Me and Billy (12 page)

Anyway, we were pretty busy. We’d get up around five-thirty in the morning, milk the cows, take them out to pasture. Around seven we’d sit down to breakfast. Pa Singletary wasn’t as fussy about his cooking as Prof, but there wasn’t ever any shortage of food—eggs and potatoes, or pancakes and syrup, biscuits and ham, a baked apple with cream so thick you had to plop it on with a spoon, and all the coffee you wanted. We’d stoke up good, for it’d be a long time until lunch.

By that time the dew would be off the hay—you couldn’t cut it wet. We’d go on out to the hay field, cut hay, rake it, and load up the wagon. We’d get in a couple of loads in the morning and a couple in the afternoon.

Then, around toward five o’clock, we’d go out to this place where a creek came under a wooden bridge. Betty Ann would climb over the railing and jump in, and Billy would have done it, too, but she wouldn’t let him, for she said he didn’t swim good enough. Me and Billy would slide in off the bank and paddle around, learning how to keep afloat. None of us had bathing suits: me and Billy swam in our underwear and Betty Ann wore an old housedress. It didn’t matter—you’d dry out in twenty minutes in that hot summer sun.

I tell you, it suited me fine. Oh, the work was hard. I’d done hard work at the Home, but it wasn’t anything like ten hours a day in a hay field, pitching hay up to the top of a heap on a wagon twelve feet off the ground. But it was nice doing something useful for a
change, instead of getting shouted at by Deacon or skinning people with the elixir. We got a lot of fun out of it, telling jokes and stories and teasing each other. Betty Ann was always on Billy about the mules. She’d say, “Say, Billy, I noticed old Nelly staring at you. I shouldn’t wonder if she’s in love with you. Maybe she wants you to take the reins next load.”

Billy’d get even with her by telling her stories about the Home. Billy knew she liked hearing them, and he pitched them higher and higher—how Deacon beat a boy to death, and how the boy’s best friend put poison in Deacon’s soup, only another boy stole it off the tray and was carted away screaming and was never seen again. “Glory,” Betty Ann would say, her eyes wide. “My goodness, I never heard of such a thing.”

She liked hearing about Prof and his elixir, too, and Billy’d work up some whoppers there—whole cemeteries worth of dead children and a posse of Pa’s that hung Prof from a bridge, only the rope broke and he swam away. That one was from a story in our reading book.

So it went for five or six days. We were getting the hang of swimming—nothing fancy, but good enough so we weren’t likely to drown right away. The hay was most nearly in, too, and I knew it wouldn’t be much longer before Billy started clamoring to get out of there and off somewhere that he didn’t have to use good table manners and pray twice a day. He’d stopped talking about getting a look at Betty Ann’s ma, too, and I figured he’d switched his mind to moving on.

I shouldn’t have. For real late one night I woke up and realized Billy wasn’t in bed beside me. It was dark as could be, clouds over the sky, no moon, no stars. I felt around in the bed. Billy was gone, all right. I swung out of bed and stood up. Right away I saw a thin line of yellow under the bottom of the door. Billy was out there with the candle, sure as anything.

As quick as I could, I slipped the door open. Billy was standing in front of Ma Singletary’s door, the candle in one hand, the key in the other. “Billy,” I hissed.

He didn’t turn his head. He shoved the key into the lock and twisted it. I could hear the click where I stood. I started to tiptoe toward him, but he was too quick for me. Before I could grab him, he slipped the door open and, holding the candle up, poked his head inside. For a moment there was silence. Then came a shriek like nothing I ever heard before—the kind of shriek somebody would give off if they were burning alive. I jumped forward, knocked the candle out of Billy’s hand, slammed the door, and locked it. But it was too late, for in half a minute the other doors onto the hall busted open, and there stood Betty Ann and Pa Singletary in their nightshirts, with their own candles.

“What on earth are you boys doing?” Pa Singletary shouted.

“Didn’t you hear that scream?” Billy said. “We figured something was wrong.” A soft moan came from inside the room.

“Where’d you get that key?”

“It was there, in the door,” Billy said.

Pa Singletary looked at me. “Is that right, Possum?” The moaning went on.

“I didn’t see it. Billy got there before me.” I hated lying to them, but I had to back up Billy. Still, I wasn’t about to take the blame for it, either. “Billy sleeps on that side of the bed, and he got out here before me.” They could make what they wanted out of that.

Pa Singletary gave Billy a long look. Billy stood his ground. If it had of been me, I’d of blushed and looked down at the floor, up at the ceiling, anywhere but at Pa Singletary. But Billy looked straight back, bold as brass. Finally Pa Singletary said, “All right, you all go back to bed. I’ll try to calm her down.”

We went back into our room and climbed into bed. I could hear Pa Singletary unlock the door and go in. I waited until I heard the door shut. Then I whispered, “Blame you, Billy, you should never of done that.” I felt sick about it, like I’d caused the death of somebody. It wasn’t my fault—I’d told Billy often enough to leave it alone. But still, I felt like it was my fault, for I’d brought Billy into their home in the first place. The way I was feeling about him right then, if he’d said something about branching off I probably would have done it.

“Why shouldn’t I have done it?” Billy said. “What’s so bad about taking a look?”

“It’s none of your business. If they wanted us to see her, they’d have shown her to us.”

“Why are you getting mad at me, Possum? There wasn’t any harm in taking a look.”

“No harm? In the first place, how’d you get that key?”

“There wasn’t anything to it,” he said. “I figured sooner or later someone would leave it lying around. I kept watching for my chance. Sure enough, tonight when Betty Ann came down from bringing her ma her supper—Pa Singletary was out in the barn—she left the key on the table for him. I slipped it in my pocket. I figured Pa Singletary would think Betty Ann still had it.”

It was hard for me to understand why Billy couldn’t see anything wrong with it. Why didn’t it bother him that other people’s feelings was hurt? Back at the Home that never mattered, because it was mainly the Deacon and his sister that Billy went after, and they deserved to get their feelings hurt. But here on the outside there were people who didn’t deserve it. Billy just couldn’t get ahold of the idea that other people counted besides himself. It was useless to argue with him, so I lay there trying to calm myself down and get back to sleep.

I was almost dozing off, when he said, “Possum, don’t you want to know what she looked like?”

The truth was, I did. I was curious myself about what a lunatic looked like. But I couldn’t admit it, not after telling him he should of kept a grip on himself. “No,” I said. “I don’t want to know.”

“Yes, you do, Possum. Don’t give me that.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. Anyway, I’m going to tell you.”

I knew I ought to put my hands over my ears and say I didn’t want to hear anything about it, but I didn’t—I just lay there.

“I knew you wanted to,” he said finally. “Well, I only had one quick look before she hollered, but she was a sight. She was dressed up real nice, in a pretty gown with beads or something down the front, a string of pearls around her neck—”

“Real pearls?”

“I don’t know. They looked like pearls. And a veil over her head. I know why, too.”

“Why?”

“It looked like part of her head was missing.”

I sat up. “What?”

“I couldn’t see too good. It all happened so fast. If you wouldn’t of dunked out my candle, I’d of got a better look. But it seemed like she only had one eye and half an ear on the side where the missing eye was. It looked like a chunk of her head was gone.”

“Are you sure? Are you sure it wasn’t just a shadow?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“What do you think happened to her?”

“It could have been anything—kicked by a mule, ax head flew off when she was chopping kindling. It could have been anything.”

I thought about it for a minute, feeling kind of sick about it.

“Were you scared when you saw it?”

“It kind of took me back. I wasn’t expecting it—those fancy clothes, and then a piece of her head tore off.”

Now I wished I didn’t know about it. The picture of somebody with a chunk gone out of her head kept coming into my mind. That was always the way: you get curious about something and can’t rest until you find out about it, and then you’re sorry. But of course if you wouldn’t have found out, you’d still be curious. There wasn’t any way to win in a thing like that. “Poor Betty Ann. It must be awful for her to see her own ma like that every day.”

“I reckon she’s used to it by now,” Billy said.

It took me a long while to get to sleep. I kept thinking that right through the wall next to my head a lady was sitting there in fancy clothes with a chunk gone out of her head. I knew we would have to leave as soon as we got the rest of the hay in. Billy was bound to get curious about her again, and there’d be no telling what he’d do then.

The next day Billy waltzed around like nothing’d happened—it didn’t bother him a bit. If it had of been me, I wouldn’t have been able to look Betty Ann or her pa in the face for a week. But Billy just chattered away about whether it would rain before we finished getting the hay in and how good he was getting at swimming. I didn’t see how he could do it, but he did.

Betty Ann didn’t say anything about it and neither did her pa. But they were kind of quiet—didn’t say much during breakfast, and out in the hayfield Betty Ann didn’t pull any of her usual jokes on Billy about the mules. She just tended to business. Once, when she was at the other side of the field from us, Billy said, “What’s got into Betty Ann?”

“You ought to know,” I said.

“Aw, come on, Possum. There wasn’t any harm in taking a look.”

“I don’t think Betty Ann agrees with that,” I said. It finally got through to him, and he was quiet himself the rest of the day.

It was Pa Singletary who finally brought it up. We were all pretty quiet over supper, just talking a little about how if the rain held off for a couple more days we’d have the hay finished up and about what a good sign it was that there were a lot of crows around, for that meant there’d be a good crop of corn. We’d finished up and were sitting there, resting, when suddenly Pa Singletary said, “Well boys, since you got some idea about Betty Ann’s ma, I figured I’d better tell you the rest.”

He looked at us. I felt bad about it. “You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want, Mr. Singletary.”

“No, I don’t,” he said. “But I figured it might do you some good to know.”

I looked over at Betty Ann. She had her hands in her lap and was staring down at them. She didn’t look up at me, didn’t say anything.

“You see,” Pa Singletary said, “I know about those mountains, for I went up there myself. I heard all those same stories you were told—rubies as big as your fist, chunks of gold, heaps of diamonds, all just lying around where you could scoop them up for the asking. There were all kinds of stories about how the stuff came to be up there. The one most people favored was that when the conquistadors started fighting the Aztecs down in Mexico and Montezuma got killed, some Aztec priests ran off with bushels of gold and jewels. They came up north to get away and landed up in the mountains, where they figured they’d be safe. But, like the way it happened with a lot of Indians, they caught some disease from the white people and died off like flies. One by one they died out, until there wasn’t but one old man left, maybe a hundred years old or something. He knew he was going to die soon and that’d be the end of his tribe. He saw that it was the gold and jewels that did it—if the Aztecs had stayed home, they wouldn’t have taken sick the way they did. So he took all the stuff and flung it all around—in the meadows, the woods, the lakes, off mountain ledges, so nobody would ever get tempted by it again. And the stuff is still up there. That’s the story most people favored.” He stopped and sat there, remembering.

“Do you believe it, Mr. Singletary?” I said.

“I do,” Billy said. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Oh, there’s a lot wrong with it, Billy,” Pa Singletary said. “I went into Plunket City and spent a
couple of days at the library there studying up on the Aztecs. That story didn’t fit in with the facts. There was nothing in the history books about any priests escaping with anything. In fact, it didn’t seem like anybody escaped, not to come way up here, anyway. But still, every once in a while you’d hear about somebody coming out of the mountains with a chunk of gold. No diamonds or rubies or emeralds. Just gold. But that was enough for me.” He sat still, frowning and remembering.

“You know, people can most generally manage to believe what they want to believe, no matter how strong the evidence is against it. It’s just amazing what you can believe if you set your mind to it. I wasn’t any different. I went to work on that story, paring it down bit by bit until I got it to where it was believable. Maybe it wasn’t a whole passel of priests, but just one who ran off with a knapsack full of gold. That way you didn’t need an epidemic to kill anybody off. He could have just got lost up there and starved or got killed by something—a rattlesnake, bear, pack of wolves. You didn’t need the part about the priest scattering the stuff around so it wouldn’t harm anyone. All you needed was for an animal to smell meat in the knapsack and rip it open. A bear could do that. A wolf could do it. After that, in the nature of things, the stuff would get pretty well scattered—picked up by crows, kicked around by animals, washed into streams by heavy rains.”

“So it could of happened,” I said.

Pa Singletary shook his head. “It was an easier story to believe, is all. There wasn’t any more evidence for it than there was for any other story. It was just more believable.”