Adelaide Piper

by Beth Webb Hart

  When I slid back the ribbon and snapped open the gray velvet box, I saw a silver medal of St. Christopher carrying the Christ child across the churning waters. After I read the words inscribed on the outer rim, “And Go Your Way in Safety,” I reached up and squeezed her long neck so hard that her pointed chin left a red mark on my shoulder.

  Other than the childhood picture I had stolen from Mae Mae, it was the first tangible thing I had of Juliabelle.

  “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I said as she laughed her quiet laugh and hugged me back.

  “You know I’ll make the prayer for you, my Adelaide. I’ll be here making it every time you come to mind.”

  She watched me as I carried my bags of gifts and a bouquet of flowers through Mae Mae’s flower garden and the shrubs and over to my house, where the backyard was littered with plastic lawn chairs, an abandoned playhouse, and fiddler crabs crawling sideways in and out of their holes along the mud banks. We didn’t have a gardener like Papa Great and Mae Mae did, so the kudzu was always threatening to swallow our yard, and Daddy fought it every few months with an array of chemicals as it crept toward the tomato vines and the dock.

  Now I put down my stuff in the dirt by the playhouse and walked out to the mildewed hammock at the end of the crab dock and swung myself out over the creek, smelling the ripe tomatoes and the fishy low-tide mud as the sun baked me dry.

  That night I flipped through my NBU course catalog and highlighted the literature and philosophy classes I planned to take come fall. Josiah Dirkas, a prizewinning poet I’d studied at Governor’s School, was going to be the writer-in-residence there, and I was going to do all in my power to finagle my way into one of his upper-level workshop courses. If I could get my chapbook in front of him, maybe he would let me in.

  The phone rang, and when I answered, I was surprised to hear the familiar voice on the other end of the line.

  “You did good today,” he said.

  “Lazarus! I saw you! It should have been you, not me.”

  “Nah,” he said. “It should have been Georgianne, but things happen, and you sure pulled it off.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me good-bye?”

  “I didn’t want to bring trouble on you. You know, Skaggs and all.”

  “Did he threaten you after the dance?”

  “Tried to,” he said. “But it didn’t bother me. Taught me something, though.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to go to school down here. I mean, Adelaide, they still fly the Confederate flag over the statehouse, you know? I turned down my scholarship, and I’m moving up to DC. to live with my uncle who teaches at Howard University. He’s got some contacts at Georgetown, and he thinks he can get me into their journalism program.”

  “You’ll do great, Lazarus. You deserve every shot at what you want.

  I’ll look you up if I head up to DC. It’s only a few hours from NBU.”

  “I hope you will,” he said. “You’re my friend, and you’re going to find the answer to those two questions you posed today.”

  “You think?” I said.

  “One way or another,” he said before he hung up the phone with a final “Take care.”

  The next morning, I jumped up, kicked on my slippers, and raced downstairs to see the class superlative photos in the paper.

  But when I opened the front door, it was to see a bird hanging in a noose from the front gutter and what looked like human feces on the newspaper that was open on the doormat. Someone had added horns and a beard to my photo in the class superlatives. And scrawled across the column in black marker was the familiar sentiment, “Pipe down, Piper!”

  I wasn’t all that surprised by the cruel prank, but I couldn’t keep my heart from speeding up, and before I knew it, the hot tears were coming.

  “What’s wrong?” Daddy said as he shuffled down the hallway, half asleep and perplexed by my weeping.

  When he got to the door, he saw what had happened and closed it shut before pulling me into his arm.

  “Put this out of your mind, gal. Just some jealous no-goods, is all.”

  Now, I should have known better than to poke a stick at Averill. Like the serpent on Gadsden’s flag, he would strike if provoked. But I wanted to be a rattlesnake too. After all, it became the very symbol that united the colonies around their greatest asset: freedom. Then I remembered an old superstition Juliabelle had told me about: a snake that has been cut into parts can come back to life if you join the sections together before sunset.

  And I couldn’t help the poem that was forming in my mind . . .

  Piece me

  back

  together

  as the day

  fades,

  and I will

  twist away

  before the dust

  settles.

  3

  Off to College

  Let’s take the scenic route, gals,” Daddy announced. His prosthetic hand swatted the carefully unfolded maps of North Carolina and Virginia out of Mama’s grasp.

  He was growing a rebellious streak as he entertained Uncle Tinka’s new business venture, and we were beginning to learn it was sometimes best not to cross him. But I’d been waiting my whole life to get to college, and I couldn’t stop myself from leaning across my two siblings to thump Mama’s shoulder.

  “Take the scenic route, Zane?” she inquired before collecting her highlighted interstates from the floorboard. I knew she had mapped out our route several days ago in preparation for taking me the 325 miles into the mountains of Virginia. She had even marked the rest areas on the highway where we might want to grab a Co-Cola and stretch our legs.

  “With three daughters, someone always needs to go,” she had said with a wink a few nights before while she ironed preprinted tags that read in a graceful cursive “This belongs to Adelaide Piper” into all of my underwear and T-shirts.

  Mama. She worked herself silly for us girls.

  “Oh, just live a little, Greta,” Daddy said now with a boyish innocence as he squeezed her knee. “’Member that show we watched on PBS the other night? The one about the Blue Ridge Parkway? Heck, I think they said that it can take you all the way to Lynchburg. Now, don’t you want to show these girls the beauty of the mountains where their big sister will be living and learning?”

  “Humph,” Mama said. She patted her brow with a handkerchief before twisting the knob that controlled the air conditioner, turning it up one notch and then another. Her shoulders tightened at his insistence of our new route, but he had been on a “let’s do what I want for a change” kick since his secret meetings with Uncle Tinka, and I guessed she was deciding to choose her battles. The big one was coming, and she was stockpiling her strength for the day she’d say, “No way will I go along with this hoax of a new business, nor will I allow you to jeopardize the security of our three daughters.”

  And if I were a betting girl, I’d put my money on Mama.

  Dizzy and Lou were already arguing over their space in the back of the station wagon. Without looking back, Mama opened the glove compartment, pulled out the masking tape, and handed it back to Dizzy, who unfairly marked off the space between them. Little Lou was so flustered that all she could do was cross her arms and purse her lips.

  It was really hot, I began to admit to myself as my hair frizzed and my freshly applied makeup started to melt. Could something be wrong with the air conditioner? It groaned then sputtered every few seconds as if possessed by the morning heat of the Low-Country August. When Mama positioned the vents toward the backseat, the air covered me like a thick wool blanket. At this rate, I’d look like a greased pig by the time we hit Virginia.

  Now, Daddy said I had an overactive imagination, but it helped me cope from time to time. So instead of patting my brow or watching the paper mill’s smoke litter the sky, I pretended that I had an ejection button beneath my seat like the kind the fighter pilots have, and that I could press it and go flying out the top of the wood-paneled Coun
try Squire station wagon, fly over the Blue Ridge Mountains, and descend gently onto the pristine quadrangle of Nathaniel Buxton University in a holler north of Roanoke, where the new life I yearned for could finally commence.

  Ever since I’d received that acceptance letter and then an encouraging call from an upperclassman, I trusted that Nathaniel Buxton University on its high hill would end my longing for a raison d’être and fill the gaping hole in my heart.

  Laughing over a Cherry Coke at Campbell’s Pharmacy last spring, I had named it for Jif and Georgianne Mayfield: “It’s like an itch— the itch of the soul.”

  “We all have that, Adelaide,” Georgianne had assured me. “Every thinking person in the world has that!”

  Then Jif concurred by charging three fashion magazines and candy bars on her daddy’s credit card. “Here,” she said, handing me a Vogue and a Snickers. “These give me temporary relief.”

  We all nodded in unison and spent the rest of our afternoon devouring the sweets and the gorgeous people who lined the glossy pages.

  Now, without warning, little Lou, trapped in the middle, dodged a shove from Dizzy, and my chin caught the full impact of her sharp, eleven-year-old shoulder.

  “Get off me, Lou,” I said, my eyes narrowing toward Dizzy, the space miser and the perpetual destroyer of my peace. “Can’t you make this an endurable ride, Diz? After today, you’re not going to lay eyes on me until Thanksgiving, you know?”

  “Hallelujah! ” she shouted in a Juliabelle tone of voice, hands raised in an act of worship.

  I chuckled as my fifteen-year-old wild child of a sister feigned a sudden interest in the rotting mill village that marked the outskirts of Williamstown. Dizzy had dressed in a black lace getup (much to everyone’s dismay) for this road trip, and I could see the sharp kohl streaks around her eyes beginning to soften.

  Dizzy scratched her itch with nicotine and rebellion, I thought to myself as I watched her finger the Marlboro Lights in her backpack. Daddy would have had a fit if he knew she had brought those along!

  Then I paused to take my own last look at the mill village. The small shotgun houses were propped up on cinder blocks, with weathered cars in the dirt driveways and Confederate flags flying from nearly every third roof. One had suffered a recent fire, its marred shell of a home staring back at me like a black eye. I could not help but notice the melted cuckoo clock hanging on the singed wall or the wrinkled newspaper that was trapped beneath a sofa and lifted in a breeze as we drove past.

  Next door to the burned-down house, I spotted a young woman with flat brown hair and dull eyes peering at me from the front window, and I shivered even in the August heat of the suffocating car when our eyes met.

  “Good-bye, Williamstown,” I muttered, and I might as well have said, “Good riddance!” Or “See ya; wouldn’t wanna be ya.”

  I was over this sad Low-Country town that had entrapped me for eighteen years. I knew I’d be back this summer for the debutante teas and luncheons that Mae Mae’s Camellia Club had planned, and I’d be back during the holidays from time to time. But in the end, I had my escape route: college two states away, and, as my uncle Tinka said at our family dinner last Sunday afternoon, “She’d be doggoned if she isn’t going to take it!”

  “M-M-Mom,” Lou stammered between her standoff with Dizzy.

  “Whatcha need?” Mama whipped her head around, her oversized purse poised to provide Lou with whatever she wanted: baby wipes, bottled water, chewing gum.

  “It’s kind of h-h-o-t,” she said, rubbing her rich brown eyes. Though Lou was crossing the threshold of adolescence, she still had the most beautiful baby face I had ever seen—those chubby red cheeks and long black lashes. A grosgrain bow pulled her thick hair back, and her pretty little forehead glowed like one of those Madame Alexander dolls we all had collected over the years.

  I would miss reading with Lou at night, trying to rehearse how it would go when Mrs. Spicklemeyer, the middle-school English teacher, called her name in the class and the other children snickered to see if she could make it through the next two paragraphs of the textbook.

  I jokingly called Lou’s teacher “Mrs. Despicablemeyer” during our rehearsals, but this got Lou’s tongue so twisted when she attempted to say it that she even laughed at herself.

  I would miss curling up on opposite sides of the den couch with her, watching sitcoms and, occasionally, a teenybopper movie. I’d feel guilty every time a four-letter word made its way across the screen, and I’d say, “Now, Lou, don’t you ever say that, okay?”

  “I’ve heard them all from D-Dizzy, a-anyway,” she’d answer, then, “Don’t w-worry, I w-won’t say them, Ad.”

  Now I pulled out my new journal and began to write poetry. This was one way to scratch the itch, and a marvelous method of escape.

  The journal was a graduation present from Shannon Pitts, that former best friend who went born-again Christian on me two summers ago at a Young Life retreat in Colorado. Shannon tenaciously evangelized even our most minor conversations, and it was downright wearisome.

  “Thank God she chose the women’s college in North Carolina,”

  Jif had said, “so we can have a break from her!” Otherwise, every college question or problem would have been answered by her rote, Holy Roller lingo: “Give it to God . . . Take it to the Cross . . .” What in the world did that mean, anyway?

  And what about this: Shannon talked about Jesus as if He’d just left the room. As if He had been sitting with us, drinking a Co-Cola, and walked to the kitchen to get some tortilla chips! I was bewildered by the nonchalance with which she referred to the Son of God. It was startling, if not irreverent. Who would dare to assume that they knew Him in such an intimate way?

  Goodness knows I wasn’t on a first-name basis with the guy. I’d heard about Him at the High Episcopal church my family attended, with a Communion that was more fashion show than sacred. I could remember praying when I was a young girl. I could even recall a kind of supernatural peace when I lay in bed at night and recounted my day —the things I did right, the things I did wrong, and the things I would try to do right tomorrow. It was my own little litany of repentance, and it brought me a wonderful kind of lightness at the end of each day. But I gave it up somewhere around adolescence when my body changed and my mind raced and the itch gnawed away at me. Instead, I filled myself with schoolwork and poetry and crushes on teachers or upperclassmen who had a little something going on upstairs.

  Nonetheless, it was nice of Shannon to notice how I spent my time these days—writing. No one else seemed to. I’d spent this last summer once again at the Governor’s School at the College of Charleston, where my favorite professor, Penelope Russo, gave me fresh insight into my craft. I had learned from Penelope (she let us call her by her first name) that poems didn’t have to rhyme or have punctuation and that short stories could transport you anyplace in the world: the streets of Harlem, a café in a Paris alleyway, or even a foxhole in Vietnam, where my own daddy lost his arm and two friends when a well-aimed grenade was hurled their direction.

  Penelope Russo had taught me more than just the art of writing— she had taught me how to look within my heart and examine the itch. How to pin it under a microscope and probe at it with the point of a pencil. And for me to name what I longed for on paper provided some relief, and for that I was immeasurably grateful.

  I scribbled down a poem as the wagon steamed up the foothills of the Blue Ridge, looking up every few minutes to see if I could lay eyes on the “You are now leaving South Carolina” sign.

  Good-bye Williamstown.

  Farewell gloom

  in the window

  of a mill village

  home.

  Every mile

  toward Virginia

  takes me closer

  to what has to be

  my destiny.

  Thank God they let us retake those SATs because of the noise of the elementary-school carnival last autumn, I thought. On the second try, I had
purchased those Kaplan books and stared at vocabulary words and algebra problems until I could hardly see straight. I raised my score 240 points, which opened a spot with a minor scholarship for me at NBU, the small and prestigious liberal arts college “nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains,” as the brochure boasted. Now I was bound for an institution that judges, senators, and Pulitzer prize–winning authors were proud to call their alma mater.

  I’d had to do some fancy footwork to convince my parents that this was a better opportunity than the full scholarship I received to the University of South Carolina. I can remember walking the magnolia-lined brick path up to Papa Great and Mae Mae’s front door for a change, to sit down in their living room and ask if they would further convince my parents by splitting the remainder of the tuition bill of my academic dream. Thankfully, the old pig considered it a good investment in family relations (i.e., another way to keep Daddy happy and working at the mill), and so they agreed to contribute. Sometimes I felt a tinge of guilt knowing this would hem Daddy in to his mill job another four years, but I was in claw-my-way-out mode, and nothing short of an act of God could stop me.

  The Governor’s School, fashion magazines, and MTV—these were my only vistas into what lay beyond Williamstown. I was a bug in a jar, and I was counting on NBU to take the lid off so I could fly. I could hardly wait to register for classes, to smell the insides of the hardbound books that would expand my horizons.

  And there was more that I would experience, I was sure. I might even fall in love in college with a bright and cultured Mr. Right. That’s how my parents met, in fact. My mama, a socialite from Charleston, yearning for a slice of what she called the “All-American Life” (which I had come to realize was just an amalgamation of Southern culture and small-town charm), had fallen in love with Zane Piper, the star tailback of the University of South Carolina football team, their sophomore year. (He was a kind of legend, even today, because the Gamecocks have not had as good a season since his class graduated more than twenty years ago. Sometimes people came right up to him on the streets and said, “You were the one who gave us the taste of victory, Zane.” Or they honked and yelled, “Go, Gamecocks!” from their cars when he jogged along the interstate, his stump keeping time with his good arm.)