Billie Standish Was Here (18 page)

And before I could signal Harlan with my eyes to say “no,” he nearly jumped to his feet saying “Yes!” Of course he would. He was nodding so hard it had to hurt. I buried my face in my arms on the table as he went on. “It does get kinda boring being dragged down to the same pace as the slowest kid in the class.” He looked at me and I crossed my eyes and stuck out my tongue. He pretended not to see. “And you're right. They don't talk much at all about current events.”

Miss Lydia nodded and told him there was a stack of
Time
magazines behind her chair in the living room; would he bring them in, please? She sat humming while he was gone like she was too pleased with herself to notice she was making me miserable.

Harlan came back huffing, carrying a stack of magazines so tall his elbows were straight and his chin rested on top. When he set the pile on the table it spilled every which way and buried the surface in a sea of glossy paper. I thought about that one indecipherable article I'd read about Vietnam and started feeling sick. Even Miss Lydia looked a little overwhelmed. She opened her mouth and then shut it as though she didn't know where to start after all. Some things seem really easy when they're no more than a thought in your head and I figured this was one of those for her.

But just then her grandfather clock chimed five and it seemed to perk her back up. “Let's go watch the news,” she said. “Plenty going on there to talk about.” No way was she giving up.

And so we watched the news together and talked about it afterward. Just as we did every day forward that we were there, although after that first day the set didn't come on until 5:30 for Walter Cronkite. Miss Lydia didn't like to watch the Kansas City news—she said she just didn't need to know about
every
baby that was left in a trashcan.

There was more to it than that, but I understood what she meant. Sometimes even the stuff happening halfway around the world seemed too close to home.

She used the back issues of
Time
to look up articles that would help us understand how the current news stories came to be and had them dog-eared and ready when we came after school. We took turns reading out loud and she helped us put the stories in words and terms that we understood. Even the mess in Vietnam started making sense when you took it in small chunks. So did the protests against the mess in Vietnam.

I had never paid attention to what happened before an election for president, but before long Miss Lydia had us talking about all the candidates, Nixon and Humphrey and Wallace, like they were neighbors. She talked about the two-party system and Wallace running as an independent and pointed out articles that explained all the things that could happen with the Electoral College. And there it was, the Constitution we were studying come to life.

She hated George Wallace with such a passion I started expecting her to hiss when he came on the TV. “Children, I would try to let you make up your own minds,” she told us, “but I would be derelict if I let you think that man is anything other than the devil in a white shirt and tie.” She told us that if he got elected it would “wipe out everything Lyndon Johnson and Reverend King got done and set the United States back a hundred years.”

I associated Martin Luther King with marches and protests and riots—and I'd never thought about there being
good
troublemakers in the world. Miss Lydia said if there weren't we'd still be living in a colony and singing “God Save the Queen.”

“Yeah, but that's ancient history,” I told her.

She looked peeved for a minute. Then she pulled a roll of butcher paper out of a kitchen drawer and tore off a sheet the length of the kitchen table. She had me find a marker and draw a line all the way down the center of the paper, then she started making hash marks across that saying, “Here's the Declaration of Independence. 1776.” She made marks for the Civil War, the Great Depression, World Wars I and II and when Harlan and I were born. Laid out like that it didn't look like such a long span of time and she assured us that it wasn't.

She said, “I know you think I'm older than dirt, but think about your own grandparents and where they fit in with what you learn in your history books. Your time will be in there too, someday.” She told us history was nothing more than what happened yesterday.

Neither Harlan nor I knew anyone with a different color skin from our own, so racial issues had never been top of our minds to say the least. But Miss Lydia said all we had to do was listen to one of George Wallace's speeches to know the Civil War wasn't over yet.

She brought us books from the library about Rosa Parks and Reverend King. Then she cut the twine off bales of old
Time
magazines stacked up on the sunporch and looked up articles about the marches on Washington and Montgomery and about lynchings and shootings.

Sometimes it was hard to digest that this was the same world we were living in. Today. It seemed so far away. But then we read about four little girls in Birmingham who went to church one day in 1963 and never came home and we were so ashamed we cried.

One of those afternoons I asked Miss Lydia if there were a lot of colored people in Sedalia when she was growing up.

She frowned. “Some. Why do you ask?”

I shrugged. “I dunno. Mama and Daddy talk about the colored like they're scared of them or something. I was just wondering how you got to think the way you do.”

She was standing at the kitchen sink and her weight slumped against the counter while she stared out the window a long minute. Then she said, “There on that timeline, the year after the Civil War ended, my daddy was born.
His
daddy fought that war. Fought for the side of the South.”

She took her glasses off and polished them on her apron. Buying time to shop for words. “As a child, Billie Marie, I heard him tell stories that made my stomach churn,” she said. “Granddaddy liked to call himself a religious man, but I didn't know how to come home from church and reconcile myself to the things some folks thought they had a right to do to other people. Flesh and blood. Men, women, and children—pieces of property and not treated with the kindness you'd show a dog.” She bit her lip and said, “There is a kind of man in the world that gets meanness confused with power and I still can't reconcile that.”

She wasn't talking just about her granddaddy. I knew. That day in July she had told me there was something wrong with the men on that side of the family and called herself worse than Typhoid Mary for passing it on.

And I understood that part of what she was teaching Harlan and me—and why—was to make up for it.

School itself was still a joke but at least now it was one I shared. Harlan and I breezed through our class work. Then we read the biographies and novels Miss Lydia brought us from town. If it was a book she hadn't read she asked us to work together on a report and pretended it was so she could learn too, but I knew it was mainly to get us to discuss and decide what was important.

She read everything we wrote and prodded us to go just a little bit farther with everything we studied. It wasn't enough to tell her the who, what, and when. She asked for the why—and if that was impossible to know, she asked for our thoughts on the matter. Harlan and I learned to argue without getting mad, and it practically became a hobby.

That woman had a knack for asking the one question that could nail you to the spot and make you question everything you thought you'd decided. If we said the demonstrators at the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention were unpatriotic, she asked us which parts of the First Amendment we'd keep and what we'd throw out. If we hollered “police brutality” against any of the protestors anywhere, she asked us to define at what specific moment and with what qualification a demonstration becomes a riot. She made us look at both sides of everything.

Just like when she'd figured out how to teach me to crochet, she was a natural.

I was learning a lot from Harlan and Miss Lydia that didn't come from books, too. I learned more about kindness than I ever had at church. Kindness and generosity.

Harlan's mom turned forty-five that February and he and his sisters planned a surprise party. The youngest girl was off at college and the older two were married with little kids and lived at least sixty miles away, so it was hard for the whole family to get together anymore, sometimes even for Christmas. This party was a month in the planning.

Harlan's dad pitched in by getting Mrs. Willits out of the house that Saturday afternoon. When Harlan got his film developed, he showed me the picture he took right when his mother walked in and saw the decorations and all her little chicks home to roost. It made me cry. I had never seen such pure joy. I didn't know you could take a picture of love. For me it was like peeking through a window at a different way to live.

When school let out that spring, I was lost. It wasn't the same anymore with just Miss Lydia and me day after day. It was like feeling phantom pain from an amputated limb.

And I know it was hard on Harlan. Neither he nor I had been big phone talkers up until that point, but we started logging at least half an hour on the telephone with each other every day.

Then he showed up at Miss Lydia's one day toward the end of June in a dilapidated old pickup. A big grin smeared across his face. I was so happy I couldn't stop wiggling.

Harlan was one boy who didn't have to ride a tractor every spare minute—his folks had both inherited a fair bit of land and that gave his dad the luxury of hiring outside help. But Harlan did have chores—mainly tending the five or so kinds of animals they always had around the homestead waiting to become dinner. He told us he hadn't been able to get done every morning in time to ride with his mother on her schedule.

But his father had decided he could drive the five miles into Cumberland and back as long as he kept to dirt roads and only came for the afternoons. Mr. Willits was afraid all the work Harlan had done for Miss Lydia would come undone over a summer of neglect.

Right.

Harlan's folks were about as kind and decent as they come. I barely knew them directly—they didn't belong to our church, so I only saw them at school programs or the occasional funeral—but I'd heard Harlan's stories. And I knew what kind of boy they'd turned out.

We spent most of that summer cleaning Miss Lydia's house top to bottom, inside and out. We took down curtains and rehung them washed and pressed after the windows were clean. We beat rugs over the clothesline until we were choking on dust. We polished furniture. We scrubbed floors on our knees and then waxed them until we could see our reflections.

For her part Miss Lydia ran the best restaurant in town, open anytime we got hungry. And she still insisted on paying us a dollar a day.

Mostly we took a break from studying—but sometimes we couldn't help getting caught up in what was going on. On July 16 Harlan came early to watch Apollo 11 lift off live on TV. We had seen rocket ships take off before, but this was a much, much bigger deal.

Four days later we parked ourselves in front of Miss Lydia's TV at noon and by the time 3:18 rolled around and Neil Armstrong told us “The
Eagle
has landed,” my butt muscles were sore from being clenched. We could hear the cheering of the men at Houston Control, but Harlan's watch ticking was the only sound in that room with the three of us.

We listened all afternoon while Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra explained what was going on and sometimes we heard the conversation between the moon—the moon!—and Houston. All three of us were afraid we'd miss something if we so much as went to the bathroom.

I didn't know how they could get the TV picture to us from space, but Miss Lydia explained about satellites and signals and made me understand about as well as I understood how music came out of the radio. Then she took off her glasses and dabbed at her eyes and I asked her what was wrong.

“Nothing, child,” she said. “I just never thought I'd live to see the day.”

“Why not?” I asked her. “This space race thing has been going on since way back when Kennedy was president. You told us yourself.”

Miss Lydia chuckled, but not like she was laughing at me. “Billie Marie, you got to realize,” she said, “when I was your age I rode a mule to school. Only the richest men owned automobiles, and even they still called them ‘horseless carriages.' You and Harlan here”—he tore his eyes away from the screen to listen—“will never have to worry about polio, but you're just about the first crop that didn't. That's a fear I lived with most of my life.” She wiped her eyes again with the back of a wrist. “Now here I sit with cars buzzing up and down the street, thousands of people traveling by airplane over the country at this very minute, and I'm about to watch a man walk on the moon. It's almost too much to take in.”

Harlan and I looked at each other and I wondered if my eyes were opened as wide as his.

He called his mom when he knew she'd be home from work and asked if he could stay late. He had pulled the phone cord all the way into the living room next to me so I heard when she said, “Well . . . let me talk to Miss Jenkins, would you?”

The phone wouldn't reach so I helped Miss Lydia hoist up out of her chair and take a few stiff steps toward the kitchen. “Hello,” she said, then, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I think that's a fine idea. No, no, don't worry. It's just fine.”

She handed the phone back to Harlan and I heard his mother say “Behave yourself. I love you” and Harlan said, “I love you, too, Mom.”

It sounded so normal. I was amazed.

Harlan hung up and raised his eyebrows at Miss Lydia. “Your mama asked if I'd kick your butt out early enough in the morning to go do your chores,” she told him. “I promised her I would. So settle in. You're staying the night.”