by Diane Munier
It is the silliest thing ever. It’s a troll doll and he isn’t very big but he was so crammed in my pocket I could barely get him out because his arms are spread out wide. He has long cottony pink hair. “Me and Abigail May call them dammy dolls,” I say. “That one is my fav…favorite. I want you to have it.”
He laughs. “Why you giving me this?” he comes closer and takes it.
“Cause,” I say looking up at him, “I want to. You’ve my very, very best…best friend Easy. That didn’t leave town.”
He plucks at that crazy doll’s hair. I put that barrette he wanted across the hair like a clamp on all that wildness.
“Hope it don’t…doesn’t look like me,” I say.
“Like you?” he says quick. “Maybe a little.”
Well I smile, and I wipe under my eyes in case there’s any tears left over cause I’m so happy now.
“Will you come around after church to…morrow then like we planned?” I’m going to show him how to grow a beautiful lava garden on a brick using basic household cleaners. He doesn’t believe me when I say me and Abigail May make one every summer.
He keeps looking at the doll, playing with the hair. He don’t answer then he unclips that barrette and hands it back to me.
“Why…?”
“I don’t want it,” he says. “But I’ll keep this,” he says smiling and shaking the doll at me.
I put that barrette in my pocket where he won’t have to see it no more.
“Say Easy…are you all alone?”
He is looking at me, his eyes so dark, like midnight. He makes my heart beat so fast. I hope he doesn’t get mad again.
“Why you got to be so nosey all the time?” he says. “If you don’t stop being nosey I’ll have to stay away.”
“You just saying th…at to be mean?” I ask, scrunching my toes.
“No. I don’t want to be mean to you. I told you that.”
“Well…I know you told me not to be nosey, but I saw Disbro Peak come out of Miss Lit…tle’s house when I walked home earlier.”
He is staring at me, so dark and silent. “What do you want me to do, Georgia?”
“Well…why would he be in there? She told Granma and me those strange things.” I’ve already told him all that she said.
“She’s got madness,” he says sternly.
“I know that,” I say. I have lived on Darnay Road longer than him and I know that about Miss Little. “But what business could he have with Miss Lit…tle?”
“There are some things you don’t know,” he says, and he is so serious I don’t think I want to know, but I am listening, ain’t I?
“Then tell me,” I say.
“Things aren’t always good, Georgia. You’re just a kid and I’m not…I don’t want to get you worried. But you need to mind your business sometimes. Then it will be all right. But you go poking in all the time and your little nose with those freckles will be like a stick in a hornet’s nest, see?”
“I’m not afraid. If he’s hurting Miss Little then we should t…ell.”
“He’s not hurting her. Not like you think.”
“How do you know?”
He turns away and he smacks that dammy doll into his hand. “I know the things you don’t need to,” he says so firmly.
I am looking at him. “But I….”
He turns toward me again. “No. You are just a little girl and you got your nice pink room and your pretty little…toes and your nightie.” He’s flustered looking me up and down and I knit my fingers together I am so throwing a leg over my high horse. “You’re the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Smartest too. And you make me laugh all the time. You’re like that little doll that winds up in the jewelry box…going round and round.”
I don’t know what to say. I’m not mad anymore, but how he sees me, it can’t be true. And I don’t want it false cause it’s so nice. And so wrong too. It makes me feel all lumpy in the throat and it worries me hugely. Really enormously. Going round and round?
“Did Disbro Peak take my kittens?”
He looks at me, his tongue in his cheek again. “Sure.”
“Sure? For really real?”
“You got your fists digging your sides and I know how you get,” he says.
“You didn’t go after him?”
“I didn’t see the point,” he says. “He didn’t hurt them and your Granma don’t want four stray cats.”
“I thought you’d protect them.” Protect me is what I want to say.
“I’m trying to now, but you won’t quit.”
It’s like he heard me inside. He says he’s trying to protect me. But I thought he was…Superman.
“I’m going home,” he says like he can feel my disappointment.
“No.” I try to block his way. “He took her my kittens and you never said.”
“He thought they were his. He thought you took them from him. You see how it works?”
“They weren’t his!”
“Maybe they were,” he says and his breath smells like cigarettes. Do I even know Easy? Or anybody? Or anything?
“You going to protect Disbro Peak?” I am going round and round now.
“No.” He steps away a little. “I’m just letting it go until I can’t. See? When I can’t…then I do something. Sometimes I don’t see it coming…what I’ll do.” He looks down.
“Easy?” I say, my hand going to his arm so lightly.
He looks at me. He’s got a sadness in him so deep I can feel it coming into me. But I would take this for him, this bucket of blue-blue. “You should come to church with us tomorrow. The music just fills the church and it’s all so beautiful.”
He is looking at me and he laughs some. “I seen that church. It’s fake too, just like everything else it’s all for show. We looked, didn’t we? We went in that booth. There’s nothing there. Only thing that seems like something more is you,” he says.
“Me? I ain’t a thing. My own dad don’t come around. I think he’s so bored when he does he can’t stay awake even.”
He laughs then. He laughs so much he sits on the top step. “He’s a shithead then,” he says still smiling.
The cursing is powerful. I’m not used to it at all.
He pats the stair beside him and I hurry to sit there, close as I can. I thread my arm through his. I tell him about my mother too.
He can’t believe it. “A real model?” he says. “No wonder you’re so pretty.”
Well I don’t know what to say. He goes on about me being so pretty all the time. I don’t feel pretty. I think I’m funny when I look in the mirror. I’ve got stick out ears and a little head and big hair and everything is the same dark color, hair and eyes and I make some crazy faces and I’m just me.
“Maybe if she loved her own child she’d be alive,” Easy says.
I never thought of it that way, but it seems so grown up to be so stern about it.
“People bring on most of their own troubles,” he says. He seems as old as Granma in saying that.
He gets out a cigarette then. I am leaning on his arm watching him light it and pull in.
“Not you,” I say.
He looks at me, corner of his eye. I got my face real close since he likes it so much. I want him to be sure.
“Not you,” he says to me. “I don’t get half of what I deserve. I told you I’m not good.”
I don’t believe that for a minute.
“Easy…you think when we get big we could get married or something?”
He laughs and pulls on his smoke. “I’d marry you,” he says blowing the smoke out. “But I have to get older and so do you.”
“Would you turn Catholic?”
“No,” he laughs still smoking.
“Why not?” I sit up a little. I know it will never go with Granma if he stays heathen.
But then Grampa had that same problem. But Grampa turned. Sort of.
“Well what about those older girls? Like at the Quick Shop?”
/> “Those girls? Look, I’m way older than you,” he says.
“Two years,” I say.
“You can’t have a boyfriend now and I don’t have any money for a girl. I have to get older and go in the army then we can think about getting married and stuff.”
“But what if you fall in love with someone else?”
“I’ll tell you,” he says. “And you have to tell me. But don’t talk about it anymore. You’re too young. And you’re innocent. You have to remember not to let boys get around you. They’ll want to because you’re pretty. They’ll probably all be around you. But you have to not let them get close.”
“I don’t let them get close. Just you.”
“I mean when you get older. Does your Granma tell you stuff? About boys?”
“No. I mean, I don’t want to know it. I mean…what kind of stuff?”
“Well, she’ll tell you. You need to listen. Boys are disgusting,” he says. “You can’t let them around you. C’mon, let’s get my bike.”
One thing, I don’t have the hic-cups anymore at all. He is holding my hand and we go around the house to get his bike. He pulls the door and it’s on the stairs. He says he doesn’t know why I did it that way and I must be stronger than I look.
I am.
Darnay Road 37
A new schedule begins and it interrupts our usual schedule but me and my Granma do not mind at all. Easy comes at eleven and Granma gives him work to do around the house. I did not realize there was so much needing a ‘man’s’ or boy’s touch, which comes from Granma always singing, ‘It’s So Nice to Have a Man Around the House,’ whenever Easy is working here, just like she loves, loves to sing, ‘I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right Out of My Hair,’ when she washes my hair. But anyway, I thought our house looked fine but there is a long line of projects it seems.
Sometimes she gives him a job that lasts for two or three days but mostly it’s a lot of different things. Sometimes she comes up with the job, sometimes he makes suggestions.
And one day she gets out Grampa’s tool box and everything in it is in fine shape and well-kept even after all the years he’s been in heaven—if he made it, and I think he did.
Grandma opens that toolbox and she shows Easy. Easy looks at Granma and she gives the go ahead and he takes the hammer first and looks it over.
“He always took good care of things,” Granma tells him.
Easy looks at her when she speaks, he always does. Me too, mostly, except when I’m nosey then he tells me to quit being a Darnay Spy and I almost wish I hadn’t told him about that.
So after that Easy can use the tools without asking but he always has to put them back where they belong which is in the garage on the workbench, second shelf. And he does that.
I love, love to watch Easy work and I get him lots of drinks. He makes me feel kind of safe and definitely happy. There’s nothing he can’t do. He even fixed our toilet from running water all the time—kind of embarrassing, but kind of really nice, too. He cleaned the gutters up high on the ladder which about scared me to death and he put putty around the attic windows and I sat near him and handed him the putty knife or screwdriver when he needed them.
He white washed the old garage in the back of the yard and it put me in mind of Tom Sawyer so I told him the entire story while he did that. He shored up the fence and cleaned the debris from every corner. He trimmed the big branches on the bottom of the trees and once I screamed because a branch came down and nearly hit him and he grinned and grinned.
He taught me how to climb the big tree and we sat up there in the Sycamore until I really wasn’t afraid then he helped me down. Then he cut up the big branches so Aunt May could use them for firewood cause she still likes fires and Granma does not, and he tied the smaller ones in bundles and set them out for the trashman. I still have my red wagon so I helped him pull those loads, well watched him pull them mostly.
He scraped the bottom of the porch and painted, even the latticework. I read him the first Hardy Boys while he did that, top of my lungs almost cause I sat on the porch stairs while he climbed around with his brush.
He dug up all the rocks around the flowerbed and put them back and they look so pretty. I helped on that until a cricket got on me, then no thank-you.
He’s a wonder, he’s a marvel. He’s Easy. I sing that to him sometimes and he laughs. I don’t even mind singing to him at all.
Pretty soon Aunt May gives him work too, then Nettie further down. They are the three on our block besides Miss Little without husbands around to take care of things. It makes me feel something—jealous. I guess that’s what it is all right. Granma says so. I say, “Why they have to take Easy when he’s ours?”
Granma just laughs and sings, “Jealousy is taking over thee. There goes your fingernail…into your gingerale.”
I hate that song but Granma loves Frankie Laine and this is the funny version of his song “Jealousy.” It makes me smile and I don’t want to.
Jealousy feels like a green heartache.
But mostly Easy is still ours.
Trouble is I don’t see him as much with all his jobs. And the things I used to do that were fine-and-dandy just don’t seem like enough. I have plenty to read and I know he’ll be around. And Granma says to stop moping I should not be so attached to Easy. She still says I’m not his right-hand man. But it doesn’t stop me.
What is worse--school is starting. Naturally the Catholics start a week before the heathen. We’re just so eager to get trapped in those desks. I can’t imagine going to Bloody Heart every single day, Mass every morning and high mass on Tuesdays, confession once a month, all of it without Abigail May and without being able to see Easy.
It’s unbearable to think on it. And Easy will be at public. His reading isn’t so bad. He finally let me hear and he does pretty well. His problem is he doesn’t finish his words all the way through sometimes. He just reads the beginning then makes up the rest. I heard that right off and he thought I was a magician to be able to tell him what he’s doing wrong. But all I had to do was listen.
“What you doing?” I ask Granma on the very last day of vacation. She’s got the box of recipes out.
“Looking for that yellow butter cake,” she mutters, glasses perched on the end of her nose as she sorts through one section of her file.
She is a cooking fool since Easy. He loves, loves my Granma’s cooking and who doesn’t. But she never cooked like this. We’ve had about everything she ever made in her life in the past few weeks with Easy around.
But that last night after supper we’re sitting on the porch eating butter cake, me and Easy. My new school clothes are upstairs hanging in my closet and folded neatly in my drawers. They all came from the JC Penny catalogue.
Easy says, “Got me a paper route.”
Disbro Peak rides by with Bobby and Mike. They were starting to do that thing where they make fun of Easy for being here with me, but Easy took off after them on his bike one night and they haven’t done it since. But Little Bit lifts her head where she lays on my lazy stomach while I try to fit another bite of cake down my throat cause why in the world would a boy that works so hard get a paper route?
“How you going to do that with everything else?” I ask, licking my fork. He goes sun-up to sundown. He’s become the handyman of Darnay Road. Pretty much. Yep.
“I worked harder than this in Shoehorn. Worked those fields.”
“Not when I met you. You and Cap were just doing what boys do all the time.”
“It was supposed to be better up here. But I was taking care of them, so….”
I perk right up. He never as in ever talks about himself like this. “Cap and your mom?”
“Yeah it was…supposed to be different.”
“Your dad…?”
His eyes shift to mine. “Got killed,” he says and I figure he’ll end it now.
“I won’t tell,” I say. He should know that by now.
“Tell what?”
“Wha
tever you tell me,” I say.
“She was gonna have a baby…but um….” His eyes fill with tears so quickly. He’s staring off poking his tongue in his cheek like he does. He breathes in and I wonder if he’s not holding so much in there’s no room for air.
Granma’s program is playing in the background beyond the screen door. I know she’s already sipping from the glass so it’s not likely she’ll come out here. It’s time he told me something.
“Easy…go on and tell me,” I say.
He is looking at me, and I just hold steady and true. I don’t know what I look like to him but it makes him smile a little anyway.
“You know anything about babies?” he says.
“Well…I guess so. I mean…I know people have babies,” I say like I’m insulted but I’m not.
“I mean…sometimes the mother loses a baby,” he says.
“Oh. I never thought much about it.” Losing a mother, yes. But losing a baby…I just never looked at it from that end I guess.
He looks at his empty plate like he’s trying to find some words in-between the yellow crumbs.
“Thing is…she lost the baby.” Then he looks at me, his eyes reddish and he sniffs, but it’s kind of mad maybe. “She lost more than one.”
“You mean your mom.”
“Yeah.”
“Were they born? Or….”
“They weren’t born,” he says angrily. “They didn’t get a chance even.”
I am barely breathing. “How…did it happen?”
He looks away from me. “It just happened. I wasn’t sorry when he died. I wasn’t a bit sorry,” he says.
“Your dad?”
He nods, his mouth so set. “Cap was. Sorry. But not me.”
I decide to stay quiet then. I truly don’t know what to say.
“Guess you think that’s pretty strange,” he says.
“No,” I lie. I mean it’s strange but I know he’s speaking the truth.
“It is. It shouldn’t be that way. I know that. I told you I’m not good.” He looks at me, he’s pretty fierce now. “Cap is. He’s good. But not me.”
“He went back home with your mother, didn’t he?” I say. Oh Lordy I didn’t mean to say it. Not a hundred percent.