by Ruth White
“Hey, boy,” I whispered to him and put my fingers through the wire.
He wagged his tail and came to me. I can’t tell you how much I loved that dog!
“It’s a girl,” Dolly said as she entered her yard.
“She’s so pretty, Dolly. What’s her name?”
“Tennessee, ’cause that’s where she came from. We call her Nessie for short.”
“Is she yours?”
“Yeah.”
Nessie kept looking at me and made no move to go to Dolly. Dolly went inside.
“If you were mine, Nessie,” I said, “you would never leave my side.”
Nessie grinned.
After a while I reluctantly left the dog and went into my own house. The kids were eating cold beans and light bread. I poured myself a glass of buttermilk.
“So how was school?” I said to nobody in particular as I parked myself at the table.
“Awful,” from Beau.
“Stupid,” from Luther.
“Miz Matney don’t like me,” from Phyllis.
“Already?” from me.
“Nobody likes you,” from Beau.
“Daddy does,” from Phyllis.
“Daddy does,” Luther mimicked her.
“Oh, shut up, Luther,” Phyllis said.
Luther cracked Phyllis on the head with his knuckles and she started bawling.
“Holy cow,” I said in disgust. “Can’t y’all get along for five minutes?”
I put my dirty glass in the sink with the breakfast dishes.
“Look who’s so high and mighty since she’s in high school!” Beau said.
I ignored him.
“Luther’s a nasty old …” Phyllis struggled to find the right word. “ … slop jar!” she bellowed at last.
“A what?” Beau, Luther, and I said together.
“A nasty old slop jar!” Phyllis cried.
That set the rest of us to laughing.
“A nasty old slop jar, huh?” I said. “Well, let’s get him, what d’you say?”
“Yeah!” Phyllis smiled through her tears, and we all made a dive for Luther.
The floor was covered with a roll-down linoleum rug, and it was sticky and grimy, but that’s where we were rasslin’, tickling Luther, squealing, and giggling, when Mama’s voice cut through the din. I wondered what she was doing up and with a dress on, too.
“What’s all this racket?” she said crossly.
Of course we didn’t pay her any attention. We never did. She grumbled and went to the sink. She filled it full of hot, soapy water, acting like she was going to do the dishes.
We stopped playing and settled around the table again.
“You can just do the dishes, Miss Smarty,” Mama said to me. “Since all you have to do is waller on the floor.”
I went to the sink without a word. Syrup and grease were congealed on the plates. Oh well, she did cook breakfast, and in all fairness to Mama, she rarely made me do the work she hated to do herself.
Mama turned on the electric stove to heat up the morning coffee, which had grown strong enough to stand alone. Then she sat down at the table.
“The telephone company’s coming at two,” she said.
“The telephone company!” we chorused.
So that’s why Mama was up and dressed.
“Yeah, they said if we could get everybody in the bend to join a party line, they’d run us a pole up here.”
“And are they all going in?” I said.
“Yeah, all except Aunt Evie. We’re meeting at the Hesses’.”
“You mean it?”
“Yeah,” Mama said, pleased with herself. “I mean it.”
“We don’t know nobody to call,” Beau said.
I went on washing dishes and looked out at the hills against the sky. My mind was racing through the next four years of high school. Bobby Lynn Clevinger probably had a telephone. All the town kids did. Maybe she would call me, and maybe a boy would call me.
“Mama, can I have a pair of white bucks?”
“A pair of what?”
“White bucks. They’re shoes. And everybody—”
“And what’s wrong with your saddle oxfords is what I’d like to know?”
“Oh, I love my saddle oxfords, but if I had two pairs of shoes for school, they wouldn’t wear out so fast, see?”
“No, I don’t see, and I’ll tell you one thing right now, you can just get this new-shoes disease out of your system. I’ll not hear no more about it.”
The coffee began to perk, and she poured herself a cup. I finished the dishes.
“Now, go see if Aunt Evie wants anything from the A & P,” Mama said.
“Are we going to the A & P?”
“Yeah, when Vern comes home.”
We went to the A & P about every two or three weeks because they had so much more stuff than the small coal company store down the holler.
I went out the back door, which opened onto the hillside, and I turned to the right and followed a wellworn path that curved around the hill to Aunt Evie’s shack above us.
Aunt Evie was nobody’s aunt that I knew of, but everybody called her that. She was sixty-three and just as poor as you can possibly be and still exist. She had no known income whatsoever. She couldn’t even take in washing because she had no washing machine and no well. Once in a while she did some sewing and canning for people, but that was about it. That’s why our community pitched in and gave her things all the time, like coal in winter. Every time any of us went to the store, we picked up something for her, too, like cornmeal, or beans, or lard. And always when you took it to her, she said, “I don’t have no change right now. I’ll pay you later.”
“Okay,” we said.
She owed us about a thousand dollars apiece, but nobody was counting, because everybody loved Aunt Evie. Like Cecil, she was the kind of person you naturally loved.
When Aunt Evie was a young girl of seventeen and dressed up in white at the church, she was jilted. She never got over it; in fact, she talked about it almost every day these forty-six years later. She was always laying plans for “when Ward comes back …” She was convinced that something prevented him from showing at the church that day, and she still expected him to return to her. Even though Ward had disappeared from these parts altogether and never contacted Aunt Evie again, she never gave up hope. When she had candles on winter nights she burned them in the windows for Ward. In the summer she sat out on her tiny porch and watched every car that came up the holler. She was pitiful.
But every person I knew, adult or child, visited Aunt Evie. She listened to you, and she remembered everything you said to her. She never judged or shamed you, and you always left her feeling like you had solved something.
I knocked on her door, then walked in, because in the first place, I knew she was home. Where else would she be? And in the second place, nobody in Ruby Valley ever locked a door. It was such a bother to have to stop whatever it was you were doing to unlock it when somebody came.
Aunt Evie’s house was very small and dark. It used to be a miner’s shack a hundred years ago, and it still looked the same as it did then. There were two rooms—a sitting room and kitchen together, and a small bedroom tucked right into the hillside in back. There was a side door leading to a huge clearing in the woods which served as her back yard.
“Hidy, girl,” she greeted me.
She was eating boiled potatoes at the kitchen table.
“Pull up a cheer and have a tater.”
I sat down with her.
“No thanks, Aunt Evie. Mama says you need anything from the store?”
“I’d like to have me some brown sugar if hit’s not a bother to you.”
“Anything else?”
“Not today, honey. How was school?”
“Okay. I made a friend, Aunt Evie.”
“First day? That’s good, Tiny.”
So I told her about Bobby Lynn Clevinger.
“Clevingers are good folks,” sh
e said. “Is she Jacob’s girl or Horace’s girl?”
“I didn’t ask her daddy’s name.”
“If she’s Horace’s girl, she’s got the finest daddy ever lived and breathed. Horace’s daddy, Clint, was Ward’s good friend.”
I leaned in close in the dim room and whispered, “Guess what, Aunt Evie?”
She wiped a bit of potato from the corner of her mouth and grinned.
“Hit’s a boy, ain’t hit?”
“No, it’s a teacher,” I said, giggling. “It’s our new band director, Mr. Gillespie. It was love at first sight.”
“So tell me,” she said breathlessly, like she was interested and excited for me, and I believe she really was. She hung on to every word I said, and asked me to repeat the part about the blond hairs on his arms. She liked that. Pretty soon she was giggling with me.
“Tiny’s in love! Tiny’s in love!” she chanted like a schoolgirl.
“Oh, Aunt Evie, nobody’s ever going to love the likes of me.”
“And what do you mean by the likes of you? You’re about as fine as they come.”
“Oh, you know, I’m not pretty and popular. I never know what to wear. Everybody else seems to know. And I don’t know what to say to boys. I’m always daydreaming, and I run into things, and—”
“My goodness,” Aunt Evie interrupted me. “I’m sure glad you told me how awful you are. ‘Cause if you hadn’t a’told me, Tiny Lambert, I woulda thought you’s an all-right gal. But I reckon you orta know.”
“You know what I mean, Aunt Evie.”
“I know you sell yourself short. Just keep telling yourself how bad you are, and sure enough you’ll live up to your own expectations.”
“What d’you mean?”
“Have you got time for a story?”
“Sure.”
I always loved Aunt Evie’s stories.
“Well, I knowed this family when I was a girl of twenty. They were smart enough, I reckon, and good folks, too, but ugly! Whoo—ee! They were nearabout the ugliest people I ever saw. They all had tiny, squinty eyes set real close together, humped noses, and big elongated chins. It was embarrassing to see them all out together. Folks looked away. Well, poor Lila was my age and probably the ugliest one of the bunch, but the tenderest-hearted. Hit hurt her real bad not to have one spark of good looks to her name. She nearly cried her eyes out before Clyde Justus come along, twenty years older’n her, and no looker hisself, but a good man, and he took her to wed. In a year’s time, Lila found herself with child, and confided to me, as I was her onliest friend.
“‘Evie,’ she said to me. ‘My baby’s going to be the loveliest child ever seed in these parts.’
“I said, ‘Course hit will be, Lila.’
“I honestly didn’t see how Lila and Clyde could have a pretty child. But, Tiny, I was wrong and I learned a valuable lesson.”
“You mean they did have a pretty baby?”
“Yeah, the most adorable little girl, who grew up into the most beautiful woman ever I beheld. Hit was a pleasure just to look at her.”
“How do you explain it, Aunt Evie?”
“Why, hit’s easy, honey. From the day that child was conceived, she heard only good things said about herself. Her mother talked to her constantly before and after she was born.
“‘You are beautiful. You are remarkable,’ Lila would say to the child. ‘You are my bright and shining star. You have silken curls, big sparkling eyes, a rosy complexion,’ things like that all the time. You know, she actually shaped that child.”
I sat in silence, thinking about her story.
“You see,” she went on, “we come to believe what we tell ourselfs over and over, and hit’s our beliefs that shape things.”
Could it be true?
“Well, that’s something to think about, Aunt Evie,” I said.
“You’re a smart girl, Tiny,” Aunt Evie said and grinned. She had teeth missing all over the place, and I felt sorry for her.
“I’ll bring the brown sugar to you,” I said and touched her arm affectionately.
She squeezed my hand.
I went down the hill talking to myself: “Tiny Lambert, you are wonderful and beautiful. You are smart and popular and …”
FOUR
When Vern came home shortly after five, it was obvious he had had something to drink. He was always in a good mood after two or three drinks, and loud and obnoxious after four or five. Then he would curl up somewhere and go to sleep. He didn’t get mean like some men do. I knew kids who were whipped regular pretty hard. But Vern didn’t hit us except for a rare swat on the butt. Sometimes he did get so mad you thought he was bound to kill somebody, but he got over it after storming and raging for a while. Or he just drove off in the pickup real fast and came back calm.
Vern was fifteen years older than Mama, and real short and stumpy. He put you in mind a whole lot of the movie comedian Lou Costello, except he wore denim britches and plaid shirts. He was getting a bald spot on the back of his head, and what hair was left was turning gray. His eyes were all the time bloodshot from too much bourbon, and the veins alongside his nose were broken. Vern’s hands were rough and dirty from working in the mines. Even after he washed them good with lava soap, they were lined with coal dust in the wrinkles around his fingernails and knuckles.
That day he was in rare form. He was telling jokes and pinching Mama on the fanny. She was aggravated with him but she didn’t let on. She hit at him playfully and bit her lip. We went out to get in the pickup to go to the store in Black Gap. I started to climb into the truck bed with the kids as usual when Vern said, “No, no, Tiny, you’re in high school now. You ride up here in the cab with me and your mama.”
A feather would have knocked me over I was so pleased. Mama smiled.
“Come on, honey,” she said. “You can set in the middle.”
I climbed in between them, grinning. Did this mean I was going to be treated like a grownup from now on? Vern backed the truck down the hill.
“Can you imagine what this child asked me for today, Vem?” Mama said.
“What in the world?” he said.
“Another pair of shoes!”
“Oh, Mama!” I protested. “Not just any shoes. Everybody at school had on white bucks today, Vern. Everybody but me. I just want to be like everybody else.”
Vern didn’t say a word.
Mama said something about everybody jumping off a cliff, but I wasn’t listening. In about ten seconds flat she had ruined my ride in the cab.
“I’m going to the hardware,” Vern announced when we were parked behind the A & P. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Mama, the kids, and I went into the store. Every single time we went to the A & P, Phyllis started begging for something. It never failed, and you could hear her all over the store.
And Mama, every single time, would start up with, “Hush now, Phyllis. Be nice. Look at that pretty display. Hush now, Phyllis. Be nice.”
Of course Phyllis would get worse, and it nearly drove me fruity. Then Luther would start in.
“Can I have a bottle of pop, Mama? Can I? Huh? Can I, Mama? Can I have a bottle of pop?”
Next Beau would whine for suckers. And all three of them were dirty and barefooted as usual.
I always lagged behind like I didn’t know these people, and Mama would fuss at me, “Quit dawdling, Tiny!”
Dawdling? I’ll declare she made that word up.
But that day Beau dawdled with me and he didn’t say anything. I guess he was growing up because you could tell he was embarrassed, too.
When Phyllis began her high-pitched squeal, I knew there was no shutting her up, so I headed for the door, hoping I wouldn’t see anybody I knew. I climbed in the truck and started to fantasize about Mr. Gillespie.
We are at a ball game and he offers me a ride home. My hair is long and blond and shiny. I am wearing a pink evening dress with yards and yards of chiffon because I am the homecoming queen. Mr. Gillespie notices I am s
hivering.
“Here, take my coat,” he says to me …
Vern climbed in the truck and tossed a shoe box my way. The lid was off that box so fast, and yes it was! Vern had gone and bought me some white bucks.
I squealed almost like Phyllis, and Vern grinned. Now, I am not a kissy person, never have been. It was years since I kissed anybody; and then it was Mama, and the kids when they were babies. But at that moment I threw my arms around Vern before I realized what it was I was going to do. Everything happened fast and I’m not sure how it came about, but what I meant to be a kiss on the cheek turned into something else. He squeezed me till I couldn’t breathe, then stuck his tongue in my mouth and wiggled it around. I about gagged because his old tongue tasted sticky and rank with tobacco and bourbon.
I struggled and he let me go.
“Ugh!” I said, rubbing my mouth hard against the back of my hand. I wanted to spit, but I didn’t want to insult him that bad. “Vern, what’d you do that for?”
Vern laughed a funny laugh, and he looked around at everything else but me.
“Well, try ‘em on!” he finally said real loud. “I’ll take ’em back right now if they don’t fit.”
I put on the shoes. Perfect fit, and beautiful! I could picture me wearing them in band tomorrow. Mr. Gillespie would see me.
“Well, I gotta go and pay the grocery bill,” Vern said and left.
I placed the saddle oxfords inside the box and wore the white bucks. Then I spit out the door of the truck a few times, and wiped out the inside of my mouth with my dress tail, but I could still taste Vern’s spit.
Ooooo … what got into him anyway?
FIVE
“Tiny Lambert!” Bobby Lynn hollered my name all the way down the hall the next morning, and I was secretly pleased because just about everybody heard her. I waited for her to wade through the crowd to me.
“Hey, girl,” she said. “Come on out and let’s sit on the fence with Rosemary till homeroom.”
“Who?”
“Rosemary Layne. You know her. She plays clarinet, too, and she sat on the other side of you yesterday in band.”
