The Search for Belle Prater

by White, Ruth

  Before she could respond, Woodrow leapt into another story. He was on a roll. “Another time we were talking about the presidents, and Miz Mclntosh sez in her sweet schoolteacher voice, ‘Boys and girls, what do you reckon Thomas Jefferson would say if he were alive today?’

  “And I sez, ‘He’d prob’ly holler, ‘Somebody let me out of this grave!’”

  I laughed along with Cassie though I had heard the joke before. In the short time Cassie had been in our school, she had not yet seen this mischievous and lighthearted side of my cousin. I could tell she was charmed.

  A few minutes later the repetitious old codger tapped Woodrow on the head again and said, “Hey, sonny, it’s Graham Street that runs past the bus station. Remember to read the signs!”

  And that was only the first ten minutes of our trip.

  5

  We had started snaking around and around and up the mountain toward Lucky Ridge when a massive red-faced woman lit up a pipe. I clutched my tummy.

  “I guess you’re not used to these smells on the bus,” Cassie said. “And the hairpin curves. It’s been a long time since I had motion sickness, but I remember how it feels. It’s awful.”

  Then a baby, maybe two months old, started squalling.

  “Reckon we’ll have to listen to that all the way to Bluefield?” Woodrow asked.

  “That’s June Honaker’s new baby,” Cassie said. “She’ll stick something in its mouth drek’ly.” I looked out at the sky, which was a perfect blue with only a few fluffy white clouds in it. Even though the sun was shining bright, Pap had the heater running wide open because it was cold and windy out there. This was my least favorite time of the year to look at the trees, because they were so skinny and brown. You could see the cliffs and the slate dumps, and strip mines all up and down the sides of the hills, which you couldn’t see that good when the leaves were full and green.

  The bus took a sharp curve, and my tummy rolled.

  “Gypsy’s turning green,” Woodrow said to Cassie.

  Timidly she looked back to where the pipe smoker was. “I don’t know her,” she whispered. “She’s awful big.”

  About that time the woman opened her window and knocked the fire from her pipe out of it. At the same time, the baby hushed. My stomach settled. It was a miracle. The bus was quiet then, except for somebody snoring, and I was able to put my mind on other things.

  Woodrow stood up and leaned over me to look at the steep drop-off on our side of the road. It was a long way down.

  “If Pap should move that wheel just a wee bit too much to the right we’d drop like a rock to the bottom of the mountain,” he said. “We’d be goners for sure.”

  “Pap is the best driver in the world,” Cassie said. “And there’s no cause for worry.”

  Ever since meeting Cassie, Woodrow and I had talked about her gift, and wondered if she could help in finding out where Aunt Belle was. Now, I guess, Woodrow figured the time seemed right to bring up the subject.

  “Cassie, you say you got the gift?” he said.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Then maybe you can tell me something important.”

  “Where your mama is?” Cassie said.

  “Joe Palooka! How did you know what I was going to say?” Woodrow said with awe in his voice, like he was real impressed.

  “Everybody knows about Belle Prater disappearing,” Cassie said. “Me and Pap read about it in the Mountain Echo when it happened, and I focused on her picture, hoping maybe I would get a clue, but nothing came to me. The kids in our class told me you were Belle Prater’s boy.”

  Woodrow told Cassie about the New Year’s Eve phone call.

  “So we decided to go to Bluefield and have a look-see,” Woodrow went on.

  “How come your grandpa didn’t bring you?” Cassie asked.

  “He didn’t think we could find her,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Woodrow said. “Besides, we wanted to do this by ourselves.”

  The road became more and more winding as we reached the top of the mountain. Far down in the bottom of the holler you could see a coal camp with all its brown look-alike houses lined up against the base of the mountain. There was a littered dirt road running in front of the row. You could see frozen overalls hanging on a clothesline, and outdoor toilets and water pumps between the houses, because they didn’t have indoor plumbing. It was like looking down into a big trashy hole, but people actually lived there.

  “We’re coming up on Lucky Ridge,” Cassie said. “We’ll go into Joe’s and set down for a few minutes where it’s warm, so we can talk.”

  Shortly we were pulling up in front of a country store at the top of the world. You could see nearabout a hundred miles in every direction. As we got off the bus, we saw five or six people waiting to board, three of them little kids.

  “Oh no!” Cassie said when she saw them. “There’s them Lucky young’uns. They’ll aggravate the tar out of us. Don’t give ’em a lick of attention, you heah? Not one lick. Or they won’t leave us alone.”

  The wind was whipping around us and whistling through the shivering trees, so that we pulled our coats tight and hurried into Joe’s Grocery, where we sat on a bench beside a potbellied coal stove and warmed ourselves.

  “Cassie, do you know your way around Bluefield?” Woodrow said.

  “Yeah,” Cassie said. “Sometimes I shop there while Pap does his run to Johnson City. I usually have time to kill, so I go to the library and read a book, or I go to the dime store and buy a comic book. Sometimes I hang around one of the drugstores and have a fountain Coke and play the jukebox. One time I went to a show. I’ve learned the streets pretty good.”

  “Do you think Pap will let you go with us today?” Woodrow asked hopefully.

  “Shore he will!” Cassie said quickly, happily.

  Woodrow reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a photo of Aunt Belle, and handed it to Cassie.

  “This is her,” he said softly.

  It showed an ordinary-looking woman with brown hair and nice eyes.

  “She was peculiar, I reckon, to most folks’ way of thinking,” Woodrow said as he took the picture back and gazed at it fondly. “I understood her, but I don’t think anybody else did. She liked things we would like. You know, kid things—comic books and ghost stories and magic. And her piano playing was so sweet, it made you wanna cry. Sometimes I can feel her near me.”

  “What do you mean?” Cassie said.

  “Do you remember the day after Christmas when it started snowing late in the afternoon?” Woodrow said as he placed the photo carefully back into his shirt pocket.

  Cassie nodded. Woodrow had already told me this story on the day it happened, but I was glad to hear it again.

  “Well, I was in my room, laying on my bed reading, when all of a sudden Mama popped into my head. So I put down my book and thought about her. The room was dim and cool, and I knew the snow clouds were gathering above. I felt bad ’cause me and Mama had always enjoyed playing in the snow together.

  “I could hear sounds from downstairs, and I was thinking how comfortable it is living with Granny and Grandpa, and I know they love me. Life is a whole lot easier now than it ever was with Mama and Daddy on Crooked Ridge. So why couldn’t I let her go?

  “A stillness came, and I opened my eyes just a sliver. The room had turned a silver blue, and there was the faintest scent of mountain laurel, which was a favorite smell of Mama’s. The air seemed to move like there was a breeze blowing through, but all the windows were shut tight.

  “I had a funny sensation then right beside my ear, and I heard her voice just as clear and sweet.

  “‘Oh, look, Woodrow! Look!’ she said. ‘It’s snowing.’

  “I whispered, ‘Mama!’ and I jerked myself straight up in bed.

  “But of course she was nowhere to be seen. I went to the window and saw that snow was falling on the orchard.

  “I said, ‘Yeah, Mama, it’s snowing here, too,’ and I know she heard me
.”

  Woodrow fell silent.

  “That is fey,” Cassie said in a whisper. “You smelled the mountain laurel, you heard her voice; then when you went to the window you saw it was snowing”

  “That’s right,” Woodrow said, also whispering. “It was like she was there telling me to go to the window and see the snow, like she used to do.”

  “What do you mean by fey?” I leaned over and joined in the whispering.

  “It means magical, and beyond the natural way of things,” Cassie said. “Woodrow’s mama was talking to him from afar. That happens to people who are real real close to each other in here.”

  And Cassie touched her heart tenderly.

  6

  When we reboarded the bus, Cassie asked Pap if she could go with me and Woodrow in Bluefield. Pap said he reckoned so, as long as we were at the bus station at five o’clock when he returned from Johnson City.

  Cassie squeezed into the same seat with me and Woodrow so we wouldn’t have to talk across the aisle. I was at the window, Woodrow was in the middle, and Cassie was on the aisle side so she could jump up in a hurry to help Pap if she had to.

  The toothless man had moved to the last seat of the bus, where he was blissfully gumming a wad of tobacco—no wonder he was toothless—and spittin’ his nasty juice in a coffee can. In low voices we were continuing our conversation about Belle when Cassie suddenly held up one hand and jerked her head to the rear. We looked behind us, and there were the Lucky young’uns eavesdropping over the top of the seat.

  The three of them simultaneously stuck purple tongues out at us. There were two girls and a boy, all with cornflower blue eyes and the dirtiest faces I ever did see on anything human. They had bushy white hair that they were scratching at one moment and pushing out of their eyes the next. All of them were sucking on grape Tootsie Pops, which explained the color of their tongues.

  The boy had on worn-out overalls with galluses, and the girls had on matching dresses with big blue roses all over them. I had seen sacks of grain at the feed store with that design on them.

  “Excuse us,” I said to them politely. “We were having a private conversation here.”

  “’Scuse us,” the boy said prissily, obviously imitating me. “We were having a private conversation here.”

  The three children belly-laughed. You’d think it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. I was speechless, and I felt my face growing hot. I was not used to being made fun of.

  “I warned you.” Cassie leaned over close and whispered through clenched teeth. “I said not to give them one lick of attention.”

  “I warned you!” one of the Lucky girls mocked devilishly.

  She was hanging her mangy head right down between me and Woodrow.

  “Ignore them,” Cassie whispered again.

  “Ignore them!” the Lucky young’uns all said together.

  It was clear they were going to repeat everything we said, and they were grinning like a bunch of possums. Lordy, what a nightmare, I was thinking. I searched for their mama, and there she was by herself a few seats behind us reading a Modern Romances magazine.

  Woodrow, Cassie, and I went into a dead silence. If we’d had pencils and paper we could have passed notes; the Luckys probably couldn’t read. But of course we didn’t have any with us. We would just have to wait them out. They would get bored and leave to go find other mischief.

  Wrong. They started kicking the back of our seat.

  “You know what!” Woodrow said suddenly, and stood up.

  He acted like he was so aggravated. The young’uns sat up grinning and looked at him.

  “I really wanted to tell everybody a story!” he went on, and threw up his hands in exasperation. “But how can I hear myself think with all that racket, and banging on the seat? Can you tell me that?”

  The grins faded away.

  “A feller can’t tell a story to save his life!”

  And with that Woodrow sat down again in a huff.

  A tousled head popped up over the top of the seat. It was the Lucky boy.

  “A story ’bout whut?” he said.

  Woodrow turned to him. “Whadda you care? You wouldn’t listen to it. You’d just kick me in the head or something!”

  “Naw, we won’t kick ye no more if you’ll tell us a story.”

  The other two heads came up over the seat.

  “Not never no more?” Woodrow said.

  All three heads bobbed up and down.

  “Well, does that mean yes you will, or does it mean no you won’t?” Woodrow said, huffy again.

  Cassie and I giggled.

  “It … it means yeah we won’t kick ye no more,” one of the girls said.

  “All right, then,” Woodrow said. “When you give your word, you know you gotta keep it? If you don’t, you’ll sprout horns like a billy goat.”

  I sneaked a peek at the mother, who was still glued to her magazine. She had escaped and wasn’t about to come back yet.

  Woodrow got up on his knees and faced the children. Cassie and I moved over to the empty seat behind Pap, because Woodrow needed a lot of room to tell a story right.

  “This is a true story that my mama told me. It happened down in Kentucky. There was this boy, see, who would go out ever’ day and play in the woods, and he could hear voices in the water running over the rocks, and in the wind, and he could see faces in the blossom of a flower, and not only that, but he could see tiny people running in and out among the briars and weeds. And they would giggle and beckon him to come play with them. So he did. And they would tell him and show him fey things.”

  Woodrow emphasized the word fey, then turned and grinned at Cassie.

  “Then one day his little friend Ann died,” Woodrow continued, “and he felt so bad that he went into the woods to cry.”

  The children were absorbed.

  “And while he was there, a beautiful lady appeared to him. Her eyes were like the blue in a flame, and her hair was yella as corn. She wore a long shimmery gown, and had glass slippers on her feet, and—”

  “It was Cinderella!” one of the girls said breathlessly.

  “No! It was not Cinderella!” Woodrow said crankily. “Maybe they were silver slippers instead of glass. But it was not Cinderella. Anyway, she said to him, ‘What’s wrong, Eddie?’ That was his name—Eddie.

  “And Eddie told her what was wrong, so she said, ‘Make any wish you so desire and I will grant it unto you.’

  “So he told her that he would like to grow up to have the gift of healing people, especially children, because it made him sad to see young’uns suffer and die.

  “And the beautiful lady said, ‘Your wish is granted.’

  “And she vanished into a cloud, and he was amazed. When Eddie grew up, he found out he could look inside of people and see what was wrong with them, and heal them. And he got famous; then he died.”

  “Couldn’t he cure his own self?” the Lucky boy asked.

  “No, he could not,” Woodrow said, and then he asked, “Are y’all going to Bluefield?”

  The three heads bobbed again, as the children looked at Woodrow with new respect.

  “Well, lookee here,” Woodrow said, and he showed them a nickel. “I’ll give this buffalo to the one who can stay the quietest the rest of the trip.”

  We didn’t hear another peep from the Luckys.

  7

  Our next stop was Deep Vale, which had a real depot with a diner. Woodrow and I started to follow Cassie inside, but before we got to the door, Woodrow caught sight of a rest room sign on the outside of the terminal.

  “There,” he said, and sprinted for that door. “I’ll meet y’all inside.”

  “Oh, shucks!” Cassie said, and took off after him.

  He had his hand on the door knob when she reached him and gave his arm a jerk.

  “Woodrow, wait!”

  Woodrow turned around, and I could see the annoyance on his face, because he was bustin’ to go.

  “Wha
t is it?” he said irritably.

  “You don’t want to go in there, Woodrow.”

  “Course I do!” he hollered.

  “Just take a look at the sign there,” Cassie said as she jerked her thumb toward the door.

  “It says MEN,” he said, exasperated.

  “What does it say above that?” Cassie yelled.

  He looked again.

  “It says COLORED,” he yelled back at her.

  That stopped him short because Woodrow had never seen such a sign before.

  “What does it mean?” he asked.

  “It means white folks have their rest rooms inside the terminal. These here are for colored folks.”

  “Why?” Woodrow said.

  Cassie shrugged. “I don’t know, but that’s the way it is. White folks have their rest rooms, and colored folks have theirs.”

  Disgruntled, Woodrow followed Cassie into the terminal and without another word went to the WHITE ONLY men’s room, while Cassie and I went to the WHITE ONLY women’s room. Then we met in the diner, perched on stools in front of the counter, and ordered hot cocoa.

  “That’ll be fifteen cents,” the waitress said.

  We hauled out our nickels and paid.

  “Will we see any colored folks today?” Woodrow asked Cassie.

  “I imagine so,” she said.

  “I never saw one in person before,” Woodrow said, “but I’d like to.”

  “You never saw colored people?” Cassie said. “How about you, Gypsy?”

  “Yeah, we always see them in Bristol when Mama takes me shopping there,” I said.

  “I’ve seen some in pictures in the paper,” Woodrow said, “and in the movies and on television.”

  “Yonder’s a colored boy now,” Cassie said and pointed to a tall, gangly teenage boy outside the window. He was wearing a brilliant jacket of red, green, and black Scotch plaid.

  “A real colored person,” Woodrow said with wonder all over his face. “And look at that snappy jacket, will ya? Ain’t that the best-looking thing you ever laid eyes on?”

  When we got on our bus to continue the trip, we caught a glimpse of that bright plaid at the rear of the bus, and there was the colored boy at one end of the last seat, which ran the width of the bus.