Good Hope Road (31 page)

“They had to put a plate in his leg to fix it,” I told her as we crossed the room to where Drew was helping Nate into a lawn chair next to Mr. Jaans’s bed.

“. . . and ain’t all this somethin’?” We caught the tail end of what Mr. Jaans was saying. “I been alive a long time, but I ain’t ever seen a day as good as this one—all them folks coming in and picking up their pictures, and then the Andersons getting their baby back. It’s enough to put the faith right back in ya, that’s for sure.”

Mrs. Gibson turned her face aside and acted like she didn’t hear him, so I answered, “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

“It’s somethin’ else,” Nate agreed, looking around at the pictures.

Mr. Jaans smiled. “I have to say it’s done me good to be part of it. Sorting through all those pictures today, giving folks back a little piece of their memories, that was the best feeling I’ve had in a long time. Feels good to have the chance to do for other folks.”

“Well, it’s all due to Jenilee,” Mrs. Gibson snapped, as if she thought he was trying to take credit.

Mr. Jaans didn’t seem bothered. “I’d say a bunch of people had a hand in it.” He chuckled, glancing at Drew and me with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “And you, probably both hands, Eudora.”

Mrs. Gibson coughed, her mouth dropping open. “You hush up, June Jaans.” The corners of her lips turned upward. She wheeled around and hurried away so he wouldn’t see her smile.

Mr. Jaans winked at me. “I think I’m getting to her.”

“I don’t know why you bother. She’s so mean to you all the time.” I knew what it felt like to be on Mrs. Gibson’s bad side. I didn’t understand why she could change her mind about me and not about Mr. Jaans.

“There’s a lot of history to it,” he said, then lay back against his pillow. I could tell he didn’t intend to reveal any more, at least not in front of Drew and Nate.

Drew cleared his throat and changed the subject. “Looked like your cows were all in pretty good shape yesterday, June. A few skin cuts, a little hide knocked off here and there, and I fixed some fence where your old bull got out.”

“I do appreciate that. Ain’t seen old Charlie, have ya? I hear he went wandering by what’s left of Mazelle Sibley’s grocery, near scared her to death. She had a bucket in her hand and Charlie was hungry. Chased her plumb down the block and into the Willamses’ pasture. She finally got shed of him by runnin’ through a bog. Charlie don’t like mud much.” He laughed, then winced, grabbing his ribs. “Lands! I’d of paid money to see that. . . .”

My mind drifted away from the conversation, and I looked toward the doorway. Outside on the stoop, I could see Mrs. Gibson’s shoulder. Her hands were moving and I could hear her talking to someone. I left Drew and Nate and walked over to see who was out there with her.

Weldon, Janet, and Dr. Albright were standing with her on the steps. They stopped talking when they saw me, and they gave each other strange, secretive looks that made me wonder if they had been talking about me. The bushes rustled behind them and Lacy emerged. She walked up the steps and slipped her hand into mine as an uncomfortable silence fell over us.

Weldon finally broke the stalemate. “Well, we wanted to see the pictures,” he said, then gave the others one last, unreadable glance.

Lacy squeezed my hand. I tried to ignore the rest of them and focus on her as Weldon and Janet went into the building and Dr. Albright headed toward the motor home.

Mrs. Gibson stayed on the stoop, watching Lacy and me.

“How are you today, Lacy?” I asked, smoothing the dark hair away from her face. Her gray eyes met mine, and for just an instant I pictured those eyes looking at me from the darkness behind the ventilation screen in Mrs. Gibson’s cellar. She seemed as lost now as she was then.

Lacy shrugged her shoulders.

“You look pretty,” I said. “I like these flowered overalls. Can I borrow them someday? I think they would look good on me.”

Lacy grinned, her eyes shining for only a moment before she did something that I could remember doing all my life. She ducked her head and hid the smile. Behind me, Mrs. Gibson sighed heavily, her disappointment like a cloud in the air. I suppose it was hard for her to understand why Lacy stayed closed within herself. Mrs. Gibson didn’t know what it was like to feel the way Lacy felt—small and helpless and afraid of everything.

When you’re afraid of everything, the thing you are most afraid of is happiness. You’re afraid to step into even a little piece of it, because you know that as soon as you do, someone will slam the door, and you’ll be trapped in the darkness again, remembering how the light felt.

It’s easier never to know the light at all.

Lacy pulled her hand away and looked past me toward the door. Standing up, I glanced at Mrs. Gibson, who had turned her back to us, her shoulders trembling with withheld tears.

Lacy slipped past me and into the armory, and I let her go. I didn’t want her to see her grandmother crying and know she was the cause of it.

I stood beside Mrs. Gibson, not knowing how to comfort her. “She’ll be all right,” I told her. “Sometimes it’s just hard to understand things when you’re a kid.”

Looking up at the sky, she dabbed her eyes with her hankie. “I don’t want her life to be hard. I don’t want her to hurt this way.”

“I don’t think my mama wanted me to, either.” I thought of the times Mama cried and told me she didn’t want my life to be the way it was. “Sometimes it just happens.”

“It’s my fault.” Mrs. Gibson wiped her eyes again, unfolded the hankie, and blew her nose like a foghorn. “I been a mean, stubborn old lady, and I drove her father away because I didn’t like that gal he married, and that’s why I don’t know Lacy enough to be a help to her. I’m just one more stranger she don’t know and don’t like. The only thing she likes about me is my old cat, Mr. Whiskers.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to all that. As far as I could tell, a lot of it was true. Mrs. Gibson could be a mean old lady. Once she got her mind made up about somebody, it took something like a tornado to change it. “Sometimes things like that take time.”

“I ain’t got time!” she wailed, wadding the hankie in her fist and punching it into her pocket, her back turned to me. “I’m an old lady, and I’m losin’ my memory, and I can’t leave my life with all this meanness in it. God ain’t gonna let me. He’s gonna keep sending me back until I straighten out all this mess and keep the promises I made. That’s what that angel come to tell me. I gotta set things right this time, get shed of all this meanness in me. God done turned me back from heaven once, and . . .” She paused. Gasping in a breath, she turned and pressed her fingers to her mouth, shocked by what she had said to me.

I stood looking at her, as dumbfounded as she was. We gaped at each other, both wondering what to say now. She had sounded crazy. Even she knew that.

Except the part about her losing her memory. That explained a lot of things—like why she would sometimes ask me the same question two or three times in a day, or why she sometimes looked at me for an instant the way she used to before the tornado, or why she kept forgetting Dr. Albright’s name.

Was that why she was so desperate to find the notebooks? Because she couldn’t remember things without writing them down? I could tell by looking at her that she didn’t want me to know.

Silence stretched like a tightrope between us. “I don’t think you want to be mean to people,” I said finally. “It’s just a . . . well, sort of a habit, I guess. People can change habits, if they want to.”

“I been formin’ this habit a long time.” She sighed. “It’s turnin’ out to be a hard one to break.”

“You could start by being nicer to Mr. Jaans. All he wants is for you to treat him with a little kindness.”

Pressing a hand to her chest, she craned her neck back, as if she couldn’t believe I had said that. “That . . . that goes way back.” She coughed.

“Maybe so.” I felt strangely bold. “But if you’re trying to make God happy, that would be a good way. Mr. Jaans isn’t a bad person. He’s just trying to get by the best way he can, like everybody else.”

Flaring her nostrils and widening her eyes, she peered around my shoulder to make sure no one was listening. “He done some
bad things
in the past.”

“Everyone has. You just said you had. A bad past is like gristle. You can either starve to death chewing on it, or you can spit it out and see what else is on the table.”

Mrs. Gibson blinked at me, coughing softly, as if that piece of gristle was stuck in her throat.

Finally, she pointed a finger indignantly toward the door. “
That man
turned my head and talked about marriage, and all the while he was sparkin’ my baby sister, Ivy. He run off with her when she was just fifteen. Said he was gonna take us to a USO dance. He sneaked Ivy out of there and never brought her home. Come to find out, he’d got her pregnant, and they had to get married, and it was the shame of the county. The only reason he was sparkin’ me was because I was old enough that Mama would let me date, and then Ivy could come along with us. That was the only way he could see Ivy, and he knew it. Once he and Ivy run off, everyone in the whole county knew it, too.”

“Oh . . .” I murmured, wondering what kind of quicksand I had stepped into.

“So you can see why I ain’t friendly with him.”

“Uh . . . uh-huh.”

“And you can see why I ain’t gonna go makin’ nice with him, actin’ like nothing ever happened. He talked Ivy into getting married too young, and she shouldn’t of been having babies, and she died trying to birth that baby.
His
baby. It was a terrible thing. He had the funeral for her and the baby—buried them right in the casket together, and didn’t give my family one single say in the funeral or anything. Then he went off to the war, and by the time he come home again, he brought a new wife with him, and bought that place right down the road from us. He went right on like our Ivy never existed at all, and we had to watch it year in and year out. I ain’t ever gonna forgive him for it.”

I looked at the tents shuddering in the breeze below, not knowing what to say. Mr. Jaans had shown such kindness to me and Mama. I couldn’t imagine that he would do the cruel things Mrs. Gibson was talking about.

“Maybe he really loved Ivy,” I said, thinking of the words from the old letter I had found in our yard and how much that old couple must have loved each other. “Maybe he moved back here because he wanted to be close to her. Maybe he did what most people do.”
What my mama did
. “Maybe he just did the best he could to go on when his life wasn’t what he thought it was going to be.”

She shook her head, hugging her arms around herself as a whippoorwill started singing somewhere close by. Finally I turned away, leaving her there, and went inside to get Drew and Nate.

Lacy was sitting beside Mr. Jaans’s bed with a red string around her fingers, learning how to make a cat’s cradle. “Then . . . I do this . . . one?” she said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world to be talking to him.

“That’s right, precious.” Mr. Jaans smiled at her, his aged, trembling hands guiding hers. “All right, see. That’s cup and saucer. Right. See? You’ve got it. Hook your thumb in there like this now.”

Lacy’s lips lifted into a smile. For a minute she forgot to be afraid.

I motioned to Drew, and he helped Nate to his feet. Mr. Jaans gave us a quick wink, then went back to helping Lacy.

Mrs. Gibson came in the door. I motioned for her to stop, then pointed at Lacy and Mr. Jaans.

“Sssshhh. Listen,” I whispered.

Mrs. Gibson crossed her arms, narrowing her eyes at them, but she didn’t say anything or step closer, or stop them from weaving the string.

“This one looks like . . . a kitty cat,” Lacy said.

Mrs. Gibson’s eyes widened and she glanced at me, then back at Lacy and Mr. Jaans. Mrs. Gibson’s arms fell to her sides, and she leaned against the wall.

“Let’s go, Jenilee,” Drew whispered from the doorway.

I turned and followed them.

In the doorway, I stopped and looked back at all the pictures taped to the walls. They fluttered in the breeze from the doorway, whispering in the still air, a thousand stories, countless memories, now patched together like an enormous, murmuring quilt.

 

 

I
watched Lacy and June Jaans weave that string, him helping her move her hands this way and that, and her talkin’ to him like she was a normal little girl. Her big eyes sparkled with joy as he praised how quick she was learning cat’s cradle.

Why?
I thought.
Why can’t I get her to light up like that?
Lacy tangled the string and gave a frustrated groan, then smiled a little at him. He grinned back, his teeth looking straight and white against the gray stubble of beard grown over his thin face. I remembered how I used to like his smile. I remembered how, when that boy grinned at me, something went warm and soft and fluttery inside me. I didn’t want to remember it, but I did. I guess, in a way, I always had.

“Come on, Dora,” he would say to me back then. “How about a smile from the prettiest girl in school?” I’d giggle and blush and feel lighter than air.

Nobody else ever made me feel like that—not even Olney, though I loved him dearly and we made a good life together. That wild, fluttery feeling only comes with a powerful dose of first love. What made it all the worse was that June give me a first dose of heart-break, too, and he was the one who took my sister away from me.

I heard Jenilee’s voice in my head.
You could start by being nicer to Mr. Jaans. All he wants is for you to treat him with a little kindness.