Ghost Girl (11 page)

I woke up to voices—angry and low at the bottom of the stairs. The voices had worked their way into my dream, something about me and Dewey fighting over the picture book I had left under the chestnut tree. It seemed like we had been fighting for hours, circling round and round each other, our words turning meaner and meaner, just on the edge of something terrible.

I pushed myself up in bed, trying to get my bearings.
My arm.
Somehow it had tangled up in the sling and the long sleeve of my nightgown, and now it hurt so bad I wanted to whimper. But then I heard those voices again and footsteps on the stairs and I knew it was Mama.

Before I could get out of bed, she was flying into the room with Miss Vest following along behind her. Miss Vest looked like she had just woke up, with her eyes still puffy from sleep and her wavy hair mashed to one side. She had on a long blue robe tied at the middle.

“Please, Mrs. Sloane, wait,” Miss Vest called. “Just let me explain something. . . .”

“No, I heard enough,” Mama said, marching over to take my broken arm in her hands. Her fingers felt as cold and hard as barbed wire. Without even glancing at my face, she started peeling away my sling and unwrapping the bandages.

“Her arm's all swolled up,” she said, peering down between the splints.

Miss Vest hurried over to see. “I'll get another ice pack,” she said.

Mama looked shocked. “
Ice pack.
The only thing
ice
is gonna do is drive a chill right down inside that bone.”

“But Mrs. Sloane, the corpsman told us—”

Mama whirled around to face Miss Vest. She gritted her teeth like she was chewing dirt. “I . . . don't . . . care . . .” she said, spitting out each word, “what that
corpsman
or whatever he is has to say. He's
wrong
—and this should never have happened in the first place. What kind of school are you running here, where kids are fighting and my daughter gets her arm broke and then doesn't come home all night?”

Miss Vest opened her mouth to answer, but Mama turned away. “Now, come on April,” she said. “Get dressed. We're going home.”

“But Mama—” I cried.

She shook her head hard, cutting me off. “Where are your clothes?”

“Here,” Miss Vest said quietly, lifting the stack of my folded things from the dresser. My heart sank as she turned and went downstairs.

There was nothing I could do to calm Mama down. She wouldn't hear a word—not about Camp Rapidan or the ice packs or Wit, nothing. While I sat on the bed floppy as a rag doll, she yanked on my stockings and my boots and my sweater, keeping her mouth set in its hard little line. I let my arm hang limp at my side, not even wincing when Mama kept bumping against my splints.

Miss Vest was at the front door of the schoolhouse, waiting to meet us. She held out my sling and the bandages along with the bottle of white pills. “This medicine is for the pain,” she said. “April should take two pills every four hours. I'm sure if she keeps to that schedule, she'll feel well enough to come back to school tomorrow.”

Mama took the sling and bandages, but she wouldn't touch the pills. “We won't be needing those,” she said. “And April won't be coming back to school tomorrow, neither.”

Miss Vest forced herself to smile. “Well, the next day, then,” she said.

Mama let out a heavy sigh, and I knew, with a panic rising in my throat, what was coming. “No, not the next day,” she said slowly, like she was talking to a baby. “Ma'am, I thank you for your trouble, but April won't be coming back to your school after today.”

Miss Vest blinked. “What do you mean?” she asked, trying to reach for my mother's sleeve. Her voice was climbing higher. “Mrs. Sloane, we can always decide about school later, but April—she needs medical attention soon. We need to make sure she gets a cast and . . .”

I didn't hear the rest. Mama was herding me through the front door and down the porch steps. It was a fine day, with a gaudy blue sky and a morning sun so bright it seemed to be throbbing, just like the pain in my arm.

Mama kept pushing me along, saying, “Come on now. You'll be better off at home.”

I looked over my shoulder at the schoolhouse just once. Miss Vest was standing on the front porch, staring after us, with the tie on her robe flapping in the breeze.

As we passed the chestnut tree, I noticed my little reading book still lying in the dirt. For a second I was tempted to jerk away from Mama, to run and pick it up. At least it would give me something to hold on to. Then I changed my mind. I wouldn't ever want to set eyes on those pages again. All I would see were words I couldn't read and a sister and brother looking so much happier than me.

Miss Vest let a week pass
before she came knocking. It was awful to sit inside the cabin not making a sound while my teacher pleaded and banged on the rough boards of our door long enough to scrape her knuckles raw.

“Please, Mrs. Sloane,” she called out again and again. “Just let me see April for a minute. I won't try to make her come back to school. I just want to see if she's all right.
Please!
”

Still, Mama wouldn't let me open the door. Somehow, with her stare, she forced me to sit frozen like a scared jackrabbit. The second time Miss Vest came, we were in the middle of mucking out the shed when we heard her calling. Mama had been shoveling up manure into a cart while I scattered fresh hay with my good arm.

“Don't you move,” Mama warned through her teeth, and I leaned against Old Dean's warm flank, praying for Miss Vest to just give up and go away.

Maybe if Daddy had been around, he could have stopped Mama from acting so crazy. But he wasn't due back from his latest job for another two weeks. And the truth was, if I had really wanted, I could have run yelling from the shed. “
I'm here!
” I would have screamed. “
My arm's still hurting bad, Miss Vest. What should I do?
”

I can't say for sure why I didn't do it—probably because for the first time in months, Mama was paying attention to me. We didn't talk much, but she was always close. She brewed comfrey leaves and other herbs for poultices to press against my arm. Every morning she checked my sling and my splints, and during the day, when I fumbled through my chores one-handed, I could feel her watching me, worrying.

With Daddy gone, we lit the lantern and sat together at the kitchen table every night, keeping each other company. Mama mended clothes while I tried to cut out scraps of cloth for a crazy quilt that I wanted to make once my arm healed.

One night when Mama was fishing around in the rag bag searching for a piece of cloth to patch Daddy's overalls, I saw her pull out an old shirt of Riley's. I remembered him wearing it buttoned up to the neck on church days. It was soft and faded plaid and looked tiny lying across Mama's lap.

She stared down at it for a minute, her scissors frozen in the air. I held my breath, waiting to see what she would do.

“Don't cut it, Mama,” I finally whispered, half expecting her to slice into it anyway, just to get rid of it so she'd never have to look at it again.

But when Mama turned toward me, her face looked almost peaceful in the dim light of the oil lamp. “All right,” she said, holding the little shirt out. “You take it. Might be nice to work a patch or two into your quilt.”

I smiled. It was the first time Mama had ever shared a piece of what she remembered with me. So a week later, when Miss Vest came knocking and pleading again, I decided not to open the door even though I was in the house alone. After that, she didn't come back anymore.

Summer took me by surprise. I had stayed so close to our hollow all spring, I was amazed when Daddy came home saying work was hard to come by with the farmers in the valley so worried about drought.

Then I remembered it hadn't rained since that day in early May when the Hoovers came to the Sunday prayer meeting. But living in our hollow under Doubletop, with the mountain blocking out the sun most of the day, the ground around our cabin still felt damp and spongy under my bare feet. And the spring was running fine, plenty enough to water our vegetable patch up in the clearing.

Still, Daddy stood on the porch, shaking his head and saying it was going to be a long summer. That's when it hit me. “Do you know what the date is?” I asked in a rush.

Daddy gave me a strange look. “June. The twentieth,” he said. “Why?”

“Just wondering,” I told him, trying to keep my voice calm. But inside, I felt my stomach turn queasy.
June.
I remembered Miss Vest telling the class that school let out in June. We'd all have a break from our lessons, she had said, and she planned to spend her three months of vacation with her family in Kentucky. What if she had left already?

The next day Mama was so busy lining up chores for Daddy, she barely noticed me heading out the door. “I'll be weeding up at the clearing,” I called as I grabbed the hoe next to the back step. I started up the path toward the garden, then veered off into the woods, leaving my hoe in the crook of a tree. Then I ran, not even stopping to check the stones in the creek for Aunt Birdy like usual. I wasn't wearing the sling anymore, but my arm still ached sometimes and I had to keep it bent against my side while I ran, like a broken wing.

By the time I started up the last slope toward the schoolyard, sweat was trickling down between my shoulder blades. At the top of the hill, I stopped, hugging my arm and squinting against the baking sun.

I was too late. With the blinds drawn down, the schoolhouse looked naked and lonely. The yard had been swept clean of lunch pails and balls and jump ropes. It was so still, I could hear a squirrel scrabbling through the bare branches of the chestnut. Off in the distance, the mountains stretched out in quiet green waves.

I wandered up to the front steps and stared at the clumps of pink petunias Miss Vest must have planted before she left. They needed watering. I knelt down and yanked at a couple dandelions that had pushed their way up through the drooping flowers. The tops kept snapping off in my hands.

Miss Vest had given up on me, all right. She must have planted her flower bed with Ida or Luella or one of the other girls. Now she was off in Kentucky for the whole summer, maybe for good, and I hadn't even told her goodbye.

I found Aunt Birdy back behind her house, hanging out washing. As soon as she saw me, she dropped her clothespins and ran over to give me a squeeze. “I've been waiting for you to come round,” she said, pressing her wrinkled cheek against mine.

“I can't stay long,” I told her. “Mama thinks I'm out back weeding.”

Aunt Birdy shook her head. After I had broken my arm, she had come to visit me a few times. But whenever she told Mama what she thought of me quitting school, Mama had pressed her lips together tight and refused to answer. On her last visit, Aunt Birdy got so disgusted, she left, not even pulling the door closed behind her.

Now she was staring at my arm. “Still hurting you, ain't it?”

I looked down and realized I had been rubbing at the sore spot without even knowing it.

“Not much,” I lied and just to show her, I used my bad arm to pull a wet apron from the basket at her feet and pin it on the line with the wooden clothespins.

Aunt Birdy fastened one of her faded cotton dresses next to the apron. “Barely need to hang these up before they're dry,” she said. “If it doesn't rain soon, I'm gonna lose my corn. Can't seem to keep anything watered long enough to do any good.”

I bent over the basket again, trying to keep my face hidden. “It looks like school's let out,” I said.

“That's right. Miss Vest left near a week ago. They took her down to catch the train in Charlottesville.”

I couldn't stand it. Aunt Birdy sounded almost cheerful. She chatted on about Miss Vest inviting her over to hear the radio before she left. Then, while we pinned the rest of the clothes up, she started telling me the whole story of the
Amos 'n' Andy
program they had listened to together.

Finally, I couldn't keep quiet anymore. I cut right into the middle of her tale. “Didn't Miss Vest say anything before she left? I mean, anything about
me
?”

Aunt Birdy stopped and gave me a sad little smile. “Why, sure she did, honey. I was just getting ready to show you.” She took the leftover clothespins from my hands and dropped them into the basket. “Here, come with me,” she said and I followed her through her wilty garden back to the house.

Aunt Birdy's place felt like a cave after the glare outside. For a minute I had to stand in the doorway blinking until the corners of the room came clear with their dusty bunches of herbs and ginseng root hanging from the ceiling. Aunt Birdy fished around on a cluttered shelf by the fireplace. When she turned back to me, she was holding out a plain cardboard box.