Belle Prater's Boy

by Ruth White

  That one got a good laugh, too. And so it went all evening. The wine seemed to loosen everybody up, Granny’s cooking was blue ribbon, and even Porter didn’t get on my nerves as much as usual. I caught myself almost smiling at him once.

  “Can we do this on my birthday?” Woodrow suddenly blurted out when there was a quiet moment.

  Then, seeming to regret his boldness, he ducked his head into his plate and blushed scarlet.

  There came a chorus of replies:

  “Certainly!”

  “Of course!”

  “Naturally!”

  “When is your birthday, Woodrow?” I said.

  “January 1,” Woodrow said, smiling with pleasure at all this attention. “Or December 31. Mama never knew for sure. I was borned right on the stroke of midnight, New Year’s Eve, 1942.”

  “Right on the stroke!” Mama said. “Belle never told us that.”

  “Well, she told me lots of times. She told me that story so many times I know it by heart. A midwife was with her and she was having a real hard time. She was trying and trying to birth me, but I wouldn’t come. Finally Mama passed out from all the pain and she went out of her body. Then she felt peaceful and free. She said she drifted around the room and could see the midwife and her own body on the bed.

  “Then she realized she wasn’t alone. Another person was there floating around with her. It seemed like it was somebody who just arrived from far away, and it was somebody she felt like she used to know a thousand years ago in another place.

  “And Mama said to that person, ‘Oh, it’s you! I’ve waited for you, and I missed you so much! What took you so long?’

  “And the person said, ‘I couldn’t get away. They just now let me go. But here I am, so let’s get started.’

  “Then Mama came to herself and she heard the clock strike midnight, and I was borned all at the same time.”

  “Who do you think it was she met?” my mama said breathlessly.

  I looked at her and at the others. All their eyes were on Woodrow. The wine and cake were forgotten in the fascination of his story.

  “Why, it was me!” Woodrow cried joyfully. “Me!”

  There was complete silence as we digested what he had said. A shiver ran up my spine as I thought what a strange story that was.

  Suddenly there was a ring, and we all jumped like we were shot. Then we laughed nervously as Mama ran to answer the phone. It was for Doc Dot. Somebody was having a fit up on Grassy Lick and he had to go see about him. The party scattered when he left. The twins curled up on the couch and went to sleep while the women cleared up the dishes, and Grandpa and Porter commenced discussing President Eisenhower.

  Woodrow and I went out to feed Dawg; then we sat in the swing on Granny’s tremendous porch. It was a still, clear night. The moon was full and there were millions of stars. The mountains loomed over us like friendly giants, and we could hear the frogs having a spring fling down in Slag Creek.

  “This is the day I will choose,” Woodrow said softly.

  “Choose for what?” I said, and yawned.

  I was about ready to turn in.

  “Mama told me when we die, we’re allowed to live one day over again—just one—exactly as it was. This is the day I will choose.”

  I was surprised. A day that for me had been only slightly special was the most wonderful day of his life. It made me wonder how bad things had been in Crooked Ridge.

  Then we talked real serious about the pagan babies over there across the ocean dying with filth diseases. And what about those poor folks in New York City who were living practically stacked on top of one another. And in Russia they had gobs of people all living together in one little bitty house. If you complained, they had you hauled off to Siberia to live in an igloo and see how you liked that. Both of us said we felt real lucky to live right here on Residence Street.

  “I wonder how my mama could ever have left here to marry my daddy and go live up there with him,” Woodrow said. “It seems like this beautiful place has everything you could ever want, and nothing could ever hurt you here.”

  Five

  Almost an hour later Mama and I were in front of the mirror in my room as she rolled my hair for the night. She was in her thin rose robe for the first time of the season, and I was wearing my summer pajamas.

  My room, all ruffled and lacy, was very spacious, and as pink and white as the spring, with a canopy bed; a nightstand and a lamp beside it where I always had good books to read; my own desk; a dresser with a big brass mirror over it; a chest of drawers and a closet so full of clothes I couldn’t keep track of them.

  “You never told me my daddy was Aunt Belle’s sweetheart first,” I said to Mama.

  She was startled.

  “Who told you that?” she said sharply.

  I shrugged. “Does it matter who told me? Is it true?”

  She didn’t answer. She wasn’t listening. Her face had taken on that hurt look I recognized as belonging to her grief for Daddy.

  “I guess Aunt Belle really loved him too, huh?” I said softly.

  “Love?” Mama said. “Belle was eighteen, I was nineteen, Amos was twenty-five. We were mesmerized, brainwashed, hypnotized, whatever you want to call it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, my Gypsy girl,” she said, and gave me a quick hug. “I guess I mean when folks are in love they say and do things they wouldn’t dream of doing when they’re in their right minds.”

  “And I guess Aunt Belle was pretty shook up when Daddy picked you over her, huh?”

  “I guess so,” Mama said with a sigh. “And I was so caught up in your father’s spell, I’m afraid I ignored her feelings. Amos did, too. We didn’t see anybody or anything but each other.”

  “So how did Aunt Belle take it?”

  “Badly,” Mama said. “She …”

  Mama paused and I saw her chin quiver.

  “She … she was like a whipped dog. She shut herself up in her room, wouldn’t talk to anybody, lost weight, cried …”

  Mama abruptly walked to the window and placed her forehead gently against the frame.

  “That’s okay, Mama,” I said quickly. “You don’t have to talk about it. I was just curious, but that’s okay.”

  She gave me a brief wave of the hand, as if to say, “I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  So I watched her and waited. A soft, scented breeze ruffled her hair and her thin robe. She shivered and hugged herself, then walked back to me and calmly started rolling my hair again. There were tears on her cheeks.

  “In the last months I have relived those days over and over again,” Mama said. “And I have promised my sister in my heart that if I ever see her again, I will tell her how truly sorry I am that I caused her pain.”

  “But, Mama, if Daddy loved you best, that wasn’t your fault. What were you supposed to do?” I said, trying to comfort her.

  “I could have been kinder,” Mama said.

  Our eyes met in the mirror, and she smiled a sad kind of smile.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I insisted. “Nor Daddy’s either.”

  “I remember that Saturday so vividly,” Mama said. “The day Belle finally came out of her room. She came down the stairs all dressed up fit to kill in a red dress and bright red lipstick, and smelling like she fell in a vat of perfume. Mother and I were in the living room altering a dress I was going to wear on a date with Amos later that night.

  “‘Where are you going?’ I said to Belle.

  “And she laughed. There was something unnatural about that laugh. I should have been more tuned in to her feelings.

  “She had one of those sheer white scarves she kept twirling around her neck and through her fingers like she couldn’t be still.

  “‘Going to find myself a beau,’ she said, and laughed again.

  “‘Oh no, Belle, don’t go out tonight,’ Mother pleaded with her. ‘It’s payday for the miners and the town is full of drunks.’


  “But she was out the door in a flash. We should have stopped her right then. We should have sat down with her and talked to her. We should have seen how alone she felt. But we didn’t.

  “And that was the night she met Everett Prater. She ran off with him and sent us word the next day she was okay. A week later she sent word again she was married. And two weeks later she came home and got all her stuff while we were gone to church.

  “We were shocked at her behavior. Don’t get me wrong. Everett’s okay. A bit dull, maybe, but a good man, I guess. It’s just the way she did it, you know, picking up the first man that showed an interest in her. I guess she was lucky it was Everett. She could have done worse.

  “At the time it seemed to me a terribly immature, impulsive, reckless thing she did, and so spiteful! Like she hated us. Like it didn’t matter who she married as long as she got away from us.

  “But now I see it with different eyes. She was so hurt … and desperate. She had to leave, not because she hated us, but because seeing me and Amos together every day was like opening up a wound over and over.”

  Mama walked back to the window.

  “Now I almost admire her for what she did then,” Mama said, more to the night than to me. “She was courageous in an odd sort of way. It was like stepping off a familiar and safe place into darkness, not knowing …”

  “Maybe she’s done it again,” I interrupted. “Have you ever thought of that, Mama?”

  Slowly she turned back to me.

  “Yes, I have thought of that. But there’s Woodrow. I don’t think she would leave him on purpose.”

  I crawled into bed and Mama tucked me in.

  “How grown-up you seem tonight, Gypsy,” she said wistfully. “It’s almost like talking to another adult.”

  “Really?” I said, pleased.

  “Really. But now give me some little-girl sugar and get some shut-eye.”

  I slept in the soft night with the sounds and smells of spring in my senses, and my dreams were filled with the face of my Aunt Belle. I followed her down through the corridors of bright seasons when she and Mama were girls, through warm summer nights and cold white Christmases, through schoolrooms and parties and autumn in the golden hills she climbed.

  Where did you get lost, Aunt Belle?

  It was near dawn that the nightmare came. Just like the ones before it, there was an animal, limp and lifeless, in a puddle of blood. Was it a deer? A dog? A kitten? An ugly, ugly thing was in that animal’s face. The ugly thing that I could not see. The ugly thing …

  I woke up crying for my mother, and I didn’t feel grown-up at all, nor did I want to be. She came to me as she always did, gentle and silent, rocking me like a baby in her arms.

  “I can’t see its face, Mama,” I sobbed. “Why can’t I make out its face?”

  She said nothing, but the sadness in her eyes told me she knew the answers and could not bear to tell me.

  Six

  “Oh, Gypsy, you’re so awfully beautiful!”

  These were Woodrow’s words the next morning when he first saw me all dressed up for Sunday school. He was on Granny’s front porch, reading the Sunday paper, which he dropped when he saw me coming.

  I couldn’t help smiling.

  I was wearing one of those little bitty pieces of a hat with a veil barely covering my eyes. It was pink like my new dress, which had long, tapered sleeves and kick pleats on each side. I also had on pink shoes with an inch-high heel, and naturally I was wearing the white gloves every well-brought-up girl wore to church.

  “You’re not so bad yourself, cousin!” I said, as I looked him up and down.

  He was wearing a pair of new pants and a nice blue dress shirt with a tie to match.

  “I never wore one of these before,” he said as he fingered the tie. “But it’s kinda nice. Grandpa tied it for me.”

  “Ready to go?” I said.

  Together we strutted down the street.

  There was a Methodist and a Baptist church on up Slag Creek, and all kinds of offspring churches in the hollers, but everybody in Coal Station who was anybody a’tall, as Mama put it, went to the Presbyterian church. It was the biggest and the best. It had a tall steeple with a bell in it that rang at 11:00 on Sunday mornings and on special occasions. You could hear it echoing through the hills for miles around, and you could imagine folks stopping whatever they were doing to listen.

  My Sunday-school class had about ten kids in it, ages eleven and twelve, which meant we were the inbetweens, feeling like we didn’t belong anywhere—not with the teenagers, and certainly not with the young’uns.

  Some, like Buzz Osborne, had had a growing spurt that shot them a head taller than the others. Some, like Willy and Mary Lee, were pure tee runts. Then there were the average ones like me and Woodrow. But none were stingy with the questions and Woodrow got the works. Everybody talked at once.

  “You live with the Balls? Since when?”

  “How old are you?”

  “Can you look in two directions at once?”

  “You don’t favor Gypsy a bit.”

  “How much did that tie cost?”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  To the last question Woodrow replied, “Yeah, I met him once.”

  “You met God?” they all said. “No, you didn’t!”

  “Yeah, I did. And you know what? He sneezed, and I didn’t know what to say.”

  They didn’t get it. Woodrow tried again.

  “His name is Howard, you know.”

  “God’s name ain’t Howard!”

  “Sure it is,” said Woodrow. “It says so in the Lord’s Prayer—‘Howard be thy name.’”

  That one they got.

  Nobody asked Woodrow anything about Aunt Belle, and I figured they didn’t get the connection. When our teacher, Mrs. Compton, came in, I introduced her to Woodrow, and she made him feel welcome, but she didn’t ask him any questions at all. She went right into the lesson.

  That Sunday the Presbyterian literature for intermediates dealt with Jesus healing the sick. We read about it in the New Testament. Then we talked about it.

  “You know, boys and girls,” Mrs. Compton said very sweetly, “sickness is a bad thing, but all of us get sick once in a while. Sometimes it’s so bad we think we are going to die. Have you ever known anyone who was very very sick?”

  About four people raised their hands, including Woodrow, but I couldn’t think of any sick people.

  “Would one person like to tell us about someone who was very very sick?” Mrs. Compton said.

  Only one person raised his hand then, and that was Woodrow.

  “All right. Is it Woodrow?” Mrs. Compton said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said politely.

  “Would you like to come up here, Woodrow?”

  Woodrow went to the front of the class. I was amazed. Every bright and shiny face was turned to him, curious to hear what this new boy had to say.

  “This is a story about Buck Coleman,” Woodrow began, “who had a sickness so bad … well … let me tell you it was bad. His belly kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. It got big as a watermelon, but the rest of him kept falling off. Buck finally had to go to the doctor’s, and the doctor said, ‘Buck, you got the biggest tapeworm I ever did even hear tell of, and it’s curled up in your belly getting all your food.’

  “Well, the doctors tried to kill that tapeworm, but they couldn’t do it without killing Buck with it. He kept eating a lot, but he was still starving to death. And, oh yeah, I forgot to tell you, he craved molasses.”

  Woodrow paused to let everything sink in.

  “Molasses?” little Willy Stacy said.

  “Yeah, molasses,” Woodrow continued. “Finally the doctor decided to lure the tapeworm out.”

  “How was he going to lure it out?” Mary Lee Rowe said.

  “With molasses, naturally. They took a big jar of molasses and held it in front of Buck’s face, and the tapeworm smelled it and came crawling out to
get it.”

  “And Buck was saved?” from Willy again.

  “No, that tapeworm was so long and fat, Buck suffocated to death before it got out.”

  Woodrow sat down.

  I thought Mrs. Compton was going to faint.

  “Really, Woodrow!” she said irritably. “Was that necessary? Did that happen or did you make it up?”

  “He made it up!” Buzz Osborne chimed in.

  “’Pon my word of honor,” Woodrow said. “Buck Coleman was my daddy’s sister’s husband’s uncle’s cousin.”

  “That doesn’t make it true!” Mrs. Compton shot back.

  “I know a story, too,” Mary Lee said. “About my aunt who went to New York City and they fed her snails.”

  “Never mind!” Mrs. Compton said. “Let’s talk about something else. The thought for the week is on page 36.”

  While everybody was turning to page 36, Woodrow glanced at me and winked so quick I don’t think anybody else saw him. I ducked my head to hide the smile that had to come. That’s when I knew for sure that Woodrow wasn’t as backward as he let on, but he had a bit of the devil in him.

  After Sunday school the church bells rang and we went out into the bright morning to listen. I thought I never had seen such a blue and green and golden day. Mama and Porter were in the choir room fixing to sing during the service, but Grandpa and Granny were outside chattering with their neighbors.

  Mr. Cooper, the school principal, was okay, but he was married to a killjoy. She could hardly stand to see folks enjoying life, especially kids. It got on her nerves so bad, I was sure she lay awake nights thinking up ways to put a stop to it. And that’s how it was that morning as we stood there listening to the bells and taking in the sweetness of the moment.

  Suddenly she walked right up to Woodrow and grabbed him hard under the chin, lifting his face exactly like he was a horse she was looking over and fixing to buy.

  “Not much for looks, is he?” she said. “Takes after his mama.”

  Woodrow jerked away from her with fury in his eyes, but he didn’t say a word to her.

  “Well now, I hope you aren’t as hardheaded as she was!” Mrs. Cooper went on, placing her hands on her ample hips.