A Bird On Water Street (10 page)

“It must weigh fifty pounds!” I grunted as I lifted it out.

“Close to it,” Dad said.

“So that's what you've been up to in your metal shop.” Mom smiled.

Dad had cut every piece, welded and riveted them together, painted the car a deep orange, and even hand-painted the rebel flag on its roof. It looked like a miniature version of the real thing. He'd done a beautiful job.

“Wow,” I said, admiring his work.

“It's your favorite, right?” Dad asked.

“Oh yeah,” I smiled. “Thanks, Dad!” I tried to roll it across the floor, but the round wheels scratched the wood. Dad could do anything with metal, but he couldn't make tires. If he could've, it woulda saved a lot of money since cars in Coppertown went through tires fast.

“It's kind of more for display,” Dad said.

“I'll find a good spot for it.” I smiled. I knew I'd be staring at it a lot, dreaming of myself at the wheel.

“You have more,” Mom said and handed me the other package, which was large and squishy.

I tore off the paper and pulled out a multicolored quilt. I ran my hand over the bumpy and uneven surface—it felt soft and somewhat worn. I stared at a blue patch with white writing.

“Hey, that's my old baseball team, the Braves!” Another patch looked like my first pajamas. “What the?”

“I took your old clothes, the ones that I could never throw away, and made a quilt out of 'em,” Mom said with a sniff.

I held it up and looked closely. “That was the back pocket on my favorite overalls, the ones with the patch, and that was my favorite shirt when I was a kid.” It was a fabric scrapbook of my life. “Mom, this is really nice, thanks.”

“Grace, I didn't know you quilted,” Dad said.

“I didn't either.” She blushed.

Dad handed her a small box. “Ray! I thought we agreed no presents!” She glared at him but untied the string and opened the lid anyway. Inside was a Christmas tree formed by silver waves going back and forth.

“Oh no, Ray, this is too expensive.” She frowned. “You shouldn't have.”

“Don't worry, Gracie. I made it myself out of stainless steel wire. I hammered the shape.” Dad pulled it out of the box by the black ribbon he'd run through the loop at the top. “See here, it's a charm necklace.” He tied it around her neck.

Mom smiled wide and tears ran down her cheeks. She threw her arms around my dad and gave him a huge kiss . . . which kept going.

I coughed . . . then coughed again a little more loudly.

“Sorry!” They smiled.

“I've got something for yu'uns too.”

“Really?”

I handed them my rolled-up drawings.

“I didn't know we had an artist in the family,” Dad said.

“Oh, Jack, it's wonderful,” Mom said. “What kind of bird is it?”

“It's a sparrow, like in your song,” I replied. “But I thought I'd make it prettier, so I colored it purple.”

“It's beautiful, honey. Thank you.” She hugged me tight, wrapping me in her smell of soap and flour. “We've got to hang them somewhere.” She grabbed some pins from the bedroom and my dad tacked them on the wall above the couch.

“That looks real nice,” he said. We stared at my picture of the barren landscape of Coppertown next to the sparrow—two things that didn't go together anywhere but on our wall.

“I'll start breakfast,” Mom said and wiped the tears from her cheeks.

She made biscuits and gravy with eggs, grits, and sausage roll—the biggest breakfast we'd had in a long while. It wouldn't have been Christmas without sausage roll. I added hot sauce to my ketchup like Dad did and it burned on my tongue.

Grandpa showed up halfway through breakfast with an armful of presents. He handed Mom a bag of oranges, which she set to slicing up. He handed me a fishing pole with a big red bow. “I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to wrap it,” he said.

“Cool, Grandpa. Thanks!” Now Piran and I would both have one for the summer, although it would be a while before we'd be able to use 'em.

“Grace, sit for two seconds,” he said. “I got you somethin' better than oranges.” Mom dried her hands on the kitchen towel and unwrapped a camelhair coat. “Oh, Pa, thank you.”

“I got it at Faysal's Dress Shop,” he said. “Your old one was lookin' a little bit moth-eaten, and sometimes you got to treat
yourself
to the nicer things rather than givin' it all away to everbody else.” He looked at her with a knowing expression and Mom blushed.

He gave my dad a metric ratchet set for his metal shop—about the only thing he didn't already have.

“How'd you know?” The tops of his ears turn red, a sure sign he was pleased.

I showed Grandpa my General Lee, and Mom showed him her Christmas-tree charm.

“You made these?” Grandpa's eyebrows went up. “Nice work, Ray. If you make some more of these, I'll try to sell 'em in my store.” That was a high compliment.

“And look what Mom made for me,” I said and showed him the quilt. I pointed out all the pieces and told him where they'd come from.

He touched it gingerly, like it was a treasure. “Grace, you think you could make one of these for me from your mama's old dresses?” Mom looked at him, surprised. Grandpa Chase didn't mention Grandma very often. Even now it was still painful for him. “I'd pay ya, of course,” he said.

“You wouldn't have to pay me, Pa. I'd be happy to.”

“Nonsense. I know yu'uns could use the money, and it would mean the world to me.”

“All right.” Mom wrung the kitchen towel between her hands tightly. She didn't talk about her mother much either 'cept for her singin'. Mom claimed Grandma Chase had an even prettier voice than she did, which I found hard to believe. I'm sure I'd heard her sing, but most of my memories of Grandma Chase were like an out-of-focus slide show.

While my parents cleaned up, I handed Grandpa my drawing. “It's Coppertown, Grandpa, the way it used to be. The way it'll be again someday.”
Somehow
.

“This is right handsome, Jack,” he said. I could have sworn I saw his eyes water up before he looked away. He hugged me so tight I thought I was gonna break.

Grandpa asked to see some of Dad's other projects in his metal shop metal shop while Mom made a green bean casserole, yeast rolls, and apple pie.

“That's not all we're having is it?” I asked. Our meals had been pretty slim lately, so I was worried.

“No, Jack,” Mom laughed. “Everybody's bringing a dish just like at Thanksgiving. It'll add up, you'll see. We're not going hungry quite yet.”

Speak for yourself
, I thought.

The whole family showed up at our place again, 'cept Aunt Catherine, who never did come back, and Uncle Amon, of course. I caught Dad lookin' out the window, all wistful, a few times.

Mom was right—we ended up with a feast. Since Uncle Bubba was a hunter, he brought a wild turkey. Aunt Livvy made giblet gravy, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, regular mashed potatoes, and pumpkin pie. She brought Brussels sprouts too, but I didn't eat any of those. Grandpa brought the cranberry sauce and I helped him get it out of the can in one ringed piece.

Dad and Bubba started talking about the strike over dinner, but Aunt Livvy told them to shush. “It's Christmas. Yu'uns give it a rest.”

Buster and I sat at the card table, even though we were too big for it. Course, there weren't no room at the big table for all the adults and us too.

“How do you like your new place?” I asked him.

“It's okay, I suppose,” he said, “'cept for when the wind blows the wrong way. Those chickens stink something awful. Worse than a sulfur cloud.”

“There haven't been any of those since the miners went on strike,” I whispered. “The whole plant is shut down.”

His eyebrows went up at that. “That don't sound normal.”

“It's not.” I smiled.

After dinner, Grandpa played Christmas carols on his fiddle and we sang along.

That night, I crawled into bed full and tired and wrapped up in the quilt Mom made for me. I didn't get a lot of presents like other years, or my BMX bike, but everything I got came straight from the heart and it felt pretty good.

O

The week sped by visiting with friends, but New Year's Eve snuck through quiet as a mouse. I heard a few bottle rockets here and there, but mostly people let the New Year in with as little notice as possible. So much time had gone by since the strike began that people were startin' to worry, and without the holidays to think about, it crept back into everybody's heads. My parents didn't say much in front of me, but I could hear them whispering in their bedroom at night. Whatever they were saying, it didn't sound good.

On New Year's Eve Mom made black-eyed peas.

“Eat 'em all,” Dad said. “Every pea is a dollar we'll make this year.”

I poured vinegar over mine and ate every last one.

r

Chapter 14

Flood

After the holidays, winter settled in to stay. It rained nonstop which is all winter ever does. It seemed to fit everybody's moods, though. The gray clouds sat on us heavy with worry.

My arm twinged a lot where the break had been. Sometimes it even kept me up at night.

It got so wet the ground couldn't hold any more rain and all the creeks in Coppertown started flooding. Peanut butter–colored water rushed through the erosion ditches and new streams popped up everywhere.

The phone rang late one school night waking me from a deep sleep. I heard Mom answer down the hall. “Of course, Doris, he's welcome to stay. Do you need us to come get him? Okay. We'll see you in a bit.”

She padded to my bedroom in her big fuzzy slippers. “Jack, Mrs. Quinn is dropping Piran off in a few minutes. The flooding is getting pretty scary down there. Make room, okay?”

Dad, fully dressed, passed her in the hall. “I'm goin' down to see if I can help.”

“I'll make coffee.” Mom yawned.

We didn't get much sleep after that. I kept rubbing my arm and Piran worried all night. “I should have grabbed my mitt,” he said again and again. “I can't believe I didn't grab my mitt.”

It rained throughout the night. My eyelids finally closed, heavy as cement, right before dawn. It seemed I had just dozed off when the kitchen door closed. The sky was silver rather than charcoal, which is the only way I knew it was morning, but at least it wasn't raining. Piran and I stumbled to the kitchen and looked at my dad. “Well?”

“It's up to the second stair on yu'uns back porch,” he said, “but the water's not rising as fast now that the rain's stopped. We put about two hundred sandbags around the house, so I think you'll be okay.” He looked exhausted. “Just pray it doesn't rain for a few days.”

Piran fell heavily into a kitchen chair and sighed. “Thank you, Mr. Hicks.”

“Oh, and your mom told me to give you this.” He handed Piran his baseball mitt and Piran hugged it tight to his chest.

“Yu'uns still have to go to school,” Mom said. “Go clean yourselves up and I'll make some breakfast.”

I was so tired, I could barely swallow my oatmeal.

At school, we weren't the only ones running on no sleep. Most everybody was draggin'. Miss Post finally stopped her lesson. “Close your books, class. Today we're going to talk about erosion.”

Which was really more talk about trees again. I may not have gotten it right about their roots holdin' the mine together, but their roots would hold the top layer of ground together. And when they died, they'd fall over and rot, creating organic soil for bugs, smaller plants, and animals to live in. It was hard to imagine trees were that important.

Without trees, without soil, the water had nowhere to go but into the earth, which in Coppertown was hard as a baked brick and didn't want it. That's why we had so much flooding.

The rain had stopped, but the water rose a few inches higher from runoff—now we understood why. We watched the Tohachee River out our classroom window. It had turned into a swift-moving lake. The current carried all sorts of debris as it rushed by.

“I wonder whose porch swing that is,” I said.

“I dunno, but I'm pretty sure that's my dad's ladder,” Piran replied as we watched it tumble end over end, getting stuck once before it was pulled downstream again. If anybody had been standing nearby, it would've knocked 'em dead.

I was slow gathering my books at the end of the day and told Piran I'd catch up with him.

Once everybody was out of class, I approached Miss Post. “I thought that was real interestin', what you talked about today. Do you have any books about erosion, or nature, or . . . or trees?”