Me and Billy (11 page)

“Dear Lord, we heartily thank Thee for what we are about to receive of Thy bounty,” Mr. Singletary began. He carried on for a while like that. I couldn’t see those potatoes, but with my head bent over like that my nose was only about a foot away from them, and I could smell them, hot and sweet. Then, next door to me, I heard a kind of rustle. I slid one eye open and took a quick look. Betty Ann and her pa had their heads down, praying. Billy had his head down and his eyes closed, too, but his jaw was moving.

Finally Mr. Singletary decided we’d suffered enough and said, “Amen.” We dug in. I stuck to my manners, but there was no hope of Billy doing it. Whenever he figured Betty Ann and her pa weren’t noticing, he snatched at the food with his fingers.

Betty Ann’s pa spent the time asking us a whole lot of questions, and that slowed us down some. And he started right off with the one I always hated. “That’s your real name? Possum?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What’s your last name?”

Here it came again. “That’s it. Possum’s my whole name.”

He frowned. “They never gave you a last name? That wasn’t a Christian thing to do.”

“I guess they could have given me a last name, but Deacon, I think he figured it served me right for being an orphan.”

“Possum, why didn’t you give yourself a last name?” Betty Ann said.

“There wasn’t any point to it. Nobody would have called me by it. The boys would have just pestered me about it. You know, if I called myself Jones they’d of called me ‘bones,’ or ‘groans,’ or something.”

“Poor Possum,” Betty Ann said, reaching over to pat my arm. That was the first time in my whole life I’d found any advantage in not having a last name. “Well, you’re not in the Home anymore. You can give yourself a last name now. Nobody’ll ever know it isn’t real.”

“It wouldn’t be the same. I never figured it would count unless I got it done official.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that, Possum,” Mr. Singletary said. “In this country people are forever giving themselves last names. You take somebody just
come over from Poland or Italy or someplace, got a name nobody over here can say. Probowinosky or something. Change it to Powell or Porter or something. Happens all the time.”

“You mean I could just give myself a name and everybody would have to call me by it?” I couldn’t believe it could be true.

“Well, it’d be better if you went to court and got the judge to OK it. That way nobody could argue with you about it. But most people, they don’t bother going to court. Just take whatever name suits them.”

I sat there feeling excited and happy. I could really give myself a last name if I wanted. I decided not to get in any hurry about it. Choosing a last name was something you ought to think about and do real careful. You wanted to pick one you could stick with for a while.

But I didn’t want to say any of this, so I changed the subject. “We were trying to figure how far it was over to those mountains. When we started out we reckoned it was maybe ten miles, but they kept backing off from us.”

“Ten miles?” Mr. Singletary said. “More like fifty.”

“Fifty miles?” My heart sank. That was a powerful piece of walking. “How long do you reckon it’ll take us?”

“Oh, three, four days, most likely.” He gave us a look. “Why do you want to go up there?”

Billy gave me a kick under the table. I didn’t like lying to them, not with them being so nice to us and all, but I figured I better duck around it as best as I could. “We heard there was a lot of interesting sights up there.”

He looked serious and gave his head a shake. “People around here shy away from those mountains. You hear all kinds of stories about fellas going in there and never coming out again. They say you can get lost real easy. My advice is to keep away from there.”

“If people never come back,” Billy said, “how come they know what it’s like?”

“Well, I guess they don’t all get lost. Every once in a while a fella comes staggering out near starved to death, all bit and scratched up. He’ll tell you how he came up a ravine ten feet ahead of the others, and suddenly they weren’t there anymore and are probably dead.” He shook his head. “I’d keep out of there.”

“Why do they keep going in, if it’s so risky?”

“Oh, there’s all kinds of stories about what’s up there. Rubies as big as your fist lying on the ground, diamonds and gold just for the taking. You can’t put any stock in it.”

So there wasn’t any secret about it. Why shouldn’t we put any stock in it? I didn’t want to hear that. I didn’t say anything.

“That’s what we heard,” Billy said. “That there was a lake up there with chunks of gold lying all over bottom.”

I wished he hadn’t said that, but it was too late.

“Who told you that?” Mr. Singletary said.

“The cook back there at the Home,” Billy said.

“Where’d he get his information from?”

I jumped in. “He was up there. He saw it himself.”

I noticed Betty Ann was staying out of the conversation. In fact, she got up from the table, went over to the stove, and started fixing a plate of food. But I was worrying more about what Pa Singletary was saying about that lake, for I didn’t want anyone to take the idea away from me. “No, he saw it himself. He got lost, like you said people did, and stumbled on it. He couldn’t swim and couldn’t dive down for the gold, so he left, and came back a little while later with a rake to scoop the gold off the bottom. But this time he couldn’t find the lake.”

Mr. Singletary studied me for a minute. “Do you really believe that story, Possum? You look smarter than that.”

I blushed. Still, why couldn’t it be true? “Cook said he saw it. He said he saw all that gold on the bottom, plain as day.”

“Doesn’t it seem odd to you that he couldn’t find it again? It’s mighty hard to lose a lake.”

“Mr. Singletary, you said yourself anybody could get lost up there.”

He turned to Billy. “What about you, Billy?”

“I never believed a word Cook said. But he’s too dumb to have made that story up.”

“So you’re just as set on going as Possum is?”

“My heart won’t be broke if we don’t find that lake. But I reckon it’s worth the risk.”

I was bound and determined not to get talked out of it, so I changed the subject. “Betty Ann, do you know how to swim?”

“Sure,” she said. She had the plate of food on a stool by the stove and was carefully cutting the meat into bite-sized pieces. “There’s a swimming hole down the road a ways where a creek goes under a bridge. Sometimes when it’s real hot, the kids from the farms around here go swimming there.”

I looked at Mr. Singletary and back at Betty Ann. “Suppose we were to stay and help you get the hay in. Would you teach us to swim?”

“I can already swim,” Billy said.

“No, you can’t, Billy,” I said. “You never swam a stroke in your life.”

“Oh, yes I did. I swam in that lake once when those Charity Ladies took us out. I was doing pretty good until I sucked in that loose water.”

I decided to let it go and looked at Betty Ann and her pa. “It’ll take Betty Ann a couple of weeks to get that hay in by herself.”

Mr. Singletary nodded, thinking about it. “We could use the help, no doubt of that. But if you’re learning to swim just so you can dive down after that gold, I don’t think I ought to encourage it.”

“Please, Pa,” Betty Ann said. “Let them stay.”

“I’ll sleep on it,” he said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small gold watch. It wasn’t near as noble as the watch that fella Robinson waved around; even at a distance I could see that some of the gold was wore off. He took out his handkerchief and gave the watch a little polishing. Then he snapped it shut. “Betty Ann, you better get that supper up to your ma. The boys and I’ll clean up here.” She went off with the plate, but not before I noticed that lying across the food was a big spoon—no fork, no knife.

We cleaned up, and after a bit Betty Ann came down. Pa Singletary took another look at the watch, once again gave it a little swipe with his handkerchief, and closed it. “Time for prayers,” he said.

We all knelt down on the kitchen floor, and Pa Singletary prayed. He went on for a good while and only stopped when he realized that Betty Ann was sound asleep setting on her knees. The poor thing, she’d been out in that hay field since first thing in the morning.

Pa Singletary showed us to a little room upstairs. We’d be squeezed, but after sleeping under that van for two weeks, it looked mighty fine. So we lay down, and we were just dozing off when there came through the dark a kind of steady, low moan, like a hum with a gurgle in it. We both sat bolt upright. “What’s that?” Billy whispered.

The moan went on and on. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s Betty Ann’s ma.”

“Do you think she’s a lunatic?”

The moaning went on. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe that’s the problem. Did you notice Betty Ann didn’t bring her a knife or a fork, just a spoon? I guess they figure she’s dangerous.”

Billy flung back the blankets. “I’m gonna look. I never saw a lunatic before.”

I grabbed his arm. “It’s none of your business, Billy. You stay put.”

“I can if I want to,” he said. Just then the moaning stopped.

“Besides, she’s bound to be locked in. You couldn’t get in there, anyway.”

Billy lay down again. “I’m going to find out tomorrow. I want to see what she looks like.”

There were some things you just couldn’t get across to Billy, such as how other people might feel about something. “She probably doesn’t look like anything, Billy. Just some lady who moans. Leave her be.”

“I want to see what she looks like.”

We lay there quiet for a while, and then Billy said, “I don’t know about this whole idea, Possum. As soon as I get a look at Betty Ann’s ma, I’d rather push off for the mountains.”

“We got to learn how to swim sooner or later, Billy. You wouldn’t want to be looking down at all that gold and not have any way to get it out, would you?”

“We could learn along the way. There’s bound to be streams and lakes here and there.”

“Who’s going to teach us?” I said.

“I reckon we could figure it out for ourselves.”

“Why do that when we got somebody to teach us?”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he said,
“Possum, I don’t know how long I can stand all this praying and having good table manners and watching my mouth because there’s a girl around. It doesn’t suit me.”

“It’ll only be a few days, Billy. Just until we get the hay in and learn to swim.”

He lay there for a while more. Then he said, “Possum, I know me. It’s going to get to me, all this praying and such. I’ll only be able to stand it so long. Sooner or later I’m bound to do something bad.”

“You can hold out for a few days, Billy. We got to learn to swim.”

But I knew all that stuff about learning to swim was a lie. It’d been a lie from the beginning. The truth was, I wanted to stay there for a while. I’d never been in such a place in my whole life. Never been anyplace but the Home, and then camping out by the Professor’s van. I wasn’t exactly sure what it was about the Singletary place that got me. Neat and tidy, for one. Back at the Home we were supposed to keep ourselves clean and were always being set to scrubbing floors and washing windows. But things didn’t hold together too good. There was always clothes laying on the floor, boys hollering and getting into fights, Deacon or
somebody yelling, some boy getting a whipping and screaming and crying.

And then Prof skinning people of their hard-earned money and not caring if anybody got better or worse for the medicine. And here was Betty Ann out there in the broiling sun all day getting the hay in, her pa refusing to take any money for supper and giving us a bed to sleep in, where most people would have shoved us out into the barn.

I’d lived so long at the Home, it was hard for me to believe that things could be any different. Could it really be true that people didn’t have to fight all the time and try to cheat each other? Billy wouldn’t believe it; I knew that. I wasn’t even sure I believed it, either. But I wanted to find out more.

So I knew I was lying to Billy when I said we had to stay so’s to learn to swim. I didn’t feel bad about lying, either.

He didn’t say anything for a minute. I lay there listening to him breathe. “Well, I guess if you put it that way, Possum, I got to go along with it. But don’t push me too far. I can only take so much praying and tidiness.”

I lay there feeling mighty happy. I knew we couldn’t stay forever. We weren’t invited to, for one thing. For another, I was bound and determined to find that lake. But we could stay for a little while.

Of course Billy couldn’t wait until we got out of earshot of Pa Singletary to ask Betty Ann about her ma. We were going along the little farm road toward the hay field, with Betty Ann up on the seat driving the mules, and me and Billy sitting in the wagon.

”Hey, Betty Ann,” Billy said. “What’s the matter with your ma?”

Betty Ann snapped the reins over the mules. “She’s got something wrong with her, is all.”

“Leave it alone, Billy,” I said in a low voice.

“What makes her moan like that?”

“She only moans sometimes,” Betty Ann said.

“She moaned pretty good last night,” Billy said. “What happened to her?”

Betty Ann snapped the reins over the mules again but didn’t answer. After a while she said, “Going to be mighty hot by ten o’clock. Maybe we should of brought another water jug.”

Billy got the idea and dropped the subject. Still, he couldn’t let the whole thing rest. At supper time that night he told Betty Ann he’d help carry up her ma’s food. Betty Ann said she didn’t need any help; it was only a plate and a spoon. And when we were getting ready for bed, he slipped out into the hall and tried the knob on Ma Singletary’s door. “Blame thing’s locked,” he told me when he came back.

“I told you it would be,” I said.

“I got to figure how to get in there,” he said.

“Forget about it, Billy.”

But he didn’t. Once I saw him outside the house, studying the windows to Ma Singletary’s room. It’d be easy enough to haul a ladder out of the barn and climb up, but he’d have to do it in daylight when he could see in, and Betty Ann or her pa were bound to spot him. Pa Singletary kept the key in his pants pocket, so there wasn’t much chance of Billy getting ahold of it. Still, I knew Billy—once his curiosity about a thing got risen up, he couldn’t let it rest. To be fair about it, it was hard to let it go, for every couple of nights we’d hear that long, low moan. The sound chilled my blood—I didn’t want to see anyone who made a sound like that, but it kept Billy’s interest up.