Swan Place (32 page)

When the form was completed, the woman reached back into the drawer and took out a blank sheet of paper. She wrote on it for several minutes, but I couldn’t read her handwriting, what with it being upside down to me. When she was done, she folded the form and the letter together and put them into an envelope, which she sealed.

“Please take this to Room 14, Dove,” the woman at the desk thrust the form at me. “And we are honored—” she glanced at Buzzard—”to have you attending our school.”

I took the form and started to walk away, but Buzzard called me back loudly.

“Wait! You need lunch money,” she said, raising her voice so the woman at the desk could hear easily. And while I watched, Buzzard opened her purse and took out a whole twenty-dollar bill! I tried to keep my eyes from going wide, but I just couldn’t believe Buzzard was giving me that much money—just for lunch!

“Take it,” Buzzard ordered, still speaking loudly. “Miz Swan told me exactly how much money the great-niece of her beloved late husband should have for pocket money every few days.”

Buzzard glanced at the woman, who was watching us intently.

“Thank you.” I lifted the bill from Buzzard’s fingers.

Buzzard motioned to Molly and Little Ellis, and I bent down and hugged them. “You be as good as gold for Buzzard, you hear?” They nodded. “And when I come home this afternoon, I’ll tell you all about my day at school.”

Then I headed down the hall, to find Room 14.

“Well!” she sputtered. “Welcome, Dove!” She came toward me and put her hand, ever so gentle-like, on my shoulder.

“Class, this is Dove Johnson, who’s going to be in our class.” The passive eyes and the sweet smile from the back row. I felt my face beginning to burn.

“And I’d like you to know,” the teacher said, glancing at me a little uneasily, “that Dove’s great-uncle was our beloved Mr. Swan, who so generously provided all the funds to build our town’s public library—the Swan Memorial Library.”

Then, “Welcome, Dove,” she repeated. “I’m Miss Gray, and I’ll be your teacher. Now let’s find you a desk.” Every single seat in the row next to the big windows was filled, but Miss Gray guided me to the front desk, where a freckle-faced boy was sitting.

“Simon, please move to the vacant desk in the third row,” she asked in a soft voice. “I don’t want you sitting next to Paul anyway. You’ll both get into trouble.” Simon looked at me without showing any anger or resentment at all.

“Yes’m,” he murmured, gathering his things and moving out of the seat.

“All right, Dove,” Miss Gray said to me. “This is your desk. Please be seated.”

Oh, I was ever so glad to be able to sit down—to get away from standing in the front of the room with everybody looking at me. Now, sitting down, I thought that I probably looked pretty much like everybody else. I glanced over at Simon, and he was already looking at me. I smiled at him a little, to kind of let him know that my taking his desk hadn’t been my idea at all. But then I looked away so fast, I didn’t get to tell if he smiled back. Miss Gray seemed to be real nice, and the first thing, after we said the pledge of allegiance to the flag, was that she got two pretty-big-sized boys to help her get all our textbooks passed out to us. But I watched and saw her take the newest-looking books in each stack and put them aside. Then, when everything was passed out, she put that stack on my desk. I felt my ears burning, but I just pretended to look over all the books. And there it was: that wonderful thrill of new books with all kinds of things in them that I didn’t know—but that I certainly would learn.

The English book was the most interesting, of course. It had stories and poems in it and grammar lessons about things I’d never heard of. Gerunds, for instance. The morning went by so fast that I was surprised when Miss Gray said, “Well, it’s time for lunch. Mandy, would you and Rachel show Dove where the lunchroom is? And will you please be sure that she gets everything she wants?”

Mandy, who was plump and red-haired, and Rachel, who was as delicate and small as a little doll, came over to my desk while the rest of the class filed out of the room. Miss Gray introduced them to me.

“Dove, this is Mandy, whose father is an attorney. As a matter of fact, he’s Miz Swan’s very own attorney.” Miss Gray puffed herself up a little, and Mandy turned bright pink and smiled. It was a good smile, not a proud one.

“And this is Rachel, whose grandmother is on the school board.”

“Is your grandmother’s name Miz White?” I asked.

“Why yes,” Rachel said, obviously pleased.

But I was thinking I sure better be careful—
anything I told Rachel would go right back to Miz White!
And that was too bad, because I already liked Rachel—liked her frank brown eyes and square-cut bangs.

“Well, run along to lunch then,” Miss Gray chirped, herding us out of the room and into the hallway.

When we got our lunches, I held out the twenty-dollar bill Buzzard had given me. The lady stared at it without saying a word.

“I can’t make change for such a large bill,” she said. “You ought to know that.”

“Oh.”

Mandy and Rachel were staring at the bill. I didn’t know what to do.

“I’ll pay for hers,” Rachel spoke up, passing along some one-dollar bills to the cashier.

“Thanks,” I muttered, putting the big bill back into my purse. “I’ll get this changed somewhere and pay you back tomorrow.”

“No need,” Rachel said. “Let’s just call this your treat on your first day in a new school.” When we sat down, Rachel said, “My mama said for me to ask you about Miz Swan’s house.”

“What about it?”

“Some folks in town say that her maid
 . . .
Buzzard
 . . .
has just
ruined
all of the furniture and everything, what with Miz Swan being in France so long and nobody around to check on Buzzard’s work
 . . .
or even to see if she’s working at all.”

Why, I was so surprised, I hardly knew what to say!

“Rachel!” Mandy exclaimed in surprise. “That’s a terrible thing to say about somebody!”

“Buzzard isn’t a somebody at all,” Rachel insisted. “She’s a maid, for Heaven’s sake!”

“That doesn’t matter one little bit,” Mandy insisted.

“I’ll bet you it’s true!” Rachel said. “You’re just taking Buzzard’s side ‘cause your daddy’s Miz Swan’s lawyer!”

Mandy clamped her teeth together and turned a bright red. “I’m not supposed to talk about my daddy’s clients,” she whispered.

I stepped in. “Buzzard takes real good care of everything. It’s all so clean and nice, and I get to help too. I do all the dusting of the beautiful furniture in the parlor.”

Rachel stared at me. “
You
dust the furniture? She makes you do her work?” she breathed, as if she couldn’t imagine such a thing.

“No, she doesn’t
make
me do anything,” I protested. “I like doing it.”

“I can hardly believe it,” Rachel said. “Miz Swan’s maid letting Mr. Swan’s very own niece help with the housework!”

“Stop, Rachel!” Mandy said in a whisper. “Just stop!”

“Great-niece,” I corrected Rachel. And all of a sudden, it dawned upon me that these girls were like the rich girls back in my old school, except for one very important fact—this time, they accepted me as one of them. But that was just because they thought I was the late Mr. Swan’s great-niece. I guess those important thoughts settled me down, sure enough! Neither Mandy nor Rachel asked anything else about Buzzard, but they did want to know what the house was like on the inside and how did it feel to live so far outside of town. Those were questions I could handle, and I was pleasantly surprised, because I was afraid I’d be asked other things not so easy to answer, like: Where was I born? Why were my parents traveling and where? And what was my older sister like and where did she work? So while I finished my ice cream, I told them everything I could think of about that beautiful house and about the pond down at the bottom of the garden that used to have real swans swimming around in it. And I told them, most truthfully, that I liked living way out in the country. When we went back to class, we stopped in the bathroom, and while Rachel was in the stall and Mandy and I were already washing our hands, Mandy whispered to me, “Don’t think too hard of Rachel. She’s really nice, but sometimes she starts sounding just like her mama!”

“Is your daddy really Miz Swan’s lawyer?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mandy said. “And I can’t talk about that.”

“Okay,” I said.

After school, I told Miss Gray, “I’m supposed to ride the bus home, but I’m not sure which bus I am to take.”

“Most of the children in this class live in town, so I don’t know which bus you’re supposed to take, either. Let’s go down to the office and find out,” Miss Gray said. So she went with me all the way back to the office, and we found out that I was supposed to take Bus #3.

The bus had only seven
or eight children on it, all of them much younger than me and living out in the countryside. I sat right in the front, so I could be sure to show the driver where to stop. At the first stop, four of the children—all with the whitest-blond hair I’ve ever seen—got off and went walking down a dirt road. At the next stop, two more did the same thing. And when I looked behind me, there was only one child left on the bus: that girl from my very own class. The one who wore a dress too small for her. She met my eyes and gave me that same sweet smile she’d given that morning. I waved my fingers at her and saw her turn absolutely beet-red! I would have gone back to sit and talk with her, but we were getting close to the Swan-painted mailbox, so I had to point it out to the driver.

When the bus pulled away, the girl stared at me through the dusty back window, and I watched until I couldn’t make out her face any longer.

“And how was school?” Buzzard asked as soon as I came into the house.

“Fine. Except the lunchroom lady said she didn’t have change for a twenty-dollar bill.”

“Then how’d you eat?”

“A nice girl named Rachel paid for my lunch for me,” I said. “And she’s Miz White’s very own granddaughter.”

Buzzard frowned hard. “Then you gotta be careful what you tell her, Dove. Be better if you don’t say anything more to her than needs be. Anything you say to her, she will tell her grandmama.”

“I already thought of that.” And for some reason, I thought about telling Buzzard about what people in town were saying about her probably not taking good care of Miz Swan’s house. But I didn’t. It felt too much like what Michelle had said about Aunt Bett that time. My mama used to say, “There are some things better not said.” And this was one of them, I was sure.