Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed

by Virginia Hamilton

  “Just twelve,” said Willie Bea, “August nineteen.”

  “August nineteen,” Aunt Leah mused. She uncrossed her long, slender legs and reached for the red pocketbook. “Me see,” she said to herself. And, sighing, she searched until she found what she was looking for. The Wizard of Odds and Even Almanac, 1938 edition.

  “Oooh!” sighed Willie Bea.

  Everyone looked around to see. “Oh, Lord,” said Willie Bea’s mama, turning away.

  “Whoo! Here we go,” Grand said, and chuckled to herself.

  “What she got?” Aunt Mattie asked Marva. If Aunt Mattie had been a Wing, she would have known right away. As it happened, she’d never come across anyone like Aunt Leah before marrying into the family.

  “It’s her vibrations book,” said Marva. “You must’ve seen it once or twice.”

  “Her what?”

  “Wait,” said Marva.

  Aunt Leah flipped through the book. “August nineteen,” she said. Willie Bea let her hands rest on the table, trying not to seem nervous or excited.

  “What’s it say?” she whispered.

  “Me see,” said Aunt Leah. “Now, the waver back and forth, that vibration is life. You know that. I tole you that before.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” whispered Willie Bea.

  Aunt Leah’s starry, mascaraed eyes shone brightly. “Everything, from a grain of sand to the sun size, from the mackerel to the shark, from the big shot to the wino—”

  “Leah, cut it,” interrupted Willie Bea’s mama.

  “Come on, I didn’t say nothin’—”

  But again Marva Mills interrupted. “I said, cut out the grown-up business.”

  “From the mackerel to the shark,” Aunt Leah repeated. She had Willie Bea and her sister’s full attention. Willie Bea could hardly believe Aunt Leah’s special magic would be directed at her alone.

  “Every form of good, bad, breathing life on this round earth has a waver rate just particular to theyself. You see?” asked Leah.

  Willie Bea and her sister nodded, fascinated, although they didn’t understand a word of it. They knew food preparation was going on all around them in the busy kitchen. Still, they could not take their eyes from Aunt Leah’s gorgeous face.

  “All wavers be cause by the trinity of Freedom, Life and Love Thy Neighbor,” continued Aunt Leah. “They got light, oh, and they got feelin’s and they got voices, wavers has.”

  “Wavers, vibrations, do?” whispered Willie Bea.

  Aunt Leah nodded. “And they can be shaped into numbers. Now.” Leah licked a painted index finger and flipped over pages of her pamphlet.

  “She believe that stuff, too,” said Grand, placing her au gratin potatoes atop the stove, all ready to bake in the oven. Willie Bea spied candied sweet potatoes waiting atop the stove, too. All the time she worked, Grand Wing chuckled.

  “Wish you wouldn’t encourage Leah, Mama,” said Marva to Grand.

  “Ain’t my place, encourage or discourage,” Grand answered her daughter, the one she thought of always as the serious, sensible one. “My place to listen and unnerstan’.”

  “Hunh,” said Marva, and kept her peace.

  Aunt Leah studied her book. “It’s a fact, we each has numbers,” she said. “Everything be touched by the special number it has. And there are numbers for each name, each activity, each day and month of each year. Combinations be for certain months and the dates on which they most often appear. Now.”

  She flipped more pages. “We look for the Fast numbers first. They the ones appear more than the Law of Averages rating, which come three or four times a year. Now.”

  Leah looked up and down the pages. “This book don’t have no Willie listed for ladies. But it has Bea—Beatrix or Beatric. Marva, what her full Bea name?” she asked Willie Bea’s mama.

  “Lord,” Marva muttered.

  “It’s Willie Beatrime,” said Willie Bea.

  “Beatrime? Well then, we’ll say it’s close to Beatric,” her Aunt Leah said. “We’ll use the numbers for Beatric and say it Beatrime. Now. Beatrime is two-eight-three and one-eight-three. That’s all right. It might work out. Number one-eight-three appear three times in the month of August. Not bad. And two-eight-three appear once. Now. Let’s take your name. Beatrime Mills. Now, I happen to know what numbers stand for what letter of the alphabet. Like, A, J and S are all number one. And I and R are both number nine. Beatrime, your first name comes out to two-five-one-two-nine-nine-four-five. Add the numbers across, they make thirty-seven. Your last name is four-nine-three-three-one. Add it, it come to twenty. And thirty-seven plus twenty gives fifty-seven. Add five, seven, gives twelve. Add one, two, gives three. Number three is Beatrime Mills’ vital number. Number one-two-three is your lucky number combination. Add one, two, three across, they are six, one half of number twelve. Now, remember Beatrime is two-eight-three and one-eight-three?”

  “Yes,” whispered Willie Bea. The kitchen was utterly quiet. Even Marva Mills had stopped her work at the sink to listen. She lifted the colander, full of beans now, and quietly placed it on an old work table.

  “Number one-eight-three,” said Leah. “Adds up to one plus eight plus three, gives twelve. Remember thirty-seven plus twenty gives fifty-seven?”

  Willie Bea managed a nod.

  “Five plus seven gives twelve,” said Leah triumphantly.

  “What about two-eight-three?” said Marva. She had turned all the way around from the sink now. She held her head high and would not let go of Leah’s eyes.

  “Hunh?” said Leah.

  “I said, what about two-eight-three? It never add up to twelve.” Marva stood still, tall, most serious in her dotted Swiss.

  A silence, in which the two sisters regarded each other. Willie Bea looked solemnly from one to the other. She had seen her mama and her aunt in fights before.

  “Two-eight-three,” murmured Aunt Leah. “Two plus eight plus three gives thirteen.”

  “Thirteen,” said Marva quietly, “not twelve.” She looked at Willie Bea.

  “Thirteen is one plus three,” Leah murmured again. “Equals four. Four into twelve equals …” She paused, waiting.

  “Three!” sang Willie Bea, swinging from side to side. She felt like jumping up and down. “Three! Three!”

  “Three,” said starry-eyed Aunt Leah. “It work out ’most always. Three. Beatrime Mills’ vital number!”

  Marva Mills knew there was something wrong with the numbers. There was a trick to it somewhere. Every time Leah did the numerology, Marva knew there must be something wrong in it. But never did she have the time to ponder or figure out what that could be. Now she held her peace. She went about getting her pole beans ready for this Sunday afternoon dinner at which all the Wing families would break bread together. Renew the ties that bind.

  Just then they heard the screen door open in the front. Voices. In came Aunt Lu Wing, followed by Uncle Jimmy carrying a huge roaster. He musta gone home after Aunt Lu, Willie Bea thought. So busy talkin’, didn’t hear a car.

  “Turkey!” shouted Bay Sister.

  “I’ll be darn!” said Willie Bea. “It is! No chicken this Halloween.”

  “Well, hi, yall,” said Aunt Lu. “Lordy, that hot cook-stove. Had to put the turkey in, the middle of the night, almost. Get it done for now. What time was it I put it in, Jimmy? Five, six? Jimmy know.” Uncle Jimmy said not a word. He seldom did when Aunt Lu went on. “It’ll stay hot in the roaster, Grand Wing,” she said, “if you just keep it atop the cookstove. Be room? Hey, chile?” she said to Bay Sister.

  She spoke a warm greeting to Aunt Leah. She smiled on Willie Bea. Then grinned. “Hey!” she whispered loudly at Willie Bea. “How it go—‘An all us other childern, when the supper things is done, We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun …’”

  “‘… A-list’nin’ to the witch-tales ’at Annie tells about.’” Willie Bea promptly took up the next line of the James Whitcomb Riley poem, “‘An’ the Gobble-uns ’at gits you Ef Yo
u Don’t Watch Out!’” It was her favorite poem any time of year.

  “Yes! ‘Little Orphant Annie,’ yes!” laughed sweet Aunt Lu. “But it ain’t Halloween yet, darlin’.”

  “Well, it’s the night for beggars,” Willie Bea told her. “And we’ll be by to see you, Aunt Lu. We’ll be all in costume, too.”

  “Well, for … And me with no popcorn nor candy! Wonder why Little didn’t say nothin’ about it? I’ll have to hurry, after supper, too.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Willie Bea said politely, glad she had reminded Aunt Lu.

  Aunt Lu continued her busy swing around the room. “Mattie Belle? Honey, hush! I know you tired. All that long way! Get off you feet, I’ll finish it up.” Aunt Lu had on a sheer apron over an organdy dress she’d made herself.

  Aunt Mattie Belle groped protectively for her pies. They all knew Aunt Lu, sweet as she was, could do no more than wreck a decent pie.

  “She try too hard about they crusts,” Grand always said about Aunt Lu. “She work and work at the dough until she turn it to paste. Nerves.”

  “You’d have nerves, too, if Big and Little was yours,” Willie Bea’s mama had said.

  All at once her mama jumped a foot in front of where she had been standing. Her eyes looked wild. She clapped her hands over her ears. She spun around, wide-eyed, looking half-crazed about the room.

  Lookin’ like a witch, a goblin, Willie Bea thought, and felt a chill up her spine.

  “Marva?” said Grand.

  “Shhh!” Marva said. She rushed out of the kitchen into the dining room, into the front room. She rushed upstairs. They could hear her come directly over their heads. She came back down and into the kitchen.

  “Where!” she said to Willie Bea. Stamping her foot. “Where is he? Where’s Bay Brother!”

  Willie Bea sucked in her breath. “Ohhhh!” she moaned at last, remembering what she had forgotten. Her baby brother. And Little Wing was gone, too.

  Both she and her mama were at the back door, tripping over each other to get outside first. It was Marva’s hand that went right through the screen, as if she had not realized the screen door was there. But that didn’t stop her. She carefully pulled her hand out of the torn screen and went on her way.

  Aunt Lu was behind them, whining. She took the door by the handle, as though to come outside. But, turning away, she went back in the kitchen, calling for her husband.

  “Oh, Lordy,” they could hear her. “Oh, Jimmy, come fix it. Fix it!” She wasn’t talking about Grand’s screen door, either, Willie Bea realized. “It’s Big again,” Aunt Lu cried. “I know it is.”

  Of course, she was right, too.

  “Jimmy! Jimmy! Big’s done it again!”

  3

  Willie Bea had a hard time keeping up. Her mama cut across the lawn and through that part of the land where Grand had grown her corn. Now all of the corn was cut down. Corn was being cut on farms all around. On bigger stretches of land than Grand Wing’s bitty plot. Way in the night, every night this week, Willie Bea had heard tractors humming and hauling, in a hurry to get the harvest finished during dry days. Wouldn’t do for the farm machines to sink in the muddy, soaking-rain fields of November. And Willie Bea knew that farmers of the land would work clear to dawn if they had to.

  The sharp spikes of cut cornstalks stuck out of Grand’s harvested land. Willie Bea’s mama didn’t seem to notice them. She had taken off her high heels and rolled her stockings down and over her toes. She had wadded her chiffon stockings, worn only on Sundays, and flung them onto the grass at the edge of Grand’s corn plot. Then she had flung her high-heel pumps onto the lawn. She was barefoot now, just like Willie Bea.

  In her hurry, Marva stepped too near a corn spike and it creased her ankle, leaving a white line against her brown skin. This happened more than once.

  “Ouch! Ouch!” Marva whispered, through the plot of spikes. White stripes soon criss-crossed her ankles, but she did not slow down.

  Willie Bea knew exactly how being stuck and scratched by a corn spike felt.

  Give you that icy feeling all inside, she thought as she hurried, following her mother. That was what she called it, “that icy feeling.” She had a few spike scratches now, herself. And when it happened, it hurt so, all of a sudden, that the pain of the scratch streaked up through her like a painful, icy cold.

  “Mama, slow down!” Willie Bea hollered. But her mama would not slow down.

  Shoot! thought Willie Bea. Mama been runnin’ through places all her born days, but I been doin’ it just a little while.

  Her mama kept going and Willie Bea kept on following. They headed diagonally across the wide field belonging to Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Lu. The field had been harvested the week before and was full of corn shocks. These were stacks of cut cornstalks tied around the middle with heavy twine and set up to dry. The corn shocks were full of mice inside, getting at the corn and fodder. Willie Bea never knew whether the mice or sudden breezes caused the shocks to tremble. They did rustle so. The shocks looked to her like fat ladies in long yellow dresses. And with tight sashes around their waists. All over the field, the ladies stood like dancers at a ball, frozen still as the music stopped.

  On the ground at the base of the corn shocks were huge field pumpkins, many of them still on the vine. Some of them weighed fifty pounds or more. Uncle Jimmy had such a crop of pumpkins this year, he couldn’t sell them all, Willie Bea’s papa had told her. And what was left of the pumpkins by the final days of the Halloween month, any of the Wing families could have.

  Big ole pumpkins! Willie Bea thought, racing by. Her papa had taken a couple home to carve and put candles inside. Tonight Willie Bea would light them.

  She did so love to see jack-o’-lanterns grinning with their flickering lights on front porches all over town. Most of the carved pumpkins came from this one field of Uncle Jimmy’s. And that made Willie Bea feel so proud.

  Her mama did slow down a moment as they came around a corn shock toward the back of Uncle Jimmy’s house. A low, barbed-wire fence separated the backyard of Uncle Jimmy’s house from the field. A path led right up to the fence. There the path disappeared, then reappeared again on the other side of the fence. The path had been made by Willie Bea’s and Big and Little’s older brothers and sisters, she supposed. Now Willie Bea and Big and Little and her little brother and sister kept up the path, walking back and forth, trotting, running between the two houses. They would climb over the fence and pick up the path again on the other side.

  Panting, Willie Bea caught up with her mama.

  “Not there,” Marva murmured, looking at the back of the house. You could always tell when a house was empty. No sound. Nobody flying around, busy. Even the chickens in the chicken coop were quiet in the shade. Willie Bea regarded the old chickenhouse with its tin roof. She and Big and Little often slept all night on the slant of the cool roof under the stars. Everyone marveled that they could stay asleep there through a starry night and not slide off. They never did slide off. They were experts at sleeping on a slant. Only one thing could get them off the roof in the night, and that was rain and wind in their faces. Willie Bea noted Big and Little’s homemade stilts just like her own, leaning against the chickenhouse. They must have been stilting for Cousin Hewitt.

  Marva Mills was moving again, fast. Her bare feet made light puffs of sound as they padded over the dark earth. Willie Bea stayed beside her. She could hear her mama’s breath coming in sighs from her chest. But her mama was not panting, not yet. She was breathing hard and deep for strength. Marva Mills was strong and country-smart. She knew her way through the fields and into the wood that also belonged to Uncle Jimmy.

  Say that some gentleman came along one day and offered Uncle Jimmy a fortune for his wood, twenty-five hundred dollars, Willie Bea remembered now as they hurried along.

  Uncle Jimmy had laughed in the man’s face. He believed his wood was worth a fortune because he would believe anything anybody told him. But he was no fool. He would not take the f
ortune for his woodland, whose very shade was worth more than anything Uncle Jimmy could think to name.

  They were in the wood. It was a thick growth of trees, stands of oak and elm and great old walnut trees. It went on and on clear to the far side of town. You could find strangers wandering through it most times. You could find hoboes resting off the roads, living awhile from the berries and nut trees. Uncle Jimmy tolerated all kinds of strangers, for these were hard times. But strangers must never take an axe to a tree. There were signs posted everywhere. “WARNING. HIM DARE CUT DOWN, BE WARE.” Those who knew Uncle Jimmy knew he wasn’t about to hurt anybody, although he carried a shotgun when he walked his wood. And those who didn’t know him, had never heard of him and came upon a sign, could not be sure. They were trespassers, after all. And it was another man’s wood.

  “They’ll be in the clearing,” Marva whispered, moving fast along an almost invisible path carpeted with leaves. Trees were bare and their tall, twisting branches were cutout shapes against the bright sky.

  “Mama,” said Willie Bea. “He won’t mean it bad, Big won’t.”

  “No? No?” whispered her mama. “That’s what they all say. That’s what they all tell me. But it’s not their child he does it to. It’s not their baby!”

  “Big hasn’t hurt Bay Brother yet.”

  “Yet!” her mama said in a strangled voice. “My Lord, and he so overgrown and about half-witted, too!”

  “He’s not half-witted, Mama. Not like half-wit Hewitt, Big’s not.”

  “Hewitt’s no dummy,” her mama said, her breath rushing in a whisper. “He gets the best kind of grades in school, Mattie Bell tells me.”

  “That don’t make him smart,” Willie Bea said. “That just makes him the teacher’s pet. Aunt Lu says Big is just overgrown. He grew too fast. Who ever hear of a thirteen-year-old over six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds, Aunt Lu says,” said Willie Bea. “And Big not knowing what to do with all that weight, all that heighth. Sometimes he sits all day on a straight chair, for fear if he moves, he’ll turn over a table or knock Aunt Lu’s glass figurines and shatter them.”