The telephone rang and on reflex Carry sat up, her hand jerking toward it. My mother beat her to it. “I’ll get it.” Carry sneered at her as she answered. When my mother either didn’t notice the sneer or just chose to ignore it, Carry dropped the sneer onto me. I turned away, looking up and listening to my mother’s side of the phone conversation.
“Hello? Yes, Mrs. Dailey. No, not yet. We’re doin’ our best. I’ve got an officer checkin’ around there right now. No, ma’am.” There were lots of pauses between my mother’s responses, but this one was the longest. Finally, she said, “Mrs. Dailey? Listen, I’d appreciate it if from now on you call through the station instead of my home. No, ma’am, I understand that, but there’s always one of us there who can answer any of your inquiries. Well, ma’am, I appreciate that and it’s nice of you to say so, but, no, that ain’t the way it works. I promise to call as soon as we know anythin’. In the meantime, if you think of anyplace else she may have gone, let us know. Just try to stay calm. There’s no need to worry yet. You know how girls her age are. Yes, ma’am, you certainly did tell me that already. Thank you, ma’am.”
She hung up and let out an exhausted sigh. I looked up at her expectantly, realizing I was still holding the plate of cold casserole.
“Why is she calling you at home?” I asked.
She sighed. “Cuz she don’t want to talk to Chris. Says only another parent could possibly understand what she’s goin’ through.”
“But it’s really cuz Officer Jackson’s black, ain’t it?”
My mother hesitated. “I don’t know, honey. Maybe. Maybe not. She’s pretty stricken with grief right now. I would be too if it were you or Caroline that went missin’.” She looked to Carry. “Caroline, are you absolutely certain there ain’t nowhere else you can think of where she might be? Someplace maybe her other friends wouldn’t want to have told me about?” This caught my attention. Seemed like a weird thing to be asking my sister. “Like, does Mary Ann have a boyfriend, maybe?”
Carry shifted uncomfortably on the sofa cushion, looking to me like she wanted to bolt from the room. “I hardly know her, Mom,” she said.
“But you ride the bus with her every day. You must hear things. You must see her at school.” Squatting down, my mother had reached out and gently pushed Carry’s bangs off her face. “This is important, honey. It’s not like you’re tattlin’ on your friends when it’s somethin’ like this.”
A tinge of anger flashed in Carry’s blue eyes, as though my mother had just offended her. I didn’t quite understand why. “I know it’s important,” she said. “You think I’m lyin’? I don’t know if she has a boyfriend.”
“Are you absolutely certain?” I wondered why my mother thought my sister might be confused on such a point.
Carry got real angry now. “Yes! I’m absolutely certain! To the best of my knowledge, Mary Ann Dailey does not have a boyfriend! My Lord, is this how you treat all your witnesses? Or is it just me you don’t believe?” Jumping up from the sofa, she stomped out of the room. I heard the slam of her bedroom door following shortly thereafter.
My mother looked down at me in frustration.
“This part of the hard part you tol’ me ’bout?” I asked.
She nodded, frowning.
“Hope it don’t last long,” I said.
“Oh, we got a while to go yet.” My mother’s attention drifted to the living room window that looked out over the front lawn. Thick, yellow drapes hung down on either side of it. She didn’t seem to be looking at anything in particular, and I got the feeling her thoughts were someplace else entirely.
My eyes were drawn to Mr. Farrow’s garage door squatting across the road with its white-toothed sneer. The view was partially obscured by the cedar shrub growing between our front steps and the living room window. The shrub was in much need of trimming, just as the lawn was starting to be in serious want of mowing. My mother used to pay Luther Willard King ten dollars to ride his bike over and do all the yard work every couple weeks, but it had been a while since he came around. My mother told me Luther Willard’s father had gotten very sick near the end of school last year, and Luther Willard didn’t have time to come out and help her anymore. His own mother needed his help now.
Even though he wasn’t working, my mother still got me to ride my bike all the way across town every two weeks to give him the ten dollars anyway. It was a long way to his house. The Kings lived down Oakdale Road, in a section of town known as Cloverdale where most of the other black people in Alvin lived.
“How come he still gets paid for doin’ nothin’?” I asked the first time she sent me.
“He ain’t doin’ nothin’,” my mother said. “He’s lookin’ after that family. He’s got three younger sisters, a mama, and a really sick papa to tend to.”
“How do they all live off ten dollars every two weeks?” The youngest two were twins and only three years old, but I thought even three-year-olds must eat more than ten dollars’ worth of food every two weeks.
“They get other money, too. But not a lot. Our ten dollars means a lot more to them than it does to us.”
That hadn’t made much sense then. To me, ten dollars was ten dollars, no matter how you looked at it, or who was doing the looking. Then, the first time I brought it over, I figured out what she meant. The farther you went down Oakdale, the deeper you went into Cloverdale and the more rundown the homes became. The ride to Luther Willard’s took me all the way past Blackberry Creek, almost to the turnoff leading to Cornflower Lake; one of the prettiest yet poorest areas in all of Alvin.
The Kings lived in an old green shotgun house that looked just about ready to fall in on itself. Some of the wooden slats were missing from the front, and the roof drooped to one side. I left my bike lying on the edge of the road and stepped across the yard where the twins sat, their legs almost as black as their shadows being cast by the early-afternoon sun. They played there in the dirt; there was no real lawn to speak of. Neither of the girls had shirts or shoes on, and their shorts were dusty and torn. They looked up at me with interest as I passed, their eyes and teeth bright white against their smudged brown faces, a swarm of midges buzzing over their heads. I noticed a thick caking of dried mud beneath their fingernails and toenails.
I climbed the broken steps to the porch and opened the screen, nearly pulling it off its hinges. Most of the screen was busted. I knocked on the wooden door behind it and glanced back at the two girls. They no longer paid any mind to me, they were back to playing in the dirt. Leaning against the side of the house, I recognized Luther Willard’s bike. Most of the white paint had flecked off since I last saw it, and it looked more rusted than I remembered it.
The other King daughter answered the door. She wasn’t nearly as dirty as the two in the yard, and her clothes looked recently scrubbed, although awfully worn out for a girl who couldn’t have been no older than six, and probably outgrew things at least once a year. I reckoned they were hand-me-downs from someone who probably over-wore them in the first place.
“Luther round?” I asked.
She stood quietly considering me, and for a minute I thought she wasn’t going to answer. Eventually, though, she nodded and trod off inside. From one of the rooms, someone suddenly began coughing something fierce, with wheezy breaths drawn in between sounding so thin, I expected them to end the life of whoever they were coming from at any moment.
The coughing continued as Luther Willard, wearing a gray T-shirt and worn jeans, appeared in the doorway, looking at me, puzzled. He had short, curly black hair and scratched at the back of his neck as I held out the ten dollars to him. “This is from my mama,” I said.
I thought he was going to cry, so much disappointment fell over his face. “Tell her I’m sorry, but I can’t do her work this week,” he said. “I probably won’t be able to for quite some time.”
“She knows,” I said, still holding out the bill. “She says she’s gonna pay you anyway, on account of she doesn’t want to lose yo
ur services once you’re ready to come back.” My mother had told me to say this, explaining most folks don’t like accepting anything that even slightly smells of charity. But they have no trouble taking the money so long as you can give them any reason to feel it’s okay.
This one felt a bit farfetched even to me, and as Luther Willard stood there thinking it over, the summer sun beamed down hot on my neck and back. His father coughed and wheezed up a hurricane in the back room, and I thought for sure Luther Willard was just going to send me back with the money, making my entire ride out here a complete waste of time. A trickle of sweat ran from under my unkempt hair, winding its way down the side of my face until I wiped it off the edge of my chin with my arm.
Finally, Luther Willard took the bill from my hand and a great big grin spread across his thick lips. “You tell your mama I’ll be round as soon as I can and that I’ll make sure she’s got the prettiest little yard in all of Alvin,” he said.
I said I would do just that, but really I was just happy he took the money.
The twins once again watched me as I walked back to my bike, only this time I noticed different things about ’em. Somewhere in those big brown eyes was a mixture of sadness and hope that made me understand what my mother had meant. Ten dollars was not the same value no matter who was doing the looking at it, and these people saw a lot more in it than we did.
Since then, Luther Willard had accepted my ten dollar delivery every second Saturday without question, always reminding me to tell my mother how beautiful her yard was gonna be when he finally came back to work for her. And each time he told me this, it was over top of the sounds of death wheezing out of a room somewhere behind him that grew worse each and every trip. I couldn’t imagine living with those sounds every day.
Now I just lived with the silence of Carry completely ignoring me.
I looked back at my mother, still standing there, staring off into space. I guessed she was puzzling about where it was Mary Ann Dailey might have run off to. Or maybe she was weighing whether or not to believe Carry about Mary Ann not having a boyfriend. That thought brought a weird feeling, because until this summer, my sister’s virtue was never called into question.
Then again, until this summer, Carry had been a completely different Carry. She had been a sister I could rely on. Now I wasn’t so sure that I could. When I was sick from school last year for them five days, it was Carry who would come home and make me chicken soup.
“Chicken soup for my little chicken nugget,” she had said as she brought it into my room. She was always saying stupid things like that to make me laugh. Even when I was sick, Carry had a way of making me laugh.
I didn’t know if this new Carry would even care if I was sick or not. Since she now so readily ignored me on a regular basis, I had my serious doubts she’d be making me any chicken soup or calling me her “chicken nugget.”
So much had changed in Carry, it made me wonder about her school grades. She was normally really good at pretty near all her subjects, getting almost all As or Bs. I wondered if that had changed. Then I wondered if my mother had considered this at all. Maybe I should bring it up with her when I had the chance.
Then I realized this was one of those things where my mother would most likely tell me to mind my business. She was always telling me to mind my business. More and more, it seemed, as I got older. Maybe this was because the older I got, the more I cared about other people’s business. There had to be some reason.
Whatever it was, I just knew all of this came from the same thing: Carry’s sudden interest in boys. I hated that thing. I wished Carry had never noticed boys. They were obviously no good for nothing.
Then my thoughts went back to Mary Ann Dailey, and a thought struck me. “Hey, Mom?” I asked.
It pulled her back from wherever her thoughts had taken her and she looked down, eyebrows raised.
“Reckon maybe this is like when Isaac Crosby ran off and got lost in the woods behind Shearer’s cotton farm couple years ago?”
“I don’t know yet, honey.”
Isaac Crosby had run away from home, only he didn’t run very far, just into the woods, where he managed to get himself completely lost. It happened in the spring, and Isaac was found at the breaking light of dawn the next day by one of the Mexican workers. The Mexican had gone into the woods to do his business when he found Isaac huddled beneath a cluster of maples, shivering, scared, and hungry.
The Mexicans came up every season to find work. Because of the acres of farmland wrapping the outskirts of Alvin, there always was lots of work available. They usually stayed on through the summer, going back home around October. Harvesting season was pretty near over now, so there weren’t too many of them left. The ones that were still here would be leaving very soon.
This brought another possibility to my mind. “What if maybe one of them Mexicans snatched Mary Ann Dailey on his way out?”
Concern came to my mother’s face, and I knew she disapproved of my idea, but I couldn’t figure out how come. “Why would you say something like that?” she asked.
“Well, because they’re always comin’ and goin’, so it’d be easy for them to just grab her and go. And some of ’em are just leavin’ now, right? So I was figurin’ this might make a lot of sense. Besides, Dewey told me in Mexico they use kids as slaves, makin’ ’em do all the chores and whippin’ ’em if they refuse. Sometimes even just whippin’ ’em for fun.”
She crouched down, straightened my dirty blond hair, and set her hands upon my shoulders. I could tell she was collecting her thoughts on the matter.
“Abe, what you just said was a very racist remark. I don’t want you sayin’ things like that. Not about black people, not about Mexicans, not about anyone.”
“How is it racist, if it’s true?”
“Because it’s not true.”
“Dewey said—”
“Don’t pay attention to everything Dewey says. Think about things for yourself and ask yourself if it makes sense before takin’ it as the Gospel truth. If you still can’t decide on your own, come and ask me ’bout it. But don’t judge people by their skin or where they come from or how much money they have. Judge them by who they are individually and how they act. Okay?”
I thought about this. It made sense. Mr. Farrow wasn’t black or Mexican and he was the only person in the town I knew was up to no good; I just had yet to figure out what it was he was up to. “Okay,” I said. Then I decided to take her up on her offer. “Can I ask you somethin’ I’m not sure ’bout, then?”
“Of course.”
“Ernest Robinson said before old Newt Parker died, he rode his bike past the Parker place and saw him eating road-killed raccoon. Did Newt Parker really eat roadkill, do you think?” I knew I was on tricky ground here because Newt Parker was black, but I was pretty sure it was okay because I was judging him individually, and not on his color. Only his diet.
She laughed. “Quite honestly, Abe, I don’t know. But I suspect on this particular point, the rumors may actually be true.”
“I see.” I nodded. Then I went back to Isaac. “Do you reckon Mary Ann Dailey maybe just ran away from home?”
“Again, I’m not sure yet,” she said. “Mrs. Dailey is quite adamant on the point that her daughter is a very happy, well-adjusted girl, who, as she would have me know, comes from a perfect balanced family environment full of positive support. The woman did everything but tell me she deserved the Mother of the Year award today.”
I didn’t understand a lot of them words, but it sounded like my mother was making fun of Mrs. Dailey. “You reckon she’s lyin’?” I asked.
With a soft smile, she shook her head. “I reckon she’s very upset and wants her daughter back, is all.”
“Well, if Mary Ann ran off like Isaac Crosby, she’s probably just lost,” I said. “And I reckon after what he went through, Isaac was taught a pretty good lesson. Reckon he never thought of runnin’ off again.”
“No,” my mother said
, “I reckon you’re right on that.” She looked down at my plate of cold casserole. “What you say you let me take that away and make you somethin’ real to eat ’fore I head back out?”
My stomach rumbled again. I told her I thought that was a great idea.
CHAPTER 3
The next morning, when Mary Ann Dailey still hadn’t turned up, Mr. Robert Lee Garner organized an all-out search for her. Mr. Garner owned the Holly Berry Cattle Ranch, and had, by far, more head of cattle than anyone in Alvin. For at least five miles, his farm stretched east from Tucker Mountain Road, following along the curve of the Anikawa River. On Mr. and Mrs. Dailey’s behalf, he spent the last night’s evening making phone calls, requesting that folks help out in searching for their daughter. Everyone was to meet in front of the library on Main Street at eight o’clock sharp, first thing in the morning.
Just as she was fixing to head out, my mother asked me and Carry if we wanted to come along and join in the hunt. Carry, who had been sound asleep before my mother woke her, declined. “I can’t believe you’d even imagine in your wildest dreams that I’d get out of bed on a Saturday before eleven. Especially not to go traipsing through some ol’ mud and creek beds.” The conversation stayed barely this side of civil before my mother finally just let Carry turn over and go back to sleep.
I thought it all sounded like an adventure and so I was more than eager to come along. On my mother’s advice, I pulled on my galoshes and put on my rain jacket. The day outside looked as though it had the ability to turn sour on the drop of a pin.
Just before we left, I remembered Dewey. “Can we bring him along with us?”
“If he wants to come, sure.”
“ ’Course he wants to come.” I quickly phoned over and told him to get ready, mentioning the galoshes. We picked him up in the car on the way. He was waiting outside his house, wearing a puffy olive drab raincoat, looking ridiculous in black rubber boots at least four sizes too big for him.
Dream With Little Angels Page 2
