Sometimes Miss Emma seemed all right. She loved to answer the phone when Mrs. Dawson, Dr. Thomas’s housekeeper, didn’t get there first. She could sweep the walks and go to the store if someone went with her. On Sundays, she went to church and wore her boa, a fur scarf with real little fox heads hanging from it. She liked to pat them, but Dr. Thomas had to give her a nudge when she started talking to them.
I was lying in bed thinking about Miss Emma when Mama came into my bedroom. I was hoping she was bringing me some of her homemade lemon drops or a piece of the pineapple upside-down cake that she baked in a heavy black frying pan. But it was a mustard plaster, evil-smelling and sinister-looking. She had spread the mustard mixture on one-half of a piece of red flannel, then folded it together to make a kind of envelope.
She held it out in front of her, and I could feel the heat coming at me as she lowered her arms to plop that flannel on my chest. Mama pulled my blanket up under my chin, and I got hotter. She made me sip some steaming chicken broth, and I started to sweat. By morning I was feeling better. “Dr. Thomas’s cough syrup usually does the trick,” I heard her say to Daddy. “But a mustard plaster is a sure thing.”
I was well again when Geraldine came to visit on Saturday afternoon. We were playing jacks on the front porch, cooling our legs on the cold cement steps, when Mama came back from calling on Mrs. Hewitt, who was just out of the hospital. She was all sweaty and out of breath, and she began talking to my father before she got the front screen door shut behind her. We kept on playing and listened.
“It was terrible,” she gasped. “There was poor Mildred Hewitt, lying on her sickbed, frozen with fright, and Emma Thomas sitting there talking a mile a minute with that awful thing around her neck!”
“You mean her boa?”
“Not the fur one!” Mama exclaimed. “The real one. The one she keeps in a cage. It crawled around her neck and up in her hair and down her arms and onto the bed.”
Geraldine and I quit playing jacks and inched a little closer to the screen door. We loved hearing stories about Miss Emma.
Mama hugged herself and shuddered.
“So what did you do?” Daddy asked. I could hear the laughter bubbling up in his voice.
“Do? I was as scared as poor Mrs. Hewitt, who looked like she was having a stroke. All I could do was call Dr. Thomas. He came and got her, poor man. I know Emma loves to go visiting, and it’s good for her to get out, but he’s going to have to make her leave that snake at home.”
After that, they lowered their voices, so we slipped around to the back and went into the kitchen, where we poured some grape Kool-Aid and listened through the crack in the swinging door.
I didn’t see anything wrong with what we were doing. Geraldine said listening was important. It was a good way to find out things grown-ups wouldn’t tell us. We had learned a lot about the people in our town by paying attention to what they said, and the way they sounded. Geraldine wasn’t as good a listener as I was. She got sidetracked by little things—like hangnails, or a wart on her knee. But now she was as interested as I was to hear the latest about Miss Emma. So she kept quiet and put her head close to mine against the crack in the door.
“It’s those animals,” Mama insisted. “That nasty little pug-faced dog and all those cats. She feeds them at the table, in chairs. And they sleep with her at night, in her bed. The boa, too, I’ll bet. Lord knows what else she’s got living with her. The worst of it is, she thinks they’re people. Mrs. Dawson told me so, and she ought to know. She’s the one who has to clean it all up.”
“Poor Miss Emma,” said my father.
“Poor Mrs. Dawson!” I whispered to Geraldine. We slipped out the back door, and I whistled for Buster. Then we walked up the street, hoping we could get a glimpse of Miss Emma with the snake around her neck.
When we did, we almost dropped dead in our tracks. There she was in the upstairs window. Her head reminded me of a plump yellow apple, smooth all over but with frizzled brown hair that resembled dried leaves. She wore a clean white blouse with a crocheted lace collar, but she had a soiled look about her. Dark smudged spots hollowed out her eyes.
I stood there, staring back, until Buster began to whine and push between my bare legs. But when Miss Emma smiled and waved, I didn’t think she looked so strange after all. I was waving back when the snake around her neck began to move. Its head swayed as she fondled it, and in the window beside her was the ugly face of her nasty little pug dog, Lily-Poo. She scooped it up and kissed it smack on the mouth.
Geraldine and I turned and ran, with Buster at our heels. I didn’t stop until I reached my front steps, and Geraldine kept right on going. I threw my arms around Buster’s neck. I would let my dog sleep at the foot of my bed if he wanted to. But Buster would think it was undignified if I tried to put him in a chair at the table. Besides, Mama would take a switch to both of us.
That was the whole difference, I decided. Poor Miss Emma didn’t have a mother to lay down the law. She didn’t know when to stop playing games.
The fortunate thing was that the strangeness didn’t keep me from loving Dr. Thomas. He bore his cross well. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it had to be true because I had overheard Reverend Adams say so when Reba Lu and I were hopscotching in the parsonage driveway.
CHAPTER FIVE
All the Congregationalists went to church the next day to hear Reverend Adams give his first sermon. Even my dad went, and he hadn’t been inside the church since the Sunday that Reverend Linfield decided to preach for over an hour on hellfire and damnation.
Reverend Adams and Mrs. Adams had been doing a lot of visiting around the neighborhood. When they came to our house, Reverend Adams and my dad rolled up their sleeves and tinkered with our Plymouth sedan until Mama and Mrs. Adams made them come sit on the front porch and have some iced tea and oatmeal cookies.
“Nice folks,” my dad said after they had gone home. I figured Mama wouldn’t have too much trouble getting him into his good suit come Sunday morning, and it turned out I was right about that.
There was a big crowd for the new preacher’s first Sunday. It seemed like half the town was filling the pews. I was in my seat when I heard a kind of commotion in the back of the church. I turned around and saw that Mr. and Mrs. Clement had come in. You never saw so much hand shaking and carrying on. People smiling and nodding and patting him on the back like he’d won first place in a popularity contest.
The sermon started with a funny story. Reverend Linfield had never done that. He always just plowed into sin like he knew folks had a pile of it in their own backyards. But Reverend Adams, after he had got people laughing and feeling comfortable, commenced talking about ordinary problems and how we should do the best we could every day. He ended up telling everybody: Love your enemies, turn the other cheek, hate the sin, and love the sinner.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my dad nodding his head.
“Mighty fine ideas,” he said later, after we got home. “Too bad the preacher didn’t go a little farther.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“Well, he told us what we should do, but he didn’t give us any directions. Folks need some hints as to how they can go about doing those things.”
I was still thinking about what he said when Geraldine came over on Monday afternoon with a pile of Calling All Girls magazines. The two of us liked to sit together on the porch swing, thumbing the pages and arguing about which outfits would look good on us.
“Look here!” She held up an advertisement. “The girl in that skirt and sweater looks just like you.” She pointed to a page with a girl carrying an armload of books. Her dark brown hair was shoulder length and straight, like mine. She was wearing a big fake smile that made her look like studying must be fun.
Well, I was a little like that, except I didn’t think my smile was so fake. I did like school, and I liked to get good grades. I might groan along with everybody else when we had homework, but that was just for show.
Geraldine hated homework. She came over almost every afternoon so we could do it together. Sometimes I got real impatient with her when she picked at a fingernail or made whistling sounds between her teeth while I was explaining an arithmetic problem.
“You’ve got to pay attention,” I would say. “You’re just copying my answers, but you don’t know how I got them.”
“Well, they’re the right answers, aren’t they?”
“That’s not the point. What are you going to do when we have a test?”
She sat back in her chair and gave me her exasperated look. This meant bulging her cheeks out and staring at me real hard. “I’ll manage,” she said. “I always do.”
I knew she “managed” by sitting behind me and peering over my shoulder, but I didn’t say anything. Whenever Geraldine got on my nerves, I thought about that day when she’d taught me how to hang by my knees from the bars in the playground. And I remembered that we were best friends.
The front door slammed across the street. Reba Lu picked up a stick and started drawing a new hopscotch pattern in the driveway. She never looked our way.
Geraldine peered over the top of Calling All Girls. “Who’s that redheaded girl across the street?”
“Reba Lu Adams. She’s one of the new preacher’s kids. She’s pretty good at hopscotch.”
“She sure has a funny name.” Geraldine raised one eyebrow, and I remembered how Reba Lu had done the same thing when I told her my name. I could only raise both eyebrows at the same time, but I reminded myself to pick up on my eyebrow exercises in front of the medicine cabinet mirror, starting again that night.
“Let’s see if she wants to come over here and look at magazines.” Geraldine turned a page. I sighed. That’s the way it was with Geraldine and me ever since I’d bawled her out for that phone call about Dr. Thomas’s refrigerator running. Now, whenever she got an idea, she sat back and waited for me to act on it.
I went down the front steps and stood on the sidewalk. “Hey, Reba Lu!” I called. “Come on over.”
She dropped her stick and hightailed it across the street. She stood a second on my front porch until I said, “Reba Lu, this is Geraldine.” Then Geraldine scooted over to one side of the porch swing and I sat on the other so Reba Lu could fit between us. We three sat and thumbed the pages until we came to an article called “Does Your Voice Charm?” We practiced using low, vibrant tones for a while, then we looked for new ways to fix our hair.
Geraldine found a picture of a girl with long blonde hair. “That’s what I want to look like,” she said. “But my mother won’t let me. She cuts it so short I look like a boy.”
“It is short,” Reba Lu said, and we explained that a couple of years ago, some new kids had brought head lice to school. The kids moved away soon after, but the lice stayed. Our mothers took us to the barbershop to get our hair cut real short so Dr. Thomas could treat our scalps. My hair grew out, but Mrs. Murlock, Geraldine’s mother, never really believed the doctor when he said we were cured.
“I’m not taking a chance on lice,” she had said. “They could come back any time.” And she made Geraldine wear her hair real short so she could spot the dirty things if any more of them dared to raise their heads.
I’d overheard Mama say, “Mrs. Murlock is a fearful kind of person, but she means well.”
I took that to mean that being fearful was why she was always saying no! whenever Geraldine wanted to do something. That didn’t stop Geraldine. She just went ahead and did what she wanted without asking her mother first. I thought things might have been different if Geraldine’s daddy had lived. He died when she was just a baby, and Mrs. Murlock was bringing her up all by herself. I thought if I had that job, I might turn into a fearful kind of person, too.
Personally, I thought short hair suited Geraldine, but it would never be as blonde as the girl’s in the picture. Geraldine’s was pale brown. She squeezed lemon juice on it after she washed it and sat in the sun to let it dry, but it didn’t help. “No matter what I do to it,” she said, “it’s as dull as mud.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Reba Lu told her. “Rich people put mud packs on their faces to purify their skin.”
Geraldine looked impressed that Reba Lu would know a thing like that, but I didn’t believe a word of it. Nobody with any sense would put mud on their face. I began turning pages by myself because the two of them were talking a mile a minute and ignoring me. It felt like they were sitting on the porch swing together, and I was sitting somewhere else. I bet if I went in the house, they wouldn’t even know I was gone. I started flipping through the pages faster and faster until, all of a sudden, I came to an article called “What It Takes to Be Popular.”
“Look here,” I said. “This is what we need to read.”
Reba Lu took the magazine and spread it open in her lap. She pointed to a boxed-off area titled “HELPFUL HINTS.” The first hint was Be Nice to Everyone.
Geraldine read the words out loud. “That sounds like something your daddy said in his sermon last Sunday.”
Reba Lu sighed. “He says that all the time. Especially to Charles and me.”
“Let me get this straight,” Geraldine said. “If you act nice to people—even the ones you don’t care about—then they’ll like you and you’ll be popular?”
Reba Lu nodded. “That’s the general idea.” She folded her hands and looked from one of us to the other. “Besides that, it’s a surefire way to get on God’s good side.”
Geraldine scrunched up her face. “Why would I want to do that?”
Reba Lu stared at her. “Everybody wants to get on God’s good side.”
Geraldine narrowed her eyes, the way she always did when she was about to start an argument. But I spoke up before she could say a word.
“What exactly did you have in mind?” I asked Reba Lu.
Reba Lu pursed her lips like she was kissing air and squinted her eyes. We waited for her to speak, figuring that she had an inside track, her daddy being the preacher and all. Finally, she said, “I thought we might do what my daddy said. You know, make God happy by loving our enemies and all that. Loving your enemies is almost the same as turning the other cheek, so we’d be killing two birds with one stone.”
I felt uncomfortable about turning the other cheek. It was like inviting somebody to slap you two times in a row. “What about hating the sin and loving the sinner instead?” I asked.
Geraldine really liked that idea. “They won’t be hard to find,” she said. “There must be plenty of sinners in Messina.”
This was starting to sound complicated to me, but I decided to go along with it because the two of them wanted me to.
“Let’s make a list,” Reba Lu said.
“Yeah!” Geraldine exclaimed. “Let’s get their names down on paper.”
They looked at me until I went in the house and came back with a notepad and a pencil with some eraser still attached. Reba Lu reached for it before I had hardly gotten settled on the swing. When Geraldine and I started telling her about some of the folks in our town who did bad things, Reba Lu licked the tip of the pencil and wrote down their names. I noticed she had neat penmanship and dotted her i’s with perfect little circles. I admired that.
“Even though we like him a lot, and he always takes time to talk to us kids, we probably ought to start with Willie Jack Kelly,” Geraldine said. “Everybody knows that’s not grape soda that he carries around in his paper sack.”
I pinched myself to keep from grinning because I was in on Willie Jack’s secret. I had overheard Dr. Thomas tell Daddy that the bottle Willie Jack kept in his brown paper sack was filled with tap water instead of whiskey like people thought. “He’s been prone to kidney infections ever since the war,” Dr. Thomas had said. “Now that we have that new sulfa drug, he’s some better, but I told him he still needs to drink lots of water.”
The doctor had laughed. “He just keeps his water bottle in that sack because it irritates the tarnation o
ut of those old hens like Mrs. Hewitt and her crony, Hallie Harper, to see him drink from it. Willie Jack doesn’t care much what people think about him. He says he did his bit to help his country because it was the right thing to do. He knows that, and it’s enough for him.”
It was enough for me, too, and I decided right then and there I wasn’t going to tell what was in his sack.
“What about Miss Hallie Harper?” I said real quick, just to change the subject. “There’s no way you can please that teacher!” I told Reba Lu to write her name in capital letters.
Geraldine nodded. “And then there’s Mr. Flannery. He chased me out of his yard when I was only trying to taste a couple of grapes off his arbor.
“And Old Man Snyder,” Geraldine went on. “He told Johnny Henderson to stop snooping around his property, and Johnny wasn’t doing anything but walking up the street to go to work at the drugstore. Probably he was afraid Johnny would discover Mrs. Snyder.”
“Where is Mrs. Snyder?” Reba Lu wanted to know.
“In the cellar, where he buried her after he killed her. Everybody knows that.”
Geraldine reached across Reba Lu and gave me a nudge. “Remember how Mr. Jefferson Clement had to go to the revival and confess he’s a philanderer?”
“That’s not all,” I said. And I told them about his disgusting spitting and how Mrs. Clement had wailed when she opened the door and saw him standing there.
“But Mama says he did his bit in the war, and we oughtn’t to forget that. She says he was decorated. That means he got some sort of medal.”
“For doing what?” Geraldine asked.
I shrugged. “Something brave, I guess. Don’t you have to do something brave to get decorated?”
“It depends,” Reba Lu said. “You could get a Purple Heart if you were wounded. That might mean you were brave, and it might not. What if you got shot while you were running away? Or you might have accidently shot yourself in the foot.”
When the Crickets Stopped Singing Page 3
