Ghost Girl (21 page)

It was easier to think straight in the dark. I hurried down the path, trying to calm myself with good thoughts. Daddy will be there, I chanted in my head, now that he's working on the road so close to home. Daddy will be there to smooth things over between us and convince Mama to come with me.

The chant made me bold—bold enough to run even faster down the trail. I could hear animals scurrying through the brush nearby, and a few times I didn't duck fast enough and low-hanging branches slapped across my face. But I knew if I slowed down, I might turn back. So I never stopped running until I had made it up the sagging front steps of the cabin and banged on the door.

“Mama?” I called. “It's me.”

There was no answer.
Daddy must be gone after all
, I thought. Still, I knew she was inside. There were no front windows to peek through, but I could see a sliver of light under the door. And what was that sound? The creak of a chair and the rustle of someone moving.
She was in there.

“Mama?” I cried again. “Aunt Birdy sent me. She needs you, Mama! She's been calling for you.”

I didn't care if I had to lie. I started beating on the door, pounding with my fists. She was in there, hiding, and she wasn't making a single move to let me in, even though her own mother was dying just across the hollow. I had stood by and watched Riley die, but I wasn't planning on letting Aunt Birdy go so easy.

Just then I remembered the back door to the kitchen. It didn't have a lock. For years Mama had been after Daddy to add a latch that she could bolt, but he never seemed to get around to it. I flew down the steps and around the side of the house and it was as easy as taking my next breath. I turned the knob, pushed the door open, and walked through the kitchen.

I felt like I was stepping back in time. Nothing had changed—the same frayed rag rugs and dusty pile of baskets, the same scrubbed kitchen table and splintery floor. And there was Mama, in her chair by the fire with a pile of sewing on her lap. The same sad, worn face and her mouth carved in a hard line.

I didn't give her a chance to look me up and down or say my name. “Why wouldn't you let me in?” I cried. “Why? Didn't you hear me?
Aunt Birdy's dying.
”

Mama bent over her sewing again. “It's too late,” I heard her say. Her flat, hollow voice sent chills running along the back of my neck.

“It's not!” I screamed. “She needs to see us together! Just for a minute! I know you can't forgive me, but just give me this one thing and I'll never come near you again. Just come with me now, for Aunt Birdy's sake. Come with me, please!”

Mama didn't look at me. She held tight to her sewing needle, pushing it in and out and in and out of the fabric, and before I knew what I was doing I lunged for the bundle of colorful cloth and ripped it out of her hands.

A look of horror flew over Mama's face. “Give that back,” she ordered.

When I didn't move, she reached her hands out like claws and shrieked, “Give that back!” Her face started to crumple. “It's all I got! Give that back!”

I looked down at the cloth in my arms and realized what I was holding. It was a patchwork quilt. I had never seen it before, but it seemed familiar somehow. Then I saw them . . . all through the pattern were pieces from Riley's little Sunday shirt, the one I had saved Mama from cutting such a long time ago.
Riley.
That's all she cared about.

I started to fling the quilt to the floor, then I saw something else. In the far corner of the quilt, worked into the design, was a piece of a doll's dress Mama had made me when I was six. I hadn't seen it for years.

“You kept it,” I said with a gasp. I looked up at Mama in amazement. “My doll's dress . . . you
saved
it.”

Mama reached for the quilt again, but I took a step backward, cradling it in my arms. “And look. . . . There's my old baby blanket. And there, that's a piece of the apron I used to wear when I helped you with canning.”

I sank to the floor, stroking my hands over the quilt and searching for more patches. It was just like Aunt Birdy had said. If I looked deeper, I might find something I wasn't expecting.
There!
Another one near the middle—a scrap from the blue dress with the lace collar I had worn on the first day of school.

When I lifted my head again, Mama had slumped back in her chair with her hands lying limp in her lap. Tears were rolling down her face.

“Why couldn't you just tell me?” I asked her. “Why couldn't you tell me you were saving my old things, too? That you might use them to make a quilt someday? That's all I would have needed, Mama.”

She closed her eyes, but the tears kept dripping down. “I don't know,” she whispered, shaking her head back and forth. “I don't know.” She kept her eyes closed, even when I laid the quilt over her lap again and left through the front door.

Aunt Birdy died that night,
but not before she opened her eyes and heard the sweet music from the Victrola filling her home. At first I thought it was the music that lit her face up with such a beautiful glow, but then I heard a noise behind me and turned around to find Mama standing in the bedroom doorway. While the Victrola played, Mama sat with me on the edge of the bed and held Aunt Birdy's hand until she drifted back to sleep.

The next day I asked Mr. Jessup to give the sermon at Aunt Birdy's funeral and without blinking an eye, he said he'd be pleased. I fretted over where to lay Aunt Birdy to rest until Miss Vest promised me that all the talk of moving our cemeteries off the mountain had been just an evil rumor.

“That's sacred ground, April,” she told me, hugging me to her chest. “At least that's something that will never change.” So we buried her in the little graveyard on the hillside next to Grandpap Lockley, just down the slope from Riley.

Even though it was a funeral, Dewey couldn't help smiling through the whole thing. Mr. Jessup's words were strong and true, and he read one of Aunt Birdy's favorite Psalms from the Bible—number sixty-one. “From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed,” Mr. Jessup called out. “Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.”

Afterward, all the folks who had loved Aunt Birdy best stood quiet while I placed her favorite stones around the edges of her grave. When everyone had gone, Daddy and I waited as Mama wandered up the hill and stood for a minute, resting her hand on Riley's marker.

By the springtime, Aunt Birdy's stones looked as if they had always been there, hidden among the periwinkle's blue flowers and glossy green leaves. Unless you knew enough to kneel down and peer closer, you would never see that there was a stone shaped like a fish, and others like an egg in a nest, a footprint, or perfect halves of a heart that fit together.

And by the springtime, I was used to living alone in Aunt Birdy's house and going to school without Miss Vest. After Miss Vest's wedding, a new teacher, Miss Lucy Tuttle, arrived to take her place. Of course, it wasn't the same. Miss Tuttle wore plain blouses and long dark skirts, and she didn't talk with her hands or pay me any special mind. But I had Miss Vest's letters from China to keep her close. She wrote from Wit's military post there, thousands of miles away in a city called Peking.

Every letter was something special. In one, she wrote about dragon parades and rickshaw rides. In another, she described her walks through the dark, narrow streets, where she saw medicine men toting bundles of dried snakes and people called contortionists twisting their bodies into amazing positions. “Our cook is trying to teach me to speak Chinese,” she wrote me, “so I can talk with the little children who pull at my skirts in the alleyways.”

I counted out money from Aunt Birdy's nest egg to buy writing paper and stamps so I could tell Miss Vest how life was coming along on our mountain. Her letters were always full of questions about Mama and Daddy. “They come to call every so often,” I wrote back. “Last week they brought more kindling for the stove. I've invited them to supper next Saturday night. I think I'll make potato soup and fried apple pie for dessert.”

“What about Camp Rapidan?” Miss Vest asked in one of her letters. I hated to tell her the truth—about how President Franklin Roosevelt had come for one visit and decided the trails were too rough to suit him. Now the camp stood empty. When I peeked through the locked gates, I could see wasps making nests in the eaves of the guardhouse and old brown pine needles gathering along the paths.

As the months passed, more and more folks left their homeplaces behind. Nobody knew exactly when the park would open or when we'd all be asked to move. But some people decided to go earlier than they needed to, just so they wouldn't have to see the end. “The Woodards are gone, too,” I wrote Miss Vest. “They didn't even say goodbye. I passed by their place yesterday, and all that was left was a skinny tomcat and a pair of dungarees hanging on the line.”

As for me, I'm happy to stay put for a while. Maybe there will be more Saturday night suppers with Mama and Daddy. Or maybe Miss Tuttle will offer to lend me one or two of her precious leather-bound books with gold writing on the spine. In the meantime, I'm starting a new collection of stones on the railing. Already, I have a mushroom, a knife, and a lady's dainty slipper. I can't wait for the next fine day. I will sit in Aunt Birdy's old rocker, polishing until my stones glint like jewels in the sun and dreaming of where I might go from here.

While
Ghost Girl: A Blue Ridge Mountain Story
is a work of fiction, the novel is based on real events and, in some cases, real people, whose lives were forever changed by the opening of the President's Mountain School. The characters of April Sloane, Aunt Birdy, and Dewey Jessup and his family were all inspired by bits and pieces of information that I discovered while reading letters and newspaper articles written about the school and the local mountain people during the early 1930s. Many of the students of the school did, in fact, learn to read with the help of the Sears, Roebuck catalog. And they truly did attend Sunday lessons at the schoolhouse; they held flag-raising ceremonies, ate picnic lunches with Mrs. Hoover in the schoolyard, and each fall made the trip down to the valley to attend the Madison County Fair.

Because Christine Vest, the real-life teacher of the school, left behind such detailed and vivid accounts of her Blue Ridge years in her letters and personal narratives, I felt confident in portraying this little-known heroine and using her actual name. Christine Vest Witcofski returned from Asia in 1936 and spent the following year making a home for her husband and two young sons in one military post after another. In 1938, she made her first trip back to the Blue Ridge, only to find that the families she had once known had scattered. Their cabins stood empty, most waiting to be removed from parkland. Eventually, the schoolhouse itself was dismantled, transported to Big Meadows, and rebuilt as a residence and ranger station.

With the Shenandoah National Park's official opening in 1935, more than 450 families were displaced. Some remained bitter and resisted giving up their homeplaces until the final deadline. Other families viewed their move as an opportunity and were eager to resettle on their own or in one of seven government-built homestead communities in the lowlands, where there was running water and electricity, and better access to schools, medical care, and jobs. A very small list of elderly residents, like Aunt Birdy, were given special status and allowed to live out their lifetime in their beloved homes.

Although this upheaval was painful for many, there was some comfort for those who had been involved in establishing the President's Mountain School. As Christine Vest Witcofski reflected in 1960:

When [my students] moved from the mountain because of the park, the older ones went to work and the younger ones found their places in the regular schools where they moved. I often wonder what their lot would have been if they had not had all this preparation before leaving their mountain. Because of the school, they were able to take their place in a normal way and many have done very well and have nice homes and fine families of their own today.

After stepping down as president, Herbert Hoover donated the land and buildings of his fishing camp to the Shenandoah National Park. Today visitors can tour the Hoovers' “summer White House” and walk along the rock-lined pathways and beside the trout streams where the president, first lady, and famous guests such as Charles Lindbergh once wandered. The extensive trails throughout the park can also lead hikers back into history. If you decide to venture off a bit, you may find yourself standing in the middle of an old mountain cemetery or stumbling upon the stone foundation of an abandoned cabin. And while the exact site of the President's Mountain School has been lost, the Skyline Drive, which winds 105 miles along the crest of the mountains, offers a clear window into the vistas that Miss Vest and her students once admired from the front steps of the schoolhouse. As Christine Vest Witcofski wrote, “In between these mountains lay the valley below. Always some shade of blue, but never the same, any two days of all the years I was there.”