Darnay Road

by Diane Munier

  “What you gonna do with these?” Easy asks, and I like the way he asks questions like if I answer and get going I won’t give him the headache.

  “I don’t know,” I say. My plan is to go straight to the cellar but I don’t have my flashlight. “Put them under the porch,” I say, newly inspired.

  Then it’s quiet and just the sound of my thongs slapping a little and the ten fifteen going over the trestle and if Easy wouldn’t have saved the kittens they’d be jelly about now. “Disbro Peak,” I say, but he’s just too terrible to talk about.

  Cap catches up and Easy hands him the bundle of kittens. He takes them in one hand. “Put them under her porch.”

  “What?” Cap says.

  “Be quiet so Granma don’t come,” I say, but I know she don’t rouse unless I go to her bed and shake her and say her name ten times. “You can push the trellis in on the north side.”

  Well he takes off then, riding with one hand and all.

  “Come on ballerina,” Easy says and maybe he’s tired too, but it’s just lovely that I’ve got nicknames.

  “Why you call me that?” I say like before.

  But he don’t answer. He straddles his bike and reaches to help me on the bars again. He’s pretty much a wonderful boy.

  We are riding at night and I hold my hair again and at one point Disbro and the others fly past us, but Disbro rides doubles with Bobby. I think it’s because he don’t have glasses. They don’t ever yell or make a sound, and we don’t either, but I feel safe with Easy, so safe.

  We fly down Darnay Road and I look ahead and there is no Calvary in front of my house or Abigail May’s so I am strongly hopeful that Aunt May sleeps as soundly as Granma. Easy pulls up to the bushes and Cap is coming out of the yard. “I put them under there. Want to see?”

  “Did you pull the trellis in place?” I say.

  “Yeah,” Cap says.

  “My shirt?” Easy says and Cap just grins so I guess that shirt is a lost cause.

  “Well,” I say then looking at Easy.

  But he says, “Go on in ‘fore the boogie man comes.” He has that half a grin once more.

  Cap laughs and I do a little. So I wave a dumb kind of wave, only kind I have, and I go in then and I get to the door and pull the screen but the big door is still open a crack like I left it, moving back and forth a little cause there’s a breeze coming off the river and working its way here somehow. Granma always says that—the river and the breeze.

  I go in and the house is dark and silent and I look out the crack in the door and Easy and Cap are straddling their bikes but they’re talking to each other. I close the door then. It clicks in place and I take off my flips and carry them up to my room.

  “Georgia Christine are you sick?” Granma asks.

  That’s the first thing I hear except for the man calling out to sharpen scissors. His cart rolls on the bricks and makes all kinds of noise and he calls out and you can’t tell what he’s saying.

  I am lying on my back and trying to imagine where I am. My room of course. My fan is on and pulling in hot air and the knife man’s voice.

  Oh my eyes are stuck shut. I try to get them open, then I rub them with my good hand and pick at the bucket of sand and remember one name only—Easy cause I’ve been dreaming about him too. And then everything comes rushing and Granma opens my door and says, “Lord a mercy it’s ten o’clock! Are you sick?”

  I groan all right, but not because I’m sick, because I’m not ready to come out of my dreams and face Granma.

  She’s rushing around and raises the shade over my fan, and the other and all the sunshine comes streaming in on me…and my lies.

  “Hey Granma,” I say all dry and raspy.

  She comes to feel me for fever and she says, “What in this world?” Then she pulls the covers and looks at me the way a nun might look if you missed every word in your spelling. I suppose God is looking at me that way too about now.

  “Your face is filthy and look at your nightgown and you didn’t braid your hair before you went to bed and it’s as wild as a bird’s nest.”

  She continues to peel back the covers and there are my filthy legs and feet. “Georgia Christine how in the world did this happen?”

  I can hear that scary sound the organ makes when we go to the movies on Sunday and Stan Kahn rises up out of the floor playing his organ at halftime.

  I start to cry.

  But then I remember the kittens and I gasp pretty loudly and get up really quickly and say, “Excuse me Granma,” and I get around her and before I go pee-pee even she’s calling my name, “Georgia Christine,” but I’m running downstairs and I don’t even stop.

  Darnay Road 13

  Well I don’t let grass grow under my feet before I’m pretty well out the door and around that side of the porch and there they are mewing and wrestling around under there and I can barely catch my breath.

  One of them has his paws on the trellis and he’s stretched out showing me his soft kitty belly. “Hey there,” I say as I quickly count four. I hear Granma come out on the porch cause she wears the same black shoes as the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz and they clack so loudly I can always stop any wrong thing I’m doing before she ever gets in the room. But I usually end up telling on myself cause I can’t bear to keep the truth from her. And I eye Easy’s shirt under there then and I need to get it and wash it or something cause he probably needs it from what I’ve seen.

  “Tell me I do not hear cats under there,” she says looking over the banister. She’s wearing her flowered apron with the pink rick-rack trim I love over her black and white housedress with the flowers and birds and she looks tall as Jesus might upon his return when he separates the Catholics from the heathens and lets us good ones into heaven.

  “Yes ma’am you do hear cats but they are kittens and I need to keep them please please please. They don’t have a mother.” I pull the trellis and get that one and he’s so cute, so soft and warm and I rub my cheek on him and look up at her.

  I don’t know why her hand goes over her mouth like that. Then she pulls her hand away and bunches them in her apron. “Oh you sweet thing,” she says to me.

  Then I remember I am an orphan, well almost Abigail May says Aunt May says.

  I do not know what to say now. It’s not Granma’s fault. I told her that before, but she says my daddy loves me, he sends the check every month and if that’s not proof she doesn’t know what is. So I can’t be an orphan, can I?

  “I see what happened now,” Granma says. “You been crawling around under there hiding those kittens from me.”

  I open my mouth, but this story is telling itself so I think I might wait a minute.

  “You think I wouldn’t find out?”

  “Um,” I close my eyes for a minute cause I been of two minds on it—telling the truth and not telling it. “Can I have a can of tuna fish Granma? And a dish of milk?”

  “Tuna and…,” she repeats, then she runs out of steam.

  So I get both of those things and I take first one to the kittens then the other. They’re so cute I can hardly bear it and now I don’t have to pen them up until we’re done playing. But Granma calls me in for a bath cause we are going shopping it being Saturday and Granma says I look like I rolled around in a pig-pen.

  So pretty soon I am in the shallow bath with a Wonder Bread wrapper over my arm and she leaves the plug out and I lay back and she puts pitchers of water over my hair. She is saying she might call the dog-catcher to come get those kittens and I am feeling mad and sad all at once. “You can’t do that,” I’m saying, though I hardly look at her cause I am heavy-hearted.

  “You’re getting attached already and we are not keeping four cats. They will soon be twenty-four.”

  “No ma’am,” I say, meaning they won’t be twenty-four. They’re just babies.

  “Your daddy would not like you holding cats that could have worms Georgia Christine.” She pours another load of water over my hair and it creeps onto my
forehead and I have my eyes shut tight.

  She is sure bringing up Daddy a lot today, like the cats got her going. She sets the pitcher on the side of the tub and gets up off her knees and they crack a couple of times and she seems to barely make it. She uses two words, lumbago and rheumatism. And headache so that’s three.

  “Well we don’t have to tell him,” I suggest wiping the dry washrag she hands me over my face. It’s just a possibility is what I mean.

  She leaves the room and comes back with a big fluffy towel which she holds out for me. Another is under her arm for my hair. I get out and she wraps the towel around me then I bend over and she wraps my hair then I flip back my head and I look like the maharushie. That’s what I call it. She takes the Wonder Bread wrapper off my arm and she’s drying me all over. “Well that’s a sight better.”

  I take the towel and wrap up again and run to my room while she scrubs out the tub. I know I left a ring.

  I get my favorite underpants with the pink ruffle around the back and my pink Keds and my cut offs and my sleeveless blouse with the little blue dogs on it.

  Well Granma isn’t going to roll my hair cause it takes forever and ever and I’m not going to the store in curlers, no way. I’m going to let it be long and dry in the sun, and just that quick I think of Easy touching my hair so many times cause it blew all over him, like an octopus might, but that don’t make sense cause an octopus can’t blow around like my hair.

  I am smiling so big thinking about what a friend he is. He’s my friend now.

  So Granma comes in and she’s pulling the sheets off my bed cause I slept on them dirty.

  “Abigail May says her Mama wants to take her to Florida,” I say.

  She keeps bustling around my bed. Maybe now she doesn’t want to look at me.

  “Granma?”

  “Well I don’t know about that,” she says. “Guess we’ll wait and see.”

  “I don’t want her to go,” I say right away.

  “Course you don’t. Remember Abigail’s mother said this before and nothing came of it,” she says putting my sheets in the basket for washing.

  “How old were you when you met Grampa?” I ask her.

  “I was twelve.”

  “I’ll be ten years old in two weeks. Two handfuls.”

  “Yes you will.”

  I lie on my bed and try not to think of Easy and I say, “Tell me that story how you met him.” I mean Grampa.

  She sits next to me and takes the brush and I get in front of her and sit pretzel style and she starts to brush my hair. “Well…he was the new teacher and they introduced him in front of the church. Most handsome man I ever saw. Looked a lot like Anthony Perkins.”

  “Not when he played Norman Bates,” I say because that’s what we already figured out when she tells this story.

  “Right,” she says pulled out of that dream where she’s seeing Grampa standing up there right out of Hollywood, or Salem Missouri take your pick.

  “Then what happened?” I say to get her going again.

  “Well we had him to dinner because folks did that you know, had the new teacher in. And we were friends for a while and I finished school and I was sixteen and we married.”

  “That’s not all,” I say cause she always rushes that part about the four years unless I ask her at night. “He was a Baptist man and they had him to dinner and when you got sweet your family said he had to get made into a Catholic, but his family said you had to get Baptist, but the Catholics got him cause he had to sign papers and that’s where you had the wedding, so he went your way and oh his mother was mad, and then he didn’t practice anyway—being Catholic that is—but everybody was pretty happy with it cause he was also a carpenter, like Jesus, and he could fix most anything so they didn’t stay mad for long, and then you had my dad and they forgave all of it mostly.”

  “Well…that’s about it I guess.”

  “Well, they shouldn’t have judged someone they didn’t know,” I say as she pulls the brush through my hair.

  “That’s right,” she says.

  “Cause someone might be a good person even if…they’re not Catholic. Like Grampa wasn’t Catholic but he was good.”

  She just keeps brushing.

  “And if someone’s poor they can still be real good,” I say.

  “Yes.”

  “So it wouldn’t be right…right?” I say.

  “What wouldn’t be right?”

  “To hold something against someone else that they can’t help.”

  “Course not, now get downstairs before you give me the headache.”

  But I talk almost all the way to the market. We walk there when the weather is good. It’s eight blocks, but they aren’t all long. Granma pulls the wire cart and its rubber wheels don’t make much noise on the sidewalk. I can’t wait because I’m getting a pack of Hostess Cupcakes, but mostly I’m telling Granma how I can find homes for the kittens. One for Abigail May, one for me, and I don’t tell her, but maybe Easy could take one. Maybe Cap. Then we could let our cats visit and play and they’d be so happy.

  Well I would be, that’s for sure.

  And what do you think it’s about that time he goes riding past so fast on his bike and Cap is with him and a couple of boys I don’t know, all of them riding so fast and he pops a wheelie and circles around and passes me again and I almost take my good hand out of Granma’s and wave, but I catch myself because he isn’t looking at me. And I’m thinking he is just as handsome in the sunshine as in the moonlight.

  And Grandma looks at me. “He came with Ricky the day you broke your arm,” she says.

  And I say, “That’s Easy.” Because it is.

  And she keeps looking at me and I look at her.

  “He’s nice,” I say.

  Then we just keep walking.

  Darnay Road 14

  When we get home I see that trellis pulled away first thing. I say oh no and run to the side of the porch and the kittens are nowhere to be seen. Easy’s shirt is still under there. I wiggle between that trellis and the footing and grab that almost rag as if I might shake it and those four babies will fall right out.

  I’m coming around to the front and Granma has the cart parked on the walkway and she’s still standing on the sidewalk and I meet her with that shirt in my hand.

  “They are gone,” I say in a terrible voice. “I know someone took them, maybe Disbro.”

  She is taking that shirt from me, shaking it out and holding it arm’s length like it’s the most nasty thing.

  “Hold on,” she’s saying. “Now hold on.” And she’s looking at that shirt, thin and tattered, dirty white.

  Maybe Easy came for his shirt and thought he should take the kitties so I didn’t get in trouble. Maybe that’s what he was saying when he circled back and went past me.

  But why would he? It doesn’t make sense. I just know it was Disbro Peak. “He’ll put them on the tracks. He’ll put them on the tracks.” I am crying, but mostly I’m mad. I go running out of the yard.

  “Georgia Christine,” Granma is saying, but I’m not talking now, I’m running across the street for Abigail May and I get to her yard and on her porch and I’m looking in her screen. “Abigail May,” I’m huffing and puffing.

  And I see into the living room, it’s off to the side and the pocket doors are opened wide and she’s in there sitting in the chair and across from Father Anthony with a saucer on his knee and he’s drinking tea or something.

  “Abigail May,” I say again.

  They all look then, and Aunt May is at the door first, and she says something to me about Abigail can’t play now, and behind her Ricky runs upstairs and he’s shouting he won’t go, and Aunt May goes after him.

  I just slip in then, cause Abigail don’t know what’s happened. And she comes around the wall where her chair was and Father Anthony is setting his saucer on the coffee table where the magazines are fanned out and the big ashtray with the gold speckles sits with the lighter that looks like A
laddin’s lamp and we’ve rubbed it many times believe me and it’s fake.

  Abigail is hugging me, crying on my shoulder.

  Her mama is coming for them. A new man. She’s going to marry him and she wants Abigail and Ricky to come to Florida and Abigail May says she is not going.

  “Abigail May,” Father Anthony says, “sit down and wait for your aunt to return. Should you be here Miss Green?”

  Abigail May says she is not sitting down without me and she keeps holding me. She disobeys Father. I move us toward the chair and get us into it, and I’m looking right at Father, but I’m saying, “It’s all right Abigail. It will be okay.”

  But I don’t think it will. We have got problems with a capital P. I think of the music man, but he can’t help us now.

  “I’ll stay with you, Georgia,” Abigail says. “I can live with you and Granma if Aunt May don’t want me no more.”

  Aunt May comes down the stairs then. She enters the living room and stops when she sees me like she’s getting the headache. “Georgia Christine?” she says like she’d say, Gomer Pyle? What I mean is, she can’t believe I’m all the way in the chair, I guess.

  I have my good arm around Abigail May and I’m just looking at Aunt May, then Father, cause Granma says over and over, look people in the eye and I’m trying to. “Please don’t send Abigail May away,” I say to them.

  “Now I don’t need another one,” Aunt May says, mostly to Father Anthony.

  “You should run on home Miss Green,” Father says in that same voice he uses to give me penance after confession—you should say three Hail Mary’s, ten Our Father’s, twenty Glory Be’s. That’s pretty much my usual. And come to think of it, I have a few sins piling up I need to tell him about. Hopefully he won’t know it’s me when I finally have to come clean. That would be so embarrassing.