Casteel 1 - Heaven (4 page)

“That's right, Tom. And pick up a few for Our Jane and Keith, and even Fanny.”

“Fanny won't read em,” said Tom, his eyes lighting up, “but Heavenly and I sure will!”

We went home that day with five books to read, and four to study. Keith did his bit by carrying two books so neither Tom nor I would refuse to carry Our Jane when she grew tired. It worried me to see how white she grew after only a few steps uphill.

Tagging along behind came Fanny with her boyfriends swarming like bees around the sweetest flower. I had only a devoted brother. Keith lagged about twenty yards behind Fanny and her friends, reluctant to stay with us, but not for the same reasons as Fanny. Keith was in love with nature, with the sights, sounds, and smells of earth, wind, forest, and, most of all, animals. I glanced behind to check, and

saw he was so absorbed in studying the bark of a tree he didn't hear me calling his name. “Keith, hurry up!”

He ran a short way before he stopped to pick up a dead bird, examining it with careful hands and observant eyes. If we didn't constantly remind him where he was, he would be left far behind, and never find his way home. Strange how absentminded Keith was, never noticing where he was, only where the objects of his interest grew, lived, or visited.

“Which is heavier, Tom, the books or Our Jane?” I asked, lugging along six.

“The books,” he said quickly, setting down our frail sister so I could empty my arms of books and pick up Our Jane.

“What are we gonna do, Ma?” Tom asked when we reached our cabin, where the smoke belched out and reddened our eyes immediately. “She gets so tired, yet she needs to go to school.”

Sarah looked deep into Our Jane's tired eyes, touched her pale face, then gently picked up her youngest and carried her into the big bed and laid her down. “What she needs is a doctor, but we kin't afford it. That's what makes me so damned mad with yer pa. He's got money fer booze, an money fer women .. . but none fer doctors to heal his own.”

How bitter she sounded. . Every Sunday night I had nightmares. The same

one repeated over and over, until I grew to hate Sunday nights. I dreamed I was all alone in the cabin, snowed in and alone. Every time the dream came I woke up crying.

“It's all right,” comforted Tom, crawling over from his place on the floor near the stove and throwing his arms about me after one of my worst nightmares. “I get those bad dreams, too, once in a while. Don't cry, we're all here. Ain't no place for us to go but to school and back, and to church and back. Wouldn't it be nice if we never had to come back?”

“Pa doesn't love me like he loves you, Fanny, Keith, and Our Jane,” I sobbed, and even that made me feel weak and ashamed. “Am I so ugly and unbearable, Tom? Is that why Pa hates me so?”

“Naw,” scoffed Tom, looking embarrassed, "it's somethin about yer hair he dislikes. Heard him tell Sarah that once. But I think yer hair is beautiful, really do. Not so hatefully red as mine, nor so pale as Our Jane's. Or so black and straight as Fanny's. You've got an angel look, even if it is black. I think you are, no doubt, the prettiest girl in all the hills, and Winnerrow

as well." There were many pretty girls in the hills and in

the valley. I hugged Tom and turned away. What did Tom know about judging beautiful girls? Already I knew there was a world beyond the hillsa huge, wonderful world I was going to know one day.

“I'm sure glad I'm not a girl,” shouted Tom the next day, shaking his head in wonder at a sister who went so easily from frowns to laughter, “made happy by silly compliments!”

“You didn't mean what you said last night?” I asked, crestfallen. “You're not gonna like me either?”

He whirled about and made an ugly face. “Seeyer almost as pretty as this face of mineand I'd marry ya when I grow upif I could.”

“You've been saying that since you learned how to talk.”

“How would ya know?” he shouted back.

“Tom, you know Miss Deale doesn't want you to say yer or ya. You must remember your diction and your grammar. Say instead you are or you. You must learn to speak properly, Tom.”

“Why?” he asked, his green eyes sparkling with mischief. He tugged the red ribbon from my ponytail and set my hair free to blow in the wind. "Nobody

round here cares about grammar and diction, not Ma, not Pa, not anybody but ya and Miss Deale."

“And who do you love most in the whole wide world?” I asked.

“Love you first, Miss Deale second,” Tom said with a laugh. “Can't have you, so settle for Miss Deale. I'm gonna order God t'stop her from growing old and ugly. Then I can catch up and marry her, and she'll read to me every book in the whole wide world.”

“You'll read your own books, Thomas Luke Ca- steel!”

“Heavenly,” (he was the only one to combine my two names in this flattering way) “the others in the school whisper about you, thinking you know more than you should at your age, and that's my age too. I don't know as much. How come?”

“I get the A's, and you get the B's and C's because you play hooky too muchand I don't play hooky at all.” Tom was as thirsty for knowledge as I was, but he had to be like others of his sex once in a while, or fight them each day so they wouldn't call him teacher's pet. When he came back to the cabin from his wild days of fun in the woods or on the river, he'd spend twice as much of his free time poring over

the books Miss Deale allowed us to bring home. Other words Miss Deale had said to Tom and

me lingered in my head, to comfort me when my pride was injured, my self-​confidence wounded. “Look,” she'd said, her pretty face smiling, “you and Tom are my very best students. The very kind every teacher hopes for.”

The day Miss Deale gave us permission to take books home, she gave us the world and all it contained.

She gave us treasures beyond belief when she put in our hands her favorite classics. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, and three Jane Austen novels and they were all for me. On the days that followed Tom had his own selection, boy books, the Hardy Boys series, seven of them, and just when I'd begun to think he'd select nothing but fun books, he picked up a thick volume of Shakespeare, and that made Miss Deale's blue eyes glow.

“You don't, perchance, hope to be a writer one day, do you, Tom?” she asked.

“Don't know yet what I want to be,” he said in his most careful diction, nervous as he always was around someone as educated and pretty as Miss

Marianne Deale. “Get all kinds of notions about being a pilot; then next day I want to be a lawyer so I can get to be president one day.”

“President of our country, or of a corporation?”

He blushed and looked down at his large feet that kept shuffling about. How awful his shoes looked. They were too big, too old and worn. “I guess President Casteel would sound kinda stupid, wouldn't it?”

“No,” she said seriously, “I think it sounds fine. You just set your mind on what you want to be, and take your time about it. If you work to obtain your goal, and realize from the very beginning that nothing valuable comes easily, and still forge ahead, without a doubt you'll reach your goal, whatever it is.”

Because of Miss Marianne Deale's generosity (we learned later she put down her own money as deposit so we could take those books home), in books we had the chance to look at pictures of the ancient world, and in books we traveled together to Egypt and India. In books we lived in palaces and strode the narrow crooked lanes in London. Why, we both felt that when we got there eventually, we wouldn't even feel strange in a foreign land, because we'd been there before.

I loved historical novels that brought the past to life much better than history books did. Until I read a novel about George Washington I thought him a dull, stodgy sort of president . . . and to think he'd once been young and handsome enough to cause girls to think he was charming and sexy.

We read books by Victor Hugo, by Alexandre Dumas, and thrilled to know adventures like that were possible, even if they were horrible. We read classics, and we read junk; we read everything, anything that would take us out of that godforsaken cabin in the hills. Maybe if we'd had movies, our own TV set, and other forms of entertainment, we wouldn't have grown so fond of those books Miss Deale allowed us to take home. Or maybe it was only Miss Deale, being clever when she “allowed” only us to take home precious, expensive books that she said others wouldn't respect as much as we did.

And that was true enough. We read our books only after we washed our hands.

.

I suspected that Miss Marianne Deale liked our pa more than a little. God knows she should have had better taste. According to Granny, his “angel” had taught Pa to speak proper English, and with his

natural good looks, many an aristocratic woman fell for the charms of Luke Casteel, when he cared enough to be charming.

Every Sunday Pa went with us to church, sat in the midst of his large family, next to Sarah. Petite and dainty Miss Deale sat primly across the aisle and stared at Pa. I could guess she was marveling at Pa's dark good looks, but surely she should consider his lack of knowledge. From all I'd heard from Granny, Pa had quit school before he was finished with the fifth grade.

Sundays rolled around so fast when you didn't have the kind of good clothes you needed, and I was always thinking I'd have a pretty new dress before another showed up; but new garments of any kind were difficult to come by, when Sarah had so much to do. So there we were again, in the very last pew, all in our best rags that others would throw out for trash. We'd stand, and we'd sing along with the best and richest in Winnerrow, along with all the other hillbillies dressed no better or worse than we were, who reveled in coming to church.

In God you had to trust, and in God you had to believe or feel a fool.

On this particular Sunday after church services

were over, I tried to keep Our Jane neat while she licked the ice cream just outside the pharmacy, not so far from where Pa had parked his truck. Miss Deale had bought cones for all five of the Casteel children. She stood about ten yards away, staring at where Ma and Pa were having a tiff about something, which meant any moment Pa might whack her, or Sarah would belt him one. I swallowed nervously, wishing Miss Deale would move on, or look elsewhere, but she stood watching, listening, almost transfixed.

It made me wonder what she was thinking, though I never found out.

Not a week passed without her writing at least one note to Pa concerning Tom or me. He was seldom home, and when he was, he couldn't read her neat, small handwriting; even if he could, he wouldn't have responded. Last week she had written:

.

Dear Mr. Casteel,

Surely you must be very proud of Tom and Heaven, my two best students. I would like very much, at a time convenient for both of us, to meet you to discuss the possibilities of seeing that they both win scholarships.

Yours sincerely, Marianne Deale

.

The very next day she'd asked me, “Didn't you give it to him, Heaven? Surely he wouldn't be so rude as not to respond. He's such a handsome man. You must adore him.”

“Sure do adore him,” I said cynically. “Sure could chisel him into a fine museum piece. Put him in a cave with a club in his hand, and a red-​haired woman at his feet. Yep, that's where Pa belongs, in the Smithsonian.”

Miss Deale narrowed her sky-​blue eyes, stared at me with the oddest expression. “Why, I'm shocked, really shocked. Don't you love your father, Heaven?”

“I just adore him, Miss Deale, I really do. Specially when he's visiting Shirley's Place.”

“Heaven! You shouldn't say things like that. What can you possibly know about a house of ill-​rep-- ” She broke off and looked embarrassed. Her eyes lowered before she asked, “Does he really go there?”

“Every chance he gets, according to Ma.”

The next Sunday Miss Deale didn't look at Pa with admiration; in-​fact, she didn't cast her eyes his way one time.

But even if Pa had fallen from Miss Deale's grace, she still was waiting for all five of us in the

pharmacy while Ma and Pa chatted with their hill friends. Our Jane ran to our teacher with wide-​open arms, hurling herself at Miss Deale's pretty blue skirt. “Here I am!” she cried out in delight. “Ready for ice cream!”

“That's not nice, Our Jane,” I immediately cor- rected. “You should wait and allow Miss Deale to offer you ice cream.”

Our Jane pouted, and so did Fanny, both with wide, pleading eyes fixed doglike on our teacher. “It's all right, Heaven, really,” Miss Deale said, smiling. “Why do you think I come here? I like ice-​cream cones, too, and hate to eat one all alone. . . so, come, tell me which flavors you want this week.”

It was easy to see Miss Deale pitied us, and wanted to give us treats, at least on Sundays. In a way it wasn't fair, to her or to us, for we were so damned needing of treats, but we also needed to have pride in ourselves. Time after time pride went down in defeat when it came to choosing between chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry. Lord knows how long it would have taken us if there had been more flavors.

Easily Tom could say he wanted vanilla; easily I could say chocolate; but Fanny wanted strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla, and Keith wanted what Our

Jane was having, and Our Jane couldn't make up her mind. She looked at the man behind the soda fountain, stared wistfully at the huge jars of penny candy, eyed a boy and a girl sitting down to enjoy an ice-​cream soda, and hesitated. “Look at her,” whispered Fanny; “kin't make up her mind cause she wants it all. Miss Deale, don't give it all t'herunless ya give it all to us, too.”

“Why, of course I'll give Our Jane anything she wants, all three flavors if she can manage a triple cone, and a chocolate candy bar for later, and a bag of candy for all of you to take home. Is there anything else you'd like?”

Fanny opened her mouth wide, as if to blab out all we wanted and needed. I quickly intervened. “You do too much already, Miss Deale. Give Our Jane her small vanilla cone, which will drip all over her before she eats it anyway, and a chocolate bar that she and Keith can share. That's more than enough. We have plenty of what we need at home.”