Swan Place (41 page)

And right after her name came little circles and crosses.

“What’s that mean?” I asked Buzzard, who was reading over my shoulder.

“It means hugs and kisses,” Buzzard said in a flat-sounding voice. And I was thinking that it was a strange thing to add at the end of a card that said she was going off and leaving her very own child.

“I guess that’s it,” I said. “She’s not coming back.” Buzzard nodded.

And I don’t know why, but all of a sudden, everything started trying to go through my mind all at once. So that for a little moment, I didn’t know whether I was the Dove who was Mr. Swann’s great-niece and lived in a big beautiful house and had everything I could ever want—or whether I was the Dove who wore dresses that were too short and that the other girls in school looked down on. Then I thought about Miss Madison and how
she
didn’t look down on me! And right then and there, it seemed that nothing else mattered. The mean girls at school could say anything about me they wanted to say, and I wouldn’t care. And I thought about how our leaving was going to open up a lonely place in Buzzard’s heart that Savannah would fill. Suddenly, I wanted to be with Aunt Bett more than anything in the world. I wanted her to tell me everything was going to be all right. Wanted her to make me change out of my Sunday dress. Wanted to know that if anything mean or evil or sad tried to get close to any of us, she would pitch one of her Holy Ghost fits and fight against it and keep it away from us.

Maybe Buzzard could see what was going through my mind, because she just looked at me for a long time. Then she nodded her head and headed down the hall toward the telephone.

After Buzzard got off the phone—and she was on it for a long time, I called Aunt Bett and told her we’d be coming the next morning.

“Well, come on!” she laughed. “I’ve had lots of help getting everything ready for you. Come on home!”

And it wasn’t long after that before all of the sisters came driving around the back of the house in that same truck, and they lifted Sister Blood-of-the-Lamb down and carried her inside. I followed them into the kitchen where they all sat down around the big table, looking at Buzzard expectantly. Buzzard picked Mary Elizabeth up out of the bassinette and held her in her arms. Then she called to Molly and Little Ellis to come into the kitchen.

“These here little ones
 . . .
” Buzzard motioned to us all, and then she tilted Mary Elizabeth up into almost a sitting position in her arm. “These here little ones are going back to live with their own Aunt Bett,” she announced. “And I asked you to come here so that we can pray them to a safe trip and happy lives. And to pray for their Aunt Bett, who is getting ready to open her arms to them.”

All around the table, heads nodded and “amens” sounded. Buzzard stepped up and put Mary Elizabeth into the arms of the sister closest to her. “You prayed this little one into the world safely, and now we need to pray again.” The sister who was holding Mary Elizabeth crooned into the baby’s sleeping face, and then she passed Mary Elizabeth along to the sister beside her. I stood there and watched, while Mary Elizabeth made the rounds of those big, strong, dark arms—except for Sister Blood-of-the-Lamb, who had fallen asleep. Then Buzzard guided Little Ellis and Molly around the table, and each sister put her hands on their heads and asked God to bless them. And when that was done, Buzzard’s eyes fell on me.

“And we want God especially to bless Dove here,” she intoned, and I felt the tips of my ears going all hot. “This child—this young woman—has more courage than almost anybody I ever met before.”

Me?
I was thinking.
Me?

Buzzard went on: “She is faithful to family, and I guess there’s nothing as important as that.”

Moans and amens again, and then Buzzard said, “Let us pray.” They all bowed their heads, but nobody said any prayers out loud, at least not so that you could tell what they were saying, but the murmuring voices filled that kitchen just as surely as the aroma of Buzzard’s good biscuits could do. They prayed for a long, long time, and finally, Buzzard whispered, “Amen.”

When they were ready to leave, each one of the sisters kissed Mary Elizabeth and put their hands on Molly and Little Ellis’s heads, and each and every one of them gave me a big bear hug that almost squashed me. But I didn’t mind.

Then they went to wake up Sister Blood-of-the-Lamb, and I waited around, wanting to hear her say “Jesus come while I was asleep?” But this time, the hand on her shoulder didn’t wake her up. Then someone shook her shoulder, and another sister reached out and put her fingers on Sister Blood-of-the-Lamb’s wrist. We all waited. And in a few minutes the sister looked up at all of us with shining eyes. “This time, Jesus came while she was asleep.”

The drive back to our
little town from the Swan Place didn’t seem at all as long as when we had driven it before—when Crystal was still with us, and we hadn’t added Mary Elizabeth yet. And when Buzzard’s big black car pulled up in front of Aunt Bett’s house, the cousins came out, and Aunt Bett herself came down the steps, wiping her hands on her apron. There were hugs all around and lots of laughing, and then Buzzard got out of the car with Mary Elizabeth in her arms, and a hush fell over everything. Aunt Bett pressed through the crowd of children and stood right in front of Buzzard, who was holding the sleeping baby.

“Oh, please give her to me,” Aunt Bett said, and when Buzzard had handed over the sleeping baby, Aunt Bett cradled her and laughed and went into a whole conversation with her that I couldn’t understand one bit. All kinds of baby-words and them chanted in a high, soft voice. And when she got done with that, she looked at all of us and announced, “Oh! God is so good to bring a baby into this house again!”

“Amen,” Buzzard said. Then to me she added, “I’m going on over to Mee’s house, but I’ll stop in and say good-bye before I go on back home.” And watching Buzzard get into the big black car and drive out of Aunt Bett’s yard, I felt my heart just lurch so hard. But there wasn’t time for me to think about it much, for we all started crowding into Aunt Bett’s little house.

Why, I never saw such a thing as what had happened to it! There was an extra couch in the living room and a bigger table in the dining room and plenty of chairs to go around it. The boys’ room had two big sets of bunk beds and each with a cowboy bedspread, and the girls’ room had another two sets, but they were white and each had a ballerina bedspread. In the corner was a beautiful white bassinette with a little lace pillow in it—for Mary Elizabeth.

“Now come on and let me show you the best surprise of all!” Darlene grabbed my hand and pulled me to the back porch. But the porch looked so different, because somebody had walled up part of it and built a partition with a door in it, right on the other side of Aunt Bett’s washing machine. Darlene opened the door and I saw that it was a small room with twin beds with pretty yellow bedspreads, and a small bookcase with lamps on either end of it right between the headboards of the beds. Neatly stacked on a shelf on my side of the bookcase were all my notebooks. I glanced at Darlene.

“I didn’t look at your notebooks, Dove,” she said. “I sure
wanted
to, though!”

Aunt Bett had come up behind us, and I heard her take in a sudden breath.

“Darlene!”

“It’s all right, Mama,” Darlene said hastily. “It’s not a sin to be tempted—only a sin to give in to it.”

“Well
 . . .
” Aunt Bett muttered, as if she couldn’t decide whether to fuss with Darlene or not. But Darlene just kept right on talking: “This is
our
room, Dove—yours and mine—because we’re the two oldest. And I remembered how we made ourselves some privacy in our old rooms.” She went into the room and pulled on a white curtain that was attached to a long wire and slid it forward as far as the door, making two narrow rooms out of the one.

Aunt Bett said, “Folks at church did all this for us, and they sure had to work hard and fast! They brought in all the extra beds too.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, and I wanted to hug her, but I knew she would just wave away anything like that. So I just said, “Thank you!”

And later, when I unpacked my suitcase, Aunt Bett admired the beautiful clothes Buzzard had bought for me, and the way her eyes glittered, I knew that she was thinking how far down the line of girls those clothes could go, once I outgrew them—all the way down to Mary Elizabeth herself, I expected.

So that’s the way our
little family changed all around—with folks leaving it, like Mama and Roy-Ellis and Crystal and Sister Blood-of-the-Lamb, and then other people coming into it, like Buzzard and Mary Elizabeth, and the Sisters of the Circle of Jesus. And at the last, we all finally got mixed in with Aunt Bett’s family, and that turned out to be the very best thing of all. Why, there were so many of us, we were like a mighty army! When we’d go to church on Sundays—and Aunt Bett made sure we all went with her, every single one of us—we could practically fill two whole pews, all by ourselves. I always felt so happy seeing us there like that, in two good, strong rows.

Miss Madison was so happy to see me back at school, and we went right back to spending our lunch times writing in her classroom. Eventually, I let her see some of the stories I wrote about Mama and Roy-Ellis and Savannah and Crystal and Mary Elizabeth, and she said that they were “promising,” whatever that meant. But it sounded good and made me happy.

When Easter Sunday morning came again, I woke up before anyone else in the house and went and sat on the front porch and waited for the daylight to come. But it was very different from the Easter before, when I had just lost my mama. I could think about her and not feel all lost and alone. I could remember all the good things about her, especially her singing her honky-tonk songs, and I could think of Buzzard, too, and how she helped us when we had no place to go. And Mary Elizabeth, that wonderful gift Crystal left with us.

In the sleeping house, I knew that Easter clothes for all of us were ready to wear. Buzzard had sent a beautiful “first Easter” dress for Mary Elizabeth, but Aunt Bett was never one to accept charity, so she packed up a box with five jars of her homemade pickles all packed in safely and sent it to Buzzard. The postage probably cost more than Buzzard had paid for the dress, but Aunt Bett wouldn’t have it any other way.

The Easter baskets for the little ones were well hidden, a big ham was ready to go into the oven, and it would fill the house with the aroma of ham and cloves while we were at church.

Somehow, we had come right back to where it all started, but I had not come back as the same person who fled into the night with Crystal. I knew for a fact that Aunt Bett had been right, that other Easter Sunday when she told me that I was going to grow up to be a good woman—a strong woman.

So
that
Easter Sunday morning, when I heard a young mockingbird, far off, starting to sing, even before good daylight, I remembered that his song would be wobbly and timid. Mama would have said that he hadn’t quite learned his song yet. But even while I sat there on the front porch of a quiet little house that held my big, big, sleeping family, he tried again and again.

And he finally got it right.