The Wonder of Charlie Anne (5 page)

I tell Mirabel we do not need Aunt Eleanor. Mirabel tells me I am too big for my britches. I tell her I am not wearing britches, I am wearing a dress. Then I scoot Birdie out the door and tell Peter and Ivy we have to all go to Evangeline’s.

As we are hurrying down the driveway, Olympia, Minnie and Bea are sunning themselves on the manure pile. I tell them they better stop lazing around and lay some eggs or they will get the what-for as soon as I get home.

Evangeline is looking like she is not used to people asking her for credit. But I know folks are asking her all the time now that half the men in our town are working on roads for President Roosevelt. It is hard now for everybody.

She is rubbing her forehead. We are standing beside big bags of flour that nobody bought yet. That can’t be good: to have flour that nobody wants. I look at the lemon drops in the candy case. When you have flour
you can’t sell, you can’t be giving away lemon drops, either.

“I don’t know about credit,” Evangeline says, coming around closer to us. “Where’s Mirabel?”

“Home,” I tell her. “Home because she hasn’t had a minute off her feet all day. That’s what she told us to say.” Ivy walks off to check where the movie magazines are and Birdie is in her far-off place, looking at the lemon drops.

“I would like to help you children, really I would, but it’s getting really hard for me now, too.”

“But we’re really good sweepers,” I tell her. “And our papa promised to send money soon. Mirabel says we’ll pay you as soon as we hear from Papa.”

While Evangeline goes through her head thinking what she should do, Becky Ellis and her mother walk in, and Birdie takes one look at them and runs over to hide behind me. The Ellis family can do that to a person.

Becky sticks her nose straight in the air when she sees me and I hope it gets stuck way up there. Then she gives her nose a pinch, like something in the store smells really bad, probably me.

I look Becky in the face and let all those times Papa told us about kindness and compassion and treating others the way you want to be treated rush right out the window, and I stick my tongue out at her. It feels almost as fine as having a cool sweet lemon drop in my mouth.

That’s when Evangeline brings up the subject of our credit again, and now I wish she would forget the whole thing.

“What do you need again?” asks Evangeline.

“Lemon drops,” whispers Birdie, tugging on my arm.

“Flour,” I say, my voice all balled up inside of me. “And sugar and maybe some coffee … and a lemon drop for Birdie.”

Then Evangeline sighs and turns and whispers to Mrs. Ellis that she can’t very well let Sylvie’s children go hungry—poor things—and then she tells me to go get the brooms in the back closet and get to work.

Mrs. Ellis is looking at our bare feet. Maybe I should not have run through so many mud puddles on the way here. I want to pull Becky’s tie-up shoes and her stockings right off her feet. Then I notice Birdie’s feet. She jumped in every single puddle, and her feet, as tiny and perfect as a sparrow’s, are dirtier than mine. I take her hand and pull her away from those Ellis eyes and go get the brooms.

Becky’s mama keeps writing letters to very important people telling them we still don’t have a teacher way up here. Times are hard, the very important people keep telling her. “My daughter can’t grow up without a proper education,” she tells us all, and after she says this about a dozen Sundays in a row while standing up in
her fancy box pew in front of everybody at church, you can tell people are surely kind of embarrassed and shameful over our situation, but knowing at the same time that most of the men are gone now and how the rest of us need to work together because of how bad things are getting, we tell ourselves that there will be time for school when times are better.

Our schoolhouse has been all boarded up for more than a year now, ever since Miss Moran told us she was going as far away from our town as she could get. Maybe California, is the last thing she said before she hurried away. I was so happy she left I did cartwheels all the way to the upper field, and Anna May wanted to know why I wasn’t walking on my feet, the way the Lord intended.

My papa said things are no better in California. It’s bad everywhere. We’re luckier than most, way up here, because we all have a cow in the field and chickens in the coop, and apples on the trees and peas and corn and potatoes in the garden. He stood up in church one Sunday before he left and faced us all. “There’s a colored lady teaching school four towns over, that’s what I’ve heard. If we’re lucky, maybe she can help us find someone who would come out here soon as the hay is in and teach the children through the winter.”

Mrs. Ellis jumped up so fast you would have thought she was sitting on something. “You are all backwater people without a wit of sense. That’s why no one
decent wants to come teach us. And we certainly aren’t going to improve our situation by having a colored teacher in our town. I’m ready to send my girl to Boston, where they know how to educate children properly.” She looked at Becky, with her hair all curled and her shoes all shining, and Becky grinned.

Papa said under his breath that might not be a bad idea.

I miss my papa very much.

I give Peter a broom and tell him to sweep the porch on Evangeline’s store, and I give Ivy a broom and tell her to sweep in the front. She takes one look at it and tells me she isn’t sweeping up this dirty old floor, and she stomps off and goes over by the table where sometimes Evangeline keeps
Movie Mirror
magazines. But there are none. I see her looking at her dress and at the holes that run through it and then over at Becky, who is wearing a dress so new it still has a pin sparkling near the hem that her mama must have forgot. I hope Becky gets pricked pretty bad. Serves her right when the rest of us are wearing the same handing-me-down-forevers we always get.

I take Birdie’s hand and we go sweep over by the woodstove that heats the store in winter, and Birdie keeps asking me if I think we’ll get some lemon drops. I tell her sometimes you get things you wish for. You really do. Life is like that sometimes.

I sweep all along the wooden floor and beneath the shelves that hold flour and laundry soap and bluing rinse. There are kerosene lanterns and dustpans hanging on big hooks, and china dishes stacked on the table beside cups and bowls, and fifty-pound bags of sugar beside a barrel of sauerkraut and a barrel of pickles.

Mrs. Ellis is looking over dress fabric when Zella Polanski walks in. She lives up the road and must have seen Mrs. Ellis out walking. Then Mrs. Reilly comes. They are just like Minnie and Olympia and Bea. When one comes, they all come running. Now all they need is a manure pile.

They stand by the fabric, whispering, and pretty soon Evangeline walks over to talk to them all.

“Have you heard?”

“What?” asks Mrs. Ellis.

“They were to be married this morning. He went to the train station to pick her up and then they were to be married, all without barely knowing each other. She’s from Mississippi, you know.”

“What would anyone want to come way up here for?” says Zella.

“Especially to marry
that
man,” says Mrs. Ellis, and I do not even have to hear another word to know who it is they are talking about.

“Oh, come now, ladies,” says Evangeline. “He’s been without a wife for so many years; surely he deserves a little happiness.”

“I don’t know who would want him, though,” says Mrs. Reilly. “I bet he hasn’t cut his hair in six months.”

“Or shaved,” laughs Zella.

I stand there sweeping, wondering who would want Old Mr. Jolly when he can’t even take care of a cow.

“We’ll find out soon enough,” says Evangeline. She starts packing up our flour and sugar and a little coffee. Birdie is mooning over the lemon drops so bad I think her face is going to fall off.

Mrs. Ellis pulls a grape pop from the icebox, opens it on the bottle opener that’s nailed to the wall and hands the bottle to Becky. We all just about faint from looking at the fizzing purple as Becky holds the bottle up to the sun. Then she smiles over at us, puts it up to her mouth and takes a huge gulp.

“The electric is coming,” Becky tells me after she drinks half her pop. “We are the only family on our road that’s getting the electric and the telephone at the same time.”

Then she takes another gulp, and if I still prayed to the angels, I would pray for something very bad to happen to her.

Evangeline notices, too, and then she pulls a small bag of lemon drops out of the basket and drops it in my hand, and I pass the candies out and I think about how life is like that sometimes. Sometimes you do get what you hope for.

This is how I make sure I am the first to see Old Mr. Jolly’s new wife.

I run to my swing as many times a day as I can get away from Mirabel and her chores and her manners book. I start pumping my legs and look over at Belle and Anna May, who are resting under the butternut tree. I ask them if they are sick of hearing all about how a young lady must avoid a loud tone of voice, and also avoid laughing too much and too easily. They tell me they are.

I get to pumping and swinging high enough to look straight into our loft and watch Big Pumpkin Face soak up the sun on a pile of hay, and when I get up just a little higher, I can poke my head out and see clear up our road, almost all the way to Evangeline’s store.

And then wouldn’t you know it: late in the day when Mirabel is napping and Ivy is supposed to be picking string beans, I see Old Mr. Jolly’s truck coming down the road.

I am so excited about seeing somebody new I can hardly breathe. Spending all day, every day, with only Ivy and Peter and Birdie and especially,
especially
Mirabel is like eating the same plate of peas, every day, all day, morning, noon and night.

I try and keep my legs pumping high so I can get a good look at Old Mr. Jolly’s wife. Higher, higher, higher I push my legs. Higher, higher, higher my swing goes. At the split second Old Mr. Jolly’s truck is close enough for me to almost see in the front window (are there three people in there?) my swing starts going down. So quick as I can, I push my legs and then I am up, up, up again, looking past our barn, and I see Old Mr. Jolly pull into the driveway and get out and go around to open the door on the other side of the truck, and, hey, wait a minute, who’s that sitting in the middle?

Then I am going down again, and I give my legs a good talking to and get myself back up again. A lady climbs out of the truck and she is wearing trousers, and they are red pepper red. I never saw a lady wearing trousers before, except maybe overalls sometimes for chores. I wonder if where she comes from in Mississippi all the ladies wear trousers.

Of course, just as these thoughts are filling up my head, my swing is going down again, so I kick my feet as hard as I believe possible because I want to see who else is in the truck, and that is a mistake because just as I am getting myself higher than I’ve ever been before, I hear something crack and I feel something snap and I go sailing in the direction of Old Mr. Jolly’s new wife.

*    *    *

My knees grind into the gravel and little bits of stone cut the skin on my shoulder and my cheek as I roll over and over on the road, and finally when I come to a stop, I am lying with my arm underneath me.

Old Mr. Jolly’s new wife is screaming, as if maybe she isn’t too used to seeing girls go flying off their swings and landing in the middle of the road.

“Sweet Jesus,” Old Mr. Jolly is saying.

I am all knocked out and I want to cry but I don’t know how. I also cannot tell them that I am not dead.

Pretty soon after that, Old Mr. Jolly reaches under and picks me up and carries me into his house and sets me on the couch. I notice he has cut his hair and trimmed his beard. He is wearing a suit, which is surely something I’ve never seen him in before. The new Mrs. Jolly tucks a pillow under my head.

Then there is a lot of hurrying around on the new Mrs. Jolly’s part and a lot of movement of my arm, and it does hurt something awful, and it seems I am still knocked out because I can’t quite remember how to talk. So I don’t.

“At least it’s not broke,” I hear Old Mr. Jolly say.

“You better go get her mother,” the new Mrs. Jolly says, and then I hear Old Mr. Jolly tell her to shush because there isn’t any mother, not anymore, and I am fading out while I am trying to tell him, yes, yes there is. She lives up on the hill by the river now.

“Her father is building roads.”

“Then who does she live with?”

I hear Old Mr. Jolly groan, and I think in my half-asleep knocked-out way that I didn’t know anyone else thought Mirabel was as bad as I did. I hear the new Mrs. Jolly talking again, and I think her voice is as soft as the buttercups sound when they wake each other in the morning.

Soon the new Mrs. Jolly is mopping my face and washing my arm and my knees with warm soapy water, and that’s when I start opening my eyes, just a little teeny sliver at a time. Then Old Mr. Jolly is propping me up and the new Mrs. Jolly is trying to get me to drink some water, and that’s when I see there is someone else in the room.