Belle Prater's Boy Read online

  I grabbed Woodrow’s arm quick and pulled him toward Granny and Grandpa.

  “Grandpa, don’t you have a quarter for Woodrow to put in the collection plate?” I said as loud as I could to drown out Mrs. Cooper, who was still talking.

  Grandpa did have a quarter for Woodrow, and I could tell by the way he looked at that quarter Woodrow wanted to keep it for his own self, but he didn’t. In fact, he made it clatter when he tossed it in the plate, so everybody would hear it.

  Going back home from church, Woodrow and I skipped along in front of the family, singing. He knew all the words to “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” which he taught to me.

  Later we vacuumed Dawg while Granny and Mama fixed fried chicken and gravy for dinner. Granny had one of those newfangled vacuum cleaners that was so mighty it could pick up a steel ball. In fact, that’s how the salesman sold it to Granny. Grandpa always teased her about it, ’cause he said if anybody had any steel balls to vacuum up, Granny’s machine was ready. It was strange how Dawg wasn’t one bit afraid of that vacuum cleaner, even with all the racket it made. When you went to turn it on, she would lie down in front of you and put all her legs up in the air and grin at you. That meant she was ready for a good vacuuming. So I would put on one of those attachments that was made for doing the couch and curtains, and vacuum Dawg’s belly with it. She just loved it. Her four legs would paw the air at about ninety miles an hour. Woodrow got such a kick out of that, I offered to let him do the rest of Dawg, which he did, giggling all the time.

  Late that evening, Woodrow and I went out to my tree house overlooking Slag Creek, which my daddy built for me when I was only five. It was a two-story job, the lower floor being the porch and the upper floor the house. Woodrow was impressed. After inspecting it throughout, he suggested we make it our secret hideout. The house part was tucked up among the leaves and blossoms so that from the ground nobody could see it unless they got up close.

  “We’ll put a sign on it—KEEP OUT!” Woodrow said. “And we’ll stash our treasures inside.”

  “What treasures?” I said.

  “Oh, money and stuff. We’ll get some treasures.”

  “Treasures” was a good word. It sparked my imagination and conjured up images of kidnapped princesses and pirates and swashbuckling heroes.

  “I have an old jewelry chest I don’t use!” I said. “We’ll bring it up here for our treasures.”

  We settled down on the tree-house porch and let our legs dangle out over the creek. The frogs were starting up with their party again, and all mingled in with the night sounds were the mamas calling their children to come in because tomorrow was a school day.

  “Peggy Sue!”

  “Franklin Delanooooo!”

  “You must ask for what you really want,” Woodrow said softly. “That’s what Mama’s poem said. And Preacher Yates said the same thing today in his sermon. Ask and you shall receive.”

  “What do you really want, Woodrow?”

  “You won’t make fun of me?”

  “Oh no, Woodrow, I would never make fun of you.”

  He smiled.

  “Well, besides wanting Mama to come home safe and sound, I want my eyes to be straight,” he said. “If my eyes were corrected, Gypsy, they would look just like yours.”

  My heart filled with pity for him, but I didn’t say anything.

  “What do you really want, Gypsy?”

  “Oh, it sounds silly next to what you want, Woodrow. You want important things.”

  “But what you want is important to you no matter how it seems to someone else. What do you really want, Gypsy?”

  “I have never let those words cross my lips about the thing I really want. Mama would just about die if she heard it. And it’s no use asking for what you can’t have. I want to get my hair cut off short.”

  “But why? It’s so beautiful! Nobody has hair like yours, Gypsy.”

  “That’s for sure. And you wanna know why you don’t see other people running around with their hair down to their butt? Because it’s so much work! That’s all I do is take care of my hair! It’s disgusting.”

  “Oh,” Woodrow said.

  “But that’s not all,” I continued. “Sometimes … sometimes, Woodrow, I feel invisible. Like maybe under all this hair nobody can see me. They talk about my hair, but do they ever see what’s underneath? You know what I mean?”

  “No … not exactly,” Woodrow said.

  “Sometimes I want to say, ‘There is a person in here!,’ but it sounds silly, even to me.”

  Woodrow didn’t say anything, and I let out a long sigh. I guess I just didn’t have the right words to explain.

  The night air was turning chilly. We watched the moon and listened to the mamas.

  “Garnet! Am I gonna have to come out there and get you?”

  “Willy! Don’t you make me call you again!”

  “Woodrow, do you think Aunt Belle asked for what she really wanted that morning, like the poem said?”

  “Yeah, and she got it, too,” he whispered.

  “What? What do you mean? What did she ask for?” I said breathlessly.

  “To get out of her life.”

  “Oh, Woodrow, you mean … you think she’s …”

  I couldn’t say the word.

  “Dead? No, she ain’t dead,” Woodrow said matter-of-factly. “But by now she may wish she was.”

  “What! What do you know, Woodrow?”

  “GYP … SY!”

  It was Mama calling me.

  “Nothing for sure and certain,” Woodrow said.

  “Gypsy, you come in now. Time to brush your hair.”

  I groaned.

  “COM … ING!” I yelled back.

  “I’ll tell you all I know tomorrow,” Woodrow said. “But you won’t believe me.”

  “No, now! I wanna know now!”

  “Not now. You gotta go brush your hair.”

  That was definitely the wrong thing to say to me at that particular moment, and I guess Woodrow realized his mistake too late.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled.

  I folded my arms in stubborn resolution.

  “I am not moving from this spot till you answer me. I’ll stay right here all night if I have to, or until Mama drags me outa this tree kicking and screaming.”

  Woodrow sighed.

  “Okay,” he said. “You go on home and do your stuff and go to bed. Then you get up and sneak out the window and meet me back down here.”

  “No foolin’?” I said, grinning.

  I was excited. Never in a hundred million years would it have occurred to me on my own to do such a naughty thing.

  “No foolin’,” Woodrow said. “Think you can get away?”

  “Oh sure,” I said. “Mama and Porter will turn in about an hour from now.”

  “Okay, an hour, then.”

  So I ran home.

  Seven

  “There’s this place, see.” Woodrow began his story in a very soft voice. “Up there in Crooked Ridge, right behind our house—or shack, as you called it.”

  I hung my head in shame. “Oh, Woodrow, that was real hateful of me to say that.”

  “It don’t matter. It is a shack,” Woodrow said.

  We were wrapped in blankets and sitting face-to-face, Indian-fashion, on the porch of the tree house. My hair was in curlers and we were both in our pajamas.

  “Anyway, behind the shack there’s a place … I don’t rightly know how to say it … but the air is thick and it vibrates. You hit this warm spot and you feel the air quivering and you hear noises.”

  “What kind of noises?”

  “Voices. Only they’re funny voices. Have you ever sung a song or said words into a fan when it’s running?”

  “A fan? A ’lectric fan? No, can’t say as I ever spoke to one.”

  We both giggled. How thrilling it was to be out here in the cool night tucked up among the leaves like a couple of cattypillars.

  “Well, anyhow,” he went on. “My Aunt M
illie and me played a game with her electric fan. I would say words into it and she would try to make out what I was saying. Then she would say words … Get it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s the rotating blades. They take the sound waves and chop them up, and it makes your voice sound real funny. I’ll show you the next time we’re around a fan that’s running. And that’s what this place sounds like.”

  “But I don’t get it, Woodrow. It’s just a place in the air?”

  “Yeah, I felt it the first time when I was a kid. And it scared me real bad. I thought there was something there … something that wanted to get me. You know how little kids think? I would run into it sometimes when I was playing, and …”

  “What was there to run into?”

  “I don’t know, Gypsy, but something was there. And you know, when I would try to find it—that’s when I wasn’t afraid of it anymore—I would walk back and forth and stop here and bend there and stretch around, but I couldn’t find it when I was looking for it.

  “But when I had my mind on something else, and I was just walking by or turning or doing something ordinary, boom! There it was!”

  “There what was?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. It was just a place in the air where …”

  “Where what?”

  “Where two worlds touch,” he said, and let his breath out with the words.

  “That’s what the poem says,” I whispered.

  “Yeah,” Woodrow said. “People are going back and forth across the doorsill / where the two worlds touch. / The door is round and open.”

  I was lost, but I didn’t want Woodrow to see how confused I was, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “Mama knew about the place,” Woodrow went on. “We used to talk about it sometimes; then suddenly one day she told me to hush up about that place. She didn’t want me to talk about it anymore. She said I was imagining things, but even after that, I saw her out there sometimes going around and around and back and forth, kinda batting at the air like she was feeling for it.”

  We were quiet for a long time, and a suspicion started worming its way into my head—that Woodrow was pulling my leg.

  “And for the last few days before she disappeared, whenever Daddy wasn’t around, she practically lived near that spot.”

  “Did Uncle Everett know about that place?” I asked.

  “I doubt it. I tried to tell him about it after Mama left, and he told me to hold my tongue. He said if folks heard me carrying on about a place in the air, they’d think I was addled in the head. So if he ever felt anything there or heard them voices, he kept it to his own self.”

  “What did the voices say, Woodrow?”

  “The sound vibrated so you couldn’t understand any words.”

  “Could you see anything there?”

  “Sometimes I thought I did … It was like a shadow, then a flicker, real quick. I don’t know. It’s real hard to explain.”

  “Woodrow, are you teasing me?”

  “No!” he insisted as he shook his head from side to side. “Now I may tease a Sunday-school class, Gypsy—which I did—but I would never tease you. It’s true.”

  Suddenly from the street a mellow voice could be heard singing as it cut through the sounds of spring.

  He was some mother’s darling,

  Some mother’s son.

  Once he was fair

  And once he was young.

  “What is that?” Woodrow said as he scooted closer to me.

  “What? Oh, that singing? That’s just old Blind Benny.”

  “Who’s Blind Benny?” he said.

  “He’s a man who hangs out at night. He walks the streets and sings and goes through folks’ trash and talks to the dogs. They love him and follow him around.”

  “He can sing good,” Woodrow said. “Is he really blind?”

  “Yeah. Doc Dot told me he practically has no eyes at all. And that makes him look like something from a horror comic, you know? Folks used to be scared of him, but he wouldn’t hurt a body as far as I know. Some folks poked fun at him and said nasty things. Then he quit coming out in the daylight. He sleeps in the day and comes out at night, when there’s nobody to look at him.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “I don’t know. When it gets daylight, he vanishes, and you don’t see him again till dark.”

  “Just like a bat,” Woodrow said.

  “Tell me more about that hole in the air,” I said.

  “It’s not a hole.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I told you, I believe it’s where two worlds touch.”

  “So what’s it got to do with Aunt Belle?”

  “I think she went across the doorsill.”

  I was getting cranky.

  “Woodrow!”

  “I told you you wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Well, you’ve got to admit it’s not an easy story to swallow, now, is it?” I said.

  “Maybe not, but it’s what I believe,” he said.

  “Did she do it on purpose?” I asked.

  “She read me this book,” Woodrow said. “It was called The Twenty-fifth Man. It was about a man called Ed Morrell who was in prison. In fact, he was in Alcatraz, and he would get in trouble with the guards all the time. They didn’t like him a bit, because he was smart. But anyhow, whenever he got in trouble, they put him in a straitjacket, and it would be so tight he couldn’t even move a muscle. It was the most awfulest thing you could do to a man, and some men died in that straitjacket, because it squeezed the life right out of their body.

  “So one day Mama was reading out loud to me about that straitjacket, and suddenly she stopped reading and said, ‘I know how he feels. I am in a straitjacket, too. That’s how I feel. Squeezed to death. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I have to get out of here.’”

  Woodrow was quiet for a minute. We could hear a night owl. I wondered what time it was getting to be.

  “Do you know what Ed Morrell did, Gypsy?” he said softly.

  “No, what?” I said.

  “He would leave his body. It was the only way he could survive. He would leave his body and go traveling. He said it was the most wonderful feeling. He would just soar away over the water and the land. He would go see people outside the prison. Then when the guards came to take him out of the straitjacket, he would have to go back into his body and he didn’t want to.”

  “That’s a good story, Woodrow.”

  “It’s a true story. He finally got out of jail, and he wrote the book and he went around telling people that he had visited them when he was in the straitjacket and he would tell them what they were doing. Folks were amazed, but they had to believe him.”

  “But, Woodrow, if your mama was doing that, her body would still be somewhere, wouldn’t it? I mean, that man’s body was still in jail, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, Gypsy. I was just telling you Mama said she knew how he felt, how he had to get out of that straitjacket or die. That’s how Mama felt about her life. I think she kinda willed herself to leave it.”

  “But what about you, Woodrow?” I said. “Didn’t she think about you?”

  Woodrow didn’t say anything.

  “She was your mama,” I said. “I know you miss her.”

  “Yeah.”

  Mary, she rocked him

  Her baby to sleep.

  Then they left him to die

  Like a tramp on the street.

  It was the end of Benny’s song. We looked out toward the road, but we couldn’t see anything except the moon shining on the apple blossoms. We could hear Blind Benny muttering cheerfully to the dogs. Dawg, freshly vacuumed, was probably among them.

  We eased down the ladder and headed home.

  “One last thing,” Woodrow whispered before we went in opposite directions.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “I get a feeling sometimes,” he said, “that Mama is trying to contact me.”

&nbs
p; “What makes you think that?”

  “It’s just a feeling. I wake up some nights and remember her voice from a dream. She’s saying my name over and over … and she’s crying. She’s afraid.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “And her voice,” he went on. “Her voice quivers like the voices in that place. She’s in that place. I know she is.”

  We said good night, and I hurried across the yard and around the back of my house, shivering. I had almost reached my window when I heard a sound in the shadows.

  “Gotta light?” someone said.

  I like to jumped out of my skin.

  A body stepped forward into the moonlight. It was Porter standing there in his pajamas, holding a cigarette.

  “She won’t let me smoke, you know,” he said. “So I have to sneak out here after she goes to sleep … just like you. But I forgot my lighter.”

  We stood there looking at each other in the moonlight. I guess he was waiting for me to explain the situation, but it seemed like I plum forgot how to talk.

  “I don’t suppose you want to tell me where you’ve been?” he said at last.

  I was trying to think, but absolutely nothing came to mind.

  “No, I reckon not,” he said when I didn’t answer. “But I’ll tell you what, you sneak in and toss me a match out the window and I’ll forget I ever saw you, okay?”

  I nodded, went to my window, climbed in, and pulled the blanket after me. Then I tiptoed to the dark living room, took a match from the wood box by the hearth, and hurried back to my window, where he was waiting. I handed the match to him.

  “Thanks,” he mumbled, and disappeared into the orchard.

  I replaced the screen in my window and slipped between my sheets. Well, I was thinking, quite an ending to quite a day!

  Blind Benny was coming back down the street singing:

  On the wings of a snow-white dove

  He sends his pure, sweet love

  Though I had heard him sing a thousand times or more, that night I really listened to him. Yes, it was a good, strong, clear voice. It had put me to sleep many, many nights, and I had never paid attention. It had become as much a part of the mild nights as the frogs down in Slag Creek. I snuggled into my feather bed, feeling warm and secure, and thinking Woodrow was making me see things in a new light.