Belle Prater's Boy

by Ruth White

  “Well, Grandpa, maybe she was happier than you thought she was,” I said, although I knew from what Woodrow had said that that wasn’t true.

  “No, child, no. I never believed for a minute she was happy with him. That union was doomed, because it was an impulsive, foolish thing, and I’m betting they both regretted it.”

  “But she would never say she regretted it, Grandpa?”

  “No, she was too proud. But she never said she was happy either. What she did say was nothing. Just nothing. Not to us. Maybe I’ll never know what was on her mind.”

  “Grandpa, do you think it’s possible … Well, I almost hate to say it, but …”

  “Spit it out,” Grandpa said.

  “Do you reckon Uncle Everett might’ve had something to do with Aunt Belle’s disappearance?”

  Grandpa looked at the sky and said nothing. I guess he was trying to decide what he really did believe. I was thinking of the blond-headed woman I had seen in Uncle Everett’s Ford, but I didn’t know if Grandpa had seen her or not.

  “Well?” I hurried him. “Do you?”

  Then there came a big fat “No!” not from Grandpa, but from Woodrow, who was near us in the yard. He had come home and walked around the house. There was no telling how long he had been listening. And it was a sure thing he had heard everything we said, because you couldn’t help hearing around this place where the volume was always wide open.

  “No!” Woodrow said again. “Don’t you dare say that!”

  “’Course not, Woodrow,” Grandpa said gently. “We don’t believe such a thing.”

  Woodrow turned on his heel like a top and stalked across the yard toward Slag Creek.

  Me and Grandpa just looked at each other, stunned and ashamed.

  “I guess we orta apologize,” Grandpa said.

  I agreed.

  Fourteen

  I left Woodrow alone for a while, went home to undo my pigtails and wash my hair, then searched him out. He was inside the tree house, cutting out personal ads from some old Sunday newspapers he had saved and placing the ads carefully inside my jewelry box, where we had commenced keeping our treasures.

  “You sore at me, Woodrow?”

  “Naw. I ain’t sore.”

  I parked on the floor beside him.

  “We need some furniture in here,” I said. “Something to sit on.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Granny is going to give us her old blue rug soon as she gets a new one.”

  “Wanna go feed some baby birds whose mama died?” I said.

  “Sure. Feed ’em what?”

  “Worms. You have to pick them up. I don’t want to.”

  Woodrow almost smiled.

  “Why are you saving those ads, Woodrow?”

  “I dunno. I just think they’re interesting. You know, folks send messages to each other sometimes through these ads?”

  “Do they? Like what? Let me see.”

  Woodrow spread out one of the papers, and we fell down side by side to read it.

  “Here’s one,” Woodrow said. “Lizzie baby, call Charlie 9147.”

  “What if Lizzie baby never reads the paper?” I said.

  “Then Charlie wasted his quarter,” Woodrow said. “Listen here to this one: Clyde Higgins is no longer responsible for the debts of Myrtle Higgins.”

  “Free dog,” I read aloud. “Don’t bark after 10:00 p.m.”

  “Smart dog,” Woodrow said. “He can tell time.” “Looking for family roots,” I read. “All Stiltners call me at Cedar 3291, Rising Sun, Maryland.”

  “That guy has no idea how many Stiltners live here,” Woodrow said. “His phone will never stop ringing. They run these ads only on Sunday. Aunt Millie let us have her paper when she was done with it, and Mama and I would read these ads together. We got a lotta laughs out of ’em. We would read the Katzenjammer Kids and Li’l Abner. Then we’d do the crossword puzzle, but the ads were our favorite.”

  “I’m sorry, Woodrow,” I said; then added quickly, “Grandpa is, too.”

  “What? Oh well, that’s okay.”

  “Woodrow, do you know where the poem says, People are going back and forth across the doorsill/where the two worlds touch?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think the two worlds could mean her life here with Grandpa and Granny, and her life there with you and Uncle Everett?”

  “Mama was always fascinated with that place where two different things come together.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like twilight and dawn—places where dark and light meet. Like the horizon. Like the moment between waking and sleeping. See what I mean?”

  “I think so.”

  “She talked to me a lot about those few seconds just before I was born when she went out of her body and met me.

  “‘We were hovering between this side and the other side,’ she’d say to me. ‘And it was right on the stroke of midnight, too, between the old year and the new.’ She thought that was real significant.

  “And once she said how odd it would be to live on the equator, or exactly on the place where a time zone changes. She was peculiar that way.”

  “Yeah, but in the poem …”

  “In the poem,” Woodrow interrupted me, “it’s talking about that place I told you about where two worlds touch.”

  “So you really think she’s in that other place … in another world?” I said.

  “I know she is. A whole ’nother world.”

  He folded the newspaper neatly and tossed it on the splintery floor.

  Then how come he was so interested in checking the ads every Sunday, I was thinking, but I didn’t say it. Because it all fit together—Woodrow’s great interest in the newspaper every Sunday and no other day. He was looking for his mother to send him a message through the classified ads. So he really didn’t believe his own farfetched story. He felt she was somewhere in this world, and she would contact him in a familiar way.

  Fifteen

  In midsummer the apples were getting some size to them. They were bending the tree branches down, and you could smell them when the breeze was just right. But you couldn’t eat them yet, because they were too bitter. Woodrow tried it and got a fearful bellyache.

  There were blackberries and raspberries growing wild along the creek bank. And from Grandpa’s patch of garden in that sunny place behind the shed, butter beans and green beans, summer squash, tender cucumbers, and melons of all shapes and sizes were coming on.

  It was the best time of year for good stuff to eat. There were always fresh berry pies cooling on the kitchen windowsills, and there was corn bread to crumble up in your vegetables, and fried green tomatoes and okra. You could drink cold buttermilk with your roastin’ ears, and dribble hot pork drippings over your garden salad. There was nothing like it.

  It was also the time of year for Mama’s annual garden party, the social event of the season. It was always written up as such in the Mountain Echo’s social section. In the past I had dreaded it worse than a typhoid shot, but that summer of 1954 was different, because Woodrow was there. He was interested in everything and almost everybody, and the way he looked at things with fresh eyes made me see them fresh, too.

  It was an especially hot, humid summer afternoon the second week of July. Grandpa and Porter moved tables and chairs down by Slag Creek at the edge of the orchard near the tree house. The gardenias there were in full bloom and aroma. It was my favorite flower. Sometimes I could smell it in my dreams.

  It was mine and Woodrow’s job to get all the names of the women there and make sure they were spelled right for the newspaper. We were also in charge of serving refreshments, which consisted of dainty sandwiches of exotic substances, mints, nuts, and Mama’s special drink, which she named Peach Ice. It was made with vanilla ice cream, fresh peaches, and ginger ale.

  Mama had me wear a plain white, sleeveless cotton dress with a real fancy ruffled red apron, red sandals, and red ribbons in my hair. Everybody oooed and ahhed over me. Wo
odrow was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, black pants, and a red bow tie, and he took his job very seriously. He wouldn’t let anybody run out of anything.

  There were about fifty women there, counting Mama and Granny and the five eighteen-year-old debutantes who were coming out that year. That meant they were now considered young women of marriageable age and could be included in all the right gatherings with the other women who had a certain social standing in town. It was a tradition that went way back, all the way across the water to the old countries. Since Coal Station was a mining town, I asked Mama one time how come none of the miners’ daughters were ever invited to be a debutante. Mama just looked at me and said, “When you’re a debutante yourself, you’ll understand.”

  I figured I wouldn’t be a debutante if I could help it, but to say that to Mama would be like saying I didn’t want to live past the age of eighteen.

  Woodrow was immediately smitten with the debutantes, so I let him serve them. They really were pretty and smelled almost as good as the gardenias. They were all wearing sweet sundresses in pastel colors, with crinolines underneath, high heels, summer hats, and white gloves, which they very carefully removed before eating the delectables Woodrow spread before them. They fussed over Woodrow and called him “darling” and “dearest” and “precious,” which were not your routine Coal Station words. Woodrow soaked them up like sunshine.

  Mrs. Osborne, Buzz’s mama, was a jolly, wee woman, who favored Mammy Yokum in Li’l Abner the way she jerked herself around like a puppet and tended to wrap her arms and legs around her own self, and the way she smoked cigarettes one after the other. Buzz, her oldest boy, was her favorite topic of conversation; whether anybody was listening or not made no difference to her.

  “He had such a case of the scratchies a while back,” she said at one point. “I don’t know if it was poison ivy or chiggers—or maybe even the itch. He never would let me see it.”

  Woodrow and I looked at each other with perfectly straight faces.

  Mrs. Cooper, the principal’s wife, who had grabbed Woodrow under the chin that first day at church, said, “It’s no tellin’ what a child might pick up going to school with those hillbillies.”

  She complimented me nearly to death, patting me on the head like I was a poodle, and called Woodrow Angel Face till I thought he would puke on her if she said it again. But when Mama was far enough away, and seeing to the needs of her guests, Mrs. Cooper leaned over casually and said to Woodrow, “What do you hear from your mama, boy?”

  Woodrow’s face flushed.

  Mrs. Cooper would never have said a thing like that in front of my mama, Love Ball Dotson, sister to Belle Prater and leader of Coal Station’s social set.

  “Nothin’,” Woodrow mumbled, and tried to move on.

  “And I doubt you ever will!” she called after him. “She was an impulsive thing! Hard to tell what she’s done this time!”

  The debutantes who were standing nearby looked away and pretended they didn’t hear or see, but they did. And Woodrow knew they did.

  I watched him walk toward Mama’s kitchen.

  “She called me a cow, you know,” Mrs. Cooper said to me.

  “Who did?” I said.

  I was thinking to myself I would never insult a cow in that manner, but I didn’t say such a thing.

  “Belle Ball!” Mrs. Cooper went on. “She was in the ninth grade and I was her English teacher. She said it right in front of Mr. Cooper. That was before we were married. I’ll never forget it. And I said to myself then and there, ‘This girl will never amount to a hill of beans!’ And you see? I was right!”

  So that was it! As a young girl Aunt Belle had embarrassed her in front of her boyfriend. And Mrs. Cooper had carried that anger with her all these years, so that now it was a bitter acid she was spraying on Woodrow in retaliation.

  Woodrow came back shortly with a trayful of tall, frosted glasses of Peach Ice and resumed his duties as if nothing had happened. I saw him lean over and whisper to one of the pretty debutantes where she sat on a pink blanket. She giggled and I was thinking, Well, what do you know about that. Woodrow is learning to flirt.

  Then I got busy—real busy. In fact, I couldn’t keep up. Every time I surfaced for air, somebody needed something else. I made about a hundred trips to Granny’s kitchen, where Grandpa was doing all he could to help without actually going amongst the “hens,” as he called them. It didn’t occur to me to be insulted. The women did put you in mind of a whole lot of hens.

  I noticed Woodrow was trotting pretty regular to Mama’s kitchen, where the ice was stored in the freezer and the Peach Ice filled up the Frigidaire. It was so hot everybody was drinking a lot of it. I saw him offer Mrs. Cooper some and then whisper something to her. Mrs. Cooper clapped one hand over her mouth to stifle a sputter and reached for the glass with the other.

  One thing was sure: Woodrow would not be flirting with Mrs. Cooper! So what was going on? As I stood there puzzling over it, Granny whispered to me, “Mrs. Osborne is trying to eat and smoke and talk about Buzz all at the same time, and she is dribbling. Can you fetch her a napkin?” So I got busy again.

  As the sun moved across the sky, the women clucked louder and got happier, especially Mrs. Cooper. She slipped into a fine mood. She was laughing and complimenting people, talking about how much she liked first this one, then that one; which was not a bit like Mrs. Cooper to go on like that. Why, she was as pleasant as Mrs. Santa Claus. But the thing that beat all was the way she and Woodrow buddied up. Every time he would bring her a fresh glass of Peach Ice—and she really was putting it away—she would giggle like a girl. She even started reminiscing out loud.

  “Me and my sister, Audrey—she’s a nurse in Roanoke, you know—used to wade up the creek on a hot day like this and gather tiger lilies. We had the best times.”

  “That sounds like fun, Mrs. Cooper,” Woodrow said.

  “I wish I could wade in the creek again,” she went on wistfully.

  “I wisht you could, too,” Woodrow said sweetly, and patted her on the shoulder.

  In light of that conversation I shouldn’t have been surprised a little while later to hear Mrs. Cooper’s voice down by the creek near the tree house, but I was.

  “Come on in! It’s wunnerful!”

  I eased my way through the powdered and perfumed ladies on the creek bank, and there I saw Mrs. Cooper with her dress tail pulled up to her thighs. This was the same Mrs. Cooper who, in the past, lay awake nights thinking up ways to put a stop to folks’ fun.

  “Come on in, girls! Don’t be proud!”

  And she giggled.

  The other women stood on the bank, uncertain, not knowing if they should be embarrassed for Mrs. Cooper or laugh, jump in with her, or what. You could almost hear the whirling in their very proper heads. There was nothing in the etiquette books about creek wading at an elegant garden party.

  “I’ll declare, Gypsy,” Granny whispered to me for the second time that day. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say she’s drunk!”

  Drunk! Of course! The bottle of rum in our kitchen! That’s why Woodrow kept running in there. He had gone and got Mrs. Cooper drunk!

  “Oh no, Granny,” I said in the most scandalized voice I could find. “Mrs. Cooper doesn’t drink!”

  Suddenly one of the debutantes kicked off her white pumps.

  “What the heck!” she said, as she gathered up her pretty dress tail and crinoline in a bunch and went splashing into the creek. “I’m hot!”

  “Me too!”

  It was Mrs. Osborne jumping in.

  Did he put rum in all the Peach Ice?

  Then another debutante. “Geronimo!”

  Mrs. Cooper was laughing so hard she suddenly lost her footing and went flying backwards into the water, wetting herself all over. The two debutantes, also laughing and splashing, went to her aid and, in the process, went down, too.

  And there they were. Somehow it didn’t quite fit then picture of the Event of the Sea
son, as it was usually referred to in the social column of the Mountain Echo. I looked around for Mama. She was standing back a piece from the other spectators, her pink polished fingernails resting lightly at her pretty white throat—totally dumbfounded.

  Woodrow was standing a few feet away from me, watching the four women in the water and enjoying himself immensely.

  I eased over to him. “Woodrow, did you put rum in Mrs. Cooper’s Peach Ice?”

  “No, Gypsy,” he said calmly. “I did not.”

  “Then what … how?”

  “Just an experiment I wanted to try with the power of suggestion,” he said, and his eyes lit up again.

  “What kind of experiment?” I said.

  “You see, there was no rum involved—no alcohol at all. What I did, see, I told Mrs. Cooper that her drink had a bit of rum in it. Her mind did the rest. I didn’t figure on her going splashing around in the creek like that.”

  And Woodrow laughed out loud.

  “What about the debutantes?” I said. “And Mrs. Osborne? What did you tell them?”

  “Oh, them? Nothin’. They’re just hot, so they’re cooling off.”

  Sixteen

  “Now, let me get this straight, Woodrow,” Doc Dot said. “You told Mrs. Cooper her drink was laced with rum, but it really wasn’t.”

  “That’s right. I would never slip alcohol into a person’s drink. I know it could hurt them,” Woodrow said with such sincerity you had to believe him.

  Mama, Porter, Granny, Grandpa, Doc Dot, Woodrow, and I were all seated around our kitchen table late that evening. The rum bottle, still three-quarters full, had earlier been produced, viewed, and tasted to verify it was the real stuff, and returned to its respectable place on the medicine shelf. It was agreed Woodrow had not been into the rum, but he was still getting the third degree.

  “And you’re saying it was an experiment?” Porter said.

  “Yeah. Me and Mama read one time that the power of the mind is so strong that if you tell a person he is drinking liquor and he really believes it, he might feel the effects just like if he is drinking alcohol for sure. We tried it on Daddy by pouring out his rum and putting water in the bottle, but it didn’t work with him ‘cause Daddy was so used to the taste and the smell and the feelin’ of rum, he didn’t believe it. You gotta believe it, see? So me and Mama reckoned it would work on somebody that wasn’t used to drinking, somebody you could fool into believing, so—”