Дэвид Балдаччи - Wish You Well

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Lou got up especially early and went into her mother’s room, where she watched for a bit the even rise and fall of the woman’s chest. Perched on the bed, Lou pulled back the covers and massaged and moved her mother’s arms. Then she spent considerable time exercising her mother’s legs the way the doctors back in New York City had shown her. Lou was just about finished when she caught Louisa watching her from the doorway.

“We have to make her comfortable,” explained Lou. She covered her mother and went into the kitchen. Louisa trailed her.

When Lou put on a kettle to boil, Louisa said, “I can do that, honey.”

“I’ve got it.” Lou mixed some oat flakes in the hot water and added butter taken from a lard bucket. She took the bowl back into her mother’s room and carefully spooned the food into her mother’s mouth. Amanda ate and drank readily enough, with just a tap of spoon or cup against her lips, though she could only manage soft food. Yet that was all she could do. Louisa sat with them, and Lou pointed to the ferrotypes on the wall. “Who are those people?”

“My daddy and momma. That me with ’em when I just a spit. Some of my momma’s folks too. First time I ever had my pitcher took. I liked it. But Momma scared.” She pointed to another ferrotype. “That pitcher there my brother Robert. He dead now. They all dead now.”

“Your parents and brother were tall.”

“Run in the line. Funny how that get passed down. Your daddy, he were already six feet when he weren’t more’n fourteen. I still tall, but I growed down some from what I was. You gonna be big too.”

Lou cleaned the bowl and spoon and afterward helped Louisa make breakfast for everyone else. Eugene was in the barn now, and they both heard Oz stirring in his room.

Lou said, “I need to show Oz how to move Mom’s arms and legs. And he can help feed her too.”

“That right fine.” She laid a hand on Lou’s shoulder. “Now, did you read any of them letters?”

Lou looked at her. “I didn’t want to lose my mother and father. But I have. Now I’ve got to look after Oz. And I have to look ahead, not back.” She added with firmness, “You may not understand that, but it’s what I have to do.”

After morning chores, Eugene took Lou and Oz by mule and wagon to the school and then left to continue his work. In old burlap seed bags, Lou and Oz carried their worn books, a few sheets of precious paper tucked inside the pages. They each had one fat lead pencil, with dire orders from Louisa to trim it down only when absolutely necessary, and to use a sharp knife when doing so. The books were the same ones their father had learned with, and Lou hugged hers to her chest like it was a present direct from Jesus. They also carried a dented lard bucket with some cornbread chunks, a small jar of apple butter jelly, and a jug of milk for their lunch.

The Big Spruce schoolhouse was only a few years old. It had been built with New Deal dollars to replace the log building that had stood on the same spot for almost eighty years. The structure was white clapboard with windows down one side, and was set on cinder blocks. Like Louisa’s farmhouse, the roof had no shingles, just a “roll of roofing” that came in long sheets and was tacked down in overlapping sections like shingles. The school had one door, with a short overhang. A brick chimney rose through the A-frame roof.

On any given day school attendance was roughly half of the number of students who should have been there, and that was actually a high number compared to the attendance figures in the past. On the mountain, farming always trumped book learning.

The schoolyard was dirt, a split-trunk walnut tree in the center of it. There were about fifty children milling about outside, ranging in age from Oz’s to Lou’s. Most were dressed in overalls, though a few girls wore floral dresses made from Chop bags, which were hundred-pound sacks of feed for animals. The bags were beautiful and of sturdy material, and a girl always felt extra special having a Chop bag outfit. Some children were in bare feet, others in what used to be shoes but were now sandals of sorts. Some wore straw hats, others were bareheaded; a few of the older boys had already upgraded to dirty felt, no doubt hand-me-downs from their daddies. Some girls favored pigtails, others wore their hair straight, and still others had the sausage curl at the end.

The children all stared at the newcomers with what Lou perceived as unfriendly eyes.

One boy stepped forward. Lou recognized him as the one who had dangled on the tractor over the side of the mountain their first day here. Probably the son of George Davis, the crazy man who had threatened them with the shotgun in the woods. Lou wondered if the fellow’s offspring also suffered from insanity.

“What’s the matter, y’all can’t walk by yourselves? Hell No got to bring you?” the boy said.

“His name is Eugene,” said Lou right to the boy’s face. Then she asked, “Can anybody tell me where the second- and sixth-grade classes are?”

“Why sure,” the same boy said, pointing. “They’s both right over there.”

Lou and Oz turned and saw the listing wooden outhouse behind the school building.

“Course,” the boy added with a sly grin, “that’s just for you Yankees.”

This set all the mountain children to whooping and laughing, and Oz nervously took a step closer to Lou.

Lou studied the outhouse for a moment and then looked back at the boy.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Billy Davis,” he said proudly.

“Are you always that scintillating, Billy Davis?”

Billy frowned. “What’s that mean? You call me a name, girl?”

“Didn’t you just call us one?”

“Ain’t said nuthin’ ’cept the truth. Yankee once is a Yankee for life. Coming here ain’t changing that.”

The crowd of rebels voiced their complete agreement with this point of view, and Lou and Oz found themselves encircled by the enemy. They were saved only by the ringing of the school bell, which sent the children dashing for the door. Lou and Oz looked at each other and then trudged after this mob.

“I don’t think they like us much, Lou,” Oz said.

“I don’t think I much care,” his sister said back.

The number of classrooms was one, they immediately discovered, which served all grades from first to seventh, the students separated in discrete clusters by age. The number of teachers matched the number of classrooms. Her name was Estelle McCoy, and she was paid eight hundred dollars a school year. This was the only job she had ever had, going on thirty-nine years now, which explained why her hair was far more white than mousey brown.

Wide blackboards covered three walls. A potbellied stove sat in one corner, a long pipe from it running to the ceiling. And, seeming very much out of place in the simple confines, a beautifully crafted maple bookcase with an arched top took up another corner of the room. It had glass-paned doors, and inside Lou could see a number of books. A handwritten sign on the wall next to the cabinet read: “Library.”

Estelle McCoy stood in front of them all with her apple cheeks, canyon smile, and chubby figure draped in a bright floral dress.

“I have a real treat for y’all, today. I’d like to introduce two new students: Louisa Mae Cardinal and her brother, Oscar. Louisa Mae and Oscar, will you stand up please?”

As someone who routinely bowed to the slightest exercise of authority, Oz immediately leapt to his feet. However, he stared down at the floor, one foot shifting over the other, as though he had to pee really badly.

Lou, however, remained sitting.

“Louisa Mae,” Estelle McCoy said again, “stand up and let them see you, honey.”