Anybody Shining

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  If that’s what they thought was going to happen, they surely did not know who they was dealing with.

  “Miss Earlene! Open up!” Lucille shouted, and then she stopped shouting and commenced to throwing her little body at the door. “I’m busting in,” she told me. “I have had enough of this nonsense!”

  Well, I shook my head at her foolishness, but I climbed on the porch and threw my weight against the door too. No need for Lucille to break her shoulder.

  After a few shoves, the door groaned open and we went reeling into the cabin. There, in a rocking chair by the fireplace, sat Harlan, still as midnight. The walls around him were gray and bare, the only spot of color in the room the red squares of the quilt laid across his lap.

  “Where’s you mama?” Lucille asked once she got herself steadied. “I come to talk to her.”

  “She’s gone,” Harlan replied matter-of-factly. “Been gone for about two months now.”

  “Where’d she go off to?” I asked, downright flabbergasted that somebody’s mama could just up and leave that way.

  Harlan shrugged. “Don’t know. I woke up one morning and she weren’t here. Thought maybe she’d be back soon, maybe with my daddy, but she never did come back.”

  “So who told you to go to school?”

  Harlan shrugged again. “I told myself.”

  Sometimes when Harlan is getting on my last nerve, I think about what it must be like to sit by your ownself for two months, waiting for your mama to come home. Me, by the end of two months, I think I’d just have laid down and died. But not Harlan Boyd. He decided it was time to get on with his life, and that’s just what he did.

  You can’t help but admire a boy like that. Even when he’s just snuck under the table and tied your shoelaces to the table leg. You might clobber him, but you stay filled with admiration all the same.

  Ever since Harlan has come to live with us, he can hardly sit still. He hops out of bed of a morning and is on the move from this spot to the next all the day long. Sometimes I wonder if I just imagined him sitting still as a stone in that rocking chair up in the cabin. After studying on the matter, I have come to believe Harlan knowed we was on our way to fetch him that day. I think he wanted us to see that he was a boy who could sit quiet as could be, if that was the sort of boy we needed him to be.

  But that ain’t the sort of boy we needed him to be at all.

  Signed,

  Your Cousin,

  Arie Mae Sparks

  Dear Cousin Caroline,

  I keep thinking if I could tell you remarkable things, you would write me back. Who could resist a girl who writes stories of remarkable things? Like one about a boy who goes to scout out a haunted cave and comes running out, his face pale as the moon, crying that a ghost wrapped its ghosty fingers around his neck to strangle him? And sure enough, when the others stepped into the cave, moanings and groanings of a ghosty kind could be heard.

  Harlan has admitted that it weren’t really a ghost trying to get aholt of him in the Ghost Cave, but only James pretending. So now I don’t have that good story to tell you after all.

  Turns out it was just James standing at the back of the cave, trying not to bust up laughing at the sound of his own terrible noises. I’m mad at my ownself for not figuring that out, but in the excitement of Harlan showing us the finger marks from where the ghost tried to strangle him—and there were marks, put there by James, it turns out—I failed to notice that James was not among us.

  Ruth Wells looked suspicious when she seen them marks, but Tom? He got right up close and wondered out loud how was it that a ghost had bony fingers.

  “There was no ghost,” Ruth said with a sniff, before turning on her heel to head for home. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  “You don’t know that for sure,” Tom called to her back. “There’s more to this world than meets the eye, Ruth Wells!”

  I hope he won’t be too mad when he finds out the truth. He don’t strike me as the type who would mind a practical joke, even if he fell for it. Ruth, on the other hand, well, you can tell she’s a person that would hate getting tricked. That’s probably why she don’t let herself believe in interesting things such as haints and boogers.

  Me, I’m of the opinion you should keep your mind open to unlikely occurrences and events. I’d bet my bottom dollar that Tom Wells feels the same.

  It was Miss Pittman who got the confession out of Harlan this morning. She had come up to the house to try yet again to get Mama to sing for them Baltimore folks. This time she picked a wily way to do it too.

  “Maybe Mr. Sparks could accompany you on his fiddle,” Miss Pittman suggested to Mama. They were sitting in the rocking chairs on the porch while Mama did her piecework and us children worked in the little garden out front. It is a garden with such pretty flowers as lady slippers and fire pinks, and taking care of it is the only chore Lucille and I will fight to do. It seems everything we have got is made from faded-away colors like brown and gray and washed-out blue—our clothes and our quilts and the covers on the bed. But the flowers in our garden sing with pinks and reds and purples, and it’s a pleasure to gaze upon them, even if it means mucking around in the dirt while you’re plucking out weeds.

  “I thought you’uns weren’t interested in fiddles,” Mama said. She looked up from her piecework. “I been wondering. Is it because you’re religious?”

  “I think it’s mostly you Baptists who are against music and dancing,” Miss Pittman replied.

  “I thought everybody was Baptist,” Lucille said from her perch on the steps. She had given up gardening to visit with Miss Pittman. “I didn’t know there was anything else you could be.”

  Miss Pittman smiled. “Why, child, there are ever so many ways one can worship the Lord. Where I’m from, there are indeed Baptists, but there are also Methodists and Congregationalists, Catholics—”

  “Now, do them Catholics believe in Jesus?” Mama interrupted. “I’ve heard some say that they don’t. They got somebody they call a pope that they worship instead.”

  “My grandfather’s people were Catholic,” Miss Pittman replied, “and you can rest assured they believed in Jesus. The pope is just their religious leader, the way Pastor Campbell is the religious leader here for the Baptists, only on a much smaller scale.”

  I took this all in with some interest. Pastor Campbell is a Baptist preacher, and he is as nice as he can be, but he says that if you don’t believe in Jesus, you’ll go to hell, no two ways about it. But in Miss Sary’s World Book Encyclopedia, there are pictures of children in India who follow a different way of thinking. They are called Hindu, and from how I read things they hardly give Jesus a second thought. I don’t care to think of them burning in the fires of hell, and for my money I don’t believe Jesus would care to think of it either.

  “So if you go to Catholic church, you don’t mind folks dancing and playing the fiddle?”

  “No, I don’t believe that Catholics mind music and dance at all.”

  I glanced up at Mama and saw she had that thinking look in her eyes. I bet she was wondering if she turned Catholic, maybe Daddy’s barn dances wouldn’t be a sin. Daddy was a Baptist, but he had fairly freewheeling notions of what made something a sinful activity, and dancing fell low on that list.

  To my way of thinking, a barn dance is the best thing in the world. How they got started here is that last spring Daddy and Larry Peacock put their money together and bought a radio out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog, and then on Saturday nights they took it to Truman Taylor’s barn and tuned it to the National Barn Dance on WLS radio out of Chicago, Illinois.

  Most folks look forward to Daddy and Mr. Peacock’s barn dances all week. You’ll be in the middle of some boring old chore like beating out the rugs on the porch rail and all the sudden you remember that Saturday’s a-coming. Your toe will start tapping its ownself when you think about all the good radio music you’ll hear in Truman Taylor’s barn. At the barn dances, folks jig and cut up an
d have themselves a good time. When the radio show is over, Daddy and Mr. Peacock get out their fiddles and play, and folks dance some more. The very thought of the good times ahead will pull you all the way through the week.

  There are them who are against the barn dances. Pastor Campbell has made his stand clear on dancing, which is that it will lead to sin. Most Baptists other than Daddy believe this, but more than one will show up to a barn dance, because they been playing music in their families longer than they been Baptist.

  It surprised a lot of folks when Miss Keller and Miss Pittman come out against the barn dances. For them, it’s mostly because of the radio. Miss Keller told Daddy that the songs on the radio lack the nobility of our mountain ballads. “They are tawdry and full of cheap sentiment,” she said.

  “But folks like to dance to ’em,” Daddy said. “You against dancing?”

  “No, I am not,” Miss Keller informed him. “But I am against throwing out the good and bringing in the bad. You have a tremendous tradition of music in these mountains. You should work to preserve it, not dilute it with silly songs about lovers’ quarrels.”

  “Them ballads you like so much, what are they about other than lovers’ quarrels?” Daddy asked. “You just like ’em ’cause they’re old. Ain’t nothing special about old. The songs we listen to on the radio, they’ll be old someday too, and folks will jump up and down about how precious they are.”

  Now Mama, she loves the old songs just like Miss Keller and Miss Pittman, and like Pastor Campbell, she believes dancing leads to sin. The problem is, ain’t nobody on this mountain loves to dance better than Mama.

  Mama didn’t turn Baptist until she was fifteen years old, when she went to a tent revival and the spirit of the Lord entered into her and wiped her soul clean. Before that, her family read the Bible on Sundays and wouldn’t work on account of the Sabbath, but they were not churchgoing. They could dance and play music to their hearts’ content. Mama says she wishes she had been Baptist from the minute she was born, because then she would never have gotten the love of dancing in her and she would not have to try so hard to get it out.

  “How you get to be a Catholic?” she asked Miss Pittman out on the porch this morning. “They let any sort of folks do it?”

  “Yes, but I believe the closest Catholic church in these parts is in Asheville,” Miss Pittman informed her. “Perhaps you should try the Methodist Church over in Spruce Pine.”

  Mama sighed. You could tell she weren’t going to give up being Baptist, even if the pope offered to take her out dancing every Saturday night.

  “So do you think you would sing if Mr. Sparks played?” Miss Pittman asked again. “Perhaps the whole family could join you.”

  Mama’s eyes sparked, and I knowed she was pondering whether or not she could convince Daddy to let her sing at the school. Mama loves to sing better than she loves to dance even, and singing for a crowd of folks is her idea of standing in high cotton.

  Just then Harlan walked up from the barn, where he’d been helping James muck Old Dan’s stall. “I’ll sing. I’m the best singer you’uns probably ever heard.”

  Harlan sung about as well as a cat caught in a paper bag screeching to get out. Given this particular falsehood, I should have knowed he was capable of others.

  “Tell Miss Pittman about the ghost that nearly strangled you,” I urged. “She never believes me when I tell her about the ghosts in these parts.”

  The tips of Harlan’s ears turned red. “Ah, she don’t want to hear about no ghosts. Grown-up ladies ain’t interested in them kind of things.”

  “On the contrary,” Miss Pittman said, leaning toward Harlan. “I am riveted by such tales.”

  Well, by the time Harlan had tripped over his own tongue, mixing up the story so bad nobody who had actually been there would have recognized it, it was clear to Miss Pittman and everybody else that the whole thing had been a scandalous deception.

  “You ain’t right,” I told Harlan. “You and James are the worst two boys I know.”

  “Ah, we ain’t so bad,” Harlan said with a grin. “We just like a little fun, is all.”

  I would have been madder at him than I was, but for the fact that I have made up some ghost stories myself once or twice. Between you and me, Cousin Caroline, I ain’t actually ever seen old Sam and Joe who Daddy says lives in our barn. I don’t think James has either, but we both talk about it like we have. In fact, we may have convinced each other that them haints exist even though we know they probably don’t.

  At least I don’t think they do.

  Do you like ghost stories, Cousin Caroline? Because I know several that will send the shivers up and down your spine. Just the minute you write me back, I will tell them to you.

  Signed,

  Your Cousin,

  Arie Mae Sparks

  Dear Cousin Caroline,

  You are not to breathe a word of what I am about to tell you! Today I snuck down to the settlement school so I could get better acquainted with them Baltimore, Maryland, children. I just had to go, is the thing. Why, I can barely sleep at night knowing them children is right down the mountain from where I lay, just waiting to be my friends.

  It is easy enough to get to the settlement school from our home place. You follow the path that rambles alongside Cane Creek on its way to the river. It’s been fairly trampled down ever since they built the post office next to the train station last year. Anybody looking for something to do will say, “I’m off to see what the news is,” and head for the post office, where Miss Ellie Mize sorts letters and packages and collects the gossip. If you want to know who’s sick, who’s courting, or who got in a fight on Saturday night, why, it’s to the P.O. you need to go.

  Sometimes me and James go down to the train station to watch the three o’clock train come through. It don’t stop unless there’s a mailbag hanging on the post waiting to be picked up, but it always slows down. Me and James like to take a gander at the folks inside the train. We always wave, and some of them wave back while others act like they don’t see us.

  The settlement school ain’t but a couple minutes farther down the road, and it don’t take but maybe fifteen minutes to walk from here to there. The only problem is, Daddy don’t want us to go.

  Do you always do what your daddy says, Cousin Caroline? Until the Baltimore, Maryland, children come to visit, I almost always did, partly because I try to be good when I can, and part because it don’t pay to go against my daddy. He ain’t mean, but he can be fierce as a bearcat when you vex him. James is the same way. Daddy is teaching James his habit of walking out of the room when his temper starts to rise. I have seen him do this on many occasions. To me, when Daddy leaves the room it is a sign to make yourself scarce as well.

  Well, I don’t like to go against my daddy, but I woke up this morning knowing that I must. It seemed clear to me that Tom Wells and I were meant to be friends, but how could we be such as that if I’m always here and he’s always there? No, there weren’t nothing to do but for me to go.

  I done my morning chores as quick as I could, and then I found James over to the barn throwing slop into the pigpen. When I told him of my plan, he shook his head. “You know there’ll be a price to pay if Daddy finds out you gone down there.”

  “But my chores are all done until the afternoon,” I replied. “There ain’t no law I have to stay put till then.”

  “But there is a law that says you’re not to go to the songcatchers’ school.”

  “All I’m asking is that you tell Mama and Daddy I gone to the post office to visit with Miss Ellie. And to make it the truth, I’ll stop by and say hey to her on my way down the mountain.”

  James thought on that a second and said, “I won’t tell ’em you gone to the school if’n I don’t have to.”

  I knowed that was the best I’d get from James, who will joke and tell tales for fun, but when it comes to serious matters hates to be false. I didn’t reckon they’d ask my whereabouts anyway. Mama and Daddy let
us roam fairly free of a morning if we done our chores and weren’t needed to take care of Baby John.

  Oh, and didn’t I feel so free as I headed toward the creek! There was butterflies floating across the sky and a breeze lifting up the leaves, making a sweet hush sound over everything. A slew of birds chirped from their branches, the bobwhite calling “Hoyee! Hoyee!” and the mourning dove answering back with its “Who-whoooo, whoooo.”

  I started thinking on all the fine things that have come to our mountains in the last few years. There’s the settlement school and the post office, Miss Sary, the barn dances, and Doc Weems and his wife, Miss Olivia, who is a nurse. They come up last year because Miss Olivia has a lung sickness and the mountain air is good for what ails her. She was at the house on the night that Baby John was born and helped Mama with the birthing.

  And now them Baltimore children! They are just one more good thing that has come to us, I thought as I trotted down the path, and I felt lucky to be Arie Mae Sparks who lived in Stone Gap, North Carolina.

  Here is another secret: the nearer I come to the settlement school, the shakier my insides got. I’ve been knowing most folks around here since I first entered this world, and they are as familiar to me as the ten toes on my feet. But Ruth and Tom Wells and the others might as well have been kings and queens from Paris, France. What if they thought I weren’t worth their time? Tom had been nice enough when we gone to the caves to see the ghost of ol’ Wendell McBean, but we had been in a clutch of children, and it was too many of us to suss out his true opinion of me.

  All I could do to ease my nerves was to say over and over, “You are a good girl, Arie Mae Sparks,” which is what Mama says when I’ve pleased her. I singsonged them words all the way down to the post office.

  “Well, hey there, Arie Mae!” Miss Ellie called when she saw me. She was leaning across the counter, not doing a thing but chomping on a piece of gum. “You got another letter to send to your cousin down in Raleigh?”