Anybody Shining (6 page)

The next day Lucille wrapped up two more biscuits, just in case Harlan's mama forgot to pack his dinner again, and sure enough he showed up to Miss Sary's empty-handed. Lucille tsk-tsked and tut-tutted, and from that moment on Harlan Boyd was her project.

I don't think he minded too much, except when Lucille talked about visiting his cabin up on Cane Creek. “Someone's got to tell your mama to feed you better!” she declared. “I'm fixing to go up the mountain and tell her myself.”

“She feeds me real good in the morning,” Harlan insisted. “Eggs, sausages, biscuits and gravy, bacon and ham, why, it's all about to topple off my plate, they's so much food. That's why I don't bring no dinner. Ain't hungry again till supper after such a big breakfast.”

Me and Lucille both doubted that story. We
were not the only ones distracted by his stomach's grumbles all morning while Miss Sary sat listening to us read from
The Beacon Primer
.

It was getting on into November, the sky gray and stretched thin, when Lucille took it into her mind to go ahead and do what she'd been threatening to do all fall. “Arie Mae, you come with me,” she said late one Saturday afternoon, “in case they's any bears out there that need shooing away.”

It's true that I'm not afeared of bears, so I agreed to come along.

So we trudged up the mountain, following the creek, until far up in a little clearing we saw the run-down cabin that belonged to Harlan Boyd and his mother Earlene. A sad little curlicue of smoke come out of the chimney, but we couldn't see or hear anybody moving about.

Lucille, who is afeared of bears but not much else, knocked firmly on the cabin door. Mind you, she was but eight years old at the time, come to give Miss Earlene a piece of her mind. It got me to giggling the more I thought
about it. Who on earth ever heard of an eight-year-old bossing around a grown woman? Nobody, probably, until Lucille Sparks come into this land.

“Miss Earlene, I am here to talk to you about your boy Harlan!” Lucille called through the door. “He says you feed him breakfast, but I don't believe this to be the case. He is starving most every morning, Miss Earlene! His stomach growls like a lion! A boy needs to eat, Miss Earlene!”

Dead silence. I imagined Miss Earlene and Harlan standing on the other side of the door, shushing each other so that Lucille wouldn't hear them and would give up and go away.

If that's what they thought was going to happen, they surely did not know who they was dealing with.

“Miss Earlene! Open up!” Lucille shouted, and then she stopped shouting and commenced to throwing her little body at the door. “I'm busting in,” she told me. “I have had enough of this nonsense!”

Well, I shook my head at her foolishness, but I climbed on the porch and threw my weight against the door too. No need for Lucille to break her shoulder.

After a few shoves, the door groaned open and we went reeling into the cabin. There, in a rocking chair by the fireplace, sat Harlan, still as midnight. The walls around him were gray and bare, the only spot of color in the room the red squares of the quilt laid across his lap.

“Where's you mama?” Lucille asked once she got herself steadied. “I come to talk to her.”

“She's gone,” Harlan replied matter-of-factly. “Been gone for about two months now.”

“Where'd she go off to?” I asked, downright flabbergasted that somebody's mama could just up and leave that way.

Harlan shrugged. “Don't know. I woke up one morning and she weren't here. Thought maybe she'd be back soon, maybe with my daddy, but she never did come back.”

“So who told you to go to school?”

Harlan shrugged again. “I told myself.”

Sometimes when Harlan is getting on my last nerve, I think about what it must be like to sit by your ownself for two months, waiting for your mama to come home. Me, by the end of two months, I think I'd just have laid down and died. But not Harlan Boyd. He decided it was time to get on with his life, and that's just what he did.

You can't help but admire a boy like that. Even when he's just snuck under the table and tied your shoelaces to the table leg. You might clobber him, but you stay filled with admiration all the same.

Ever since Harlan has come to live with us, he can hardly sit still. He hops out of bed of a morning and is on the move from this spot to the next all the day long. Sometimes I wonder if I just imagined him sitting still as a stone in that rocking chair up in the cabin. After studying on the matter, I have come to believe Harlan knowed we was on our way to fetch him that day. I think he wanted us to
see that he was a boy who could sit quiet as could be, if that was the sort of boy we needed him to be.

But that ain't the sort of boy we needed him to be at all.

Signed,

Your Cousin,

Arie Mae Sparks

Dear Cousin Caroline,

I keep thinking if I could tell you remarkable things, you would write me back. Who could resist a girl who writes stories of remarkable things? Like one about a boy who goes to scout out a haunted cave and comes running out, his face pale as the moon, crying that a ghost wrapped its ghosty fingers around his neck to strangle him? And sure enough, when the others stepped into the cave, moanings and groanings of a ghosty kind could be heard.

Harlan has admitted that it weren't really
a ghost trying to get aholt of him in the Ghost Cave, but only James pretending. So now I don't have that good story to tell you after all.

Turns out it was just James standing at the back of the cave, trying not to bust up laughing at the sound of his own terrible noises. I'm mad at my ownself for not figuring that out, but in the excitement of Harlan showing us the finger marks from where the ghost tried to strangle him—and there were marks, put there by James, it turns out—I failed to notice that James was not among us.

Ruth Wells looked suspicious when she seen them marks, but Tom? He got right up close and wondered out loud how was it that a ghost had bony fingers.

“There was no ghost,” Ruth said with a sniff, before turning on her heel to head for home. “There's no such thing as ghosts.”

“You don't know that for sure,” Tom called to her back. “There's more to this world than meets the eye, Ruth Wells!”

I hope he won't be too mad when he finds out the truth. He don't strike me as the type who would mind a practical joke, even if he fell for it. Ruth, on the other hand, well, you can tell she's a person that would hate getting tricked. That's probably why she don't let herself believe in interesting things such as haints and boogers.

Me, I'm of the opinion you should keep your mind open to unlikely occurrences and events. I'd bet my bottom dollar that Tom Wells feels the same.

It was Miss Pittman who got the confession out of Harlan this morning. She had come up to the house to try yet again to get Mama to sing for them Baltimore folks. This time she picked a wily way to do it too.

“Maybe Mr. Sparks could accompany you on his fiddle,” Miss Pittman suggested to Mama. They were sitting in the rocking chairs on the porch while Mama did her piecework and us children worked in the little garden out
front. It is a garden with such pretty flowers as lady slippers and fire pinks, and taking care of it is the only chore Lucille and I will fight to do. It seems everything we have got is made from faded-away colors like brown and gray and washed-out blue—our clothes and our quilts and the covers on the bed. But the flowers in our garden sing with pinks and reds and purples, and it's a pleasure to gaze upon them, even if it means mucking around in the dirt while you're plucking out weeds.

“I thought you'uns weren't interested in fiddles,” Mama said. She looked up from her piecework. “I been wondering. Is it because you're religious?”

“I think it's mostly you Baptists who are against music and dancing,” Miss Pittman replied.

“I thought everybody was Baptist,” Lucille said from her perch on the steps. She had given up gardening to visit with Miss Pittman. “I didn't know there was anything else you could be.”

Miss Pittman smiled. “Why, child, there are ever so many ways one can worship the Lord. Where I'm from, there are indeed Baptists, but there are also Methodists and Congregationalists, Catholics—”

“Now, do them Catholics believe in Jesus?” Mama interrupted. “I've heard some say that they don't. They got somebody they call a pope that they worship instead.”

“My grandfather's people were Catholic,” Miss Pittman replied, “and you can rest assured they believed in Jesus. The pope is just their religious leader, the way Pastor Campbell is the religious leader here for the Baptists, only on a much smaller scale.”

I took this all in with some interest. Pastor Campbell is a Baptist preacher, and he is as nice as he can be, but he says that if you don't believe in Jesus, you'll go to hell, no two ways about it. But in Miss Sary's
World Book Encyclopedia
, there are pictures of children in India who follow a different way of thinking. They are called Hindu, and from how I read
things they hardly give Jesus a second thought. I don't care to think of them burning in the fires of hell, and for my money I don't believe Jesus would care to think of it either.

“So if you go to Catholic church, you don't mind folks dancing and playing the fiddle?”

“No, I don't believe that Catholics mind music and dance at all.”

I glanced up at Mama and saw she had that thinking look in her eyes. I bet she was wondering if she turned Catholic, maybe Daddy's barn dances wouldn't be a sin. Daddy was a Baptist, but he had fairly freewheeling notions of what made something a sinful activity, and dancing fell low on that list.

To my way of thinking, a barn dance is the best thing in the world. How they got started here is that last spring Daddy and Larry Peacock put their money together and bought a radio out of the Sears and Roebuck catalog, and then on Saturday nights they took it to Truman Taylor's barn and tuned it to the National Barn Dance on WLS radio out of Chicago, Illinois.

Most folks look forward to Daddy and Mr. Peacock's barn dances all week. You'll be in the middle of some boring old chore like beating out the rugs on the porch rail and all the sudden you remember that Saturday's a-coming. Your toe will start tapping its ownself when you think about all the good radio music you'll hear in Truman Taylor's barn. At the barn dances, folks jig and cut up and have themselves a good time. When the radio show is over, Daddy and Mr. Peacock get out their fiddles and play, and folks dance some more. The very thought of the good times ahead will pull you all the way through the week.

There are them who are against the barn dances. Pastor Campbell has made his stand clear on dancing, which is that it will lead to sin. Most Baptists other than Daddy believe this, but more than one will show up to a barn dance, because they been playing music in their families longer than they been Baptist.

It surprised a lot of folks when Miss Keller and Miss Pittman come out against the barn
dances. For them, it's mostly because of the radio. Miss Keller told Daddy that the songs on the radio lack the nobility of our mountain ballads. “They are tawdry and full of cheap sentiment,” she said.