Prairie Evers (11 page)

“You’re going to love this, you’ll see.” I ran to get my BB gun.

“We won’t shoot anything living,” I said as we headed out to the back pasture. “We’ll pretend to be girls who live in olden times and make our way in the wilderness.” I pointed at the bale of straw. “Pretend that’s a bear come to harm us, or a highway robber, or a deer we need to eat.”

Ivy nodded, but she didn’t look happy. I shrugged that off and took aim and fired. Ivy flinched. I had hit my mark, for I’m a fair shot, and I turned to her, grinning. She was paler than ever.

“Here, you try.” I held the gun out toward her.

Ivy crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head.

I stomped my foot. “You’re just being stubborn. Everybody
ought to know how to handle a gun. How many people have got a friend who’s willing to show them?”

Ivy didn’t answer, and that made me even madder. “You’re acting like a coward. I’m surprised at you! I thought you had some gumption.”

Ivy gave me a furious look, and she tore that gun from me. She was shaking like a poplar leaf. I felt sorry then for being so harsh. I said, gently, “Ivy, you’ve got to learn this. What if a band of outlaws came upon us and we weren’t ready for them? What if we were a Cherokee family trying to elude the soldiers?”

“There’s no band of outlaws coming. And we’re not Cherokees hiding from soldiers.” Ivy’s skin seemed stretched tight across the bones of her face.

I sighed. “I know that, but we’re pretending. You like pretending.”

“Not about stuff like this.” Ivy said that so softly, I didn’t think I could have heard her right.

“Here, come on, I’ll teach you how to shoot.” It’s easy, more or less, you just pull the trigger. You can learn to take aim before you fire, but I thought it best just to get her started.

What Ivy did next I would not have predicted. It made me uneasy, I confess. She took that gun and lifted it up in the air. She looked at me real brief, a kind of wild look, and then she fired. She fired and fired and fired.

There are a lot of bullets in a BB gun if you have filled it up, all you have to do is keep cocking the trigger and pulling it back. Ivy
fired up into the sky until the gun wouldn’t shoot anymore. Then she flung it down and went running across the fields. She was half out of sight before I thought to run after her.

I never did catch her. Ivy ran too fast. I finally gave up and went and picked up the gun and walked home, feeling put out. We had been going to play all day and had packed a lunch even. There were cheese sandwiches with pickles on them, and chocolate chip cookies, and two RC Colas, our favorite and a special treat. Mama didn’t buy soda very often, and now I didn’t even want mine.

IVY’S DADDY

When I got back,
Ivy was beside the henhouse. I said, “Hey,” and she did too.

I asked, “Are you okay?” She said she was. “Well then, what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

I wasn’t feeling very cheerful after she had just run off like that.

Ivy said, “What do
you
want to do?”

I shrugged. Then I climbed up into the maple tree. I didn’t know if I wanted Ivy to climb up after me or not, but she did. After a while we spoke of
this and that. We were somewhat strained, but Ivy and I don’t have it in us to hold a grudge for long.

Suddenly Ivy blurted out, “I have to tell you something.”

I held out for a moment and then I said, “What?”

“It’s about my father.”

Ivy had never mentioned her father before. I’d never asked. It seemed like if her daddy was no more use than her mama, it wouldn’t be something she’d want to talk about much.

“I don’t have one,” she said.

I was thankful to be sitting down when she told me why. If I’d been standing, I believe I would have fallen under the weight of it.

“My mother killed my father. She shot him,” she said.

I was so surprised, I couldn’t even move.

“I was five. I was there.”

“What happened?” I whispered.

“They had a big fight. I don’t know what it was about. But they were
so
mad at each other. They weren’t themselves. That’s what my aunt Connie always told me. They were drinking, I guess. I don’t remember that part. I heard yelling and stuff being thrown.”

I flinched. “That must have been scary.”

Ivy nodded. Her eyes were big and bright, but she didn’t cry. I don’t know how she goes about each day, what with all that happened. She is stronger than she looks with that fair skin and long yellow hair and her quiet ways.

“Why did she do it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. She was just so mad, they both were. It was an accident. A bad mistake. It happened so fast. In just one moment she did something she couldn’t take back.” Ivy looked like she was a million miles away. “They were young and they let their tempers get away from them. That’s what Aunt Connie said.”

I wondered where Aunt Connie was now. “But—” I didn’t know how to say what I thought. Tripping on a tree root and dropping your gun and having it go off, that was maybe an accident. Pulling the trigger while the gun was loaded and pointed at somebody? That was something else.

“My dad was bigger than my mom, and she was afraid he would hurt her. He was throwing things at her. She was defending herself. That’s what the court papers said. My aunt Connie explained it all to me.”

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

“It was called justifiable homicide.”

We were sitting at the edge of the platform in the tree, swinging our legs and looking down at the ground below. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. I could see Ivy had spent some time reflecting on those words.

“My mother didn’t get into trouble, not really. Not like you’d think.”

I kept on not saying anything, looking at the toes of my boots swinging there below me in the leafy air.

“She had to go to classes for a long time. But she didn’t go to jail.”

I nodded, to show I was listening and I understood. I gave Ivy’s toe a little kick with my toe, to show I thought as much of her as ever, and more. She gave my toe a little kick back. We were both real quiet for a time. I listened to my chickens down below, pecking about in the yard. They didn’t sound any different than ever. I wondered how that could be, with what Ivy had just told me falling down through the air.

“My dad loved me,” Ivy said. “I know he did. He gave me a Battleship game for Christmas the year before she shot him. He wrapped it up himself, I’ll bet. I was too little for it, but I loved it. I remember the paper, it was white with red Santa Clauses on it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“He’s buried back where he grew up, near Schenectady. Aunt Connie took me to the funeral, but his family didn’t want anything to do with us after what my mom did. I never saw any of them again.”

“I’m really sorry, Ivy.”

Ivy did cry then. She bent down her head and wept real quiet, with her shoulders shaking. I didn’t know what to do. I just sat there beside her, kicking her toe with my toe every now and then. After a while Ivy wiped her face off with the back of her shirtsleeve and said, “We moved here afterward, from
Poughkeepsie. My mom didn’t want everyone knowing. And plus my aunt Connie was here, so we moved in with her.”

I thought to myself that was the one thing Ivy’s mama had done that made sense. “So where’s your aunt now?”

Ivy’s whole body slumped. She looked even sadder than before, which I would not have thought possible. “She died last year. She had cancer.”

“Oh, Ivy. That’s not fair.”

Ivy smiled kind of wobbly at that. “Yeah.”

I had a feeling inside me like I wanted to go out and kick something.

“I never told anybody any of this before.” Ivy looked sore afraid when she said that. “I’ve been worrying about telling you. I was afraid maybe you wouldn’t like me anymore if you knew.”

I grabbed her hand and squeezed it hard. I could feel it shaking. “That would never happen, Ivy. Never.”

Ivy nodded and tears kept rolling down her cheeks, but her hand stopped shaking.

“I don’t hate my mom,” she said after a while. “She didn’t used to be like she is now, so much. They were just so mad at each other that night. You know?”

I nodded, but I did not know.

“She’s sorry but there’s nothing she can do about it, so she pretends it didn’t happen. But it eats away at her, you know?”

I nodded again. Ivy stared up into the branches and leaves above our heads. “I’m sorry I was no good at hunting.”

“That’s okay. It was a dumb idea.”

I put the gun away in the mudroom that evening and never brought it out again when Ivy was there.

PATIENCE

I wrote Grammy
another letter that night. I kept trying to talk her into using the neighbor’s computer so I could send e-mails from school, but she always said a letter would reach her in just a few days, quicker than she’d bother traipsing the five miles over to the neighbor’s place, so I might as well apply pencil to paper and quit pestering her.

When she wrote things like that—traipsing and pestering—I missed her and North Carolina more than ever. I missed the sound of people talking who sounded like me and used the words I’d use.
I missed the green smell of North Carolina and the mist hovering over the mountaintops. I missed the rhododendron and the redbud trees and the burbling streams hurrying down Peabody Mountain, and most of all I just missed Grammy. No matter how much I loved Mama and Daddy and Ivy, there was still a hole in my world.

I sat down at the kitchen table after supper that night and wrote and told Grammy everything Ivy told me. I said that I wanted to bring Ivy home to live with me because in my opinion her mama was no use at all. Even before Ivy told me about her daddy I thought that. I told Grammy I thought Ivy would be much better off with us, and what if her mama got mad and decided to shoot a gun off again? I asked Grammy what she thought.

I expected her to answer straightaway, and she did. But also I expected her to send me a solution to Ivy’s problems, and that she did not do.

Grammy wrote,

Grammy always said Patience was a ridiculous name for a person who had not been born with much. But she said it was
a skill you could learn if you really tried, and I reckoned that was what she was advising to me, to have patience. I am like my grammy, and not having an answer to things doesn’t sit easy with me. But she said to try and live with it and I did, or anyway, I tried.