Otherwise Known as Possum Page 4

  “For real this time.” She opened her mouth like to say something else but closed it again.

  “Well, that’s fine, June May. When you do, you can read me ’n’ Trav to sleep like Momma used to.”

  I twinged to think on that, but by then our foolishness had got us to Miss Eulah’s place. I set the parcel on the step and rubbed my red hand. It felt good to have a different kind of pain.

  June May ran up the porch. “Hey, Dusty, how’s that ear, better?”

  Miss Eulah’s milk cow lives on the porch, in the shade, though Miss Eulah’s usually in the sun. Right then she called out to us from the kitchen plot, “Miss Eulah be there d’rectly, girls.”

  ’Course, Miss Eulah is about a hundred and her “directly” never is, so I drooped onto a step like a worn-out willow. As she shuffled toward us, I compared her sagging, tobacco-colored skin to my sun-browned arms. Miss Eulah rarely goes inside, because this way, she says, “When da Lord He fit to take me, He won’t have’t go lookin’.”

  Trav got himself a bellyful of cool water from the trough below the pump, while June May scratched between Dusty’s eyes and whispered into what I figured was the bad ear. June May can’t stand to see any animal or person hurting. It’s plain inconvenient at times.

  Trav curled up under the steps as Miss Eulah come up finally and heaved herself onto the lowest step, barely missing Trav’s water-speckled snout. “June May, you hear from your daddy?”

  “No, ma’am, not lately.” June May fussed with Dusty. “Penny postcard a while back.”

  Miss Eulah nodded. “Tell your momma I had the Vision, and I seen he fine, got hisself good work over to Grant County.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’ll be sure ’n’ tell her.” June May beamed like she’d seen her daddy herself. In fact, he’d been away since around the time we lost Momma. “Milk in the crick house?”

  Miss Eulah nodded, and June May ran off to get her bucket, which I pictured keeping cool in the shade of the little shelter Daddy built for Miss Eulah after she fixed my baby colic. Miss Eulah is a healer and, since she was a girl, has had a touch of the Sight. GrandNam told me so. The closer to blind Miss Eulah gets, the better her Sight.

  June May came back with two tin pails, one half-full of eggs. “I best get these home. Come to supper?”

  I’d been taking plenty of meals at the Justices since Momma died. I tried to cook for Daddy or him for me, but often as not he’d send me off with June May with flour for biscuits or some such, saying he’d fend for himself, though I don’t rightly know how. No matter how hard I tried to take care of him, he just seemed to keep shrinkin’, sometimes looking tight and hard as cured leather. Stood to reason that me going to school would just make Daddy shrivel into such a hard prune that no amount of pokin’ would get through to the pit-stone heart of him.

  June May set down both pails and squatted, rearranging the eggs like she had a plan. “Boys’ll likely be there,” she told the creamy shells.

  “Well … ” I wanted to ask Jump about his double-figure-eight follow-through knot.

  Miss Eulah dumped a load of carrots atop the eggs. Don’t rightly know how she does it without breaking a one, but she never has yet, and she grows enough to share with half the holler. Like our garden, which GrandNam kept fed with bits of sand, chicken litter, pine bark, and sawdust till the soil exploded in thanks, Miss Eulah’s earth was more loamy than the clay-rich earth brought in by the river flooding its banks. Either of those ladies could and did grow just about anything from prize tomatoes to fresh asparagus and grapes plus roses and japonicas and even hostas that couldn’t feed a bat at noon.

  Last fall, Momma and I stacked a year’s worth of carrots in sand under Miss Eulah’s house. I think carrots taste best in winter, when you know they’ve finished working and are in bed asleep till you need them. These carrots, I realized, might remember Momma like I do. I’d come myself this year and stack every last one of them. No way Miss Eulah needed more change and hardship neither.

  Taking a tiny cloth poke from one of her apron pockets, Miss Eulah turned her cloudy eyes toward June May. “Give this to yo’ momma, hear?” She fumbled the little bundle of herbs into June May’s hands.

  “But Miz Justice ain’t sick, Miss Eulah,” I butted in.

  “They’s for the baby, child.” I felt sick when Miss Eulah clasped my shoulder. “For the baby to come.”

  Part of my head knew Miz Justice was in the family way. Still, Miss Eulah’s hand felt like a branch in a nightmare where I’m lost in the woods. I knew she was thinking of Momma and Baby. Not even Miss Eulah could save them.

  Suddenly, I didn’t want supper anyhow.

  “As for you, child.” Miss Eulah put her long thumbs on my cheeks and cupped her hands over my ears. “Don’t be trustin’ everything you eyes and ears try tell, hear?”

  “Ma’am?” Her skin felt like dry paper on my sweaty face. Her breath was hot as Dusty’s, only not as sweet.

  “You look and listen heah.” She poked my chest. “Don’t be mixin’ up learnin’ and knowin’. Ain’t that right, June May?”

  “Yes’m, Miss Eulah.” June May grinned at me, then at Dusty, then at Miss Eulah.

  Miss Eulah kept hold of my head. “Now take me for a sample. I ached for proper schoolin’ when I was the size of yous, but the hopes we hold ain’t always the ones get handed to us.”

  “Why didn’t nobody hand you schoolin’, Miss Eulah?” Wide-eyed, June May pulled at the curl of hair that worried her nose.

  “Some think only a certain collection of folk can be let into proper school on account of that’s where all the knowin’ of foreign lands is shared.”

  Miss Eulah gazed no place in particular, but it felt like she was seeing everything past and future all at once, and for a firefly-flick, she looked different, angry.

  “Like el’phants, Miss Eulah?” asked June May. She’s been stuck on elephants since I read to her in a magazine about Tarzan the Ape Man. We don’t have anything around here like Hollywood or like the jungle.

  Fast as a blink, Miss Eulah’s angry look was replaced with her normal peaceable calm, and she nodded. “It’s powerful, that kind of knowin’, like Miss Eulah’s knowin’ is powerful, but sometime folks don’t like to share it.”

  I tried to stop what was in my head from making my stomach flutter. Does it snow in the jungle? Do elephants like snow? All of a sudden I wanted to know useless things like what kind of footprints an elephant makes.

  “I know every important thing.” Didn’t I?

  But elephants. What do elephants eat for supper? I shook my head to free it of its foolishness.

  The way June May and Miss Eulah was staring at me, owl-eyed, it wouldn’t surprise me if their heads turned clear around on their necks. Those two were like to make me skeeter-crazy.

  And then Miss Eulah said, “Possum Porter, you best git after that dog’a yours.”

  He’d been right at my feet. I peered down into the shade cast by the wooden steps my own daddy replaced two years back. No Trav. I turned in time to see a tail disappear into a stand of trees and blueberry bushes.

  “See you soon, Possum,” June May sang as I took off running.

  “Trav!” I gave him our whistle, expected to see him bound back, but nothing rustled in the hot stillness.

  “TRAV!” As I tumbled out of the bushes, I thought I caught a flash of his honey-velvet fur and spun around toward a brambly hedge. Moving this fast, he was showing more life than I’d seen—or felt myself—in weeks.

  I heard a single bark a ways off and spotted a Trav-sized break in the grasses. Coming at it from the far side, I saw he’d hooked up with a critter path headed toward the hollow.

  What’s got into him?

  I guess Traveler is about the best dog a person ever called friend, besides being the only dog I’ve ever had. When I had a fever, he licked my head till it cooled. Soft ears share the color and feel of giant pussy willows. And those eyes. Oh, those eyes. I know looking into th
em that he knows all my secrets, even the ones I haven’t thought up yet.

  “Fweeh-fweh,” I whistled. “FWEEH-fweh.”

  Trav and me were raised together as pups, so he knows my mind, and I know his—usually. But he’d just taken off toward the hollow like he thought I was right in front of him, and that pure made no sense. Trav was right there after the funeral when I promised Tully I wouldn’t go to our spot till he came home. We spit-shook on it.

  But Trav wasn’t coming to my whistle; all I heard was the sharp whee-hyah of a nuthatch making a party-line call.

  That’s when I lit out like a firecracker, knowin’.

  I stumbled out of the brambles spitting dust and leaves and near about tripped on the roots of the giant oak that held our tire swing in its big branchy arms.

  And there was Tully Spencer big as Christmas, riding our rope swing in lazy hawk circles.

  “Aw, shoeshine,” I swore. “Bullets and shoeshine.” I needed time to know what I was feeling.

  All summer I’d counted everything but chiggers till Tully came home. Yet seeing that excuse for a straw hat low on his forehead, I felt tore in two.

  On the one side, it felt like my shadow had walked into the sun and found itself.

  On the other, what if he’d had all summer to get soft and start feelin’ sorry for me?

  The two ideas turned over and under in my belly like the seats on a double Ferris wheel while Tully just half-grinned down at Trav and me, him all calm as bees at midnight.

  Hot and tuckered as I was, I could have shot straight up into the tree branches above Tully—and in good time too. But without knowing why exactly, I felt cantankerous, so instead I moseyed a mite around the tree trunk, giving my belly a better chance than it had had on the Flying Circles of Death.

  By the time I rounded back to the swing side of the oak, Trav had settled into a good scratching from his favorite itching root. He opened his eyes to me all innocent, tail thudding on damp earth, before wriggling onto his back. “Traitor,” I said, and right then I meant it. What kind of nonsense had my own dog turnin’ his tail on me? I looked at Tully with suspicion—was he next to quit being his self?

  Tully raised his chin at me, then went back to chewing sweet grass.

  I couldn’t think of a thing to say, so I didn’t. Instead I inspected the cane poles that Tully had set up in soft earth downstream of our tree.

  Some kind of time later, he said, “Hey.”

  Relief hit me the way a swimming hole meets a belly flop. ’Course I can count on Tully; he’ll never let me down. I belched like a toad. “Hey back.”

  Tully stared at his feet awhile and then shot me a look. “Reckon you grow’d about a inch.”

  I guessed Daddy’d been too preoccupied to notice. Who knew what else I’d missed without my other eyes? A person needs someone to tell you such things.

  I threw myself onto the creek bank, feeling tired of so many feelings piled on top of each other like ants in a hill.

  Tully dropped from the rope and rolled down the bank, ending up on his back halfway between me and Trav. Dragonflies whirred the reeds like barnstormers till the buzz droned louder than my breath in my ears. I reached for the sack near my feet, figuring his Aunt Gree’d packed enough johnnycake for three Tullys.

  Tully turned his head and spit out the grass stem, getting maybe two, two-and-a-half, feet on it before turning to look back at me. That’s when I noticed that staring back from the rolled top of the sack was the angry-pansy coal-black face of the sorriest excuse for a kitten I’d ever seen. I tensed up and squinted at him, ready to run if he showed any signs of sap dripping.

  “Found ’er under the bus stop. Some kids was pokin’ sticks at ’er, but she’s scrappy, brave. Figured she’d make a good mouser for Pa.” He shrugged, but his eyes fixed on me. “Thought maybe I’d name ’er Possum.”

  My insides flopped like a landed bass; I couldn’t look for fear of seeing those eyes people been giving me all summer. Pity-full. Not you too, Tully.

  Tully popped a fresh stem into his toothy old mouth. “She got your fish breath.”

  A feeling started in me like a bubble at the bottom of a pop bottle and bust out my mouth. I laughed so loud and hard, like I hadn’t done in forever, that our supper most likely swam itself downstream and into the next county. But it felt good to laugh, like the way it feels good to have a day of sun in the middle of rainy season, just when you think it’s about time to build an ark.

  Trav stood and barked once, wagging his tail to see me laughing, and Tully gave me that smile that told me everything I needed to know.

  “Hear you been told to join us poor dumb folk in school.”

  Tully chucked the kitten under its pink-tip chin, and it was asleep in seconds, its tiny paws opening and closing in rhythm with its soundless breathing.

  “So how you plannin’ to get out of it … ’cause I know sure as anything you are.”

  Not surprising that we didn’t catch a thing after all the hoo-ha’ing, but me and Tully had caught up and settled in easy as brown Betty crumble, and I was about halfway home before I remembered to stop smiling. My brain was still itching to come up with a plan … somethin’ to make everything right. Something maybe to convince that brown-Crow teacher that I was just as well learned as her and she had no business keepin’ me in that coop of a schoolroom and away from my business in helping Daddy and I hold Momma and Baby alive in our hearts.

  On that first Monday morning of what was meant to be my purgatory, I half-expected to wake and find Daddy dozing with his rifle outside my window, my preferred shortcut for escaping trouble.

  I whispered, “Trav, boy.” Right away, he lifted his head, and his tail thumped the rag rug at its before-daylight volume. I wiggled my right pointing finger, and he went to the window and stood on his hind legs looking out.

  The tail wag meant the coast was clear. “Good boy, Trav,” and he went back to his rug to await further instructions.

  “Trav, you figure Daddy’s in the kitchen?” My stomach growled, and Trav lifted his head again, tail thumping out, “LET’S go EAT, eat, eat. LET’S go EAT, eat, eat.” I obliged him.

  But the kitchen was dark, stove cool. I looked out the back door, but no light came from Daddy’s work shed. My stomach tightened up like a fist.

  I went back to Momma and Daddy’s room and knocked on the door, which was ajar. It swung open, and the smooth white duvet in the dim looked like a snowbank. I made that bed myself every day, and I knew Daddy hadn’t slept in it since I’d last tucked the corners and fluffed the pillow.

  Trav whimpered, and his cold nose nuzzled the palm of my hand, which was still curved from knocking, but I wasn’t hungry anymore. He padded back to the kitchen. When I heard his whuff, I pictured him settling onto his rug by the stove and followed him out.

  I fetched water and stacked kindling by the stove, but still no Daddy appeared. I tried to act like it was a regular morning tending to certain chores, but I couldn’t help seeing the dented tin pail that Daddy had set in the middle of the table the night before. That, I knew, was meant to hold my lunch for my first day of s—I gulped the word down without even letting myself think it.

  Could Daddy have forgotten he’d sentenced me without trial? Or—? Maybe he felt so guilt-stricken he couldn’t face sending me off to my doom.

  Yet somehow I knew that wasn’t it.

  Beside the pail was one of the towels Momma embroidered from flour sacks. The way it was folded, three purple-thread crocuses grew out of the letters M-O-N-D-A-Y done in red and blue cross-stitch.

  I traced the O with a fingertip and felt something hard underneath. A biscuit! Instead of lifting the towel, I traced the rest of the word. Felt like two biscuits. And I didn’t have to look to know they’d be sliced open and smeared with bacon fat, which is about my favorite way to eat them.

  I felt the scratchy heat behind my eyes that means you’re downwind of your own campfire. I wanted to be angry that Daddy had betrayed M
omma by agreeing to send me to school. I wanted to be angry he wasn’t there for me to yell at him about it.

  I wanted to go about my business and pretend I didn’t know what was expected of me. I wanted to go out to Momma’s tree and find her sitting there on her bench and put my head in her lap and have her run her fingers through my hair and trace my ears.

  I wanted to be a million miles away.

  Or to be ten again.

  What I did instead, maybe because it was the easiest thing to do without thinking, was put that biscuit bundle in my pail, whistle for Trav, and head out to school.

  Momma and Daddy met in school. But GrandNam said those two were too smart for school. I guess she was right since they quit and got married.

  And I guess I was not too smart for school, because that’s where I was headed.

  The school itself was built on the far side of our holler, away from the woods and every good thing, so we had little occasion to be acquainted with it. After a piece, we joined up with the train tracks and followed them east as the mist lifted.

  To me, the trains are like dragons passing through my kingdom, seeing me and mine, but paying us no never mind. I wondered if I would ever see the dragons’ lairs, cities themselves loud and gritty, fast-moving and blind to what’s around them.

  You can put your hand on the tracks and tell if a train is coming long before you can see, smell, or hear it from the hum in that steel. I had set to know the rails’ secrets as good as any Chinese worker who once toiled and maybe died laying down the line.

  We turned off the tracks when we reached the junction box at the switch, and the sun was well up. From there, the tracks stretch on ahead straight and true before winding through the labyrinth of hollers and mountains.

  I never yet seen a man or lady from China, but GrandNam told me stories, always reminding me that what the Lord made we had no need to fear. I would like to meet one someday and I’ll be ready if I do. I’ll tell him I walked his hard-laid tracks the only day of my life I went to school. Wouldn’t take me more than a few hours to show that teacher lady that I’d already learned everything there was to know. I needed school about as badly as Momma’s sweet tea needed salt, ’cept of course when there were Crow Ladies nosin’ around.