Prairie Evers (15 page)

“What are you doing?” I asked.

Ivy looked at me as if I weren’t very bright. “I’m writing.”

“I can see
that
. What are you writing?”

“It’s just something your grammy said I might like to do. She said it’s something she does. Writes down the things that are in her mind, and the things that happen.”

“What do you mean happen? Nothing really does what you could call
happen
in Vine’s Cove.” I felt kind of cranky suddenly. I knew Grammy had written to Ivy welcoming her to the family, and that Ivy had written back, but I wasn’t sure I liked the fact that they wrote back and forth another time.

“Your grammy said it didn’t have to be anything special. She said she might write about how the air felt during a thunderstorm. That’s what I was doing. Or she might put in a recipe or a song.” Ivy fiddled with a tendril of that plant Mama gave her, which sat on the windowsill right next to her bed. “She said it might help me from feeling lonely sometimes.”

I wadded up a piece of paper and threw it at her. “How can you be lonely when you’re only two feet away?”

She just looked at me and didn’t answer.

I let the subject drop, but I still didn’t like it. I knew about Grammy’s journal keeping, but it wasn’t anything I was interested in, so why should Ivy be? We liked all the same things—supposedly. And another thing—Grammy was
my
grammy. And Ivy had
me
to keep her from being lonely. Me and Mama and Daddy and Pup and all the hens and Fiddle. What more did she need?

But I knew in my heart that a person could be lonesome no matter what. Lonesome for what wasn’t and never would be.

I didn’t mind living in New Paltz anymore; it had become home. But I would always be lonesome for Peabody Mountain and Vine’s Cove. And I was happy as anything to have Ivy living with us, but that couldn’t stop me from missing Grammy like a sawed-off leg. So I knew very well that a person could feel two ways at once. And I saw how much it meant to Ivy that Grammy set right in to treating her like someone particular and special. I left her alone about her notebook, but it wasn’t easy.

A few days later there was a brand-new notebook in the mail from Grammy for each of us. Ivy’s was yellow and mine was red.

“Dear chicklet,” the letter Grammy sent with mine said,

I thought about what she’d said. But setting down words end to end in a journal seemed too much like quilting to me. An awful lot of slow, small work. I’d rather be outside with the chickens. Maybe I’d use the notebook to keep track of them.

Even though I’d been in the poultry business for over six months now, I still didn’t have much of a bookkeeping system. I could start by writing down all their names, how many eggs I gathered each day and how many I sold, and what I spent on feed. I could even write down some particular thing that struck me each day—like the way Fiddle lifted his head to crow, or the way the sunlight reflected off Miss Emily’s feathers, or
about the time Harriet panicked when I wore a hat into the henhouse. She flew into a tizzy and sent the whole flock rushing for the corners and bumping into one another. The hat was a big fur hat I found in a trunk that probably belonged to my grandpa Patton. Maybe Harriet thought it was a fox come to eat her.

I was just about to write that on the first page of my notebook when Pup came tearing around the corner and distracted me. I never did get back to it.

FRAGILE/FRAGILÉ

On Friday,
December the third, the FedEx truck pulled up our driveway in the afternoon. Ivy and I ran outside to see why. We figured the driver must be lost. He wasn’t, though. He had two big packages with red-and-white
FRAGILE/FRAGILÉ
stickers plastered all over them. One was addressed to Miss Ivy Blake and the other to Miss Prairie Evers. They both came from Mrs. Patience Evers, Vine’s Cove, North Carolina. We ran to get Mama to sign for them, but she said no, they were ours, we could sign.

We wanted to rip right into the boxes, but Mama said we had to wait until the next day, which was my birthday. I could hardly sleep that night, wondering about them.

The next morning a few snowflakes were tiptoeing down from the sky, which gave me a thrill even though they did melt as soon as they hit the ground. I woke up early and made my way to the living room to look at the boxes some more. Along with those from Grammy, there were also three packages from Mama and Daddy. Two were for me and one was for Ivy, which I thought was nice—I didn’t mind sharing my birthday. Daddy was in his recliner reading a book about beekeeping.

“Happy birthday, chicklet,” he said.

“Thank you, Daddy.” I gazed at the big package from Grammy. What could it be? A giant stuffed panda? A big Chinese kite, already put together? A huge rubber ball for rolling around on?

“Hard to wait?” Daddy asked.

I nodded.

“I expect you’ll want pancakes for breakfast.”

“Of course!” I always had pancakes with maple syrup for my birthday breakfast. It was a tradition as old as me, so Daddy was just making conversation.

Pretty soon I ran back upstairs and woke Ivy up, then started badgering Mama to get breakfast going. The quicker the day began, the quicker we could open our presents. Finally, when
breakfast was over and the dishes were cleared, Mama sent me and Ivy to bring our boxes to the kitchen table and let us tear into them.

First we opened our two matching packages from Mama and Daddy. Mama’s eyes were dancing and she held her hand over her mouth to hide her smile. I started grinning as soon as I lifted my gift out. It was a quilt that was solid red corduroy on one side and a red-and-blue calico print on the other: just two big chunks, a back and a front, sewn together.

“What do you think, Prairie Evers? I finally took your advice.”

I ran around the table and flung my arms around her waist. “It’s perfect.”

I turned to look at Ivy and she was running her hands over the sage-green corduroy of her quilt. The calico on the other side was green and dusty rose.

“Do you like it?” Mama asked her.

“It’s my favorite colors,” Ivy whispered.

“I thought so.” They smiled at each other. Then Mama said, “Go on, Prairie, open your other present from us,” and I did.

Even though it was in a Redwing boot box, it turned out to be a gift certificate for the Agway. “I love it,” I told Daddy, running to give him a hug too. I knew that one was probably his idea.

Next we lit into our presents from Grammy, and mine was something I would never have guessed. It was a banjo, one just
the right size for me. I was so excited, words could not express. I had always admired Grammy’s playing, and to have her send me this—it was like I had grown up overnight.

It was also like missing her brand-new all over again. It had been too long since I’d heard her voice belting out “Oh Glory, how happy I am.” The moment I thought that, my eyes watered up. I hugged the banjo to me and thought how strange life was. Up and down, happy and sad, good and bad, one thing mixed up with another all the time.

Ivy opened her package next, and what Grammy had sent her was a small guitar. “But she never even met me.” Ivy’s voice was full of wonder and doubt.

“That doesn’t matter. You’re one of the family.”

Grammy didn’t send any note or explanation, just a piece of paper with each that had a song on it, with the chords and the notes and the words written out. I did wonder how she meant for us to learn to play from just that little bit of information, but we set out to try anyway. That afternoon we went to the library and found some books and printed off pages from the computer, then headed for home to apply ourselves to the project.

“Do you think this is really possible?” Ivy asked me, laughing as we left the library. The air was sharp and refreshing, like a drink of cold water, and her long hair was blowing in the breeze. “Do you think we could really teach ourselves to play?”

I smiled back at her. I liked how happy she looked. “I don’t know for sure. Maybe. Grammy always says that with effort and determination, just about anything’s possible.”

Ivy skipped over a crack in the sidewalk. “I think she’s right. I think we can. Let’s try really hard, all right? Let’s not give up no matter what.”

SHE’LL BE COMING ’ROUND THE MOUNTAIN WHEN SHE COMES

One week later,
Ivy and I were feeling proud of ourselves. We’d learned enough that the song almost sounded like itself. We played it over so many times that one afternoon Mama finally got a little worn out on it, I guess. She said that since it was such a fine, sunny day, maybe we could take our music outside.

We dragged our chairs out to beside the henhouse
and began our song again, to see how the chickens would like it. They didn’t seem to like it much at all. Fiddle fluffed his feathers and stretched out his head and made as if to peck at me. I stood up and loomed over him and looked real menacing; he frowned (I swear a rooster can frown) and rounded up the hens and made off to the other edge of the yard, as far away from us as they could be.

Nonetheless we kept on, singing every verse off the song sheets Grammy sent. “She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes,” we sang at the tops of our voices. “She’ll be coming ’round the mountain when she comes.”

Out of the blue, a third voice joined in from off a ways, a voice that was loud and wavery and plain. “She’ll be driving six white horses when she comes,” that voice belted out like there was no tomorrow. I stopped playing, and Ivy trailed off too. The voice came closer. “She’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses when she comes.”

My jaw gaped open. It couldn’t be. It
couldn’t
. But it sounded just like Grammy.

GRAMMY

And then,
around the corner she came—
my grammy
!—a traveling bag in each hand. I had never been so happy in my whole life as I was at that moment.

She looked so good to me, I could have gobbled her up like a chunk of cake. I don’t know how to describe her. She is average tall, with blackish-white hair cut short to keep it out of her way, and an interesting, smiling face that has a sort of squashed-in, wrinkled-apple appearance. She was wearing blue jeans and sneakers and an old red
sweatshirt I remembered from way back, with a quilted flannel shirt over the top of it.

“Grammy,” I hollered, running to her, my banjo still in one hand. “Grammy, Grammy, Grammy!”