Cousins (7 page)

“Students,” said Ms. Devine. “If you will stop a moment and see what Patty Ann is doing. Children! Patty Ann, stand up and show your doll. Now some of you are having trouble with the arms. Show them, dear, how to take the shuck and wrap it around one arm. See, she forms the sleeve starting somewhere around a fourth inch from the hand of the arm. She wraps it up toward the head—see? Now some of you have had trouble with getting the head tight enough. Patty Ann will go around and show you all who are having trouble. Some of you boys with your boy dolls need to pay attention.”

Cammy liked Ms. Devine fine, until she had to let Patty Ann show them stuff. Andrew once told Cammy that what Patty Ann was about was some “self-filling profit,” it sounded like he said. Since everybody knew Patty Ann was good in school, she got to be the leader of things just on general principles. And because she was made the leader, she thought she was one, too, and would be good in school because it was expected of her.

But what was wrong with making the kind of doll you wanted? Cammy thought suddenly. I mean, I wet the husk for five minutes like Ms. Devine says to. But I want my doll to be like I want it and not the way she says it ought to be.

Cammy stuck her lip out and did it her way. She liked her doll’s head to look more round than square. She wanted the arms to be longer and clasped in front, not sticking out to the sides. The whole thing made her fed up with Patty Ann.

When she came around to their table, Patty Ann acted real nice. She didn’t look at Cammy. But she smiled down at Elodie. She took Elodie’s doll into her hands. You could hardly see her hands work over it, but you could see the doll change into something really good. Right before Cammy’s eyes, too.

“Well, I’ll be,” said Elodie. She looked up at Patty Ann as if Patty Ann were some kind of queen. “Can I come sit beside you to do her hair?” Elodie asked.

“I know how to do the hair, look at mine,” Cammy told her. She had her doll’s hair almost done. She tied the dampened cornsilks around her dolly’s forehead with the string, then flipped back the cornsilks so the face would show and the string would be hidden under the hairline. It was nice that cornsilk hair could be blond, or reddish or dark brown, depending on when it was stripped off the corn.

But Elodie pretended she didn’t hear Cammy.

“Sure, you can come sit by me,” Patty Ann told Elodie.

Elodie got up, left Cammy’s side to sit with Patty Ann. Cammy couldn’t believe it. It was like Elodie forgot how she felt about Patty Ann. Forgot how they both felt about her.

Elodie settled down on one side of Patty Ann, who had Larry on her other side. And then, Larry started being nice to Elodie, since Patty Ann was. It was as if all of a sudden the three of them were best friends. All at once, Elodie had become popular. Everyone else at the table over there began to notice Elodie. “See my doll, ain’t it cute?” somebody said to her.

Cammy pretended she was deaf, busy with her doll.

“Elodie, your doll’s hair is the same shade as mine is.”

Cammy could’ve cried. I don’t care! Who cares? she thought.

But it felt like suffering forever, being left out the way she was. There were only two other people at her table, both boys and both nerds. Well, there was Esther Lovejoy, who was also at the table. She didn’t count. She was near raggedy and they say she had lice sometimes. When you lifted her hair in back, her neck was dark gray, it was so dirty. Cammy had seen it once. And here she was by herself, with Esther of the pale fish eyes across the table from her. Just because Patty Ann stole Elodie away.

6

IT WAS AN
agonizing time before the doll-making was over. Cammy made her way through it, feeling awful inside. But before it was over, Elodie got what was coming to her, too. Patty Ann lost interest in her, or forgot that she was paying Cammy back for the other day, when Cammy was over there during the rainstorm. When Cammy said bad stuff to Patty Ann and ran away from Aunt Effie, too.

Patty Ann got back at Cammy and then she and Larry just up and left Elodie. And then, everybody at that table shied away from Ms. Eloise Odie.

Cammy watched it all. Larry and Patty Ann finished their dolls first. Then everybody else finished, except Elodie, who sat there looking like somebody had stolen her heart and then cut it up and ate it. Big eyes, all misty and sad. Cammy almost felt sorry for her, but not quite. Elodie turned around and looked over at Cammy. Cammy stared right back. She smirked. But then, she turned away.

Elodie did come back to Cammy’s table. Too late. They weren’t quite friends anymore but they would probably play together.

“Can I still come over after camp? Remember, you said I could,” Elodie had the guts to ask.

Kid, you’ve got a lot of nerve! Cammy should’ve said, but she didn’t. She was still too mad, and upset, she had to admit. “Should of thought about that before,” was what she managed to say without her voice trembling.

Elodie’s eyes brimmed with tears. Then the tears kind of sank back.

Cammy let her stew. Maybe she would let her come on over. Maybe she wouldn’t. Nothing said she had to tell just now, so she didn’t.

And then, things happened, one after the other, the way they always did at camp. Just regular like ABC. They finished their dolls. Each was given a sack to put each one in with the owner’s name on it. They were told to take them home to show the dolls to their parents. It was nice to have a doll for the table way on to Thanksgiving time. Cammy smelled the air, to see if she could smell cold Thanksgiving coming. She couldn’t. It was still late August. Still hot and steamy.

They went for their nature walk. Ms. Devine always went with them. She was the last one, because she was so big and slow. Sometimes, the helper, Tim, who had been in college but quit, came a little later.

“Let’s go
down
!” kids shouted. “Yeah! Yeah! Let’s do!”

“Too far, you won’t feel like swimming after,” said Ms. Devine.

“No it’s not! We need a good walk. We need to skip rocks! Ooh, yeah!”

“She just doesn’t feel like moving herself down that far,” Cammy murmured to no one in particular.

Elodie was right there, grinning in her face.

“Step aside, kid,” Cammy said. She didn’t care if she did hurt Elodie’s feelings. This was her walk. She could pretend she was by herself, if only Ms. Devine would let them go down.

“I will let you if you listen to me good,” Ms. Devine was telling them. “Now I don’t want any roughhouse from you boys—Larry.”

“Me-ee?” Larry said back, looking wounded. “I never do nothing and I always get the blame.”

Everybody laughed. It was true in a way. Larry was too big a noise to do anything out-and-out. What he might do was to trip a kid on the path down and then pretend innocence. They all knew to look out for him, trip him up before he could start in. If you got him to his knees at first, everybody could use him to lean on as they went down. Pretty soon, he was grinning because of the attention and allowed himself to be a good post to lean on.

Things happened, one after another all right. But what Cammy never knew was how fast they could change. Like a storm out in the country could come from nowhere. Its lightning would catch a house afire right before your eyes. Or a day that was all blue sky could turn over dark and dangerous while she was playing a game with the other campers, or just sitting on a bench. It could happen that fast. Change.

Funny how it is when we go down, Cammy thought. Pretty steep and with loose dirt and stones. Broken roots and such. Expect somebody will fall, hope it won’t be me. Maybe it’ll be Ms. Devine. Not for her to get hurt, Cammy thought. But for excitement. So I can tell Mama and Andrew how she fell down head first. So her head was downhill and her feet, uphill. And me and Patty Ann run to get help while Elodie guards big ole Ms. Devine.

Or maybe it’s Patty Ann who falls. Skins her knees and twists her ankle. Blood all over her little pink socks. I have this white hanky to mop it up. Patty Ann rests her head on my shoulder, too. “You just hold still,” what I tell her. “It’ll stop bleeding in a minute. L-O-D, call 9-1-1.”

Only, none of it happened. Nobody had fallen. Cammy guessed that was good. Most of them could almost run some of the way, slipping and sliding down the path of this slanty hillside. It was amazing that they still had to go down when you thought about being down on the lower level of the park to begin with. But the whole place was ridges and gorges, almost canyons, Andrew said, some of the ridges were so close and came down so far. Andrew said that you never thought about the midwest having canyons but it did sometimes—places in Illinois, too.

They went down to the Little River, that was its real name, which they all loved. Maybe because here the river was so swift sometimes. The Little swirled out toward this one place in the middle where the waters were still. Out there was an odd bluish color. Kind of sickly, and dark bluish-green. But mostly it was a blue mystery. Oh, so many stories about that blue place!

Andrew called it the blue hole. Mama said it had been there forever and was bottomless. She called it the blue devil. All the kids Cammy’s age called it the bluety.

“There’s the bluety!” somebody shouted.

That made them pause. Cammy felt a stripe of cold go through her at the name, the bluety. She knew all about it but now was no time to think on that. She had to get
down
.

Elodie was the first one down. She was so quick and nimble. Maybe she felt she should try harder because she was adopted, or something. But she always could go faster than almost anybody. Elodie didn’t slide or trip or anything.

“There’s the bluety! I kid you not, tooty!” It was Elodie making a rhyme and hollering up at them all still coming down. She was jumping this way and that, like she was fit to be tied.

Well, there were bushes, small trees that they clung to for balance, going down. Cammy couldn’t see the bluety yet. It was exciting, that dark, deep place, but it wasn’t her kind of thing, truly. Swimming pools were her personal favorite places. She could float on her back better than anything else. She would be a swell backstroker one day, her mama said.

Cammy saw the water of the Little River racing by. It seemed higher than usual. Muddy, close in. Some days, you could see bottom close to shore.

Not today, I bet, Cammy thought. Carefully, she made her way down, surprised to see that her sneakers were mudcaked.

Bet the Little’s been up as high as I am! So much rain, she thought.

She could see now. There wasn’t any bank left, the Little was that far up.

No two ways about it. When she came off the slant, she would be in the water. So would everybody else, when they got to where she was. Did Ms. Devine know?

Elodie was off the hill and she was in the water, right at the Little’s edge where it met the bottom of the hillside. In a second, her sneakers with her socks stuffed inside came flying up the slant. Cammy could see Elodie’s face full of mischief.

You know you aren’t to wade in the water! Cammy thought to tell her. But why tell Elodie anything?

One thing came after another, like counting out a deck of cards on a card table.

“Awh, L-O-D, watch what you’re doing. You see what she did?” one kid complained. “Almost got me in the mouf’ with her sneaker, too!”

“Yu-uk, Ucky!” somebody else said. The crowd coming down giggled and laughed.

One of Elodie’s sneakers had hit the ground wrong; it bounced off and fell back down, turning over right into the water. Everybody hollered.

“Ooh-ooh, L-O-D!” kids hooted.

Kids were just being funny on a good day.

Couldn’t see for looking, was what came to Cammy long after.

But things began to turn in a great circle.

Ms. Devine was way up above them. They could hear her panting. But she hollered down all of a sudden: “Now, L-O-D. Hon, stay still. Stay where you are.” Panting hard, “Wait. L-O-D? L-O-D!”

Until Cammy thought she would hear the sound of Elodie’s name in Ms. Devine’s voice forever; probably would, too. And seeing that sneaker hit the water. They all did see it.

“L-O-D, wait for us! Wait for me!” It was Patty Ann calling L-O-D.

Well, can you believe that? Cammy thought.

Patty Ann took these giant steps right by Cammy. She must’ve wanted to wade in the water with Elodie or be first in right after her.

Cammy eased down, holding onto a bush. There wasn’t anywhere to stand on flat land at the bottom without getting her feet into the water. She was thinking about that when Patty Ann went by, Larry on her heels.

“Better watch out,” he told Cammy, as he passed.

“You little wimp, better watch out for
me
, too!” Cammy said under her breath. Larry turned around slowly, not missing a step. Just like he heard her. The look he gave her was the I’ll-get-you-later-girl kind of look. Cammy didn’t care.

“L-O-D, wait for me!” Cammy called, all of a sudden. She could hear meanness, get-evenness, in her voice. But that was for Patty Ann and Larry.

Elodie’s my cousin, too, she thought. Patty Ann, you’re not taking her away! She’s
my
friend!

It was like a dream, her fighting for Elodie.

But none of them had seen the meaning in Elodie’s sneaker falling. They’d all seen it roll down into the water, which had been really funny. Losing a sneaker in the Little River! That was something for Cammy to tell her mama and Andrew. How was Elodie going to get home with just one shoe? She’d probably hop all the way, too, Cammy thought.

But Elodie recovered the sneaker and threw it up again only to have it fall back down into the water.

This time, the kids didn’t have time to laugh. Cammy saw Elodie standing a few feet now from where the sneaker hit the river a second time. The sneaker filled with water. Sinking, it was moving away from Elodie.

Everything seemed still in the daylight. There was the river without a bank and where would they all stand? Cammy was thinking.

From that moment, she didn’t remember moving for a long time. She watched as Elodie reached for her sneaker, and missed it.