Text copyright © 2018 by Marilyn Cram Donahue
All rights reserved.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, please contact [email protected].
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Calkins Creek
An Imprint of Highlights
815 Church Street
Honesdale, Pennsylvania 18431
calkinscreek.com
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-1-62979-723-6 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-68437-137-2 (eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949839
First e-book edition
H1.0
Design by Tim Gillner
The text is set in Bembo.
The titles are set in LeOsler.
This book is for the storytellers of my family—grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins—who so often sat around the kitchen table, telling tales that inspired me to write about the past and help me understand who I was to become.
CHAPTER ONE
MESSINA, CALIFORNIA JUNE 13, 1939
It was so hot outside the dogs quit panting. They just rolled over, lay quiet, and let their tongues hang out. My brother, Eddie, cracked an egg and fried it on the sidewalk. Mr. Abbott, the mailman, collapsed on Palm Avenue right in front of Dodie Crumper’s house, where I never slowed down if I could help it. The weather report said “more of the same,” which was no different from what we all expected, it being the middle of June.
I was lying on my stomach on the front room floor. It was the coolest place in the house. The big apricot tree spread its leafy branches above the roof, and the wide front porch was protection from the midday sun. I felt the roughness of the carpet against my elbows, felt the sweat behind my ears, heard the static when Mama turned on the radio.
“In these troubled times …,” a voice began.
I didn’t feel troubled. Just hot, and that was OK. Hot was supposed to be uncomfortable, but for me, it wasn’t. Not so long as the fan kept working. Hot meant summertime, and summertime meant vacation. Long days and longer twilights. It was the time of year when the frogs over by Willow Pond croaked all night. The time of year to steal slivers of ice from the ice truck, drink Kool-Aid all day, and play kick the can in the street until the moon came out.
I rummaged around in the cigar box that held my favorite things and found my four-leaf clover, dried and put away in a smaller box. Half a walnut shell sat on a wad of cotton. It looked like a little brown boat floating on a white cloud. I found the scattered nasturtium seeds that I kept meaning to plant. My fingers closed over an irregular stone. A moonstone. I had found it at La Mirada Beach when we went there after a storm. It had washed up with the seaweed and sand-crab shells and just seemed to be waiting to be found.
I rolled over on my back and held the stone up to the light coming through the living room window. The soft, warm glow shone through milky patches like a full moon shining through the spaces between drifting clouds.
That’s the way summer was supposed to be. A warm glow in the middle of the year. I didn’t want it to ever change.
“… escalation of the war in Europe …,” said the voice. Then the words, “… only a question of how long America can stay out of the conflict.”
But not now, I thought. Not here. I was glad Europe was far away. I closed my eyes and thought of the silkworm moths, safe in their cocoons in the shoebox on the back porch. I felt like that. Wrapped in the cocoon of my hometown, Messina, with the warm glow of the whole summer ahead of me.
I was waiting for the electric rotating fan to blow on me again when I heard the commotion outside. Somebody was whooping at the top of his lungs. Other somebodies were screaming and yelling.
I ran to the window. It looked like the new preacher, Reverend Adams, had a family. I counted two little girls the same size, a girl about my age, and a boy who looked to be a year or so older.
I opened the front door and slipped out. I took a copy of Calling All Girls magazine with me so I could sit on the porch swing and pretend I was reading. I kept the swing as still as I could because it had a squeak, and I didn’t want to miss a thing the newcomers said.
That house had always been a quiet place. Whenever I visited there with Mama, she warned me to talk soft and not clump my heels on the polished hardwood floors. We always sat on the rose velvet love seat and sipped mint tea out of flowered china cups and nibbled butter cookies with walnut halves pressed into the top. Mrs. Linfield, the preacher’s wife, would ask, “So how are you these days, Angelina?”
I always answered, “Very well, thank you, ma’am.”
I said those words even though I might have had a bleeding blister on my right heel and a sty in my left eye. I knew if I was very well, thank you, Mrs. Linfield would proceed to talk to Mama while I helped myself to another cookie.
Reverend Linfield was what people called an academic. I guessed that meant he had a lot of education. From our front porch, we could see him at his desk in an upstairs room at night.
“Working on his sermon,” Daddy would say. “Let’s hope it will be an improvement over the last one.”
I couldn’t remember what Reverend Linfield had said in any of his sermons. They were full of long words, and he had the habit of letting his eyes wander when he spoke. He seemed to be inspecting the organ, the stained glass windows, a cobweb in the corner of the ceiling. He was more interesting to watch than to listen to.
When Reverend Linfield finally retired, the church members sighed with relief. The search committee that looked for a replacement said they wanted a lively family to fill the old parsonage. It looked to me like they were getting what they’d ordered.
Mrs. Adams, the new preacher’s wife, came out of the house and began shaking her finger at the boy. He paid no attention. “Charles,” she insisted, “we must cooperate!”
From what I could see of Charles Adams, he didn’t look like he was big on cooperating. Testing the waters, I thought. Just testing the waters. I had heard my dad say that about Eddie when he caught him smoking Mr. Flannery’s dried grape vines along with a bunch of boys he wasn’t supposed to hang around with.
“You can’t get away with anything in this family,” Eddie had told me. I thought he and Charles Adams might have a lot in common.
Now Charles hung his head, but only until his mother went into the parsonage and shut the door behind her. Then he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out something. It was wiggling.
The girl my age started drawing a hopscotch pattern on the dirt driveway. Charles came up behind her, holding that wiggling thing in both hands, trying hard not to drop it. Quick as a cat’s wink, he reached out and slipped it down the back of her neck. I could see it kicking before it disappeared.
The girl yelped and started jumping around like she was standing on an anthill. She started patting herself all over to make sure nothing was hiding in her clothes, then gave another yelp and pulled at her blouse.
“You creep!” she yelled. “Your stupid toad peed all over me!” She turned and aimed a kick at a place that would have made Charles double up and fall in the dirt if it had made contact.
“You,” she shouted, “will go to the BAD PLACE if I have anything to say about it!”
“You won’t,” he answered.
“How do you know?”
“Because you, Reba Lu, don’t have any authority.”
She turned red and slammed into the
house. Charles was busy gathering some leaves from the front lawn when she came out a few minutes later, wearing a clean blouse. She went right up to him and shouted, “You’d better keep away from me. Don’t talk to me. Especially don’t touch me!”
“It’s your own fault,” Charles said. “You shouldn’t have carried on like you did. You know that toads only pee when they get excited. You scared the poor thing.”
It was at that moment, when she whirled around and went back to her hopscotching, that I decided to wander across the street. I was halfway there when Mrs. Adams came to the front door and put both hands on her hips. She spoke in the same kind of voice Mama uses when she says she’s at the end of her rope.
“Really, Reba Lu …,” she began.
“He started it.” Reba Lu stood on one foot and bent over to pick up her marker stone.
“Turn the other cheek,” Mrs. Adams advised.
“Ha!”
Then Reba Lu saw me. For a few seconds we stood there, measuring each other up. Reba Lu had red hair and freckles and what Mama called “oomph.” She looked at me like she doubted if I had any. I guess she decided to take a chance because she said, “What’s your name?”
“Angie.”
She raised one eyebrow. “Must be a nickname.”
I nodded. “It’s really Angelina.”
“I’m Reba Lu.”
“I heard.”
“It’s really Rebecca Louise, but that’s too big a mouthful. The monster is Charles. Those others over there are the twins.”
I saw them up close for the first time. Two identical little girls, about five years old, pretty as pansies. They were making mud pies and trying to feed them to a mangy cat with big eyes and a crooked tail. They had their hair braided in short pigtails tied at the ends with colored ribbons.
“Keep your distance from those sisters of mine,” Reba Lu said. “The one holding the cat’s head, that’s Violet. The one with the mud pie is Rose. My mother makes them wear purple and pink ribbons so people can tell them apart. Don’t let their names fool you. If you get too close, they’ll bite.”
From the look of the cat’s tail, they could do more damage than that. I decided to take her advice. I changed the subject. “What happened to that toad Charles put down your back?” I asked.
She shrugged. “It hopped into those bushes by the front door. It’ll probably give me warts.” She glanced over at Charles, who was putting a large leaf on the sidewalk. “Don’t pay him any mind. He has a missionary complex.”
“What?”
“He doesn’t want to be one and he’s trying to prove he isn’t the type. It’s a good thing, as far as I’m concerned. By the way, we’re the new preacher.”
“You mean your father is.”
“Nope. He says we’re all in this together.”
I wondered what the Reverend Adams would say if he could see Charles spitting on the sidewalk, which was what he was doing now. He put a leaf a few feet in front of him. Splat. “Perfect shot,” he said. Then he backed up two steps. Splat. “Almost perfect.”
He walked over to the edge of the grass and picked up something fat and black. It looked like a stinkbug. He put it carefully in the middle of a sidewalk crack, where it began to move slowly away. Charles wiggled his mouth around to work up some spit and shot it straight at the bug. He raised both fists above his head. “Bull’s-eye!” he shouted. Then he gave me a sideways glance.
“That was pretty good,” I said. I measured Charles with my eyes and saw that he was a little taller than me.
He shrugged. “Stinkbugs are pretty easy because they’re so slow. But a grasshopper—now that takes some practice. They’re liable to hop away before I have enough spit.”
I thought Charles had a real talent, but Reba Lu didn’t. “Ignore him,” she advised. She squinted at me. “How old are you?”
“Twelve.”
She nodded. “I’m almost twelve and a half. I guess we’ll be in the seventh grade together come September.” She gave me a questioning look. “You like to hopscotch?”
I picked up a smooth stone, tossed it onto the first square, and did two singles and a double over it. That’s how our friendship started. With names, and being the same age, and liking to play hopscotch in the preacher’s dirt driveway.
CHAPTER TWO
The next day, Mama and I made her famous meat loaf, scalloped potatoes, and Waldorf salad to take across the street to the parsonage. It was my favorite meal, and I was glad when Mama said, “Let’s double the recipe, and have enough for our own dinner tonight.”
It took most of the morning because there was so much mixing and chopping to do. We boiled potatoes, then skinned them and cut them into thick slices and put them into a big bowl. Mama made the white sauce while I grated cheese. We took turns chopping onions, first putting a slice from the hairy end on top of our heads to keep from crying.
“It’s a mystery to me why this works,” Mama said. She had learned about it from a cooking demonstration at a meeting of the Messina Woman’s Club. We had to stand up straight while we chopped so the slice wouldn’t fall off. I didn’t care why it worked. I was just glad it did, because I was always the one who had to chop the onions, and I was sick of red eyes and a snotty nose.
I loved cooking with Mama. She never scolded me for doing something wrong, just showed me the right way instead. And I loved the way she plunged her bare hands right into the bowl of ground meat and raw eggs and onions and bread crumbs to mix up the ingredients because that meant I didn’t have to do it. Getting raw meat and eggs under my fingernails was not my idea of a good time.
Mama put her arm around me. “This is a welcoming dinner, Angie,” she said. “Folks have been doing this for new neighbors for longer than I can remember.” She gave me a hug. “It’s a kind of sign that this is a good place to live. That our town is full of good people.” Messina did have a lot of good people in it, but I thought there were some exceptions. Miss Hallie Harper, my sixth grade teacher, for example. There were times when she was downright mean.
That afternoon, when I went over to the parsonage with Mama to deliver the food, nobody came to the door when we rang the bell.
Ding-dang-ding-dong. The four brass chimes hung just inside the front door on the entrance wall. Mrs. Linfield used to polish them with a soft cloth and Vaseline. “This is the kind of music angels make,” she had told me. But angels weren’t making the kind of noise I heard now.
“Look what you’ve done!” Reba Lu shouted from somewhere inside. A door banged, or maybe it was somebody’s head hitting the wall. “Get out of my room! Get out, get out, get out!”
“Give me back my rat!” Charles yelled.
“I already gave it to the cat.”
“Argh! I’ll get you. You’ll be sorry!”
Reba Lu shrieked, and the door slammed again.
“Now, Charles. Reba Lu. I have heard enough.” It was Mrs. Adams, speaking in a low, controlled voice.
Mama rang the bell again. A horrible yowling filled the air, and the Adams’s cat streaked around the corner of the house with the twins close behind it. Its crooked tail stuck up like a zigzag bolt of furry lightning.
Mama turned to go home, but the door opened wide and there was Mrs. Adams with a red kerchief wrapped around her hair and a dust mop in one hand. She looked at the twins and shook her head. She didn’t try to stop them. I didn’t think anybody could. She just pulled the kerchief off, smoothed her hair, and held out her hand to Mama.
“I’m Deborah Adams,” she said.
“And I’m Sally Wallace,” Mama answered.
They both looked at Mrs. Adams’s outstretched hand and started to laugh because Mama had the meat loaf in one hand and the Waldorf salad in the other. Mrs. Adams leaned the dust mop against the wall and took the meat loaf. Then they joined hands and smiled at each other as if they were old friends.
When we handed over the rest of the food, you would have thought we were delivering Christmas presents
. “Oh, Sally, you’ve saved my life,” Mrs. Adams exclaimed. “The children aren’t usually so wild. Reba Lu, especially, knows when to turn on her good manners. But all four of them are acting like savages today. I hope it’s the confusion of moving that’s done it. I’d hate to think they’ll be like this permanently.” She invited us right into the kitchen, put the food on the counter, and filled the teakettle.
“You’ll stay for a cup of tea? Of course you will. I’m dying to visit. Everything about this town is still new to me.”
We sat at the kitchen table, and Mama began to tell her things about Messina, like how you could get your groceries delivered free if you paid your monthly bill on time, and how the children’s shoes at Hanson’s dry goods store were every bit as good as the ones you could buy in the city and not nearly so expensive.
But I kept thinking about how she had called her children savages. I liked that. I couldn’t wait to tell my friend Geraldine, who was always the one to be telling me new things. I wondered if Mrs. Adams got her information about savages firsthand—if they had been missionaries living among savages before they moved to Messina.
Mrs. Adams seemed so friendly I got up my nerve to ask.
Mama acted shocked and said, “Angie, what a question!”
Mrs. Adams put her hand on Mama’s arm. “It’s all right, Sally. We have some friends who are doing mission work in New Guinea. But whenever my husband gets to thinking we might do the same, I remind him there’s plenty of missionary work to do right here at home. Anyway, I have quite enough to deal with trying to keep peace among our own four.”
The teakettle began to sing, and she put the tea things and a plate of cookies on a tray. “We’ll have tea in the parlor, like proper folks do,” she said. She laughed like she’d made a joke, and I saw Mama smile. This was sure a lot different from having tea with Mrs. Linfield.
It wasn’t but a few minutes before Reba Lu came in and shook Mama’s hand. When Charles came in, I could hardly believe he was the same person who had just put a toad down his sister’s blouse. He wore a clean shirt that was tucked into his pants, and it looked like he had put water on his hair and combed it flat on top. He sat down and ate about a dozen cookies and talked to Mama about his hobbies, which included reptiles, stamps, and camping out.
When the Crickets Stopped Singing Page 1
