What I Came to Tell You (7 page)

“I didn’t hear Grover very well,” she said. “Can you tell me what the word is?”

Ashley lowered her head. “Hillbilly,” she whispered.

“I’m sorry, Ashley,” Mrs. Caswell said, “I didn’t hear you.”

“Hillbilly,” Ashley said a little louder, her voice trembling.

“What is the definition of
hillbilly
?” Mrs. Caswell asked.

Ashley didn’t look up.

“I asked you a question, Ashley,” Mrs. Caswell said.

Ashley looked up. “Please, Mrs. Caswell,” she said, sounding like she was about to cry.

Mrs. Caswell crossed her arms, still waiting for an answer.

Ashley ducked like she was trying to curl up into a ball and disappear.

“Can anyone help Ashley come up with a definition for
hillbilly
?”

No one spoke.

Daniel Pevoe raised his hand. Daniel sat in the front row where Mrs. Caswell could help him catch up with his work. With Mrs. Caswell’s help, he’d been passing all his subjects.

“Yes, Daniel?”

“
Hillbilly
is kind of like the N-word …”

The class gasped.

“… except it’s talking about mountain people.”

Mrs. Caswell just looked at Daniel a moment as all kinds of whispering went on throughout the room. “Thank you, Daniel,” Mrs. Caswell said slowly as if needing time to think. “You raise a very good point.” She turned to Ashley. “Don’t you think Daniel raises a good point?”

“Ma’am?” Ashley said.

“We were all surprised, even shocked, by Daniel’s comment, yet I think he’s making a pretty accurate comparison.” Mrs. Caswell turned back to Ashley. “Would you ever call Mira the N-word?”

“Of course not!” Ashley said. “That’s a horrible, horrible word! I’ve never said that word before in my life!”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Mrs. Caswell said. “It is a horrible word. But according to Daniel’s comparison,
hillbilly
is a pretty horrible word too.”

“It was a game,” Ashley said weakly.

“Oh, I see,” said Mrs. Caswell. “You weren’t calling Emma Lee a hillbilly. You just wanted to play a game called H-I-L-L-B-I-L-L-Y.”

Ashley’s head slumped to her chest, like she was about to melt right out of her chair and collect in a miserable puddle on the floor.

“You owe Emma Lee an apology,” Mrs. Caswell said.

“I’m sorry,” Ashley whispered.

“It’s been my experience,” said Mrs. Caswell, “apologies are delivered best when one is standing and looking the offended party in the eye.”

Ashley slowly stood up, walked over to where Emma Lee sat and said, “I’m sorry.” What surprised Grover was that it sounded like she meant it.

Almost half an hour later, the class had gone back to work. Ashley was at her desk, her eyes rimmed in red. With his mother no longer bothering him, Grover had finished the assigned reading
on clouds, answered the questions and even contributed to the class discussion on the difference between cumulus and nimbus. Somehow Sam had moved the discussion from clouds to storms to hurricanes, which got Mrs. Caswell off on a story about a cat she’d read about that had survived Hurricane Katrina by floating in a salad bowl for a week.

Grover felt a tap on his shoulder.

“You didn’t have to go and do that,” Emma Lee whispered.

Grover thought about it. “Yes, I did.”

They looked at each other a minute.

“Oh,” she said, looking into his eyes. “
She
made you do it.”

“What are you talking about?!” he said, louder than he meant.

“Grover,” said Mrs. Caswell, “do you have something you’d like to share with the class?”

“No, ma’am,” Grover said, turning back around in his seat.
Who in the heck was this girl who read him like one of her books?

H
e felt his report card burning a hole in his backpack. It was Tuesday, the day after the Emma Lee incident. Grover and Sudie had walked out of Isaac Claxton and headed up Montford Avenue toward downtown and the Wolfe house. Grover’d forgotten that first quarter report cards were being given out today. Unlike the other kids, he hadn’t slid his out of its little manila envelope, but had stuffed it deep into his backpack. The past couple of weeks there’d been more Cs and even a D. He’d never had a D on anything in his life. This might very well be the first D in the history of the Johnston family. Mrs. Caswell had asked that the tests and papers be signed by his father. Instead of showing them to his father, Grover had forged his father’s signature. He was amazed he hadn’t been caught. Of course it wouldn’t make any difference. His father would see his report card and it’d be all over.

They passed Reader’s Corner, a small used-book store with a
black-and-white cat named Tom after Thomas Wolfe, who always sat in the front window. Grover often stopped here with Sudie and would sit and pet Tom while Sudie picked out books. Their father kept a tab at the Reader’s Corner, which he’d pay at the end of every month. Their mother had loved Reader’s Corner. Two blocks farther up they passed Videolife, another little store, but with movie posters plastered all over the windows. Grover’s heart always sped up whenever they passed Videolife.

“Look, Grover, they have
Fantastic Mr. Fox
.” Sudie stopped, looking longingly at a poster. “Maybe we could rent just one movie?” She held up her finger. “Just one.”

“Come on, Sudie,” Grover said impatiently, taking her hand and pulling her along. Sudie kept looking back over her shoulder at Videolife as they walked on up Montford.

“I don’t see why we can’t rent just one,” Sudie said.

What Sudie didn’t know, and what Grover and his father agreed never to tell her, was that their mother had been walking up to Videolife to get
Fantastic Mr. Fox
. She’d asked Videolife to call her as soon as it arrived. She’d wanted to surprise Sudie.

They crossed the bridge that led into downtown. The bridge was the overpass of I-240, a busy four-lane expressway with cars and tractor trailer trucks rumbling beneath them. Built thirty years ago, I-240 cut through the middle of Asheville, dividing Montford and other Asheville neighborhoods from downtown. Their father hated it because in its construction they had bulldozed Thomas Wolfe’s birthplace and made a big wide wound in Beaucatcher Mountain.

They crossed into downtown and entered the Grove Arcade—a long building built in the 1920s with immense winged lions guarding the doors. They walked down the long hallway, which glistened with polished marble and granite. Sunlight slanted through the high windows, so that the bright light and deep shadow reminded Grover of a famous painting he’d seen in some art book. The painting was of a church, but that’s all he could remember.

The Grove Arcade had been renovated into a kind of mall, with shops down both sides. People lived in condos on the second floor. The original architect’s drawings, displayed in the middle of the building, showed that it was planned to have twelve stories above it, a small skyscraper, where people would live above the shops. The Depression had hit and the project ran out of money, and they never built above the first few floors.

Businessmen in coats and ties, and businesswomen in high heels and suits, using the building as a cut-through, walked fast to one important meeting or another. Tourists strolled around, lugging shopping bags and pausing in front of store windows. A few street people lounged on benches beside grocery carts full of their belongings. Young street people, what their father called quasi street people, wore backpacks and camped downtown in alleys and vacant lots. A lot of them wore their hair in dreadlocks. Many carried drums, and, on Saturday nights, a huge drumming circle gathered in Pritchard Park, the drumming echoing off the buildings and carrying all the way to Grover’s house.

Grover’s family would walk downtown on Saturday nights and watch the drumming, which went on for hours. People danced in the center of the circle. Sometimes Grover’s mother would try to pull their father into the circle to dance, but he almost always refused. Their mother would go into the center of the circle and dance by herself, swaying and turning around, closing her eyes and smiling like the drumming had taken her some other place. Watching his mother dance like that, Grover sometimes felt he didn’t know her.

With the report card in his backpack, Grover was in no hurry to reach their father’s office. They stopped at Bean Streets Café, a coffee shop, on the way to the Wolfe house. Every morning their father gave them enough money to stop after school and buy hot chocolate and a doughnut. After they got their hot chocolates, Grover and Sudie sat at a table in the lower section of Bean Streets. It was like somebody’s den with old sofas and big cushioned chairs to sit in. A woman mannequin’s arm reached down from the ceiling, its nails painted bright red.

Grover liked Bean Streets because Mr. Critt, the owner, who lived upstairs and often walked around in a robe and bedroom slippers, was a painter and displayed his own paintings on the walls. They were never of any particular thing. You might make out a tree or a telephone pole or a tennis shoe or a bicycle, but whatever it was would always be caught up in crazy swirls of colors. His paintings looked like little framed nightmares.

Grover and Sudie sat at their usual table, a giant checkerboard,
with the pieces in the little drawers underneath. Sudie started to get them, but Grover shook his head.

“You don’t want to play?” Sudie asked.

“Not in the mood.”

“What’s wrong?”

“He’s going to kill me.”

“How come?”

“My report card,” he said.

“What’d you get?”

“Haven’t looked.” He glanced down to his backpack on the floor.

“Why not?” she asked.

“It’s gotta be bad.”

“Why don’t you get it out? Maybe it’s not so bad.”

He looked at his backpack but didn’t move.

“I’ll get it out.” She reached for his backpack.

“Sudie!” He grabbed the backpack from her.

“You’ve got to look at it sometime.”

He sighed, unzipped his backpack and dug out his report card. He slid it out of the manila envelope and started to open it. But then he handed it to his sister.

Sudie unfolded the report card and began to read. “It’s not so bad,” she said. “A B in social studies. An A in math.” She looked up at him and smiled. “An A in physical education.” She paused. “A C- in science.”

“Ah,” groaned Grover. “I told you.” Science had always been one of his best subjects.

She turned the report card to another page. He watched her read it. She looked up at him, biting her lip. She shut the report card and slid it toward him.

“What?” he asked.

She scratched her forehead, then, looking around, lowered her voice. “A D in English.”

Grover sat back in his chair. “D is for dead man.”

“It’ll be okay,” Sudie said, leaning across the table toward her brother.

“Are you kidding? He was expecting my grades to improve by coming to study at his office, not get worse! Heck, he might even think I messed up on purpose.” He stared at the report card for a minute. “I’m a dead man.”

“Stop saying that.” Sudie sipped her hot chocolate.

Grover kept staring at the report card. Then it came to him. “Unless …”

“What?” she asked.

“Unless you don’t show him
your
report card.”

“How will that help?” Sudie asked.

“If you don’t show him yours, then he won’t know report cards have come out, and he’s too worried about the Wolfe house right now to remember.” In fact he’d never seen his father so preoccupied.

“But …” She paused. “We have to get them signed.”

“I can take care of that,” he said. “I’ve been signing my papers and tests the past few weeks. I’ve got Daddy’s signature down.”

“Grover, that’s not right!”

“I knew he’d kill me if he saw those Cs and Ds. Besides, I didn’t want to worry him.”

Sudie narrowed her eyes at him.

“Mostly I didn’t want him to kill me.” He put his hands together like he was begging. “Come on, Sudie. I need your help.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s like lying.”

“Sudie, please.” He took his sister’s hand. “Daddy won’t let me near the Bamboo Forest if he finds out about this. And life without the Bamboo Forest … well …”

She crossed her arms.

“I mean
you
wouldn’t be hiding anything bad,” he said. “You’ve got straight As.” Sudie always had straight As.

“He’s going to find out sooner or later,” Sudie said, uncrossing her arms and sitting up.

“By then I’ll have pulled my grades up,” Grover said.

“I don’t know.” Sudie looked down at Grover’s report card.

Grover took his sister’s hand again. “You’re my only hope.”

“Daddy’ll be wondering where we are,” Sudie said.

As they were getting up, Grover noticed a guy sitting at a table by the window, drinking coffee and underlining with a big yellow highlighter in what looked like a textbook.

“Did he look familiar to you?” Grover asked Sudie as they walked outside.

Sudie looked back at the guy in the window. “Isn’t that Matthew? Jessie’s assistant?”

Grover saw she was right. He hadn’t recognized him. Instead of the worn Army jacket, he wore a UNC Asheville sweatshirt.
His hair was neatly combed and his pale face shown like he’d just taken a shower. Still, there was something about him that seemed sort of off. The crooked way he held his mouth, like a slight but permanent scowl. Jessie often hired what seemed to Grover pretty eccentric students. Their father had said Jessie had a soft spot for misfits. Thinking about all this as he and his sister headed for the Wolfe house, Grover realized that he himself had been hired by Jessie for a number of jobs. What did that say about him?