The Wonder of Charlie Anne
Read The Wonder of Charlie Anne Online
Authors: Kimberly Newton Fusco
For my children—
Daniel, Matthew, Kate and Laura
CHAPTER
1
Go do this, the new mama tells me, and I do it, just because.
Look in that cupboard because maybe there’s something in there, maybe a mouse. Or maybe not, maybe it’s just a shadow from that old pee pot in there, the new mama isn’t sure. But I better do it, just because.
I know just because. Just because means I am a girl, and a girl needs to know about things, like keeping whites from colors in the washbucket and why you sweep before you mop, and about keeping your legs crossed all the time and how to rub a skinny little chest with Vicks while you’re wiping a nose. Two things at once, that’s what you do. Keep your cow from running in the road at the same time you’re trying to get all these peas shelled for supper. And do be quiet while the new mama talks, on and on.
“You better listen when I’m talking because I’m not going to say it twice, Charlie Anne. Put on some beans, and why don’t you mix up some biscuits, nice and high like your papa likes them, and how come these underpants aren’t ironed right? They’re rough as shingles. Don’t you listen to a thing I say?”
I turn and look as far as I can see.
No, ma’am.
The new buttercups bloomed this morning. Can’t you hear them? They are singing, and I can hear their tiny voices calling out to me, and the bees are buzzing inside that apple tree so loud I can hardly think about the laundry that still needs hanging.
But the loudest voice is the river that races right across our fields. It says, Hurry, Charlie Anne, hurry. It says it all the time.
This is how we got so many babies around here.
One morning when I am small I walk out to check on our cow, Anna May, and nestled up against her is a new little calf with eyes as dark as a full jar of molasses. I pull my milk stool over and sit and watch Anna May and how happy she is nuzzling her first baby calf and I get to thinking about how I would like to have little babies in the house for me to play with so I will have more than just Thomas, who is too old, and Ivy, who tells on me all the time. So I pray to the angels that they will bring my mama a baby. I pray awfully hard because Anna May’s calf is so gosh darn cute and he just about splits my heart like an old melon and before I know it we have two babies in our house, split, splat. First Peter and then before I know it another baby, Birdie, who will not eat anything but biscuits, blackberry jam and lemon drops. Mama gets all tired and
worn out from her new babies and she gets a cross look when I ask if she wants to go to our favorite spot by the river.
My prayers keep on strong as rock because, before I know it, there’s another baby, the one who takes Mama straight to heaven as soon as she is born. I stop praying to the angels after that. Prayers are powerful things.
After lunch I stomp outside because the new mama says I have to go get all the laundry I just hung up. It is going to rain and I have to take it all down and hang it in the barn. I don’t want to take down everything I already hung up. The sun will dry it all over again tomorrow, and besides, I want to go to the river, I tell her. I have already been doing chores since I woke up. The new mama tells me to get the laundry, or else.
The new mama is the cousin Mirabel from two towns over. Papa did not ask her, she just showed up one day after the funeral with her suitcases, all strapped up tight, and her shoes that snap when she walks. After Mama left us, Papa walked around like a horse kicked him in the belly, so he did not say much when Mirabel told Peter and Birdie to move up to the attic with Ivy and me. Since Thomas was already fifteen, he could sleep in the barn. I asked why couldn’t I do that. Why couldn’t I sleep with Anna May and our chickens, Minnie and Olympia and Bea, instead of Peter, who
still wets the bed. Mirabel told me right then and there that I was going to learn some manners, or else. None of us like Mirabel, me especially. I think she has her eyes on Papa in a bad way.
I stomp outside.
Actually, I am afraid of me dying from all my chores. I reach up and check my heart. It is all skittering and I sit down on the clothes basket and let it rest. Mirabel tells me not to worry, I am strong as an ox. I hear the screen door bang, and before I know it, she is out on the porch with her hands on her hips yelling for me to help her with the lunch. I jump up and start pulling down all the laundry I already hung up, and when I do, I hear the river calling me again: Hurry, Charlie Anne, hurry.
I believe it wants to be listened to.
For a long time, I think it is the “Charlie Anne River.” My mama told me it was true, it was the Charlie Anne River even if no one else knew that.
Everything has a song, a kindness, if you just take the time to listen, she told me one night when she was pushing me on my swing in the old elm tree by the barn. We were listening to the owls and the peepers and watching the bats flit across the sky right in front of us. That was back when she used to call me her singing butterfly. “Lots of people don’t know how to
listen, Charlie Anne. But when you do, you know things that other people don’t.” After that I started putting my ear to the turnips growing in the garden, to the barn door, even to Anna May, and listening for their songs.
That is how I know the river likes my name very much. I hear it singing Charlie Anne, Charlie Anne when I am sitting high on the ridge, watching it rush over the rocks and out of my sight. It is a name the wind likes, too. I hear it singing my name in the afternoon when it is sending a quiet little breeze big enough to cool me down after I have been carrying wood for our wood box all morning. There is a kindness to the river and the wind and to lots of other things, if you only take the time to listen, I tell Mirabel. She gets that cross look on her face when I say that, that the trees are singing and the clothesline is tired from its clothes from yesterday and it doesn’t want me to hang up that old rug.
Back before Peter and Birdie came along, back before the last baby, who took Mama away forever, I used to pretend that I was the river. Sometimes I was the summer river, moving all slow and lazy, and singing to the blueberries that stretched almost halfway to the other side, and offering up drinks to the little fawns that still had spots on them. Now when Mirabel yells what is taking so long with the laundry, I am the spring
river, big and fast and in an awful hurry to get away from here.
Wait, I tell the river. Wait for me. But it doesn’t wait. It rushes faster, off to someplace else, and I watch it go.
2
Papa wakes me early. He wants to walk down by the river because he has some things he wants to tell me. He is whispering. I feel my stomach start balling up. The last time Papa said he wanted to talk with me, the news was about Mama and it was very bad.
I pull Peter’s skinny little wrist off my arm. It’s like sleeping with a rolling pin. He’s always turning over and turning around, and besides that, I never have any covers, and I always have to check and see if he wet the bed. I roll away from him and up against Birdie. She opens her eyes and lets out a holler, the way she always does when she wakes up fast, as if the wake-up world is too hard to be in. I tell her, “Shush, Birdie. It’s okay,” even though I know it’s not, because why else would Papa want to walk down by the river? Then Birdie falls back asleep, and I am the only one awake. Even our cat, Big Pumpkin Face, is sleeping, all curled up by my shoulder. I pretend I am asleep. I think about what my papa wants to tell me. My belly is a hard tight spring. Then Papa comes back and asks what I’m still in bed for.
I believe my bed wants me to stay. I listen to it, and
it tells me it does like my company very much. It starts humming that happy tune that makes me start to feel better about things. Then Papa is back and this time he says, “Charlie Anne,” and it is not soft, it is mad with a lot of hurry around the edges. I get up and tell him I can’t get dressed with him watching over me.
“I’ll fire up the cookstove,” he says, and he is gone, shutting the door so quiet you can hardly tell it was ever open at all.
I climb out of bed. I pull my nightgown off and take the dress I wear for chores off the hook. It is Ivy’s old dress, and there are new rips from when Birdie and I went out to check on the blackberries. Mirabel wants me to get another year out of it, so she cut off the sleeves and made it over so it would tie up on my shoulders, but now it hangs funny and looks like what it used to be: a feed sack for chickens.
That’s when Mirabel talked the first time to Papa about Eleanor, my aunt from Boston, and how she and Uncle Will still had some money—even though most everyone else around here has lost all of theirs. Maybe they could give us some, she said. But that made my papa so mad he kicked the compost bucket off our porch, and Mirabel got that big frown on her face and told me I had to clean it all up, the beet tops and the old oatmeal and the carrot peels, plus I had to mop the whole porch and the stairs, just because.