The Search for Belle Prater

by White, Ruth

  Granny read quickly, passed it on to Porter, then asked, “Where did this come from?”

  So as we ate in Granny’s cozy, civilized kitchen, with heat coming out of the registers at our feet, the three of us told of our adventure in Crooked Ridge.

  That very afternoon, because there was an ongoing investigation and he had to inform the law, Grandpa took the letter to the sheriff, along with the information from Miz Lincoln. The sheriff took Miz Lincoln’s phone number and said he would call her to get the address of the ringmaster in Florida. By Monday morning the whole town knew more’n we did. There were rumors flying ever’ whichaway. Finally, when people kept pestering us, Porter wrote a short piece for the Mountain Echo, in which he gave only the facts as he knew them.

  18

  On Wednesday the furniture store delivered our new TV set. It was a twenty-one-inch floor model, built into a beautiful cherry cabinet. Nobody in Coal Station could boast of a finer-looking TV set than ours.

  Porter and Grandpa spent the greater part of the day stringing the antenna line up to the Christmas Tower on top of the mountain. They finished just before dark, when everybody, including Cassie, gathered around this new wonder in our living room to watch something. It didn’t matter what. The two channels available to us, compliments of the Christmas Tower, came in bright and clear.

  We were quietly watching the NBC News with John Cameron Swayze, when we were suddenly startled by a cry from Mama.

  “Oh, my stars!” she said.

  All eyes went to Mama on the sofa, and she was pointing at me. I was sitting on the floor in front of her.

  “Lice!” she gasped.

  Had she said lice?

  “I saw one crawling there in the crown of your head!” Mama screeched.

  “Me?” I said, placing both hands over my heart, desperately hoping she did not mean my head.

  But alas, yes. That’s what she meant. My face went hot with humiliation.

  “I saw the creature with my own two eyes!” Mama spoke with so much outrage it was comical.

  In fact, Porter, Grandpa, and Woodrow nearabout choked to death, trying not to laugh, but they were unsuccessful.

  “You can laugh!” Mama said angrily. “But head lice are serious business. They lay their eggs down close to the scalp, and they’re nearly impossible to get rid of.”

  “Nonsense,” Granny chimed in. “I can get rid of lice in no time with my special remedy. I just need to go home and fetch my supplies. I’ll be right back.”

  With that, Granny happily scampered out the door like a kid, seeming delighted with my violated cranium. It gave her an opportunity to show off her lice-killing talent.

  While waiting for her, I imagined tiny highways and tunnels and nests in my hair where the invaders were scampering about merrily. I resisted a powerful urge to claw at my scalp.

  “I betcha a dollar she caught ’em from the Luckys,” Cassie said.

  “The what?” Mama said.

  “The Lucky children from Lucky Ridge on the bus,” Cassie went on. “Their hair is so dirty and matted up, anything could hide in there. And they were hanging all over us.”

  Mama let out a long weary sigh. “I can’t believe it. My own daughter has caught head lice.”

  “The future debutante?” Woodrow said impishly. “Them varmints don’t care whose head they jump onto, do they?”

  “I guess not!” I snapped at him. “On the way to Crooked Ridge I noticed you about scratched a hole in your scalp!”

  Woodrow’s face went from mischievous to startled. “Huh? I did?”

  “I’ve been scratching a lot, too,” Cassie confessed.

  Granny came back in the door, carrying various items in a box.

  “Better treat all three of them,” Mama said to her.

  Granny did not hear her, but it was okay. She had already made that decision.

  “You young’uns go to the bathroom and wet your heads real good in warm water,” she said to us, “then come back in here.”

  “Me too?” Woodrow said.

  “Of course you too. And Cassie. Lice love to jump around from one head to another. Y’all go on now, do as I tell you.”

  We did as she said, and when we returned to Granny, she instructed us to sit on the floor in front of the fireplace. She had some white cloths that she spread over our laps, then she gave us fine-tooth combs, which we were to use for raking our scalps as close as we could, and see what would fall on the cloth.

  We started combing, and lo and behold, little brown critters started falling from hair to cloth—and not just my hair, I was delighted to see, but Woodrow’s and Cassie’s, too!

  “Don’t let ’em get away!” Granny hollered. “You gotta catch ’em and throw ’em in the fireplace!”

  We followed instructions, but I had so many lice I couldn’t even catch them all, and I had to wad them up in the cloth and throw the whole thing in the fire. Then Granny gave me a fresh cloth.

  After ten minutes the lice stopped falling, and we figured we had them all.

  “Now we gotta put this stuff on your heads,” Granny said, and she brought out this stinking paste in an old battered pot. “We rub this in good all over and let it stay for a half hour. Then you can go wash it out with shampoo.”

  “What for?” I said. “We got all the lice out.”

  “The nits are still there,” Granny said calmly, “just waiting to hatch.”

  And she began to rub the stuff in my hair first. Mortified and stinking, the three of us sat there watching TV, with our hair pasted to our scalps for half an hour. All the while Mama acted like somebody had died, and Porter and Grandpa made wisecracks, thoroughly enjoying the show.

  “I wouldn’t laugh if I were you,” Granny snapped at them suddenly. “You’ve been near these young’uns, and it wouldn’t surprise me a bit to find a few lice in your heads, too. Put that in your newspaper, Mr. Re-Porter!”

  At which Grandpa and Porter shut up.

  19

  After the lice incident, it was Porter who once again persuaded Mama to let me return to Bluefield.

  “You have to let her go, Love,” he said to Mama. “Yes, there are bad things in the world. There are bad people. There are poor children. There is filth, and disease, and lice. But you have to let Gypsy go to find her own way in the world. You can’t protect her forever.”

  I thought it was a stunning speech, and it made my eyes sting a bit. I could only marvel at what a brilliant man he was.

  That Saturday, on the Black and White Transit bus, Woodrow, Cassie, and I breathed a sigh of relief on reaching Lucky Ridge to discover that the Lucky children were not waiting to board the bus. This time the trip was uneventful, almost boring. When we reached Bluefield, the sky was perfectly blue, and the temperature mild. We headed straight for 111 Appalachian Street.

  Joseph and Miz Lincoln, who were expecting us, came out the door with big smiles before we had a chance to knock. We greeted one another and went inside, where Miz Lincoln had soup and sandwiches ready for an early lunch. We settled around the table in her pleasant kitchen and inquired about Joseph’s first two weeks with his aunt.

  “Everything’s good,” Joseph said happily. He was wearing new clothes. His face was more relaxed than it had been the last time we saw him, and his eyes were sparkling.

  “Can you walk to school?” Woodrow asked.

  “No. There’s a white school close to us, but blacks are bused to our own school. I’ve made some friends on the bus and got picked for the basketball team my first day.”

  “Wow! Y’all got a basketball team in the seventh grade?” Woodrow said.

  “It’s just competition between the grades. But we beat the eighth grade the other day. Whooped ’em good.”

  We didn’t want to tell Miz Lincoln and Joseph about the head lice, but Mama had made us promise that we would, just in case Joseph had caught a bug or two himself. With shamed faces and apologies we gave them the disgusting news so they could be on the looko
ut.

  Joseph said, “Oooo … nasty!” and went running to a mirror, as if he might detect the vermin running around in his hair.

  Miz Lincoln merely laughed. “Tell your folks it takes more than a few head lice to scare me,” she said. “In the circus we occasionally had infestations of everything from bedbugs and lice to ticks and fleas. We blamed it on the animals. Whatever it was, I learned all the remedies. Besides, Joseph hasn’t been scratching, have you, son?”

  “Not until now,” Joseph said, then went into a fit of scratching, the likes of which we had never seen.

  Of course he was just puttin’ on, and we laughed at him.

  After eating we headed out to continue our search. Joseph went with us, promising his aunt to return before dark. This time Woodrow had brought several pictures of Aunt Belle. We discussed splitting up so that we could cover more territory, but we decided against it for fear of being lost from each other. We also felt more confident together than apart. All afternoon, we trudged up and down the Bluefield streets, showing the pictures of Aunt Belle and asking about her. But once again, we had no luck at all.

  On the way home, Woodrow was quiet. We were going up the mountain toward Lucky Ridge when he turned to me and said, “I’ll make one more effort. I’m gonna place an ad in the Bluefield paper. But that’s it. I’m not going to Bluefield again to look for her. It’s plain to me now she left for her own reasons, and she’ll contact me when she’s ready.”

  And that was that. At least we knew now that Aunt Belle was alive, and perhaps that was enough for Woodrow.

  Two weeks later we had a call from Miz Lincoln in which she informed us that her letter to Roy, the ringmaster, had been returned because the circus, apparently, had moved on. There was no forwarding address.

  “Sometimes they go to Mexico after the holidays,” Miz Lincoln explained. “And I’m betting that’s where they are.”

  The sheriff got the same information. And nothing new came to light.

  Porter helped Woodrow place an ad in the personals of the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. It read: “To B.P. Please call soon I miss you From W.P.”

  In the same paper the sheriff placed another picture of Aunt Belle with the caption “Have You Seen This Woman?” Neither the ad nor the photo brought a response.

  The days following were cold and dreary. Woodrow lapsed into moodiness again, but this time he was not hateful to me. He was quiet and patient, treating me with kindness and respect, even when he felt bad. I thought he had battled something in himself and won. Maybe my New Year’s Revelation would not be necessary after all.

  20

  The next thing we knew, it was time for Grandpa and Doc Dot to take Woodrow to Baltimore for the long-awaited operation on his eyes. For several days the three of them were bustling around getting ready, packing things in suitcases, and laying out maps on Granny’s kitchen table to plan their route. Doc Dot was on the phone with his friend Dr. Bridges in Baltimore almost every day. He was to operate on Woodrow’s eyes. Grandpa had to take his car to get the oil changed and have the tires checked. Woodrow was trying to get ahead in his schoolwork so he wouldn’t miss too much, but he was too distracted to concentrate.

  And me? Well, I was watching the whole thing and feeling left out. It was silly, I know, but I wanted to go, too. I had never been to Baltimore, either.

  “It’s not a pleasure trip,” Mama reminded me.

  On the Saturday morning of their departure, I walked out to Grandpa’s car with Woodrow to stash his suitcase. Then we stood there waiting for Doc and Grandpa.

  I could tell Woodrow was nervous, but I didn’t know how much until he said, “If I don’t make it, Gypsy—”

  I interrupted him with a laugh. I know I shouldn’t have, and I didn’t mean to, but I did.

  “Oh, Woodrow, you don’t die from eye operations,” I said.

  He bristled. “No, but you can die from ether. Some people don’t ever come out of it, you know.”

  “But you will. You know you will.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  I shrugged. “Because you’re Woodrow Prater. You always come out of everything smelling like a rose, no matter what!”

  He grinned then, and said, “Well, anyhow, if I wake up dead, you can have my comic book collection.”

  We had daily reports from Baltimore, but I didn’t see Woodrow again until Thursday afternoon, when I looked out of Granny’s window and saw him being helped out of the car by Grandpa. He had his eyes all bandaged up. He was led into the house by Grandpa on one side and Doc Dot on the other.

  “All went well,” Doc Dot said to Granny as she hugged Woodrow to her. “Like we told you on the phone, Dr. Bridges says he believes the operation ‘took.’”

  “Glory be,” Granny said. “So our boy’s not going to be cross-eyed anymore?”

  “We believe not,” Doc Dot said.

  Then he told us goodbye and went on home to see his wife and daughters, while Grandpa went upstairs to take a nap and Granny helped Woodrow get settled on the couch. He stretched out and sighed.

  “Want some iced tea?” Granny said to him.

  “That would be swell, Granny,” he said, and she left the room.

  “Hey there,” I said to him then.

  “Oh, hey, Gypsy,” he said, and smiled in my direction. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “No, I didn’t feel a thing till I woke up. I had a splitting headache the next night, but the nurse gave me a magic pill for it.”

  “You haven’t looked in the mirror yet?”

  “No, Doc said I have to wait another week to take the bandages off my eyes. They gotta heal good in the dark.”

  “Well, I collected all of your homework assignments from all of your classes. I’ll help you with them later.”

  Woodrow groaned. “Let’s save them for the weekend.”

  Granny brought in iced tea for both of us, then hurried back to the kitchen, where she had supper cooking on the stove.

  Late that evening Woodrow, Grandpa, Granny, Dawg, and I were listening to a radio show instead of watching television—for Woodrow’s sake—when somebody knocked on the front door. Grandpa went to see who it was.

  “Well, hello there, Benny!” we heard him say. “Come in, come in!”

  Blind Benny was a man who had little bitty eyes he couldn’t see out of, and he wandered around at night with a sack collecting stuff that people left out for him. He had a wonderful voice, and he sang while he walked up and down the streets. He lived in a room over the hardware store on Main Street, and the dogs all loved him and followed him around.

  Most folks couldn’t tolerate Benny because of his appearance, but Woodrow had made friends with him, and when I got to know him, I didn’t mind how he looked. In all my years I had never known him to go into anybody’s house, but there he was standing in Granny and Grandpa’s living room. Grandpa led him to a seat and took his coat.

  “I come to see the boy,” Benny said. “Is he about?”

  “I’m ri’cheer, Benny!” Woodrow said, smiling broadly. “I got my eyes bandaged up. Ain’t we a pair, though?”

  “Yeah,” Benny said with a laugh. “One of us is blind, and the other’un kaint see!”

  They both laughed heartily.

  “How ye feelin’?” Benny said.

  “Feelin’ good,” Woodrow said.

  Dawg came up to Benny, sniffed him all over, and wagged her tail like crazy.

  “Yeah, I knowed ye wuz there,” Benny said to her softly, as he went rummaging around in his pocket. “And I brung ye a treat.”

  He brought out what looked like a piece of baloney wrapped in waxed paper and stuck it under Dawg’s nose. She gobbled it up quick.

  “How’d ye like that Baltymore?” Benny asked Woodrow.

  “I had only one day to see it,” Woodrow said. “We got there on Saturday night, checked into this hotel close to the hospital, and went out to eat fresh seafood at the waterfr
ont. While we et two flounders apiece, we watched the boats come in.

  “When we got up Sunday morning, we went sightseeing, and saw lots of interestin’ stuff. But Sunday evening I had to check into the hospital so they could prep me for the surgery. That’s what they call it—prepping.

  “Monday morning I had the operation. It took nearabout two hours, but I didn’t wake up till three o’clock. The doctor kept me Tuesday and Wednesday, and this morning he let me go. Doc Dot is going to take off the bandages for me next Wednesday. Then we’ll see what we’ll see.”

  On the designated day, as Doc Dot began to take the bandages off, I could see that Woodrow was nervous, and so was I. I reckon we all were. Around and around, the wrap was slowly unraveled.

  “Like unwinding a mummy,” I said, and Woodrow and I laughed uneasily.

  Finally there was nothing but patches left, one on each eye.

  “Don’t open yet,” Doc warned him as he turned off the lamp beside Woodrow’s chair. “Sudden light could be painful.”

  Then he removed the final patches.

  “Open slowly,” Doc said.

  And Woodrow did. He blinked several times, closed his eyes, then opened them again and looked around careful at the faces in front of him. Me and Grandpa, Granny, Mama, Porter, and Doc Dot were all there crowding in close, trying to see his eyes.

  “Well, there’s all them funny-lookin’ people,” he joked, “just like I remember ’em. So at least I know I ain’t blinded.”

  “You got red in the whites,” Granny said. “But I’ll declare, I believe you got you some straight eyes.”

  “Nice!” Doc Dot said, with a huge grin on his face. “The blood spots will clear out in no time at all, and you are gonna have eyes as clear and blue as a Virginia sky, my boy!”

  “And straight?” Woodrow said eagerly.

  “Of course straight! Of course!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Grandpa said, pleased as could be. “Good job. Good job.”

  Doc Dot then held a mirror in front of Woodrow. He looked, and his face broke into a grin. He glanced around at us and kept on grinning, gazed at his reflection again, and grinned some more.