The Wonder of Charlie Anne (20 page)

Rosalyn asks Mrs. Morrell if maybe the girls could go to school tomorrow, and by the time we get the
house clean and warmed with a fire, she is saying that maybe they could.

“Can Charlie Anne come, too?” Phoebe asks Mirabel, and then everyone is looking at Mirabel.

Mirabel twists a towel around her fingers. “Gosh, it’s getting hot in here,” she says. Then she opens all the windows to let some fresh air in.

The oldest Thatcher boy is chopping wood by the barn, and he looks up as we pull into the driveway. He isn’t wearing a coat, and he has that mean look he’s had since his father got killed in that hunting accident.

This was Old Mr. Jolly’s idea, to bring food over. Maybe he could get to the mother and talk to her about her oldest son, he told us.

Old Mr. Jolly turns off the truck, and we watch big dogs on chains howl and jump toward us, and I think on how you’d have to be crazy as a loon to get out of the truck.

The house is turned gable-face to the road, which means the front door looks out on a field overgrown with ragweed and thistle. The side door is covered with poison ivy. Three doghouses sit on the grass and the clothesline creaks around and around. Paint is peeling and cracking off every single clapboard.

After a while, the oldest Thatcher boy comes over to the truck, an ax over his shoulder. Two other boys come out of the house and watch us. No one is wearing shoes.

“What do you want?”

Old Mr. Jolly opens the truck and climbs out and slowly straightens his back. He is tall, now that Rosalyn makes him stand up straight. “We brought some things over. We hear your mother is sick.”

The boy backs up a pace. “We don’t need no help.”

“We know you and your brothers are fine,” Old Mr. Jolly says, pointing to the porch, where there are now four boys standing beside a broken swing. “We brought food for your mother. How is she?”

“Poorly,” he says. “She has the influenza.” The boy is stubbing his toe into the dirt.

“Well, she might like this,” says Rosalyn, climbing out of the other side of the truck, carrying a basket, keeping her eye on the dogs. “There’s soup and bread and apple dumplings and pie.”

Rosalyn holds out the basket. “Can we go up and see your mother?”

“She don’t like company.” The boy scratches his toe in the dirt again.

Rosalyn watches the dogs. “I can see that.”

Mirabel climbs out of the truck. I watch her noticing the dirt all over the boy’s neck and his ripped shirt and dirty feet.

Rosalyn takes a step closer and sets the basket in front of him. “We’re opening the school tomorrow, if you’d like to come.”

I look at Phoebe, my mouth open. “NO!” I can’t
believe Rosalyn is inviting the oldest Thatcher boy. I remember how he stuck my braid in the inkwell on my desk, and how Miss Moran thought I had done it myself to get attention. “NO!” I say again.

The oldest Thatcher boy turns and looks at Phoebe and me. I look right back at him, daring him to look away first.

“Is she going?” he asks, pointing to Phoebe.

“Yes,” says Rosalyn, her voice slow and careful. “The school is for everyone.”

“I ain’t going to no colored school.”

No rock is necessary this time. The words cut Phoebe all by themselves. Then he picks the basket up off the ground and walks to the porch and tells his brothers to get in the house now or he will beat them silly, and then he follows them inside and slams the door.

We notice the garbage all over the porch, and then Mirabel marches after the Thatcher boys. Old Mr. Jolly starts after her. We’ll just see about that, I tell my feet, and I am hurrying right behind.

It smells like cats, many, many cats that don’t have the sense to pee outside. Blankets are nailed over the windows to keep the sun out.

“Where’s your mother?” Mirabel asks, and the little one points to the bedroom.

“Ma’am?” says Mirabel, going in. “Mrs. Thatcher?”

Mirabel is right over, pulling the blankets down and opening the windows so she can see better. The bedroom is not much bigger than our pantry. Mrs. Thatcher has only a sheet covering her, and she shivers when the fresh air comes pouring in the room.

Mirabel turns to us. “This is going on right under our noses? My goodness.”

“You,” she says to one of the middle boys. “Go get some fresh water. And you,” she says to another, “go put on some tea. And somebody get a mop, for God’s sake, and clean this room up.”

Mirabel forgets all about her manners book and orders us all around for the next couple of hours. When we are done, Mrs. Thatcher is eating a piece of vinegar pie and sipping some strong tea. Mirabel has written down chores for all the boys to do. “I’m coming back tomorrow to make sure these things are done.”

“They can’t read,” I whisper to her. Mirabel looks at Rosalyn, and turns a little red. Then she reads the list. “Make sure all the cats stay out of the house. That’s number one.”

As we are leaving, Mirabel turns to the oldest Thatcher boy. “My girls are going to school tomorrow. And if you try to stop them, you’ll have me to answer to. Do you understand?”

I feel my heart lighten, just listening to Mirabel say
that. I wonder when she changed her mind about the school. The littlest boy is nodding, up and down, up and down. The oldest Thatcher boy is giving me an ugly look. I know things are not over.

When we get back, Old Mr. Jolly says he has been wanting to fix that swing of mine for some time now and he needs something to do to keep his mind off things and would that be all right and I say yes, yes, it surely would.

Well. When we are done getting the ropes up to the highest limb that can hold me, I swing farther than I ever have before, almost all the way up to where Mama is, and she is laughing, she is so happy for me.

I tell her I am still too mad to talk to her and she says that’s okay. Sometimes that’s the way things are when mamas die. Sometimes there are a lot of mad feelings that need working out.

I believe my bed wants me to stay, and it starts humming that happy tune that makes me feel better about things, but I am very stern with it this morning and tell it that no, today I am going back to school, where Rosalyn knows how to help readers like me.

I put my feet on the cold floorboards, and my toes are so happy they don’t even notice. I give Birdie a hurry-up–get-up kiss on the cheek, and she hollers to be entering the wake-up world so early, and I yell at Ivy to get up or she will sleep right through this amazing, wonderful day.

Ivy rolls over and sticks her head under the pillow, but I am already jumping into my sunflower trousers. A girl who is going to school can pick out what she wants to wear, Mirabel or no Mirabel. Then I rush down the stairs and out the door to Belle and Anna May.

It is so early the sun’s not even up and I hear the trees along the road waking each other. They tell the stone wall not to grumble so much about standing still. Being strong is no small thing, they say, and they are right, but I am glad for my feet and how they can fly out to the barn.

Olympia and Minnie and Bea still have their heads tucked under their wings, and Anna May wants to know what I am doing here looking for milk so early. Belle is wondering what the dickens is going on.

“Oh, happy day!” I yell over to Minnie and Olympia and Bea, and they look up and start clucking about being woken up, and then I reach around and give Anna May a big hug, and then I go get the milk pail and the stool and put it down beside her and tell her she better be good, or else. I don’t have time for any fooling around.

Anna May turns around and gives me one of her grumpy looks. “Oh, don’t you be doing that,” I tell her, and when I get the pail nearly full of milk and am thinking about being with Phoebe at school and how I’m going to learn to read so well that even Becky Ellis can’t laugh, that’s when Anna May lets her kicking foot fly and she sends the bucket straight up in the air and the milk comes flying down all over me and my new trousers.

I do more than give Anna May my most terrible mad look. I give her a you-know-what on the backside.

“They aren’t so bad. I will wear them anyway,” I am telling Mirabel.

“You will not wear soaking wet trousers to school. You can wear your dress.” Mirabel is fixing twice as
many biscuits as usual because she’s taking some over to the Thatchers to make sure they have done their chores.

“I don’t want to wear that dress,” I wail. My bright yellow trousers are stuck to my legs and Ivy is laughing. She is eating biscuits, and Birdie is only eating the blackberry jam. Ivy and Birdie are wearing the madeover dresses that Mirabel made, purple as pansies and decorated with ribbon and lace that Mrs. Ellis sent over.

I cross my arms over my chest and just stand there in the middle of the kitchen, dripping, smelling potatoes boil and thinking how mad I am at Anna May.

“Remember what we read last night?” Mirabel says, looking over at me, a frown already on her face. “Remember what you are to do when you are angry?”

I remember.

I do not think this is easy when Ivy is laughing at you and your trousers are sticking to you like butter on bread.

*    *    *

I believe my trousers want to go to school. They are unhappy that Mirabel is making me hang them on the line. I am very firm with them and say how they mustn’t be mad at me. Blame Anna May, or even better, blame Mirabel. She’s the one making me wear this pea green made-over dress that is so big it reaches down and touches the top of my shoes.

Mama whispers softly that it will be all right. No one will care about what I am wearing, especially not Rosalyn. Mama says wait till I see what Old Mr. Jolly has done with the woodshed.

What? I ask, starting to tremble.

Don’t worry, Charlie Anne. He’s filling it with wood, not children. Hurry, or you’ll be late.

It takes Ivy about a hundred more minutes to get her hair pinned just right. Then I take Birdie’s hand and tell her we are going to wait by the road for Phoebe, and Birdie keeps asking me if we will get lemon drops. She doesn’t understand that school isn’t the place for lemon drops. It’s the place for reading.

When Phoebe comes out of her house with Rosalyn, they are both wearing bright yellow trousers.

“Where are yours?” Phoebe wants to know, and I point to the clothesline and my dripping pair of pants.

“Oh,” says Phoebe, and Rosalyn tells me she thinks
I look just wonderful in my pea green dress, and after that I feel much better.

Ivy keeps looking over her shoulder to see if Becky is coming, but I tell her she must be forgetting about how Mrs. Ellis wanted a teacher from Boston.

“She won’t be coming, will she?” I ask Rosalyn, and Rosalyn puts her lips in a straight line, just like Papa.

“No, I don’t think she will. Maybe some other day. People have a way of changing if you wait long enough.”