Coming up to the grave, I press Woody’s arms down to her sides and say, “Hey, there.”
“Mornin’, Shen,” Bootie says, thrusting his shovel into the dirt. He’s towheaded with a cleft in his chin that I’ve always wanted to stick my finger in to see how deep it’d go. First knuckle, I bet. “Haven’t seen you in forever.” Bootie looks more plumped out in the body than the last time I saw him but none of it’s chub. His bare chest is smooth, but the hair under his arms matches his brown eyes and he’s still got the most luscious smile. Like a gooey dessert. “Where ya gonna sit on parade day?”
“In the park with Beezy,” I say. “Like always.”
After Woody and I have led the Parade of Perpetual Princesses most of the way down Main, we peel off so we can join Beezy and the rest of the Negroes. The parade doesn’t go through Mudville so they got to watch it as it winds past Buffalo Park. Even though we are light-skinned, Woody and me are always nicely tanned by this time of the year. We also wear straw hats that cast shadows upon our faces so we do not stick out like two whitefish in that sea of brown bodies. (We have to be careful not to get noticed by Grampa, who does not in any way, shape, or form approve of us associating with Beezy or any of the other coloreds in a social way.)
When the parade turns the corner and heads our way, I tell Beezy every year beneath the shade of that big maple, “Here comes the high school band.”
Tittering from her folding chair, Beezy will say, “I’m blind, child, not deaf.”
“You’re blind? Really? How come nobody told me?” I’ll say in mock surprise, because she’s got one of those great booming kinds of laughs that you would never suspect could come out of somebody so small. “Next up are six baton twirlers whose sparkly uniforms are a mite skimpy on top and riding up in the back, especially Dot Halloran’s. (Never have been able to stand Dot, not sure why.) “Right behind them are Joe Morton and Cal Whitcomb dressed up like Uncle Sams and waving to everybody. After them, the float with Grampa in that Confederate uniform is coming. He’s sitting on top in that golden horseshoe throne.” I always spit into the grass once he passes by. “There’s six black horses makin’ a mess all over the street behind him.”
Beezy will sniff the air at that point and remark, “Always thought those animals were a lot smarter than folks give ’em credit for,” and that never fails to crack me up ’cause I think Grampa stinks, too.
“Whose body ya diggin’ that hole for?” I ask Bootie, narrowing it down to a Caucasian since Stonewall Jackson Cemetery doesn’t allow coloreds. They got to start their trip to the Promised Land over at Evergreen.
“This here is Mr. Minnow’s grave,” Bootie replies with a respectful bow of his head.
“
Clive
Minnow?” I may sound surprised, but I’m really not. I’ve been wondering why I haven’t seen our neighbor around lately. Usually when I’m doing some afternoon reading, he’ll appear in his adjoining woods with his metal-detecting device. Of course, Papa told me to stay away from him. They do not get along because you got to walk on eggshells around His Honor and Clive wasn’t light on his feet.
“Are you absolutely positive it’s Mr. Clive Minnow that you’ll be buryin’ here?” I ask, recalling how the last time I saw him, he didn’t look fatally sick. He
had
been complaining of stomachaches off and on, but that wasn’t unusual. A few years ago when Clive was convinced that he had gotten a brain tumor, I got worried because I’d seen a man on the Dr. Ben Casey television show get the same thing and he expired during the first fifteen minutes. But when I told Mama, she wasn’t upset one bit.
“He’s all right, Shenny. It’s not a brain tumor, just a headache,” she said, handing me a bottle of aspirins from the cupboard. “Mr. Clive is what is known as a hypochondriac.”
“A hypo
whatee
ac?”
“A hypochondriac,” she said slowly. “That’s a person who thinks that they’re either sick or about to become sick or much sicker than they really are, but it’s only in their head.”
“But a brain tumor
is
all in somebody’s head!” I protested, but after I looked the word up in the dictionary that made sense.
Hypochondriac
means that Clive was the kind of person who had quite the imagination when it came to illness and that’s really true. Over the years, I’ve lost count of the number of times he told me that he thought he was coming down with polio or chicken pox, even leprosy and malaria. I explained to him we don’t have those last two diseases in the Commonwealth, but he hissed, “Ain’t nobody ever taught you that there’s a first time for everything, little girl?”
“How’d he die?” I ask, feeling guilty.
Bootie says, “Virgil went up to the Minnow place to deliver groceries Saturday morning like always. Nobody answered the door, so Virgil went looking. He found Clive facedown at the edge of the creek, his dog whinin’ by his side.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” I say with genuine regret. He and I had recently been bickering over a ring he’d found in the woods with his detecting device, but that’s not an excuse. I should’ve stopped by the Minnow place more often than I had been to check up on him. “Poor Clive. Poor Ivory.”
“Who?” Booty asks.
“That’s the name of Clive’s dog. Ivory Minnow.”
Bootie pulls the shovel out of the dirt, using muscles that look like they could keep you safe. “I heard drownin’s one of the worst ways to go.”
“Yeah, I heard that, too.”
My other grandparents drowned. For a while there, I think the sheriff thought that’s what happened to our mother, too. He had half the county searching the creek’s banks and bushes for her. The day Woody and I were out there watching, I pulled him aside and told him, “She’s a good swimmer. She was on the water ballet team in college.”
Sheriff Nash, who is not particularly smart, but
is
well-mannered, said, “Don’t think your mother drowned, Miss Shen. The rowboat is missin’.”
I told him, “But Mama would never take the boat by herself,” but would he listen?
He pulled me behind a yew bush and said in a lowered voice, “Are you aware of your mother and father havin’ any . . . ?”
That’s when His Honor spotted us and hurried over. He said to the sheriff, “That’ll be all, Andy,” and then he dragged me farther into the bushes and reprimanded me. “Take your sister back up to the house immediately. Her crying is upsetting the hounds.”
Papa.
“Nice job on the hole, Bootie. Keep up the good work. Time to go, Woody,” I say, grabbing her by the arm and praying that this isn’t one of those times when she makes herself as stiff as her name. She can do that when she doesn’t want to leave one place and go to another. I don’t have time to look for a coaster wagon to set her in. We should’ve been back at Lilyfield by now.
“Wait a tick, Shen,” Bootie says, toeing the dirt at the bottom of the grave. “I . . . I was wondering if you’d like to . . . Y’all are goin’ to the carnival, right?”
“A course we are. Right, Woody?”
No matter how much our father warns us about staying out of the public eye, the Carmodys are the descendants of those that get celebrated during Founders Weekend. Grampa Gus will insist that we not miss any of the “brouhaha,” and that includes the two nights of the carnival, which is just fine and dandy with us. Woody and I have always gone crazy for those rickety rides and penny pitching games and most of all, the Oddities of Nature sideshow, which has an Armadillo Boy and the beefiest gal in the world named Baby Doll Susan, who lives behind a wall of glass with a refrigerator and a floral sofa set on cinder blocks. The best oddities
,
though, have got to be the Siamese twins. There was a time when I praised Jesus for not planting Woody and me so close inside of Mama that we grew into each other the way they did, but with my sister running off the way she’s been, I’ve begun to out and out envy joined-at-the-hip Milly and Tilly. If my sister keeps this up . . . well. I can’t find Mama
and
chase after her. There’s only so many hours in the day.
“Shen? Earth to Shenny.” Bootie laughs.
“Yeah?”
Giving me what I’d consider to be a smile of invitation, he says, “I heard from my cousin in Winchester that the sideshow’s bringin’ a baby in a bottle this year.”
“No kiddin’? How’d they ever—” I’m dying to RSVP. To tell him, “I would love to go for a ride with you in the Tunnel of Love. After that, we could sit on the tent benches and watch the show. I’ll bury my head in your strong chest when the snake man charms the serpent out the basket because secretly, Bootie Young, you make me want to unbraid my hair and put on a frilly dress.” But I put on a disinterested voice and say, “Maybe we’ll run into you there,” because he’s not only distracting me, he’s distracting Woody, and the clock in Washington Square is chiming quarter past the hour.
“Please.” I yank on my sister again, but she’s not budging. Her eyes are locked down, her face a mural of yearning. She’s thinking about how good it would be to lay herself down on the bottom of the grave and have Bootie cover her missing-Mama heart in cooling dirt, I just know she is. “We’ve got to get back before . . .” I don’t want to, but I got to. I lean my head to Woody’s and whisper, “The root cellar,” and thank goodness, she picks up her pace.
C
hapter Six
W
e’re standing at the edge of the creek on the Tittle side.
I’m arguing with E. J. He keeps fussing, insisting, “Let me walk back across the stones with you.”
I got my reasons for not wanting him to get involved in the Carmody family business more than he already is. “Quit bein’ more of a pain than you already are,” I say, piggybacking onto the first stepping stone behind my sister, who is still real agitated on account of me bringing up the root cellar over at the cemetery. I get a better grip on her. “I mean it, E. J. Make like a bunny and hop up that hill.”
“But I’m worried that—” He looks past me at Woody.
I warn him, “If you don’t get out of here on the count of three . . .” One of the other reasons E. J. is being extra-overbearing is that even though he’s never said anything to me, I’m pretty sure he’s heard my uncle and grandfather whooping and hollering through our woods in the wee hours. That’s when they like to play hide-’n’-seek. Woody and me hide—they seek. “One . . . two . . .” When E. J. doesn’t make a move to turn towards home, I pull out my heaviest artillery. “I won’t let you see you know who anymore if you don’t git,” and that settles that. Not sure that I’ve ever seen him move so fast. He doesn’t even say, “Catch ya on the flipside,” which he normally does as he scrambles off.
Woody, who appeared to be paying no mind to E. J.’s and my squabble, quick twists out of my grip and starts running across the stepping stones. Usually so sure-footed, she’s in such an all-fired hurry that she slips and falls into the creek when she’s almost onto our side. I want to holler out to E. J. to come back and help, but if I do, I’ll never hear the end of it, so I hustle across the remaining stones, jump in after her and the two of us go panting up onto the bank. We’re trying to catch our breaths. She’s flushed and frenzied. I take a piece of her hair out of her mouth and set it behind her ear. “Pea . . . you . . . you have
got
. . . to stop runnin’ off like—what?” Woody is sniffing the air. She can hear the wind change directions since she’s gone mute, and her nose—it’s keen. She’s almost locked onto something and then I hear him, too.
“Have you cleaned these stalls?” Papa. His voice is coming out of the barn, not more than fifty yards from us. I thought for sure he’d be occupied in his study already, but he’s come back from his ride much later than usual. “Did you throw down fresh shavings and clean the water buckets?”
Mr. Cole answers back soft-spoken so I can’t hear him.
I say urgently to Woody, “If he comes out, he’ll see us. Quick. Dive under the willow.”
Not a beat later, His Honor comes out of the barn. The handsomest man in all of Rockbridge County, the one who’s got midnight hair and eyes that are the same color as the whiskey and soda he drinks around that time looks even worse than he did last night. Taking unsteady steps our way, Papa shouts, “Girls? Is that you?”
The branches of the willow tree are wiggling and there’s no wind today. That’s what’s gotten his attention. I will them to be still.
“Twins?” he calls, coming closer.
“Scoot . . . scoot back,” I whisper frantically to Woody. We use our hands and heels to dig deeper into the branches. “And please, please, please, don’t start howling.”
“I see you,” Papa says, but I’m sure he can’t. He’s tripped down to the grass. He’s been worse the last few days because he gets extra soused whenever Grampa’s due to visit. I can’t really blame him. I have been forced to slug back a few when that old nincompoop shows up. I want to rush to his side and help him up, but I’ve fallen for that before, and Woody knows it. She holds me tight by the wrist until Papa struggles back up, first onto all fours, and then semiupright. He shakes his head like he’s forgotten what he was doing and turns back towards the barn.
Woody is fluttering. She wants to make a break for it, but I warn her, “Wait.” I inch forward until I can see Papa through the curtain of shimmering leaves. Maybe he really did see us. Sometimes he can fool us. Sometimes he can double back. I lean back to my sister and start counting slowly, “One Virginia, two Virginia,” and when I get up to “thirty Virginia,” I tell her, “All right. Get set, go!” On our dash to the house, I run backwards so I can keep an eye on the barn door. “Keep movin’,” I tell Woody when she looks at me bug-eyed.
Once we’re on the back porch of the house, I trap my twin between my arms, press her against the peeling white wood. “Don’t even swallow.” I squeeze her to make a big impression. “I mean it. Hold still.” I’m waving my hand and blowing on the bottoms of our shorts to dry them off the best I can. “We’re gonna sneak through the kitchen.”
I get Woody by the chin and raise her eyes up to mine so I’m sure she sees the seriousness daggering out of them. I’m leaving her out here until I can make sure the coast is clear. If Papa
did
double back and came in through the front door, we’ll run into him. He’ll do what he always does, inspect us like we’re pieces of fruit, looking to find the soft spots. I am especially gifted at fibbing so I could come up with a reason how our shorts got damp, but once His Honor goes after Woody, I’d be forced to tell him the truth and nothing but the truth about where we’ve been this morning.