The Search for Belle Prater (7 page)

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Authors: Ruth White

BOOK: The Search for Belle Prater
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Woodrow was whispering, more to himself than to us. “Maybe she
is
here somewhere, behind one of these doors.”
Several
of the same people we had traveled with in the morning were on the bus going home. There was the big old woman with the pipe and June Honaker with her baby. When the Luckys got on the bus, I could see that their mama had been crying, and the kids didn’t look too happy, either. The toothless man must have stayed on in Bluefield with his sister, Tulip.
There were also some newcomers, including two pretty ladies we knew as Tootsie and Ruby, who lived in Coal Station, and a young man named Chester.
Again Woodrow and I grabbed the wide seat at the end of the bus, and once we were on the road, Cassie joined us. There was a strong smell of fumes from the fuel of that old black-and-white bus, but right then it felt and smelled like home. It was warm and cozy in there ’cause it had a real good heater, while outside freezing rain was falling.
It was pitch black by the time the bus pulled out of the Bluefield terminal heading toward Deep Vale, and we were too give out to talk. Besides, there seemed nothing left to say.
Then, right on the outskirts of town, we saw some people huddled beside the road in the headlights, flagging the bus, and we came to life.
“They got
git
-tars!” Woodrow cried out. “And fiddles!”
“Oh, goody!” Cassie said. “It’s the Bluegrass Blues!”
She hurried up front to welcome the musicians aboard, collect their fares, and guide them to the seats right in front of ours. There was a man and three women, which was not your ordinary bluegrass band. They were usually all men. Pap turned on the inside lights in the bus while Cassie helped the musicians store their instruments in the rack over the seats.
“What are they doing out’cheer on a night like this?” Woodrow said to Cassie when she returned to us.
“It’s Saturday, and they’re going to Deep Vale to play at a honky-tonk,” she whispered. “We’ll let them rest and warm up a bit. Then we’ll ask them to play us some music. They’re always glad to oblige.”
Woodrow and I were squirming with excitement.
Pap had left the lights on, probably because he knew what was coming. Sure enough, about ten minutes later
the one man in the band peeped around the side of his seat and said to Cassie, “Well, okay, my gal, I’ll wager you wanna hear a tune, don’tcha?”
“I do!” Cassie said. “I wanna hear a tune, Billy Blue!”
Billy was a short, friendly, almost bald-headed feller with a bushy beard, and he had crinkly blue eyes that laughed when he talked. He looked for all the world like the cowboy Gabby Hayes.
“Will you read my palm for me?” Billy said to Cassie.
“I will for shore!” she said. “I wanna hear ‘In the Pines.’”
“All right, then!” I heard a woman’s voice there beside Billy. “Toss down my mandolin, honey chile, and hand me my rum, Billy Blue.”
“Your rum?” Billy said. “Now, Bonnie Blue, didn’t you promise me you’d never drink another drop?”
“Heck no, Billy! I promised never to drop another drink! So hand it to me careful.”
We laughed louder and longer than the joke was worth, ’cause we knew it was only part of their act, and Bonnie was not really going to drink rum.
The other two Blues women, who were introduced as Nancy Lou Blue and Nancy Too Blue, got up in the aisle to retrieve their instruments. There was no telling how old anybody was in this group. They all had on bright
colors, lots of fringe, rhinestones, and cowboy boots and hats. I suspected the women were wearing wigs, ’cause nobody could naturally have that much blond hair.
Bonnie Blue said to Cassie, “Who you got there wid’ja?”
“This is Gypsy and Woodrow,” Cassie introduced us.
We said hey, then Cassie said to us, “Let’s give the band our seat so they can spread out and have room for all their stuff.”
It was agreed, and with much bustle and jostling, we changed places with Billy and Bonnie. The two Nancys joined them.
Billy played the guitar, Bonnie the mandolin, Nancy Lou the banjo, and Nancy Too the fiddle. They were fooling around with the strings to get tuned up, and I settled between Woodrow and Cassie. The three of us were on our knees looking back.
“Are they all in the same family?” I asked Cassie.
“Naw, they’re not even related,” Cassie said. “They take the name of Blue when they’re performing.”
Suddenly the band cut loose with “In the Pines” as pretty as you please, and their music just filled me up. We started keeping time by clapping, and in some places where we knew the words, we sang along. The Luckys, who now occupied the seat where the two Nancys had been, imitated every move we made. Their faces were
shining. The other passengers patted their feet and craned their necks to see the band.
Then pretty Ruby started dancing in the aisle up near the front, and she could dance good. In a minute Tootsie started dancing with her.
The first song ended, and everybody whooped and clapped.
“‘Bury Me Beneath the Willow’!” came a holler. “You know that one?”
“Do de queen speak English?” Billy said.
And off they went into “Bury Me Beneath the Willow,” followed by “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” and a man got up and danced slow with Tootsie, while Ruby sat down and sang along with the band. She had a sweet voice.
When they were finished with that one, Nancy Lou said, “‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.’ Everybody knows that one.”
That song was a real tearjerker, and we crooned pitifully, milking it for all it was worth. When it was over, Woodrow said, “Now do something jolly.”
“Okay, just one more,” Billy Blue said. “We have to rest up for Deep Vale.”
Then the band twanged a lively rendition of “Ain’t We Crazy?” Ruby got up and danced again, and the young man named Chester danced with her. After that we gave
the Bluegrass Blues a huge round of applause and helped them put their instruments away again.
We could hear Cassie murmuring behind us as she read Billy Blue’s palm.
Woodrow whispered to me, “Running into the band was another sign.”
“How do you figure that?” I said.
“I dunno why exactly,” he said. “But we keep coming across the word
blue
. There’s the name of the band, Bluegrass Blues, and their last name is Blue, and they play bluegrass music. They played ‘Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain’ while we were coming home from Bluefield!”
I didn’t say anything, but I figured that was stretching it a bit. You could run this sign thing into the ground.
“The first midget we ever saw had on a blue dress!” he went on excitedly. “And the Lucky girls have blue flowers on
their
dresses.”
“Don’t forget the sky,” I said sarcastically. “It was blue until we got to
Blue
field.”
Woodrow looked at me doubtfully and said no more about signs.
The band left us in Deep Vale, and we reclaimed our seat. As we left that town, our mood began to list toward the dark side. We were in total blackness because Pap did not turn the inside lights on for us this time. The temperature had dropped considerable, and in the headlights you could see the sleet coming down fast and
thick, making sharp pinging sounds as the pellets hit the windows.
When we started up the mountain toward Lucky Ridge, where the Luckys would be getting off the bus, I thought of those steep drop-offs over the edge of the road. In the dark you couldn’t see the bottom of the deep hollows below. You could see nothing but this big, yawning murkiness over there. I shivered.
The Luckys snuck back in the dark to eavesdrop on us, but there was nothing to hear. So they snuggled together at one end of our wide seat.
The rhythm of the wheels had almost lulled me to sleep when I heard Woodrow say to the kids, “Where do y’all live?”
“Right now we’re stayin’ wid Granddaddy in the Lucky Ridge Coal Camp,” the boy said.
“What were you doin’ in Bluefield?”
“Went to see our daddy,” one of the girls said.
“Your daddy? Don’t he live with y’all?”
“He’s in the jailhouse,” the other girl said.
“What for?”
“Moonshinin’,” the boy said. “He was just trying to give us young’uns some Christmas. But they throwed him in jail, and now we’re on relief.”
Lucky Ridge was the coal camp I had seen that morning. That seemed like such a long time ago. What an awful place to have to go home to! I snuggled deeper into
my seat and thought of Mama and Porter waiting for me in our cozy, sheltered ranch house on Residence Street. And it occurred to me that Lucky should be
my
name.
“I got me a dawg,” the Lucky boy said. “He’s a good old coon dawg.”
“What’s his name?” Woodrow said drowsily.
“Blue.”
When
I got home, Mama had supper ready, but I was almost too tired to eat. I managed to swallow a few bites between sentences as I told her and Porter about Joseph and Miz Lincoln. Then I stumbled off to bed, tossed my dirty clothes into a pile on the floor, wrapped myself in a clean flannel nightgown, and crawled between crisp sheets. I was asleep in a jiffy.
Mama did not make me get up and go to church the next morning. I couldn’t remember the last time that had happened, and it felt good to sleep in. When I heard her and Porter go out the front door, I turned over and listened to the rain spattering against my window.
I couldn’t sleep anymore, but I wasn’t ready to get up. I lifted the curtain and peeped out at the gray weeping world and the dripping orchard. It was hard to imagine spring, when the apple trees would be all decked out in their white lace.
I turned on my radio, which had been a Christmas present from Porter. Most of the stations had nothing but preaching on Sunday morning, but there was this one station out of Richlands that played the latest music all the time, and told good jokes, too. So that’s where I turned the dial. Kitty Wells’s voice filled my room, and I sank again into the pillows.
My mind went to all the people I had been with yesterday. It seemed sad and strange to me that so many of them had lost one or both parents. Miz Lincoln’s parents had given her away like she was a puppy or a kitten. Then her adopted parents had died. Cassie’s mama and grandma had both died. The Luckys’ daddy was in jail. Joseph’s daddy had abandoned him. And my own daddy? He had taken his own life.
Then, of course, there was Woodrow’s mama. I had actually seen Aunt Belle only a few times in my life, but through Woodrow I felt that I knew her well. Who woulda thought she could ever abandon him? The idea must seem even more incredible to him, and that was why it was so hard for him to let go.
I felt sure she had loved him with all her heart. They had made plans to get Woodrow’s crossed eyes fixed. They had shared special moments together. Aunt Belle believed Woodrow had visited her from a far-off place in the moment before he was born. How could she possibly have left him?
Then I set aside my thoughts to listen to a joke on the radio. Oh yeah, this was a good one. I found a piece of paper and a pencil in my nightstand drawer and wrote it down before I could forget it.
After a while I managed to drag myself out of bed and fix a bowl of cornflakes. The house seemed awful cold and empty without Mama and Porter. I chucked some wood on the coals smoldering in the grate, and before long I had me a big old fire.
Mama and Porter found me all curled up on the couch in front of the fireplace, reading Nancy Drew, when they got home from church. It was all that I had promised myself yesterday during the cold rain in Bluefield.
Mama went straightaway to fix us some lunch, and Porter settled down with the Sunday edition of the
Bluefield Daily Telegraph.
“I reckon Woodrow is becoming quite the traveler,” Porter said to me.
“Whadda ya mean?” I said.
“Yesterday Bluefield, today Roanoke.”
I sat up and looked at Porter. “Ro’noke?”
“Yeah, his Aunt Millie and Uncle Russell took him there today.”
“His Aunt Millie and Uncle Russell?” I said. “What for?”
“To see his daddy.”
“His daddy?”
“Is there an echo in here?” Porter said with a grin.
Porter relished any opportunity to tell folks interesting things they didn’t already know. That’s why the newspaper business fit him like a glove.
“Tell me!” I said.
“While you young’uns were galavantin’ all over West Virginia, your grandpa had a long-distance call from Woodrow’s daddy. He said he has admitted himself to a special hospital in Roanoke. His brother, Russell, and Russell’s wife, Millie, were driving out there today to visit him, and he wanted Woodrow to come along.”
“What’s he in the hospital for?”
“To get dried out.”
“What does that mean—to get dried out?”
“It means he’s soggy with alcohol.”
“In other words, he’s an alcoholic,” Mama said, coming in from the kitchen, “and he needs medical attention. Lunch is ready.”
You didn’t have to tell me and Porter twice to come and eat. We settled around the kitchen table, said the blessing, and began to fill our plates.
“Does that mean Uncle Everett is addicted to alcohol?” I asked.
“Yes, alcoholism is an addiction,” Mama said.
“That’s another thing Woodrow and Joseph have in common,” I said. “Joseph’s daddy is addicted to gambling. Is there a hospital for that, too?”
“I don’t know,” Porter said, “but there should be.”
“How long will Uncle Everett be there?”
“He’ll probably be hospitalized for a month or so, but he plans to stay in Roanoke permanently,” Porter said.
“He’s moving away from Crooked Ridge?” I asked.
“Yeah, he has a job offer in Roanoke, if he straightens himself out. He also wants to stay near the hospital in case he backslides.”
“Do you think he’ll make Woodrow move with him?”
“No, I don’t think so,” Mama said. “You see, Gypsy, there’s a woman in the picture now, and it’s my bet she does not want Woodrow.”
“You mean Woodrow’s daddy is gonna get married again?”
“I think so,” Mama went on. “Everett wants to file for a divorce from Belle. That’s another thing he said on the phone.”
“Does Woodrow know that?”
“He’ll find out today,” Mama said with a sigh. “Poor kid.”
“How could Uncle Everett do that to Aunt Belle when she’s not even here to speak for herself?”
“I doubt seriously that she would care if she were here,” Porter said.
“I think she’d be glad,” Mama agreed. “But it’s still hard on Woodrow. They’re his parents, and he loves them both.”
I told Mama and Porter more details about our trip. I talked about Cassie and Pap, the old toothless man, the Bluegrass Blues, and the Luckys. But they were most interested in Joseph and Miz Lincoln.
“How tall would you say she is?” Mama wanted to know.
“She’d come about up to my shoulder,” I said.
“Is that right?” Mama said. Her eyes were big. “I wonder how she goes about shopping for clothes? Does she shop in the children’s department, or what?”
Porter laughed. “You would think of that.”
As the day wore on, Mama let me be as lazy as I wanted to be, and between naps I finished my Nancy Drew mystery. A person needs a day like this once in a while, I thought. Life with Woodrow had turned into one never-ending adventure, and that can wear you out.
When Woodrow came home, late that evening, he did not tramp across the yard to see me, like I thought he would. I was surprised, but I pulled myself off the couch and ran next door through the mud puddles to find out what was happening. I was even more surprised when I got there and learned that Woodrow was already in bed.
Granny and Grandpa were sitting on the couch, watching
The Ed Sullivan Show
. I settled down between them, and Dawg squirmed right under my feet. I petted her.
“I think Woodrow’s a little depressed,” Granny said. “Even when you have a rough childhood as he did, it’s hard to say goodbye to it.”
“Did he tell y’all what happened today?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Grandpa said. “His daddy told him that a relative is planning to move into their house on Crooked Ridge. He told Woodrow to go there and look through his mother’s things, decide what he wants to keep, and dispose of the rest. He talked about Belle as if she were dead.”
“So when are you gonna take Woodrow up there to Crooked Ridge?” I said.
“It has to be this Saturday,” Grandpa said. “The feller wants to move in the following week.”
“Woodrow was planning to go back to Bluefield on Saturday,” I said.
Grandpa shrugged. “He can’t do both.”
The next morning the rain had stopped, and I met Woodrow, as usual, to walk to school. He was quiet, and I didn’t push it. He would tell me everything by and by.
When we got to Mr. Collins’s homeroom, Cassie came rushing up to us, grabbed Woodrow’s arm with one hand and mine with the other, and pulled us off into a private corner away from our classmates.
“What was in the letter?” she whispered excitedly to Woodrow.
“What letter?” he said.
“The letter your mama wrote to you. I know she did! I dreamed it.”
“I didn’t get it!” Woodrow said, and now he was excited, too. “Maybe it will come today!”
“No, no, no!” Cassie said. “She wrote it before she left you. In the dream she was standing on a stairway with a letter in her hand. There was one word on the envelope, wrote out in large block letters—WOODROW”
“How do you know it was before she left?”
“Because she was sad to be leaving you. She was crying!”
Woodrow was stunned into silence.
“So there wadn’t no letter from her to you?” Cassie prodded.
“No, me and Daddy and the sheriff and everybody searched the cabin good. We looked ever’where for any clues. If there’d been a letter, we’d a’ found it.”
“It’s another parallel to Joseph’s story,” I whispered. “His daddy sent him a letter that he never got, and your mama wrote you a letter that you never got.”
“That’s right!” Woodrow said. “Read the signs!” He turned to Cassie again. “In the dream, what was Mama wearing?”
“I couldn’t see that,” Cassie said. “She was standing in the shadows.”
“On a stairway?” Woodrow said. “There’s no stairs
there in the cabin. There’s a ladder going up to the loft, that’s all.”
“Maybe that was it,” Cassie said.
“Saturday me and Gypsy are going up there to my old house,” Woodrow said.
It was the first time I had heard I was going along, but that was okay. Me and Woodrow assumed a lot of things about each other these days.
“Go with us, Cassie!” he went on. “Maybe you’ll pick up something while you’re there.”
“What about Bluefield?” Cassie said.
“Bluefield will have to wait. Daddy’s cousin Calvin is gonna move into the house next week, and I’ve gotta sift through Mama’s things.”
“Sure, I’d like to go,” Cassie said. “Pap can get by without me one Saturday.”
Bitter cold days followed, but the sky was clear. I had a new wool hat to keep my ears warm, but I soon decided I must have an allergy to wool, because it made my head itch something awful. On Thursday morning, as Woodrow and I walked to school, I had to stop for a moment, and ask him to hold my books while I took off the hat to scratch my head.
He stood there without a word, watching me scratch. It appeared that his mind was anywhere but in the moment, or he would have been laughing at me. Since the weekend he had grown more and more gloomy, which
was definitely not his nature, and he had dived into his schoolwork like he was consumed with it. He studied every hour he was not sleeping or eating or doing his chores.
“I haven’t seen you without your nose in a book this whole week,” I said.
He didn’t answer. I replaced the hat and tied the string under my chin. I took my books from him, and we continued our walk.
“You know what they say about all work and no play,” I chided him. “What’s it gonna get’cha to study so hard, anyhow?”
“It’ll get me to be the smartest person in the world,” he answered in all seriousness. “I’m gonna read Grandpa’s whole set of encyclopedias.”
“What!”
“That’s right. I started on Monday, and I won’t be doing anything for fun till I’ve finished.”
“How far are you up to now?”
“I am up to
aardvark.
”

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