Land of a Hundred Wonders (33 page)

From atop the roof, Billy, slipping and sliding down the shingles, shouts, “Gibby, run!” and I almost do, but the blood from Janice's head is gushing down her neck and onto her chest.

“Stay still, stay still,” I cry, hurrying to where she's collapsed on the grass. Picking up her pointy-nailed hands and cradling her head gently in my lap, all I can think to say is, “Why? Why the hell did ya do that, Janice?” Amidst all the yelling and the distracting smell of fresh gun smoke, I can barely focus enough to hear her struggling to say, “The Boys.” She's striving for, but not attaining, one of her snotty smiles. “I know 'em real well. They . . . they was gonna shoot Cooter for the reward no matter what.” A bubble of pink comes floating to the corner of her pale lips. “I had to stop them . . . I . . . every girl should have a daddy. My grandbaby is gonna have hers.”

Pressing my hands to the side of her head, I'm trying to push the blood back where it belongs. “For crissakes, don't die, Janice,” I say, at the same time the awfulest keening comes from outta the house.

When I look up, there's Clever standing in a broken-out top-floor window, Cooter by her side. Our desperate eyes meeting as she screams out, “Mama. I'm comin'. Don't let her go, Gib.”

But after Janice in a barely-there voice says to me, “I told ya . . . I told ya I'd make it up to her someday, didn't I?” I know it's too late. With a flutter, like a petal falling from a flower, nothing more, Clever's selfish, selfish mama is already gone.

In Conclusion, I'd Like to Say

With all her funeral-attending experience, Clever was able to pull together a real attractive one for her mama. She came to me a few days after Janice's passing and asked, “Ya mind puttin' some words together for her stone? Something
nice
,” she tacked on, because she knew that even though I admired Janice sacrificing herself for Cooter, and her wonderful waitressing skills, I still got some leftover feelings about her overall poor mothering performance. Did the best I could.

Janice Lever
(1937-1973)
MAMA OF CLEVER
BATON TWIRLER
TWO-TRAY SERVER
HEAVEN DESERVER

Miss Florida musta baked a hundred pies. That's what the coloreds do when somebody makes their trip to the Promised Land. Throw 'em a goin'-away food and music party. Janice Lever, if she hadn'ta been gunned down, woulda been Cooter's and Miss Florida's kin, so once Miss Florida got over her initial blood-mixing madness, she explained to me as we baked those pies together in her Browntown kitchen, “Since she ain't got no other family, Carol has given us the go-ahead on buryin' Janice the colored way.” So everybody was gnawing on pork ribs in their funeral best, keeping a beat to that lowing saxophone music after the ceremony at First Ebenezer, remarking how awfully attractive Janice looked in her old twirling costume, which Clever insisted on buryin' her in, sparkling baton and all.

Clever and me are at the cottage, out on the pier, legs hanging long to the water, shooting skimmers in the dwindling light. Pink balloons are sagging off the dock after today's shindig. We're celebrating my belated twenty-first birthday and Rosie Adelaide's one month. Cooter and Clever got to the hospital in plenty of time after the showdown for her to deliver a baby who resembles a box of colors with her burnt umber skin and cornflower blue eyes. She's curled up in the cottage in her daddy's arms. In Grampa's old bed.

As usual, Keeper's at my side. Snubby tail wagging at nothing I perceive. His back leg is still bandaged and maybe he won't be able to use it again after he got it caught up beneath one of the Brandish Boys' horses when he was trying to lead Cooter to the hospital. The fact he can't bound into the lake and retrieve these skimmers is just about causin' him to go blind.

“Tell me again what Mama said to you right before she passed,” Clever says, landing a three-skipper.

“She said that every baby should have a daddy and her grandbaby was gonna have hers.” I musta told her this story a bazillion times, adding on as I go, “And that she was sorry for treatin' you like she did. And that you were the best daughter in all of Kentucky. And that she knew you'd be the best mama. And that you were extremely good-lookin'.”

I can practically see my sidekick's smile coming clean through the back of her head when she says, “That really was something, her taking that bullet for Cooter like she did.”

“It sure was, Kid.”

I gotta admit, I was somewhat shocked by how broken up Clever was after Janice's passing. More than I thought she'd be. But she's settled down some now 'cause after they set her mama in the ground at Land of a Hundred Wonders Cemetery, her and Miss Lydia have become quite close, their shared interest in the dead being the thing they have in common. They've been spending a lot of time having VISITATIONS and discussing in depth:

WONDER # 12
TRANSMUTATIONS OF THE HIGHEST ORDER

“Ya think that's possible?” Clever asks.

“Do I think what's possible?” I'm remembering the last time we were out here on the pier. It was right after Grampa's heart attack.

“Transmutation of the Highest Order,” Clever says, looking
almost
thoughtful. “Ya think a soul could crawl into another body so it can finish off any business it didn't get to when it was alive?”

I haul back my arm and let loose, delivering a four-skipper. “Before I answer with what I think, why are you askin' me?”

Clever looks sheepish. “I swear, sometimes Rosie reminds me an awful lot of Mama.”

“She's not askin' ya to pour Mr. Jim Beam into that baby bottle, is she?”

Clever cups her hands, moving into Indian burn territory. When I'm done swatting her off, she says, “Miss Lydia's taken to wearin' black almost every day. She's missin' ya something awful, ya know.”

“I heard she's got Teddy and Vern managin' the tobacco farm. That was smart a her.” After all, one of them
is
the Caretaker, and the other one reads. Once that hiring news got out, agitated Browntown relaxed.

“How do ya think the white folks are gonna feel 'bout that?” Clever says, knowing we're not the only ones that enjoy throwin' stones.

“What choice do they have but to at least pretend it's such a fine idea, bein' that Miss Lydia is the second-richest person in Grant County now?”

“Shoot. I forgot. She gave me something to give to ya.” Clever pops up dripping, runs off to the picnic table, and brings back a shoe box. “Open it,” she says, bossy as ever. I lift off the top, and beneath the white tissue paper there's a bouquet of dried forget-me-nots held together with a purple ribbon. “She said you'd know what that meant.”

“Gibby?” Grampa shouts out. He's making his way toward us from the old Fleming cottage. The one that damn Yankee Willard rented out. That's where Grampa's been living since he got back from the Houston hospital. That's the way he wanted it. Said me and Clever and Rosie should stay in our cottage and he'd move over there. After he aired out the hemp smell. When they're married, though, him and Miss Jessie will live at her farm. Cooter's been bunking down with Billy for the time being in the tent in the woods. We're all gonna have a ceremony right here on the cottage lawn when the maple leaves reach their reddest. This is what the
Gazette
headline is gonna announce in next week's “
All You Need Is Love
” column:

We haven't worked out all the details yet, where everybody's gonna be living
after
we've tied the knots, but for sure it'll be here in Cray Ridge and not Bolivia. Which is good, since Loretta Boyd from over at Candy World told me this afternoon when I stopped by to pick up a sack of chocolate-covereds that
Senor
Bender would NOT be available to do any
Espanol
work in the near future 'cause he's run off with the Spanish Club's treasury money. And Miss Darlene Abernathy. (I haven't told Clever about that last part. She'll be too disappointed. She stole a rusty shovel from somebody and gave it to me for my birthday, promising, “Tomorra we'll head over to the hospital and beat that varmint Darlene to death on her lunch break.”)

“Ya hear me, Gib?” Grampa calls out to me again in his hut-to voice.

“Hard not to, Charlie.”

Turns out his heart attack wasn't as bad as the doctors first thought, so he didn't have to get his chest opened up with a saw down in Houston. “But,” Miss Jessie explained on our way home from the airport a few weeks ago, “he's had a complication.” (I'm embarrassed to tell ya that made me snort, and say, “Ya think HE'S had a complication. Lord. Ya have no idea.”)

Once we got him back home, the four of us, Billy and me and Clever and Cooter, took turns telling him the best we could about what's been going on. Slow, so he'd understand. Because his complication is called a stroke. (Just in case you're not familiar, this has nothing at all to do with swimming. It's a medical condition that happens when some of your brain blood doesn't get where it's supposed to and your body can go sorta slack on one side and your understanding of words can get messed up.) He said to me yesterday morning when I was gettin' him dressed, “Guess the thoe's . . . on . . . the other foot now, huh, Gibby girl?” See how confused he gets? His shoe was right where it was supposed to be.

While Grampa's been rehabilitating, he's turned over the everyday running of Top O' the Mornin' to Miss Florida. Some folks got their dandruff up 'bout that, but I have a lot of faith in the persuasiveness of her black bottom pie. The customers are also having to get used to new waitress, Clever Lever, who is displaying the familiar snotty behavior of her mama. She's already got down the two-plate arm handle, so it looks like waiting tables is in her blood. Cooter's also back in the kitchen part-time helping out.

“Got thomthin elth I forgot to give ya,” Grampa says, still making his way over from the next-door cottage. The hospital doctors told Miss Jessie that it's important to his recovery that he does things on his own, so I don't rush over to help.

“Hey, Grampa,” Clever calls to him as he lowers himself into his chair to take the evening breeze on his face. “I can tell you're fond of that baby, so ya can quit pretendin' ya ain't.”

“That baby . . . that baby looth like a frog.” He gifted Rosie a whittled red-wing blackbird at the party today. (Until he gets his strength back in his right hand, everything he's been working on looks a lot like everything else, but he said it was a blackbird, so there ya go.) To get him stronger, Grampa and Clever work every morning in the rose garden as well. He's named a real pretty miniature pink rose—Rosie A. That made Clever do her air-raid siren crying. And, of course, the other part of his rehabilitation means I take him out on the boat every day.

“Mr. Bailey came by and mentioned that the fish been bitin' all week in Carver Cove. So if you wanna go over there tomorrow, we can. But we have to get an early start,” I tell him slow. “I'm doin' something important in the afternoon. Whatcha got there?”

“Happy birfday,” Grampa says, taking a vanilla envelope out from behind his back.

“Sounds like somebody needs me,” Clever says, running her fingers down my hair as she walks past me toward the cottage. Like her, I can tell by the sound of that cry that Rosie's hungry. There's not a doubt in my mind that Miss Lydia didn't lie about one thing. Yes, what we're witnessing here is an honest-to-goodness Transmutation of the Highest Order. Rosie's piercing, wailing demands remind me EXACTLY of Janice.
She
doesn't like to sleep in her own bed, either.

“Open it,” Grampa says.

Inside the big envelope there's a birthday card that says in his new scrawled-out-like-a-ransom-note writing:

When I look back up at Grampa, he's apple-doll puckering. (Even more than usual, factoring in the sag he got from the stroke.)

“I don't get it,” I tell him, studying both sides of the card.

“Look inthide the envelope. There ith thomething elth.” Blowing it open, I palm out a large glossy picture of my hero, smoking a wood pipe in a tweedy jacket with patches on the sleeves and looking nothing at all like I imagined he would. Not rugged and sly, more bookish with horn-rimmed glasses. Down on the bottom in professional handwriting:

Finest regards, Mr. Howard Redmond

“Gosh,” I gush. “I can't believe he made the time to get a picture taken and then sign it so personal. Isn't that something?”

Grampa half smiles, and so does Billy, who's done doing the dishes and has joined us out on the lawn. He looks adorable in Grampa's Chief Cook and Bottle Washer apron. (On the airplane trip home from Houston, Texas, Grampa had an old-man-to-old-man talk with Billy's daddy. Told him to quit being such a horse's ass. That he had a fine son. A soon-to-be Vietnam veterinarian. Big Bill Brown is still not buying that. But that doesn't seem to upset Billy like it used to. We're his family now.)

I open my leather-like briefcase and slide in the picture of Mr. Howard Redmond below his fine book,
The Importance of Perception in Meticulous Investigation
, which reminds me that I'm not done for the day just yet. “I got a little more work to do. Don't let the bedbugs bite,” I say, bussing both my men on top of their sweet heads.

Keeper limps after me up the lawn and into the screened-in porch. (I'd pick him up, but he takes after Grampa in this respect.) After fluffing up my pillows, I take out my blue spiral and read aloud this week's top story.