The Wonder of Charlie Anne (10 page)

“Move your big butt, Olympiaaaaa!” I scream. “Gooooooooo.”

Anna May and Belle stop cheering, and all of a sudden their faces fill with cow-worry and then they are telling me oh no, oh no, here comes Mirabel, but I am so busy shooing Olympia over the finish line that I can’t take even a second to look up.

This time, Mirabel’s frown is big as the barn. She takes a long icy look at Phoebe. “Go home,” she says. “You’re not wanted here.”

“Mirabel, it wasn’t her fault,” I say, shooing Olympia away from my feet. “It was my idea to have the
chicken race because of Birdie’s bee sting. It’s my fault we’re not hoeing between the carrots.”

Birdie is already holding Phoebe’s hand. Mirabel steps over and slaps it away.

I see that ironing board go down Phoebe’s back again. She gives Mirabel a hard look and then flies off home.

There are about one hundred ways to cook potatoes. Mirabel knows them all: potato puff, potato casserole, potato cream soup, potato stew, potato dodge, potato dumplings, creamed potatoes, scalloped potatoes, potatoes with flour gravy, potato filling side dish, potato pancakes and my favorite, pigs in a potato patch. This is a huge pile of mashed potatoes with crisp pieces of bacon pushed in, all over. This is Birdie’s job. My job is to peel the potatoes, lots of them.

When Mirabel was down in the cellar organizing all the canning jars, she noticed that mice had gotten into our potatoes from last fall.

My new job is making sure Big Pumpkin Face gets down there every day on mouse duty. Big Pumpkin Face is not so easy to find these days. Sometimes she is up in the barn sunning herself, sometimes on the stone wall sunning herself, sometimes on the porch swing—sunning herself. She is getting fat from sunning herself so much. “Get to work,” I tell her.

While she is mousing around, I have to pick through the bin because there’s a bad smell coming from deep inside, and when you have one rotten
potato, pretty soon you have a lot of them. We can’t afford to be losing potatoes when we eat so many of them, Mirabel says. I say we could lose a few.

I begin tossing the bad ones out. Even the ones that Mirabel says we can save because they are just getting a little wrinkled, I toss into the pail, plus all the ones that have little mouse nibbles on them. Then I carry the whole load out to the compost pile.

Phoebe and Rosalyn are out by the road working in their garden. Anna May and Belle want to know why don’t I take a little stroll over to see them, and I tell them I think I will. I throw down the potato pail.

They are planting seeds and humming. I hear their fence being all happy about their company.

“What are you planting?”

“Sunflowers,” says Phoebe. “Want to help?”

“Sunflowers, by the road? Most people plant them by their gardens. Sunflowers are for birds.”

“That may be so,” says Rosalyn, standing up and wiping the sweat off her face, “but I want people who walk by here to know there’s a family living here now. And these are the only seeds I have.”

Rosalyn hands me a shovel. “Here, why don’t you help us plant some of these seeds. Do you know how?”

Do I know how to plant seeds? I roll my eyes.

After I am digging for a while, I say, “My mama used to plant flowers with me.”

“Yes,” says Rosalyn. “I’m sorry you’ve lost your mother, Charlie Anne.”

“Yes,” I say, because when you think about it, what else is there to say?

“Would you like to come in with us and have some sweet raspberry tea?” Rosalyn wants to know.

I don’t even pause. “Yes,” I say, because when you think about it, what else is there to really say.

There are big changes happening inside Old Mr. Jolly’s house. Everything is getting painted and made over. Someone has even touched up the roses on the wallpaper so they are blooming again.

The stairs going up to Phoebe’s room are the color of the sky on a good day. Rosalyn has made new covers for the sofa and chairs, so now everything is dressed up in her trouser cloth: red pepper red, crushed blueberry, sunflower yellow, evergreen.

Phoebe has made curtains out of muslin sheets, and she’s embroidered little cornflowers and poppies along the hems. Old Mr. Jolly has been busy making bookshelves, and now the one thousand books that Rosalyn brought are neatly tucked in together, and everything smells good, too, because there are dishes of cinnamon and cloves and nutmeg on the shelves.

Just like at our house, there is no electricity, but there is a kerosene lamp on the kitchen table. And when Rosalyn pours us all cups of sweet raspberry tea, I am noticing we are all glowing with a special light. Even Old Mr. Jolly.

For about the hundredth time, I want to see Phoebe’s bedroom way up under the eaves, but she keeps telling me no, she has never had a room to herself and it is not ready for visitors, but soon, soon, soon.

What does it look like? I want to know. I am imagining it must feel like a castle to have a room all your own.

“It’s a surprise. You’ll see.”

“Today?” I ask as soon as I see her the next day.

“No,” she says, her hands covered with whitewash. “Maybe tomorrow.”

“Today?” I ask when I see her the next day.

“No. Maybe tomorrow.”

“That’s what you said yesterday.”

“Come on,” she says, laughing at my pouting face. “You can help me pick these flowers.”

“What’s it like?” I ask as we walk through Old Mr. Jolly’s fields, picking black-eyed Susans and goldenrod and wild asters and rose hips.

Phoebe smiles. “You’ll see. Soon.”

The briers are cleaned out. Any day now, Old Mr. Jolly will come looking for Belle. I sigh and pick a clump of daisies.

“I will light a candle in my window when I am ready,” Phoebe says. “Make sure you watch for it.”

That night, there is a candle burning in Phoebe’s window. I light one, too, to say yes, I’ll be there, but your room better be ready, because I’m getting awful sick of the waiting.

It takes forever to get Anna May milked and two eggs found and then Ivy burns the oatmeal so I have to help her start over and show her how to do things. “Don’t you know anything?” I tell her, and she starts screeching, “Mirabel! Charlie Anne is being mean to meeeeeeee!”

“What are you rushing for?” Mirabel wants to know, and Ivy says, “Yes, what are you up to, Charlie Anne?”

I want to get over to see Phoebe so badly, but I still have to wash the dishes and put everything away and finally, finally, I rush outside, not bothering to listen if Mirabel is going to give me any more work. I am too excited about Phoebe’s new room.

I rush across the street and right up on their porch and I plow into Old Mr. Jolly and he says what the heck, what the heck, and before he can say anything to me about Belle I fly in the house. I bump into Rosalyn
and she points up those sky blue steps and before you can count ten I am sprinting up and they are steeper even than my stairs and they creak with every step and then I turn the corner and finally, finally, I see Phoebe’s room.

She is standing in the doorway. “Welcome, Charlie Anne.”

The walls are whitewashed and the trim is that same happy sky color and the bed has a bedspread made with the sunflower trousers cloth. There are curtains at the little windows under the eaves with little roses embroidered on them and the floor has been oiled and shines in the sun that is pouring through the window.

There is a washstand with a pitcher and bowl for washing her hands and face and a table beside her bed that has a little white cloth and on top are several books.

She shows me her closet, where her trousers are hanging in a neat row beside some dresses, and she points to a secret door that Old Mr. Jolly has made.

We go inside and there is a blanket on the floor and a secret window that looks outside and I see Ivy carrying the compost bucket out to the garden.

“Tell me a secret you never told anyone else,” Phoebe is saying.

I feel a little nervous. I never shared secrets before with anyone but Mama. “You first,” I tell her.

“Okay.” She closes her eyes and thinks for a while. I watch Ivy dump the compost and bring the bucket back up to the porch. Then she looks over at Old Mr. Jolly’s house and I move away from the window.

Phoebe opens her eyes. “My mama told me there was a light inside me that no one could put out unless I let them.”

I lean back against the rafters and breathe in the warm smell of the old timbers. I think about what she said. “That’s a good secret.”

“Now tell me.”

I look at her. I hope I can trust her. I close my eyes, and begin. “Sometimes my mama talks to me, usually when I am up by the river near her grave, but other times, too. Sometimes I think I hear her just before I wake up.”

When I open my eyes, Phoebe is smiling. “That’s a good secret, too,” she says.

Then Rosalyn is calling us down to lunch. While we are slurping the best vegetable soup I ever had, Rosalyn says, “Maybe Charlie Anne would like to hear
David Copperfield?”
and Phoebe goes over to the one thousand books and brings one back to the table and starts to read.

Well. Phoebe reads way better than me and pretty soon I forget all about where I am and how Mirabel is probably looking for me by now. I want to know how Phoebe learned to read so good, when I can’t hardly
read at all, but I am too caught up in the story to stop her and ask.

“Would you like a turn?” asks Rosalyn, pushing the book toward me. I am shaking my head no, no, no, and that’s when I hear Mirabel down by the road calling me, and for the first time ever, I am glad. I won’t have to watch the letters all jumble and remember all about Miss Moran if I get away from Rosalyn and Phoebe quick enough. Which I do.

Mirabel tells us we are going to start going to church, and this means Saturdays are bath day, and this means about a hundred trips to the well to get the water that we need to fill the washtub that we pull to the middle of the kitchen floor.

We hang a curtain from the ceiling, but you really don’t get any privacy at all. “Get out of here,” I tell Birdie, who keeps wandering in when it is my turn.

Mirabel comes in with the dress I wore to Mama’s funeral.

“I am not wearing that dress,” I tell her, feeling that awful hole inside me that opens up any time I look at that dress, and Mirabel says, “Yes, you are, because tomorrow your aunt Eleanor is coming.”

She pulls an envelope from the front of her apron and slaps it down on the table.

“Papa said not Aunt Eleanor.”

“Don’t Papa me,” Mirabel says, holding a towel up for me.

“I can do it myself,” I say, snapping the towel out of her hands and holding it in front of me.

Birdie is already naked as a baby jaybird, and as soon
as I’m out, Mirabel lifts her up and plunks her in. Mirabel starts scrubbing Birdie’s arms with a washrag. “And, Charlie Anne, I want you to make two of those vinegar pies, one for church and one for when Eleanor comes.”

I pick up the letter and open it and try to read it, but the letters jumble all up like they always do. Very badly I want to know what Aunt Eleanor has to say.