The Waking Bell

by Jackie Weger

  There weren’t any soda shops or theaters in Oak Flatt. Those were in Maryville, which was the county seat for Blount County.

  At the corner, I rode onto the main residential street in town and continued to a quaint olive-green home built in a craftsman style. At least that was what Ginny Rose called it. She took a great deal of pride in her home.

  The covered porch was held up by tapered columns with wooden steps leading to the front door. Ivy wove like a carpet up the columns. Boxwood shrubs ornated the front while on the left side of the house there was a line of blue hydrangeas in bloom that bordered the driveway.

  On the right side of the driveway was a massive walnut tree. Its fallen bounty caused me to stop and walk my bike into the carport. Only special visitors used the front door. Most came into the house through the carport.

  The fragrance of gardenias assaulted me as I parked my bike against the wall of the house. Ginny Rose had a huge gardenia bush at the entrance to her large backyard. I gave it a glance, and out by the live oak, I saw a brown Cadillac.

  The sight meant only one thing: Dodie had stayed the night.

  When I first discovered that the Reeves were blood kin, I was stunned. The Reeves were one of the most respected families in these parts alongside the Pritchards. Ginny Rose said her family settled here before the American Revolution. Though, I suspected they weren’t as rich as the Pritchards, which was a sore spot for Mr. Reeves.

  Mr. Reeves liked his money. I imagined he was much like the character of Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. I wasn’t certain if their looks were the same, but every old man seemed to have thinning gray hair and a stoop. The similarity to me had more to do with his demeanor.

  He was quite tight-fisted and thought everyone was out for his money. As far as I had seen, he held no sympathy for anyone who wasn’t family. More than once, I had seen him count his coins that he hid in the bottom drawer of the bedroom bureau. It seemed he liked the feel of money. Moreover, I quite doubted that his cold heart would warm like Scrooge’s at the end of the book. I don’t think he was capable of that warmth.

  Ginny Rose said it came when he lost his son, Holden, my father. “He lost his heart,” she’d said on a sigh.

  In my dealings with Mr. Reeves, I wondered, at times, if he even had a heart. But the Bible says to forgive those who sin against you. I wasn’t so sure that he had sinned against me, but he had shunned my momma and me.

  His anger was against me. It had been my fault Daddy ran into the burning house. Daddy became a hero that day for saving me. But to Mr. Reeves, I became a symbol of what he had lost. Afterward, he had refused any help to Momma.

  I don’t know what Momma and I would have done if not for Goldie. She opened her home up to us long before Otis married Momma. Poor Momma. Alone with a child who wouldn’t speak.

  The situation worsened when I went to school. I didn’t say much. I remember writing everything down. I knew how to read and write before I even went, but it would make the teacher so mad that I wouldn’t answer questions.

  The more she demanded I talk, the more the bells would ring in my head. I would stand there and stare at her. She threatened me and would write home notes to Goldie, who paid her no mind. Then the threats became spankings with a paddle, standing in the corner all day, and being hit across my hands with a ruler.

  My classmates were no better. They called me names and threw their food at me. The bells became louder.

  The day I came home from school with a black eye, after one of the boys had used me as a punching bag, Goldie pulled me out. She said, no more. I don’t think that Momma noticed. When she did, she would say things like Are you alright, baby? I’ll take care of them for you. I wouldn’t let anyone hurt you.

  Then, she would take two steps and fall down blackout drunk. Momma had drowned her sorrows with booze.

  Most of my memories of Momma was of a drunk. That was until Otis and her got married. When she got pregnant with Dickie, she was awfully sick most of the time, but they were my favorite memories.

  She would take my hand and squeeze it tight. You know I love you, Cady Blue, she would say. Then she died two days after Dickie was born.

  Shortly after Momma’s death, Ginny Rose came to Goldie’s. She brought things for me, clothes and books. She even offered to home-school me.

  Goldie hadn’t been happy about the whole thing, but she didn’t stop me. I went to Ginny Rose’s twice a week for a couple hours. I felt exceedingly fortunate until Mr. Reeves revealed a badly kept secret.

  “Don’t you think that you can weasel your way into this family,” he stated firmly to me one afternoon while I waited for Ginny Rose to ready my lesson. “I want to make you understand that fully, young lady. You aren’t a Reeves and never will be.”

  At the time, I was eleven and didn’t understand exactly what he’d told me. When I told Goldie, she did.

  Goldie stomped all the way into town to their house with me in hand. She banged on their front door. The minute Mr. Reeves came to the door, she gave him a piece of her mind. Within that conversation, I learned of my heritage.

  Two years passed before I visited Ginny Rose again, soon after her tuberculosis diagnosis. When she returned from the sanitorium, she offered me a position in her household. She gave me a job.

  Ginny Rose never demanded much from me. Anything she asked me to do, she would work alongside with me. She taught me how to cook, make preserves, can green beans, and how to make a dress from a pattern. Once we cleaned the attic. I hung on every story Ginny Rose told while she organized her memories.

  Most afternoons, she would rest in her sitting room. It was there she introduced me to the world of literature and books became a fixture in my life.

  Ginny Rose had an air of fragile sensitivity. She was a petite woman with pale blue eyes and thin white hair, curled with a permanent wave. She walked with a slight stoop but carried herself with an unassertive gentleness of a lady.

  One of her favorite pastimes was sitting under the big oak outback with a glass of iced tea and talking of the past. Her voice riddled with sadness recalling the loss of her brother, no older than a toddler, from a fever; then, joy as she conveyed the story of Mr. Reeves proposing to her in a garden of roses as butterflies flittered from one bloom to another.

  When she reminisced, I felt as if I’d walked back in time. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I always believed she wanted me to know my family, whether Mr. Reeves ever acknowledged me for who I was or not.

  I was given a glimpse into a different life. Mine had been consumed with the upkeep of a farm. For as long as I could remember, I woke at the crack of dawn. There were animals to feed, eggs to gather, and breakfast to fix. I never worried about the clothes I wore because no one saw me.

  I had one dress for Sunday church, one set of boots for the farm, and a pair of shoes for the house. When I first began working for Ginny Rose, she bought me a blue dress and a pair of fine leather shoes to wear that she deemed appropriate.

  The first time I’d put them on, I felt like a princess. I whirled around and around so much that Goldie told me to stop. It was making her dizzy. I laughed and laughed.

  Goldie may have complained about me leaving her during the day, but deep down, I believed she was proud of me. She’d mumbled, “Making a lady of ya.”

  Two doors down from the Reeves lived my father’s older sister, Claire. She was married to Phillip Wentworth who worked down at the bank with Mr. Reeves. They lived in a large two-story white house with their three children.

  Jed Wentworth came from his father’s first marriage. I had heard that his mother died from cancer when Jed was three. Dodie was the oldest girl, followed eighteen months later by Lauren.

  Neither Jed nor Lauren lived there anymore. Jed worked over at Oak Ridge about half an hour west of Knoxville. Lauren married a man from Nashville right before the war began.

  Lauren was nice enough, I supposed. Mostly, she ignored me. Jed, though, had a mean streak. He
would do things to watch me clean them up like spilling his drink on the floor, then laugh when I did. From what I gathered, he didn’t have many friends. He was known for his intelligence but wasn’t well liked by anyone.

  In my youth, it had been Dodie that I watched in adoration. She was beautiful with a headful of dark tight curls that fell to her shoulders if she didn’t have it pulled back. Tall and slim, she had prominent cheekbones with the faintest sprinkle of freckles across her nose. She always smelled like a floral bouquet.

  She would walk into a room and all eyes would turn. I envied the way she captivated people. Moreover, she was the only one of the three to talk to me. Granted, most of it was to ask me to do something for her, but she would tell me if I needed to straighten my skirt or pull back my hair.

  “Need to look respectable,” she would tell me.

  The grandfather clock struck seven when I opened the back screen door. Usually when I walked into the kitchen, I was greeted by a smile and Ginny Rose cooking her husband breakfast. Not today. Mr. Reeves sat at the kitchen table, readied for his day in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie.

  Being direct, Mr. Reeves said in a blunt abrupt fashion, “Ginny Rose had a spell during the night. Dr. Taylor came by and told her to stay in bed. He didn’t like the sound of her heart. She’s to rest.”

  He returned to reading yesterday’s paper. I understood perfectly. He was not the type of man who could be inconvenienced by a sick wife. He expected me to watch over her in his absence. In his eyes, his work was of the utmost importance.

  A man of routine, he required his breakfast to be served promptly. I obliged him and heaped a spoon of Postum into the coffee grounds before I perked it. While it perked, I walked down the hall to check in on Ginny Rose. She was sleeping peacefully.

  With a quick glance, I saw that the back-bedroom’s door was closed, confirming Dodie’s presence. I wondered the reason for her appearance. She never came around when Ginny Rose was sick, much less nursed her. There had to be another reason. Rather ashamed of myself to believe that Dodie’s presence had nothing to do with Ginny Rose’s health, I returned to the kitchen.

  In all probability, Mr. Reeves sent for her when Ginny Rose fell ill. If he had a soft spot for anyone, it was Dodie. In his eyes, his eldest grandchild was the epitome of what a Reeves should be: elegant, sophisticated, educated, and beautiful. I had heard him say many times she was a true Reeves.

  Dodie would do anything her grandfather asked. He had been her defender when Dodie’s parents pressed her to find a purpose in life. She was a twenty-five-year-old woman with a college degree. Yet, she had never used her education as far as I knew, much less held a job.

  From what I had seen, Dodie didn’t share the concern that her parents did with her life. She seemed to be enjoying herself. Before the war, she had brought a man to meet her grandparents around the same time Moria made her appearance in Oak Flatt. We had never seen or heard from him since.

  Ginny Rose said that the war dampened Dodie’s prospects for a husband, deeming that a woman was judged by whether she married or not. I don’t believe Dodie used that measuring stick.

  It was my belief that Dodie wanted to maintain a certain lifestyle. She talked continuously of elaborate parties, theater, and the gowns she wore. Her ambitions made her refuse to consider anyone other than a man who could support her in that manner and was quite content with her life until that time.

  Dodie traveled extensively in Europe before the war. With Moria Pritchard as her constant companion, she had continued her ventures, having gone to New York last spring and her annual trip to Charleston and then to Moria’s home in Savannah.

  Soon enough, the smell of bacon filled the air. There wasn’t enough time to cook biscuits, so I made toast with fresh strawberry jam and scrambled eggs.

  Mr. Reeves ate in silence after I placed the plate in front of him. Afterward, he looked at the kitchen clock, neatly folded his paper, and left without a word.

  I had thought he would have asked me how the search was going for Alfie Walker. Then again, I supposed he felt uneasy around me as I did with him.

  Picking up his plate, I began to clean the kitchen. I had only scraped the frying pan of the egg remnants when Dodie appeared in the door: disheveled hair, no makeup, in wrinkled clothes I could only assume she had worn to bed, and reeked of booze.

  “Has Grandpa left?”

  I nodded and kept washing the dishes. I realized I had my answer to her presence. Dodie had gotten drunk last night.

  From the corner of my eye, I watched her walk to the coffee pot and pour a cup. She ran her hand through her hair and rubbed the back of her neck. “My head hurts.”

  Saying nothing, I understood she wanted aspirin. I wiped my hands with a dishtowel and reached above the fridge, seemingly not quick enough.

  “For God’s sake, you can’t even do a simple task.”

  I felt a hand push me to the side. I stared at her when she turned back to me with the aspirin bottle in hand. “Daddy says it’s bad enough that you work for Grandpa, but now you’ve gone and given yourself airs. Don’t give me that look. I heard you dressed up in Grandmother’s dress at the revival.” In her foul mood, she rushed getting a glass of water to take her pills and knocked her coffee to the floor. The cup broke and hot coffee splashed on her. “Oh, look what you made me do! You’re nothing but an imbecile. Everyone knows it. It’s ruining the family keeping you around.”

  “Dodie Jean! We don’t talk like that in this house.” Ginny Rose made her appearance in the doorway. She moved slowly into the kitchen. Her face was pale; her legs weakened so she inched forward. I was afraid she would fall and rushed to pull out a chair for her to sit. She squeezed my hand and gave me a warm smile, but her grip was icy cold. “Why don’t you go and get yourself cleaned up for the day, Dodie,” Ginny Rose said. “You’ll feel better, I’m certain.”

  Dodie gave me a once-over with a stern look, challenging me to say something. I didn’t. I wouldn’t have dared in her bad mood. She huffed and departed with no more protest, leaving the broken pieces of the stoneware in the puddle of coffee.

  I held my breath until I heard the bathroom door shut. My attention turned to Ginny Rose.

  “Let’s get you back in bed, and I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  Color had returned to Ginny Rose’s cheeks by the time I had made a breakfast tray for her. Propped up on pillows, she smiled.

  Her bedroom was quite lovely. The walls were covered in a floral wallpaper with a large landscape painting of the mountains that hung behind the two full beds. The Reeves had slept in separate beds since Ginny Rose’s illness but refused to live in separate rooms.

  The room had a double window by Mr. Reeves’s bed and a door that lead to the outside porch which stretched around to the front of the house. Fresh cut flowers sat on the window table along with a radio. A floral upholstered rocking chair that had belonged to Ginny Rose’s mother was situated between the beds.

  “You’re too good to me,” she said, taking a sip.

  “Nonsense.” I stepped back and frowned. “You should have sent word. I would have come sooner.”

  “I know that, sweetie.” She placed the tea down. “I confess I fainted, but I don’t feel bad. Doc Taylor told me I only needed to rest. I probably over did it yesterday with you not being here—oh, don’t blame yourself. I heard about what happened. Quite awful. Is there anymore news?”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing since we found the shoe. They do believe that a struggle took place there at Two Oaks.”

  “A bear perhaps. Boyd believes it was a cougar.”

  “Perhaps.” I moved over to the window and stared outside. I supposed that was what Sheriff Brawner told the public so not to cause an uproar.

  The sound of a car pulling into the driveway was undeniable. I walked to the window and saw a black Lincoln Continental park behind Dodie’s car. Moria Pritchard emerged from the vehicle.

  The willowy figure stood motio
nless in the driveway. Her blond hair was carefully arranged under her white pillbox hat. Her delicately patterned dress suited her figure to perfection. She had pulled down the veil, which did nothing to hide the forlorn aura that illuminated around her.

  With her gloved hand, Moria lit a cigarette and raised her head when the back door shut. I watched Dodie emerge from the carport and walk to the woman.

  Dodie had changed into a pink buttoned-down shirt, well-fitted long pants, and loafers. She hadn’t time to fix her hair. Instead, she wore her mass of thick brown curls in a snood.

  Startlingly, Moria seemed to become quite emotional at Dodie’s appearance. She dropped her cigarette and extinguished it with her high-heel shoe. She reached up under her veil and wiped her eye. Her chest heaved. Was she crying?

  In a swift movement, Moria grasped Dodie’s hand. Dodie abruptly jerked her hand back and frowned. Glancing over her shoulder, she gestured for Moria to get into the car.

  Moria made no protest but went to the passenger side door. Dodie got in the driver’s seat and drove off.

  “Did Dodie leave?” asked Ginny Rose. “I thought I heard a car drive in and then took off.”

  “Yes, I’m afraid she did.” I sighed. Looking back at her carefully, I concluded it would do little good to tell Ginny Rose that Dodie left without a bit of concern for her welfare. It confused me why Dodie stayed the night.

  “She wasn’t with that Pritchard woman, was she?” Ginny Rose squinted, and the tiny lines around her eyes deepened. “Wish Dodie would stop hanging out with that one. She’s nothing but trouble.”

  The fierce anger in her voice shocked me. Ginny Rose never got mad at anyone.

  “She’s gone now.” I moved back to her bedside to quiet her and picked up one of her Good Housekeeping magazines. “What story would you like me to read?”

  Ginny Rose shook her head. She wasn’t the least bit interested in the magazine. “It’s not right. I have half a mind to have you call Claire and tell her.”

  “Tell her what, Ginny Rose? Moria and Dodie are inseparable. I don’t think that the two of them being together would be news.”