Faith, Hope, and Ivy June (18 page)

March 30

I’d sure like to know what Catherine’s writing about me. About here. About us. Now that she’s seen how we live, though, I don’t feel as worried as I did before.

She didn’t bat an eye when I showed her the outhouse, back in the trees. Was surprised we have toilet seats over the holes, and that they’re clean, too. What she did blink her eyes at was the chamber pot—the slop jar under my bed—like all of us have.

“What’s that for?” she asks, lifting the lid and looking inside. When I told her it was to use as a toilet in the middle of the night, she looked shocked. “I couldn’t!” she said.

“Yes, you could, if you had to go bad enough,” I told her. “Just put the lid on again after, and we’ll empty it in the morning.” Then we laughed. If I know Catherine, though, she’ll hold it in till morning.

I can tell she “dressed down” to come here. Brought her oldest jeans. Left her North Face jacket at home. No shoes with the fancy heel. No panty hose. She probably doesn’t want anyone at school thinking she’s trying to show us up. But … so what? I dressed up to go to Lexington, didn’t I? We both want to fit in.

I think she got along okay with Ma, but I was embarrassed to death when Ma told about Jessie getting the day shift, like she’d just been made manager at Walmart or something.

Mammaw and Papaw like Catherine, I can tell. She brought them a photography book. Kentucky, it says on the cover, and it’s mostly photographs to show just how many different things make up our state—mountains and horse farms and rivers and parks.

“Why, look at this!” Mammaw says, pointing to Cumberland Falls. And I know I’m going to have to describe every one of those pictures to Grandmommy by and by.

Anyway, I’m breathing easier because Catherine’s been nice. If she’s still mad at me
about that boyfriend, she doesn’t show it. I notice she brought her cell phone, though. She probably didn’t believe me when I told her we’re in a no-service area. No “boyfriend calls” up here in the hollow.

Ivy June Mosley

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

An hour after Sunday dinner, as Ivy June and Catherine were washing the frying pan and stacking the chipped white plates on the oilcloth-covered shelves in the kitchen, they heard Mammaw call to Papaw to come look at Grandmommy’s toe.

“Don’t you tetch it!” Grandmommy cried. “Don’t you go tetchin’ that toe!”

Papaw put down the almanac he was reading and walked from the parlor into what used to be the dining room, where the one-hundred-year-old woman sat on the daybed, one foot propped up on a stool.

“Mama, your foot’s swelled up again,” the girls heard him tell her. “You know what Dr. Grace said about tellin’ her ‘fore those red streaks start travelin’ up your leg.”

“Jus’ bring me some salt water … and soak it,” Grandmommy pleaded.

The girls could hear Ivy June’s grandparents talking in low voices. “Last time Mama got to hurtin’, she said she was sufferin’ so bad she’d have to get better before she could die!” Papaw said. “I’m going for Dr. Grace.”

He came striding through the kitchen and reached for his old hat with the stained sweatband, then took his key off the hook, went out, and started down the hill.

“The doctor comes all the way out here?” Catherine whispered.

“Has to. Grandmommy broke her hip once and it never healed right. We can’t get her into the car,” Ivy June explained.

“How far away is the doctor?” asked Catherine.

“About thirty miles, if she’s in. If she’s out making rounds, he’ll just have to find someone who’s seen where she’s headed and try to catch up with her.”

“But what if it was an emergency?” Catherine exclaimed.

Ivy June had no answer for that. “We do the best we can. It’s just the way we live.”

Mammaw came out to the kitchen and filled a pan with water from the teakettle, then poured a little salt in it and stirred. “I surely did not need this trouble today,” she murmured. “Got me a headache the size of my fist, and I’ve been wanting to get to the garden and see if that asparagus came up again this year.”

“Is there anything we can do to help?” Catherine asked.

“You might check and see if her socks are dry. I washed ’em out last night and hung ’em on the porch. Ivy June, that foot look swollen yestiddy when you was tryin’ to put those slippers on her feet?”

“No, ma’am. Not a lot, anyway. Not that you could notice.”

“Well, it’s pink as watermelon now, and there’s a sore between her toes. I’ll put on some of my tallow salve when we’ve finished the soaking and see if that’ll hold her till Dr. Grace gets here.”

The girls went out onto the porch and took down the white stockings flapping in the breeze.

“What’s tallow salve?” asked Catherine.

“You don’t want to know,” said Ivy June.

“Of course I do!”

“You’d have to get all the ingredients from Mammaw, but I know it has beef fat, turpentine, camphor, and whiskey in it,” Ivy June said.

“Yum!” said Catherine.

Ivy June poked her. “You don’t
drink
it!” she said, and the girls laughed.

It was an hour and a half later when Papaw came back with Dr. Grace. She had driven her own car as far as the footbridge, then followed him up the long hill with her worn black bag in hand. Catherine seemed astonished that the doctor was much older than Papaw. Definitely in her eighties. She stopped a few times on her way up the hill to catch her breath, then plodded on, her legs taking long strides.

“Hello there, Emma,” she said to Mammaw as she came in the door. She placed her bag on the table and took off her coat. “Nice warm wind we got out there today. Crocuses are up down next to the clinic.”

“That’s good to hear, Dr. Grace,” Mammaw said. “This here is Catherine Combs from up in Lexington. She’s on the exchange program.”

“Hello, Catherine,” the doctor said. “And how you doing, Ivy June?”

“Doing okay,” said Ivy June.

The doctor was a small woman, even thinner than Mammaw. She got right down to business, and her gnarled fingers worked efficiently at the clasp on her bag.

“Can I give you a cup of sassafras tea?” asked Mammaw.

“Wait till I see the patient,” the doctor said, rolling up her sleeves and walking over to the pump at the sink. She worked the handle up and down a few times. “Find me some of that lye soap, would you?” she asked, and Mammaw slid the soap dish toward her and produced a clean towel from the cupboard.

“It’s that toe again,” Mammaw told her. “I got it salved up some.”

“Best you let me look at it plain next time,” Dr. Grace said. “You want to go ahead and rinse it off for me, and I’ll come see what’s what.”

Papaw put one hand on Ivy June’s shoulder, the other on Catherine’s, and guided them toward the front door. Behind them they could hear Dr. Grace’s voice as she entered Grandmommy’s room: “How you doing, Iree? It’s Dr. Grace, here to look at that foot of yours.”

“Don’t tetch it!” Grandmommy began.

Out on the porch, Papaw sat down on the swing. “Good idea for us to just sit this one out,” he said. Ivy June sat down beside him, and Catherine took the rocker.

When Grandmommy hollered—and she always hollered a lot when Dr. Grace came by—Ivy June could only imagine what was happening to her. Catherine looked alarmed.

“Not nearly as bad as it sounds,” Papaw said. “Older she gets, the younger she sounds. Figure one of these days she’ll have the cry of a newborn baby. It’s strange, you know, to feel like a daddy to your very own mama.”

“I could never be a doctor,” said Catherine. “I would hate being responsible for anybody’s life. I’d worry about making some huge mistake.”

“They do, sometimes. No matter what kind of work you do, you make mistakes,” Papaw said, pushing gently against the floorboards with his feet.

“Do you ever make mistakes in the mine?” Ivy June asked, not sure if she wanted the answer.

Papaw nodded, arms folded loosely across his chest. “Sometimes. So far I’ve been lucky. Either the mistakes aren’t big enough to cause trouble, or somebody discovers ’em before it’s too late.”

“Would you want your grandsons to work in the mine?” Catherine asked him.

“That’s up to them,” said Papaw. “I’d have no say in it.”

“Miss Dixon says we should figure out what we like to do most and what we do best, and then find a way to make a living of it,” said Ivy June.

“Well, that’s easy to say, girl, but it’s not always possible to do. When I was eighteen and saw my four older brothers scatter to the winds—my pa was doing poorly, and there was still a brother younger than me—I went to work in the mine to help out. I didn’t much like it, but the pay was good. Year or two went by, and I figured this was where I was goin’ to be, ’cause I didn’t see a future for myself anywhere else.”

“What part didn’t you like?” Catherine asked, and Ivy June knew it would probably all be recorded later in her journal.

Papaw smiled wryly. “All of it. Didn’t like the way it did my back, didn’t like the dark and the damp, didn’t like comin’ home all covered in coal soot. But the money helped out at home, and by then I had me a wife and a couple sons. I made up my mind that I would be the hardest-workin’ man on a job he didn’t like that the coal company had ever seen.”

Ivy June listened in silence and sadness at the thought of her grandfather’s going to work every day at a job he didn’t like. She tried to understand the mind of the strong, quiet man, whose skin was a map of small wrinkles around his deep blue eyes. But she also knew there was a certain pride in being a miner, and it wasn’t every man who had the courage and the muscle and the guts to go deep inside a hole every day, not knowing for sure whether he would walk out on his own two feet or be carried out.

“And that’s where I get my satisfaction,” Papaw continued. “Every day that the bell clangs and my shift is over, I tell myself I did the best work of any man in the hole. And I remind myself of it every morning. It’s easy to do a good job on work you love. Hard as paddlin’ up-stream to do work you don’t like and do it well. But I do it.”

Ivy June nestled against him, her head on his shoulder. “I’ll be glad when July comes and you never have to go down in the mine again. What will you tell yourself
then
when you get up in the mornings?”

Papaw grinned down at her. “I’ll tell myself that now I get to do just what I want, and I can do it every which way, won’t matter.”

The squeaky sound of the pump handle came again from the kitchen, and a minute later Dr. Grace appeared in the doorway.

“Well, Spencer, I had to lance that foot again, but I think we’ve stopped the infection,” she said. “She’s back there giving Emma the what-for ’cause you sent for me.”

Papaw smiled a little and stood up, and the girls followed him inside. Mammaw came out of the next room, wiping her hands on her apron.

Dr. Grace took a large bottle out of her medicine case and counted out fourteen pills. “I want Iree to take two of these a day for a week,” she said. “One in the morning and one at night.”

“What about a cup of tea now, Dr. Grace?” Mammaw said.

“I appreciate it, Emma, but I’ve got to see Mr. Gibbons this afternoon. I pray his leg doesn’t have to come off, ’cause I can’t do it, and the hospital’s full up.”

“You’ll put this visit on our bill?” Papaw asked.

“Of course. You make sure she takes those pills, Emma. It’s trouble, I know. If the pill’s too big, cut it in half, but make sure she swallows both halves. Don’t let her fool you. If I know Iree, she’s got a dozen tricks up her sleeve, and if she lives to be a hundred and one, she’ll have a dozen more.”