Faith, Hope, and Ivy June (4 page)

“I got time before supper, or is there something else you need me to do?” Ivy June asked when she’d completed her work.

“It’ll be a while yet,” said Mammaw. “You wrap up those jars of preserves you’re taking?”

“Three layers of newspaper each,” said Ivy June.

“Then you can go say your goodbye to the mountains,” Mammaw told her.

It was as though her head were made of glass and her grandmother could see through it, Ivy June thought as she set out up the winding path to the Whistling Place. It was not Ivy June or Papaw who whistled there. It was the wind. A quarter mile up that path, there was a jutting-out spur of land overlooking the hollow, with a steep wall of rock behind it. Three thin saplings grew so close to the rock that when the wind came through, it made a rushing, whistling sound.

The saplings grew between the rock wall and a flat, raised boulder, and Ivy June marveled that they grew at all. They reminded her of the plaque in Mammaw’s kitchen, just above the stove:
BLOOM WHERE YOU ARE PLANTED
, it read. And those trees did just that.

Ivy June crawled up on the flat boulder, surveying the valley below, and gulped back a welling-up of homesickness that took her by surprise. She’d not set foot off the mountain yet, and she was missing it already. It was a place she came to often, sometimes to sing, accompanied by the wind, and sometimes with her sketch pad. Once she drew only a close-up of a branch. Another time she sketched the clouds. She drew Papaw’s house below, from this angle or that. Last fall she had taken one of those sketches to art class at school and she’d used watercolors to fill it in, squinting as she worked, so that she painted it as it might appear through mist or fog, the edges blurred. Mrs. Sullivan had liked it so much she’d found a frame for it, and Ivy June had presented it to her mother.

Mrs. Mosley had studied it a little, holding it out away from her. “It’s Papaw’s house, all right, Ivy June,” she had said, “but it looks to be out of focus.”

“Just another way of painting, Ma. I wanted to try something new,” Ivy June told her.

Howard had said, “Why didn’t you just take a picture of it?”

And Jessie had commented, “I want to hang a picture of a house on my wall, I’ll cut one out of a magazine or something.”

When it had lain around for a week or two and no one had volunteered to put it up, Ivy June had taken it to Papaw’s house and hung it on the wall in her own small bedroom.

When she got back from the Whistling Place, Papaw was napping in his chair in the parlor.

“Grandmommy’s awake now,” Mammaw said. “Go in there and see if you can entertain her till supper, will you? Read her that birthday card she got last week.”

“I’ve only read it a dozen times!” Ivy June said.

“Well, make that thirteen, then. She never tires of it, you doing the reading.” The small dining room had been converted to a bedroom, with a daybed, a wheelchair, and an array of bottles and ointments on a low shelf along with a Bible, a brush, and Grandmommy’s figurines.

The tiny woman sat immobile in the wheelchair, her feet in mended stockings, her toes barely reaching the footrest. Her scalp showed pink beneath the white strands of hair, and her fingers were knobby at the joints, veins standing out raised and blue on the backs of her hands like the rivers on the map of Kentucky.

It was hard to know how much Grandmommy could see, because both eyes were cloudy. But she always seemed to know when Ivy June was there.

“Well!” she said, turning her head and smiling as Ivy June leaned down to kiss her cheek.

“How you doing, Grandmommy?” Ivy June asked, sitting on the edge of the daybed.

The old woman managed a smile but didn’t answer.

“What’ll it be this afternoon? The Bible? The almanac?” Ivy June asked.

In answer, Grandmommy jiggled a large white card in her lap, and Ivy June dutifully took it from her wrinkled fingers and began reading aloud from the top:

“From the White House: Dear Mrs. Mosley, Please accept our heartfelt congratulations on the occasion of your one hundredth birthday….”

“Just cain’t … understand … how the President knew … about my birthday,” Grandmommy interrupted, as Ivy June knew she would. Ivy June would never tell her that one of Kentucky’s senators forwarded names to the White House if anyone let him know of a Kentucky resident who had reached the century mark.

“’Cause you’re special, and everybody around here loves you,” said Ivy June.

The old woman moistened her lips and said something else, but Ivy June had to lean down to hear.

“Almost all the friends I had … are gone,” said Grandmommy, her voice wavery as a loose string.

“Well, you got us, and all of them down at the house. That’s nine right there,” said Ivy June, and continued reading:

“How wonderful to know that you have lived to see some of the greatest scientific advancements in human history—the discovery of penicillin, man’s walk on the moon—”

“I never did,” the old woman interrupted again.

“Never did what?” asked Ivy June.

“Believe that. About the moon,” said Grandmommy. “It’s like … in the Bible, you know … the Tower of Babel. Men tried it before, and … God stopped ’em short. Never meant it t’happen.”

Ivy June had to smile. “But the Bible’s full of miracles. You believe in miracles, don’t you?”

“Walkin’ on the moon … was no miracle,” said Grandmommy, “and no science, neither. It’s hogwash.” She raised her head defiantly. “Now go on….”

Ivy June continued to read.

In the evenings, if he wasn’t too tired to talk, Papaw was full of stories, and generous with his smiles. There was always a smile on his face when Ivy June came in. She was his favorite grandchild, and she knew it.

But he also made time for the others. She remembered once when they’d all been playing up here at Papaw’s and hadn’t set out for home till after dark. Ezra, not quite seven at the time, had been afraid of the shadows and all the night sounds, and Papaw had walked them the four hundred or so yards back to the house.

Holding little Danny’s hand on one side of him, Ezra’s on the other, Papaw had said, “Why, boy, you don’t know what dark is. Up here you got the stars, you got the fire-flies, you got the light down in your ma’s kitchen—I can see it from here. Down in the mine, you turn off your carbide lamp and it’s black as black can be. You can’t even imagine anythin’ that dark.”

“But it don’t make scary sounds!” Ezra put in as crickets chirped around them and an old hoot owl picked that time to cut loose.

“You kiddin’ me?” Papaw said. “You go way deep in a mountain, turn off the machines for a minute, and you can’t imagine the sounds. The mountain groans and it shifts, like a giant movin’ around in his chair. It’s a noise like a handful of marbles rubbin’ together. You’d never think a mountain would talk to you, but you go down six hundred feet, you’ll believe it.”

Ivy June knew, from hearing this story before, that this was the time the tunnel roof had caved in and Papaw and the other miners had waited all night to be rescued. All night, sitting in the dark, listening to rock shift and moan. But when Danny and Ezra were around, Papaw never talked about danger. That was something he kept to himself.

Then he had picked up Danny and pointed out Venus, the brightest star in the sky. “We see a light like that down in the mine,” he said, “why, it’d be like the sun to us. It’s not dark up here, Ezra. You got all the stars, all the fireflies lightin’ your way home.”

And what Ivy June remembered most about that night was not the stars or fireflies but the thought of Papaw, six hundred feet down, in the dark.

The mine where Papaw worked now was a drift mine. The entrance was a big yawning hole in the side of the mountain, and mine cars carried the men a mile or two straight in. But whether Papaw went two miles in or six hundred feet down, he was surrounded by rock, and that was something Ivy June could not forget.

On this particular night, however—Ivy June’s last dinner at home—Papaw’s smile was wider than ever when he came to the table, and just as Ivy June was about to kid him that it must be because she was leaving, he said, “Four more months and I retire, Ivy June. What do you think of that?”

“And you won’t ever have to go back in the mine again?” she asked. “Not even if they’re short of men?”

“Not ever. Once I step off that mine car, it’s the last I’ll set foot on it again.” He took another swallow of cider and set the glass on the table, savoring the array of food spread out before him—the homegrown green beans, pickled beets with onions, corn bread and sweet butter, and of course, the chicken.

Mammaw smiled too as she wheeled Grandmommy up to the table and tied a dish towel around her neck. “That will sure be some happy day!” she said. “Wonder how you ever made it through, Spencer. Sometimes you’d get so disgusted with life you couldn’t see what was ahead and what was behind, but it didn’t stop you.” She leaned down and planted a kiss on his weathered cheek.

Ivy June buttered Grandmommy’s corn bread for her. “What are you going to do, Papaw, when you don’t have to get up at four and drive all the way to the mine?” she asked.

The tall man with the crinkles about the eyes grinned as he helped himself to the chicken. “Well, for the first year, I’ll wake up at four out of habit. Take me another year to learn to walk upright, not bent over like an ape. Third year I’ll still be washin’ coal dust out of my creases, and maybe by year four, I’ll see if there’s any more fish left in the creek.”

Mammaw laughed out loud at this, but Grandmommy smacked her toothless gums together and said, “He just … wouldn’t listen. Wouldn’t … listen a’tall.”

And everyone at the table knew she was talking about her husband, Papaw’s daddy, who had gone to work in the mine despite Grandmommy’s pleas for him to find factory work, and had gotten so much coal dust in his lungs he never lived to retire.

“Here, Iree,” Mammaw said, mashing some beans with the back of her spoon and holding them to the old woman’s mouth.

But Grandmommy was looking in Papaw’s direction, and Ivy June knew her great-grandma wouldn’t rest easy—none of them would—till he was out of the mine for good.

CHAPTER SIX

March 8

Hard to sleep last night. When rain hits the tin roof, it sounds like acorns coming down. If the road floods while I’m gone, Papaw’s going to have to take the long way home, park up at Vulture Pass, and walk down through there.

I’ve got a homesickness growing inside me already for Papaw and Mammaw, and even a little for Grandmommy. But the lonesomeness I’ve got for Ma and Daddy is more like for what I wish they were, and that’s hard to put down on paper. I know what their worry’s done to them, though, and I figure we all love each other down underneath where you can’t hardly see it.

But it wasn’t the rain that kept me awake, and not excitement, either, though that’s part of it. It’s the same thing that’s upset my sleep for the past thirteen months—the memory of what I did to Luke Weller’s family.

The closest I ever came to telling anybody was when I let Papaw know once how worried I was about him when he was in the mine. And the next night he came home, he called me out on the porch, his face all grimy with coal dust, and he says, “Got something for you.” He gives me this little piece of rock. It’s about as big as a walnut, smooth on one side, rough on the other.

“This is from way back in the mine,” he tells me. “A million years old or more. You keep it somewheres, Ivy June, and whenever you get to worrying, you just take this rock and hold it in your hand. Tell yourself that your Papaw’s as strong and hard as that old rock. It can shatter, it’s true, but it would take a mighty blow, and it’s the same with me.”

So I’ve packed that rock in my suitcase. But not even Papaw knows what I once asked God to do, and that’s a sin I’ve got to carry along with me.

Ivy June Mosley

CHAPTER SEVEN