Borrowed Children (2 page)

“It's all right,” I begin.

“But look at him,” Anna splutters. “It can't be Daddy. He doesn't have a …”

Then I see what she sees. The figure sits high, his body covered in a cape. And where his head should be, there's nothing. It's like in the Sleepy Hollow story—but this time it's coming at a gallop directly for us.

The screen door bangs and I feel Mama behind us. I reach for her hand, but she's already holding Helen's, so I grab the rail. The figure is getting close now, swaying and gleaming.

Not a one of us moves and even Helen is quiet. The figure slows, dismounts, and leads the horse toward the porch. Mama takes a step forward, drawing herself up. “Come no farther,” she commands.

Then the rider throws back its shoulders and laughs. It keeps coming. The cloak slips down, a head emerges, and it's Daddy, his smile wide, his glasses all steamed up.

I almost cry, I'm so glad it's him, but Helen buries her face in my skirt. Mama moves toward him, not yet ready to laugh.

“Jim,” she says, “what on earth do you think you're doing, scaring the children to death?”

Now he's up on the porch, water pouring off the cloak, and him still shaking with laughter.

“Just trying to keep dry,” he says. “I cut a piece of cloth off a log tarp. Never dreamed it would give these girls a fright. I couldn't see them through the rain.”

“Well, they could see you,” Mama says, “and you could have been the Devil himself.” She's trying to brush water off his face. “I'll call one of the boys to come get Midge.”

“That's all right, Rena.” Daddy lays a dripping hand on her shoulder. “I'll walk on down to the shed.”

Mama doesn't smile till his back is turned, and then it's a slow smile, like the sun coming up.

“You girls get on in the house now,” she says. “It's so damp out here you could catch your death.”

2

And so she herds us in—through the parlor and the dining room to the back of the kitchen. Towels hang by the washtub where we bathe. I dry Helen off while Anna gives herself a rubdown. I didn't realize the rain had blown in on us so much. Guess I was too scared.

Mama dabs at her face with her apron, then scrapes cornbread batter into a cast-iron skillet which she eases into the stove.

If this were a regular Friday we could relax now. But there's that bill, hanging over everything. I wonder if Ben's trying to break it to Daddy down at the shed. And I wonder about David. He won't take whatever happens as hard as Ben, or he won't show it. David's calm as snow.

Here they come now, up the back steps.

“Scrape your feet, boys,” Daddy orders.

Stamping and tramping like mules, they come in. I pass the towels. When Daddy takes off his glasses to wipe his face, it's so naked and tired, I look away. From behind the towel he begins:

“The boys tell me the hotel sent us a bill, Rena. You haven't been putting up secret Memphis kin?”

“Not chick nor child,” she answers, bent over, checking the fire in the stove.

“Probably Mr. Asher's mistake.” He sets his glasses on his nose, then anchors them behind his ears. “But I'd best have a look.”

He walks out of the kitchen and his good mood all at once. Ben blanches; David studies his hands.

The hinge creaks as Daddy opens Mama's desk in the parlor. A pause while he finds the bill and the letter knife. Then:

“God almighty, what has been going on?”

Mama goes through that door, too.

“What is it, Mandy?” Anna always thinks I know. “What's wrong?”

“You tell her, David,” I say.

But Daddy's back, taller and louder than he left.

“I want an explanation, boys, and it had better be good.”

“Mandy,” Mama starts.

“I know. Take the girls to their room. But I'd like to—”

“Do as I say,”

So we miss the big scene.

“David and Ben did something wrong,” I tell Anna, after she and Helen are sitting on the edge of our bed.

We're not allowed to lie on it unless we pull back the red and white zigzag quilt, Hard Road to Kansas. Daddy said his mama called it Drunkard's Path.

“Did
what
wrong?” Anna demands, pushing her brown hair out of her eyes. It's straight as straw.

Daddy's voice rolls down the hall:

“You think I cut down money trees on Big Lick?”

I try to cover it over.

“Well, you know David and Ben go to the high school in Manchester now?”

Anna nods. Helen slides to the floor, chewing on the blond sprig of her braid.

“And they take their lunch, just like we do?”

She nods again.

“Trouble is, toward the end of school, they quit eating it. Started going to the Asher Hotel for lunch instead. The bills for that.”

“Oh. That's trouble, huh?”

Its my turn to nod.

“And they're going to get a whipping?”

“At least.”

“They're awfully big,” Anna ventures.

“So was their mistake.”

The screen door bangs. More heavy feet on the back steps.

“I guess the discussion's over,” I tell them. “Mama will call us in a minute.”

“Mandy?” Helen's voice surprises me from the floor. “Has Daddy ever whipped you?”

“No. But Mamas switches sure have made me dance.”

“Will Daddy whip them with his belt?”

“I don't know, Helen. What's wrong?” Her wide mouth is twitching to cry.

“What will they do? They can't eat with us or go in the wagon…” Big tears roll down her cheeks.

“Helen, what are you talking about?” It's Anna asking this time.

“If they can't sit down,” Helen explains. “David said if Daddy used his belt, they'd never sit down again.”

“Oh, honey,” I kneel beside her. Anna giggles. “They don't mean
really.
They just mean they'll be sore.”

This is the child who ran out to look when Mama said her birthday was just around the corner.

“You girls wash up,” Mama calls. “Mandy, come pour the milk.”

Dinner is slow and silent. Helen drops her cornbread. I pick it up quick and Mama pretends not to see. Before anyone asks for seconds, David mumbles:

“May we be excused?”

“There's applesauce for dessert,” Mama says.

“Thanks, but I've had enough.”

Ben agrees.

“Well, then, go along.”

And they do, walking very carefully, like they had somebody else's legs.

Once they're out of the room, Daddy declares, “Not a nickel of that bill do I mean to pay. Tomorrow I'll go into town and speak to Lige Asher. He's bound to have some work those boys can do. They'll see more of that hotel than they reckoned on.”

He folds his napkin and puts it beside his plate.

“Rena, if you'll excuse me now, I've got a little figuring to do.”

“I'll bring your coffee.”

Nodding thanks, he goes back to the desk.

Daddy likes to carve, and usually on Friday nights he takes up whatever piece he's working on and sits in the kitchen whittling, while Mama and I do the dishes. But not tonight. The parlor could be as far away as the mill.

“Finish up, girls,” Mama tells us. But the dumplings are heavy and cold.

“I'm too full,” I say.

“You'll see it again tomorrow.” We nod. “Then let's get the kitchen done,” she says. “Bad business cooking for them that won't eat.”

3

David and Ben started working at the Asher on Sunday. They won t tell what they did, but Ben says it was “too close to housework” for him.

That makes me mad. It's easy for them to scorn clothes-washing and floor-scrubbing and chicken-plucking. It's all done for them—I even make up their bed! And Mama's silly about them; she always has been: David because he's her firstborn and Ben because he's so much like Daddy as a boy. At least that's what
she
thinks:

“I just look at him and catch up on all of Jim Perritt I missed.”

And Ben doesn't look any more like Daddy than a frog.

“It's his walk,” she says. “It's how he looks out of his eyes.”

So I'm glad they're getting a little taste of dust rags and paste wax. I hope Mr. Asher has them do everything that's to be done. Puts them in little aprons. Makes them wear maid hats. I'd walk the four miles to town just to see it!

They've got to work all this week, which is the last one before school starts. Then they'll go in on Saturdays for a while. I wonder if all those fancy lunches were worth it.

Mama and I are busy getting clothes ready for school. Monday we altered and mended, yesterday we washed, and today were ironing. We're set up in the kitchen with basket, clothes, the board, and three irons—one to heat up while the other cools from use, and a small one for finishing.

“No child of mine is going to drag around like a ragamuffin,” she says, as though that's a fate you have to fight all the time. “You're lucky, Mandy. You're the one with new clothes.”

But
new
isn't exactly the word. Mama's sister, Aunt Laura, sent a box of her discarded clothes from Memphis. That's where Omie lives too. It's not that the clothes aren't nice—they're too nice is the problem: a black file suit, nipped at the waist; a water-blue taffeta skirt; a slick red dress with hardly a front.

“How could she wear that?” I ask Mama.

“Well, Laura's endowed,” she says.

“Endowed? You mean with money?”

Mama smiles.

“No, I mean her bust is full enough that she fills this out. Of course, it's still a bit scandalous, but Laura is Laura.”

Mama's still smiling, then shrugs the smile away.

“At any rate, with a little white yoke I can fill it in for you. And the suit just needs to be hemmed.”

“Oh, Mama, I can't go to school in clothes like that!”

“And why not? They're perfectly decent clothes. Or will be.”

“But nobody wears clothes like that! And I'm not—I don't even fill out a slip.”

Mama pats her stomach, where the dress is stretched like a

skin.

“Well, I certainly do.”

I don't know what to say to that.

“And you'll look better in Lauras clothes than you will in your birthday suit. You've grown too much over the summer to wear most of last year's clothes. Besides, Mandy, by the end of this year you don't know how you'll look. You're getting to an age—” Her voice trails off. She gestures for me to bring her the hot iron from the stove.

“What do you mean?” I ask, setting the hot weight down, taking back the cool one.

For a minute Mama just looks at me.

“You'll be starting to mature is all,” she says. Then she sprinkles water from a jar onto the iron to test its heat.

I want to ask more, but her face says the talk is finished. It's the same with the clothes. No point in arguing. So I go on dipping shirts in starch and rolling them into balls. And I keep an eye on Anna and Helen through the screen door. They're in the back yard shelling beans.

School will be all right somehow, though. It always is. Just thinking about it makes my throat tighten. “Pencil fever,” Daddy calls it when I can't wait to go back to school. “Darnedest thing I ever saw.”

Daddy finished the eighth grade and Mama went on into high school, so they know what it's like. Except they didn't have Mr. Aden for a teacher. If they had, they might have caught pencil fever too.

Mr. Aden's from Boston. He came to Goose Rock on a mission, he says, but he and the Almighty got separated on the way down, so he doesn't work for a church.

“I work for you,” he tells us, “for the tilling of your minds and the fruit of your ever-growing souls.”

I told Mama and Daddy that.

“Bet he gets a check, too,” Daddy said.

Sure he does, but that's not the main thing. Mr. Aden has a greater goal in life than “worshiping the brazen dollar.” That's why he came to the mountains.

“People are different here,” he says.

Daddy says we can't worship what we haven't got.

I expect Mr. Aden just got tired of Boston, the way a full person pushes back his plate. But that wouldn't happen to me. I'm hungry enough to feast on a city forever: theaters and cobbled streets, museums and libraries and running water! We have to pump our water in Goose Rock, of course, and order books from Sears-Roebuck. That means we don't get many. A library means free books, all you want, over and over.

“You'll have a library here,” Mr. Aden promised us. “The spirit requires books and there will be money for them once people's bodily needs are met. We must be patient. In the meantime, I'll make a school library of my collection.”

And that's what he did. The first week I brought home Jane Eyre ….

“Amanda!”

“Oh—what, Mama?”

“I've been talking to you for five minutes and I don't believe you've heard a word.”

“I'm sorry. I guess I was daydreaming.”

“Well, those shirts are going to turn to bricks if you don't hand them over here. And these I've finished need to be hung up in the boys' room.”

I've exchanged the wet rolls of cloth for the billowing shirts when I hear a knock at the door. A steady knock, insistent.

“My word, who could that be?” Mama says, putting down the iron, smoothing her dress front with her hands.

“Amanda, you wait here.”

From the kitchen I watch her heavy journey around the dining room table and into the parlor. I can't see the front door.

“May I help you?”

“Mrs. Perritt?” a husky young voice asks.

“Yes?”

“I'm Cob Russell, Wilt Russell's son, from Russell's Grocery, you know, in Manchester…”

“Yes?” For some reason, she lets him fumble.