The Nerviest Girl in the World

by Melissa Wiley

  “Why, you’re a natural,” said Bart.

  After that, we practiced a few more times and I started to feel like I knew what I was doing. But right before we did it for real, with the film rolling, Nell said, “You don’t want it to get too pat, like you know what’s coming. Remember, you aren’t Pearl who’s practiced this a bunch of times; you’re my little girl on our farm and this terrifying thing is happening to you for the very first time.”

  She said it in such a chilling voice that I got goose bumps. For just a flash it felt real. The goose-bumpy feeling was still on me when Mr. Corrigan yelled “Action!” and I felt almost shaky as I stood in the doorway watching my pretty young ma struggle with the evil robber who meant to do her harm. I found I was twisting a big wad of my pinafore up in my hands as I watched the struggle. Then Nell—Ma—screamed for me to go for help, and I bolted like a jackrabbit.

  “Cut!” cried Mr. Corrigan, and I could tell from the way he smoothed his hair down that I’d done it just the way he wanted.

  But it was the oddest thing. As soon as it was over, I really did feel shaky with fear. Was that how acting worked? You pretended so hard it became real?

  At the end of my two days’ work, Mr. Corrigan paid me fifty cents—fifty whole cents!—and clapped me on the back like I was one of the cowboys. It seemed like a vast amount of money just for riding a horse, running off a porch, and one other scene where I ran up to a sheriff (it was Jack, of course, who always got the biggest good-guy part) and tugged on his sleeve, begging him to help my ma. After that, I wasn’t in the story anymore. I didn’t even know how it ended, because they filmed it on Feather Day.

  Feather Day happens once a year, when Mama has collected enough ostrich feathers to make it worth a trip by train to the millinery district in the city. Riding a train is like riding Dinah, only you’re inside its belly and it goes even faster. Except when it pokes along in and out of a station, which I guess is more like riding Apple than Dinah.

  Mama washed and combed the feathers and put them carefully into two big canvas sacks. We held these carefully on our knees on the train, never letting go for a second. Mama was saving the feather money up to send Ike to college. She had tried to talk Bill into college but he said he was content to be a rancher. Ike used to talk about studying to be an engineer so he could build bridges and things, but that was before Mr. Corrigan came along. These days he and Frank both seemed a lot more interested in fake mustaches and cowboy pictures and motion picture cameras.

  It made me feel queasy inside to think of my brothers going off to college or moving away from home. Who would wink at me across the table if Ike was gone? And Bill…he never said much but I always felt sort of safe and comfortable when Bill was around. He was like our bell post: steady and solid and ready for emergencies. Bill was the one we always hollered for when there was a rattler in the yard; he’d just stroll up with a shovel and take its head off without batting an eye. Once, when I was eight years old, I was hoisting an ostrich egg out of the hay, and not two feet away from me there was a big diamondback all coiled up and hissing. Bill heard me shriek and came running, and he leaned over the rail fence and lifted me out of the pen to safety, so gently the egg I was clutching didn’t even crack. He sure did crack that rattlesnake in the head, though.

  Even Frank. Sure, he annoyed me, acting all wise and superior like some kind of hoity-toity professor—but I couldn’t picture our ranch without him. He acted like a know-it-all—but as far as I could tell, he kind of did know it all. Why else would I keep pestering him with questions even when he made me feel like an ignorant baby?

  But thoughts of my brothers fell away behind me as the train chugged along the canyons and ridges toward the city. The wide, empty chaparral began to fill up with houses and farms, more and more the farther west we got. I wished I could ride up front with the engine driver, or better yet, right on top of the train, where I might get a view of the sea. Surely, someone could figure out how to put a kind of saddle on top of a train so you didn’t have to waste the journey inside its metal belly. That Mr. Edison could probably figure it out, I supposed. But then he might send henchmen to make you pay extra to sit on it.

  We passed the gleaming white walls of the mission tucked in its canyon and, not long after that, the old fort high on a hill with the same white stucco walls shining through the trees. I knew that meant we were getting close to the city. We took the train all the way to San Diego near the harbor, which is as far west as you can go. Any farther and you’d wind up in the Pacific Ocean.

  From there we took a hack to the millinery shop. It was pulled by the laziest horse I ever saw, ten times pokier than Apple on her pokiest day. Automobiles kept whizzing past us, blaring their Klaxon horns—more autos than I’d ever seen in my life—a dozen at least, maybe more!

  “My goodness,” remarked Mama. “They’re popping up like mushrooms, aren’t they?”

  “Can’t we get an auto?” I pleaded, but I knew Mama would scoff at the notion. She said they were loud and smelly.

  “So are ostriches,” I pointed out.

  “Don’t be pert, Pearl.”

  I watched buildings slide slowly past the hack’s window and tried to decide what was smellier, an ostrich or an auto. Neither one could hold a candle to a horse, which had a nice earthy smell somewhere between hay and woodsmoke, and could take you flying across open country so fast you felt like a bird. A real bird, not a snippy, land-bound haystack like an ostrich.

  The feathers were nice, though, I had to admit. Mama only took the best ones to the hatmaker’s, and since the birds dropped all their feathers during molting season every year, I had as many as I wanted to play with. When I was little, I tried to stitch a bunch of them together to make myself wings, but Ike pointed out if ostriches couldn’t use them to fly, why would it work for a person? Anyway, the feathers kept tickling my nose and making me sneeze.

  Mama always did business with Mr. Abrams on Broadway. His office was in the back of a big open room where half a dozen girls sat at high tables, combing feathers and sewing them to hats. Mama strode straight through between the tables with our enormous sacks and disappeared into the little boxy office. I knew she’d be in there forever and a day, haggling over prices. Grown-ups’ money talk was just about the most boring thing I could think of. It was much more interesting in the big feather room with little specks and motes of fluff floating in the air like dandelion seeds. A bit sneezy, maybe, but a beautiful sight, especially in the shafts of light angling through the high windows, which seemed to catch and hold the fluff in a kind of suspension, like tiny tadpoles in a clear pool.

  I always appreciated our birds more here, surrounded by piles of ostrich feathers, than I did when I was in their presence. It seemed to me our feathers were much bigger and silkier than the scores strewn on the tables around me. Our birds were more richly colored, a gray so soft it was almost blue in the right light, or creamy white like the inside of an eggshell. It wasn’t something you noticed when the feathers were still attached to the birds, because the birds’ bad tempers ate up all your attention. If you stopped to admire their colors, you might get clouted on the head by a big hard beak that may as well have been a piece of stovepipe. Some things, like ostriches and brothers, were easier to appreciate from a distance.

  All that summer the Flying Q crew filmed picture after picture—one a week, give or take. My brothers were in most of them, one way or another. They were ranchers and robbers and, once, Catholic priests at a mission church. Jack with the wavy hair was always the hero—a brave farmer defending his stock from cattle thieves, or a sheriff bringing outlaws to justice, or a young man pining for the love of his beautiful Nell. Nell’s part always seemed the same—she was a girl in danger, sometimes resourceful and sometimes pretty helpless, and always rescued by Jack in the end. Sometimes I wondered if Mr. Corrigan had only known one girl in his whole life. Didn’t he kn
ow we came in different varieties? Why, look at me and Mary Mason—as different as Dinah and Apple, as different as ostriches and chickens.

  I hung around the crew every chance I got, especially Gordy, in case Mr. Corrigan needed my help in another picture. But he didn’t seem to come up with many stories involving kids. I didn’t care too much, to be honest, because it had been pretty nerve-wracking to have Mary—to have all those people—watching me try to act scared.

  But I loved the excitement of a shoot. That’s what they called it when they filmed a scene. I liked the bustle, the noise, the way Mr. Corrigan’s excitable hands made his hair stand up all spiky during the getting-ready parts. I liked the way he marched back and forth in his boots, hollering orders like an army captain. I liked the way Gordy slid his cap around backward when it was time for him to peer into his eyehole, and then slid it back brim-front during the waiting-around times.

  Seemed like waiting around was one of the main jobs of anyone involved in making a picture. Waiting around while Mr. Corrigan explained to the actors what to do in their next scene. Waiting around for a cloud to pass or the wind to die down. Waiting around while Gordy fiddled with his camera lens or figured out where was the best place to stand the camera during a scene. Waiting around while Mr. Corrigan picked out the right size of megaphone for shouting his instructions through. He used a little one for close-in scenes and a big one for booming at the cowboys far across a field.

  I didn’t mind the waiting-around one bit because it often meant a chance to chat with Gordy. I liked his twinkly eyes and his light, lilting accent. He was born in Ireland, he told me, and came to America with his father when he was a lad, after his mother died.

  “Sure and he couldn’t bear to lay eyes on the lanes they’d walked together. He sold our cottage and our cow, and we sailed to Boston. And then it seemed even an ocean wasn’t enough space between him and the memories that overpowered him with grief. He bought us a pair of train tickets and we came all the way west until we bumped into the next ocean. He set up a barbering shop in San Juan Capistrano, and that’s where I did the rest of me growin’ up. That’s how I came to meet Mr. Corrigan and his acting troupe.”

  “Gordy, that’s so sad! About your mother.”

  “ ’Tis indeed, lass. But ’twas a long time ago. I was old enough when she died to remember her—and for that I’m forever grateful, for she was a grand woman, was Molly Gordon—but young enough for my heart to heal. It wasn’t so for my poor father. He lived out his days with a hole in his chest where his heart used to be.”

  I loved Gordy’s stories, even the sad ones. He was full of tales about the “little people” back in Ireland—he said it was a pity America didn’t have anything of the kind, and he reckoned if there once had been fairy people here, they must have all disappeared under the hills when the white men came and snatched the lands away from the Indians. The little people despised land thieves, he told me. Most of the ones in Ireland had disappeared when the English took control of the land.

  “Although they’ll not hesitate to steal a babe out of its cradle if they’ve a grudge against its parents,” he added. “They don’t consider that stealin’, exactly. More like getting their just deserts.”

  I shuddered at the thought. “Did you know any babies who were stolen?”

  “Only one. It belonged to our neighbor down the road. At least, my mother said it must have been a changeling, the way it fussed and fretted all the livelong day.”

  “Suppose it just had colic?” I asked. At Mass on Sundays there were always a few mothers walking up and down the chapel side-aisles with their colicky babies. Our priest didn’t mind if they drowned him out during the Latin parts of the Mass, but if a baby squawked during his homily, he furrowed his brow and glared at the poor mother until she ducked outside.

  “But if you ask me,” I explained to Gordy, “the babies are generally more interesting to listen to than the homily. My, how some of them can howl!”

  Gordy’s eyes crinkled into a laugh. He had amazingly laughing eyes, but the laughs that came out of his mouth were soft and short, often just one low, appreciative Ha!

  “I take it you enjoy a good ruckus, Pearl?” he asked, twinkling.

  “Oh yes!” I agreed. “The ruckus-ier, the better. That’s why I like watching Mr. Corrigan direct. Even when he’s not shouting, it seems like he’s making a ruckus.”

  This time Gordy burst out with a real multisyllable laugh. He swiveled his cap brim to the back, and then swiveled it to the front again because it wasn’t time to look in the eyehole, and then he whisked the cap off his head and dabbed his eyes with it.

  “Ah, Pearl, you are a one,” he said. “You must keep your mother on her toes.”

  “Oh, no, she’s much taller than I am,” I said. “Although I’m getting taller by the hour, according to my grandmother.”

  Just then Mr. Corrigan picked up his biggest megaphone, which meant the cowboys were about to ride. I stuck my fingers in my ears because, unlike the cowboys, I didn’t have a whole field between me and Mr. Corrigan.

  “Say, Pearl,” murmured Gordy when the booming instructions died down. “How’d you like to turn the crank?”

  “What?” I gasped, dumbfounded. “On the camera?”

  “Heh,” chuckled Gordy. “Sure and I don’t see any automobiles around here to wind up, do you?”

  “Oh, Gordy!” I cried. He found a crate for me to stand on and showed me what to do.

  “The moment Mr. C. calls out ‘Camera!’ you want to start the crank turning and keep her going until he says ‘Cut!’ Got it?”

  “Yes!” I said confidently. I’d watched Gordy at work umpteen times by now. He nodded and swiveled his cap backward, ready to peer into the eyehole.

  I couldn’t believe my luck. A couple of butterflies went zinging around in my stomach—suppose I did it wrong and ruined the shot?—but the only way to ruin it would be to stop turning the crank too soon. Wild horses couldn’t keep me from turning that crank. Why, a rattlesnake could slither right over my foot and I wouldn’t stop. A caterpillar could creep right up the back of my dress and—

  I shuddered. All right, maybe one thing could cause me to abandon my post. But there were no trees overhead and no caterpillar-hunting brothers to hang off their branches even if there were any. All three of my brothers were across the field on their horses, ready to ride.

  “Camera!” boomed Mr. Corrigan.

  “Eek,” I squealed, giving the crank a twist.

  “That’s it, nice and steady; keep your pace. She’ll tell you how fast she wants to go.”

  The camera’s a she? I wanted to ask but didn’t dare risk breaking my concentration. I knew ships were called she, so maybe it applied to other inventions, too. Were trains he or she? What about telephones?

  “Action!” barked the megaphone. The cowboys thundered toward us across the field and I cranked for all I was worth.

  * * *

  “You did what?” sputtered Frank at the supper table that night when I boasted about my tremendous accomplishment.

  “I took some film!” I crowed. “Or, well, I helped, at least. Gordy was the one looking in the eyehole.”

  Frank opened his mouth to say something but snapped it shut. I could see that he was furious. He was jealous! Of me! His ignorant little sister! I wanted to gloat. I wanted to crow about my superior experience. I sat up straighter and taller and was about to speak when I felt Grandma’s eyes on me. Her brows were raised a little, as if she was curious to see what would happen next. But I sensed it was a particular kind of curiosity. I felt suddenly as if I were about to take a test at school.

  “Say, Frank,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant. I was grateful for Nell’s acting lessons because I didn’t feel nonchalant at all. “Want me to ask Gordy to give you a try? I’m sure he’d say yes. He’s ever so nice.
”

  Frank’s eyes lit up like he’d found a gold nugget in a hen’s nest. “Do you think he would? Gee, Pearl, that’d be swell!”

  Across the table Grandma smiled a very small smile and quietly slid the jam pot in my direction.

  If there was a test, I think I passed.

  One day when I was hanging around the Flying Q folks as usual, Mr. Corrigan said he needed a sick child for a scene in a new picture they were filming the next day. “Think you can lie in bed and suffer into the camera?” he asked me.

  “Suffer?”

  “I want big sad eyes in a pale, sad face,” he explained.

  “On horseback again?” I asked hopefully.

  He chuckled. “No, honey. In a sickbed. We’re shooting indoors tomorrow morning. Ask your folks, all right? Same pay as before.”

  I raced home to ask. Mama said she didn’t see that I could come to much harm lying in a bed, so why not. I could hardly sleep that night, I was so keyed up. Another picture!

  Seemed like my ostrich chores took ten times as long as usual the next morning. I washed up as fast as I could and would have dashed out the door straightaway but Mama made me sit down at the breakfast table. Papa needed Apple and Dinah that day, so I had to ride behind Bill on his chestnut mare. I hated riding double, smushed up against my brother’s back, unable to see what lay ahead. My neck got a crick from being turned to the side for too long, watching the scrubby bushes of the chaparral bounce past. It was too bad Gordy wasn’t there with his camera because I could have suffered into it for real.

  The shoot was in town today, in a big old house near the post office. The first thing I discovered when we got there was that I wasn’t the only kid playing a part in the story this time. Mary Mason, Walter Murray, and a couple of other town kids were there too, wearing raggedy old clothes the costume mistress had handed out. Mary’s eyes went narrow and mean when she saw me. I glared right back at her. Two could play at that game.