by Diane Munier
Absent, of course, are my dad, and Abigail May’s new special ‘uncle,’ that Gloria Sue upped and married. He looks to be right out of Mayberry and I don’t mean Sheriff Andy. I mean the deputy. That’s what Abigail thinks and I agree. The deputy with a suntan and a Cadillac.
Well they cut my cake and put a slice and one scoop of hand-packed cherry ice cream on each plate. I am served first for being the birthday girl. Granma bought pink party hats but now that I am ten years old for really real I do not think a hat is so becoming. Not a paper cone shaped one because isn’t that what dummies wear?
Gloria Sue is wearing a hat. “I’ll just take a small, small one. Watching my figure,” she laughs, and Aunt May appears to bite her tongue.
“Georgia Christine, Ricky just asked you a question,” Granma nudges me.
I look at him. He is having a growth spurt Aunt May says. Had to get new jeans even. He’s always been comely like Abigail May, but it’s hard for me to really see it since I find him so angry and bossy and generally about as delightful as a mosquito bite.
“I said you should open mine first,” he says.
I honestly didn’t know I was supposed to open my presents.
“Okay,” I say and he picks up the one wrapped to look like a stack of comics. I remove the paper and yes, inside are Casper the Friendly Ghost, and two Richie Rich my very most favorites.
“Thank you,” I say.
Granma nudges me again. I frown at her because she has the sharpest elbows ever and I don’t know what I did wrong.
Gloria Sue is holding a Barbie doll-shaped box toward me. I so very dearly do not want it from this thief of my best friend and blood sister Abigail May.
I take the box before I get the elbow again. I quickly and sloppily rip the paper off and the box says Midge. I don’t want Midge now. I was only getting Midge because Abigail May was getting Midge for her birthday in August, mine with red hair and hers with blond, mine named Midge and hers named Madge. We were going to play like they were friends. But what good is she to me now when her friend will be in Florida? Anyway, I’m thinking of not playing with dolls anymore.
“Thank you kindly,” I say.
Abigail May gives me stationary so we can write letters, and a friendship bracelet with a heart dangling from it that says Abigail May and Georgia.
I don’t ever want to see a heart again.
“Thank you,” I say, then she starts to cry but I can’t. I just can’t. I’m just mad.
So I act like I don’t see her cry and she lets Gloria Sue put her arm around her. Granma gets me new skates with red pom-poms. But I won’t skate alone. I never would. And I know my pink pom-pom is in Miss Little’s dirty window with my kittens and Easy told me to let her have them and never come around. I can’t feel that heart on my cast anymore. It’s just a shadow now.
“Thank you,” I say.
Lastly Aunt May goes in our house and comes out with a box with holes in it. I take the box and it’s moving and little clawing sounds inside so I open it up and there’s a little wiggling puppy in there, a little Chihuahua like on the back of our comics that Abigail and I have admired forever, the dog who can fit in a teacup.
I lift her out and she licks my nose. Everyone laughs, but I don’t.
“She’s from your Daddy,” Granma says.
I look at her. I don’t care who she’s from, I love her anyway. I know I shouldn’t, I should give her back, but it’s not her fault. None of it is.
That evening when the sun goes down they light the sparklers. I ask Granma if I can take Little Bit inside because all the popping and whistling from the fireworks is making her shake.
Abigail May is running around like Sky King with a sparkler in each hand. Mostly I would do that with her, but I don’t want to now. Granma says, “Go on then.” And I do.
I put a pillow in the bathtub, put the plug in the drain, then set Little Bit in there with my teddy bear for company. I put her little saucer of water in there too and my clock wrapped in a towel so she thinks it’s her mother. Then I turn out the light and close the door. Then I take off my shorts and put on my blue jeans and my Keds. I’m getting really good with one hand.
In the kitchen I get a paper plate and put on a piece of cake and cover it over with waxed paper.
I go out the back door and yard after yard is neighbors lighting fireworks. It strikes me how they are all in families. I don’t know why it never mattered before, but I always had Granma and Abigail, even Aunt May and Ricky. I guess we had everything and I didn’t know it.
I sneak off then, go around the front and Granma is on the porch but she don’t even notice how I go out the gate and just keep on going toward Miss Little’s house. I’m taking her a piece of my cake. I just want to see if they are all right. I just want to know she is taking care of them.
He said to let her have them. I know he meant it. I don’t hold it against him, but I want to understand. I can’t take anyone’s word for it, that they’re all right. I have to see for myself. That’s all.
So I go down the street, the boys in the street throwing black cats that pop and pop so loudly. I can just imagine Disbro Peak at the trestle lighting M-80’s and cherry bombs the only cherry thing I never liked.
I get to her house and right away you can see the cold and silence. I’m afraid but not so much I won’t do this. So I go in her gate. Not a light on anywhere. I am walking up the broken walk toward that eerie spooky blackness where my kittens live.
But I hear it then, side of the house, fireworks going off all around us, but I still hear it, the awful sounds, and I know what they are. I heard something like them once when Ricky fought with Easy. But I walk around there and I’m not sure what is happening, I can’t think. It’s Cap, it’s Easy and they are working awfully hard in that tall grass, bent over, dragging….
Cap sees me first but it’s Easy who charges me like his dog that day, fast and mean. He is telling me to go on, to get home little girl. Don’t you come around here. I must say something about the kittens but he puts his hands on me, turns me around. I get to the porch and set the cake there, on the part where the floor hasn’t fallen through, but he is there and takes that cake and tries to make me take it back and I say no, it’s for her. “Why are you being so mean?”
But he don’t say, his eyes so big in his face with his hair gone like that. He don’t answer, sets his mouth in a line, sees me to the gate, pushes me out.
“Easy,” I say.
“Go home,” he says, in a terrible voice.
And I do.
“Where you been?” Granma says when I come in the gate, up the porch. “I thought you were upstairs with Little Bit.”
“No,” I say. And that’s all.
“Abigail May is looking for you. They ran up the street to watch the fountains.”
But I go inside and let the screen door close so quietly I barely notice myself.
Next day Abigail May comes running over in the morning. I am sitting on the last step watching Little Bit sniff at the grass. It’s almost as tall as she is.
Abigail falls on her knees by Little Bit and picks her up and kisses her all over. She didn’t spend the night last night. I slept in the bathroom, in the bathtub with Little Bit. Granma knocked and I said I had a tummy ache and to tell Abigail May I’d see her tomorrow, which is today.
“Too much birthday cake,” Granma said through the door. But I never ate my cake.
I am holding so much sorrow. I recognize it now. It’s not just over Abigail, it’s over Easy. It’s over Cap. It’s over whatever they were doing at Miss Little’s. It’s over Miss Little and me not knowing if she’s safe. It’s over my kittens and my pom-pom. It’s over me I guess, a girl her own father doesn’t love even if he did give her the best dog in the world.
But this is the first time I am full of a secret so big it outgrows the edges of myself and I can’t share it, I don’t grab Abigail and head for the shelter so I can spill.
I don’t even
want to.
The Darnay spies are already broken. Abigail May is moving to a street called Seagull Lane and I picture her riding on the back of one of those giant birds and leaving me here, by the tracks, with a cast on my arm with a name wearing away into memory…like our friendship…like my childhood left on the other side of a cherry cake.
I am ten years old. Two handfuls. It’s me and Granma now. And Little Bit.
There will be more mysteries, there already are—two boys at the side of a house in the dark night. There are questions I will have to carry alone.
Long about evening the first police car pulls up in front of Abigail May’s house. We are on the porch playing with Little Bit and eating tuna fish sandwiches. Abigail sees that car she stands up and boys come from nowhere on their bicycles to stop and be nosy.
The second car comes soon after. The policemen walk along Abigail May’s house and go in the backyard. Abigail goes running over there and I stay with Granma. We are on the porch and I’m holding my dog and we are looking at the growing crowd, the dads mostly who are still home from the holiday.
It’s a few minutes and Abigail comes, Aunt May behind her. I know by the way she walks that Abigail is on the job. But it doesn’t matter now. She’s leaving me.
“A man on the tracks,” Abigail says. “They don’t know who.”
“The engineer reported hitting him. Must have been the ten fifteen,” Aunt May says.
“They don’t know who he is,” Abigail says. “Probably some old bum.”
“Well how could they tell if he was hit by a train?” Granma says.
“They couldn’t,” I say. “They couldn’t tell. They could never tell that.”
Everyone is looking at me. Well I just put in my two-cents, that’s all. But they keep on looking, and I pick up Little Bit and run up to my room where they can’t look anymore.
Darnay Road 22
Abigail May and I share the last night. We lay in my bed facing one another. “We should prick our fingers again,” she says.
Close as we lay, like two hamsters in the sawdust, that’s what we’ve said before, but I feel so strange. A pricked finger is a fire-fly in all the dark.
I used to feel like things wrapped around us, this house, my room, my double bed with the thick green paint on the headboard and the decals of Bo-Peep and Jack and Jill and Mary with the Lamb. But all I can think, it’s like a bike-ride in the night, I’m going fast, looking scared into the dark.
She’s going to Florida. It’s a far away planet at the end of the line.
I feel it’s all bigger. There is Darnay Road and the tracks behind the house, and Scutter too. And all the trains that come through. And all the trains…that come through.
We say we ain’t the same as folks back there with their thin clothes. We don’t know what they believe. We say don’t go there and we’ll be safe. It will go away, those houses thirsty for paint, those houses frayed and frazzled from mysteries inside.
We went there. We smelled that sour dark thing that came out of the open door. Easy’s head shaved and dark red marks under his skin. Easy’s eyes and Easy’s voice. Cap’s lips pressed so tight.
The fires that burn inside a person like love and hate maybe, like mystery, and I know something so big, so big and deep, mystery is on the inside before you ever see it, smell it, mystery is the inside.
Scuttertown, Scutter Road. A boy that lifts my arm so gently. A boy on a bridge who saves, for a while. A boy with a terrible light in his eyes who says I must go away, a boy who scares me.
“Hide your eyes,” Granma says.
But I have faced that altar, our Lord’s treasure chest. Mops and buckets underneath the gold chalice, the sacred wine, the wafers we must not bite into so the blood runs down our throats and not our chins.
I am crying now, but it’s not just what she thinks, her going away. I got deep and mysterious tears for that and they aren’t ready to show. I know it.
Ricky said the man was dragged a distance of eight cars. He was lying on the tracks and he was mincemeat. If he’d been standing he might have been thrown and maybe lived, but a man dragged under would be cut in pieces and he was and they had to find them—the pieces--and they had to count them to make sure they got the whole person.
Prick our fingers she says? It’s a firefly in all that blood.
While I lived on Darnay Road, a crow’s line, a skip, a fast ride on someone’s handlebars, a man lay on the tracks and a train came barreling down and it didn’t slow, it couldn’t.
I’m crying because for hours I didn’t know if that man was Easy. Or Cap. I just didn’t know, and it wasn’t okay not to, to even have an idea. But I can’t tell that to Abigail May when she has to leave in the morning. I can’t say it.
Door to door the police went, all along both sides of Darnay Road and both sides of Scutter. They called Miss Little. There was evidence the man might have come from there but it hadn’t rained and it was dry and they’d been paroling the streets watching for fire and everyone knew Miss Little’s property was a cut through.
I know it best, I know the line that makes us safe is cut there, a doorway where two worlds run together, like the place where the rivers meet and crash, one green, one brown, but there it mixes in and muddies up and you can’t hardly tell unless you know, unless you look, so it flows…and flows…and goes.
But nothing was said about who it was or who it was not on those tracks, but it wasn’t a girl, that’s for sure, though they could barely tell at first Ricky said.
I would think it was Miss Little maybe, but it was not. It was not.
So we didn’t do so much, we spoke more quietly, we waited is what we did.
Ricky came with the news. “Adult male, they said.”
And I went off then, in the cellar to cry, but I couldn’t cry.
And I knew it was Abigail May’s last day and there was no joy in us. It was already over. I felt like she was already gone. She had her mother and it’s the strongest thing. I just didn’t know, but I can feel it with Gloria Sue around. Abigail is near starved for her so I don’t take that rope, I don’t pull.
So now we’re almost nose to nose, but far enough back to really look at each other. “We never did buy those bras,” Abigail says.
“Or go up top at the school,” I say, but I don’t mention Easy or Cap. I don’t want to.
“We never did rescue those kittens,” she says.
I don’t know what to say, what I know.
“I’ll write every day,” she says.
“You will not,” I say.
“I will.”
“Don’t say what you cannot do,” I rebuke her.
“Don’t tell me I won’t when I say I will.”
“Well I won’t write you every day, that’s the truth,” I say rolling onto my back to get off my cast.
“I won’t get to see your pruny white arm when they take off the cast,” she says.
“I don’t care.”
“Well that’s mean.”
“You’re talking like you feel sorry,” I say, and she knows I hate that.
“Well Mama says you can visit at Christmas vacation if Granma says, and I will come back here for summer as Florida is just an oven.”
“I ain’t coming on Christmas. I can’t leave Granma alone.”
“She can come too. On the bus.”
“She won’t leave. She barely goes to the market.”
“She said she would.”
“No she didn’t. And what about Little Bit?”
“Well what about next summer then? It’s not so long.”
“You won’t come,” I say. I really believe she will not cause people lie all the time and once they go away they don’t see how special you are, if you are special, and maybe you’re not.
“Well you’re such a sad sack I don’t want to talk to you.” She gets on her other side and rocks the bed and I stare at the ceiling and hear the ten fifteen wail and rumble.
Darnay Road 23
“I’m going to stay here and play with Little Bit,” I tell Granma next morning. I don’t even look her way.
She is almost all the way down the cellar stairs, standing where I can see the tops of her nylons rolled to the place before her knees start up, and Granma has really big knees. So I don’t look anymore, I am sitting on one of the blankets like I do with Abigail May, lying back mostly. Little Bit is chewing on my fingers like I don’t have a care in the world.
Granma sighs. “What do I say when that nice Mr. Figley is waiting on you to say good-bye to Abigail?”
“I already said good-bye,” I tell Granma, looking at her very quickly.
“Sometimes,” Granma says, “you have to make yourself do something you don’t want to do.” But she just stares at me for another minute then she goes up.
She is so mad she snaps out the light and it’s dark down here, but I am not afraid of the dark. What’s lovelier than a sky filled with stars?
There are no stars in this cellar.
I take hold of Little Bit and walk slowly until I reach the steps then up I go.
I meet Abigail May in the kitchen. She is coming for me. She’s been crying, but not now. She is angry and we stop near the table.
“You won’t even say good-bye?”
“Well go on then,” I say.
I have Little Bit and my cast.
She swallows it down cause Mr. Figley honks the horn.
“Tell Cap good-bye for me,” she says quick.
I shake my head no and stare at her feet. She’s wearing the sandals with the blue flowers and red centers that look just like gumdrops.
“Good-bye I guess,” she says.
I just look at her. I can feel those tears rising now. She needs to go.
She comes for me and hugs me on my good side. Then she lets me go and runs out. Then she runs back and gives me a paper wadded up, two papers. She almost knocks me over she pulls away so hard.
She’s back out the door then and it slaps shut and I watch her brown pixie cut disappear.
