Dovey Coe (2 page)

A boy who looked to be about sixteen, with spotty skin and an Adam's apple you couldn't help but stare at, stood behind the table and kept his eyes glued to Caroline. Anybody could tell he thought he'd died and gone to heaven from the way his mouth fell half open, a slack smile curling up the corner of his lips.

“That there's a pretty mirror for a real pretty girl, if you don't mind me saying so,” is what he finally managed to say, pointing a bony finger at his table and looking right proud that he'd gotten that much out of his mouth.

Caroline aimed them green eyes of hers directly at him and laughed that laugh of hers that hits you like a cool drink of water on an August afternoon. “Well, ain't you so sweet to say that? I was thinking how fine this would look on my dresser at home.”

The boy begun to look a little peaked, like he was thinking of Caroline sitting in her nightgown in front of her dresser table. He swallowed a few times, that Adam's apple bobbing up and down in a way that was right fascinating.

“It's too bad it's so costly,” Caroline went on, swaying her hips a bit like she were dancing to a
song only she could hear, weaving her spell. “I just don't have two dollars to spend.”

“Well, my mama might have my hide, but I'll tell you what. I'll let you have it for one dollar even, just because you're so pretty.”

Caroline shook her head sweetly. “You are the nicest thing. Most boys as handsome as you ain't half so nice.”

I was getting a little bored with all the pleasantries going back and forth between the two of them. I started humming a loud tune and bumping into Caroline's side with my hip.

“This is my little sister, Dovey,” Caroline said, introducing me to the boy, who give me a quick nod before getting back to the business of my sister. “She sure does seem to fancy that pocketknife.”

I had lost all patience with their little courtship. “Come on, Caroline, let's go. You ain't got the money for the mirror, I ain't got the money for the pocketknife, and Mama wants us home in time for dinner.”

Caroline looked sorrowfully at her would-be suitor and said, “I guess Dovey's right, we really should be going.”

Before you could say
Davy Crockett,
the boy asked me, “How much money you got?”

“I got one U.S. nickel, and that ain't enough to buy anything you're selling.”

“Don't be so sure.” Before you know it, he'd wrapped the mirror and the pocketknife in brown paper and said, “That will be five cents, please, and could I interest you pretty ladies in a lemonade, my treat?”

When Mama saw my pocketknife that afternoon, she put up a fuss, but Daddy convinced her that a girl who spends as much time on the mountain as I do needs a good knife. He was a touch curious about how me and Caroline had gotten such a fine bargain on our purchases, but we just left that topic alone, and soon enough Daddy got to thinking on other matters.

Sometimes I weren't sure that it was right for Caroline to act the way she did with men, getting them to do every little thing for her, especially since she could get real sensitive about people thinking that she weren't nothing more than a pretty face. But if ever I started to judging her too harshly, I just took out that knife and remembered that she weren't the only one who profited from her ways.

“You just be careful with that thing, Dovey,” Mama told me as I was fixing to go out the door after dinner. Me and Amos was going to check
some of our traps up on Katie's Knob. “I'm good with a needle, but I don't know how to sew fingers back on to a hand.”

Caroline was sitting at the kitchen table polishing up her silver mirror with a dish towel. “Try not to kill anyone with that thing, Dovey,” she warned me in a joking manner. “I'd sure hate to have to come bail you out of jail.”

“Caroline, where on earth do you get the notion to say such a thing?” Mama scolded. Mama was real sensitive about bloodshed and violence. Her youngest brother, Cecil, had been shot and killed in the fields of Argonne, France, in the Great War, and Mama still hadn't got over that.

“Oh, Mama,” Caroline said, sounding like she weren't taking Mama the least bit seriously. Then she started humming some song I'd never heard before. The music of her voice trailed me out the door and up the mountain path.

A
mos had gotten way ahead of me by the time I got out the door. He known every rock, every gopher hole, every twist of the dirt path that wound up Katie's Knob to all the good and secret places that the mountain held, and he could move along it like a slip of wind. I had trekked that path many a time myself, but Mama's hand was always reaching out to pull me back into the life of proper things and tiny stitches and delicate sighs. Amos was older than me by a year, and he was allowed to roam freely, so that he known that mountain like he known his own face in the mirror.

When I finally caught up with him, he was kneeling down to examine some animal tracks
that veered from the path off into the woods. Tom and Huck, Amos's dogs, had already burrowed through a thick growth of vines and weeds to follow the scent of whichever creature had been there. I figured it to be a deer by the V of the track, and when I said this to Amos, he nodded and rose. We had no interest in deer this time of year. It was roots and herbs we could sell for medicinals that we had an eye peeled for.

Amos clapped out his signal for Tom and Huck, and the dogs come running back to us. Their yellow fur was full of burrs and spotted with red clay, and they was panting from what seemed to me to be the sheer joy of the chase.

I don't know if I can even explain what a comfort them dogs were to me. I had made Amos my responsibility from the time we were little ones, but after Mama started her campaign to make a lady out of me, I couldn't always keep him in my sights. I pointed this out to her again and again, but she weren't having none of it. “Amos can get along by his own self, Dovey,” she'd lecture me. “Let him grow up some.” But not once had Mama bloodied her knuckles on some fool of a boy who'd come up behind Amos and made crazy faces, whereas I bore many a scar.

Here's the truth of the matter: When Amos
was born, he could hear as good as you or me. What happened, they say, is that he got a sickness when he was still little, and it caused water to be in his head and make his brain swell, and because of it he turned deaf. Mama started suspecting something was wrong when Amos were about ten months old. She'd walk into her room where Amos laid in his crib, and he wouldn't give any sign he known she was there until she stood right in front of him. She'd clap her hands from behind him, but he didn't take no notice. Finally she and Daddy took him to the doctors over in Asheville, who said for sure Amos was deaf and wouldn't ever hear again.

Some folks thought that because Amos didn't hear and he didn't talk, he must be stupid, and a lot of folks treated him like he was, though it was a far sight from the truth. I taught Amos to read when he was eight and I was seven, which weren't as hard to do as you might think. I started him out with picture books that had just a few words. So there'd be a picture of a dog and the word “dog,” and Amos made the connection right quick. If there was a word that didn't have a picture of it attached, I'd just find a real-life example and show it to him.

Later on, I taught him how to read lips in
pretty much the same way, and soon he could understand just about anything a person would care to say to him as long as they spoke directly to his face. He couldn't talk, but he could write. In fact, his handwriting was a sight prettier than mine. Mama said my writing looked like a chicken dipped in ink had walked across my paper.

Amos never went to school, for which I envied him greatly. The school in Indian Creek was a poor excuse for an institution of learning. Every year we got us some wet-behind-the-ears teacher straight out of teachers college who thought she was doing her Christian duty by coming up here and learning us hillbillies. I give them six months at most, and they tended not to last more than four. Partly it was because winter up here hit early and hard, sending flatlanders directly back to where they come from. The other part was that it appeared teachers college didn't teach you how to handle boys like Lonnie Matthews and Curtis Shrew, who made it their business to send wet-behind-the-ears teachers out of town on a rail.

As soon as the new teacher left, old Mrs. Dreama Bullock took the wheel. She was about as deaf as Amos and had the learning of a brick. The only way to gain any real learning in Indian Creek was to get books from the library, which Amos
and I did every week. His favorite books were those by Mr. Mark Twain, which was how he come to name his dogs Tom and Huck. Come to think of it, Amos looked like how I imagined Huck Finn to look, real boyish with a face full of merriment.

When Amos and me would get back to the house from the library, he'd head straight for the kitchen, where he'd get himself a glass of milk, sit down at the table, and commence to reading. He wouldn't budge until Mama shooed him out so she could get supper fixed. He'd come looking for me then, and the two of us would play cards or dig in the yard for precious gems until it was time to eat. Sometimes we'd sit on Amos's bed and draw maps leading to a buried treasure, and then we'd search around Amos's room looking for something to bury out in the yard that we could dig up later. Amos might have had neat handwriting, but his room was a mess. You'd find everything in the world under his bed: birds' nests, twigs, colored pencils, little smooth stones from up on Cane Creek, feathers—it was all there.

I reckoned Amos was about the best friend I had. I had other friends here and there, of course. Wilson Brown was a boy my age at school who I was good friends with. He was tall and skinny and
a bit on the quiet side, but he was always up for an adventure and knew a good bit about rocks and plant life. We'd always gotten along just fine, but he and I didn't have the closeness I had with Amos.

It's true there weren't nothing I wouldn't do for my brother, and I did as much as I could. I believe this was also true for Tom and Huck, who stayed by Amos at all times and wouldn't let no harm fall to him. We never worried about Amos roaming the mountain by himself, because Tom and Huck was always with him.

The wind begun to pick up some as we moved toward the peak of Katie's Knob, always checking right and then left for what might lurk in the trees and behind the rocks that here and there jutted up from the dirt like craggy teeth. On an afternoon such as this, cool for July, a breeze blowing, we was out for adventure as much as medicinals. Though it had been some time since Indians had walked this trail, I still wished we might see some, or that maybe we'd cross paths with a runaway from Virginia or Tennessee who we could build a shelter for and bring food to.

Amos held up his hand, motioning for me to stop in my tracks. I didn't see nothing in our path, but that didn't mean that there weren't nothing
there. A bit of excitement tickled the back of my neck. Maybe Amos had noted a stranger off to the side of the trail, or maybe he had picked up the scent of a bear lumbering toward her den in the distance. I slid my hand into the pocket of my dungarees and felt of my knife in its red case, its metal edges cool against my fingers, and touched my thumbnail to the blade's groove so that I could flick it open quick if I needed to attack.

The pounding of wings filled the air like a burst of thunder. “Good Lord have mercy!” I yelled. The bird that rose in our path was a sight, its wings spreading so wide as to reach practically from one side of the trail to the other. Its beak was as long as a pencil and curved downward, and feathers stood straight up atop its head like a headdress worn by a Sioux chieftain. I had never seen such a thing up on Katie's Knob. I reckoned that bird must have gotten offtrack from its normal course, and I said as much to Amos when he turned to look at me, grinning from ear to ear.

He nodded, then turned and chased after the thing, Tom and Huck directly on his heels. I run behind them, shaking my head, wondering what on earth Amos would do if he happened to catch the bird. But the thought had barely made tracks across my mind before the bird got ahold of the
air and headed for the sky and whatever distant land it called home.

We had reached the top of Katie's Knob by this time, and Indian Creek spread out below us like a quilt. Amos fell to the ground, breathing hard from the chase. Tom and Huck licked at his face and neck, which made Amos shake with laughter.

I sat down beside him, my breath short and quick. There was no use in trying to talk with Amos rolling around on the ground with Tom and Huck. From down the mountain I could hear the bell Mama rang to bring me in when I'd gone out past the yard and she needed me home to help her. By the look of the sun, I'd say it was close to suppertime. Lately, Mama had me setting the table every night with a full complement of forks and spoons and knives so that I would know the proper thing to do should I find myself in high society.

As far as I was concerned, where I sat was high society enough, there with my brother and the birds and every wild thing.

S
unday afternoon, two weeks later, Caroline pulled the ledger book from the kitchen drawer after church, sat down at the table to study on it, and commenced to crowing with delight.

“I knew it! All I could think about at church was how maybe when that sow got big enough for Daddy to sell it to Chester Daniels, we'd have enough for tuition, and I was right!”

Caroline's cheeks was flushed all red, and she had a big smile on her face. “I can't hardly believe it!” she said, throwing her head back and grinning at the ceiling. “I am finally going to get out of this town.”

“Do us all a favor, honey,” my mama said from
where she was standing at the sideboard, still dressed in her navy blue church dress with the pearl buttons, slicing a cold ham for dinner. “At least act like you're a little bit sad at the thought of going.”