Wish You Well (30 page)

In reading to her mother, Lou chose not books, but rather
Grit
newspapers, and some copies of the
Saturday Evening Post
they had gotten from the lumber camp. Lou would stand against the wall of her mother’s room, the paper or magazine held in front of her, and read of the economy, world catastrophes, Hitler’s bludgeoning war across Europe, politics, the arts, movies, and the latest news of writing and writers, which made Lou realize how long it had been since she had actually read a book. School would start again very soon; even so, she had ridden Sue over to Big Spruce a few days before and borrowed some reading material for her and Oz from the “lending library,” with Estelle McCoy’s permission of course.

Louisa had taught Eugene to read when he was a child, and so Lou brought a book for him too. He was concerned he would find no time to read it, and yet he did, late at night under lamplight, his moistened thumb slowly turning the pages as he concentrated. Other times Lou helped him with his words as they worked the fields in preparation for the coming winter, or when milking the cows by kerosene lamp. Lou would take him through the
Grit
s and the
Post
s and Eugene particularly liked saying “Roooosevelt, President Roooosevelt,” a name that appeared often in the
Grit
pages. The cows looked at him strangely whenever he said “Roooosevelt,” as though they thought he was actually mooing at them in a peculiar way. And Lou couldn’t help but gape when Eugene asked her why somebody would name their child President.

“You ever think about living somewhere else?” Lou asked him one morning while they were milking.

He said, “Mountain all I seed, but I knowed they a lot mo’ to this world.”

“I could take you to the city one day. Buildings so tall you can’t walk up them. You ride in an elevator.” He looked at her curiously. “A little car that pulls you up and down,” she explained.

“Car? What, like’n the Hudson?”

“No, more like a little room you stand in.”

Eugene thought that interesting, but said he’d probably just stick to farming on the mountain. “Want’a get hitched, have me a family, raise the chillin good.”

“You’d make a good dad,” she said.

He grinned. “Well, you’d be a fine ma. How you is with your brother and all.”

Lou stared at him and said, “My mother was a great mom.” Lou tried to recall if she had ever actually told her mother that. Lou knew she had spent most of her adoration on her father. It was a very troubling thought to her, since it was now beyond remedy.

A week after her ride to the school library, Lou had just finished reading to Amanda, when she went out to the barn to be by herself. She climbed to the hayloft and sat in the opening of the double doors and looked across the valley to the mountains beyond. Pondering her mother’s depressing future, Lou finally turned her thoughts to the loss of Diamond. She had tried to put it out of her mind, but she realized she never really could.

Diamond’s funeral had been a strange yet heartfelt affair. People had emerged from slivers of farms and crevices of homesteads that Lou was unaware even existed, and all these people came to Louisa’s home by horse, ox, mule, foot, and tractor, and even one battered Packard with all its doors missing. Folks trooped through with plates of good food and jugs of cider. There were no formal preachers in attendance, but a number of folks stood and with shy voices offered comfort for the friends of the deceased. The cedar coffin sat in the front room, its lid securely nailed down, for no one had a desire to see what dynamite had done to Diamond Skinner.

Lou was not sure that all the older folks were really Diamond’s friends, yet she assumed they had been friends of his father. In fact she had heard one old gent by the name of Buford Rose, who had a head of thick white hair and few teeth, mutter about the blunt irony of both father and son having been done in by the damn mines.

They laid Diamond to rest next to the graves of his parents, their mounds long since pulled back into the earth. Various people read from the Bible and there were more than a few tears. Oz stood in the center of them all and boldly announced that his often-baptized friend was a lock for heaven. Louisa laid a bundle of dried wildflowers in the grave, stepped back, started to talk but then couldn’t.

Cotton offered up a fine eulogy to his young friend and recited a few examples from a storyteller he said he much admired: Jimmy “Diamond” Skinner. “In his own way,” said Cotton, “he would put to shame many of the finest taletellers of the day.”

Lou said a few quiet words, addressing them really to her friend in the box under the freshly turned dirt that smelled sweet yet sickened her. But he was not between those planks of cedar, Lou knew. He had gone on to a place higher even than the mountains. He was back with his father, and was seeing his mother for the very first time. He must surely be happy. Lou raised her hand to the sky and waved good-bye once again to a person who had come to mean so much to her, and who was now gone forever.

A few days after the burial, Lou and Oz had ventured to Diamond’s tree house and took an accounting of his belongings. Lou said Diamond would naturally want Oz to have the bird skeleton, the Civil War bullet, the flint arrowhead, and the crude telescope.

“But what do you get?” asked Oz, as he examined his inherited spoils.

Lou picked up the box and took out the lump of coal, the one allegedly containing the diamond. She would make it her mission to chip carefully away at it, for as long as it took, until the brilliant center was finally revealed, and then she would go and bury it with Diamond. When she noted the small piece of wood lying on the floor in the back of the tree house, she sensed what it was before ever she picked it up. It was a whittled piece, not yet finished. It was cut from hickory, shape of a heart, the letter L carved on one side, an almost finished D on the other. Diamond Skinner
had
known his letters. Lou pocketed the wood and coal, climbed down the tree, and didn’t stop running until she was back home.

They had, of course, adopted the loyal Jeb, and he seemed comfortable around them, though he would sometimes grow depressed and pine for his old master. Yet he too seemed to enjoy the trips Lou and Oz took to see Diamond’s grave, and the dog, in the mysterious way of the canine pet, would start to yip and do spins in the air when they drew near to it. Lou and Oz would spread fall leaves over the mound and sit and talk to Diamond and to each other and retell the funny things the boy had done or said, and there was no short supply of either. Then they would wipe their eyes and head home, sure in their hearts that his spirit was roaming freely on his beloved mountain, his hair just as stuck up, his smile just as wide, his feet just as bare. Diamond Skinner had had no material possessions to his name and yet had been the happiest creature Lou had ever met. He and God would no doubt get along famously.

They prepared for winter by sharpening tools with the grinder and rattail files, mucking out the stalls and spreading the manure over the plowed-under fields. Louisa had been wrong about that, though, for Lou never grew to love the smell of manure. They brought the livestock in, kept them fed and watered, milked the cows, and did their other chores, which now all seemed as natural as breathing. They carried jugs of milk and butter, and jars of mixed pickles in vinegar and brine, and canned sauerkraut and beans down to the partially underground dairy house, which had thick log walls, daubed and chinked, and paper stuffed where mud had fallen away. And they repaired everything on the farm that called for it.

School started, and, true to his father’s words, Billy Davis never came back. No mention was made of his absence, as though the boy had never existed. Lou found herself thinking of him from time to time, though, and hoped he was all right.

After chores were done one late fall evening, Louisa sent Lou and Oz down to the creek that ran on the south side of the property to fetch balls from the sycamore trees that grew in abundance there. The balls had sharp stickers, but Louisa told them they would be used for Christmas decorations. Christmas was still a ways off, but Lou and Oz did as they were told.

When they got back, they were surprised to see Cotton’s car in front. The house was dark and they cautiously opened the door, unsure of what they would find. The lights flew up as Louisa and Eugene took the black cloths from around the lanterns and they and Cotton called out “Happy Birthday,” in a most excited tone. And it was their birthday, both of them, for Lou and Oz had been born on the same day, five years apart, as Amanda had informed Louisa in one of her letters. Lou was officially a teenager now, and Oz had survived to the ripe old age of eight.

A wild-strawberry pie was on the table, along with cups of hot cider. Two small candles were in the pie and Oz and Lou together blew them out. Louisa pulled out the presents she had been working on all this time, on her Singer sewing machine: a Chop bag dress for Lou that was a pretty floral pattern of red and green, and a smart jacket, trousers, and white shirt for Oz that had been created from clothes Cotton had given her.

Eugene had carved two whistles for them that gave off different tunes, such that they could communicate when apart in the deep woods or across acres of field. The mountains would send an echo to the sun and back, Louisa told them. They gave their whistles a blast, which tickled their lips, making them giggle.

Cotton presented Lou with a book of poems by Walt Whitman. “My ancestor’s superior in the arena of the poem, if I may so humbly admit,” he said. And then he pulled from a box something that made Oz forget to breathe. The baseball mitts were things of beauty, well-oiled, worn to perfection, smelling of fine leather, sweat, and summer grass, and no doubt holding timeless and cherished childhood dreams. “They were mine growing up,” Cotton said. “But I’m embarrassed to admit that while I’m not that good of a lawyer, I’m a far better lawyer than I ever was a ballplayer. Two mitts, for you and Lou. And me too, if you’ll put up with my feeble athletic skills from time to time.”

Oz said he would be proud to, and he hugged the gloves tight to his chest. Then they ate heartily of the pie and drank down the cider. Afterward Oz put on his suit, which fit very nicely; he looked almost like a tiny lawyer. Louisa had wisely tucked extra material under the hems to allow for the boy’s growth, which seemed now to occur daily. So dressed, Oz took his baseball gloves and his whistle and went to show his mother. A little while later Lou heard strange sounds coming from Amanda’s bedroom. When she went to check, she saw Oz standing on a stool, a sheet around his shoulders, a baseball glove on his head like a crown, and brandishing a long stick.

“And the great Oz the brave, and not cowardly lion anymore, killed all the dragons and saved all the moms and they all lived happily ever after in Virginia.” He took off his crown of oiled leather and gave a series of sweeping bows. “Thank you, my loyal subjects, no trouble a’tall.”