The Ghosts of Varner Creek (4 page)

Chapter 3

On August 10, 1909 my sister Sarah turned thirteen years old. There wasn’t going to be a lot of presents, no expensive porcelain dolls with exquisitely crafted features, no tortoise shell combs with an ornate hand mirror. There weren't any of those things that a typical girl her age would have loved. She did get a dress, though. It was a pretty pink dress with lace sewn on the sleeves and collar. Mama had saved up for the material for months and made it herself. She had gotten the pattern down at the general store, but of course she had to improvise. The original pattern was for a Sunday dress, but Mama had need of a princess dress. There was a drawing of Cinderella's splendid silver dress in Sarah’s book of fairytales and Mama did her best to borrow from the design. It wasn't perfect, but the hours spent on the task were evident. There was a lot of love in that dress, and Mama was proud of the end result and looked forward to surprising Sarah.

As for me on this day I was outside doing what twelve year olds do. Mama walked over to the kitchen window and hollered out, “Solomon James Mayfield! Get inside this house this instant and help me get the table set.”

“
But Mama! I got a diller by the tail! I‘m gonna haul him out.” Living out in the country sometimes requires a bit of creativity when you're trying to entertain yourself, and believe you me, playing tug of war with an armadillo down its hole was good sport for a boy my age.

She wasn‘t in the mood for it today, though. “Boy, don’t make me tell you again. And I done told you not to get out there and dirty yourself up. It’s a special day and for once I’d like you to look halfway clean.”

Mama just didn’t understand the importance of winning a tug of war. “Yes ma’am,” I whined. And I let the little diller's tail go. It clawed down deep into its hole and let out a final hiss at me to make sure I knew who’d won. “We'll just see who wins tomorrow,” I threatened.

I scampered into the house only to be immediately fussed at again. “Good Lord!” Mama said, “You look like a pig that’s been rollin’ round in the mud.” She grabbed me by the arm and hauled me right back outside where she began beating the dust off my overalls and shirt when my feet lit up with the pain of a thousand hot needles being poked into me. I let out a scream and she spun me around to face her, “Well what’s wrong now?” she asked with a slight bit of panic in her.

“
Ant bed, Mama! Ant bed!” She had walked me right into a pile of red harvester ants that were attacking my bare feet with a vengeance.

She helped me slap them off my feet and legs, “Well, if you’d wear your shoes like a normal somebody them ants wouldn’t eat you up like that.”

“
They not comfortable.”

“
Oh, and having a bunch of red ants biting on yah is, huh?” When she finished slapping off the ants and beating away most of the dirt on my clothes she proceeded to poke and prod me back indoors where she took the edge of her kitchen apron, licked it with the end of her tongue, and then started wiping my face clean. “Honestly, son, couldn’t you just stay clean until after the party?” I hated it when Mama used her saliva to wipe dirt and smudges from my face. I always figured spit was worse than dirt, but there's just no telling a mother that.

“
Sorry, Mama.”

A giggling squeal of a voice drifted into the kitchen, “O-o-o-oh, Sol’s in trouble.” Sarah hid behind the entryway from the front room, which is what we called the living room back then. Her black hair and big blue eyes were poking out from behind the corner. Then she laughed and disappeared back into the other room.

“
Don’t you run off on me, little Miss Sarah. I’m gonna need you in a minute,” chimed Mama.

“
Sol’s-in-trouble! Sol’s-in-trouble!” came the sing-song response from the other room.

Apparently her little song and dance was enough to rouse our Pap. He came out of my parents’ bedroom with a scowl on his face, “What the hell's all the racket out here?” He walked into the kitchen and bared down on me threateningly. “What’d you do now, boy?”

Mama answered for me. “Nothin’, Abram. Sarah’s just getting excited is all, this being her big day and everything.”

“
That damn girl thinks everything's funny. Must be nice.” Pap rarely thought things funny, unless they were his own little jokes, which most everyone else rarely found funny. You were always walking on eggshells when you around Pap, particularly if he'd been drinking, which was pretty much all the time.

Mama sucked in her breath and said, “It’s not her fault, Abram. She's just excitable is all.” Then she lowered her voice next to a whisper, "And she can't help the way God made her."

Pap let out a sarcastic little laugh, “God, hell. It's that Chinaman blood she got in her from your side, Annie,” he said to her, “that's why she's one of them Mongol idiots, something in that foreign blood of hers.” Mama wasn't part Chinese. Pap never seemed to understand what the doctor from Houston meant when he said Sarah might be suffering from something called Mongolian Idiocy. Our own town doctor, Dr. Wilkins, had sent her up to Houston to visit a specialist when he became concerned Sarah wasn't developing correctly. What the doctor in Houston had diagnosed as a possible case of Mongolian Idiocy was what they called Down’s syndrome back then, up until 1961. Pap thought it meant Sarah was part Chinese, though, and since he was positive he was as white as a white man gets and Mama had jet black hair, he of course assumed someone on Mama's side had some tainted Chinaman blood. That kind of reasoning might not make sense to most folks, but like Pap’s sense of humor, most things about him seemed a little left of center. I suppose part of it wasn't his fault. He only made it through the third grade when his father died of tuberculosis and his mother sent him to live with his uncle. That probably had more to do with the way Pap turned out than anything else.

Today like every other day, though, Mama bore it well, “I know, Abram. But it’s her special day. Let’s please try to make it a nice one for her.”

Pap muttered to himself, “Like she knows the difference,” as he disappeared back to their bedroom.

Mama looked at me and said, “Now I’m going to take Sarah to y’all’s room and get her into her dress. Why don’t you go and get your surprise you made for her while I do that?” She gave me a wink like she and I were partners in mischief.

Sarah had been playing princess ever since Mama read us Snow White and Cinderella from the Grimm Fairy Tales. Miss Thomas lent Mama the book. She was the town schoolteacher, if you could say we had one since it only went up to the eighth grade. I didn’t attend, though, because until most recently we didn’t have a horse and town was several miles away. Instead, Mama home-schooled me and Sarah from the books Miss Thomas let her borrow. Sarah, of course, loved the fairy tales from the big book the best. Miss Thomas had told Mama it was a collection of German folklore stories that two brothers, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, went all around Germany collecting. It was so popular they translated it into lots of languages and now people everywhere were reading them. Miss Thomas was a charitable and smart woman who liked telling people small and obscure facts she picked up along the way. It seemed that after her husband passed she found a new purpose in life by being the town's benefactor. She looked after everyone like they were family, and made it a point to stay up to date with what people were up to for the same reason. She was the Sunday social and the towns' gossip column all rolled into one. And as the towns' benefactor, she saw to it the children got a proper education. She also thoroughly pitied anyone lacking books to read and saw to it that those who didn't make it into her classroom still had the chance to enjoy the wonder that is literature, as she liked to say. The quickest way to get on Miss Thomas’ bad side was to show no interest in learning anything new. Naturally, she and Pap didn’t get along from the start.

Like Mama, it was the fairy tale book that gave me my idea for what to make Sarah for her birthday. In fact, since that was the only things Sarah seemed truly interested in, we all were on a fairy tale theme for her birthday. I knelt down beside Mama in the kitchen and opened up the cabinet, “I put them down here last night to dry,” I told her. I pulled out a paper crown along with a wand made from a large paper straw that had a pink star on top that spun around. They had sparkles on them that Mama and I had made ourselves. We had taken some rock salt and made three little piles which we dyed each a different color, yellow, red, and green. Mama had bought some glue from the general store and I covered the paper crown and the little wand’s tip with sparkles. It worked rather well so long as you didn't let any moisture dissolve the salt. The glue was nice and dry now and I admired my handiwork.

“
That’s perfect,” Mama said encouragingly. “She’s going to be princess for a day today.” She gave me a little kiss on the cheek, “You did real good, Bubba.” I knew it must be true because Bubba was her little pet name she called me when she was happy with me. If Mama called me using my entire name, including the middle name, I was in trouble, but if she called me Bubba, things were good. It was nice knowing where you stood with Mama like that.

After she humored me with a few oohs and ahhhs about my present, she went and disappeared into her and Pap’s room for a second and came out again with the dress wrapped in paper. I had already seen it but Sarah didn't have a clue about it. Mama called out to her, “Sarah Jane, I got something for yah.” Mama had a genuine bright smile on her face and I could tell how much she'd been looking forward to this moment.

Sarah popped her head out from the room she and I shared. “Mama got a . . . p-present?” Her occasional stutter was part of her condition, but Sarah did remarkably well considering her handicap. She had been getting told for weeks that her birthday was coming up and Sarah knew birthdays were like Christmas. Uncle Colby and Aunt Emma would come over with their kids, and probably Miss Thomas, too. She liked to attend anything that might be considered a social event in the small town, plus she was partial to us. And Sarah also knew that birthdays and Christmas meant presents.

“
Look what Mama made for her little princess,” Mama said as she took the dress out of the paper and held it up for Sarah to see.

Her eyes lit up like two saucers, “Princess dress!”

“
That’s right. A pretty pink princess dress made just for Princess Sarah on her birthday.” Sarah ran up to it and stroked it with her hands like it was fragile silk instead of the dyed cotton from the store in town. Mama had fussed over Sarah a few weeks ago taking measurements all over. She told her she just wanted to see how she was growing but really she was getting the measurements to make her the dress. “You wanna go put it on?”

She squealed with happiness, “Now! Now!”

“
Okay, come on sweetie. Let’s get you all prettied up.” Mama and Sarah disappeared into the small bedroom Sarah and I shared.

Right about the time they went into the room I could hear the distant sound of a horse and wagon coming up the dirt road to our house. I went out to meet the guests and waved to Uncle Colby and Aunt Emma as they arrived in their new wagon. They had given us their old one and it sat sharing the little pen area Pap had made for tools and our chickens. Attached directly next to that was the pen where our own horse, Lilipeg, stood craning her neck out of the pen trying to reach some Johnson grass. The barbed wire was starting to dig into her but I guess that grass was worth it. She bit off a large clump and smacked on it in enjoyment with ears poked our way as if curious about what we were up to.

Uncle Colby and Aunt Emma had brought Miss Thomas with them along with their three children just liked they had planned at church, Sunday past. The kids were in the back of the wagon and the three adults had crammed themselves on the front bench. Aunt Emma had another child on the way, we’d all recently learned. They had two girls and one boy already. Francine was a little bit older than me and the other girl, Amber, a couple of years younger. My cousin George was about a year younger than I was, but we were pretty close anyway. There weren’t a lot of other kids in our parts so we were normally each other’s only playmate. It was nice having each other since we both lived with sisters, though I wouldn't have traded him Sarah for Francine and Amber for all the candy at the store in town. They were regular little nightmares compared to Sarah, I thought. They teased poor George about anything and everything. I didn't blame him at all for the pranks he liked to pull on them now and then. It was the only way to keep things balanced.

Uncle Colby called to his horse, “Whoa there, Joe,” as they reached the house. He put the brake on the wagon and they all climbed down. The girls were whispering to each other and probably laughing at my feet, which at this point were pockmarked with red bites all over them from the ant bed earlier. George hopped down ready for play.

“
Where’s your Mama at?” asked Aunt Emma.

“
She’s inside getting’ Sarah dressed up nice.”

“
And your father? Where is he at, dear?” asked Miss Thomas. She had a head of hair that looked more blue than gray and she was wearing a blue Sunday dress that almost matched. I was trying not to stare, but it was remarkable how similar in color they appeared in the afternoon sun, and I smirked at George who would have laughed except Aunt Emma’s eyes caught him too fast.

“
He inside,” I said, straining to keep my eyes on hers instead of her hair.

“
He is inside,” corrected Miss Thomas. “You mustn’t leave out the essentials of a proper sentence, dear.” She had a little wrapped gift in her hands and that I knew right away was a book.