by Ruth White
“Red hair!”
“Yeah, the reddest, curliest mop I ever did see.”
“Did you love him lots?”
“Yes, I still do. But I guess he died in the war. His own mama never heard from him again, and the army to this day can’t say what happened to him.”
“What was his name?”
“Ernest Bevins. He was from Shortt’s Gap.”
Ernest Bevins! And he had curly red hair like Willa’s. What a strange, strange thing!
“Wanna go pick some strawberries, Tiny?”
“Sure.”
We crawled out and I followed Mama a ways across the mountaintop behind the cabin. We came upon a spring of sparkling clear water bubbling up out of the ground.
“’This is where we got all our water,” Mama said and knelt down by the spring. She took water in her hands and drank it.
“Ahh … still the best water in the world.”
I drank some, and it really was good—much better than what we had down in the holler. Our water was full of iron. It tasted bad and smelled bad, and stained the sinks and tub and toilet a rusty red color. You couldn’t scrub it off to save your hide.
Beyond the spring was a huge strawberry patch. It went a long ways back and spread down over the side of the mountain. I never saw so many strawberries, and they were ruby-red ripe.
“Mama,” I said. “There’s enough strawberries here to feed the whole holler.”
“I know,” Mama said. “You and the kids can pick ‘em if you want to, and sell ’em.”
“Are they ours?”
“Course they’re ours. This whole mountaintop is ours now.”
I looked around at the honeysuckle and the cabin and the willow and the wildflowers and strawberries.
“You mean it, Mama? It’s ours? The willow tree, too?”
“All of it.” Mama smiled and popped a strawberry in her mouth. She looked happy.
“Ain’t you sad about Grandpa?” I said.
“Huh!” Mama snorted bitterly. “That old man hated me and made my life miserable. I tried my best to make him love me, but he didn’t have it in him. He believed women were wicked and weak and stupid, all of us. So now he’s dead, and we’re alive!”
“What are we gonna do with all this, Mama?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll think about it and talk to Vern about it.”
We filled our bucket in about twenty minutes and Mama said, “Let’s go in the house.”
So we went inside the cabin. It had four rooms all cluttered up with junk and dust and homemade furniture. The first room was a living room and it went straight into the kitchen. Then there were two bedrooms. Mama walked into one of them, and I followed her. It was not a bad room at all. There was a fourposter bed with a patchwork quilt, and a dresser with a mirror.
“This is where you and me slept together every night for three years,” Mama said. “Both of us babies.”
She sat down on the bed and I sat beside her, and we looked out the window at the weeping willow, which was only a short distance away.
“When the moon was full,” Mama said dreamily, “it threw shadows of the willow tree across our bed. We would go to sleep with the willow branches sweeping across our faces. It was nice.”
Willa, Willa, on my pilla’ …
“You were born in this bed,” Mama went on. “And you were the prettiest baby I ever did see.”
“Where did you get my name, Mama?”
“That’s always been my secret, Tiny, but you have a right to know. My daddy wouldn’t let me call you Ernestina like I wanted to, for Ernest. So I thought of Tina, but I knew he wouldn’t hear of that either, so I hit on Tiny—a version of Tina. I knew he would never figure out it came from Ernest’s name. So in that small way I defied him.”
“Ernestina? That’s nice, Mama.”
“Don’t you like Tiny?”
“Yeah, that’s nice, too. It’s different. There’s a hundred Marys and Susies and Shirleys in school, but there’s only one Tiny.”
Mama laughed. “And it suits you, too,” she said. “There is something very feminine about being tiny, Tiny.”
We both laughed.
That laugh sounded nice and it looked nice on Mama’s face.
We left the bucket of strawberries on the porch and went back to walking against the sky.
Afterward I remembered that day, not as the day Grandpa died, but as the day Mama came alive.
ELEVEN
There followed a strange time for me and for my whole family.
Grandpa was buried up on Ruby Mountain under a dogwood tree beside his wife and boy, who died of scarlet fever in 1940.
Vern took me and the boys up on Ruby Mountain every evening for the next two weeks to pick strawberries. Phyllis absolutely refused to pick, and I was too ashamed to knock on people’s doors to sell, so we struck up a deal. I picked, she sold, and we split fiftyfifty. We made thirty-two dollars apiece and the boys made more, but, still, buckets of strawberries rotted on the ground.
“Next year we gotta get organized better,” Mama said. “And get some help. What in the world did my daddy do with all them strawberries?”
Mama had a fit of motherhood unequaled in my memory. Most mornings she popped out of bed, cooked breakfast, washed dishes, and started doing things. She made kitchen curtains. and couch covers and put up strawberry preserves. I had so many clean clothes I ran out of drawer space, and we discovered windows and mirrors we never knew we had. She planted petunias out beside the house near the Horns’, and a small vegetable garden on the hillside.
Very early one Saturday morning, Aunt Evie came out and found Mama looking up at the sun where it was just rising in the east.
“What’s the matter, Hazel?” Aunt Evie hollered. “You never been up in time to see the sun in that position before?”
In the past, Mama’s feelings would have been hurt, but that day she laughed hard. And Aunt Evie laughed, too. Then the two of them worked in the garden together all morning, and Mama got sunburned. Was this really my mama? It was when I went to the movies one day with Rosemary and Bobby Lynn, and we saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers that I finally understood. Yes, I thought, that must be it: my mama’s body had been taken over by aliens.
Mama even talked Vern into finishing the fireplace. It looked nice except for that ugly old gun hanging over it.
“Why don’t you sell that thing to Mr. Horn and get it over with?” I said to him.
“Sell it!” he bellowed. “Why, that gun went through the Civil War with my great-granddaddy Vernon Mullins, who was just sixteen and left his right leg over there in the ground in Alexandria. Sell it?”
“Oh,” I said, hoping he would shut up. “I see.”
“It’s a piece of history. It’s all that’s left of him. That’s the trouble with you young people nowadays. You don’t appreciate nothing.”
And Vern stroked the musket on the wall.
Well, shut my mouth. It was still ugly.
In June the First Annual Black Gap High School Talent Show was held in the auditorium one Friday night. Rosemary had been after me and Bobby Lynn to enter, but we were both plain scared. The three of us went to the talent contest and cheered for Paul Hurley, a senior, who picked a guitar and sang “The Cry of the Wild Goose.” All the time I was thinking, “I could beat him.”
Paul’s picture was in the Black Gap paper the next week with a long list of prizes he won donated by local merchants. I gazed at that picture for hours and read the list of prizes over and over, daydreaming it was me.
When school was out, Mama slept later and we tiptoed around the house with a finger to our lips reminding each other to keep it down. You see, when she went into a cleaning frenzy, she drafted us to help her. It was funny how all those years we wished Mama would get up and do something. Now we wished she would just stay in bed.
One day after Vern came home from work, he called me out of my room into the kitchen, where he and Mama were sitting at t
he table with a pile of official papers. I sat down.
They stared at me with such strange expressions I glanced down at my shirt to see if everything was buttoned up.
“What’sa matter?” I said.
“Nothing,” they said together and looked at each other, then down at the papers.
Well, something was up.
“What’s all that stuff?” I said.
“It’s your grandpa’s will,” Mama said. “We didn’t know he had one till today, when his lawyer dropped it off.”
“Oh.”
Vern cleared his throat loudly, but it was Mama who spoke again.
“Remember that day I told you Ruby Mountain was all ours?”
“Yeah, I remember.”
“Well, I was wrong. It ain’t ours a’tall. It’s yours.”
“Mine? What d’you mean?”
“He left it all to you,” Mama said. “Sixteen and a half acres, but you can’t touch it till you’re eighteen years old.”
“So you own a mountaintop,” Vern said.
I was stunned.
Mama laughed.
“Why me?” I said. “He didn’t even know me.”
“He must have seen you somewhere. He told his lawyer you look like a Lambert, and you talk like a Lambert, and he didn’t want no Mullins to git his land.”
“So it says here in the will.” Vern spoke up. “‘My granddaughter, Tiny Lambert, is my sole hair.’”
“His what?”
“His hair.”
“Oh.”
I wanted to laugh, but I coughed instead. Vern didn’t know about silent letters.
Okay, so I was an heir.
I took a deep breath.
“Wow,” I said, and I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Owning Ruby Mountain meant only one thing to me at the moment: the weeping willow was mine.
A few days later, Mr. Horn came over and offered Vern a hundred dollars for his ugly gun.
“Nothin’ doin’.” Vern laughed. “We’re landowners now. And no amount of money will buy that musket.”
Mama like to have had a hissy when she heard that. I never heard her talk back to Vern like she did that day.
“Do you know what we could do with a hundred dollars?” she screamed at him.
Then they didn’t speak to each other for days. Mama was changing, for sure, and it was unsettling to everybody. Sometimes I went over and talked to Nessie about it, and sometimes I went up to visit Aunt Evie, but most of the time I stayed in my room out of Mama’s and Vern’s way.
One day when I was cleaning out a dresser drawer, I came across an old valentine I got one time in the third grade. It was one big red heart with the words printed: DO YOU LOVE ME? And there were two boxes, one marked YES and one marked NO. I was supposed to check one box and return the valentine to the sender. The trouble was it wasn’t signed, and I never knew who sent it to me. But it gave me an idea: an anonymous love letter to Mr. Gillespie! I could say anything I wanted to say without ever letting him know who I was. And in a sense we would still be communicating. Our minds would touch.
I was so excited I spent hours writing and revising the perfect letter:
Mr. Gillespie, band director
Black Gap, Va.
Dear Mr. Gillespie:
I have loved you for a very long time, and I am very blue that our love has not ever had a chance to blossom and bloom and if you knew me you would love me also and I will tell you something about myself. 1 am very tall and I have very long silken curly blond hair, and blue eyes. Some people say I am very pretty. I don’t know. I think about you every night before 1 go to sleep. Will you think of me too?
XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXO
Ernestina
I thought that was clever of me to sign it Ernestina. I hid the letter in my clarinet case until I had a chance to go to the coal company store to buy a stamp and mail it.
A week later we started summer band practice on the field, and I got to see him again. He looked at me like always—like I was just anybody. In a way I was relieved, and in another way I was disappointed. He was cute in his Bermuda shorts.
When we played the marches I was ashamed I hadn’t touched my clarinet since school went out. Rosemary was promoted to second clarinet while Bobby Lynn and I stayed at third. I vowed again to practice every day.
When school started, I still had thirty dollars, and this year I planned to have the right clothes. I went to Rosemary for advice.
“What do you reckon I should buy for school?” I asked her.
“Black,” she said. “That’s the color for this year. Black poodle skirts, slim jims, and black flats with seamless hose.”
“Hose?”
I couldn’t keep a pair of hose from running to save my life, but I bought two pairs anyway, and a pair of black imitation-suede flats, a black skirt with a pink poodle on it, his gold chain leading to the waist, and a pair of black slim jims.
On the first day of the tenth grade I looked like all the other girls at Black Gap High School, and once again I felt my life had taken a decided turn for the better.
Then one Saturday, when I came home from marching with the band in a parade, there was a surprise waiting for me in the living room: a television set! Mama and everybody else were already hypnotized, so I joined them in watching The Lone Ranger. Except for running to the kitchen for food, and going to the bathroom, all of us stayed in the same spot until signoff time at 11 p.m. We watched Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour, My Little Margie, and Your Hit Parade. It was magic.
The next morning I got up real early and went tippytoeing down the stairs to turn on the set when it signed on. But surprise, surprise, there was Mama and Vern and the boys eating cereal in the living room and watching the test pattern.
It was about that time that Phyllis, who was now eight, started up with a phase of aggravation unprecedented in anybody’s memory. She would squeal like a pig when I was trying to watch television or talk on the phone. She would ask the stupidest questions all the time, and follow me around every step I took. She would scoot right up against me on the couch and put her cold dirty feet on me, and she refused to wear socks. I took to pinching her as hard as I could when she got against me like that. Then she would squeal and Mama would yell at me. I just couldn’t stand that kid. Sometimes I would give her the silent treatment for days at a time, but that made her worse. My comfort came from Aunt Evie, who assured me that the Lord does not put more on us than we can bear. That was nice to know, but I wondered if the Lord had miscalculated this time.
TWELVE
When Dolly Horn got married and moved to Princeton, West Virginia, I was the only one who ever paid any attention to Nessie. The Horns didn’t even feed her regular, and she sat there behind that fence looking my way all the time. She really loved me, and I loved her more and more.
I went over there a lot to talk to her through the fence. She whined and got as close as she could. I always checked to see if she had fresh water, and most of the time she didn’t. So I gave her water and all the food I could smuggle to her. Mama and Vern both fussed if they saw me feeding her.
One day after school I talked to Aunt Evie about Nessie. We were sitting at her kitchen table playing Old Maid, and eating pumpkin tarts.
“I’m the only one who cares about her,” I said. “And I would love to have her. I’ll declare it seems like I can’t ever have anything I really want. I always have wished for a collie dog, and there Nessie sits all the time pining, and I can’t have her. And then there’s boys. I want a real boyfriend, somebody cute and popular, and not one boy looks my way.”
“Give ’em time, Tiny.” Aunt Evie patted my hand. “You’re fleshing out real good now. One of these mornings you’re gonna look in the mirror and find a pretty woman.”
“Sure!”
The very next moment I was sitting there holding the Old Maid.
“See!” I cried. “An ugly Old Maid.”
Aunt Evie laugh
ed.
“Bite your tongue!” she said. “Remember what I told you about saying nice things to yourself?”
“It don’t work, Aunt Evie.”
“Hit does so work!”
Aunt Evie shuffled the cards and dealt another hand.
“Now, Tiny, have you asked Ralph Horn about Nessie?”
“Asked him what?”
“Ask him can you have her. I heard him with my own ears say he’d like to get shed of that dog since Dolly’s gone.”
“He said that?”
“Yeah, and I’ll make you a deal, Miss Pouty-Mouth. You ask Ralph Horn if you can take Nessie off’n his hands for ’im, and I’ll talk to Vern for you.”
“You will? What’ll you say? He won’t listen. It won’t do no good. What’ll you say?”
“Just listen to yourself.” Aunt Evie shook her head. “Never mind what’ll I say to Vern. What’ll you say to Ralph?”
“I’ll be as nice and polite as I know how to be.”
“Good,” Aunt Evie said. “My Ward useter say sugar draws more flies than vinegar. And hit’s the God’s truth.”
Then Aunt Evie was left holding the Old Maid. We laughed.
“Yeah, there I am,” she said. “I’m the Old Maid for sure.”
I dealt, and we played in earnest silence for a few minutes.
“What is ‘happily ever after,’ Aunt Evie?” I finally said. “Does it exist?”
“Yes, Tiny. I never found hit, my own self, but I know hit exists. If I could have married my Ward …”
When I went back home and into the kitchen, Vern was sitting at the table in his underwear. A bottle of bourbon was in front of him, and he was holding a glass half-full.
I went to the refrigerator and poured myself some milk. Then I stood looking out the window over the sink, not even thinking of Vern Mullins.
“What’sa matter?” he said, and I could tell, the way he was slurring his words, he was nearly drunk. “You never saw a man in his drawers before?”
