Betty Raye nodded, big tears welling up in her eyes.
Good-bye
W
HEN THE
O
ATMANS
came to pick up Betty Raye, the Smiths all walked out to the car with her. Minnie leaned out the window and said to Dorothy, “I hope she weren’t no trouble to you, Mrs. Smith.”
“Not at all—we loved having her.”
“I told you she wouldn’t eat much.”
“Mrs. Oatman,” Dorothy said, “could I trouble you to come inside for just a minute? I have something for you.”
Minnie said, “Sure,” and turned to her husband. “Turn the motor off, Ferris, you’re burning up the gas.”
When they were inside the kitchen, she could see that Dorothy had prepared a huge basket of sandwiches and cookies for them to take on their trip.
“Well, ain’t this nice of you. We sure loved them other cookies you give us, we just enjoyed them to the highest.”
Dorothy closed the door and said, “The truth is, Mrs. Oatman, I wanted to get a chance to talk to you privately. Could we sit for just a second?”
“Sure, honey.” Minnie sat down at the table. “And, by the way, thank you for letting us advertise over the radio. We never had so many people to show up . . . they had to bring in a hundred more chairs and benches to fit them all in.”
“You are certainly more than welcome.”
“And thanks again for taking my little girl in.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Mrs. Oatman. . . . I know this is none of my business, but are you aware that Betty Raye shakes?”
Minnie nodded. “Oh yes. She been doing that for I don’t know how long, ever since she was five or six, I guess.” She glanced up at the kitchen window and exclaimed, “Oh, look at your pretty little curtains and all them plants in them little glass fiddles in the window . . . I swear I’ve never seen nothing like that before.”
“Do you know why she shakes, Mrs. Oatman?”
“Call me Minnie, honey. No, I haven’t an idea in the world what makes her to do it. Maybe she’s just too thin for her own good. She’s got all them delicate little bones just like a bird.” She laughed and held up her arm. “She sure don’t take after me. Look, even my wrists are fat. Momma says when your wrists is fat then you know you’re fat.”
“Mrs. Oatman . . . Minnie . . . I know you know best, but considering she’s so shy I just wonder if all this traveling from place to place could have something to do with it.”
“You know, you might be right, Mrs. Smith.” Minnie leaned forward and lowered her voice as she confided to Dorothy, “It pains me to say this but I don’t think gospel singing is in her blood. It just don’t come natural to her. We have to just about drag her onstage and even then she won’t sing out and I can’t understand it for the life of me. She’s got gospel singing on both sides of the family, the boys couldn’t wait to jump on the stage, but Betty Raye . . .” She shook her head sadly. “She was always real different and it’s been hard on all of us, especially her.”
“Yes, I can imagine.”
Minnie sighed. “Mrs. Smith, I know she don’t like traveling and I know she hates singing but what can I do?” Just then Ferris blew the horn and Minnie got up. “Well, I better go. We got to be in Humboldt, Tennessee, for an all-night sing by seven but I sure appreciate you putting her up and all the nice food you made for us.”
As they walked to the car Dorothy said, “We’d be happy to have her back anytime, Mrs. Oatman.” She looked in the car to say good-bye, but Betty Raye was already lost in the crowd in the backseat. Anna Lee and Bobby and Mother Smith all stood and waved good-bye as they drove away.
Mother Smith said, “Lord, those country people love to travel in a pack, don’t they.”
As the car turned the corner, Dorothy felt a wave of sadness and had to fight back tears. There was something about Betty Raye that touched her. She had given Betty Raye their address and asked her to write but she wondered if she would ever see her or hear from her again. When they were out of sight, Dorothy put her arm around Anna Lee. “You were very sweet to her, and I appreciate it.”
Bobby piped up behind them. “I was sweet to her. I gave her one of my best rocks.”
“Did you?” said Dorothy and put her other arm around Bobby, which is what he wanted in the first place. They walked back to the house together. Bobby added, “Yeah, and it was probably worth a hundred dollars, too, or maybe even more!”
Anna Lee asked her mother, “Do you think she had a good time while she was here or did she just hate it?”
“I don’t know, honey,” Dorothy said. “I hope she enjoyed herself. But I really don’t know.”
What They Didn’t Know
F
OUR HOURS LATER
and a hundred and seventy-eight miles from Elmwood Springs, the Oatmans were crossing over the Tennessee River. Betty Raye was mashed between her older brothers, Bervin and Vernon, who were hitting at each other, and as usual everyone in the car was talking at the same time. Minnie was fussing at Ferris because he had not stopped at the last gas station so she could go to the bathroom. Chester the dummy was out of his box, yammering away at Ferris and complaining because Floyd had also wanted to stop at the gas station and get himself a cold Dr Pepper. But Ferris, who was determined to drive straight through without stopping, ignored them and started singing his favorite hymn, “Oh for a Thousand Tongues.” Betty Raye sat in the back with her eyes closed, holding on to the small rock Bobby had given her, and tried to shut the noise out all the way to Humboldt.
What the Smith family did not know and she had been unable to tell them was that theirs was the nicest house she had ever stayed in. Compared with the hundreds of sofa pads on the floor and the lumpy beds she had shared with as many as four or five children, to her the little sewing room had been as grand as the Mansion on a Hill her mother was always singing about. The reason she had not wanted Anna Lee’s room was not because she did not like it. It was the most beautiful bedroom she had ever seen, in fact, much too nice for her. The real problem was its size. She would have been scared to stay in such a big room. She was used to staying in the small homes around the various country churches where they usually sang. If the Smiths thought she ran to her room every time she got a chance because she had not liked them, they were wrong. It was just the first time in her life she had ever been able to go in a room and shut the door and be completely alone—the first time she could remember not being surrounded by family and by strangers. If they had wondered what she had been doing in her room, they might have been surprised to know that she had done absolutely nothing but sit quietly for hours at a time. And as far as not liking Anna Lee, nothing could have been further from the truth. She thought Anna Lee was wonderful and was in awe of her and her friends. If she had not talked much it was only because she could not think of anything to say. She had liked everyone she met, particularly Dorothy, who had been so nice to her. On that last morning it had taken all her strength just to keep herself from begging them to let her stay. She had only been in Elmwood Springs for one week but it had been the best week of her life.
But by this time next week the Oatmans would be headed to Fayetteville, North Carolina, for another revival and dinner on the ground, and Elmwood Springs would be farther and farther away.
Stargazing
T
HE
F
RIDAY AFTER
Betty Raye left, Bobby’s Cub Scout troop was supposed to have gone on a field trip to the Indian mounds outside of town to look for arrowheads. The trip was canceled because of rain. But Bobby did not mind. He loved to go sit on the porch on warm rainy days and listen to the sounds of the cars swishing up and down the wet streets. Everything was green and lush and wet. He daydreamed all afternoon until about four o’clock, when the sun came back out as bright as ever. But the rain had left the air fresh and cleared away some of the mugginess of August. This was Monroe’s turn to spend the night with him, and after dinner, as usual, they all started to wander out onto the porch. Mother Smith walked over to the edge and looked up at the sky and announced, “I’m going out and look at the stars. Anybody want to come with me?” Bobby and Monroe said they would go and all three headed out to the backyard. Mother Smith sat in a wooden chair and Bobby and Monroe lay on the lawn beside her to enjoy the show. “It’s so clear tonight,” Mother Smith said. “Have you ever seen so many pretty stars? Look, there’s the Big Dipper and Venus. I’ll bet we see a shooting star before the night’s over.”
Bobby loved to be with Mother Smith like this, watching for shooting stars and asking her questions.
“Grandma, what was the world like when you were little? Was everything real different?”
“Well, it was a different time.”
“Did people look different than we do?”
“No, people looked pretty much the same but we didn’t have a lot of things you do today. Don’t forget, that was way back in the eighteen hundreds.”
“During the Civil War?” asked Monroe, wide-eyed.
“Not that far back. But I can remember my father talking about it and when I was little we had this sword hung over the mantelpiece.”
“A sword?” said Bobby. “A real one?”
“Oh yes. He was a Confederate soldier during the war.”
“Did he kill people with it?”
“Oh, I doubt it. I think it was mostly for show.”
“Do you still have it?”
“No, that was years ago. I think my brother took it or maybe it got lost.”
Bobby said, “But he was a real soldier though, wasn’t he?”
“Absolutely, and so was your Great-grandfather Smith on your daddy’s daddy’s side, but he fought for the Union. Both from the same town. But that’s how it was back then.”
Bobby was amazed. He could not imagine that his grandmother had been alive so long ago. “Were there stars back then?”
She laughed. “Yes, honey, when I was your age I saw the same stars and moon that are up there now. Nature doesn’t change, just people. New ones are born every year but the stars and the moon stay the same. We just didn’t have cars or movies or radios or electricity yet.”
“What was that like?”
“Very quiet.”
Monroe made a face. “That must have been terrible.”
“Yeah,” Bobby agreed. “You must have been bored.”
“Not really. We had other things. We had books and we played games and sang and went to parties. You know, you don’t miss what you don’t know.”
“What did you want to be when you grew up, Grandma?”
Mother Smith smiled. “Believe it or not, at one time I thought I’d like to be a famous scientist like Madame Curie, maybe find a cure for some terrible disease.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“My father could only afford to send one child to college, so Brother was the one to go and there went my dreams of being the next Madame Curie.”
Bobby said, “Tell us about where you went on your honeymoon and that hotel.”
“Bobby, you’ve heard that story a hundred times.”
“I don’t care, Monroe hasn’t heard it. Tell it again.”
“I haven’t heard it,” said Monroe.
“Well . . . after your grandfather and I were married we got on the train and rode it all the way to North Carolina for our honeymoon. He wouldn’t tell me where we were going. He wanted it to be a surprise and all he would tell me was that it was a famous hotel overlooking the most beautiful lake in the world. I’ll never forget that first night we were there. After dinner we walked out on this wide veranda overlooking the lake and they had all these pretty different-colored little paper Chinese lanterns strung all from one end to the other. Then, around eight o’clock, as soon as it got really dark, everybody in the hotel came out on the porch and said, ‘Look out on the lake.’ ”
On cue Bobby asked, “Then what happened?”
“Well, all of a sudden this huge sign made up of a thousand golden light bulbs lit up that said
HOTEL LUMINAIRE
right out in the middle of the lake.”
“Whoa!” said Monroe.
“Then we all went down and got into canoes and rowed all the way out to the sign. I don’t know which was a prettier sight, looking back at the hotel and seeing all those little green and red and yellow Chinese lanterns glowing in the dark or paddling right through the words
HOTEL LUMINAIRE
reflected in the water. It was a magical night, I can tell you that.”
“Now tell him about going to Coney Island.”
“I will. So . . . from there we went to New York City but it was so hot that every day we would ride the trolley way out to the ocean to Coney Island and walk around and see all the sights.”
Bobby punched Monroe. “Just wait till you hear the next part.”
“And we went to this big amusement park called Dreamland, so big that they had an entire little town in there, called Midget City. You could go in and nobody lived there except hundreds of tiny midgets.”
“Whoa!” said Monroe.
“They had their own little houses and stores and their own little midget mayor and tiny midget policeman. When we went through we met the nicest little married midget couple who had two normal-sized children that lived in New Jersey.”
“Oh, wow,” said Monroe, impressed out of his mind. “I’d give anything to see a town full of midgets.”
“It was a sight I’ll never forget.”
“What else do you remember in olden times that was great like that, Grandma?”
“Well, let’s see. I remember at the turn of the century, January the first, 1900—that was a big event.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, there were parties everywhere and at midnight of 1899 everybody in Independence went out in the street and rang bells and blew whistles and set off firecrackers and stayed up all night ringing in the next century. We thought the twentieth century was going to be the best one, but not more than fourteen years after that World War One started, so there went that dream out the window.”
After a moment Mother Smith said, “Well, boys, it’s getting late, so I’m going to leave you two to the stars and head on in.”