How It Happened in Peach Hill (11 page)

“Well, I’ll think about it, ma’am. I’m not sure there’d be any point.” He stood up. I plugged my ears, hard, so I wouldn’t have to hear the way she said good-bye to him. Some things really were too painful for a delicate girl like me.

“Do we have any clothing we no longer use?” I asked Mama.

“I’m collecting for the needy.”

“You’re what? The who?”

“The needy, Mama. Poor people who do not have enough clothing to wear.”

“Nonsense,” said Mama.

“There is a girl at school who has no shoes,” I told her. “And I’m sure she’s not the only one. So I thought I’d collect outgrown clothes and take them as a gift.”

Mama shook her head. “You amaze me,” she said. “I’ve raised a missionary. However did that happen? You’ll be sailing away to Africa before I know it.” She dealt another row of tarot cards and examined them closely.

“So, do we?” I insisted. “Have extra clothes?”

“Only if you’ve grown too fat to fit them,” Mama said.

“I can decide?” I asked. “It’s up to me?”

“You’re only depriving yourself.” She didn’t look up from the Empress card.

“I’m collecting clothing for the needy,” I told Peg. “Do you have anything you’d like to contribute?”

“Honey,” she said, “I am the needy.”

I’d never thought about that before. Here was Peg, working for us and then going home to work some more for her ungrateful father.

“Why don’t you have a husband, Peg?”

“Just don’t have one yet,” she said. “I aim to find one, but none of the scaredy-cat men I’ve met want anything to do with me as long as my father lives and breathes. I’m going to have to poison his tea before I get a beau.”

“That’s what I think about Mama,” I said. “And not just boys, any friend at all. She jolts the bejeebies out of anyone who ever meets her, except in the front room.”

“She’s scary, all right,” muttered Peg, giving a careful look at the doorway first.

“But anyway,” I said. “There’s this needy person I’ve noticed, and I want to give her some things.”

“Who is she?” asked Peg. “I probably know her.”

I hesitated. I couldn’t think of a reason not to tell her, though often the reason didn’t show up until after the telling was done. But maybe Peg would know where she lived.

“It’s this girl,” I said. “She’s a bit younger than me, and smaller. She wears raggedy overalls and looks a bit rough.”

“Dark hair?” asked Peg. “Big, moony eyes and dirty hands?”

“Uh-huh.”

“That’s the Wilky girl. I’m surprised you had a reason to meet her. She’s not at the school, is she?”

“How do you know that?”

“Reverend Wilky and his wife, Tabitha, who was Tabitha Crane before she married that man, they don’t believe in school. They believe children will learn what they need to know through the guidance of a heavenly hand. So far, that hand seems to be leading their own child into nothing but trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

Peg looked at me and ruffled my hair just like back when I was a moron. “Nothing you need to know about, honey. It’s a nice impulse, you thinking you could help that girl, but she is beyond help. Certainly any kind you could give her. Reverend Wilky has the kind of opinions a team of oxen couldn’t shift.”

“Does he have a church?”

“If you can call it a church. He’s got what used to be a living room in the front of his house out on the Way. Now it’s full of every kind of broken-down, rubbishy chair and bench that he could salvage from anyone’s back door all over town. He has his wife and child dragging furniture and anything else from wherever they find it. He’s got about twenty regulars, I’d say. They squeeze in there on a Sunday morning and listen to the Reverend stomp his feet and thump his chest and squeeze the Word of God out of thin air.

“He makes a tonic that he sells as a sideline: Wilky’s Silk Revitalizing Elixir. That stuff just flies out of there on Sundays, not to mention Saturday nights. Between you and
me and the bedpost, that stuff should be called Wilky’s Kick-in-the-Pants instead of Silk. It’s like drinking gasoline.”

“How do you know so much about it?” I asked.

“I went there once.”

“You did?”

“I was curious, that’s all. A girl from my own church, St. Alphonse, switched over and started going there. But I knew after ten minutes it wasn’t for me.”

“Why not?”

“I like to worship in a place that smells good, not like boiled carrots, and where the pews are hard and smooth and holy. I like when the priest talks in that fancy language that I don’t understand, makes me feel he’s closer to God. Reverend Wilky, well, he just scares me. Tells folks they’re sinners and have to pay for a chance to see the heavenly gates. What’s the point in trying down here if it won’t take you someplace better?”

“I still think his daughter deserves to have shoes,” I said. “Mrs. Newman gave the girl her shoes just so she could go to school.”

“Her name is Helen,” said Peg. “She probably sold the shoes the next day to pay for a week’s worth of macaroni. Don’t think I’m hardhearted, Annie. I’ve spent some time feeling sorry for that girl, but after she took my Sunday slip right off the line, along with six pairs of my father’s socks? That’s where my sorry goes straight out to the ashcan. Even if her father put the socks on and thanked her for them, even if he sent her out to get them! There has to be a point where a child is smart enough to know right from wrong, and stands up in the face of it.”

I stopped thinking about Helen right there and started thinking about myself. Peg had accidentally poked a stick into a tender spot. Was I smart enough to know right from wrong? Was I going to stand up and do something about it?

I found a pair of shoes that no longer fit me, and an old tunic the color of mulberries that I’d never liked anyway. From the costume trunk, I pilfered a green jacket and a couple of chiffon scarves. Not the essentials, but at least Helen would have her own shoes. I made a bundle and set it beside my bedroom door. Delivery would be another challenge.

One morning, without even meaning to, I stepped outside at the very moment when Sammy was passing by. His smile erased the hundred hours of wishing for it.

“You’ve been avoiding me,” he said.

“No,” I said, glancing around for Delia.

“You act so shy,” said Sammy, “but you’re not really.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You must be friendly to be in contact with other worlds,” he said. “Like an ambassador.”

I had a choice. I could tell him flat out that I knew little enough of this world, let alone any other, or I could continue to feel warm all over, under his sunny gaze.

“It’s really my mother who travels to the Great Beyond,” I said. “But I’m learning.”

“I bet you’re really good at it,” said Sammy. He stopped walking and looked straight at me. I looked straight back at him, my heart thrashing under Mama’s cashmere cardigan.

“Hello, Sammy Sloane!” Giggles showered us on all sides.
They came from the girl named Lexie and two of her ninth-grade friends.

“Hello, Lexie,” said Sammy. “Do you know Annie? Annie, this is Lexie and Ruthie and Jean.”

“Hello,” I said, as if I hadn’t eavesdropped on their conversations a dozen times. We were nearly at the school gate.

“You’re the one who used to be, uh, poorly, aren’t you?” said Jean, peering though smudged eyeglasses.

“That’s one way of putting it,” I said.

“I heard you were an idiot,” said Ruthie, who was round and pink.

“She’s got the Gift,” said Sammy, as proud as if he’d given it to me himself. “She can see into the future and talk to spirits.”

“Is that true?” asked Jean, squinting.

“Can you really?” said Lexie.

I felt Sammy’s eyes on me and succumbed instantly to temptation. “Well, yes,” I admitted. “Since I was healed, I have entered a trance and received messages from a girl who died in the thirteenth century.”

Miss Primley’s bell clanged from the steps.

“What?” said Lexie.

“You have?” exclaimed Sammy. “I’ll have to hear about that!”

The bell kept going. Sammy headed toward the BOYS door, and I followed the girls to our entrance.

“What does that mean?” asked Jean. “How can you receive messages from someone who’s dead?”

“I go into a trance and the spirit takes me over. She uses me to write her words down on paper.” It sounded dumb now that Sammy was gone.

“Will you show us?”

“Well, it doesn’t just happen,” I said. “There are preparations and circumstances …”

“Will you eat lunch with us?” invited Lexie. “We’ve noticed that you’re always alone. Do you want to sit with us today?”

As silly as it seemed, I thought just possibly I’d hear the secret of being a regular girl. So I ate lunch with them, sitting on a bench near the water fountain instead of nestled between the roots of my tree.

One thing I learned was that I was not the only girl to have noticed the charms of Sammy Sloane.

“Ooooh! He’s so cute!” said Jean.

“He makes me quiver all over!” moaned Ruthie.

“If he could stop talking about Sherlock Holmes for five minutes,” said Lexie. “I’ll take Terence Price any day.”

Sammy Sloane, Freddy Blau and Terence Price, those were the three. And the girls started to chant:
“Sammy
Sloane? Mine alone! Freddy Blau? And how! Terence Price? Kiss me twice!”
And then they collapsed with hysterical laughter. Well, I thought Freddy was conceited, and Terence Price had hair that hung about his ears like oiled thread. I’d put Sammy far above the others, but my only hope of being his choice was my dubious connection to the Other Side. So was it me he’d be choosing, or my mother’s daughter?

“Mama,” I said as Peg and I set the table for supper. “I’ve been invited to spend the night in the home of one of my new school friends.”

I counted silently to ten. Mama watched me, perhaps waiting for me to say I was joking.

“On Saturday night,” I said. “I’ve told Lexie I’d like to come. It’s a sleeping-over party, with two other girls.”

No reply.

“She lives on Walnut Street, in one of those big houses.”

No reply.

“Mama. Say something.”

“This is not wise, Annie.” She had to be careful, with Peg right there listening as she folded the napkins. That was why I’d chosen that moment.

“It decreases our mystical appeal if we appear ordinary in any context.”

“Please, Mama? Please? I want to be ordinary.”

“No, you do not. I don’t want to hear you say that ever again.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t mean ordinary, I mean …”

What could I tell her? I meant ordinary. I meant not unusual,
not a freak, unremarkable, not remarked upon, not weird—ordinary. For the occasional Saturday night, anyway.

“I mean—I want to have friends,” I said.

“You don’t need friends,” sniffed Mama. I looked at Peg.

“Lexie Johns?” said Peg, trying to help. “She’s a nice girl. Her daddy owns the lumber mill by the river.”

“That’s the one,” I said, feeling Mama’s breathing quicken next to me. “Ruthie said that Lexie has a big bedroom with two canopy beds, just for overnight guests.”

“Her mother belongs to the country club over in Timmons,” said Peg. “One of the first women ever to play golf there. She goes out every Saturday. I know the girl, Alice, who’s the maid over there. Says Mrs. Johns just throws out her golf shoes if the course was muddy and buys a new pair. Alice never has to clean them.”

Peg went to stir butter into the rice.

“You keep your ears open” was all Mama said to me after that.

I packed my suitcase with a bubble of glee rising in my throat. Don’t be too excited, I warned myself; these are silly girls. But I was eager to study the ceremonies of friendship close up.

I wished I had a new nightdress instead of old flannel pajamas from the boys’ department at the F. W. Woolworth Co. in Hawley. I slipped into Mama’s room and rifled her drawers.

Almost at once I uncovered a stash of paper money, rolled in bundles an inch thick and tied with narrow blue ribbon. All our customers paid in cash, of course, to hear their futures told. Like a squirrel who hides nuts in more than one tree, Mama kept her money in several secret places. She knew there were occasions when a speedy departure could not wait for banking hours. There were eight bundles here in the drawer, and more in the muslin sugar sack in the pantry, and in a hatbox on the shelf in the hall closet, and lying in the false bottom of our trunk. Each bundle held twenty
twenty-dollar bills. Four hundred dollars, multiplied by how many bundles altogether? A lot of money. Enough to buy a house?

But I was not looking for money at the moment.

I touched the silk pouches that held Mama’s necklaces and rings, and two photographs in gilded leather frames. One was of me, when I was five years old, sitting on the step of our Lenny’s Famous caravan, wearing the biggest hair bow you ever saw. The other picture was slightly out of focus, and though I’d never told Mama I’d seen it, let alone had her show it to me, I liked to think it was my father.

Mama said my father had died in the Great War, but I didn’t believe her. I thought she didn’t know where my father was and didn’t like to admit it. She’d made up a good story over the years, but I’d been paying attention and the details changed quite a bit from telling to telling.

I was pretty sure his name was William because usually she referred to him as Will, except the once when he was Henry. Where they met was either at a dance or at a party at a friend’s house, or one time she said a museum in New York City. They might have been married or they might not, but I suspected not.