by Mary Knight
“Curley, your very own Discovery Channel is waiting for you right up those attic stairs.”
I haven’t asked for a TV—or a computer, for that matter—since.
Jules lies across from me against the opposite arm of the couch. We throw one of Mama’s quilts over us and stretch out our legs until our toes touch. I guess it’s the warmth of the room and a full stomach that makes me let down my guard and start bragging.
“Papaw, the only conundrum I can’t figure out tonight is why you picked such an easy word. Jules and I could have done way better than that.” I like to cast Jules and me as a team any chance I can get. That doesn’t stop Papaw from seeing an opening the size of a barn door and driving a truck through it.
“Well now, you’ve got a point there, Curley. I bet you could do better than me.” Papaw sits there, his head propped up in his broad calloused hand, looking at me with those piercing blue eyes of his. “Maybe it’s time you picked your own words.”
Dang. The last thing I want to do is spend more time with my head in a dictionary. I don’t like where this conversation is going and I need a diversion fast. That’s when Jules saves the day by putting me in a different kind of trouble.
“Here, Curley. Open your present.” She pulls it out from under the covers and throws it at me, where it lands squarely in my lap.
“It feels like a book,” I say, stating the obvious. She has this effect on me.
“Well, duh, yeah,” she says. I have this effect on her.
I pull the ribbon loose and the burlap falls away. The book has a brown leather cover but no title, and the pages are blank.
“Gosh, Jules, just what I always wanted—a book with no words. I guess you could say it’s a fast read.” I crack myself up, Papaw, too, but I guess Jules doesn’t think it’s so funny. She kicks me under the covers and just about jams my big toe.
“It’s a diary, stupid.” Her dimple shows up, so I know she’s not really mad. “But that’s not how you’re going to use it.” Papaw raises his left eyebrow.
“Well, that’s a relief.” I sigh. “You know how I hate to write.” That isn’t entirely true, and she knows it. I try my hand at short stories once in a while, when we have to write something for English, and I always choose Jules to be my reader.
“It’s not for writing, exactly, at least not in the way you think. It’s for keeping track of your papaw’s words. Like keeping a dictionary.”
Well, that makes me speechless, mainly because I’m not sure how much work this dictionary idea’s going to entail. Jules keeps talking about how Papaw’s leaving me a legacy, like a hope chest of words, and how I should have a place to keep them. So I guess you could say Jules has saved me. No way Papaw’s going to make me pick my own words now.
After Jules finishes her explanation, Papaw winks at me. Jules keeps tapping my foot under Mama’s quilt like she’s stepping on the gas real gentle-like. Even though it feels like she gave me homework for my birthday, I’d let her drive me just about anywhere.
“Thanks, Jules,” I say. “You’re a gem.” She usually hates it when I say that, but she knows I have mixed feelings. She cocks her head all apologetic-like and grins back at me.
Her gift falls open, its pages all naked and white.
Conundrum—noun
1 : a kind of riddle based upon some fanciful or fantastic resemblance between things quite unlike; a puzzling question, of which the answer is or involves a pun
2 : a question to which only a conjectural answer can be made
You might think that Papaw only gives me highfalutin words, but no, he says if you leave out the fun ones, why bother? That’s why conundrum is followed this week by dillydally, although it’s hard to believe it’s a real word. It even looks silly when you write it, like its arms and legs are sticking out all over the place, and yet it seems to like itself that way.
Papaw makes me look up my words in the dictionary we keep in the living room. We call it the Big Book or sometimes just the Book, like all the Baptists in these parts call the Bible. It sits on top of a pedestal Papaw carved out of maple wood and shaped to look like a Doric column from ancient Greece. Papaw’s a woodworker and sells his furniture up in Berea, where they sell a lot of handmade stuff from Appalachian craftsmen. It’s not making us rich, he says, but at least we’re getting by. After seeing that mysterious handoff between him and Antsy last weekend, I’ve been wondering if woodworking might not be his only occupation.
I look up dillydally in the Big Book and write down the definition in my dictionary. Basically, it means “to waste time,” like that’s a bad thing. Pretty judgmental for a silly-looking word. I notice that dillydally is derived from the word dally, which means “to act playfully, especially”—and especially is italicized, as if the dictionary makers really liked that part—“to play amorously” (my italics).
“For cryin’ out loud, Papaw, why can’t I just have dally?”
I’m thinking of Jules, of course. Practicing dally would give me the perfect excuse to flirt. She’d have to dally back, since she’s the one who gave me this dang dictionary in the first place. I don’t recall ever begging for a word before, but this one feels important.
“Please, Papaw … just this once?”
“Hmmm …” Papaw holds a lit wooden match over his pipe and puffs until the tobacco fires red. It always looks like the eagle’s head Papaw carved into the bowl of the pipe is fuming. One of his spy books lies open on his lap. As a little boy, I used to watch Papaw read, waiting for stray ash to come floating down from his pipe and set the book on fire, but it never did.
“Well, I suppose I could let you switch words this once.” He clamps the pipe stem into the side of his mouth, which makes his words come out all slurpy. “But you know, Curley, I’d rather you start owning your words, rather than letting them own you.”
I groan. Here comes another lesson.
“Words are like wood.”
“How’s that, Papaw?” When Papaw starts philosophizing (p word, last fall), it’s best to go along.
“Under the proper conditions, with the right heat and moisture, wood is pliable. So are words. Meaning can change with context.”
“But what does that have to do with this week’s word?”
“That’s just it, Curley. If you want your dillydally to have an amorous context, let it.” His eyebrows jut up and down like they’re on strings. “One person’s waste of time is another person’s lingering moment, if you know what I mean.”
Turns out, dillydallying is something Jules and I are really good at. We’d been doing it every day on our walk to the school bus stop about a mile up the holler and didn’t even know it. This morning, snowflakes are falling like a bad case of dandruff dusting everything along the trail—honeysuckle bushes, brambles, oaks, sycamores, and scraggly pines. In the summer and early fall, you can’t see as far as you can spit in these woods, but now, it’s like you’re looking through skeletons, their jagged arms sticking out every which way against the clouded sky all the way up Red Hawk Mountain.
I join up with Jules by our special tree, an old sycamore with a hollow trunk you can crawl inside. According to Mrs. C, who knows a lot about American Indians, the sycamore is sacred to the Cherokee because it plays an important part in their creation story. When we were little, Jules and I sometimes ran away from home and hid in it. Problem was our parents always knew where to find us. Our favorite place to hang out now, though, is on the lowermost branch, which is as thick as a horse’s back. That’s why we call our tree Ol’ Charley, after an old workhorse Jules used to ride. “Hey, Curley,” Jules shouts as she comes tromping through the woods to meet up with me. Her voice sounds dry and crisp.
“Hey, Jules,” I shout back. Every time I call out to her like that, I think about that Beatles song Papaw sometimes plays on his old stereo, “Hey, Jude,” only I sing it in my head, “Hey, Jules.”
She stomps up to me through the snow and nudges me with her backpack. The moist cloud
of her breath warms my face in the frosty morning air. “Your hair looks like cinnamon and powdered sugar,” she says.
“Good enough to lick?” Me being amorous. I duck my head a little in case she wants to take me up on it.
“Get real, Curley Hines. I’d rather use your head for a mop.” She takes her mittened hand and shakes snow from my hair like lint. “Hey, I heard the buses are running a little late on account of the snow. Help me up on Ol’ Charley, okay?”
I lace my gloved hands together like a stirrup and give her a lift up onto our special branch. Her hair brushes my face, and I smell herbal garden shampoo, something her ma makes from a secret mix of local herbs, milk, and wild honey. After she gets settled in, I pull myself up, too, facing her.
Jules gets real still up here. I know better than to talk about stuff. Her breathing slows and she peers out over the holler, watching for signs of life. Maybe this counts as dillydallying. Certainly, there are folks who would consider it a waste of time, but Jules says it’s better than a good breakfast for starting the day out right.
I couldn’t agree more. While she’s staring out at the woods, I’m meditating on how our knees are touching and how I wish I had the guts to grab ahold of her hand.
“Curley.” She hushes me like she can hear my thoughts. “Look.”
I follow her line of sight midway up the mountain, where a magnificent buck is eating the bark off a Fraser fir. He looks up and sniffs the air. Humongous, eight-point antlers splay out behind him like a bone-white tree. I’ve never seen anything like him.
I lean toward Jules as my wonder deepens. “Is that a deer?”
She shakes her head almost imperceptibly. “Elk,” she breathes.
It’s the first one I’ve ever seen. Ringed with a dark brown mantle, his enormous chest radiates power; I can almost feel his heart pulsing in rhythm with mine. When he stretches his muzzle all the way out, I think he’s about to gag, but then he emits this long, mournful bugle call that rolls through the holler. Jules and I look at each other in oh-my-gosh amazement as its echoes fade into the snow-packed hills.
“He seems kind of lonely,” I say, rubbing my hands together for warmth.
Jules nods. “I bet he’s missing his mate.”
That’s the only call we hear from the bull elk for the next half hour as we watch him gingerly pick his way up the mountain, nibbling at branches. Now and then, he rubs his antlers against the trunk of a tree like he’s got a powerful itch. The farther up the mountain he goes, the smaller he gets in our sight, until, with one final kick and a leap, his white rump falls over the horizon, out of sight.
Jules leans back against Ol’ Charley and sighs. Her breath forms a mist in the frozen air between us. I pass my hand through it to see what sticks.
Bus?
What bus?
Dillydally—verb
: to loiter or trifle; to waste time
Thwack.
“Okay, you knuckleheads, listen up!”
Everyone in fifth-period science jumps about a foot out of their seats. No matter how many times Mr. Amons begins the class this way, whacking his yardstick against the whiteboard, we’re never really ready for it. You see, shots ring out for all kinds of reasons here in the hills—like for target practice or hunting season or when a second cousin from three hollers up throws a fistful of firecrackers at you on New Year’s Eve. You learn to duck.
Mr. Amons runs his hand over the top of his head, like he’s smoothing back hair, only there’s nothing there. It’s all in back, corralled into a foot-long, silver-gray ponytail. He taps the yardstick on a question he’s scrawled on the board:
What do Appalachia and Noah’s Ark have in common?
Mr. A calls these start-up questions “Noggin Knockers.” He says he’d rather bang our heads together to start our brains up, but the Board of Education won’t allow it, so he thinks up these riddles instead.
“Anyone want to try cracking this one?” he asks in a gravelly voice, probably from chain-smoking Camel Straights. “Certainly you geniuses are awake enough by now to have begun your daily allotment of thinking—unless, of course, you ate lunch in the cafeteria.” A chorus of groans rolls through the room, followed by laughter. Mr. A is off on one of his daily rants.
“What was that, anyway?” he says, referring to lunch. “A cardboard Frisbee soaked in tomato sauce? Do they seriously think that poor excuse for pizza has any nutritional value whatsoever? Please, someone, anyone … enlighten me.” Mr. A’s tirades are something we all look forward to, and I’ve got to admit, they usually get us going.
Papaw and Mr. A used to be friends. When Mr. A got out of college in the 1970s, he joined Papaw in the “War on Poverty”—something that got started back in 1964 when President Lyndon B. Johnson came down to Appalachia to have a look. Papaw had been working in construction, building schools and hospitals for over a decade, when he hired Mr. A to be on his crew. According to Papaw, that was when they were both young and idealistic (i word, fifth grade), raring to put an end to poverty and help their people. Twenty years later, I guess the war kind of petered out even though poverty hadn’t. Right around that time, Papaw got laid off and Mr. A started teaching, but they were still friends.
It wasn’t until sometime after Ma and little Zeb died that something broke between them, and Mr. Amons didn’t come around anymore. I remember when Papaw gave me the word irascible when school started up last fall. I used it and Mr. Amons in a sentence together at dinner one night, and Papaw just about split a gut laughing.
“Oh, Curley,” he finally said, after he soaked up the tears on his beard with his dinner napkin. “If ever they needed an illustration of the word irascible in Webster’s Dictionary, a picture of Percy Amons would be it.”
Mr. A taps the question on the board one more time. “Okay, everybody. I’m not getting any younger up here.” Someone behind me mutters, “No kidding,” and thwack goes the stick against the board. “Watch it!” he warns.
Anna Ludlow shyly raises her hand. She’s one of seven Ludlow kids who live several hollers up from us. When Mama was alive, she was always bringing the family pans of grits and casseroles and such on account of how poor they are. Not that that’s unusual in these parts. More than half the kids at school are in the free lunch program.
“Miss Ludlow?” Mr. A’s voice softens when he calls on her. “Pray tell, what do Appalachia and Noah’s Ark have in common?”
“Ummm … they were both blessed by God?” Her words come out all quiet and wispy, like she looks.
“Spoken like a true, dyed-in-the-wool Baptist.” Mr. A smiles at her. “And your use of the past tense is intriguing,” he adds. “But unfortunately, it’s not the answer I’m looking for.”
Tap, tap, tap.
I try to puzzle it out. I can’t help it. It’s probably all those word games Papaw and I play. I can’t seem to leave a stone unturned if I think there’s something under it. Let’s see … We’ve been focusing our studies on the local region this semester, beginning with Appalachia’s flora. Maybe we’re starting a new unit. Suddenly, my hand shoots up into the air, as if it has a life of its own.
“They both have a lot of animals!” I blurt out, like I’m some kind of second grader. Giggles erupt around the room, along with one outright guffaw behind me from my nemesis, Carl Jenkins. I draw my arm down slowly and hide the offending appendage under my desk.
“I mean, I’m thinking maybe we’re going to be studying animals next, so that’s why I said that.” My face burns so hot, my skin feels like it will melt right off. When will I learn that in middle school, enthusiasm is not only not contagious, it’s not cool?
Jules, who shares my lab table, gives me a sideways glance. Don’t worry, her grin tells me, I still like you. That look, which only she can give, brings immediate relief to my stinging face, like how one of her ma’s aloe plants soothes a burn.
“Very good, Mr. Hines.” Mr. A reaches into the candy jar on his desk. “You’re as close as anyone�
��s going to get.” He throws a bite-sized Snickers bar across the room at me, which I snatch from the air.
“Ah, man,” I hear Carl moan behind me. I set the uneaten bar down on the lab table in plain sight, hoping he’ll drool over it for the rest of the period.
“So Noah’s Ark saved a whole bunch of animals from a big flood, right?” Mr. A starts pacing the room, tapping the yardstick on the tile floor like a walking cane. “Well, Appalachia saved a whole bunch of animals from another kind of disaster called the Ice Age. When the ice moved ever so glacially southward, animals migrated up into higher elevations in order to survive. Plants that had already been here for thousands of years also survived, as the wall of ice proceeded to eradicate all life in its path.”
Eradicate. That’s my word! Usually, I don’t hear the word for the week out of anyone else’s mouth besides mine and Papaw’s. It’s as if Papaw and Mr. Amons are in cahoots, except I know that’s not possible.
“Like the Ark during the big flood,” Mr. A continues, “the Appalachian Mountains during the Ice Age kept many species of animals high and dry, thereby becoming one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. Unfortunately, many of those species are now extinct, several of them only in the last hundred years.
“And why is that, my friends? Are we talking an ‘act of God’ here, or something else? Who’s responsible for the most recent eradication of species from our mountains?” He’s pointing the yardstick at us now.
“We are,” we say back to him. We’ve heard this tirade before.
Thwack. “That’s right. We are. That is, we human beings.
“The passenger pigeon. The Carolina parakeet. The ivory-billed woodpecker. The Eastern bison. The Eastern elk. And, most likely, the Eastern cougar. All gone. Wiped out. Hunted into extinction by us. Every last one of them.”
