From the moment she sang her first song in church, her reputation quickly started to spread around the county. People came from miles around to hear the blind girl who sang like an angel. One Sunday, a visiting preacher, moved to tears by the beautiful sound of her high, lilting, almost ethereal voice, said it was as pure and clear as a songbird at dawn. From then on she was known as the Little Blind Songbird of Tennessee.
On the day of Lillian Sprott’s funeral, when the preacher signaled it was time, Beatrice’s father led the girl in a white dress up the aisle and put her in a chair and placed her zither in her lap. She sang the old hymn “Someone’s Waiting for Me Up There” and ended the service with “There’ll Be Peace in the Valley.”
After she finished there was not a dry eye in the house. One woman who had not particularly cared for the dear departed remarked that old Lillian had most certainly been sung into heaven that day, whether she deserved to be or not. John Robinson told Ruby they should get Beatrice to sing on
The Neighbor Dorothy Show
. Dorothy was always looking for talent. That afternoon her father asked Beatrice if she wanted to go. She immediately said yes and two days later she went on the radio and sang “Always.” A guest artist on
The Neighbor Dorothy Show
was certainly not an unusual occurrence. Throughout the years Dorothy had featured many singers. Only the week before, twelve-year-old Ian Barnard, billed as Windsor’s Wonder Boy of Song and Dance, had come all the way from Canada and had caused quite a stir singing and tapping to the tune “If You Knew Susie.” But never before had there been such an overwhelming response to a single performance as there was to Beatrice Woods’s first appearance. Calls and letters came pouring in, everyone wanting to hear more from the “Little Blind Songbird of Tennessee.” And on the next appearance, when Beatrice sang “Old Shep,” a song about a dog, everyone who had ever had a dog that died, or even one that might, broke down and sobbed, including Neighbor Dorothy, who had to leave the room and when she came back was barely able to sign off the air. Down at the hardware store, fifteen-year-old Macky Warren, who was helping his daddy, heard it and cried so hard over his dog Tess he made himself sick and had to go home. She was such a hit that Neighbor Dorothy asked her to appear on the show every week and the Golden Flake Lite-as-a-Feather Flour company agreed to pay her room and board if she would. Her father drove her back over to Elmwood Springs, this time with her clothes and her radio. As it turned out, Beatrice knew the words to hundreds of songs and could sing anything—hymns, popular songs, gospel, country, you name it. Pretty soon she received so many requests she was appearing on the show every day. Since she was now living in Missouri she dropped the “of Tennessee” from her title and just went by the “Little Blind Songbird.” She did not have far to go every day since Ruby and John lived right next door. Doc ran a clothesline from one back door to the other so she could hold on to it and find her way back and forth between the two houses without any trouble. This worked out fine unless it rained. Then she was told to wait on the back porch until someone came over to get her.
The Secret
B
OBBY WOULD BE
the first one to discover Beatrice’s secret. One rainy morning Dorothy looked out the window in the kitchen and saw that it was not letting up and told Bobby he better go get Beatrice. He had just finished his breakfast, said O.K., and started for the door when his mother stopped him.
“Bobby, take the umbrella.”
Bobby moaned. He did not mind going to get Beatrice—he liked her—but he did mind having to take the umbrella. Muttering to himself, he went to the hall closet and rummaged around behind the heavy winter coats his mother had hanging there and pulled out the large black umbrella he despised with a passion. The huge multispoked creature had tortured him for years. Besides being almost as big as he was, it had a mind of its own and was mean and ornery. One spoke was always off and by the time he wrestled it to the ground three or four more had popped off. Then there was the problem of maneuvering it out the back door without falling down the stairs. Mother Smith said never to open an umbrella in the house because it was bad luck but if he stood outside on the back steps he would be drenched before he could get it open, so what was the point.
He dragged the dreaded monster to the back door, pushed with all his might, and the thing popped into place but as usual one spoke on the left side flipped up. He decided not to even fool with it and he banged and pulled himself and the umbrella out the door and down the steps. Beatrice was dressed and waiting. She had on her yellow raincoat and rain hat and galoshes, which Nurse Ruby always insisted she wear just to walk from one house to the other. Beatrice greeted him before he opened the screen door.
“Hi, Bobby,” she said, knowing it was him by the way he ran up the steps.
They walked arm in arm, chatting.
“What are you going to sing today, Beatrice?”
“Oh, I don’t know yet. . . . What do you think?”
Bobby thought about it as he guided her around a big puddle.
“What about ‘Cool Cool Water’?” Bobby’s musical tastes always led him to suggest cowboy songs first. “Or maybe ‘April Showers’?”
Beatrice nodded. “Those are two good ones.”
Mother Smith was waiting for them on the other end and opened the door. “This is a humdinger, isn’t it? Come on in and let me get those wet things off of you.” Beatrice loved going to the Smith house every morning. It was a treat for her, with the aroma of warm, freshly baked cookies and the sounds of people running in and out and busloads of fans dropping by to visit. It was a far cry from the quiet rooms where she spent most of her time.
The Robinson house, given Nurse Ruby’s fear of germs and considering her personal credo, “I never met a germ I couldn’t kill,” always had the slight smell of Lysol disinfectant lingering in the air. After the show Beatrice usually stayed for lunch and went home around one. That day the rain continued in a constant downpour and Bobby was summoned from the attic, where he had been busy mowing down an army of clay soldiers with a tank made out of a large matchbox. When they stepped out Dorothy’s back door, Beatrice heard Bobby grunting and struggling with the umbrella and whispered, “Bobby, let’s not even use that thing. Let’s just go without it.”
Bobby’s eyes lit up. “You don’t care if you get wet?”
“No. Don’t you think a walk in the rain would be fun?”
“Yeah!”
She took her rain hat off and put it in her pocket. “Let’s go!”
About ten minutes later Bobby and Beatrice were having the time of their lives, running up and down the sidewalk in their bare feet, stomping in every puddle Bobby could find. They were headed up to the end of the block again when Ruby Robinson, who had just come in from work, looked out the window and saw them. She ran out on the front porch and hollered for them to come in this very minute. Hers was clearly a medical concern; she took the responsibility of her boarder’s health very seriously.
They were both soaking wet and by the time they came up the front stairs, Ruby was in a fit. “Well, I’ve heard of people who didn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain but this is the first time I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And to think, Bobby Smith, that you of all people would lead a poor little blind girl around in a downpour.”
Beatrice defended Bobby. “It’s not his fault. I’m the one who wanted to walk in the rain.”
Nurse Ruby looked at Bobby, dripping all over her rug. After she moved him off the rug onto some newspapers, she said somewhat skeptically, “Well . . . whoever’s idea it was, if you die of double pneumonia it’s not going to matter. Both of you ought to be ashamed, putting your health at risk for such foolishness. I’ll be surprised if you live out the week.”
Despite her dire predictions, neither one got sick, not a cold or a sniffle, a disappointment to Nurse Ruby, who took their temperature daily for a week. After the seventh day, unable to detect the slightest symptom, she relented. As she held the thermometer up to the light and it read 98.6 again she said, “Well, all I can say is that you both were just lucky this time, that’s all.”
Later that day she said to Dorothy, “Imagine if that girl had come down with pneumonia and died while she was living under the roof of a registered nurse, what would people think? After all, I have the responsibility for the health of this entire community and I take that seriously.”
Neighbor Dorothy said, “I know you do and everybody appreciates it but—”
She continued. “Beatrice takes this whole episode lightly but I have a medical reputation to uphold. How could I go on giving out medical advice on the radio if my very own boarder had died right out from under me, I ask you that?”
Dorothy tried to be sympathetic and tactful at the same time. “Ruby, I know you worry about her and that’s very sweet of you but don’t you think she needs just a little bit of fun every once in a while?”
Nurse Ruby puffed up and slung one side of her blue cape over her shoulder. “Fun? Well, Dorothy, if you call putting your health at risk fun, then no, I don’t.”
There was no getting around Ruby, but what she did not know would not hurt her, was Bobby and Beatrice’s way of thinking. From that day forward Beatrice was taken on many secret excursions that Nurse Ruby knew nothing about. Including one wild ride in a wheelbarrow, a trip out to Blue Springs on the back of one of Anna Lee’s boyfriend’s motorcycle, a gallop on the back of an old mule that Monroe had borrowed and brought over, and a slide down a hill in the snow on a flattened cardboard box.
They had been caught only once when some busybody happened to mention to Ruby, “Oh, by the way, I saw your boarder Beatrice out at the state fair riding that big roller coaster and she and Bobby Smith were screaming their heads off.”
This information was serious enough to cause Ruby to put on not only her official nurse’s cap but her cape as well and immediately march over to the Smith house to tell his mother. And even Dorothy was a little alarmed at the thought of a blind girl on a roller coaster. “What if she had fallen out and broken her neck?” she said afterward to Bobby. Bobby just thanked his lucky stars that someone had not told Nurse Ruby about the other rides he and Beatrice had gone on that night, including the Loop the Loop, the Thunderbolt, the Whip, the Wild Mouse, the Caterpillar, and the bumper cars. Especially the bumper cars. They both could have gotten hurt the way he drove. With Beatrice at his side, going as fast as the car would go, he had whizzed around the track like a madman, with blue electrical sparks flying overhead, crashing into everybody he could. And in turn Monroe, a speed demon in his own right, had shown them no mercy and banged them back and forth with a vengeance. Not to mention the time Luther Griggs bashed them from behind so hard that they both were almost knocked out of their car. But bumps and all, Beatrice had loved every minute of it. At the end of the ride she exclaimed, “Oh, Bobby, let’s do it again!” and they had. Two more times, as a matter of fact.
That was the summer Bobby found out her secret. Something that most people just looking at this sweet, serene, almost ethereal person would never have guessed in a million years. Beatrice Woods had a wild streak. She longed for romance and adventure. And more than anything in this world, she loved to ride.
Anna Lee
B
OBBY
’
S SISTER
and her two best friends, Norma and Patsy Marie, were growing up together. Norma was a pretty brunette girl whose father ran the only bank in town. Patsy Marie’s parents, Merle and Verbena, owned and operated the Blue Ribbon Cleaners. Patsy Marie made the best grades of the three but was not a beauty. As her aunt put it, “She had old-maid schoolteacher written all over her from the time she was six,” but she was sweet. All three were nice girls and if they had a fault it might have been that at present they were right in the middle of their movie-star phase.
Every time the feature at the Elmwood Theater changed they were there in the twelfth row center. Each had a different movie actor they adored. Anna Lee’s major heartthrob this month was Dana Andrews. She filled piles of scrapbooks with pictures of him cut out of movie magazines. Patsy Marie’s current crush was Alan Ladd, whom she had just seen in
The Blue Dahlia
. But Norma’s movie star du jour was a puzzlement to both the other girls. She chose a lesser-known actor named William Bendix. They asked her why him; he wasn’t even good-looking. “Well, that’s the point,” she said. “
Somebody’s
got to like him.”
However, as the school year grew closer to the end they concentrated on the upcoming high school prom and movie stars took a backseat. Norma would be going with Macky, of course, and Patsy Marie would go with her cousin, as usual. Anna Lee was the only one who had not committed to any of the boys who had asked her so far. The really overriding question was what they were going to wear. All the girls in high school, no matter who they were, wanted store-bought prom dresses. Wearing a “homemade” prom dress would be akin to sprouting a big red
H
on your forehead. Although Neighbor Dorothy had a degree, made her own patterns, and was one of the best dressmakers in the state, she knew that nothing would do but to let Anna Lee go down to Morgan Brothers department store with the rest of them and buy her dress off the rack. It would cost about three times as much as it would for her to make it, but her daughter had to have a store-bought dress or die of humiliation. At least that’s what she said.
One of the other lures of buying a dress at Morgan Brothers department store was the saleslady, Mrs. Marion Nordstrom, who was in charge of the Better Dresses Department. If Mrs. Nordstrom helped you pick out your dress, then you had arrived. All the girls in Anna Lee’s group thought she was one of the most exquisite creatures who had ever lived. Tall and aloof, always impeccably dressed in the latest fashions, she was their ideal. A war widow, she had come all the way from San Francisco, California, and the wardrobe she had brought with her was the constant topic of all the high school girls. “She never wears the same thing twice,” they declared in admiration. After school Anna Lee and Patsy Marie would stroll into the store and pretend to shop just to see what she had on that day.