To Come and Go Like Magic (17 page)

We sit on the front porch waiting for the VISTA woman. Rose sews on a new square for her Dutch Girl quilt and I read
The Cat in the Hat
, the only book my aunt keeps out in the open. Her romance novels and magazines are hidden in the bedroom closet, but I’m not supposed to know about those. She always has me read
The Cat in the Hat
aloud. She likes the rhyme and the rhythm and the way the cat goes wild.

“This is a book for little kids,” I say. “Don’t you have anything else we could read?”

“Nothing
we
could read,” she says. “This is it.”

“But don’t you have—”

“I like the cat. Don’t you like the cat?”

“Yes, but—”

“You’d better hurry up,” Rose says. “Here comes that quilt woman.”

Rose is already laughing about the cat when the VISTA woman walks up the porch steps.

I follow the two of them through the house. The woman says all the quilts are pretty.
Unique
, she says.
Authentic
. I remember these words so I can add them to my notebook.

It’s hard to choose, she says, but she can only buy one today. She may be able to get Rose some other sales from her connections up North.

Aunt Rose tells her the name of each pattern, points out the quilting stitches in circles and squares and long, exact rows.

The VISTA woman goes back and forth a dozen times, unfolding and scattering the quilts here and there after we spent all morning fixing them. Finally, she pulls out an old, ratty quilt that’s folded beneath the ones on display.

“How about this one?” she says.

Rose shakes her head.

“Oh, I like this one a lot,” the woman says.

Aunt Rose looks away, wanders out to the front porch. The VISTA woman follows her and I follow the woman. Rose sits back down in her rocker and picks up the Dutch Girl pattern she’s been working on.

“I’ll give you two hundred dollars for this quilt,” the woman says. She’s unfolded it part of the way and is examining the fine stitching along the edges.

“That quilt’s an antique,” Rose says. “It’s real old.”

“Two hundred and fifty,” the VISTA woman says.

“It’s faded,” says Rose.

“That’s okay,” says the woman. She’s not about to give up.

“I made that quilt with my mother,” Rose says. “Right before she got cataracts and couldn’t sew anymore.”

“How about three hundred, then?” the woman says. “I’ll give you three hundred dollars cash for this quilt.”

Rose looks up at the woman, her eyes moist behind her tortoiseshell glasses. I’m trying to think what’s going on in her mind. Three hundred dollars will buy a lot. She could buy a suit like she’s always wanted, a skirt and blouse and coat to match. Or get her hair fixed every month. Or trade her old washing machine in for one of the new harvest-gold washers she saw in the Sears catalog last week.

The woman digs in her purse for her billfold.

“That quilt is NOT for sale,” Rose says.

And that’s that. The VISTA woman stomps down the front steps and gets in her car and drives away.

“Money’s not everything,” says Rose. She pulls thread through the needle’s eye and bites it off instead of using the scissors. “That quilt lasted a fire that took everything else we owned,” she says. Rose knows where every square on the quilt came from—old church dresses, a threadbare tablecloth they used on the Christmas table, her dead brother’s baby blanket, the one he couldn’t sleep without. She keeps coming up with more reasons for keeping that old, ratty quilt even though I never once ask why.

When the Dutch Girl square is finished, Rose gets up and heads back inside.

“Let’s go open a can of chicken noodle soup,” she says. “You can finish reading me that cat book while it’s getting hot.”

T
he Dancer …

Light shatters into colors as Lenny dances with his arms in the air. He’s wearing Pop’s green boxer shorts over his underwear and my yellow hairband on his head. It’s stuck full of colored feathers.

Lenny’s doing the “fancy dance” like the Cherokees performed at our school last winter. He got a book at the library that explained how it was supposed to be done and checked out the cassette tape that went along with it. It’s mostly drum music with a flute that sounds more like a whistle.

Last week we bought two blue lightbulbs at the dime store, and tonight we put them in the lamps on each side of the bed and the room glows like a spaceship. Everybody’s gone to the ball field to see Jack play in a summer
scrimmage except Uncle Lu and he never comes down from the attic to check on us. It’s a good thing. Ever since we broke Pop’s light shade, dancing has been forbidden in this house.

Now the music plays and Lenny dances. Sometimes he puts me on his feet and we twirl around the floor together doing the fox-trot, the tango, or the rumba. Lenny checked out a dance book that shows diagrams of all the proper steps, and I let my legs go where his feet takes them. He says a dancer has to learn how to do all kinds of routines, not just dancing to rock and roll and not always with a partner. Tonight he’s doing the “fancy dance” alone.

“Myra writes poems,” I say when Lenny twirls alongside me.

“She does?”

“I’ve read them, but she doesn’t know it.”

“Are they any good?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe. They’re mostly about a piano player.”

“A piano player?” Lenny sounds like he wants to be surprised but isn’t, like a person who knows the punch line before you’ve said it.

I take Myra’s diary from the nightstand and open it to the page titled “Counter Melody.” Lenny stops and reaches for the book like he’s reaching for a hot skillet without a pot holder, but then he takes it and flips through the pages.

Overhead, Uncle Lucius stomps across the attic, causing my light to jiggle. Someday I expect him to jar it loose from its socket and send it falling down on top of me and Myra when we’re sleeping.

I check the clock. It’s almost time for the scrimmage to be over.

“We’d better put it back,” I say, reaching for the book.

“Wait a minute,” Lenny says. He sits reading while the light outside slips into the gloaming time. That’s what Momma calls the edge of dark. The sky’s already gone to deep blue when I see Pop’s car drop over the hill from town.

“They’re coming!”

Lenny tosses the book to me. “Take out those blue lightbulbs,” he says. “I gotta go change clothes.”

The second he grabs the doorknob, we hear Uncle Lucius stomping down the attic stairs.

“What’s going on in there?”

“We’re listening to music,” Lenny says weakly.

“I don’t hear no music.”

The drums and flute have been finished for a while, but Lenny was reading and didn’t pay attention.

When my uncle opens the door, Lenny is stuck in the blue glow of the lamplight.

“What in the world …” Lucius looks like he’s swallowed a tooth.

Lenny stares at his feet so Uncle Lu can’t see his lying eyes.

“Summer project,” he says.

“A summer project?” Uncle Lu examines Lenny from head to toe, taking in his colored feathers and scrawny legs swimming beneath Pop’s huge boxer shorts.

“My Cherokee
costume,”
Lenny says finally, twirling around. “Do you like it, Lucius?” He stops, pulls back his shoulders like a soldier at attention, trying to look dignified in his outlandish garb.

Uncle Lu shakes his head at the two of us, and I feel like I’m going to faint, knowing he’ll tell Pop and we’ll be grounded for life.

But Lu turns around and starts back out the door.

“That costume’s too big, Lenny,” he says. “It’s way too big for a boy like you.”

C
hili Supper …

Fireflies dance across the yard and a full moon floats above the treetops. Lenny says the moon is cold like ice
and its seas are dry. A dried-up sea is like a desert, he says, but I’ve never seen the desert or the sea.

Outside my window Momma and Pop sit on the front porch talking, with the jar flies singing like a backup chorus. We just got home from the fried-chicken supper at the firehouse. Five dollars each, all you can eat, fried chicken till you turn blue in the face. I don’t care if I never bite into another drumstick.

“They ought to ride her out of town on a rail!” Pop’s voice rolls over the jar-fly chorus. He’s talking about Penelope Winter, this girl from Pennsylvania who came here with VISTA. They’re supposed to be helping the poor, but Pop says they spend too much time pitying people and teaching them how to get through life on handouts. Jobs are what we need in the hills, Pop says. Not pity.

“Her chili was not a bit better than anybody else’s,” Momma says. “Jimbo’s puts it to shame.”

“Trying to make a name for herself,” says Pop. “That’s all it was.”

“By acting like we’re all stupid? Like we’ve never even heard of chili?”

The uproar at the fried-chicken supper is still hot in their heads. Everybody was talking about some story this Penelope Winter had put in a Pennsylvania newspaper about how she’d brought her homemade chili to a
potluck supper in Mercy Hill and the hill people were amazed. It was the first time we’d ever tasted chili, she said, making it sound like we were as dumb as rocks.

Jimbo’s Cafe has been making chili for years, so old Jimbo and young Jimbo were fit to be tied when they heard this story. Then one of the Mason lodge men offered to make some contacts and get Jimbo’s chili sold across the state. Maybe even take it into Tennessee and teach that Yankee girl a lesson. Hill people will tolerate being ignored and left out, but they won’t stand for insult.

Pop says this is just like a VISTA. They like to show the dirt roads and the shacks and the barefoot kids on television and leave out everything that’s good and pretty. We’re not down here to promote tourism, they say, when anybody complains. But in these hills even kids with shoes go barefoot. We
like
to go barefoot. We get stung by honeybees till our feet swell up and turn red and itch like the dickens, but barefoot is who we are.

Momma agrees. “We didn’t have much growing up, but we were always clean,” she says. “Cleanliness is next to godliness.”

She tells about Grandma making soap every fall when they killed the hogs. Big brown cakes of soap too slippery to hang on to, smelling like medicine. Pig fat
and lye boiled in a round black pot in the side yard and Grandma with a red bandana tied round her head to soak up the sweat. “They never show poor kids sitting in a washtub,” Momma says.

Pop laughs. “Northern folks think they’re experts on poverty,” he says. He spits out the word
experts
like it’s made a bad taste in his mouth.

“We were as poor as Job’s turkey,” Momma says, “but I never
felt
poor a day in my life.” She remembers the kids running up and down the stairs and singing together around the fire. Momma says a good life comes from a lot of different places. You can’t buy a good life. You may as well keep your money in your pocket.

I listen at the window and turn it all over in my mind. When Myra comes in to write in her diary, I slip under the covers and daydream about traveling. Every week I choose a different place and think about that one place until I wear it out, until I’ve done in my dreams everything that I can imagine ever doing if I were to go there for real.

Tonight I go to Pennsylvania and I stand in front of the Liberty Bell, where everybody will be bound to take notice, and I make a speech. I tell them that the people of Mercy Hill, Kentucky, have been eating chili for a hundred years and it’s way better than anything they’ll ever put in
their
mouths.

S
ewing and Sweetness …