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Authors: Ruth White

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BOOK: Belle Prater's Boy
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I
t was the next evening just after it got dark that Woodrow came to my window and called softly, “Gypsy, you awake?”
The window was right beside the bed and the curtains were pushed back to let in the night breeze.
“Yeah, I'm awake,” I said, rising up on my knees.
Together Woodrow and I removed the screen and eased it down to the floor.
“Are you better?” he said.
“Some,” I said. “Doc says my fever's down.”
“Had your rum tonight?” he said, grinning.
“Not yet. Mama'll bring it in a while.”
“Well, I got somebody here wants to visit you.”
“Oh? Who?”
I leaned toward the window and detected a figure about a head taller than Woodrow standing in the shadows.
“I hope he's had the measles,” I said.
“Oh yeah. He's had everything,” Woodrow said as he pushed the person forward. “Say hello to Blind Benny.”
I was flabbergasted.
For years I had heard him singing, but I had seen him only in the dark from afar while he rummaged through people's leftovers and the dogs sniffed around him. Now here he was. Leave it to Woodrow to bring him right up to my window and introduce him like he was somebody's cousin from Grassy Lick maybe.
Blind Benny moved halfway into the dim light coming from the lamp. I could see his face and the legendary sightless eyes that were almost not there. They were like two little holes in his face, about the size of dimes, and not eyes at all. It was an automatic reflex for me to shrink from anything so hideous. I almost gasped, but I clapped a hand over my mouth before the hateful sound could escape.
As usual nothing got past Woodrow. He saw my reaction and smiled.
“Evenin', Miss Beauty,” Blind Benny said shyly. “Hope you're a-feelin' fitter than you wuz.”
Beauty? Why did he call me that? A feeling akin to pain came with that name.
“I reckon so,” I said, trying to find some words.
“I wuz sorry when your cousin here told me you wuz ailin'. But he said you'd not be skeerd of me like most girls is.”
Woodrow and I exchanged a glance.
Suddenly Benny started scratching his thighs and behind.
“Chiggers is awful this year,” he said. “I might near wore my fangers down to a nub, jist a-scratchin' myself. Woodrow tells me he knows ‘bout chiggers. Knows their ways and their secret places, he sez. He's gonna show me how to keep away from 'em. Do the chiggers git on you much, Miss Beauty?”
“Sometimes,” I mumbled.
It was true that there was a bumper crop of chiggers that year. They were tiny, almost microscopic bugs that liked to crawl up under your clothes and burrow into the white, fleshy places where the sun never touches. Big ugly red bumps would pop up where they dug in. And Woodrow did have a peculiar knack for sniffing them out.
Lots of times he'd say to me, “Don't sit there. Chigger convention.”
Or, “Don't lean on that tree. Chigger city.”
“Yeah, Woodrow's right handy to have around sometimes,” I said to Blind Benny.
Woodrow looked at me sideways, like he was wondering if I meant something by that.
“When Woodrow ast me to come over here to your winder,” Blind Benny said, “it brung to my mind a mem'ry of your pappy in this very room sanging to you when you's jist a little thang.”
“You mean … my daddy?” I said.
“Oh yeah,” Blind Benny said, moving closer and clutching the window ledge.
I felt a tremor go through me as I shrank away from him.
“Amos Leemaster and me wuz boys together back there in Cold Valley, Kentucky, Miss Beauty.”
“Why do you call me that?” I said.
“Beauty? Don't you 'member? It wuz
his
name for you! He always called you Beauty—short for Arbutus. He named you hissef—Gypsy Arbutus Leemaster. He sed he couldn't thank of ary other name to beat it, and he were right!”
I felt sick and I wanted him to go away then, but I didn't know how to say it.
“Benny's going to sing to you, Gypsy,” Woodrow said.
I lay back on my pillow and closed my eyes. I knew what the song was going to be before he began.
When the moon comes over the mountain
Every beam brings a dream, dear, of you.
Blind Benny's voice was even more wonderful—haunting, it was—up close. And I could almost hear my daddy echoing each line.
Once again we stroll 'neath that mountain
Through the rose-covered valley we knew.
Each day is gray and dreary,
But the night is bright and cheery.
When the moon comes over the mountain,
I'm alone with my memories of you.
“It was Amos's fav'rit song,” Benny said softly when he was finished. “He was a good sanger. Too bad what happened to him!”
“I'm feeling sick,” I interrupted, not quite trusting my voice. “I want to rest now.”
“Why, shore. You sleep, Miss Beauty. And I hope you'll be well agin soon.”
I didn't answer.
I heard Woodrow fumbling around with the screen; then there was silence.
 
The next day it turned real hot. Porter came into my room, ran an extension cord in from the hallway, and placed an electric fan on my dresser. It was one of those small wire ones that swivel back and forth. It felt good. Then he brought in a radio.
“Something to keep you cool and something to occupy your mind,” he said.
Mama had cleaned out my stash of books.
“How do you feel?” he went on.
“Like a mushroom,” I said irritably. “In a cool, dark place.”
Porter tuned the radio to Coal Station.
“Can I get anything else for you?” he said.
I shook my head. Didn't he know that if I wanted anything I wouldn't ask him? He hung around for another minute, then left me alone.
The radio was playing “Hernando's Hideaway.” It reminded me of my tree house. I thought I would feel better if I could go there and sit on the tree-house porch and hang my feet above the water and listen to the creek rippling over the rocks.
I remembered the day Daddy built the tree house for me. I was barely big enough to get up the steps, and Mama fussed at Daddy because she said I was too small to climb up there and play. So he promised he would always go with me until I was old enough to go by myself. And he did.
Until he died.
I didn't go back to the tree house until I was ten years old—the day Mama and Porter got married and drove away to Myrtle Beach for their honeymoon. Then I climbed up there and went into the room. It
was damp and still smelled like raw lumber. There was a button on the floor, and I picked it up and looked at it for a long time. It was green with little swirls of white running through it like marble. I knew it came off Daddy's green shirt—the one he wore to the volunteer firemen's meetings every Tuesday night.
But I didn't want to think about that anymore.
“Mama!” I yelled, feeling clammy and all out of sorts. “I wanna get up!”
She popped in the door just like she had been standing right out there in the hall. She was wearing a blue sundress with daisies all over it, and her hair was brushed back in its everyday style, with a blue ribbon in it, which made her look like a young girl.
“Don't be silly,” she said.
“I wanna go to the tree house.”
“You'll do no such thing!”
“Why did you marry Porter?”
It was a nasty thing to say, and popped out of nowhere.
“He's not my daddy!” I said in a low, evil voice. “And he never will be! I hate him!”
I saw a slow flush go over her face, and her lip began to tremble.
“You don't give him a chance,” she said in a whisper.
I turned my back to her and covered my head with the sheet.
Mama left the room.
 
By Saturday I felt lots better, and Woodrow spent most of the day with me. We played checkers, and he read to me from a book called
Lorna Doone.
It was real good. Then he showed me how you could talk into the fan; it was queer the way the rotating blades chopped up the sound waves and made your voice quiver.
“That's how it is when Mama calls my name in my dreams,” he said sadly.
“Why do you reckon it sounds like that?” I said.
“It's being filtered through two worlds. Some kind of real strong force field separating the two dimensions.”
“Oh, I see,” I said, but I didn't see at all, and what's more, I didn't think he did either.
“I think maybe she'll try to contact me another way,” Woodrow said.
“Like on the telephone?” I said.
“You're making fun of me!” Woodrow said. “I never thought you'd do that, Gypsy.”
“Honest, I didn't mean to,” I said, because I didn't, but even so, I was still ashamed of myself.
We didn't have anything to say to each other for a long time, and Woodrow looked so pitiful I couldn't
stand it. I thought and thought about what I could say to him to make him feel better. Finally I had it.
“Tell you what, Woodrow, when Mama lets me go outside again, we'll have a wienie roast, okay?”
It worked.
“Oh yeah?” he said, brightening.
“Down by the creek,” I went on. “There's a place where Grandpa lets me build a fire sometimes. We'll have it there, and we'll invite Mary Lee and Rita and Buzz, Garnet, Franklin Delano, John Ed, and …”
“And Peggy Sue and Willy!” he said excitedly.
After that I got better every day.
“
I
want to sit on the stump!” Buzz insisted when we were all gathered around the fire that Saturday night about the end of June.
It was a perfect evening. Except for a wasper, which Buzz killed, and a few gnats, the insects didn't get on us much. There was only one stump, and for that reason I had suggested we all sit on the ground Indian-fashion. But Buzz could be hardheaded as they come, and he was bound and determined to get his own way. I guess we were all a little chickenhearted when it came to Buzz, because he had a reputation for beating people up.
“Why, certainly!” Woodrow said, as agreeable as all get-out. “If Buzz wants to sit on the stump, let him!”
So whether I liked it or not, Buzz climbed up on the stump. I was disgruntled because it put him way yonder higher than the rest of us and we had to look up to see him. On top of that, he decided he wanted to tell a story. Seemed like everybody had a story these days.
We listened politely as he told us this tale we had all heard before, only he said it happened to his aunt and we knew dern good and well that was a lie. He said one day she went to eat from a can of storebought tomatoes, and there amongst the tomatoes was a human finger. She got so sick she puked all night long. Then she wrote to the factory where they canned those tomatoes, and sure enough, they said yes, one of their workers there lost a finger when he was on the job, and nobody ever found that finger, but thanks to Buzz's aunt, now they knew what had happened to it, and they sent her a whole case of canned tomatoes—which she didn't want—as a reward.
We told Buzz that was a real good story.
Dawg wiggled in between me and John Ed and gobbled up a wienie somebody had dropped on the ground. Then she sighed and lay down beside me and put her head in my lap.
“Now you tell us a story, Woodrow,” Rita said.
“Whatsa matter, Fatty?” Buzz said irritably. “You didn't like my story?”
Rita didn't say anything. She just dropped her head.
“Speaking of fingers being chopped off,” Woodrow said quickly, and I noticed he laid a hand gently on Rita's plump, tanned arm, “it reminds me of a good one. It was wintertime two years ago, and cold enough to freeze the Abdominal Snowman …”
“It ain't abdominal, it's abominable!” Buzz chided.
“Right,” Woodrow went on. “It was a joke, Buzz. Anyway, my Aunt Millie was awful sick. In fact, she was on her deathbed. Me and Daddy and Mama were over there trying to do what we could to help Uncle Russell out, but it happened I was the only one in the room with Aunt Millie at one particular moment when she turned her face to me and said, ‘Woody, my boy, dying ain't nothin' but changing your form, like water turns to steam, you know?'
“Then she closed her eyes and died right in front of me. I like to cried my eyes out 'cause I loved her.”
Willy Stacy belched real big. He had put away four hot dogs. We were all working on a sucker, which had caused Woodrow to pause and get in a couple of licks.
“So we buried her next day,” Woodrow went on. “Uncle Russell didn't have the money for an undertaker and a casket and all, so he made his own coffin out of pine. Aunt Millie always loved the smell of
pine. And he lined it with that warm, soft stuff Aunt Millie used to line quilts, to keep her warm, he said. Then he dressed her up in her white wedding dress 'cause it was the only fine thing she had to wear. And he left her diamond ring on her finger because he couldn't get it off. It was just a li'l ol' diamond anyway, but she was always so proud of it. She never took it off from the day she married Uncle Russell, and she would tell folks how he had saved up money for three years and ordered it special from Baltimore.
“We all gathered at the graveyard—the Praters and the Honakers. Aunt Millie was a Honaker before she married Uncle Russell, but don't hold that against her. And all the neighbors came, including the Sloans. I'll tell you how those Sloans are—they wouldn't miss a funeral for anything, especially Bertie and Gertie.
“So we had a graveside service there above the old home place where all the Praters are buried. First, the preacher prayed with us over the open casket. Then we placed holly with the red berries on top of her 'cause there wasn't a flower to be found anywhere in that cold. Next Uncle Russell fastened the lid down with leather ties he had made, lowered her into the hole, and shoveled it full of dirt his own self while we all cried; then it started to snow.”
There was silence for a moment, except for the frogs and Franklin Delano wheezing. He had the asthma. A little breeze rippled through the apple trees, and an
owl hooted. We shivered and moved closer to the fire, just like we could feel that cold winter day Woodrow was talking about.
“Mama and Daddy and me, we went over to Uncle Russell's to fix supper for him and keep him company, for he was tore up pretty good. And when it got dark he said to us, ‘Reckon y'all could spend the night?'
“We said we reckoned we could. By ten o‘clock it was snowing hard. We stoked the heatin' stove, rolled ourselves up in quilts, and talked quiet-like for a long time, mostly about Aunt Millie.”
Woodrow's voice grew soft.
“There was a nice smell in the room that somehow seemed to belong to her, and there were shadows on the walls, and I wondered, Was she close by? Could she hear us? Hadn't she said death is no more than changing forms? So maybe she was one of them shadows or a whiff of whatever that was smelling so good.
“Then Uncle Russell took the one bed, Mama and Daddy took the other, and that left me to sleep on the floor in front of the heatin' stove. But I didn't mind. I thought I could keep the fire burning all night.
“I'll never forget it. My old dog, Moses, had recently died, and I still missed him, so I was dreaming about him when it seemed like I heard somebody calling my name—‘Woody'—kinda soft. Then the voice said, ‘Woody, I'm so cold.' And again, ‘Woody.'
“Well, there was only one person in the world who called me Woody, and you know who that was?”
“Who?” we all said at the same time, but we knew who.
“Aunt Millie! Nobody else ever called me Woody except for her. I woke up shivering and pulled the quilt tighter around me and listened, but all was quiet. Out the window near me I could see snow coming down thick. Then I knew something wadn't right. I could feel a cold draft, and I thought the door musta blowed open, so I rolled over and looked at the front door. Then I like to died. She was standing there in the open doorway.”
“
Who!
”
“Aunt Millie!”
“Her ghost?”
“That's what I thought—a ghost! But it was really her standing there in that white dress with snow all over her hair and blood all over her front.”
“Blood?”
“Yeah, blood. She was looking right at me and holding out one hand toward me. It was that hand that was bleeding.
“‘Woody,' she said. ‘I'm so cold.'
“And I started hollerin.' How would you feel if you saw a dead woman standing in the doorway at night in the snow calling your name? Well, I'll tell you one
thing right now, you wouldn't feel good about it. And if I'd been an old person like Granny or Grandpa, I woulda had a heart attack on the spot. I about did anyhow.
“Mama and Daddy and Uncle Russell came rushing in, and when they saw Aunt Millie, all three of them froze where they stood. I'll declare, the natural laws of the world seemed reversed. You couldn't believe your eyeballs.
“It was Uncle Russell who came to his senses first. He grabbed her and brought her in to the heatin' stove.
“‘My darlin's come back to me,' he said.
“When it was all sorted out, what happened was this: The Sloan sisters, Bertie and Gertie, saw that diamond ring on Aunt Millie's finger at the graveside service and decided to dig her up, take the ring, fill the grave again, and nobody would know the difference. But when they tried to get the ring, it wouldn't come off her finger. So they took a knife and cut her finger off.
“That's when Aunt Millie rose up and shouted, ‘What the hell you doin' to me?'
“And that scared Bertie and Gertie so bad they ran away screaming, and Aunt Millie crawled out of the grave. She was a little bit out of her head and didn't rightly know what was happening, but she knew how to get home.”
“How could that happen?” Garnet said. “Did she come back to life?”
“Shoot no, Garnet, she never was dead to start with. We buried her alive. But she sure seemed dead. Bertie and Gertie Sloan actually saved her life by trying to rob her grave.”
“Well, did she die then?” Franklin Delano wanted to know.
“Nope. That night Uncle Russell took her to the Clinch Valley Clinic, where they stitched up her hand and kept her for a while. Then they sent her home. She's alive and kicking to this very day.”
“And what about Bertie and Gertie?” John Ed said.
“Both of them, their hair turned white overnight. And the next time anybody saw them, they were down at the Church of Jesus getting saved. They swore never to steal anything again, and they sent Aunt Millie's ring back to her by way of the preacher. They had put it in a li'l ol' aspirin tin with cotton all around it. 'Course Aunt Millie had to wear it on her pinkie after that. But she said that was a small price to pay for her life.”
“Is that the truth, Woodrow, or did you make it up?” Buzz said.
“It's the truth, Buzz. It really happened. You're always wanting to know is something really the truth,” Woodrow said.
“Well, I like to know,” Buzz said. “I don't like stories that somebody made up.”
We didn't say a word about his canned-tomatoes story.
“Now I have another story,” Buzz announced. “It's about a rabid squirrel. It's a true story, too.”
“Hold on there,” Peggy Sue said. “Which one was it, a rabbit or a squirrel?”
With that we got hysterical, and started telling jokes one on top of another. Woodrow wanted me to tell the eyeball one, but everybody had already heard it, so I asked him to tell the two-tents one, which he did, and everybody liked it. In the midst of this carrying on and acting a fool, I glanced up at Buzz and I saw he was not laughing at all. Huh-oh. Somebody musta stepped on his corns real hard. He was looking at Woodrow like he might want to clobber him.
“Hey, Woodrow,” he hollered suddenly. “Was your mama cross-eyed?”
Those foul words fell like a wet blanket on our good time. Nobody said anything for the longest time. I guess we were trying to think of something to say that wouldn't make Buzz madder or insult Woodrow either.
“No,” Woodrow said at last. “Just me.”
“Oh well, where'd you get 'em?” Buzz went on. “Maybe them cockeyed stories the girls seem to like so much crossed your goofy eyes, huh?”
We had interrupted his story about a rabid squirrel.
It was plain we really didn't care about his stories, and he was jealous of Woodrow.
“Well, I'll tell you,” Woodrow said brightly. “When they were giving out looks, I thought they said books, and I said, ‘Give me a funny one!'”
That got us started again. It was like the knockknock jokes. Everybody had one.
“When they were giving out brains,” Peggy Sue chimed in, “I thought they said pains, and I said, ‘Don't give me any.'”
“When they were giving out noses, I thought they said roses, and I said, ‘Give me a big red one!'” Willy said.
And around and around it went. I stole a peep at Woodrow. He seemed to be having a good time still.
It was after everybody left that I said to him, “Sorry about Buzz, Woodrow. Next time we'll not even ask him.”
“Oh shoot! Don't worry about Buzz,” Woodrow said cheerfully. “He won't have time to give us any trouble for a while. He'll be too busy scratching.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“You know that stump he just
had
to sit on?”
“Yeah.”
“It was chiggers national headquarters.”
BOOK: Belle Prater's Boy
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