Anybody Shining

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  Do you know that kind of girl, the one who has a mouth set in a firm line like she’s about to tell you what to do and won’t never stop telling you what to do? Mariella Treadway is just that way. We’ve been knowing each other since she come to live with her granny at the age of eight, and from the first second we was put in the same room, she commenced to bossing me about. “We will play tea party now,” she told me, “so you go collect acorn caps for the cups.”

  Well, what I did was head straight for home. I ain’t a disagreeable person, but I do not like being bossed by girls my same age.

  So the Baltimore, Maryland, girl in the field was not promising. She had brown curls done up in ringlets, which is a pretty style that Lucille is always trying, though her straight hair won’t hold a curl to save its life. The Baltimore girl wore a yellow ribbon in her hair, and her dress was yellow as well and looked store-bought. I looked down at my own dress, which was the brown one cut down from Mama’s old everyday dress, and knowed I was in no state to meet a girl in store-bought clothes.

  Oh, but the boy who was walking next to her! Cousin Caroline, have you ever seen anyone who shined? Well, this boy did. Even though he walked with a limp and was a little bit sideways, he was shining.

  And I thought to myself, Anybody shining, well, they are the one to be my friend. I’ll tell you, up to then I’d always hoped my one true friend would be a girl, one such as who could talk about pretty things and would read poetry aloud with me. But when I saw the shining boy across the field, I thought him and me would be friends, even with the way he limped and was lopsided.

  Sometimes you just know these things.

  Signed,

  Your Cousin,

  Arie Mae Sparks

  Dear Cousin Caroline,

  This is the fifth time I have written to you. I have to say I am starting to wonder about the manners of folks who live down to Raleigh. I have heard of big city ways, and now I have to ask myself if some of what I’ve heard ain’t the truth.

  But I don’t like to judge.

  Lucille says maybe you don’t write because your handwriting is a sight and mine is so very nice. If that is the case, I will tell you the secret of my nice writing. I have practiced it over and over until I made it just as pretty as could be. In truth, I’m left-handed, but Mama wouldn’t let me stay that way. She believes left-handedness is of the devil and ain’t to be tolerated.

  When I learned writing, the pen was placed in my right hand and it was so hard for me I cried and cried over it. But Daddy said he would buy me a bag of molasses candy if I could make my writing nice. I’ll do almost anything for molasses candy. Also, I didn’t want to write with the devil’s handwriting. It’s bad enough having light-red hair and no freckles.

  My red hair is what caught the eye of the Baltimore children just as soon as me and James stepped foot into the clearing. One of the little ones pointed at me and said, “Look! She has hair the same as Cousin Clara!”

  The tall, bossy-looking girl shook her head fiercely. “Clara’s hair is brown with a hint of red when the sun shines on it. This girl’s hair is practically pink, and quite unbecoming.”

  James whistled underneath his breath. “You still think them Baltimore children’s so nice?”

  “Not that particular one, no.” I put my hand on my cheek, which felt hot, like someone had slapped it. “But she don’t speak for the whole crowd.”

  “Maybe she does,” James said. “You gonna wait to find out?”

  A whispered voice popped up from behind us. “You want me to kick her in the pants, Arie Mae? I’ll do it, just don’t tell Lucille.”

  I turned around to see Harlan Boyd hiding behind a bush. If I ain’t never described Harlan Boyd to you, well, he’s a mess. He’s ten years old, scrawny as a half-starved cat, with muddy freckles splashed all over his skin and brown hair that sticks up in clumps no matter how much he spits in his hand and pats his head.

  “That’s all right, Harlan,” I told him. “Some folks just ain’t partial to red hair.”

  “Some folks ain’t got the manners that God taught ’em,” Harlan replied, coming out from his hiding place.

  “God don’t teach manners,” James told him. “You’re getting your Sunday school learning mixed up with what Lucille’s learning you.”

  “It’s hard to keep it all straight, that’s a fact,” Harlan admitted, shoving his hands in his pockets and taking a good spit at the dirt. Then he yelled over to the Baltimore children, “Hey, there, ya rascals! Leave ol’ Arie Mae alone! She can’t help how she looks, now can she?”

  The bossy girl scowled in our direction, but that shining boy, he bust out laughing. Then he did something that purely surprised me. He reached over and yanked the yellow ribbon straight out of that bossy girl’s hair. And when she screeched at him, he just shrugged and said, “Serves you right, Ruth.”

  Well, Cousin Caroline, I just had to go introduce myself to him right then and there. I tugged at James’s arm, and the two of us walked right up to them Baltimore children. I stuck my hand out to the shining boy and said, “My name is Arie Mae Sparks, and I am pleased to meet you.”

  The shining boy didn’t seem to know what to do with my hand. In fact, he froze up the minute we walked over. The girl named Ruth tapped him on the shoulder and hissed, “Manners, Tom Wells!”

  I dropped my hand straightaway. “It don’t matter none. Not everybody cares for a handshake.”

  “Tom’s just being timid,” the bossy girl explained. “My brother is shy around strangers.”

  “No need to be shy around us,” I told the boy, whose cheeks were burning bright red. “We’re just regular children.”

  He’d been looking at his feet, but now Tom raised his head a bit and a smile snuck onto his face. “That must be nice.”

  “It pretty much is,” I agreed.

  “So,” he said, and you could tell he was struggling to come up with something to say. “Well, I guess I was wondering, is—is it always so cold here in July?”

  James stepped forward. “Son, sometimes it gets so cold, it snows the first day of August.”

  “No, it don’t!” yelled Harlan, who had stood back from the crowd, but now run over to join us. “That James will tell you a tall one, he sure will. It don’t get cold enough to snow until nearly November, and then again some years it don’t snow until come Christmastime.”

  Tom stumbled back a few steps, like he was afraid Harlan might plow him over. But he steadied himself and give Harlan a nod. “Right now, back where I live, it’s hot enough that steam comes off the road after it rains,” he told us. “If it’s late in the day, it looks like ghosts.”

  “We ain’t got no road here,” Harlan admitted. “But we got us lots of ghosts!”

  Tom’s eyes turned bright. “Real ghosts?”

  “Real as you’re alive,” I told him, cutting in before Harlan could tell all our best ghost stories. “We got a headless one living yonder in our barn.”

  The bossy girl named Ruth snorted. “Ghosts? In your barn? I guess no one has informed you that there are no such things as ghosts.”

  “You don’t believe it? Just come up and look,” I told her. “You’ll believe it soon enough.”

  “Best ghosts are in the caves,” James said. He leaned toward Tom in that confiding way he has that draws folks to him so. “Folks get lost in the caves, never to be seen again except as spooks and spirits. Why, almost any night, you can go over to Ghost Cave and see Wendell McBean right there at the mouth, asking you what’s on the stove for dinner. Folks’ll tell him, but he don’t listen. Most spooks are stubborn that way.”

  Bossy Ruth shook her head. “Mother said we’d hear all sorts of stuff and superstition from people up here, and she was right. Tom, you’re not to listen to one syllable of this nonsense.”

  Even though that Ruth was as bossy and rude as could be, I found that I admired the way she talked. It was like she was reading directly from a book. But one look at James and Tom, and I
could see they didn’t share in my admiration. I could also see that James was drawing Tom to him, and that if I didn’t act quick, Tom would be his friend and not mine!

  “Tom, I will be pleased to take you to the cave James is telling you about,” I said, hoping to sound as refined as Ruth, but much more polite. “If you would like to meet me here in this very clearing tomorrow evening at this very time, why, I will show you the way.”

  Tom smiled at me. “I’d like that.”

  Ruth shot him a harsh look. “Mother will not approve,” she warned him. Then she turned to the little ones. “It’s time for you to be off to bed. Mazie, help me take these children to their cabins.”

  A girl of Lucille’s age, which is to say ten, took the hand of the smallest child and turned toward the cabins. Ruth fussed at the others and soon was leading them in a line like a mother duck back across the clearing.

  “We best be getting back too,” James declared. “Daddy will set out looking for us if we ain’t home before full dark.”

  “That’s when the mountain lions will jump you,” Harlan added. “If you’re in the woods and hear a woman screaming, why, it ain’t no woman at all. It’s a mountain lion, and it will eat you tip to toe.”

  The light was draining out of the sky, but even so I could see Tom’s face go ghosty pale. “Don’t fret,” I told him. “You’ll be plenty safe here from all cats and wild things. Mountain lions don’t prowl in the hollers. And if’n you do see one, just run away as fast as you can.”

  Tom looked shaky. “I can’t run very fast. In fact, I can hardly run at all.”

  “Don’t matter none,” Harlan said, trying his best to sound reassuring. “Them cats are faster than us anyhow. You see one, you’re licked from the get-go.”

  Tom did not look cheered by the news, but he give us a wave and said, “You better go before it’s completely dark. I’ll see you tomorrow, on this spot.”

  “This very one,” I agreed.

  Oh, and didn’t we do just as we said, and didn’t Harlan give us such a scare! But not one more word about it until I hold your letter in my hand and read the very words of your pen. I am sad to take such drastic measures, Cousin Caroline, but I feel you have been silent for far too long.

  Signed,

  Your Awaiting Cousin,

  Arie Mae Sparks

  Dear Cousin Caroline,

  I have waited eagerly to hear from you after my last letter. Mama asked just this morning if you had wrote, and I was sorry to tell her no, not one word, and I wondered why not. “Maybe I should stop writing her if she ain’t interested,” I said.

  But Mama said that was not the way. She said to keep writing you, and one day you would write back. “You’ve got to stay the course once you’ve started down the path, Arie Mae,” she told me. “It is far too soon to give up. I once made the mistake of giving up on someone too soon, and I have lived to regret it.”

  I asked Mama what she meant by that, but she just shook her head and handed me a pencil.

  So I am not giving up on you, Cousin Caroline. I believe you will write me back, and I’m going to keep writing you until you do. But I am not going to tell you about how Harlan Boyd almost got murdered in the Ghost Cave BY A GHOST on Tuesday evening last until I hear from you, just as I said would be the case.

  However, it is now Friday morning and my hand’s itching to write something. Miss Sary says she has never met one such as me who is so eager to put words down on paper. I told her it’s because writing things down straightens out my thinking and is almost as good as having a friend to tell all my secrets to.

  So I will tell you the story of Harlan Boyd and his mama who left him to live all by hisself up in their cabin on Cane Creek. Harlan’s mama is named Earlene Boyd, and she’s the same age as Miss Sary, which means she weren’t but a young girl when she got married to Willis Boyd and had herself a baby. Everybody said it was a blessing she got married young, as she had hair the shiny black of a crow’s wing and was known to be overfull of life, which is to say she was as wild as a rabbit in the fields.

  But why you would marry yourself someone as worthless as Willis Boyd is still a topic of conversation in these parts, even though no one has seen the man since the day Miss Earlene told him she was going to have a baby. Willis Boyd did not want a baby and made himself as scarce as scarce can be the minute he found out he was going to get himself one.

  It is a sad but true fact that Harlan has never once laid eyes on his daddy.

  So Miss Earlene and Harlan lived by themselves in a falling-down cabin on Cane Creek. It got to be a habit with some folks to leave a little of what they had extra on the cabin’s front steps. You could knock and knock all you wanted, but Miss Earlene would never answer, even if she was standing right there on the other side of the door, even if the person knocking was her own best friend, Wanda Coffey, which often it was.

  For a long time, no one ever did see Harlan, and some said that there weren’t a child at all up in that cabin with Earlene. They said she’d made a boat out of bark and twigs and sailed her baby down the creek for some rich family to find, the way Moses’s mama did way back in Bible times. Others had more sinister plots in mind. They believed Earlene had murdered Harlan and buried his small bones deep beneath the cabin’s floorboards. It was said if you stood outside the cabin under a full moon, you could hear his pitiful cries.

  Well, all them stories was laid to rest on the morning that Harlan showed up at Miss Sary’s school in the back room of the church, his knees and elbows scrubbed red, one shirttail tucked into his britches, the other one flopping out, the wore-out brown brogans on his feet a good two sizes too big. “My mama says it’s time for me to get some learning,” he announced. “She says eight years old is too old to be so ignorant.”

  All the children looked at one another, not knowing for sure who this boy was, but wondering all the same. Could it be?

  “Welcome to our school!” Miss Sary greeted him brightly, taking him by the arm and leading him to her desk, which was really just a small table with her books and papers on it. “Let me write your name down, and then we’ll find you a seat.”

  The boy went red to the tip of his ears. “My name is Harlan Boyd,” he declared in an overloud voice. “And my mama says to tell you that I ain’t stupid, just ignorant.”

  “My guess is that you’re neither,” Miss Sary assured him in that nice way of hers. “Why don’t you stay inside during dinner, and I’ll have you read to me?”

  Harlan nodded and took a seat next to Lester Jones at the boys’ table. I know I weren’t the only one to notice that he didn’t have a dinner pail with him, but when I peeked in the window at dinnertime, there he was sitting next to Miss Sary at her desk, chewing on a butter sandwich made with two pieces of light bread. Lucille, standing next to me on tiptoes, said, “Why, where’d he get that?”

  “Miss Sary give it to him, I reckon.”

  Lucille shook her head. “Imagine not fixing dinner for a growing boy!” she said in that way of hers that makes her sound like a Sunday school teacher. “His mama ought to know better than send a boy down the mountain without something to put in his stomach.”

  And wouldn’t you know, the next day Lucille wrapped Harlan Boyd two ham biscuits in wax paper and brung them to school. “A boy such as yourself needs some meat,” she told him, shoving the biscuits in his hand. “You go and tell your mama I said so.”

  “I—I—I’ll tell her,” Harlan stammered, and then he spent the rest of the morning eyeing them biscuits like a boy who had never seen such a wonder.

  The next day Lucille wrapped up two more biscuits, just in case Harlan’s mama forgot to pack his dinner again, and sure enough he showed up to Miss Sary’s empty-handed. Lucille tsk-tsked and tut-tutted, and from that moment on Harlan Boyd was her project.

  I don’t think he minded too much, except when Lucille talked about visiting his cabin up on Cane Creek. “Someone’s got to tell your mama to feed you better!” she declar
ed. “I’m fixing to go up the mountain and tell her myself.”

  “She feeds me real good in the morning,” Harlan insisted. “Eggs, sausages, biscuits and gravy, bacon and ham, why, it’s all about to topple off my plate, they’s so much food. That’s why I don’t bring no dinner. Ain’t hungry again till supper after such a big breakfast.”

  Me and Lucille both doubted that story. We were not the only ones distracted by his stomach’s grumbles all morning while Miss Sary sat listening to us read from The Beacon Primer.

  It was getting on into November, the sky gray and stretched thin, when Lucille took it into her mind to go ahead and do what she’d been threatening to do all fall. “Arie Mae, you come with me,” she said late one Saturday afternoon, “in case they’s any bears out there that need shooing away.”

  It’s true that I’m not afeared of bears, so I agreed to come along.

  So we trudged up the mountain, following the creek, until far up in a little clearing we saw the run-down cabin that belonged to Harlan Boyd and his mother Earlene. A sad little curlicue of smoke come out of the chimney, but we couldn’t see or hear anybody moving about.

  Lucille, who is afeared of bears but not much else, knocked firmly on the cabin door. Mind you, she was but eight years old at the time, come to give Miss Earlene a piece of her mind. It got me to giggling the more I thought about it. Who on earth ever heard of an eight-year-old bossing around a grown woman? Nobody, probably, until Lucille Sparks come into this land.

  “Miss Earlene, I am here to talk to you about your boy Harlan!” Lucille called through the door. “He says you feed him breakfast, but I don’t believe this to be the case. He is starving most every morning, Miss Earlene! His stomach growls like a lion! A boy needs to eat, Miss Earlene!”

  Dead silence. I imagined Miss Earlene and Harlan standing on the other side of the door, shushing each other so that Lucille wouldn’t hear them and would give up and go away.