Faith, Hope, and Ivy June (22 page)

“This is heaven!” said Catherine, reaching for another slice of warm bread and slathering it with Mammaw’s wild strawberry jam. “Mom loved those preserves you gave us,” she told Mammaw. “We already finished one jar and started the second.”

“Then I’ll send a jar or two back home with you,” said Mammaw, pleased. “I got just enough to last us till berry season comes again.” She leaned forward and checked the sky. “See the clouds? That’ll tell you the cold’s coming in, but I don’t feel it yet.” She turned to Grandmommy. “You all right there, Iree?”

“I’m okay,” said the old woman. “But it’s the last spring.”

Ivy June and Catherine stopped chewing and looked at Grandmommy.

“Now, Iree, why do you think that?” Mammaw asked her. “When a woman lives to be a hundred, why … no telling
how
much longer she could live!”

“Last spring for
some
body,” Grandmommy said, and her fingers curled and uncurled again, resting on the faded dress.

Mammaw pondered that awhile, leaning back in the rocker and letting the breeze fan her face. “Well, it’s always the last spring for somebody, Iree, but it don’t have to be you,” she said. And turning to the girls, “You have a good time down at Earl’s last night? Myrtle Tolson tells me that on Friday and Saturday nights, the cars is parked every which way on the road outside Earl’s. She says one night there was even a license plate from Virginia. We get people coming in here from across the mountain, why, who knows what could happen.”

“Maybe it was just somebody visiting relatives,” said Ivy June, smiling a little.

“Well, if Earl’s gets any more popular, and then that barbecue place catches on …”

Mammaw stopped talking suddenly and leaned forward again, staring off down the hill. Ivy June and Catherine turned to see what had caught her attention.

Something was coming their way, bobbing slowly up and down, and at first Ivy June thought it was a man holding a boy on his shoulders. Then, squinting, she realized it was a man on horseback, coming up the hill from the footbridge.

“Trouble comes in threes,” rasped Mammaw, unblinking, her hands tightening their hold on the arms of the rocker.

Ivy June felt her own hands grow cold and her heart began to pound as Sam Feeley, the man with the ham radio, rode into the yard.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

The short, muscular man dismounted and tied the reins of his horse loosely around a dogwood at one side of the yard.

“I knew it! I knew it!” whispered Mammaw.

“Hello there, Emma,” Mr. Feeley called, with a slight tip of his cap. “Hello, Iree.”

Grandmommy’s head swiveled in the direction of the voice, but Mammaw didn’t return the greeting. Her body stiff, she said, “Sam, what you got to tell us?”

Papaw!
Ivy June’s breath was coming out fast and shaky. Five more hours and his shift at the mine would have ended.

“State police radioed me this morning to take a message here, seeing as how I’m a little closer …,” Mr. Feeley said.

Ivy June stared at him, wondering if she’d been glad to see him, ever, always thinking of Mr. Feeley as a person full of bad news.

“You got a girl staying here named Catherine?” the man asked.

Ivy June blinked. Mammaw looked about in confusion. “Why, yes, this here is Catherine. She’s from Lexington.”

Sam Feeley touched the rim of his cap again as he turned toward Catherine. He wore a flannel shirt of brown and yellow plaid, and his belt buckle was hidden entirely by his large stomach, despite his small frame.

Mr. Feeley pulled a piece of paper from one shirt pocket, his glasses from the other. “Seems your father tried to get a message to the school, but it’s closed, of course, and he couldn’t reach a teacher…. Julia Dixon? That the name? So he called the state police and left a message, and I scribbled down what they told me best I could.”

“What’s
happened
?” asked Catherine.

“Says your mom fainted on … Thursday, I guess it was … and that they’ve discovered her … weakness, is it? … isn’t because of the pneumonia, but a heart condition. Your dad’s taking her to the Cleveland Clinic….” Mr. Feeley adjusted his glasses. “Yes, that’s it. Cleveland Clinic. And she’s going to have an operation.”

Catherine gave a little cry, and Mammaw reached over from the rocker and clasped her arm.

“Now, your dad says for you not to worry, that she’s got the best of doctors, and for you not to come home,” Mr. Feeley went on. “He says he wants you to stay right here like you planned…. Let’s see now…. Oh, yes. Peter and Claire are staying with Gramps and Rose … Rosemary, and there’s nothing you could do by coming home.”

Sam Feeley took off his glasses and stuck them back in his pocket. “I’d let you read this yourself, but you’d never make out my handwritin’. Can hardly read it myself. Sure sorry about your mother, but it sounds like they’re doing the right thing.”

“But … what kind of operation, and when is it going to be? Why did they have to go to Cleveland?” Catherine asked. Her eyes grew moist and the corners of her mouth sagged. “How long will they be there?”

Mammaw squeezed her arm. “Honey, your daddy couldn’t tell you what he don’t know yet himself.”

“But I have to talk to my mother!” Catherine said, the tears spilling over. “I should
be
there!”

“I’m sorry, miss,” Sam Feeley said again, “but seems to me if your dad thought you ought to be there, he’d’ve sent for you, and someone would drive you back. Best to do just like he says.” He turned to Mammaw again. “Sure hate to be the one bringing bad news. Many a time I’ve wished I didn’t have that old radio.”

“Last spring for somebody,” murmured Grandmommy, her fingers twitching, and Catherine jumped up and ran inside.

Ivy June started to follow, but Mammaw stopped her. “Let her cry alone a little, Ivy June. Then you go to her,” she said.

“Wasn’t sure just how the road was up this way,” Sam continued. “Week before last, the road from Pippa Passes to Pine Top was so muddy I couldn’t drive through. Didn’t know how it’d be over thisaway. Figured old Brandy here could bring me over maybe better’n my car.”

“Got some cider, Sam. Turning a little hard, but it’s cold,” Mammaw said. “Won’t you set down and have a glass? Piece of pound cake?”

“Might take that cider,” the stocky man said, sitting down on the chair Catherine had left. “Sure sorry about the news. Not the kind of thing you want to hear when you’re away from home.”

Ivy June got up then and went inside. Walked quickly through the parlor and into the tiny room where Catherine was sprawled on the bed, sobbing, one pajama leg twisted around her knee.

Ivy June crawled onto the cot and over to the single bed next to it. “Cat,” she said softly, “it’s going to be all right.”

“You don’t know that!” Catherine cried all the harder.

“She’s got the best doctors, your dad said! If he thought something bad would happen, he’d have asked us to drive you home.”

“That’s not it! They just want to protect me. They never tell me anything serious!” Catherine wept, her nose sounding clogged. “After Grandma died, I didn’t even know Gramps knew a woman named Rosemary. And the next thing I find out, he’s getting married. It’s always worse when they don’t tell you and you find out later. I want to
be
with my mom! I want to hug her!”

Ivy June looked around desperately, then reached out and picked up the gold locket from the backless chair that served as her bedside table. “Hold on to this, Cat,” she said. “It’ll be like touching your mom, with her picture inside.”

Catherine raised her head and stared at the locket through her tears. “It will not! That’s stupid, like you and your rock! That’s not going to help!”

Her throat tight, Ivy June put the locket back on the chair. She sat motionless on the cot, staring at her feet. They looked awkward, somehow—too big for her legs compared to Catherine’s size six-and-a-halfs. Her pajamas, thin with wear, looked faded beside the bright little pink and red hearts on Catherine’s.

But Catherine wasn’t through yet. She bolted up suddenly and leaned back against the wall, her face red and puffy and wet, her nose clogged: “I know you’re trying to be helpful, Ivy June, but you’re not! Your grandmother saying all the time she knew something bad was going to happen! She did not! Nobody knew this, not even Dad! We all thought it was pneumonia.”

“You’re right,” said Ivy June. “Mammaw didn’t know.”

They could hear Sam Feeley saying his goodbyes out on the porch, then the soft clop of the horse’s hooves on the bare ground, fading off into the distance.

Ivy June rolled off the cot. “Let’s go up to the Whispering Place,” she said. “Let’s put on our jeans and just climb.”

For a moment Catherine didn’t respond. Then, wordlessly, she got off the bed, picked up her clothes, and dressed.

“We’re going up the mountain,” Ivy June said to Mammaw as they went out and crossed the porch. Mammaw nodded.

There was a cool feel to the air now. The clouds were moving faster overhead, and when the girls reached the high ridge, the wind whistled through the saplings and Catherine stopped, listening, before she sat down.

For a long time neither girl spoke, just sat tuned to the wind’s whisperings, watching shadows scoot across the valley floor.

“If she dies,” Catherine said at last, “I won’t have had the chance to tell her I love her.”

Ivy June studied her friend’s face. “Haven’t you shown her in a hundred ways already?” she asked.

“It’s not the same as saying it,” said Catherine, and her voice sounded tense, controlled. “I just need to be with … with my family. With Gramps. Even Rosemary. Well, not Rosemary, maybe. But people who know that these things can happen. It’s
not
trouble number three, like it
had
to come. It
doesn’t
prove that superstition. And if Mom d … dies, it doesn’t have anything to do with a hundred-year-old woman saying that it’s somebody’s last spring.”

There was anger in Catherine’s words. In her eyes. She seemed to be glaring at Ivy June, but then she turned and looked again out over the valley.

“Well, I never said
I
believed that,” Ivy June said defensively.

“Maybe not, but I’ll bet you thought it. Just because your grandmother and great-grandmother and all the grandmothers before them believe something doesn’t make it true. No matter how many grandmothers put whiskey and turpentine on infections, that doesn’t mean it cures. You shouldn’t
do
things or
believe
things just because everybody who lived before you did.”

She set her jaw and gave Ivy June the same look as before. This time Ivy June glared back, anger roiling inside her. Never mind how upset Catherine might be, Ivy June wouldn’t let her go after Mammaw.

“Well,
we’re
not the ones who go to a private school just because our mother did. We’re not the ones who go into the printing business just because it belonged to our daddy.” Ivy June’s voice was shaking as she delivered that last line.

Catherine looked at her wide-eyed. “There’s a difference between wanting to keep a company going and keeping a superstition going,” she snapped.

“Even if your dad really wanted to be a pilot?” Ivy June shot back. “Down here the mine’s about all we’ve got. But in Lexington, your daddy could have been anything he wanted.”

Catherine blanched. “At least
our
traditions make sense.”

“A little boy having to wear a
tie
makes sense? Just because he’s going to the theater? That’s as silly as …” Ivy June stopped. What was
happening
here? What were they
saying?
“Let’s just both of us shut up and listen to the wind,” she said.

For a long time they did.

At last Catherine took a deep breath, her shoulders rising with resolution, then falling again. “I’m going to pretend we didn’t say any of this,” she told Ivy June.

“We can pretend, but it happened. No use playing like it didn’t.”

“But it’s so … so prejudiced!” said Catherine. “I was just upset about Mom.”

“And I’m sorry about your ma,” said Ivy June. “I’d want to be back home too if I were you.”

“We’re still friends, aren’t we?” Catherine asked. “I’d hate staying here if you were mad at me.”

Ivy June knew exactly how that felt. “Of course we’re friends,” she said.