Ghost Girl (12 page)

“She left this for you,” she said quietly.

I took the box and stood for a few more seconds, pressing my hand against the smooth lid, trying to make the tingly feeling in my chest last a little longer.

Aunt Birdy squirmed like she had an itch. “
Apry
,” she huffed, “go on and open it.”

I laughed, and careful as I could, I pulled off the lid, then pushed aside a rustling layer of tissue paper. Underneath was a pair of beautiful boots, soft leather with low heels and thin laces tied up to the ankle. My breath caught in my throat.

“Lady's slippers!” I said.

“What's that?” Aunt Birdy asked.

“Oh, just something Daddy taught me.” I hurried over to the rocker to try on my new shoes. But before I could yank off my sweaty old boots, Aunt Birdy said, “Wait. There's something else.” Then she handed me another package wrapped in brown paper and tied with white string. It was heavy.

“There's more?” I said. How could I have thought Miss Vest had forgotten me?

I pulled one end of the string and there on my lap was a thick Sears, Roebuck catalog, along with a pad of clean white paper and a silver ink pen.

I looked up at Aunt Birdy, full of wondering. She shrugged before I could even say anything. “I don't know, Apry,” she said. “All she told me was to remind you about your wish list. She said you'd remember.”

I sat puzzling for a minute. “I do remember,” I said. “I remember telling her it might be fun to write out an order, just for pretend, and she called that a wish list. But I thought we'd be doing it together. She knows I can't read and write good enough to make one on my own.”

I flipped through the catalog, feeling the excitement drain out of me again. There was row after row of tiny black print and numbers. I searched for little words I could recognize, but the more pages I turned, the more the letters seemed to swim together in one long black line.

I slammed the catalog shut. “Even if I could read, Mama would never let me keep this catalog. And what about
those
?” I glanced down at the beautiful new boots peeking out of their nest of tissue paper, suddenly realizing how useless they were. “Remember how mad Mama got that day when Miss Vest came here and asked about ordering new shoes? She won't let me step foot inside the house with those fancy boots on.”

Aunt Birdy sighed. She reached over and pushed a piece of hair out of my eyes.

“I'm sorry, honey,” she said. “I know Miss Vest didn't mean to make you feel any worse off than you are.”

“Then
why
?” I asked. “Why did she leave me here wishing for things I can't ever have?”

When I heard the regulars
down at Taggart's trading stories, I knew the drought must be even worse than I thought. I overheard Silas Hudgins say it had gotten so hot in Arkansas, corn kernels were exploding into popcorn right out in the field.

Then another man cut in, saying the fishing holes at Camp Rapidan had all gone dry. “Old Hoover might as well forget about catching any trout this summer,” he went on. “He'd be better off staying in Washington anyhow, taking care of the sorry mess he's gotten this country into.”

“What sorry mess?” I wanted to ask. I was standing at the counter, waiting to pay for a sack of flour and some spools of thread. But Mr. Taggart didn't even look at me as he took my money, and pretty soon all the men were talking at once. So I pushed past their shoulders and elbows, leaving the buzz of their voices behind me.

I couldn't help feeling like a ghost again. With Mama and Daddy so caught up in when the next rain or the next paycheck was coming, I slipped in and out of the cabin without anyone noticing, like a puff of breeze or a shadow along the wall. But for once, I didn't mind being ignored. As soon as I finished chores every morning, I stole off through the woods for Aunt Birdy's, never stopping for breath until I was sitting on her front porch with my new boots laced and tied and the catalog resting in my lap.

At first I stayed on the front porch each morning, flipping through the catalog until my fingers turned black from the newsprint. Every so often I took little breaks to admire the fine fit of my boots as I stretched my legs out on the steps or walked along the railing, touching Aunt Birdy's stones. Aunt Birdy tried to leave me alone most of the time. She tinkered around the house, talking to herself and trying to nurse her roses and wisteria through the dry spell.

After a few days of studying, I managed to memorize the order of the catalog—hats and dresses were first, then corsets and gloves, then tires, guns, cookstoves, furniture, toys, baby buggies, and on and on. I turned to the end of the book, to the page full of houses. A new house for Mama—that would be number one on my wish list. I wanted the one Miss Vest had called a bungalow. The word sounded just like the house in the picture—neat and cozy, with flower boxes under the windows, just right for three people.

I leaned down until my nose almost touched the page, squinting at the teensy print, but there were numbers and letters all mixed together. I knew enough to write down a
B
for bungalow, but what came after that? I rolled the pen back and forth between my sweaty fingers, waiting for something to make sense enough to write down. The empty square of paper gawked up at me.

It was too hard. Too hot to think out on the porch steps with the flat sky pressing down on me like a heavy hand. And whenever Aunt Birdy walked by, I kept imagining she was peering over my shoulder, checking to see if I had written anything yet.

“I'll be back after a while,” I finally told her, gathering up my notepad and the catalog.

She gave me a funny look. I had never left before without changing back into my old boots or stacking up the presents from Miss Vest on the shelf by the fireplace.

“Where you going?” she asked.

“Not far.”

I didn't know where I was going—just someplace cooler, where I could think. I headed for the trees, down an old deer path and across a drying creekbed, and pretty soon I found myself near the little graveyard where Riley and Grandpap Lockley were buried, over on the far side of the mountain near Big Meadows.

I knew Aunt Birdy visited all the time to put flowers on the graves, but I hadn't been there since Riley's funeral. It made me too sad to think of my brother buried in the ground with nothing but his initials chiseled on a piece of rock to show he had ever been alive. His whole life whittled down to those three little letters.

RJS

1921–1928

Mama had wanted to order a fancy marble headstone from the funeral parlor down in the valley. But there wasn't enough money, so Daddy had worked for days chiseling a slab of stone he found near our cabin.

When I came up on the worn path leading to the graveyard, I didn't stop. I walked all the way to the wrought-iron gate and stood with my hand on the latch. My new boots had scuffs on the toes, and the heels were mucky from crossing the creekbed, but beyond the gate, the cemetery looked so peaceful and shady. Even with the drought, the ground was still green with moss and periwinkle. Slowly, I pushed open the squeaky gate and headed for Riley's grave, winding my way through the stone slabs and whitewashed planks of wood that people had used for markers.

I smiled when I got to Riley's grave. Aunt Birdy had brought a bunch of black-eyed Susans and set them in a Mason jar by the headstone. I could see the same blaze of gold propped against Grandpap Lockley's stone down the hillside.

I kneeled in the periwinkle and set my catalog and notepad nearby. I remembered Aunt Birdy trying to convince me to visit the graveyard with her not long after the accident. She said she always talked to Grandpap Lockley and it made her feel better. But I still couldn't get the words to come. What would I say? Only “I'm sorry, Riley. I'm sorry.”

I reached out and ran my hand over the letters Daddy had carved with the chisel. It was a shame he couldn't fit his whole name. Riley had been so proud of it. Even at four years old, he was already striking up conversations with complete strangers at Taggart's. Folks couldn't help reaching out to muss his hair and ask him what his name was and he would tell them in his loudest, most grown-up voice, “I'm Riley John Sloane. They named me after my grandpap. He's dead now.” Mama would act embarrassed, but I knew deep inside she was pleased. She always gave him a little squeeze as she scooted him away.

He was so smart, so different from me. I picked up my catalog and turned to the bungalow page again. No matter how much I stared, the words still didn't come clear. I knew if Riley had gotten the chance to go to school, he would have been reading by now. But here I was, twelve years old, in the middle of a graveyard, still hopeless at reading.

A breeze blew up along the hillside and set the branches above me to rustling. The pages of the catalog fluttered, and I was just smoothing them out with my hand when something wet hit the newsprint. The drop of water landed right in the middle of the picture of the bungalow, blotting out the front door and one of the flower boxes. For a minute I thought it was a tear dripping down from my face. I had felt like crying all afternoon. But then . . .
splat
. Another wet spot landed, and another.

It was
raining
! Part of me wanted to laugh, to throw my head back and catch the drops on my tongue. But my catalog was getting wetter and the words were disappearing into the newsprint. I grabbed up my pen and the notepad and started writing as fast as I could, like a crazy person, copying all the words next to the bungalow picture.

I skipped over a string of numbers, then copied more words, trying to sound out the letters as I went along, as if I could catch them in my mouth before they disappeared. “S-s-s-s-suuuu-per-i-ooorrrrr,” I said.

The sounds didn't make sense and the pages were getting limp. “C-c-c-c-on-st-st-st-rrrr-uuu-uc-tion.”

But all at once, there it was. “Buh, Buh . . . Bun . . . Bung—Bunga . . . Bungalow!” I shouted. “
BUNGALOW!
”

I looked up at Riley's grave. “I did it, Riley,” I whispered. “I read something.” I glanced back at the word just to check, and it still made sense.

But the rain was falling harder now, splattering against my neck and soaking the back of my shirt. I pushed the catalog shut with the notepad inside and jumped to my feet, hugging the wet papers to my chest. Then I patted Riley's gravestone. “Thank you,” I said.

I could see a patch of blue through the trees as I ran toward the gate. I knew the rain wouldn't amount to much more than a shower—probably only enough to rinse the brown layer of dust off the leaves. But for a while, even the drought didn't matter. I had the first word on my wish list and I could write it down now without even looking.
Bungalow.

I wasn't expecting another miracle
anytime soon. But just as the leaves were starting to flare up with color, Daddy came home with a heavy flour sack slung over his shoulder. When he heaved it to the floor and let Mama peek inside, she let out a gasp. “Chestnuts!” she cried. “Where on earth—”

Daddy laid open the bag for me to look, too. “We were over near Free Union, cutting down trees dying from blight to sell for pulpwood for making paper,” he told us. “We'd been cutting all day and it was almost quitting time when we came over the ridge and ran into the biggest chestnut you ever seen, near six feet across. It was dead mostly, except for a couple old branches that still had all the leaves on 'em, and when you looked up, you could see they was just full of burrs with the nuts still inside, just hanging there . . . too high to reach.”

While Daddy talked, I scooped up handfuls of the smooth brown nuts and let them rattle back down in the pile. They let off a smell that was dark and rich and reminded me of being little again, when it was my job to stomp on the stickery burrs until the chestnuts came free.