Some Sweet Day (8 page)

“Why can't we help pick it out?”

“Because they won't let kids come into the hospital, that's why,” Mother said, laughing.

“We could stay outside by the alligator pond, and you and Gran could bring some out and let us pick one,” I said.

“That's a good idea!” Mother said, laughing again. “But I don't think the doctor would let us do it.”

“Why?”

“Well, does Mr. Stoner let you take candy out of the drugstore before you pay for it?

“No.”

“Well, that's how the hospital is, too. You have to pick while you're inside.”

The day was dark gray. The wind wheezed in the treetops. I carried Mother's suitcase to the car. Virgie and Joe George were driving up.

“You didn't pick a very good day to go, Mother,” I said.

“No, but it'll have to do.”

“Don't worry about a thing, Lacy,” Virgie said. “Everything's going to be all right, I promise.”

“Hi,” Joe George said. “Brrr!” He hugged himself.

“Hi,” I said.

“I believe you, Virgie,” Mother said. “We just have to trust in the Lord.”

Gran was shooing Belinda and Rick off the porch back into the house. When she had put her suitcase into the car, she bent and kissed me and hugged me. The big fur collar of her coat smelled cold and dusty. Then Mother kissed me, too.

“Remember, you're the man of the family,” she said. “Help Virgie every way you can.”

“I will.”

Virgie put an arm around Joe George's shoulders and the other around mine and hustled us into the house. As soon as we slammed the door, she pulled a brown paper sack from under her coat, held it high and said, “Well, who wants a cookie?” Rick started crying. She picked him up and carried him to the kitchen, sat him in his high chair, put the cookies on a plate and poured milk for all of us.

“You all help yourselves,” she said, “but stay in the kitchen until you're through. We don't want to mess up Miss Gloria's sitting room, do we?”

She handed Rick a cookie, and he started gnawing on it and pretty soon forgot to cry. We sat around the table and ate.

“Which would you rather have, a brother or a sister?” Virgie asked. We all looked at each other. Belinda shrugged.

“I don't guess it makes much difference,” I said. “Maybe a sister, since we've already got two boys.”

“What's a hospital?” Belinda asked.

“It's where they take people that are real sick,” Joe George replied.

“Mother's not sick!” Belinda yelled. Then she looked at me, worry in her big brown eyes. “Is she, Gate?”

“Of course not!” Virgie said. “Your mother's fine! The hospital's a healthy place, and they keep the little babies there until they're big enough to take home, and then the mothers and daddies come and get them.”

“Our daddy isn't here,” Rick said.

“I know, honey,” Virgie said. “But he'll be home someday, and won't he be surprised when he sees what your mother's got!”

“He already knows about it,” I said. “He knew about it before he went to the Army.”

“Oh, of
course
he did! He probably helped your mother fill out the order.”

“Why don't we fill out an order, Mama?” Joe George asked. “Gate's already got Belinda and Rick, and now he's getting a new one. I'm tired of being the littlest one in our family.”

“Finish your milk,” Virgie said. “Let's clean up these crumbs, or Miss Gloria will be awful mad when she comes back.”

Sleet was slapping at the windows now, and the wind was higher than ever. Joe George and I sat by the window and watched the lights of the cars moving slowly up and down the road and listened to the wheezing of the two big elms in the front yard. The lights were on in some of the houses, and Virgie turned ours on, too. She sat on the floor by the big coal oil stove and played with the little ones, but they didn't seem to want to play very much, and I was getting tired of looking out the window and talking to Joe George. It got pretty quiet, and Rick started crying again, and Belinda looked like she was about to, and I wanted to.

“Anybody want any supper?” Virgie asked. Nobody answered. “Too full of cookies, huh? Okay, then, time for bed.”

She said Joe George and Rick and I could sleep on a pallet on the floor, just for the fun of it, and I helped her get the quilts down and undressed Rick while she attended to Belinda. Belinda climbed into Gran's bed with Virgie.

The pallet was thin, and it took us a while to get comfortable, but things finally got still, and Virgie was snoring softly, and Joe George's breath came slow and heavy, and I lay there staring up into the darkness and listening to them and to the wind and sleet. I was thinking I was the only one still awake when Rick slid over to me and whispered in my ear.

“I wish Mother was here,” he said.

“I do, too,” I said. I put my arm around him.

Virgie fixed us oatmeal with prunes in it for breakfast and dressed the little ones and shooed Joe George and me out the door into the cold. The storm was over, and the sun was out, but the little white sleet pellets still lay on the dead grass and crunched under our feet as we walked across the pasture to school.

All the kids crowded around me when they found out that Mother had gone to get the baby. The girls especially liked babies, and they all wanted to know if they could come see it when Mother brought it home. Even old Mrs. Potter smiled a little and let us talk for a few minutes after the bell rang before she told us to shut up and sit down.

As Joe George and I walked back across the pasture after school, Virgie came out on the back porch and yelled at me. “Hey, Gate!” she said. “You've got a new baby sister!”

“Yippee!”

I ran for the house. Virgie told us all to get in the car and go with her to the grocery store, and we could tell everybody. She drove us all over town, and we stuck our heads out the windows into the cold and yelled the news. The little ones bounced on the back seat and chanted, “We've got a baby si-i-i-ster! We've got a baby si-i-i-ster!” over and over again, and people in cars and on the sidewalk smiled and waved.

“Your grandma called Mrs. Haskell not an hour ago,” Virgie said. “She said it weighs eight pounds, and your mother named it Cherry Ann.”

“When are they coming home?” I asked.

“Miss Gloria said Saturday, and an ambulance will bring your mama.”

“An
ambulance!
With the siren and red lights and everything?”

“Maybe. We'll see.”

“Boy howdy!”

We waited for Saturday like Christmas. Belinda and Rick were always asking Virgie, “Is it Saturday yet?” and she would laugh and say, “Not yet. I'll tell you when.” But Saturday finally came, and when it came it was cold. Virgie wanted us to stay inside, but we couldn't, at least Belinda and Joe George and I couldn't. We sat at the top of the front porch steps, all capped and coated and gloved, watching our breath steam out before us in the still, clear air. We looked up and down the street and listened for the siren and talked about Mother and Cherry Ann and wondered how much hair our baby sister would have and what color her eyes would be. But the ambulance didn't come, and we would get too cold and have to go inside and stand by the stove. Rick, all cozy in corduroy, watched us puff and blow our hands.

“Saturday yet?” he asked.

I laughed. “Not yet, but pretty soon.”

And when we were toasted, we would go back out and sit some more, and then get up and wander around the yard, wanting to do something besides just wait, but not knowing what. Finally, I climbed the mulberry tree in the backyard. The tree wasn't as tall as the house, so I couldn't see anything, but I shaded my eyes with my hand and squinted like I was looking way off down the street.

“See anything?” Belinda asked.

“Yeah, I see the street…way, way down the street, clear to the highway…and a bunch of cars…a big, long black car… It's the ambulance! The ambulance is coming! Hurry, Belinda! Run to the front, or you'll be too late!”

Belinda took off around the house. I climbed down, and Joe George and I sat under the tree and giggled until Belinda came back, and then we put on serious faces again.

“It's not there!” Belinda said. “You're telling a story!”

“Doggone!” I said. “I thought sure that was it.”

Joe George got up and walked around the other side of the house, and pretty soon he came running and yelling, “It's coming! It's coming from the other way! Hurry, Belinda, or you'll miss it!”

And Belinda took off again. We kept up this game until Belinda got tuckered out and looked like she was about to cry. “No fair, Gate!” she said. “You keep on fooling me!”

Her brown eyes looked so big and hurt that I felt kind of ashamed of myself, so I held her in my lap and played with the curls that were sticking out from under her red knit cap, and pretty soon she grinned at me, and everything was all right again.

Virgie came out and told us to come in and eat, and we missed the ambulance. We were halfway through our soup when Gran opened the door.

“Yoo-hoo!” she hollered. “Anybody home?”

We jumped up and ran outside, and there was the ambulance already pulled up outside the front gate, and two men in white coats rolling out the stretcher with Mother on it. No siren, no lights, no nothing. Virgie held us back on the porch while Gran went out and took a little bundle of blanket from one of the men. She carried it to the house, and we all crowded around, saying, “Let me see! Let me see!”

“No, no,” Gran said. “Stay back until they get your mother in.”

Mother's hair looked bright red against the sheet of the stretcher. She smiled at us when they carried her up the steps, but she looked tired and pale, and she didn't say anything. We waited until the men came back out with the stretcher, and Gran came to the door and said, “You can come in now, but don't make any noise. The baby's asleep.”

We tiptoed, but Gran still said, “Shh!” Mother had been laid in Gran's bed, and the little bundle of blanket was in the crook of her arm. She reached over and folded some of the blanket back and showed us the little red baby.

“Ooooo! Little!” Rick said, reaching toward it.

“No, no! Don't touch,” Gran whispered. “You'll wake her up.”

“She
does
look like a cherry, doesn't she?” Belinda whispered to me.

Mother stretched her arm toward us, and we went up one by one and hugged her and kissed her.

“My babies!” she whispered. “You're all my babies!”

Later, Virgie handed Mother an envelope. “Here's something that'll make you feel better,” she said. “A letter from Will.”

Mother tore open the envelope. There was just one sheet of paper inside. She read it quickly and dropped her arm onto the bed and looked at Gran, even tireder than before.

“Will's been hurt,” she said.

My father and several others had been crossing a bridge across a rocky ravine, and somebody blew up the bridge with a hand grenade. One soldier was killed, and my father and the others fell to the bottom of the ravine. I never knew where it happened, except that it wasn't overseas. My mother got a letter from him occasionally while he was in the hospital, but she never read them aloud to us as she did before the accident. And she never smiled when she read them to herself. She read them once, then put them into their envelopes and put them away in her cedar chest.

My mother sent my father some money that my grandmother gave her, and he sent us some presents. Rick got a little donkey carved out of cedar, and Belinda got an Indian doll wrapped in a little red blanket. I got a leather case with some crayons and a comb and nail file in it. “Souvenir of Hot Springs, Ark.” was printed on all of them. My father sent my mother a little leather coin purse which she said he made in the hospital.

My father had sent my mother two photographs of himself before the accident. In one, he was in dress uniform and was grinning. In the other, he wore a helmet and was holding a rifle, and his face was smeared with black grease paint. My mother told us it was taken when he was training for night fighting. She had kept those pictures on her chest of drawers and had shown them to people who came to visit us. But a few weeks after the accident, she took them down and locked them in her cedar chest, and only occasionally took them out and looked at them. I never knew why.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, trying to build a windmill with my Tinker Toys, and Mother came in and sat down across from me. She watched me for a while, and then she said, “I don't believe you've got enough Tinker Toys there to finish the job, Gate.”

“Well, you can build a windmill with them. There's a picture of one right here on the box.”

“Yes, but that's what you can build if you have the
big
box. You've got the little one. See? Here's one that shows a motor operating something. You don't have a motor in yours.”

“Well, what
should
I build then?”

“Here's a good one. Try a giraffe.”

“Okay.” I started taking the windmill apart.

“I'll help you,” Mother said. She scooted her chair over by mine, and we sat there together, pulling the sticks and knobs apart.

“Your daddy's coming home,” she said quietly.

“He is? When?”

“Pretty soon. Soon as he gets out of the hospital.”

“To stay?”

“Yes, to stay.” She was peering at me very closely, as she did when trying to find out if I was lying about something.

“Can we go back to the farm then?”

“Maybe. I don't know. I don't know how things are going to be.”

“Things will be just like they used to be, won't they? Before Daddy went to the Army?”

Mother sighed. She had been twiddling with a Tinker Toy stick, staring at it. Now she looked at me again. “Things never are just like they used to be, Gate,” she said. “I don't know how they'll be, but they won't be just like they used to be.”