Diary of a Wildflower

by Ruth White

  “Yes he does. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  So the four of us while away this blue April day together, loving each other’s company. We talk about Mommie and a lot of things, but mostly about Roxie. We share special memories of her, and more than once I fall to pieces all over again, but I feel the heaviness lifting from my heart.

  We eat fried chicken, pickled green beans that Trula put up last summer, potato salad, and Trula’s homemade biscuits with black raspberry jam. We wash it down with the cold creek water.

  “How did you carry all this stuff?” I ask Trula, “and the baby too?”

  “I had help,” she says. “Mack brought me as far as he could go in the car up Gospel Road, and Samuel met me there. He carried Ford and I carried the picnic.”

  The baby makes us laugh out loud, and it feels so good to laugh. Late in the afternoon, Trula looks at the sun and says she needs to go. Mack will be waiting for her in the car. Jewel and I kiss her and Ford goodbye, and we all promise to do this again and again. Samuel walks her down the holler to meet Mack. She turns once to wave. I watch her until she is out of sight.

  Part II: Living with Ghosts: Chapter Eight

  October 19th, 1927

  It’s my sixteenth birthday. I am in the loft in the early hours before dawn, sleeping and dreaming of Mommie. She is shelling butter beans, and I am kneeling in front of her.

  “Look at me, Mommie. I am here. See me.”

  But she goes on with her work and does not look at me.

  I say, “There’s a big hollow place in my chest, and I wonder if it will always be this empty.”

  She says, “It’s awful to be borned a female and don’t you forgit it. It’s a cross to bear.”

  I wake up in the chill and dark of night. I can still sense her presence.

  I’m in highschool, Mommie. It’s something you never even dreamed of for yourself. I’m sorry that your life was all up a hill. But it’s my turn now.

  Yes, it’s Lorelei’s turn, and I learned a long time ago that this house is not going to leave me, so I will leave it, as soon as I am old enough. Somehow, I have to get away from Willy’s house, Willy’s Road, Willy’s Mountain – Willy. And I need all the education I can get.

  At first a lone teacher came from Granger to teach highschool classes at Deep Bottom on Saturdays. His name is Mr. Harmon. He is about thirty and really nice-looking, but he’s married. His wife is also a teacher, and they have two little boys. Mr. Harmon teaches at Granger High School five days a week, and the county loaned him a car to make the eighteen-mile drive to Deep Bottom one day a week. We heard that he was coming just about the time I was finishing eighth grade. So the news seemed like a good omen to me, like the bluebird Samuel always had me looking for.

  When I told Dad what I wanted to do, he grumbled so loud and so long I felt all my hopes go crashing down around me. He said a person does not need all that dadblamed education, especially a girl.

  Then Samuel had a private talk with him, and Dad came out of it saying to me, “It don’t matter to me what you do as long as you don’t neglect your woman’s work at the house.”

  There were nine of us signed up for Mr. Harmon’s class that first day, and he told us if we attend every Saturday, do our homework faithfully, successfully complete seventeen units required by the state, and pass a standard test at the end of four years, we can earn a diploma the same as Granger High School students. We have a lot of homework, but we have a whole week to do it, and I love it, so I don’t find it hard at all. Mr. Harmon is proud of me. (I think I’m his pet.)

  Two of our nine dropped out the first year and two more last year, so there are only five of us left in the junior class. Of my cousins, Uncle Green’s boy, Vic, is in the class, and Uncle Ben’s girl, Opal. The other two are the Cole twins, Larry and Gary, from Cole Hollow.

  There are now six sophomores behind us, taught by Miss Lester. Coming up behind them is the freshman class of seven with Mrs. Owens in charge.

  Charles could have joined the freshman class this year, but he decided he didn’t need “no more dadblamed education”. Wonder where he got that? Jewel is in the seventh grade now, Daniel the third, and Clint is just starting. He seems too small to walk up and down this mountain every day, but I have to remind myself that all the rest of us did it at his age. Some days I walk with them to the school house, where my classmates and I meet and help each other with our assignments.

  After my dream of Mommie, it’s hard to get back to sleep, and I think of all kinds of things. From the boys’ loft I can hear Samuel coughing. He has done that a lot lately. He never did go back to Richmond once he was home for Roxie’s funeral. When I asked him about Lucille, he told me not to say anything else about her. Then I knew that on top of his other heartbreak with losing Mommie and Roxie, he had also lost Lucille. He spent some of his Richmond money drilling a well for us. Then he put screens over all the windows to keep out the flies. Dad had nothing to say about it.

  About the time I started tenth grade, Samuel went to work in a new coal mine up the river from Deep Bottom. I begged him not to do it. I didn’t want him working under the ground in the dark with all that coal dust, but I couldn’t talk him out of it. He said he would not work there for long, only until he could save a bit. He’s making three dollars and forty cents a day. I know that’s a lot of money, and he gives me a dollar now and then to add to my savings. He also gives Dad and Bea money. He has put on a new roof, made a lot of repairs to the house, and bought furniture for the big room. The place looks nicer, but I still don’t want Samuel in the mines. He comes home worn out and black with coal dust from head to toe.

  Samuel and Miss Mays have been courting for nearly two years now, and I wonder why they don’t get married. He is by far the best catch in these hills, and she is the prettiest little thing you ever saw, not as big as a minute. Samuel doesn’t seem to mind that she is thirty and he is only twenty-six. Miss Mays gives me and the kids permission, away from school, to call her

  by her first name, Caroline.

  As soon as Luther turned eighteen, he married Sally Watkins and went to work for her daddy in his sawmill. They built themselves a house on the Watkins property in Deep Bottom, and now they have two little girls, Madge and Christine.

  When I was thirteen, I had another chance to go to Skylark, this time with Bea and Jewel. Bea’s cousin Buddy drove us. That day Jewel and I had our first ice cream, and saw The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse starring Rudolph Valentino. We also met a woman named Sylvia who was begging in the streets. Jewel is so tender-hearted, she broke down and cried. She gave Sylvia all the money she had, which was only a bit of change. After we got home, she drew pictures of Sylvia, and of Rudolph Valentino dancing the tango.

  We haven’t been anywhere since, and this mountain gets more and more lonesome. The Old Thing still lives and hides in the woods. Sometimes at dawn or at twilight – the two saddest moments of the day – I think I get a glimpse of it. But maybe it’s just a shadow or a patch of mist floating up through the hollow.

  The doctors finally let Nell come home for a visit when she was sixteen. I was fourteen. She was about a head taller than me, skinny as a blade of grass, neatly dressed, wearing glasses, and obsessed with germs. The only things that seemed to please her during her visit were the new window screens and the well.

  “Thank goodness!” she said. “No more flies, and no more frog eggs or bird poop in the drinking water.”

  In the loft, Nell delighted in telling me and Jewel about her daily routine at the sanitorium, and her plans for the future. She wanted us to be envious, and I don’t know about Jewel, but I was envious.

  “I take my highschool classes first thing after breakfast, along with Helen and a few other young people,” she chirped. “Then we all go to lunch together in the cafeteria. In the afternoons, I work as an assistant to the janitors. I’m paid a small salary for my work. It’s just enough to pay for personal things, a few clothes and the like. But i
n another year, Helen and I will be able to train as nurse’s aides. Then, we’ll have enough money to live on. After our training, if the doctors will release us, we’re going to rent something near the sanitorium. You know, just a couple of cheap rooms.”

  She will be free. She will be able to come and go as she pleases in the city of Roanoke, and she will have her own money. Maybe getting sick was the best thing that ever happened to Nell. Still, I couldn’t help remembering how she used to make us laugh. Now, she’s the worst sour puss you ever saw. I wondered if T.B. takes away your sense of humor.

  “Jewel and I love to have secret meetings with Trula and Ford and the new baby, Arnold, every chance we get,” I confided in Nell. “Would you want to see them while you’re here?”

  “Why would I want to see her and her illigitimate children?” she said.

  I felt Jewel tense up in the bed beside me, and I almost choked in trying not to raise my voice. “Because she’s your sister. She took care of us when we were babies. She practically

  raised us. And she’s a good person.”

  “Good?” Nell snorted. “She has carnal knowledge of a married man!”

  On the third day she said she was “homesick” for the sanitorium. Even though she had planned to stay with us for two weeks, she wanted to leave the next morning. Nobody gave her an argument.

  Before going to sleep on the last night, I asked Nell what she thought of my joining her in Roanoke when I’m old enough, and also train to be a nurse’s aid.

  “Not a good idea,” she said. “Work at the sanitorium is no place for a healthy person. You would be exposed to cases of full-blown T.B.”

  “Well, I could try to find work at another place, and maybe I could stay with you and Helen while I’m looking.”

  “I don’t think so.” Then she turned her back to me and said, “Goodnight.”

  I could almost hear her gloating in the dark. My own sister! Slamming a door in my face like that, when she knew I couldn’t open it by myself. I still love Nell, but I don’t think I like her anymore. Maybe I never did.

  But there is somebody I do like now more than I did at first, and that’s Bea. I started feeling kindly toward her when it occurred to me that she must have married Dad out of sheer desperation. Why else would anybody marry a mean old fart like Willy Starr? She had no home and no income, and she was fixing to end up like poor Sylvia, begging in the streets of Skylark. She must have felt so forlorn when she first came here to live. Now she acts more like the woman of the house instead of an unwanted visitor. She does a lot of the housework and tends the little ones too. More important, she seems happy as she putters around like a lil’ole bird tending its nest, and that rubs off on the rest of us.

  I think giving birth was the turning point for Bea. The baby surprised everybody. One day in early summer of this year, when Dad and Charles had gone to Deep Bottom, and Samuel was at work, Bea started having really bad cramps. By the time we figured out she was in labor, it was too late to get help. I told Jewel to run as fast as her two little feet could carry her to fetch Aunt Sue, and the rest was up to me.

  By the time Aunt Sue got here, Bea and I had delivered a big boy, probably around eight pounds. Some people consider it a thrilling event to witness a birth. I am not one of those people. But there were no complications, and Aunt Sue told me I had done as well as she could have.

  Bea was more than surprised. She was flabbergasted. She babbled like a mad woman, repeating that she had no idea, no idea whatsoever, NO idea. But she was so..oo happy. Once she quit babbling, she started giggling. She giggled for days. Dad, being an old hand at making babies, seemed bored with it all.

  He just looked at the boy and grunted. “Call him Lawrence, after my grandpappy.”

  As for me, when the shock wore off, I began to think of what this might mean for my plans. If this was the beginning of another string of stair-step babies, would I be expected to hang around here and help raise them? One more reason to get out of here.

  It’s nearly daylight now, and I am looking forward to my special day. Samuel has teased me for a week with saying, “Sweet sixteen, and never been kissed.”

  He’s right. I haven’t been kissed – yet.

  Nine

  December, 1927

  I have become quite the reader. Mr. Harmon sends me home with two books, and the next week I ask him for two more. He says I absorb them through osmosis. That’s a word we learned in Biology. The first year he brought me juvenile stuff – Little Women, Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland. Jewel was more interested in those books than I was, so she would read them out loud to me.

  The second year we concentrated on American Literature – The Scarlet Letter, Last of the Mohicans, Moby Dick, the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the essays of Thoreau and Emerson, the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. That was more like it.

  Now, in my junior year, I am discovering a whole other world in English Literature. Mr. Harmon started me with David Copperfield and Silas Marner. The next week it was Oliver Twist and Return of the Native. I get so absorbed in these stories I walk around in a trance. I don’t hear other people talking to me.

  When Jewel tells me I’m acting like a half wit, I say to her, “Here, smarty pants, read this and see what it does to you.”

  I place Great Expectations into her hands. She’s only twelve, but she can read anything I can read. In no time she’s in a trance too. From there we go to Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which is simply too tragic for words. We read it aloud to each other, and cry our eyes out.

  ********************

  As I go into Call’s on a Saturday after school, I hear my name from someone who is coming out and politely holding the door for me.

  “Lorelei?”

  It’s a face more handsome than the average one, but I can’t quite place it.

  “Is it you, child?”

  Child? ”Let me take you back to your house, child. You have had a bad shock.”

  “Oh, it’s Dr. Wayne. Hello.”

  His face breaks into a huge grin like he’s really glad to see me. “Look at you!” He takes my free hand between his two large ones. “When I saw that lovely head of hair I knew it could be none other than the pretty little Lorelei all grown up into a real beauty.”

  I feel myself blushing, not because of what he said, but because of the memory of the last time he saw me. Me in my petticoat.

  “I’ve been away, but I have thought of you often, Lorelei. I have worried about your welfare.” He is staring earnestly into my eyes.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “Where...where have you been?”

  “In my home town of Charlottesville furthering my education at the university.”

  “That’s exciting,” I say. And I really mean it.

  “And what about you, Lorelei?”

  “I’m in highschool! Eleventh grade. I want to go away too when I’ve finished school.”

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “I don’t know yet. Anywhere away from here.”

  Again he gives me that penetrating look, and I hear an echo. I wonder if he hears it too.

  “Take me away from here.”

  He is still holding my hand. I know he can feel the callouses on my knuckles from scrubbing clothes, and on my palm from working in the garden. I ease away from his grip.

  “Lorelei, child,” he says, “if you are ever in need, I hope you will come to me.”

  “Thank you, but I’m in good health, sir,” I say.

  He smiles. “I’m not speaking of medical needs. I have felt guilty that I did nothing to help you that morning when you were clearly in distress.”

  My eyes are beginning to sting, so I walk away from him. He must think me rude.

  “I mean it,” he calls after me. “You can count on me.”

  I hurry to the counter. “I need some black ink,” I say to Mr. Call.

  Through the window I watch Dr. Wayne mount Raven and ride away. When I turn my attention back to th
e counter Mrs. Call is standing there watching me with a funny smile on her face.

  “The doctor’s a good-looking man, ain’t he?” she says to me.

  Of course people still gossip about Mack and Trula, and Mrs. Call still takes it out on me. I hardly ever see Mack in the store anymore. He stocks the shelves and keeps the books, but is more often out driving people here and there in his dad’s car for pay. He would be far easier to deal with than his mother, but this being the only store in Deep Bottom, I can’t avoid coming in here no matter how nasty she gets.

  “He seems to like you,” she goes on. “I saw him holding your hand.”

  I concentrate on a jar of sorghum on a high shelf, way above her head, because I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing me with my head down, and seeming ashamed.

  “Too bad he’s married,” she says, still with that smile.

  Mr. Call brings the ink to me and takes my money.

  “Oh, I forgot,” Mrs. Call says. “You Starr girls favor the married ones, don’t you?”

  “Ethel!” Mr. Call scolds her. “Leave the girl alone!”

  February, 1928

  As snow comes, I lose myself in the romance of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. In spite of the cold, white stillness on the mountain, I can smell the arrival of spring on the moors, taste the bitterness of strong English tea, hear the wind whistling through the gorse.

  Finally Mr. Harmon introduces me to Jane Austen. At first I find it hard to get past the fancy language of Pride and Prejudice, but once I do, I’m sucked into this world of beautiful, elegant ladies and proud, high-bred gentlemen. I love the way Jane Austen can make fun of it all, and still stir up in me an emotion akin to homesickness for that time and place. When I mention this feeling to Mr. Harmon, he actually understands what I’m talking about.

  “Some people might compare it to the longing for a return to Eden,” says he.

  As soon as I have waded through Pride and Prejudice, I’m able to breeze through Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park. Then I read them all again.