Clover (3 page)

But this time it was different. My daddy was really upset with me. He didn't say much, but I could tell.

When I gave Gaten my written report, there was a trace of a smile on his face when he read it. There was real laughter in his eyes. But it was gone when he looked at me. His mouth tightened. “A bald eagle flying through an open window to attack a snake curled in a striking position behind Miss Wilson's desk?” Gaten's voice was strong. “Come now,
Clover, are you trying to tell me this happened in the classroom?”

“Shucks no, Gaten,” I said. “That's what I was thinking about when Miss Wilson asked me to read my history report.”

The school janitor opened Gaten's office door and jumped backwards, “Excuse, excuse me, sir,” he says over and over. “I didn't aim to come in with you in here.”

Gaten glanced at his watch and stood up. “It's getting late, Mr. Jackson, we'll get out of your way.”

I made a grin at Gaten's back. Hot dog, Aunt Everleen will have our dinner on the stove, all warm and everything. Gaten will read while I stand on the little stool he made for me and fix his plate. If he kept on making me write everything I've ever learned in my whole life, I wouldn't have time to fix his ole plate.

The janitor was so glad Gaten called him mister. He grinned and squinted his pink eyes. Mr. Jackson is an albino. He stood tall and straight and grinned over that “mister” bit. Gaten was old enough to be his father.

People are still filing past my daddy's coffin. Sara Kate is wedged between me and Uncle Jim Ed, squeezed in between us on the crowded bench like vanilla cream between dark chocolate cookies. My daddy is dead. Stretched out
in a fancy coffin right before my very eyes. And all I can think of is an Oreo cookie. An Oreo cookie.

My stepmother's body is as straight as a cornstalk. She is not crying. We sit side by side as stiff as painted leaves on a painted tree. Uncle Jim Ed puts his hand on her arm. But me and my stepmother don't touch. I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I've laid eyes on Sara Kate. She's been my stepmother for almost four days and all I know for sure about her is, she's not a Mexican. I can spot a Mexican a mile away. Every summer if there's a big peach crop the migrant workers flood Round Hill. We have peaches, but not enough to need the Mexicans.

Chase Porter brings them in all the time. He couldn't get all those peaches picked without them. He's one of the biggest peach growers in South Carolina. Chase is at the funeral. He looks sad because he is sad. He has known my daddy all his life. Like Gaten he was born and raised in Round Hill.

I pick at a thorn in my finger until it starts to bleed. I watch a drop of blood threaten to fall. I turn my finger into a paint brush. The blood makes a round dot on my white dress. I keep adding to it until it almost becomes a flower. A daisy. The way I'm messing up my white dress, I might as well have held the baby with the stinky diaper. At first there had been just one little drop of blood that a bleeding
finger could not leave alone. My dress is a mess. Sara Kate reaches for my hand. I put it behind my back.

In a way the funeral was kind of like a play. Everyone had a part. A part they played right on time, like it had been rehearsed over and over until it was down pat.

An usher leads me to my daddy's coffin. I'm supposed to cover my daddy's face with the white satin quilted blanket. He is dead. Yet he still looks some kind of fine in that fancy casket. But my arms are pasted to my sides. My knees glued together. There is no way I can pull that thing over Gaten's face. They lead me away. My feet slide across the floor like it's a sheet of ice. It's a sad, sad thing to have a ten-year-old do.

A young woman takes a picture of Gaten in the coffin. I don't think Sara Kate liked that much, either. Her face shows her feelings straight out.

The men in black suits move quickly and quietly about the casket. They close the casket. Lock the brass handles into place. It's time for the funeral to start. The Ninetieth Psalm is read. I guess my daddy is like the green grass only he was cut down before he could wither and fade. A young student sings. When a boy sings, he sings so much sadder than a girl. Everybody from the county sheriff on down is crying. Everybody but Sara Kate and me.

The women in white dresses that have stood waiting in
line take the flowers off Gaten's casket and follow as he is carried away. At the graveyard they finish their part in the play. The curtain has been dropped. It's the end.

Sara Kate places a single rose on Gaten's coffin. Gaten had been put away real fine.

A group of men in dirty coveralls and dirty shovels walked toward the grave with long smooth steps like the gliding wings of buzzards flying down to feast on the dead.

If there was a hungry stranger who stopped while we were away, he didn't eat nothing. There is still food piled up everywhere. And he didn't move or take anything either. My teddy bears are in the same place. Their eyes still have the same fixed blank stares. The snow-filled paperweight is still on Gaten's desk, right beside his new solar calculator. I shake the paperweight. A heavy snowfall twirls around, then gently settles down on a tiny village. Soon all is quiet and peaceful. The tiny snow-covered village is asleep. Not a picture is missing from the crowded piano top. Not a single piece of carnival glass moved.

Even outside everything is the same. Nothing has been changed. A soft breeze gently sways the hammock sometimes. But mostly the hammock is still. Still and empty, like it's waiting.

If there was a stranger there, one thing is for sure. He
did not disturb or take away the heavy sadness in the house. Every bit of that was left behind, right in place.

The house is soon filled with people from top to bottom. The kitchen is filled with women fixing plates. Someone brings Sara Kate a plate. She moves the food around with a fork but she doesn't eat a bite. I can understand that. I can't eat anything, either.

A mother pulls her little four-year-old boy in the middle of the room to sing. He's going to sing, just to take our minds off so much sadness, she says. He sings “America the Beautiful.” He keeps his head to one side, his eyes on the floor. He sings pretty good, but how can anyone think someone would want to hear that song when their daddy is dead? But the little boy in the blue suit and red-checkered bowtie sways like he is in a swing, and sings and sings. In the end he hides his face behind his hand. He is not too shy to eat, though.

I was so sure Sara Kate was going to leave Round Hill and go back wherever she came from. I started packing my clothes to move out. I wasn't sure who I was going to live with. I only knew I was not staying in that house by myself.

I'm going to learn someday that whenever my uncle Jim Ed and his sister gather in a little cluster with Sara Kate, they're bound to be talking about me. Yes, it is me they're talking about. Sometimes Aunt Ruby Helen's voice really
gets loud. She is looking cross-eyed at Sara Kate. “It will be best for my dead brother's child to be with me,” she says. “I am her daddy's only sister. Actually, the only family the poor child has.” Uncle Jim Ed is not about to let his sister get away with that. “Clover still has me,” he says quietly. “I'm family, and she's used to us.”

His sister's voice is loud again. This is the first time she's been able to even talk. She lost her voice as soon as she got off the plane. She's been crying ever since. Tears streaming down her face like rain. Her mouth was crying, but there were no crying sounds. Her brother's death took away her voice, just like death took away his life. Just sucked it up.

“You have a child, Jim Ed, a son. I have no one. Besides, Clover needs a mother.” Like a child, Ruby Helen is pleading with her brother.

I guess she would make a pretty good mother. I got me a Cabbage Patch doll from her, way before anybody else in Round Hill got one. I guess Maryland is not the worst place in the world to live. If I go there I bet I'll start walking like Ruby Helen. I know she copied making short, swishing steps from Jackée on the TV program “227.”

One wants me to stay, one wants me to leave. I guess they will have to do like the old wise king Grandpa told me about. Just cut me in half.

A tight-lipped Sara Kate says, “I promised Clover's father I would take care of his daughter.” In her own quiet way,
Sara Kate sure said the right thing to settle that. Nobody around here messes with a dying man's wishes.

Ruby Helen looks at the corner cupboard Grandpa built with all of Grandmother's carnival glass. “My grandmother won every single piece of that glass at the county fair shooting down ducks. It is very, very valuable,” she said coldly to Sara Kate.

I can see Jim Ed is embarrassed. “I'm sure Sara Kate will see that nothing is broken,” he tells his sister. I'm thinking first, that was some kind of a cold thing to say to Sara Kate and second, I'd thought all along it had been
my
grandmother, Ruby Helen's mother, who did all that straight shooting.

It shouldn't have surprised me that Sara Kate and I would end up together, because she was a surprise for me from the start. She sure wasn't a purple bicycle.

“I thought I told you I was bringing a surprise home, honey. Aunt Everleen didn't get a dress ready for you,” my daddy whispered. He was looking at my torn dirty dress.

I pulled on my dress, my eyes on his shiny loafers. I could tell Gaten had put a lot into making everything right for this surprise. But when he rolled up with that woman in his truck and no purple bicycle, the surprise thing was over for me.

“Everleen had a whole bunch of dresses washed,” I shot back hotly, “but she just ironed this one. She claimed she was having hot flashes so bad, they were about to set her on fire. I can see her getting hot in the summertime, but she's been hot all winter.

“You may not believe this, Gaten,” I went on, “but Everleen's been running as hot as an overheated radiator all winter. One day she was standing on the front porch fanning like it was the Fourth of July, and there was snow on the ground. Cross my heart and hope me die, she was.”

I could see I'd hurt Gaten bad. Real, real bad. It showed in his eyes.

“I didn't know I was going to mess around and fall trying to catch that old lightning bug, Gaten,” I said all sorry-like.

Now that I think about it, Everleen must have known something I didn't. She did my hair pretty and dressed me up really fine. Gaten always did have this thing about hair. He wanted my hair to look just right.

The only thing I knew was, Gaten was going to bring me a surprise and I'd been waiting all day long for it. In the back of my mind I imagined it would be a ten-speed purple bicycle. Every wish I ever made, I wanted a bicycle. Surely Gaten must have known that.

I knew it wouldn't be another doll. Ever since I cut open the high-priced one Gaten got me to see what made her cry, he hadn't bought me another one. He wasn't really that mad, though. He just looked over his glasses at me and said, “I think my little girl will become a fine surgeon one day.”

He sure wouldn't have gotten me a cat or dog. Maybe
he's scared I might cut them up or something. I really don't care, though. We got more strays around now than you can shake a stick at.

The trouble was, I had to wait too long for Gaten to come. It was starting to get dark. The trees had started to show up against the evening sky like a picture under thin tracing paper. It made a pretty picture. Trees drawn in black ink on a sky framed with soft gray and pink clouds. Tiny gnats bunched together in small groups to dance their daily yo-yo dance at dusk.

When lightning bugs started darting through the sky, I jumped to catch one and landed smack dab in a pile of rotting watermelon rinds. How was I to know that's where Jim Ed threw them when we finished eating? I got me some pretty diamond rings, though.

I still wouldn't have gotten as dirty as I did if I hadn't seen the little raised furrow an old mole was making in the ground. It almost made my flesh crawl to see that dirt cracking open, like a train going through a tunnel. It kind of like drives me crazy to see dirt moving, and you can't see what's making it move. I've never, ever been able to find a mole. One day, I guess, I'll just dig my fool head clean off.

So, you see, I got some kind of dirty, waiting on Gaten all that time.

This woman, Sara Kate, is going to take some getting used to. We didn't set horses from the start. When I showed
Gaten the diamond rings I made, she shivered and eyed me coldly. “Oh, how cruel,” she said, catching her breath all short and quick, like she was hurting or something. “So cruel,” she whispered, when I answered, “Yes, I killed the lightning bugs.” I don't know how in the world she thought I got the stuff to make my rings.

Gaten didn't say a word. He knew better than to open his mouth because he taught me how to make the rings in the first place. I guess he did it, though, to stop me from running myself to death over the dew-filled grass.

You see, on bright, sunshine-filled days, if there's been a heavy dew, the light makes diamonds everywhere. When I was little I used to race to pick up one, only to have it disappear right before my eyes. Everleen told Gaten to make me stop before I went storm crazy. Besides, she said, the sores on my legs would never heal if I kept getting dew in them.

Gaten never said a word about the dew diamonds. I just quit on my own. Just like I stopped looking for the pot of gold Grandpa said was at the end of the rainbow. I still like the lightning bug diamonds, though. To me, they look kind of real.

Sara Kate can't seem to get her mind off the fireflies, as she calls them. If she's gonna stick around us, she sure better get used to things being killed. Gaten would shoot anything that flies, except a dove. My grandpa always
said, “Never kill a dove because unaware you might kill a messenger.”

My daddy told me to change my dress so we could go to the fish camp for supper.