When the Crickets Stopped Singing

by Marilyn Cram-Donahue

  Charles didn’t mention spitting. I decided he could be polite when he wanted to. Mrs. Adams said he and Reba Lu were just one year apart, so I figured he would be starting eighth grade come September.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Charles after we went home—how he could put a toad down Reba Lu’s blouse, then turn right around and have good manners while he ate cookies and talked to Mama. But mostly, I thought about his spitting. Men spat on the sidewalks and in the street. It was a dirty thing to do. Everybody knew that. Still, men got away with it and so did boys. They spat in the wastebasket at school, at the bushes on the playground, and on the railroad tracks on a hot day, so they could make them sizzle. They even spat at us girls and at each other.

  But Charles took the cake. I’d seen him hit a leaf, dead on, and he had marked that stinkbug even when it was crawling away. Reba Lu had told me that he once had to memorize five Old Testament Bible verses for spitting in the Sunday school drinking fountain from three feet away.

  I made up my mind to find out what real spitting felt like. The kitchen sink wouldn’t do. It had to be outside in broad daylight. I was walking alongside our house on the narrow sidewalk that went by the kitchen window when it came to me that this was as good a place as any.

  I looked along the walkway and saw a large stinkbug moving slowly across the concrete about two feet away. A moving target, I thought. If Charles Adams could mark a moving bug, so could I. And this one was even bigger than his, which ought to make my job easier. I sucked the insides of my cheeks to work up a good wad of spit, leaned over, and aimed.

  My saliva landed in front of the stinkbug. The bug backed off a bit and began to detour around the wet blob. I leaned over to try again, but I suddenly felt something was wrong. Probably it was that conscience thing that I kept hearing about in Sunday school. I turned around and saw Mama, staring at me from behind the kitchen window screen.

  The back porch door slammed, and she was standing on the sidewalk. She looked at the stinkbug and then at me. I swallowed what was in my mouth.

  “Angelina, were you trying to spit on that poor bug?” she demanded.

  I nodded.

  “It was not a good idea,” she said quietly. Which told me quite clearly that ladies do not spit at all. Not anywhere. Not even on stinkbugs. Then she made me move the bug, which was beginning to stink something awful, to a safe place. Then I had to get the hose and wash down the sidewalk.

  I told myself this was all Charles’s fault, but I knew that wasn’t true. He hadn’t told me to spit on the stinkbug. I had just wanted to see if I could do it myself. When I finished hosing, I went out to sit on the front steps and play jacks. I had just done foursies when I looked across the street and saw a stranger coming down the sidewalk. He looked to be a bit older than my daddy. He was wearing a dark suit. Even on a hot day like this! It looked a little shabby, but he had put a red carnation in his buttonhole. He walked kind of funny, favoring one leg. He stopped a minute and leaned over to rub it. Then he took a few more steps and stopped by the low-clipped privet hedge that bordered the lawn of the Clement house right next door to the parsonage.

  I’d never seen him before. We didn’t have many strangers in our small town. When we did, people wanted to know why they were there. Were they somebody’s kin? An old friend from out of town? A new shopkeeper? Congregational or Baptist? This man cleared his throat with a gurgling sound, leaned over, and spat a yellow wad that looked like pus into the gutter. I turned my head and looked the other way. It was clear that he was not a gentleman.

  His spitting made me feel sick. Not like when I watched Charles trying to hit a leaf. That had made me go right home and try it myself. But this was disgusting. The spit seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him, somewhere dirty.

  I was picking up my jacks to go inside when Mama came out on the front porch. She looked across the street, and raised one hand to shade her eyes from the sun. Then she went right down the front steps and walked over to the curb.

  “Jefferson?” she called out. “Is that you?”

  I stared. I couldn’t believe Mama knew that man.

  “It is you,” she said. “It’s been a long spell since you were in Messina. Are you back to stay?” I didn’t think she sounded too friendly.

  He tipped his hat to her, the way men do when they talk to ladies. “Hello, Sally,” he said. But he didn’t answer her question. He just turned and walked up the steps of the Clement house and rang the bell. It was a three-bedroom bungalow where the choir director, Lucy Clement, lived with her mother and a boarder named Gisele Martin who taught first grade at the grammar school.

  When nobody came, he knocked hard on the door. Mrs. Clement opened it. As soon as she saw him, she commenced wailing. She sounded as distressed as my dog, Buster, did when he got bit by a snake last summer. But that Jefferson person just stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

  Mama came back up the porch steps. She was shaking her head the way she sometimes did when Eddie and I didn’t act the way she thought we should. “That man,” she told me, “never did have good sense. Always taking chances. One time, he raced his old Ford out on the City Creek Road and ended up in the river.” She looked thoughtful. “I suspect he’s come on hard times.”

  Then she put her hand on my shoulder. “Mr. Jefferson Clement did his bit in the army, and he got decorated for it. He must have done something to deserve that medal, and we oughtn’t to forget it.”

  So that’s who he was. But Mrs. Clement sure hadn’t sounded happy to see him. I started to ask Mama about that, but she marched right past me and into the house. The screen door banged shut behind her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  We were eating watermelon on the front porch that evening when Geraldine Murlock came by. “Hey, Geraldine,” I yelled. She came up to the porch, flipped up the skirt of her sundress from behind, and sat on the concrete steps next to me.

  “Ahhhh,” she sighed.

  I knew right away what she meant. Those steps stayed cool even on the hottest days, and they sure felt good on your backside.

  Geraldine and I had known each other since the first day of kindergarten. I had been standing in the playground deciding whether to swing or slide when she came up and stood next to me.

  “Scared?” she asked.

  “Of what?”

  “The bars. Sissies sit in those swings and go down that baby slide. I’d rather hang from the bars.”

  She bent over and scooped up a handful of soft dirt from under the swings, then rubbed it into the palms of her hands. She went over to the bars, grabbed hold of one, and swung back and forth a bit. Before I could figure out what was happening, she was hanging by her knees with her underpants showing. “Come on,” she said. “Try it.”

  I tried, and tried again. I got a blister on the palm of my hand and a skinned knee from falling in the dirt. But when I finally hung from the bars by my knees, just like Geraldine, I didn’t care if my underpants did show.

  From that day on, we were friends. Geraldine was the one who always wanted to try something new. I was the one who could calm her down when she got carried away. Like the time she dialed “one” and asked Dr. Thomas if his refrigerator was running. When he said yes, she laughed real loud. “HA! HA! HA! You’d better go catch it.”

  “That wasn’t very nice,” I’d told her. “Dr. Thomas might have been with a sick person, giving a shot or something.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “That’s the trouble, Geraldine. It’s a good thing you have me to do your thinking for you.”

  She put an arm around my shoulders. “We make a good team,” she said. High praise, from Geraldine.

  “Have some watermelon,” I offered now.

  “Can’t have any this late in the evening,” she said. “It makes me wet the bed.”

  That’s the way Geraldine was, always blurting out the truth, no matter what it was. My father cleared his throat and started to cough. I saw his mouth twit
ch the way it always does when he’s about to laugh out loud, but Mama gave him a poke. My brother, Eddie, who was fifteen, made a choking sound and went into the house.

  “Really, it does, Mr. Wallace. My mama says she never saw anything like it. I just go to sleep and wake up in a puddle, and she says if she catches me eating any watermelon after four o’clock in the afternoon, she’ll tan my—”

  “Look there!” Mama exclaimed. “I thought I saw a shooting star!” Everybody looked, but nobody saw anything.

  “That’s too bad,” Mama said. “You must have just missed it.” She reached out and took my plate of watermelon that I hadn’t even finished. “Why don’t you and Geraldine go take a walk? It’s real nice this time of evening.”

  Geraldine’s eyes lit up. “Come on, Angie,” she said.

  I thought about asking Reba Lu to come along because she hadn’t met Geraldine yet, but taking a walk around the block was my favorite thing to do with Geraldine. Just the two of us. It meant freedom, though Mama didn’t know that. It meant sharing secrets and promising never to tell, cross your heart and hope to die.

  Sometimes it also meant stopping at the drugstore and letting Johnny Henderson fix you a double-chocolate-cherry coke. Geraldine had a huge crush on Johnny, who was going into the ninth grade and was way too old for her. But I had sworn to keep her secret.

  So we set out by ourselves. As we walked up the street that evening, Geraldine decided she wanted to drop in on the revival at the Baptist church and watch the souls being saved. We could hear the bell ringers tuning up as soon as we turned the corner by the drugstore. They weren’t real bells, just goblets of water, each one filled to a different level. The players tapped them with the backs of silver spoons and produced a waterfall of sound that made the back of my neck tingle. Half the town went to those revivals, just to hear the music.

  Geraldine and I sat in the back row of pews. It was the best place to be when people started getting the spirit. That was my favorite part of the show, even better than the water goblets.

  I looked around while we waited. The Congregational church, where my family went, had white walls and a pretty, stained glass memorial window behind the altar. The center aisle was covered with blue carpet.

  The Baptist church, on the other hand, needed an inside paint job, and the windows along the walls were filled with mustard-colored glass that gave everybody a jaundiced look, the way people get when they eat too many carrots. The wood floor was worn and scuffed, probably from so many sinners walking down the center aisle to be saved.

  The little pump organ, operated by a perspiring Miss Barnable, began bellowing out music, and the congregation swayed and sang, We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves. Geraldine and I stood and swayed along with them so we wouldn’t attract attention and look too obviously like Lutherans.

  After the singing was done, we sat down and listened to some water glass music. Then the visiting preacher, a man called Brother Otis, with slicked-back hair, got up and began to give the message. He started off soft and slow, but pretty soon he began carrying on like he had a hot brick in his pants.

  He said, in a voice that trembled as it roared, “I’M HERE … TO CURE YOU … OF YOUR SPIRITUAL … ILLS!”

  Miss Barnable eased in the stops and started playing “The Old Rugged Cross” real soft so we could hear what the preacher said above the music. But really, we could have heard him if she’d played a lot louder.

  “ALL YE WHO ARE WEARY AND HEAVY-LADEN, COME FORTH AND CONFESS YOUR SINS!” Brother Otis thundered.

  One by one, people started down the aisle toward the altar. Not everybody, of course. Only the worst sinners. That’s why Geraldine and I were there. We wanted to see which ones had been so bad they had to confess in public.

  Old Man Snyder was first. Geraldine poked me, and I poked her back. We had heard the way Mr. and Mrs. Snyder used to yell at each other right out in the front yard where everybody could hear them. Some folks said she got on the bus one day and never came back. But we figured he had killed her and buried her in the cellar.

  Miss Hallie Harper was next. She had given me a D on my geography test. It was about time she repented!

  My mouth dropped open when I saw Mrs. Clement marching down the aisle shoving Mr. Clement in front of her.

  “Get along there!” I heard her say. “You’ve got plenty of confessing to do.” He was red in the face, but he did what he was told. Right that minute, he didn’t look much like a war hero to me. He looked more like he wanted to hightail it for the door. Even so, I noticed that he pulled his shoulders back and nodded to people he passed on the way to the altar.

  I whispered to Geraldine, “I saw that man spitting in the gutter this morning.”

  Geraldine didn’t blink an eye. She stood up and followed him down the aisle.

  “Geraldine! What are you doing?” I stood up and tried to grab her, but missed. What was she thinking of? What terrible sin could she be guilty of?

  I started down the aisle after her, but somebody reached out and grabbed the waistband of my skirt and wouldn’t let go. I twisted my neck and saw Mrs. Clement’s daughter, Lucy, our Congregational choir director, sitting at the end of a pew. She had the same kind of look I had seen on her face when the sopranos in the choir couldn’t hit their high notes. Kind of determined, like life was trying to get her down, but she was putting up a good fight.

  “Sit down, Angelina,” she whispered. “Congregationalists don’t confess their sins in public. If you take one more step down that aisle, I’ll tell your mother on you.”

  I leaned over and whispered back. “But your mother went to get saved.”

  “Mama doesn’t need saving,” she told me. “It’s my father who needs to have a talk with the Lord.”

  I had a lot to think about while I waited for Geraldine. Brother Otis raised his hands in the air and began singing, Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. Everybody joined in, and the sinners started back up the aisle to their seats. We had just reached the glory, glory, hallelujah part when Geraldine plopped down beside me.

  “What did you confess?” I asked.

  “I didn’t confess anything. I just stood there and looked sorry and listened to the sinners.” She gave me a look. “How else am I going to find out about things?”

  On the way home she told me, “That man with Mrs. Clement confessed that he deserted his family. He left them to get along the best way they could. And he philanders.”

  I knew what deserted meant, but philander was a new word. “What does that mean?”

  Geraldine gave a little shrug. “I’m not exactly sure, but I know it’s something you’re not supposed to do. I think it’s why Brother Otis and Miss Barnable went behind the church this afternoon.”

  “They were probably talking about the revival hymns.”

  “Back behind the church? In the bushes? Honestly, Angie, you’ve got to start noticing what goes on in our town. They weren’t talking about music. They were … you know.”

  I knew, but I didn’t want to talk about it right then. We were quiet a minute. Then I said, “Well, guess who that man with Mrs. Clement turned out to be?”

  “Who?”

  I hugged myself inside. Geraldine didn’t know everything. “He’s her husband,” I said calmly, just like I was asking somebody to pass the salt. “That makes him Miss Clement’s father. His name is Jefferson. He got a medal in the Great War, but he needs to have a talk with the Lord.”

  Geraldine stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at me. “How do you know all that?” she demanded.

  “Why, I just listen, Geraldine. How else am I going to find out about things?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  We were saying good night at the corner of Pacific Avenue and Mulberry when Geraldine suddenly said, “Are you OK? You look kind of puny.”

  I did feel downright puny. Kind of like I’d walked too far too fast and my knees needed to rest. By morning, I had a cough th
at rattled like Dr. Thomas’s Model T Ford when he backed it out of the driveway. Mama picked up the telephone and said, “One, please.”

  It was the doctor’s number. Geraldine’s was one-one, and we were four-four. Messina wasn’t a very big town, and the telephone office had only so many plugs in the switchboard. Most people listened in on their party lines long enough to find out the news.

  My bedroom door was open, and I could hear Daddy and Mama talking in the kitchen. “She’s not so sick that she doesn’t look forward to seeing the doctor,” I heard Mama say.

  Everybody loved Dr. Thomas. He had a black leather bag, worn thin around the edges, but shiny all over. Geraldine said she thought he wiped it with shoe polish. In it he kept his instruments. When I was younger, he always put the stethoscope earplugs in my ears so I could listen to his heart. Then he let me rap his knee with the knee hammer and watch his leg kick up in the air. I was too old for that now, but not too old to feast my eyes on his little bottles of different-colored sugar-coated pills, small and round, with flat sides.

  They worked wonders, he told me. He said they even cured people who only thought they were sick. “Do you want pink or blue?” he asked now.

  I didn’t hesitate a second. “Pink!”

  “I’ll leave a bottle of cough syrup with your mama,” he said. “You swallow a teaspoonful, then suck on a pink pill to kill the taste.”

  I often wondered why he didn’t give some pink pills to his daughter, Miss Emma. Probably it was because he knew she wasn’t sick the regular way. She was strange sick.

  It must have made him sad to go home at night and see her strangeness because Miss Emma was all he had left after Mrs. Thomas “passed away.”

  I knew that meant she had died, but I thought it was a silly expression. It was like passing the potatoes, or passing gas, or passing the corner where you meant to turn. Wherever she had passed to, I thought it was too bad that Dr. Thomas had to cope with Miss Emma alone.