaken hill either.”

  She stormed out of the room. We had this argument every year, and I had just lost it again. Daddy was going to be taking depositions in Hyden, so he wouldn’t be going either—not that he ever went anyway. The men were good about taking care of the funerals with all the digging, making the temporary cross, and carrying the casket, but after that, they mostly stayed away from the cemeteries. It didn’t occur to me to pout about it. That was just the way it was, and as far as I can tell, it was not likely to change, but I loved Decoration anyway. The flowers might be paper, but the day was pure gold.