Weeping Willow

by Ruth White

  Off she went. She wasn’t Aunt Evie, but her yodeling sounded pretty.

  One day I went to call upon

  My pretty little miss,

  And I didn’t hear her

  Odel … odel … le … di … whoo!

  Rosemary and I applauded for her. We were in the mood and we sang some more. We did “It Don’t Hurt Anymore,” “Oh Baby Mine,” and “The Great Pretender.” Then we started on “I’ll See You in the Spring.” I really loved that song, and let loose. I threw back my head and looked at the sky where the sun was dancing, and I was thinking what a wonderful day it was.

  I’ll see you in the willow

  Weeping in the stream.

  I’ll see you in the newborn fawn

  Soft as in a dream.

  I’ll stand high on a mountain

  And watch young birds take wing.

  And though you won’t be there,

  I’ll see you in the spring.

  That’s when it occurred to me that I was singing all by myself. I clamped my mouth shut and jerked my head toward Bobby Lynn and Rosemary. They were just looking at me with these goofy, dumbfounded expressions. I felt the blood rush to my face. What kind of blunder had I made this time?

  “What’sa matter?”

  “What’s the matter?” Bobby Lynn said incredulously as she put her hands on her hips. “Girl, I never knew you could sing like that!”

  “Like what?”

  “I never knew anybody could sing like that,” Rosemary added with awe in her voice. “Except Patti Page or Teresa Brewer.”

  I was too stunned to speak.

  “That was wonderful, Tiny,” Bobby Lynn said.

  They were serious. They really liked my singing.

  “You know,” Rosemary said, “they’re doing a talent show this year.”

  “No, I didn’t know,” Bobby Lynn said. “When?”

  “After the beauty contest. They’re doing it so the boys will have something to compete in. But it’s for everybody. Y’all have to be in it. Tiny can sing and you can yodel.”

  “Sing some more,” Bobby Lynn said to me.

  But I had a sudden attack of shyness.

  “Not by myself. Y’all sing with me.”

  We started a lot of songs together, which I finished by myself. Afterward we went in and watched television. Mrs. Layne made sandwiches and popcorn, birthday cake and tea.

  We watched Judge Roy Bean, Fury, and Huntington Dance Party before the evening news came on.

  All the time my mind was racing giddily: “I can sing! I can sing!”

  NINE

  Me and Mr. Gillespie are sitting in his car at the drive-in movie at the mouth of Glory on a Saturday night. We are both wearing short sleeves and our arms touch …

  “Play me some checkers.” Luther plopped down beside me in the porch swing, and jolted Mr. Gillespie right out of my head. It was a beautiful Sunday in early May, a few days after my fifteenth birthday. I was in shorts for the first time of the season, and a bird was singing from a treetop, “Pret-ty! Pret-ty!”

  “Oh, Luther,” I groaned. “Not now. It’s not a checkers day.”

  Luther grinned. “Wouldn’t you like to whup me today?”

  “Huh!”

  That was a joke. Luther was the undisputed checkers champ of Ruby Valley—maybe the world. He could beat anybody. Sometimes strangers showed up at the door to challenge Luther, and they always went away shaking their heads. Luther had just turned nine and he’d been at it for three years. It was a freak thing because he couldn’t do anything else. He still couldn’t read, or add more than two numbers together. Sometimes he had trouble tying his shoestrings, but he sure could play checkers.

  “You ain’t played me in a long time,” he said. “Maybe you can beat me now.”

  He grinned again, showing two big rabbit teeth in front and a red tongue where he’d been licking dry cherry Jell-O out of the package.

  “Sure, Luther,” I said. “And maybe President Eisenhower will come to supper tonight.”

  “Oh, come on, Tiny.”

  I looked at the hills, which were all filled out with green again. Oh, what a perfect day, I thought, to spend with someone wonderful like Mr. Gillespie … to go romping in the wild places, holding hands.

  “If you’ll play me a game, I’ll tell you something I heard Cecil say about you.”

  “What? What’d he say? Cecil Hess? Huh! Was he talking about me? I don’t care what Cecil Hess said about me. What was it?”

  “Play me a game.”

  “I don’t want to play checkers and I don’t care what Cecil Hess said about me. Was it good or bad?”

  “I’ll lay out the board,” Luther said and pulled up a crate he kept there on the porch for this very purpose. Then he sat down on the floor cross-legged and laid out the checkers. He always played black. I was red.

  “Who did he say it to?”

  “Your move.”

  “Was he talking to you?”

  “No, he was talking to Roger Altizer on the telephone.”

  “Luther! Were you listening in on the party line?”

  “No, I just picked it up and heard your name.”

  Luther made one of his brilliant moves.

  “Why don’t you just jump ’em all now and get it over with?” I said.

  He laughed. He was in his glory.

  “So what’d Cecil say about me?”

  “He said somebody likes you.”

  “Somebody? Who?”

  “I dunno. Some boy thinks you’re cute and he likes you”

  “Who? Who?”

  “That’s all I heard.”

  “You mean Cecil said, ‘Somebody likes Tiny’? Just somebody?”

  “No, he said the name.”

  “And?”

  “And what? Tiny, you can’t move there.”

  “His name, stupid, what’s his name?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Luther, did you make all that up?”

  “No, go ask Cecil.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  He jumped my last two men, and the game was over.

  “One more game,” he said.

  “No!”

  “Why not? Didn’t I tell you what Cecil said?”

  “But you didn’t get the name.”

  The telephone rang.

  Inside the house I heard Beau and Phyllis go scrambling, and at the same time I made my own mad dash, stumbling over Luther on the way, and the checkers went flying.

  Luther said a real bad word, and I yelled at him over my shoulder, “You had something in your mouth I wouldn’t even have in my hand!”

  Phyllis beat me to the phone.

  “Hey, Dixie,” she said. “Mama’s still in bed. Daddy is, too. What d’you want?”

  Dixie was Mama’s childhood friend who I couldn’t stand. She was always asking me personal questions like, “What size bra you into now, Tiny?”

  “Here, talk to Tiny,” Phyllis said, and thrust the phone into my hands.

  “Hey, Dixie,” I said

  “Tiny, I need to talk to Hazel right now, so go git ’er.”

  “I can’t do that, Dixie. She’s asleep, and you know how she is when she’s woke up.”

  “Well, Tiny Lambert, your Grandpa Lambert died last night. I just found out when I got to the hospital for my shift. You want to be the one to tell your mama?”

  “Died? What of?”

  “Meanness probably, but that’s not for me to say. You want to break the news to Hazel?”

  “No, I’ll go get her.”

  “Well, make it snappy. I ain’t got all day.”

  I went slow, rehearsing what I was going to say to Mama. I knocked on her door.

  “Mama?”

  No answer. I waited.

  I knocked a second time.

  “Mama?”

  “Don’t knock on that door again, Tiny!” she hollered.

  “Mama, Dixie’s on the phone, and she says it’s real,
real important.”

  “Dixie’s hind end!” Vern snorted.

  “Mama,” I said. “It’s an emergency.”

  I didn’t hear anything for a long time.

  “Mama,” I called again, exasperated.

  Being between Mama and Dixie was a hard place to be.

  “All right. All right,” Mama mumbled. “Tell’er I’m coming.”

  So I went to the phone and told Dixie Mama was coming, then I went back out on the porch and sat in the swing.

  “I can’t find all my checkers!” Luther sputtered. “You gotta buy me some more!”

  “Shh …” I tried to hush him. “I’ll help you find them. Now listen …”

  Mama could be heard on the stairs.

  “What is it?” Luther whispered, and sat down by me.

  “Just listen.”

  “Hey, Dixie,” Mama said. “Something the matter?”

  Silence for a minute.

  Then, “Oh.”

  That’s all she said

  “Grandpa Lambert died,” I whispered to Luther.

  “Mama’s daddy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Thank you, Dixie,” Mama said. “No, you don’t need to come. I gotta think. ’Bye now.”

  And that was that. Mama went back to bed. Derndest thing.

  I thought about the night I saw Grandpa Lambert at school. I never did tell Mama about that because I thought it would upset her. One time I heard her say she saw him in Black Gap and he wouldn’t talk to her. She cried. But that was long ago. Maybe she didn’t care anymore.

  I sat swinging and thinking about Grandpa and Mama for a long time. It seemed like such a waste for them not to see each other all those years just because … because why? A stupid feud between the Mullinses and the Lamberts a hundred years ago.

  About an hour later, Mama came downstairs wearing her britches, an old plaid shirt, and a straw hat. She came out and sat beside me and lit a cigarette.

  “Did Dixie tell you what happened?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Tiny, let’s you and me go up to Ruby Mountain.”

  “Okay.”

  “I got to decide what to do. The body’s at Childress’s Funeral Home, and I don’t want to bring it here.”

  “Don’t he have some more kin somewheres?”

  “No, his family all moved down to Ohio back in the thirties, ’cept for him. He lost track of them, and I don’t even know their names. There was me and my mother and my brother, Danny James. But they both died of scarlet fever when I was fourteen. That left just me and Daddy till you came along two years later.”

  Vern came down the stairs and stood in the doorway with the screen door open.

  “Well, come on,” he said, and took the pickup key off its hook just inside the front door.

  “Where you going to?” Phyllis called from inside the house. “I wanna go.”

  “No,” Mama said. “Just me and Tiny. Get me a bucket out of the kitchen, Phyllis.”

  Phyllis came out and stood beside Vern.

  “A bucket? What for?”

  “The strawberries are ripe up on the mountain. Go on now.”

  “Cain’t I go, Daddy?” Phyllis said sweetly and sidled up to him.

  “She can ride along,” Vern said to Mama. “We’ll drop y’all off and come back for you later.”

  “I reckon,” Mama conceded. “But get me that bucket, Phyllis. The blue chipped one with the daisies on it.”

  “I get to go, too, Ha! Ha! Ha!” Phyllis couldn’t help needling me as she went in.

  The rest of us went down the tall steps. I climbed in the back of the truck because I wasn’t about to sit beside Vern in my shorts. Then Phyllis came out with the bucket and we backed down the hill onto the dirt road. We headed up the holler toward Ruby Mountain, and Phyllis started singing a silly song about a poor old woman who swallowed a fly, and my mind drifted away.

  Mama was just a year older than me when she got pregnant with me.

  Mama, I thought, what were you like? Did you have daydreams like mine? Did you love my daddy like I love Mr. Gillespie?

  The truck began to climb up between two mountains that grew closer and closer together, and the road grew narrower and rockier. Pretty soon it was no more than a cow path with big rocks sticking out of the ground; then the road wound around the face of the mountain like a belt riding up, and you could look down over the side of the truck straight down into a holler far, far below. One slip of the wheel, and …

  I visualized the truck bouncing down the mountain, turning over and over, spilling us out and squashing us.

  It is stroll-and-perch time on Monday morning. Tiny Lambert is on everyone’s lips.

  “She was a wonderful person,” they say. “Wonderful.”

  “Nobody knew just how wonderful she really was,” Bobby Lynn says.

  “She was never appreciated for her marvelous singing talent,” Rosemary says.

  And in band, Mr. Gillespie announces that Tiny Lambert is to be buried in the graveyard there on the hill outside the band-room window where she can always hear the music she loved so much …

  “I don’t want to pick strawberries anyhow,” Phyllis was saying.

  The road leveled out and we were riding across the top of the mountain. It was covered with daisies and violets and other blooming things. You could look out and see for miles—mountains and valleys, and the sky was all around us. You didn’t have to look straight up to see it.

  A memory flashed before my mind’s eye: a memory of me and Willa, tumbling and laughing in the wildflowers. And I felt like I was coming home.

  TEN

  The truck stopped in front of a log cabin. Honest to goodness, it looked like Abe Lincoln’s birthplace or something. Mama got out of the truck and stood there staring at the house. I got out and stood beside her.

  “I’ll be back about four,” Vern called.

  Mama didn’t say anything. Phyllis climbed out, set the bucket on the porch, and climbed up front with Vern.

  “Okay?” Vern yelled. “Four o’clock?”

  “Okay,” Mama said, not taking her eyes from the cabin.

  Vern turned the truck around and left.

  “It ain’t changed a bit,” Mama said.

  I didn’t say anything because I didn’t remember the cabin. Mama walked slowly around it, and I followed.

  Suddenly a wonderful aroma floated over us … as sweet and delicate as … Willa! It was Willa’s smell. Was she here? I turned around and around, expecting to see her.

  “Honeysuckle,” Mama said as she paused, threw back her head, closed her eyes, and breathed in deeply. “That aroma was thick in the air the day you were born, Tiny.”

  “Honeysuckle?” I said. “Where is it?”

  “There.” Mama pointed to a broken-down fence running at a distance. It was covered with green foliage and small peach-colored flowers. “It grows wild everywhere up here and blooms in May.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said breathlessly. “Oh, Mama, it’s all so beautiful. How could you leave this place?”

  Mama laughed and put her arm around me.

  “It was a prison to me,” she said. “Beautiful, yes, but still a prison. I thought life was something that was happening to someone else, somewhere else.”

  We walked together. Then there it was: the greenest, flowingest, most beautiful weeping willow tree in the world. Anyone who has never seen a weeping willow is deprived. It grows like an umbrella, its slender pendent branches filled out with tiny leaves sweeping the ground in places, as it weeps, sweeps, sways.

  “Do you remember playing under there?” Mama asked.

  “No, but oh, Mama, I love it!”

  “You always did. In one way I hated to take you away from all this.”

  “Oh, I wish you hadn’t!”

  Mama sighed. “I felt life was passing me by.”

  “But why Vern, Mama?”

  “Just to get away,” Mama admitted. “Don’t you se
e? I was suffocating. I would have married anybody who would take me away.”

  “And was life with Vern any better?”

  Mama got tears in her eyes, and I felt this great rush of pity. I hugged her real tight; then we just stood there holding each other and crying. I was crying because she was crying, and I wasn’t quite sure why she was crying.

  “Oh, Tiny, I was so young I didn’t know what to do.”

  “I know, Mama.”

  “And I wanted a better life for both of us. Vern seemed a way out”

  “I know. I know.”

  “It is twelve miles from here to Black Gap,” Mama said. “And we had no car. I couldn’t go to the store when I wanted, or see a movie, or meet other young people. I couldn’t even go to church.”

  We crawled up under the weeping willow then, and sat on the ground. It was a cool, private, dark world where you could barely see out, and nobody could see in. All around us the branches swept toward the ground, touching it gently in places.

  “And Vern’s been good to me, Tiny. Ain’t he been good to you?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Now, Tiny, you needn’t sit there and tell me Vern ain’t been good to you.”

  “I reckon,” I said.

  “You reckon what?”

  “He’s been good to me for the most part.”

  “All of us,” Mama said. “I don’t know how we would survive without him.”

  “But did you never love Vern, Mama?”

  Mama took a deep breath.

  “That’s right, Tiny. I never did.”

  That seemed like the saddest thing of all, for two people to live together all these years and have three children together while one of them was lonely in her heart.

  “Vern’s okay,” I said. “When he’s not drinking.”

  I leaned back onto the cool ground, breathed in the smell of honeysuckle, and looked up at the branches of the tree. This must have been where Willa got her name. Every day of my babyhood, I probably heard the phrase “pretty willow.”

  “What was my daddy like?” I said quickly, then held my breath. I never dreamed I would ask Mama that question.

  “He was just a boy,” Mama said softly. “Just seventeen.”

  “Do I look like him?”

  “No, you look like me, Tiny. He had bright red curly hair and freckles and green eyes.”