Also Known As Harper

by Ann Haywood Leal

  A wheelchair was parked up against the side of the house, and the ground was so uneven that the wheelchair was resting on only one of the big back wheels and the two tiny foot pedal wheels in front. Although it wasn’t piled as high as usual with all her bits and pieces of stuff, I knew it was Dorothy’s. Even before I saw Lorraine push open the screen door and come out on the porch.

  She was sipping at something in a mug, and from the way she was slurping at it real quick like and licking the middle of her lips, I knew it had to be hot chocolate.

  She raised her mug to me and sat down in a faded red kitchen chair. She nudged a bundled stack of magazines out of the way with her foot.

  Then out came Randall, with Dorothy right behind him. Dorothy noticed the stack of magazines right away, and fixed them back the way they had been.

  Randall’s hot chocolate must not have been so hot, because he wore most of it on his chin, with a long trail of it running down the front of his shirt and onto his name tag.

  “Hemingway!” Randall acted as if he hadn’t seen us in months.

  And Hemingway was plenty glad to see him. Especially since Randall was heading over to a nice big dirt pile at the side of the house. Complete with trucks and plywood ramps.

  Dorothy scooted another chair over next to the screen door, and Lorraine motioned for me to sit down. She raised one eyebrow at me and nodded toward the hot chocolate.

  I looked at Dorothy and knew that Mama would have an out-and-out fit if I took anything to eat or drink from someone we didn’t really know.

  Like before, Dorothy’s eyes were going straight through into my thoughts, and she nodded like she knew. “It’s instant.” She jerked her thumb toward the box on the kitchen counter. “In individual packets.”

  She had a way of saying it that made me relax, and she didn’t make me embarrassed to say no.

  The screen door was closed, but the door into the cabin was wide open, and I could see the stove where she had cooked up that hot chocolate. It was shiny white with a silver chrome canopy that made a nice roof hanging over the top.

  Dorothy followed my eyes to the refrigerator next to it, and she smiled. “Nineteen-thirty-four GE Monitor Top refrigerating machine.” She propped the screen door open with a kitchen chair and walked over in front of the refrigerator. “Foot pedal here opens it.”

  It had four legs that looked like small horse’s hooves at the bottom. She stepped on a tiny foot pedal attached to one of the front hooves, and the door popped open. She patted the round white barrel on the top. “This motor has only had to be repaired once. About forty years ago. Been running ever since.” She pressed the door shut. “Sort of like me. I just keep on going.”

  There was something about her that made a person feel right when they were around her. Lorraine felt it, too. I could tell by the way her shoulders relaxed and her mouth went into a half-smile.

  Mama always says there’s no call for rudeness, so I peeked just my head in the door to take a look at that sparkling white kitchen. It looked like one that Mr. Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird might have had in his house. That housekeeper of his, Calpurnia, was like a family member, and I think she and Dorothy polished their kitchens in the same way. With love and hard work.

  Only I wasn’t so sure Calpurnia had all those boxes of cake mixes and cans of corn. They were in perfect stacks and rows under the kitchen window and beneath the table.

  Dorothy followed my eyes with hers. “My Craw can’t go without his creamed corn at dinner. And not a week goes by that Karen Lynn doesn’t get a taste for one of my yellow cakes with white frosting.”

  I wasn’t sure who she was talking about, but I’d have to ask later. The living room off to the left had really caught my eye. The walls were all shelves. Shelves stacked with books.

  My breath caught up in the back part of my throat, and I wished Mama was with me right then. I wanted her eyes to be taking in all that I was seeing. She knew what it felt like to have all those words sitting out in front of you. Just waiting for you to go get them.

  Dorothy pointed her chin toward me. “You’re someone who weaves a good story, all right,” she said. “I knew it even before Randall and Lorraine told me about your poems.”

  Lorraine nodded.

  “I saw you sitting at the table over to the motel.” Dorothy held up her fingers like she was writing. “I could tell by the way you were looking down at your paper, there were words flowing out of you.” Her own sentences hung in the air in front of her while she looked straight through into my head again. “You have a way,” she said. “You have a way of making the right words tack on to that paper.”

  She made me feel like Mrs. Rodriguez did. Like they could erase Daddy’s words out of my brain and make me write new ones.

  Dorothy came back out to the porch and sat down in one of the kitchen chairs. She followed my eyes from her crowded porch to her cabin sign and back again.

  She smiled. “You thought I lived outside, in my wheelchair, didn’t you?”

  I felt my face get hot, and I knew it was bright red. She’d taken my thoughts right out of my brain.

  She shook her head. “It’s all right. That’s what most of them think.” She waved her hand back over her shoulder. “Most of those people around and about the motel think I’m just a crazy old woman. They think I don’t hear them talking about me, but I hear what they’re saying.” She laughed, but it was a sad laugh. “If folks don’t like the way you look, they almost never take the time to find anything out about you. They just make up their own stories.”

  I thought about that wall of books and I knew I wanted to know her. I wanted to know what she carried around in her wheelchair and inside her head. I was thinking she might be the kind of person that could help me figure out some things. Like how to get myself back to school.

  I looked at her real hard in the black parts of her eyes, and I knew I wanted her to know me, too. Before I even took the time to think, I saw my hands pulling my notebook out of my backpack and holding it out to her.

  She took it without looking at me and opened it up to the first page. Her eyes moved back and forth across the paper, and sometimes they stopped and went back a ways to start over. Lorraine read over her shoulder, and every once in a while she’d point out a line to Dorothy. Neither one of them paid me any mind, but they’d look at each other and nod or raise an eyebrow or two.

  Finally, Dorothy leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she looked me dead in the middle of my face. “You have some God-given talent, that’s what you got. I happen to know that Ms. Harper Lee would appreciate someone like you having her name.”

  I knew my poems were good, but I wasn’t used to other people saying so. Usually when someone at school said something about them, I’d feel kind of happy and embarrassed at the same time. But with Dorothy and Lorraine, it was different. My mind started racing around, trying to write itself out another poem to give them. I wanted to put that look on their faces again. I wanted them to feel like I did when Mama read me Ms. Harper Lee’s words for the first time. My body had been relaxed, but my mind had been wide awake, waiting to hear what came next.

  “Mama says the storytelling seeped through into my bones, before I was even born.” I looked over at Lorraine, and she put the palm of her hand on the cover of my notebook, as if it was glass.

  “I’m pretty sure I got it directly from Mama. She read me the stories her mama read her. When she tells those stories to me, her words move in all around me. She used to write down some ideas of her own, too.” I looked at Dorothy out of the corner of my eye, and I could tell she wanted me to keep talking.

  I had told Hem I wasn’t going to talk about Daddy for the rest of the day, but I couldn’t help it. Bits and pieces about him started slowly trickling out.

  “Daddy made fun of her so much, she stopped writing her stories down for a while,” I said. “He laughed about how she spelled, and he loved to point out her mistakes.�
��

  They both looked at me, but no one said a word. Lorraine’s eyes looked as if she automatically understood about Daddy. No one had ever mentioned her daddy. Maybe he was like mine. Gone. Saving up his poisonous words for anyone that would accidentally listen.

  At first it felt as if I was telling someone else’s story. Someone I didn’t really know that well. There was something about the way they were listening, all quiet and thoughtful, that made me keep going.

  “Daddy couldn’t tell a story like Mama.” I thought back to him sitting at the head of the kitchen table, laughing at Mama with her notebook and pieces of paper.

  Dorothy looked at me so hard, I couldn’t move if I’d wanted to. “Harper Lee, don’t you ever let anyone tell you to stop moving that pen. Writing’s like breathing for you.”

  I knew her to be right, but when I thought about Mama, I knew sometimes things got themselves in the way of breathing.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I STEPPED AROUND to the side of the cabin to see what Hem and Randall were up to.

  “He sure knows his way around a dirt pile.” Dorothy picked up a yellow bulldozer at the edge of the dirt. She turned it over in the air in front of her and stared into the middle of the sky as if she had changed channels and wasn’t quite with us anymore.

  Lorraine made her way to the other side of the dirt pile and sat down on the rickety steps of one of the worn-out cabins next door. It looked like when I’d seen a building demolished. Daddy had taken Hem and me to see it. He’d made Mama stay home and rest, because Flannery was getting ready to arrive.

  We can’t get too close. Daddy had held one arm around each of us. They’re going to use explosives and implode the building. It’s going to fall in on itself from the inside out. Kind of like a flimsy old card house. I remembered how I’d felt standing there with him—scared, but safe at the same time.

  We’d stood up on a hill across from the building and we’d watched the whole thing from beginning to end. And he’d let Hem ask as many questions as he’d wanted. I can still feel his hand on my shoulder as we watched the building fold in on itself.

  But that was a different Daddy then. Before the whiskey got in and made angry puddles in his brain. Before he stopped looking for construction jobs and left all the work for Mama to do.

  Dorothy seemed to follow my eyes along the wobbly lines of the caved-in roofs. She pointed at them with the little yellow bulldozer. “County comes along every so often to make sure no one’s trying to live there. They didn’t care much about what was back here until I sold the property from the side road there up to the main road.

  “My husband, Craw, kept things in perfect working order.” She shook her head. “They say my property’s an eyesore.” She sucked in her bottom lip. “They can come up here and spout off at the mouth all they want, but this here’s still my property. They can put up whatever they like on that pittance of land I sold ’em.” She pointed off toward the motel. “Who wants that tiny bit of land next to the highway, anyway?” She put her hands up by her ears. “It’s nowhere for people to sleep with all that noise going by at all hours.”

  I ran my eyes over her freshly painted cabin. “You keep that fixed up yourself?”

  She shook her head. “I have someone that comes in once a month and looks things over. Same person for the last thirty-five years.” She narrowed her eyes. “I don’t much like people poking around my personal belongings.”

  I got a sick feeling when she said that. It made me think of all the things we’d left behind that got contaminated with that filthy Early stink.

  But she sure did have a lot of stuff.

  And again, just like she could get right into my head, she swept her hand back and forth in the air in front of her. “A place for everything, and everything in its place. There’s a good use for everything.”

  Dorothy sure did like rows. Skinny green poles that I’d seen in some people’s gardens were pushed into the dirt at one end of the dirt pile. They were in three perfectly spaced rows of five. But they didn’t have the beginnings of a plant or vines of any sort attached to them. They all held stacks of things that Mama and Hem and me usually throw in the garbage bin.

  One of the poles held plastic rings from soda cans. And one of them held milk jugs, the pole threading through the opening in the handle. Another had margarine containers, stacked up like little pillbox hats, a hole poked in the dead center of each one.

  Dorothy flipped the front shovel of the bulldozer up and down. “My Karen Lynn used to love to play with this thing. She’d dig holes up to your elbow, and the vacation people were always complaining about her rooting up the flowers in front of the cabins.”

  Lorraine hugged her knees like she was used to hearing about Karen Lynn. She was a good listener, and she rocked forward on her toes to let Dorothy know she should go on.

  Randall stepped out of the dirt pile, and Dorothy handed him the bulldozer. “They don’t make them like these anymore. You can’t buy these at the store.”

  He knelt and took up a big scoop of dirt at the edge of the pile.

  Dorothy shook her head. “Can’t wear that thing out.” She bent down and helped Randall push a pile of moist dirt in Lorraine’s direction. “My Karen Lynn didn’t get much of a chance to wear anything out.” She bowed her head and made a sign of the cross on herself like I’d seen Mama do sometimes. Head, heart, shoulder, shoulder.

  “Why that car squeezed the breath out of Karen Lynn and Craw but still left air for me, I’ll never know.” Dorothy brushed off the palms of her hands on the front of her pants. “Took a good enough piece of my head, though.”

  She tipped her forehead down and parted the hair on the side of her head with her hands. A white scar had made a path where the hair had forgotten to grow back. “Took the stitches out myself.” She straightened up and smoothed her hair back in place. “Took myself right out of that hospital, too.” She shook her head. “Those doctors didn’t know much forty years ago. Know even less now. You got a pretty bad head injury, Mrs. Pine. You need to stay here in the hospital for a while.”

  She looked at me. “I had no business lolling about in that hospital. Who did they think was going to bury my husband and my daughter?”

  I was pretty sure she didn’t want me to answer, so I sat down next to Lorraine without saying anything.

  Dorothy pointed over at the wheelchair. “Took that thing home with me, which turned out to be a good idea. Comes in handy when I have my dizzy spells.”

  She seemed to be coming up on one right then, because her knees were looking a bit wobbly.

  I wondered what it would be like not to have even one ounce of family to catch you or to pick you back up again.

  Randall came galloping out of the dirt pile as if she’d rung a bell for him and led her back to her own front porch. “Time to go,” he said over his shoulder.

  Lorraine got up and started heading past the cabins. I thought Hem would put up a fight about leaving the dirt pile, but he followed Lorraine.

  I watched Dorothy as she sat up on the porch in one of her kitchen chairs. I wished she had Karen Lynn to check on her and to bring her some hot chocolate. Her eyes were closed, and her head rested softly against the screen part on the door. She looked like she was settled in and comfortable, so I put my backpack over my shoulder and followed everyone.

  The right side of the split in the road continued around the other side of the cabins. The trees thickened up some, too, and every so often we had to walk around a bush that had forgotten there was a road there. Those sticker bushes pushed right up through the cracks in the old asphalt and trailed long prickly vines in patterns across the road.

  “She talking about Karen Lynn?” Randall asked.

  Lorraine nodded.

  He shook his head. “I figured so. She always gets those wobbly knees when she starts talking about the car accident.”

  It wasn’t that cold out, but I shivered. It was hard to think about Dorothy having her wh
ole family gone like that. All at once. When Daddy left, we knew he could come back if he really wanted to. But Dorothy’s family wasn’t going to be climbing the steps to her porch ever again.

  I looked at Lorraine. “All that shaking she does is probably from her heart beating so hard.”

  Lorraine squeezed her eyebrows together.

  “Your heart has to work extra hard when it’s beating for people that are gone.” I thought again about Daddy and how his being gone was something entirely different.

  Lorraine smiled part of a smile at me, and I could tell she knew about the different kinds of being gone.

  Randall looked back toward the cabins. “She calls Lorraine Karen Lynn sometimes.”

  Lorraine nodded.

  Randall took a deep breath. “Just when she gets real busy with things. She still makes dinner for her husband and Karen Lynn most every night.”

  Hemingway wrinkled his nose up. “Dead people can’t eat.”

  “Usually me and Lorraine eat it,” Randall said.

  That made my heart hurt for Dorothy, and I felt kind of guilty about all that wishing I’d done. All that wishing that Daddy would never come back.

  Hemingway kicked at a bundle of brown leaves left over from the fall. “This road lead back to the motel?”

  Randall shook his head. “This road is from way before. Before there was any motel. It’s from when it was just Dorothy’s vacation cabins.” He pointed up ahead. “The road stops pretty quick.”

  Hemingway looked where Randall was pointing and shaded his eyes. “We coming up on your tent house?”

  “Almost. We have to walk a bit first.” He grabbed Hem’s wrist. “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  Hemingway and Randall took off at a run, weaving through the bushes and stickery vines. It was kind of nice to walk along in quiet, with Lorraine.

  I felt as if there was more room in my brain since I’d been talking to Dorothy and Lorraine. My thoughts seemed more organized somehow. Like Dorothy’s rows.