Daddy scrambled off the roof of the cab, my question lost in a roll of thunder. He reached up for me.
Although the rain and wind were cold, Daddy’s body was warm. He lifted me to the ground as easily as if I was a baby.
“Get the lanterns,” Daddy said. “And the rope. I’ll get…,” and his words were cut off by the rain as he waded toward the back of the truck.
He came back with a shovel and his small gray metal toolbox.
Trying to run in the darkness, we sloshed through a flooded bean field. Mud sucked at my shoes, and I stumbled trying to keep up with Daddy.
At the foot of the steep bank that led up to the railroad tracks, Daddy tied one end of the rope around my waist, yanking the slipknot.
“When I get on the tracks, I’ll jerk three times on the rope. Then you climb up. I’ll be pulling you. You bring the toolbox.”
He closed my fingers over the handle.
As he scrambled up the bank, the lanterns over his left shoulder banged against each other. Now and then, the lightning, which was dying down, showed me what was happening. Once I saw Daddy clinging to a scrub bush, which pulled out of the ground, and I heard the sliding sound of his shoes scraping through mud.
“We’re coming, Grandpa,” I whispered. “Daddy’s coming.”
Finally a circle of lantern light glowed from the railroad trestle, then another, and I felt the three jerks on my waist.
My hands were slick with sweat and rain as I clung to the rough rope. Brambles grabbed my clothes and tore my skin, and I felt the cold rain washing warm blood down my thigh after Daddy pulled me through a sticker bush.
The lantern glow grew closer, and finally Daddy’s hand closed around my wrist and hoisted me onto the tracks.
We seemed to be standing right in the roiling clouds, and I couldn’t breathe. What would happen if a train came along?
Grandpa always said he’d whip me if he ever heard of me setting foot on the tracks. He said a person could get caught, and a train would come along and just slice them in two.
Daddy was coiling the rope and draping it over his shoulder. Wasn’t he afraid?
He picked up a lantern and the shovel in one hand and thrust the other lantern and toolbox at me.
My hands went out automatically and took them.
I followed Daddy, watching my footing as we stepped from tie to tie. I tried to go faster, tried to stay close, but my legs trembled so much, I was afraid I’d fall.
“What if a train comes along, Daddy?” I gasped, hoping he’d hear me and turn around.
He stopped, looking behind us, and I caught up with him. I put the lantern and toolbox in the same hand and grabbed his coat sleeve.
“It won’t take long to cross the creek,” he said, not answering my question. “We’re going out over the water now.”
Fighting dizziness, I looked down at the wide, swirling creek below us.
Daddy clasped my hand. “It’ll be kind of like walking a cross beam,” he said. “Think you can do it?”
I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me in the darkness. “I think so,” I whispered.
“I’m going to call your grandfather,” Daddy said. “I’m going to call out to him just to let him know we’re coming.”
Daddy swung his lantern in front of him, and I did the same, copying his moves.
“Will!” Daddy yelled. “Will Shannon!”
I tried to sort out the sounds that came back to us. My lantern made a squeaking sound as it swung, and Daddy motioned me to quit. The creek rushed below us.
Please answer, Grandpa, I prayed. Please.
Daddy set down his lantern and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Will!” he shouted again. “Can you hear us?”
I listened so hard, I heard Daddy’s leather belt creaking as he took breaths.
Finally a weak “Yo” came back.
I started shaking, and Daddy hugged me to his side. Then he took my hand again and we moved out on the tracks, over the water forty feet below. I saw it swirling between the ties.
“Don’t look down,” Daddy said, his voice tight.
I clung to his hand and began counting my steps. I’d go ten steps. Then I’d see if I could work up the courage to go ten more. My knees shook so much, I doubted I could make my feet go where they needed to. But I just kept counting.
I went to ten, then twenty. When I got close to a hundred, Daddy said, “We’re almost there.”
“How come we brought your toolbox, Daddy?” I said, making myself talk to keep my mind off the last few steps.
“You never know what we’re going to find,” Daddy said. “We may need tools.”
As soon as we were over the water, he stopped.
“Will!” he called.
Grandpa’s weak “Yo” came back.
“We’re on your side of the creek now. Up on the tracks,” Daddy yelled, holding his hands to his mouth. “Can you see our lanterns?”
We swung them in front of us again.
After a long time, Grandpa called, “I see them.” His voice sounded weak.
“Watch our lanterns,” Daddy hollered. “When we’re even with you, call out.” Daddy’s voice sounded strong over the sound of the wind and water, but up close and underneath, I could hear him fighting to catch his breath.
We went along the tracks at a trot, things rattling in Daddy’s toolbox, my heart lighter and my feet more sure of themselves.
After a while, Daddy stopped.
“Are we even with you, Will?”
“Just about,” Grandpa said, his voice closer. “Another fifty feet.”
Going down the embankment was faster than going up. I skidded ahead of Daddy, digging my heels into the mud. The toolbox slipped from my hands and I winced at the sound of rattling metal rolling away into the blackness. Rocks scraped my hands and bottom, but it didn’t matter. I could fly if I had to, walk on water, lift the tractor off Grandpa single-handedly.
“Over here,” Grandpa said, his voice very close.
I could make out the bulk of the upside-down tractor. Up close, it even smelled dangerous, the reek of fuel oil floating on water.
“Here,” Grandpa said. “My foot’s caught, Harold. Who’s with you?”
“Willa Mae,” Daddy said, shining his lantern over Grandpa.
I stepped into the light so Grandpa could see me. Only the top part of him showed. The rest of his body was hidden under the mass of the tractor.
Grandpa’s face shone a sickly bluish white. He repeated my name in a puzzled voice as if he was thinking about who I might be. Then his head jerked with recognition. “Willa Mae,” he said, reaching out his left hand.
I set down my lantern and squatted beside him, clasping his hand between mine.
“How long you been here, Will?” Daddy asked, bending to look closely at Grandpa’s face.
“I don’t know,” Grandpa said, his voice slow. “A long time.”
He shut his eyes, almost like he was falling asleep, and his grasp on my hands loosened.
“Grandpa! Grandpa!” I shook his hand.
Grandpa opened his eyes, and I nearly fainted with relief. I squeezed his hand, rubbing it.
Daddy was moving his lantern around, sizing up the situation.
Grandpa’s eyes closed again, but he kept a grip on my hand. “I been watching the water come up, Willa Mae,” he said. “It was a sight.”
The rising creek was only about four feet away from Grandpa’s head. “I supposed the creek was going to get me. Still might, if your daddy can’t get me loose.”
I made a sound of denial deep in my throat as Daddy spoke from the darkness. “I’ll get you loose, Will.”
His voice soft, Daddy told me to find out if Grandpa was hurt anyplace except what was under the tractor.
I ran my hands over Grandpa’s icy head and face. Had Grandpa hit his head on a stone?
As I slipped my hands under his head, his eyes came open. “Look,” he said. “There’s the Big Dipper.”
G
randpa was seeing things. The sky was thick with clouds.
“Look, Willa Mae,” he insisted. He was coated in a slurry of mud from struggling to get loose, but his blue eyes glowed in his streaked face, focused for the first time. “Look up there.”
I looked just to indulge him. Sure enough, the clouds had parted, leaving a gap so we could see the Dipper.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, my voice singing. “I never did see anything so beautiful.”
I sat back on my heels. “Where are you hurt, Grandpa?” I asked. I hadn’t felt any wounds or broken places. “Can you move everything?”
“Everything but my left foot,” he said.
He rolled his head to stare at the water, and he shuddered. The rain had stopped, but the creek was still rising.
I concentrated on the hungry, gnawing edge of the creek, willing it back. If I wished hard enough, it would leave my grandpa alone.
“That smokestack saved you, Will,” Daddy said, starting to dig around Grandpa’s legs.
“It held the weight of the tractor off me.”
The smokestack, on the nose of the tractor, had hit sandstone when the tractor rolled over. It kept the heavy machine propped up just enough to spare Grandpa’s life.
In the silence of the wind dropping for a minute, I heard the creek still chewing and Daddy breathing hard as he threw out shovel after shovel full of mud. Grandpa waited in breathless silence, his eyes closed again, his hands twining between mine as if we were washing up for a meal.
“Try pulling your foot, Will,” Daddy said, standing back and leaning on the shovel handle. He pushed his wet hair out of his eyes with muddy fingers.
Grandpa’s hands tightened around mine and I felt his body go taut.
“Grandpa,” I said, straining with him. “Pull.”
I saw his left knee rise with the effort.
Daddy dug some more, panting. Was the water only about three feet away now?
“Try again,” Daddy ordered, panic bubbling in his voice.
Grandpa stared into the stars and shuddered with the effort of trying to pull his left leg out. “You pull on it, Willa Mae,” he said with a groan. “I think the rain washed my strength away.”
“Come on, Will,” Daddy said, throwing his shovel back and leaning his weight into the tractor.
“Tell me if it hurts you,” I said, trembling at the thought of somehow making things worse.
I straddled Grandpa, hooked my hands under his knee, and pulled back. I heard him suck air between his teeth. “Keep pulling,” he said.
Suddenly the tractor moved and a cry escaped from Daddy before he knocked me away and grabbed Grandpa under the shoulders and heaved, pulling him free.
Both men lay in the mud, entwined. The tractor tilted a little, then settled.
While Daddy followed the edges of the creek south to the Penningtons’ place, I stayed with Grandpa, talking to him, rubbing his hands, and curling my body around his to keep him warm. After a long time, I heard a tractor coming over the hill to get us.
Chapter 16
The week before Christmas, Doc Simmons stopped by and sawed the cast off Grandpa’s foot. Grandpa’s impatience with casts and crutches blazed in his eyes and he threatened to throw the crutches in the woodstove. But the doctor said if Grandpa didn’t want to be crippled for life, he better keep the weight off his leg for a while longer.
Grandpa grumbled, sick to death of listening to the radio and reading the Bible and visiting with the neighbors who still dropped by. But what had been a torrent of friends right after the tractor accident was now down to a trickle—mainly just the preacher and Uncle Retus’s family. Everybody could see that the farm was well in hand, thanks to my daddy. The pump didn’t squeak anymore, Old Jerse got milked morning and night, and things around the place worked as well as they could considering they were tended by a son-in-law, which people seemed to now remember my daddy was.
He went off most mornings to work wiring somebody’s house or farm, but he came back every night and did Grandpa’s chores: milking, tending the pigs, and helping Nana get the henhouse ready for winter. When Daddy went across the road to turn out the sheep, I went along. My lamb had grown almost as big as her mother and would eat out of my hand.
After the chores were done, Daddy came in and washed up for supper. I’d see him sitting across the table from me in the lamplight, and it felt good.
And the best part of all was that after supper, and after Daddy had talked to Grandpa about a sore place on one of the sheep’s sides—or whatever other problem he’d noticed—he’d go upstairs to bed. Daddy stayed in the east bedroom, under the eaves, where he and Mama used to sleep. That room was right over mine, and I could hear him moving around. I wondered if he was remembering Mama, and if the memories made him happy or sad.
Memories work both ways, I guess. Back in November, on a windy night that I’d figured out later was the anniversary of Mama’s death, Grandpa had hoisted himself from his chair by the stove and onto his crutches. He’d disappeared into his and Nana’s bedroom and came back after a while with a picture in his hand.
“Treva sure was pretty, wasn’t she?” he’d said.
Then he’d wiped the silver-framed picture with the sleeve of his flannel shirt and set it on the sideboard.
Lowering himself back into the chair, he’d sat gazing at the dancing flame that showed through the stove door.
In the quiet, we’d listened to little sparks of wood popping.
Daddy’d cleared his throat after a while. “Yes, sir. She sure was.”
That night in bed, I’d cried myself to sleep, but only because I was glad.
As the weeks worked up to Christmas, I got in the habit of stopping by Mama’s picture. Some days she seemed to be looking right at me, and for the first time in a long time, I thought she might be taking an active interest in my life.
“I’m learning to cook, Mama,” I whispered one day when I was alone in the room. “Nana has showed me how to make fried potatoes and biscuits. We’re going to try a pie crust on Saturday.”
Meantime Daddy was scrambling to get Nana and Grandpa’s house wired by Christmas Eve because Nana had her heart set on Christmas tree lights.
In the evenings, we’d hear him up in the attic singing, then he’d break off and yell for me and I’d scramble through the opening in the ceiling of the cedar closet to give him a hand with the blowtorch or whatever he needed.
And Nana was pushing to get the living-room walls covered with the red-velvet patterned paper she’d bought with her egg money. So the week before Christmas, Aunty Rose and I took turns slathering the strips of paper with thick, nose-stinging paste. Nana hung each strip herself, counting on Grandpa to tell her if the pattern was running straight.
With all this going on, the days till Christmas flew by. December twenty-third was Grandmother Clark’s birthday, so Daddy and I went down that night to take her a pretty box of lady’s dusting powder.
She’d put a roast in the oven, and apples baking with raisins and cinnamon perfumed the house. Aunt Belle had made a spice cake with special seven-minute frosting that swirled in peaks over the cake.
Grandfather Clark brought out his dandelion wine for the occasion, and this time I had a sip.
“It’s good,” I said, testing the taste on my lips.
Later, after we’d eaten our fill and sung “Happy Birthday” to Grandmother Clark and looked at the card Uncle Lesley sent her from Oklahoma, we went out into the starry night to get in the truck. The tip of my nose turned cold. The truck’s heater didn’t work very well, and Daddy carried a blanket for me to wrap up in. I pulled it around me and watched for who had Christmas tree lights sparkling through their front windows.
“There’s the Bradshaws’,” I said. “Look, Daddy. They’ve got a lighted angel on top of their tree.”
The Marshalls, down on the corner, didn’t have a lighted angel, but their tree lights were shaped like candles.
At Uncle Retus’
s house, the living room was dark except for the blaze of the Christmas tree.
“Won’t Nana be proud,” I said, “when we plug in the lights tomorrow?”
“Sure hope it happens,” Daddy said. “And it will if the inspector gets out.”
The inspector didn’t come the next morning, though Daddy stayed home to wait for him. About noon, Aunty Rose and I went to town to do last-minute Christmas shopping but, most of all, to stop by Morton’s Hardware Store and pick up the lights that Nana had finally decided on.
Snow started to fall about the time we turned north on the highway, and fat, wet flakes kept right on tumbling down. By the time we came out of the hardware store with a sack full of lights, the streets were slick and Aunty Rose slid through a stop sign on the square.
“We better get home,” she said.
“Just one more stop,” I begged. “I want to get Marilee and Mattie something.”
They’d given me a locket as a Christmas present. Marilee had fitted a tiny picture of herself into one side of the locket, and Mattie had done the same on the other.
And although Aunty Rose didn’t know it, Petey Tyler had slipped me a small package when we were putting on our coats after the Christmas program at school last Wednesday night. I’d hidden the present in my pocket and had not opened it until I was alone in my bedroom with the door closed. Inside the folded and refolded red-and-white-striped paper was a brass bookmark with a heart engraved on it.
I wasn’t going to tell anybody about the present—not that I didn’t appreciate it. Mostly, I guess, I liked that Petey had paid enough attention to know how much I enjoyed reading. But if Aunty Rose knew he’d given me a gift, she’d tease me day and night.
The sparkling blue ear bobs from Charles Michael winked in and out of the waves of her hair as she parked the Packard in front of Herbert’s Drugstore.
“Let’s hurry,” she said.
In the window, I saw a display of Evening in Paris perfume.
“You stay here,” I commanded her. “And keep your eyes shut.”
She grumbled, but I could tell she was giggling inside. And I knew she’d peek and try to find out what I was buying her.
Inside the front door, pine boughs scented the air. A lady with a tightly curled glossy hairdo helped me choose a small bottle of Evening in Paris for Aunty Rose and a matching set of tortoiseshell hair barrettes for Marilee and Mattie. I had exactly twenty-seven cents left from the money Daddy had given me for Christmas shopping.
Over the River Page 13
