Prairie Evers (12 page)
Authors: Ellen Airgood
FALLING IN LOVE
A week after
Ivy told me about her daddy, something else happened. Her mama got a boyfriend.
His name was George, and Ivy said he was very medium. Medium height, medium weight, medium-colored hair. I think that’s a color Crayola should add to their crayon box. It would mean something like brown and something like blond and nothing you’d remark on either way. Ivy said George and her mama had fallen in love. I couldn’t picture it, but Ivy said it was so.
I wrote and told Grammy of it right away. She wrote back and said, “Well, isn’t that nice.” I could tell she felt the same as me. Somewhat uncertain.
I told Ivy I thought she should keep a close watch on the situation. “You probably should be nice to George, polite and all, but keep a close eye out. Listen to the things he says and see if you can tell which way the wind is blowing.”
“Oh, I will.”
“Remember the coyote.”
“I will. Don’t worry.”
I was sure she would, for Ivy is no fool, but I decided I’d keep a close watch on things too. In a pack of coyotes, everyone watches out for one another: they are a team. It works that way with coyotes and cats and chickens, and I think it ought to work that way with people too.
MISCELLANEOUS
Vocabulary is
my favorite subject in school. Mrs. Hanson has us play a game where each row is a team and our job is to think of synonyms for whatever word she puts up on the board. We’re supposed to go as fast as we can and just shout the answers out. Mrs. Hanson writes all the answers in separate columns, and at the end of the game the row with the most words wins. Amabelle and I are the best players on our team.
One day after we won—again—I tapped her shoulder and whispered, “You have a nice name. It
means lovable.” I’d looked it up one day because it bothered me. It looked too much like
Annabelle
and I thought maybe her parents had just made a spelling mistake. But no, it really was a name.
She looked surprised, but she said, “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. But it’s nothing to thank me for, it’s just true.”
“Your name’s kind of cool, too. It’s different.”
I grinned. “It is that.”
“How’d you get it?”
“My mama. She thought it was a pretty word. She and my daddy had been out west on a camping trip before I came along, and she loved it there. She thought it was a name with a lot of space to it.”
“Huh.” She was going to say something else, but Mrs. Hanson stopped us.
“Amabelle! Prairie! Get back to work.”
We ducked our heads and got busy. Our assignment was to write a letter to someone using our vocabulary words. That was easy—of course I was writing to Grammy. I told her about our game. I said,
We won on the word “miscellaneous” today. The synonyms for it are mixed, varied, assorted, and motley. Mrs. Hanson made us look it up along with all our other words, like always. We can use the computer or the big
dictionary that sits on its own stand up by her desk. I always use the dictionary. I like its tissuey pages and tiny little print. It’s more interesting than the computer.
That was true, even though I was almost the only one who thought so. But I liked how you might be looking up
miscellaneous
when your eye strayed across to something else, like
mirza
, which is a royal prince in Persia, or
miscreant
, which means depraved or villainous, or
mirth
and all its synonyms:
gaiety, glee, hilarity, merriment, rejoicing, jollity, joviality, amusement, laughter.
I went on telling Grammy,
“Miscellaneous” is a word with a long history. It’s from a Latin word, “miscere,” which means to mix. You probably already know that.
Grammy always told me, “‘Latin is a dead language, dead as it can be; first it killed the Romans and now it’s killing me.’” She said that, but then she made me learn a little here and there, because she said Latin was the root our English language sprang from, like a big tree growing from a seed. Because she was a teacher in her youth, that was the kind of thing Grammy always came up with.
I have some miscellaneous news. The kitten I gave to Ivy is growing into his feet and he has learned to fetch,
which makes Ivy proud. He’ll only do it for her, though. I’m convinced Ezekiel lays the most eggs because she’s the biggest, but I can’t really be sure. Bootstrap is always trying to fly off into the maple tree. It’s true what I read, that Rhode Island Reds are full of antics. Bootstrap is, anyway. I’m thinking of getting some more chicks next spring, but I’m not sure. When you’re in business, you have to look ahead and keep improving, but you don’t want to get too big, too fast either. It’s not so easy to bring new chickens into the coop—it upsets the order of the ones you already have.
That’s just like school. But the kids are getting used to me. They don’t tease much anymore, and Ivy and I even sit with some other kids at lunch now. They’re named Charlie and Sasha. We like them fine but we still like each other best. Mama and Daddy send their love. I’m trying to be patient, like you said, but I still want to bring Ivy home with me.
Love,
your favorite granddaughter,
Prairie Evers
Then I put a big smiley face and a bunch of x’s and o’s.
Grammy wrote back and said she was still keeping Ivy in her thoughts and prayers, and ever would be. She said it seemed
like I wasn’t finding school to be too much of a burden, and I reckoned she was right. It turned out I didn’t mind it much after I had Ivy as my friend. Also I did like the swimming pool (and Mama was nice enough not to say “I told you so” about it). I liked learning, too, but that was something I had always done, with or without school. And I liked finding out all the places where the schoolbooks didn’t say everything they should have.
For example, they didn’t say much in our history book about what happened to the Cherokees or other Indian nations. One day I raised my hand and said I thought they should. Mrs. Hanson said, “That’s a good point. There’s not room in the book to cover anything in much depth, but we could learn more on our own. How about I elect you my deputy. You look into it and get back to us. In fact, I think maybe everyone should do a little extra research on some part of history they’re interested in.”
The whole class groaned, but I felt sort of proud of myself anyway.
Ivy waved her hand and said, “The book never says anything at all about the Cherokees who
didn’t
get rounded up and sent to Oklahoma. Why doesn’t it?”
“That’s a good question too. It’s the same answer, I think—so much history, so little time. I want you and Prairie to research this together and present your findings to the class.”
She gave us a little wink. I saw we had been snookered in a way, but I didn’t mind. I knew she’d make sure the other kids
listened when we presented our findings, and would pose them a quiz afterward to make sure their attention didn’t wander. Ivy was smiling. She knew we had been snookered too, and she didn’t mind either. We’d come a long way, me and Ivy, since I first began in school.
IVY’S IDEA
Even I didn’t realize
how far we’d come until Ivy came up with a brilliant idea. She made me take half the credit, but it was all her doing.
It started with that assignment Mrs. Hanson gave us. The next day after school we went to the library and delved into the subject while we waited for Mama to finish at the Arts Center.
“Prairie. C’mere,” Ivy hissed after we’d been looking things up for a while. She was sitting at a computer and I was looking at a book in the history section.
I went to see what she wanted. “Look—it’s the Cherokee word for coyote.
Wa-ya
.” She was pointing at the computer screen and sure enough, there was a Cherokee-English translation page.
I peered at the screen. “Look up something else. Look up
friend
.”
Ivy typed in
friend
and hit enter.
U-na-li
flashed up in the answer box. “
U-na-li
,” we both whispered at the same time and then started giggling.
The librarian shot us a warning look and we quieted down. We couldn’t stop looking up words, though. We looked up
pencil, computer, chicken
(ruffed grouse was as close as we could get on that). After a while Ivy said, “We should make this part of our presentation. We should label stuff all over the room with the Cherokee word for it.”
I stared at her. “That’s a good idea.”
“We could have a Cherokee word day every day for a week. For a
month
, even. All that day everybody’d have to use the Cherokee word instead of the English one.”
“Wow. That’s a
really
good idea.”
Ivy was nodding. “Yeah. It is. It’ll be cool. I bet Mrs. Hanson’ll like it.” She dragged a notebook out of her satchel and fished around for a pencil, then opened to a new page. “
Wa-ya
, coyote” she wrote at the top, then skipped a line and wrote “
U-na-li
, friend.” She punched in more words and found
the translation and wrote those down. I hated to bring up the thought I’d just had, but I decided I’d better.
“Umm, I think you’re right, I think Mrs. Hanson will like it. But what about—everybody else? Won’t they think it’s stupid? Won’t it just—make things worse?”
Ivy was giving me a look. A skeptical look. “Well, sure, maybe,” she said when I trailed off. “But really, Prairie. Who cares?”
GEORGE
The good news was,
Mrs. Hanson did like our idea and instituted Cherokee Word Day right away. She said we’d do a word a week for the rest of the school year, and it’d be our job to provide the words.
The bad news was, George and Ivy’s mama had become inseparable, like they were joined at the hip. Ivy was all in a dither. I didn’t blame her. She was sure George would propose to her mama and her mama would say yes.
In one way it was all right because after George
came along, Ivy’s mama was in a better mood. She didn’t pay any more mind to Ivy than ever, and maybe less, but her spirits were brighter. But Ivy was afraid they would get married and move to George’s place in Poughkeepsie, back where Ivy and her mama came from.
I couldn’t deny this would be a serious thing. I wrote Grammy of it right away and began checking the mailbox every day for an answer.
