by Debra Dixon
Rabbit sidled up to me and squeezed my hand.
“I’m named after my grandmother. The mayor.”
I glanced toward the beautiful Mayor Walker. “Her real name’s Rabbit?”
Rabbit Walker hooted. “No. Ida. I’m Little Ida.”
“Oh.”
“If you join the Lady Mustangs and play softball, we’ll give you a good nickname, too. It’s fun. I’m one of the very best players. We got a real Mustang for a mascot. Sort of. He’s a pony, but we call him a mustang.”
I nodded, distracted. A fleet of big, fancy cars roared up the drive.
“Oh, hell,” Rainey Cecil whispered to Chief Royden. “It’s a caravan of Bigelows. I guess mah-jong night at the country club was canceled.”
The governor’s family came bearing fruitcakes, fried chicken, and casseroles, just like the Creekites. The Mossy Creek women stepped aside slowly, both groups eyeing each other as if they expected the other to start throwing food. Though sweat ran down my face, the chill felt like winter. In the yard, the Bigelow and Creekite men stared at each other like a pack of wild dogs ready to fight. Were they going to start fighting right in front of the reporters?
Then a deafening roar rent the air, and the trees around us suddenly wavered, dry leaves fluttering and flying.
“Good God almighty, what’s that?” Mama shouted.
“A helicopter!” Boom Boom and Killer shouted.
“It’s gonna land right here in the yard.”
“Oh, my word,” Granny whispered.
“It’s the governor,” Casey said.
Seconds later, a tall, middle-aged man in a suit wove through the bushes, and the cameras swung his way. The Creekites and the Bigelowans gathered on opposite sides of the yard just like someone had drawn a chalk line they couldn’t cross. Mayor Walker tilted her head, then walked up and stared him in the face. “I believe we have this situation under control, Governor. We’re here to rescue a child, not pose for the media.”
The big man smiled, his white teeth gleaming in the fading afternoon sunlight. “I couldn’t agree more, Aunt Ida.” He waved a hand at a pair of men standing behind him. “I’ve brought two top engineers to take charge of the digging.”
“Councilman Egbert is an engineer, and our digging is going just fine under his supervision.”
The governor began to scowl. “Now look, Aunt Ida, don’t hog the spotlight, all right? I’m here to provide inspiration and leadership —”
“Dung beetles provide more inspiration and leadership than you —”
“We’ve reached the shaft!” Mr. Washington yelled.
Everyone hurried over. The fire department rigged Nail Delgado with a harness and ropes to lower him into the parallel shaft. He disappeared from sight with a group of Creekite men struggling to lower him safely. The governor turned to his fellow Bigelowans. “Let’s see if we can’t all work together, just this once, and get this little boy out safely. I’m sure his mother wants to take him inside for supper before it gets dark.” The governor scowled at Bert Lyman. “Do you think you can get some positive news about me on videotape?”
Mr. Lyman guffawed slyly. And so, for the first time in history, or at least in the last few years, a peace treaty was called for the night. The Creekites and Bigelowans formed one team, lining up in a chain to hold the pulley rope that dropped Nail Delgado down to the tunnel that would lead him to my brother.
There were hundreds of us in the yard, all tight-lipped, holding hands and watching to see if Billy Paul came up alive. Pearl Quinlan led us all in a prayer.
Finally a flashlight waved back from inside the well, and Mama yelled down, her voice squeaking as Chief Royden held her on one side and Smokey Lincoln supported her on the other. “Did you find him, Nail? Is . . . my baby all right?”
A collective gasp of held breaths rattled through the quiet. Then I heard the sweetest words I’ve ever heard as Nail yelled up, “Yes, ma’am. I found him, and he’s all right.”
When they hauled Nail into sight, holding Billy Paul in his arms, everyone cheered. I nearly collapsed from relief. Mama threw herself at him and began to cry. Sobs broke out all over the place. There wasn’t a dry eye.
I wanted to hug Billy Paul and tell him that I was sorry, that I’d never fuss at him or threaten to blister him again, that I’d play his stupid truck games and let him pull my hair. But I didn’t deserve to get to hug him.
I ran down from the porch and went to the cherry tree, broke off the biggest limb I could find and carried it around to Mama. Then I pushed through the crowd.
“Here. “I held the stick out to her, trying not to shake like a cornstalk in the wind. “Go ahead and blister me. I deserve it. I almost let Soap Sally get him.”
Mama stopped sobbing long enough to look down at me with big old tears in her eyes. A hush fell over the crowd, then Granny’s voice screeched out. “Get me off this porch.”
The men hoisted her wheelchair down to the ground and Granny rolled toward us, stopping right in front of Mama. Mama’s fingers were shaking as she reached for the stick. I stood up straighter, bracing myself for the whoopin’ of my life.
“Don’t, Ellen,” Granny said. “It was my fault, not Shirley’s. I ought to be able to change the TV myself.” The awful helplessness of old age quivered in Granny’s voice.
But I couldn’t let my frail old granny take the blame. “No, it was my fault, Mama. I knew better than to leave Billy Paul alone.” I looked down at my brother, searching for teeth and claw marks from Soap Sally. He looked so small. “I’m so sorry, Billy Paul. Did you see Soap Sally? Did she try to get you?” My voice cracked. “I could see her, Mama, big and hairy, her teeth sinking into Billy Paul’s fat legs, crunching his bones —”
“Mercy,” Mama said with a hefty sigh. “I ain’t gonna punish you, Shirley. I reckon you suffered enough, just like the rest of us.” She tossed the stick aside, then dragged me into her arms. Her body trembled against me as we both cried. “And sweet Jesus, honey, there ain’t no such thing as Soap Sally. You must have been imagining such awful things. I’m sorry for that.”
I was crying again, like a flood of water busting out. “There isn’t any old hag in the well?”
She shushed me with a kiss. “No, big girl, we just told you that so you wouldn’t go near the well. Granny told me that story when I was little. I thought it’d keep you kids safe.”
“But I let Billy Paul get up there anyway.” My chin bobbed up and down as I cried. “I shouldn’t have left him alone.”
She combed down my matted hair with her hands. “No, but it’s my fault, too. I should have done something about that well a long time ago. You’re just a half-grown girl, Shirley. You didn’t mean for it to happen.”
Maybe I was just a half-grown girl, or I had been when the day began. But I didn’t think I’d ever be that same girl again.
“Now, cover up that hole,” Mama told the men. “Soap Sally is dead and gone. And we ain’t never goin’ through this again.”
Suddenly, I looked around and realized everyone was smiling at me. And finally, I smiled back.
Maybe school would be all right this year. Maybe Creekite kids wouldn’t call me a jailbird’s daughter.
I looked out at all the people who’d come to help us. They’d all been so kind. Ain’t going nowhere, and don’t want to. I didn’t ever want to leave Mossy Creek. Maybe Mama wouldn’t either, not after that day.
The paramedics began checking Billy Paul out. Rabbit ran over and grabbed my hand. The rest of the Lady Mustangs tagged along. On Rabbit’s other side, the mayor lifted her hand toward the sky. “I hope to shout,” she said. Her favorite invocation. It was a kind of old-timey-sounding tribute to her grandmother, who had also been a staunch, rebellious Creekite named Ida, too. A way of connecting to the thread of memories and blessings that helped pull Creekites out of the holes they fell into or dug for themselves.
* * * *
The War of the Good Deeds continued, at least fo
r a little while, with my family at its heart. Both the Creekites and the Bigelowans adopted us. If a Creekite did one good deed for the Stancils, a Bigelowan tried to top it.
Creekites showed up out of nowhere and installed a new well with a sealed top. A Bigelowan painted the front porch. Wolfman Washington scraped our rutted driveway and coated it in a thick new layer of gravel. A Bigelow landscape company sowed the first lawn our trailer had ever had. The Mossy Creek Garden Club sent seed for the next year’s garden. Hank and Casey Blackshear gave us a puppy complete with vaccinations, a free-spaying certificate, and a good, warm doghouse. A Bigelowan fenced in our front yard so the puppy could play on the new, enclosed lawn. Mayor Walker sent Mama down to Hamilton’s Department Store where the mayor’s son, Rob, personally escorted Mama on a buying spree for our whole family. The governor sent the head of state social services to visit us, and like magic we suddenly qualified for all sorts of medical and dental programs.
Mama filed for divorce with the free legal aide of Mayor Walker’s daughter-in-law, Teresa Walker. Daddy didn’t even contest it. We cried a little over him, then put him out of our lives. From then on he was a specter, no more real than Soap Sally.
“You’ve been too dumb and proud to accept help, before,” Sandy Crane told Mama. Officer Crane had a way of puttin’ things in her twangy little voice so that they were just facts, not a judgment. “Now you need to be proud enough to accept a hand up in the world.” That made sense to Mama.
In the meantime, the War of the Good Deeds just plain got out of hand. Casseroles were spilling out of our freezer, sheet cakes and apple pies covered the counters, and poor Granny could barely watch her soaps for folks knocking on the door. But the straw that broke the camel’s back was when a Creekite sent Billy Paul a fancy toy motorized car, and a Bigelowan sent Granny a VCR to tape her shows if she nodded off. Mama put her foot down and said she didn’t cotton to any more charity. She could take care of her own, thank-you-very-much, and from then on, she did. She got in our old truck, went down to town, and started working the evening shift as a waitress at Mama’s All You Can Eat Café. She left me in charge at home. She trusted me. I was so proud.
This past summer I joined the Lady Mustangs, and pretty soon, thanks to my power with a bat, I earned the name Slugger. Truth be told, when they asked me where I learned to bat, I said, “I just practiced with a limb from a cherry tree.”
Little Billy Paul’s favorite pastime is throwing cherries for me to hit. He’s forgotten about falling down the well, and Soap Sally is just a silly little story for telling at Halloween. I spend a lot of time playing with him, and laughing.
Sometimes, in Mossy Creek, a bad thing is a blessing.
The Mossy Creek Gazette
215 Main Street • Mossy Creek, Georgia
From the Desk of Katie Bell, Business Manager
Lady Victoria Salter Stanhope
The Cliffs, Seaward Road
St. Ives, Cornwall TR37PJ
United Kingdom
Dear Vick:
People ask me if we ever really do have “bad things” happen in Mossy Creek, as Shirley wrote. Yes, we do. But we try to take care of them and turn them into something good. If we can’t, we have a network of people who quietly come to the rescue and do what can be done, just as they did in the case of Shirley and her baby brother, Billy Paul. I don’t always print the sad details, unless it serves some good purpose. I know that makes me quaint in today’s greedy, tell-all media world, but, hey, I’m proud to be different.
Katie
. . . feeling more than a little quaint today.
Chapter 10
In Mossy Creek we’ve learned to be patient.
The longer a thing is in coming, the sweeter it is.
Crying for the Moon
Chapter 10
Some people are blessed to be born knowing their place in this world. Others gradually grow into the idea, like breaking in a new pair of shoes bought to last two seasons. Still others spend their entire lifetimes trying to find what was always right beneath their noses to begin with.
The summer I turned twelve was hotter than most and Mossy Creek’s third year in a record-breaking dry spell. It was the first year I can remember that my mama’s gardenias wilted on their stems, not able to suck enough moisture from the cracked red earth to give them what they needed to survive. I still remember those doomed flowers of that summer, especially because that was the same summer I met Vivien Leigh Bodine, as much of a fated and thirsty bloom as the gardenias.
We’d all heard of Vivien, of course, just not ever seen her up close. She’d been born in Mossy Creek, but she’d never been allowed to play with the rest of the children from town. Mama would just say that Vivien was a Bigelow, and members of the Bigelow family did not fit in well in Mossy Creek. Then she’d send me outside to play kick the can in the Royden’s back yard. Amos’s father, Battle, was the police chief then. Amos was just four or five years old.
What I knew about Vivien I’d found out at my open window listening to my parents talking on the front porch below. Even now, I can remember the hot sticky nights and my parents’ soft voices, the tangy smell of my father’s cigar and the clink of ice cubes in my mama’s iced tea glass. I can see my father’s discarded newspaper, fluttering like a moth on the floorboards of the porch, and picture my mother’s hands stroking the back of his neck as they talked. I can attribute everything I ever learned about the facts of life from sitting at my window when I was supposed to be in bed.
Vivien’s mother, Julia Bigelow, had got herself in trouble, as my mother put it back then, and had to marry Alton Bodine, a young banking executive who worked for the Bigelow family’s financial businesses. Alton Bodine was not the father of her baby, but the wealthy Bigelow family forced her to marry him. Vivien’s real father had been a well-known actor traveling through the South with the national touring company of a famous musical, although nobody ever acknowledged him.
At any rate, Julia Bigelow Bodine was the most beautiful woman any of us had ever seen, and it surprised no one when her husband doted on her and her daughter, even agreeing to spend the money to send Vivien to a private academy in Atlanta as soon as she was old enough to start school. She only returned home for weekends and holidays.
During that long, hot summer Alton Bodine died, and, as if released from a contract, Julia brought Vivien home from boarding school. Vivien returned to Mossy Creek and to a mother whose hopes and dreams seemed to be completely fixated on her only child.
Daddy sent me to the hardware store to get more hooks for Mama’s hanging flower baskets. I was barefoot and wearing cut-offs made from my brother’s old jeans. My tee-shirt was a size too big, but it was my lucky shirt and I was planning on pitching a softball game after supper.
I’d never thought to be embarrassed by how I looked until I came upon Vivien Leigh Bodine sitting in the shade of the hardware store, wearing a white linen dress, straw hat, and red patent leather shoes. She even had a red leather purse to match. I think it was that which made me stop in my tracks and stare. She was sucking on a lollipop — red, of course — and her cat-like green eyes were staring at me speculatively.
“Hey,” I said. All she did was raise an eyebrow just like her namesake did in the movie at the part about Ashley’s surprise birthday party. I almost burst out laughing.
“What’s so funny?”
I snorted loudly. “You. You look like a candy cane.”
She tried to look stern but I could tell she was trying not to laugh, too. “I do not. I look like a proper young lady. Which is more than I can say for you. You look like a boy.”
“That’s only because I’m playing softball tonight. I don’t usually dress like this.”
She gave me that eyebrow look again, and I could tell that she knew I was lying. She sucked on the lollipop for a long moment before delicately waving it at me. “What’s your name?”
“Sammie Louise Pritchard.”
“Sammie’s a
boy’s name.”
“It’s short for Samantha. But everybody calls me Sammie because I can pitch a softball better than most boys.”
“My mama says it’s not nice to brag.”
I shrugged. “I’m not braggin’. It’s true. We’re playing tonight at six-thirty if you wanna come see for yourself.” I’m not sure why, but it was important for me to show this confectionery girl that I was more than I appeared.
She looked anxiously at the front door of the store. “I’ll see if I can come. I’ve never been to a softball game before. Mama thinks it’s a tacky sport because the players spit a lot. And they touch their privates in front of everybody.”
“That’s baseball. That’s boys. I don’t touch my privates in front of everybody!” I climbed the steps of the hardware store. “You’re Vivien Bodine, aren’t you?”
She looked away, her green eyes reflecting the relentless summer sky. “The one and only.”
Her mother chose that moment to leave the store. Julia Bigelow Bodine looked beautiful but scary. I had enough sense in me to pretend I hadn’t been talking with her daughter. Without a word, I held the door open for her and ducked inside, letting the door bang shut behind me.
I was surprised to hear the whoosh of the door as it flew open again. I turned to see Vivien running down an aisle toward me. She thrust her lollipop into my hand. “Thanks,” she said, before turning in a whirl of white linen and red patent leather, and ran back the way she had come.
I stared at the lollipop for a long time, then put it in my mouth before I approached the counter. If there was ever a symbol of friendship, that was it. I knew then that Vivien Leigh Bodine and I were destined to be best friends.
* * * *
“Strike two!” Doug Elmore shouted from behind the home plate. Though he was only twelve, like me, Doug often refereed the girls’ games. People said he already showed enough talent to play professional baseball when he got older. I’d been moon-eyed over Doug since the fifth grade, when he’d been the only one not to laugh when I’d given my book report in the front of the classroom with the side of my dress tucked into my panties.
