Miss Dimple Rallies to the Cause (3 page)

Annie’s brother Joel and his friend Will Sinclair would soon complete their basic flight training at Courtland Airfield in Alabama, and their letters were filled with enthusiastic accounts of their time in the air. The two cadets had been guests of Charlie and her family for a few days the Thanksgiving before, and because she thought her friend was interested in him, Charlie had tried to suppress her attraction to Will Sinclair. Drawn irresistibly to his clean-cut looks, intelligence, and keen sense of humor, she had attempted to put as much distance as possible between them, but on the day after Thanksgiving the foursome stopped for lunch at a rustic drive-in and found they had the dance floor and the jukebox to themselves. While Annie danced with her brother to “The Pennsylvania Polka,” Charlie had no choice but to accept Will’s offer and follow them onto the floor. “Just one more,” Will had insisted when Glenn Miller’s “At Last” began to play, and Charlie Carr found herself between heaven and, if not hell, some place that was equally agonizing. With the closeness of his arms around her, his lips inches away, she had never felt so right, and yet so wrong.

Later, when Will confessed he felt the same way, he had trouble convincing her that he and Annie were good friends and nothing more, until, reluctantly, she abandoned herself to his kisses. It was soon after that that Charlie’s brother, Fain, had gone missing, and Charlie felt she was being punished for being disloyal to her best friend. Annie, thank goodness, put an end to that! “Of course I’m fond of Will, silly,” she assured her, “but I thought you knew from the beginning how I felt about Frazier!”

That had been almost a year ago, and much had happened since. They walked past the post office on the corner with the recruiting poster out front:
Uncle Sam Wants YOU!
The wicker baby carriage that had once held Charlie as well and Fain and Delia was parked by the front steps of their aunt Lou’s Gothic Victorian cottage with its gabled roof and wide, welcoming porch. Across the street at the gray stone Baptist church, evening bells rang in familiar cadence as they had for as long as Charlie Carr could remember. Would her brother ever hear them again?

Parting with Annie at the corner, she strolled down Katherine Street for home. She had been just across the street the day she saw the boy from the telegraph office on the dreaded black bicycle turn into their driveway to deliver the news about Fain, and Charlie wasn’t sure she would ever see her brother alive. But there were no such doubts for her mother, Jo. Her son was
alive,
and she wouldn’t allow herself to believe otherwise.

Charlie would never forget the January day the letter arrived. The telephone was ringing when she reached home after school that gray winter afternoon, and she snatched the day’s mail from the box on the porch and hurried inside to answer it. Her mother was calling to let Charlie know she had stopped by Aunt Lou’s after their shift at the ordnance plant where the two sisters worked three days a week and to ask if she needed anything from the store. Charlie said she thought they could make do with leftover Spam and potatoes for supper, tossed the mail on the hall table, and lit a coal fire in the sitting room grate. It wasn’t until she started to the kitchen a few minutes later that she picked up the mail and recognized her brother’s familiar handwriting on the envelope.

She didn’t remember running all the way to her aunt’s, but the Baptist minister, who happened to be on his way to visit a sick member at the time, said Charlie never even paused for the traffic light on the corner and sprinted past him so quickly her feet hardly touched the ground.

The letter, while brief, was written in mid-December by Fain himself from a British hospital ship as he was being evacuated to the United Kingdom, and Josephine Carr almost ripped the paper in her haste to read the message.

Dear Mama,

Just want to let you know I’m ok, so don’t worry! Am unable to walk because of leg injury and will probably need some surgery on shoulder, but nothing that can’t be fixed and the doctors are taking good care of that. Am told dog tags were lost or destroyed but I’m here and should be as good as new in time.

My love to all of you,

Fain

A few days later a telegram arrived from the government confirming Fain’s report, and by the end of March he was able to rejoin his regiment in Tunisia.

*   *   *

By the time Charlie reached home that afternoon her green cotton shirtwaist dress was sticking to her, and once inside she quickly traded it for shorts and an old shirt of Fain’s. The local school board frowned on its teachers sporting such scanty attire in public, but what they chose to wear in the privacy of their own homes was their own business, and Charlie, along with most of the younger members of the faculty, had even purchased overalls at Murphy’s Five and Ten for the scheduled day in farmer Emmett Hutchinson’s cotton patch.

Would Miss Dimple follow suit? Charlie Carr smiled at the image. Most definitely not, she told herself. Besides, she was pretty sure overalls didn’t come in purple. As far as Charlie knew, Miss Dimple Kilpatrick had arrived in this world some sixty years before fully dressed in a long-sleeved purple print dress with a plain gold bar pin at her throat and a lace-trimmed hankie peeking from a pocket of the bodice. Her graying hair, gathered neatly in a bun in the back, was held in place by tortoise-shell combs. Heavens, no! Miss Dimple would never be caught dead in a pair of overalls!

*   *   *

Miss Dimple Kilpatrick stood in front of the mirror in her small bedroom in Phoebe Chadwick’s rooming house and adjusted the straps on the faded blue overalls once worn by her younger brother Henry. The straw hat, however, was new, recently purchased at Clyde Jefferies Feed and Seed, and at the risk of being immodest, she thought it rather becoming.

The thought of picking cotton again didn’t distress her. She and Henry had done their share of that as children on their father’s farm, and she wasn’t afraid of hard work. She was afraid, however, of her irresponsible first-grade charges running off on their own and perhaps even getting into deep water in the creek that ran through the property. That was why she had invited several mothers to go along and help keep an eye on the group.

The sun lay gently across the grass and small clouds drifted in a blue-washed sky as they boarded one of the borrowed buses that would take them to the farm. Dimple Kilpatrick inhaled the fresh, clean air and looked forward to the autumn days to come. She was fond of September, of course, because it brought a whole new bouquet of uncharted minds and fresh faces to her beloved classroom on the first floor of the old brick building with its dear, familiar bell. October, however, swept away the heat of summer with crisp, clear nights and patchwork days. It would be soon be time, she decided, to have her young charges begin memorizing “October’s Bright Blue Weather,” a favorite poem of hers by Helen Hunt Jackson.

Buddy Oglesby, who had been commandeered, probably by his aunt Emmaline, to drive the bus, led the children in that silly new song, “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” that had become so popular that year, and of course the children found it hilarious and shouted it over and over during the six-mile ride to the Hutchinsons’ farm. Miss Dimple was glad when they arrived.

Long tables, made by laying planks over sawhorses, waited in the shade of large oaks that bordered the fields, and Emmett Hutchinson’s wife, Lucy, had made sure there was plenty of lemonade and cold well water for the thirsty workers. Watermelon was keeping cold in the spring for the children to enjoy that afternoon, she told them.

A small area of the cotton field had been marked off for the first- and second-grade children, and Miss Dimple shouldered a burlap bag and ventured forth to oversee her energetic six-year-olds, who spread out into the rows, each equipped with a small bag of their own making.

“Just lift the fluffy cotton out of its cup,” she told one overly enthusiastic picker who was snatching entire bolls and cramming them into his bag. Her father, she remembered, had referred to that as “lazy man’s picking.”

“This way,” she continued, demonstrating to her class, “somebody won’t have to come behind you and separate the bolls before the cotton goes to the gin.”

Distributing the children among four rows, she suggested a game to determine which row could be picked cleanest in the fastest time. The winners, she promised, would not only get to choose for an entire week the story that she read to them after their noon break but also to have an extra ten minutes to draw, paste, and color during what Miss Dimple referred to as creative time.

In spite of this, scarcely fifteen minutes elapsed before two of her charges had to go to the bathroom, three were “just dying of thirst,” and a fourth cried from a scratch on her arm. While some of the mothers took care of those needs (the “bathroom” being a secluded spot screened from view by a tangle of honeysuckle and spindly pines), Dimple Kilpatrick blotted her moist brow with her ever-present handkerchief and concentrated on her own row, her fingers automatically snatching the cotton clean from its brittle brown husk and crossing over to shove it into the sack. Pull … cross … shove … pull … cross … shove … The motion seemed natural as the old rhythm came back to her and brought a satisfaction she had almost forgotten.

It also brought a backache she would have
liked
to forget. The children had been busily running back and forth to empty their small bags into a large basket where Emmett Hutchinson weighed the cotton before it was loaded onto a wagon to haul to the gin. Now Miss Dimple hoisted in her hefty burden to do the same. Ordinarily workers would be paid according to the number of pounds they picked, but in this case the farmer gave whatever he could to the school. Many of the teachers, Miss Dimple included, hoped it would be enough to replace the wooden stairs to the second-floor auditorium as the passage of years and hundreds of small feet had taken their toll on the existing steps, wearing a smooth dip in the middle.

*   *   *

Nine-year-old Willie Elrod ran bare toes through the rich, loamy soil at the edge of the cotton field. He had shed his shoes immediately upon arriving, and the moist river bottomland felt cool to his feet. Willie couldn’t make up his mind which of his teachers was prettier. Miss Charlie, who had taught him the year before, had hair almost the same color as that yellow hat she wore, and didn’t she always wave and smile when she saw him? But Miss Annie, his fourth-grade teacher, had short dark curls all over her head and lived right next door in Miss Phoebe Chadwick’s rooming house. He had brought her a bunch of zinnias from his mama’s garden on the first day of school, and she’d made a big fuss over them, too.

After a morning in the fields, the children lunched on lemonade and sandwiches brought from home, except for the few who either had forgotten or didn’t have any, and some of the mothers had brought extra for them. Willie talked Junior Henderson into trading his peanut butter and jam for the pimento cheese his mama had made him bring, but he had to throw in the plastic whistle he’d found in a Cracker Jack box. Some of the older children had already gone back to picking, while the younger ones played quiet games in the shade until the Hutchinsons brought the watermelons up from the spring. Willie could hardly wait. He spit on the scratch on his foot and rubbed it in real good. It sure was hot, and that creek looked inviting. They were
absolutely not
to go wading, Miss Annie had told them, and this was reinforced by their principal, Oscar Faulkenberry. Willie wondered if the man knew that almost everybody, including some of the teachers, referred to him as Froggie because he sure did look like a first cousin to one.

“I don’t reckon it would hurt if we just sorta stuck our feet in a little way,” Willie suggested to Junior after they tired of chasing each other through the browning cotton stalks. Because of recent rains, the creek had overflowed its banks, and the two made a game out of racing through the sticky mud and laughing at the sucking noises their feet made as they ran. Willie knew there was an unspoken dare between them of who would reach the water first, but the creek was swollen with rushing reddish brown water, and he didn’t like the sound of it as it leapt and foamed over fallen logs and boulders in its path.

“Let’s make boats,” he suggested, throwing a stick into the turbulent stream. “See which one’s the fastest.” That way they could keep a safe distance and still play in the creek.

“Aw, you’re just chicken!” Junior taunted, but he took a step backward and looked about for a suitable “boat.”

They had found a good launching place from an overhanging sweet gum tree when their teacher, Annie Gardner, demanded in no uncertain terms that they come down at once.

“I told you boys you weren’t supposed to go near that creek! What if you had fallen in? Why, it could carry you all the way to the Oconee River before you knew what was happening. What am I going to do with you two?”

Miss Annie sure sounded mad! Willie hoped that didn’t mean he wouldn’t get any watermelon, but he and Junior climbed reluctantly from their perch and slogged their way to join the others. And that was when their teacher screamed.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

Why was Miss Annie making such a big fuss about an old pile of rags? Willie turned to go back to where his teacher and several others gathered at the edge of the woods. Miss Moss, the sixth-grade teacher, was crying and hollering so that one of the mothers had to lead her away, but then she was always carrying on about something. He hoped she’d retire before he got that far—if he ever did.

“It’s probably just an animal,” one of the teachers suggested.

“That’s no animal. Somebody call the sheriff!” another shouted.

The sheriff? Wow! This was getting interesting. Willie edged closer for a better look. And that was when a hand came down on his shoulder. “William Elrod! You have no business down here. Now hurry on back with the others where you belong.”

Willie sighed. You didn’t argue with Miss Dimple Kilpatrick.