David Baldacci Read online

  Louisa turned back to them. “Coal folks sound the horn afore they blast. They use dynamite. Sometimes too much and they’s hill slides. And people get hurt. Not miners. Farmers working the land.” Louisa scowled once more in the direction where the blast seemed to have come from, and then they went back to farming.

  At supper, they had steaming plates of pinto beans mixed with cornbread, grease, and milk, and washed down with springwater so cold it hurt. The night was chilly, the wind howling fiercely as it attacked the structure, but the walls and roof withstood this charge. The coal fire was warm, and the lantern light gentle on the eye. Oz was so tired he almost fell asleep in his Crystal Winters Oatmeal plate the color of the sky.

  After supper Eugene went out to the barn, while Oz lay in front of the fire, his little body so obviously sore and spent. Louisa watched as Lou went over to him, put his head in her lap, and stroked his hair. Louisa slid a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles over her eyes and worked on mending a shirt by the firelight. After a while, she stopped and sat down beside the children.

  “He’s just tired,” Lou said. “He’s not used to this.”

  “Can’t say a body ever gets used to hard work.” Louisa rubbed at Oz’s hair too. It seemed the little boy just had a head people liked to touch. Maybe for luck.

  “You doing a good job. Real good. Better’n me when I your age. And I ain’t come from no big city. Make it harder, don’t it?”

  The door opened and the wind rushed in. Eugene looked worried. “Calf coming.”

  In the barn the cow called Purty lay on her side in a wide birthing stall, pitching and rolling in agony. Eugene knelt and held her down, while Louisa got in behind her and pried with her fingers, looking for the slicked package of a fresh calf emerging. It was a hard-fought battle, the calf seeming not to want to enter the world just yet. But Eugene and Louisa coaxed it out, a slippery mass of limbs, eyes scrunched tight. The event was bloody, and Lou’s and Oz’s stomach took another jolt when Purty ate the afterbirth, but Louisa told them that was natural. Purty started licking her baby and didn’t stop until its hair was sticking out all over. With Eugene’s help, the calf rose on tottering stick legs, while Louisa got Purty ready for the next step, which the calf took to as the most natural endeavor of all: suckling. Eugene stayed with the mother and her calf while Louisa and the children went back inside.

  Lou and Oz were both excited and exhausted, the grandmother clock showing it was nearing midnight.

  “I’ve never seen a cow born before,” said Oz.

  “You’ve never seen anything born before,” said his sister.

  Oz thought about this. “Yes, I did. I was there when I was born.”

  “That doesn’t count,” Lou shot back.

  “Well, it should,” countered Oz. “It was a lot of work. Mom told me so.”

  Louisa put another rock of coal on the fire, drove it into the flames with an iron poker, and then sat back down with her mending. The woman’s dark-veined and knotted hands moved slowly yet with precision.

  “You get on to bed, both of you,” she said.

  Oz said, “I’m going to see Mom first. Tell her about the cow.” He looked at Lou. “My second time.” He walked off.

  His sister made no move to leave the fire’s warmth.

  “Lou, g’on see your mother too,” said Louisa.

  Lou stared into the depths of the coal fire. “Oz is too young to understand, but I do.”

  Louisa put down her mending. “Unnerstand what?”

  “The doctors in New York said that each day there was less chance Mom would come back. It’s been too long now.”

  “But you can’t give up hope, honey.”

  Lou turned to look at her. “You don’t understand either, Louisa. Our dad’s gone. I saw him die. Maybe”— Lou swallowed with difficulty—”maybe I was partly the reason he did die.” She rubbed at her eyes and then Lou’s hands curled to fists. “And it’s not like she’s laying in there healing. I listened to the doctors. I heard everything all the grown-ups said about her, even though they tried to hide it from me. Like it wasn’t my business! They let us take her home, because there was nothing more they could do for her.” She paused, took a long breath, and slowly grew calm. “And you just don’t know Oz. He gets his hopes up so high, starts doing crazy things. And then…” Lou’s voice trailed off, and she looked down. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  In the fade of lantern light and the flickering coal fire, Louisa could only stare after the young girl as she trudged off. When her footsteps faded away, Louisa once more picked up her sewing, but the needle did not move. When Eugene came in and went to bed, she was still there, the fire having died down low, as thoughts as humbling as the mountains outside consumed her.

  After a bit, though, Louisa rose and went into her bedroom, where she pulled out a short stack of letters from her dresser. She went up the stairs to Lou’s room and found the girl wide awake, staring out the window.

  Lou turned and saw the letters.

  “What are those?”

  “Letters your mother wrote to me. I want you to read ’em.”

  “What for?”

  “’Cause words say a lot about a person.”

  “Words won’t change anything. Oz can believe if he wants to. But he doesn’t know any better.”

  Louisa placed the letters on the bed. “Sometime older folks do right good to follow the young’uns. Might learn ’em something.”

  After Louisa left, Lou put the letters in her father’s old desk and very firmly shut the drawer.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  LOU GOT UP ESPECIALLY EARLY AND WENT into her mother’s room, where she watched for a bit the even rise and fall of the woman’s chest. Perched on the bed, Lou pulled back the covers and massaged and moved her mother’s arms. Then she spent considerable time exercising her mother’s legs the way the doctors back in New York City had shown her. Lou was just about finished when she caught Louisa watching her from the doorway.

  “We have to make her comfortable,” explained Lou. She covered her mother and went into the kitchen. Louisa trailed her.

  When Lou put on a kettle to boil, Louisa said, “I can do that, honey.”

  “I’ve got it.” Lou mixed some oat flakes in the hot water and added butter taken from a lard bucket. She took the bowl back into her mother’s room and carefully spooned the food into her mother’s mouth. Amandaate and drank readily enough, with just a tap of spoon or cup against her lips, though she could only manage soft food. Yet that was all she could do. Louisa sat with them, and Lou pointed to the ferrotypes on the wall.

  “Who are those people?”

  “My daddy and momma. That me with ’em when I just a spit. Some of my momma’s folks too. First time I ever had my pitcher took. I liked it. But Momma scared.” She pointed to another ferrotype. “That pitcher there my brother Robert. He dead now. They all dead now.”

  “Your parents and brother were tall.”

  “Run in the line. Funny how that get passed down. Your daddy, he were already six feet when he weren’t more’n fourteen. I still tall, but I growed down some from what I was. You gonna be big too.”

  Lou cleaned the bowl and spoon and afterward helped Louisa make breakfast for everyone else. Eugene was in the barn now, and they both heard Oz stirring in his room.

  Lou said, “I need to show Oz how to move Mom’s arms and legs. And he can help feed her too.”

  “That right fine.” She laid a hand on Lou’s shoulder. “Now, did you read any of them letters?”

  Lou looked at her. “I didn’t want to lose my mother and father. But I have. Now I’ve got to look after Oz. And I have to look ahead, not back.” She added with firmness, “You may not understand that, but it’s what I have to do.”

  After morning chores, Eugene took Lou and Oz by mule and wagon to the school and then left to continue his work. In old burlap seed bags, Lou and Oz carried their worn books, a few sheets of precious paper tucked inside the pag
es. They each had one fat lead pencil, with dire orders from Louisa to trim it down only when absolutely necessary, and to use a sharp knife when doing so. The books were the same ones their father had learned with, and Lou hugged hers to her chest like it was a present direct from Jesus. They also carried a dented lard bucket with some cornbread chunks, a small jar of apple butter jelly, and a jug of milk for their lunch.

  The Big Spruce schoolhouse was only a few years old. It had been built with New Deal dollars to replace the log building that had stood on the same spot for almost eighty years. The structure was white clapboard with windows down one side, and was set on cinder blocks. Like Louisa’s farmhouse, the roof had no shingles, just a “roll of roofing” that came in long sheets and was tacked down in overlapping sections like shingles. The school had one door, with a short overhang. A brick chimney rose through the A-frame roof.

  On any given day school attendance was roughly half of the number of students who should have been there, and that was actually a high number compared to the attendance figures in the past. On the mountain, farming always trumped book learning.

  The schoolyard was dirt, a split-trunk walnut tree in the center of it. There were about fifty children milling about outside, ranging in age from Oz’s to Lou’s. Most were dressed in overalls, though a few girls wore floral dresses made from Chop bags, which were hundred-pound sacks of feed for animals. The bags were beautiful and of sturdy material, and a girl always felt extra special having a Chop bag outfit. Some children were in bare feet, others in what used to be shoes but were now sandals of sorts. Some wore straw hats, others were bareheaded; a few of the older boys had already upgraded to dirty felt, no doubt hand-me-downs from their daddies. Some girls favored pigtails, others wore their hair straight, and still others had the sausage curl at the end.

  The children all stared at the newcomers with what Lou perceived as unfriendly eyes.

  One boy stepped forward. Lou recognized him as the one who had dangled on the tractor over the side of the mountain their first day here. Probably the son of George Davis, the crazy man who had threatened them with the shotgun in the woods. Lou wondered if the fellow’s offspring also suffered from insanity.

  “What’s the matter, y’all can’t walk by yourselves? Hell No got to bring you?” the boy said.

  “His name is Eugene,” said Lou right to the boy’s face. Then she asked, “Can anybody tell me where the second- and sixth-grade classes are?”

  “Why sure,” the same boy said, pointing. “They’s both right over there.”

  Lou and Oz turned and saw the listing wooden outhouse behind the school building.

  “Course,” the boy added with a sly grin, “that’s just for you Yankees.”

  This set all the mountain children to whooping and laughing, and Oz nervously took a step closer to Lou. Lou studied the outhouse for a moment and then looked back at the boy.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Billy Davis,” he said proudly.

  “Are you always that scintillating, Billy Davis?”

  Billy frowned. “What’s that mean? You call me a name, girl?”

  “Didn’t you just call us one?”

  “Ain’t said nuthin’ ’cept the truth. Yankee once is a Yankee for life. Coming here ain’t changing that.”

  The crowd of rebels voiced their complete agreement with this point of view, and Lou and Oz found themselves encircled by the enemy. They were saved only by the ringing of the school bell, which sent the children dashing for the door. Lou and Oz looked at each other and then trudged after this mob.

  “I don’t think they like us much, Lou,” Oz said.

  “I don’t think I much care,” his sister said back.

  The number of classrooms was one, they immediately discovered, which served all grades from first to seventh, the students separated in discrete clusters by age. The number of teachers matched the number of classrooms. Her name was Estelle McCoy, and she was paid eight hundred dollars a school year. This was the only job she had ever had, going on thirty-nine years now, which explained why her hair was far more white than mousey brown.

  Wide blackboards covered three walls. A potbellied stove sat in one corner, a long pipe from it running to the ceiling. And, seeming very much out of place in the simple confines, a beautifully crafted maple bookcase with an arched top took up another corner of the room. It had glass-paned doors, and inside Lou could see a number of books. A handwritten sign on the wall next to the cabinet read: “Library.”

  Estelle McCoy stood in front of them all with her apple cheeks, canyon smile, and chubby figure draped in a bright floral dress.

  “I have a real treat for y’all, today. I’d like to introduce two new students: Louisa Mae Cardinal and her brother, Oscar. Louisa Mae and Oscar, will you stand up please?”

  As someone who routinely bowed to the slightest exercise of authority, Oz immediately leapt to his feet. However, he stared down at the floor, one foot shifting over the other, as though he had to pee really badly.

  Lou, however, remained sitting.

  “Louisa Mae,” Estelle McCoy said again, “stand up and let them see you, honey.”

  “My name is Lou.”

  Estelle McCoy’s smile went down a bit in wattage. “Yes, um, their father was a very famous writer named Jack Cardinal.”

  Here, Billy Davis piped in loudly, “Didn’t he die? Somebody say that man’s dead.”

  Lou glared at Billy, who made a face right back at her.

  Their teacher now looked completely flustered. “Billy, please. Uh, as I was saying, he was famous, and I helped teach him. And in my own humble way, I hope that I had some influence over his development as a writer. And they do say the early years are the most important. Anyway, did you know that Mr. Jack Cardinal even signed one of his books in Washington, for the president of these United States?”

  As Lou looked around the room, she could tell this meant absolutely nothing to the children of the mountain. In fact, mentioning the capital of the Yankee nation was probably not a smart thing to do. It didn’t make her angry that they were not properly in awe of her father’s accomplishments; instead it made Lou pity their ignorance.

  Estelle McCoy was ill-prepared for the prolonged silence. “Uh, well, we welcome you, Louisa Mae, and you too, Oscar. I’m sure you’ll do your father proud here, at his… alma mater.”

  Now Lou stood, even as Oz hastily dropped back into his seat, his face down, his eyes scrunched closed. One could tell he was afraid of whatever it was his sister was about to do. Lou never did anything in a small way, Oz well knew. It was either both barrels of the shotgun in your face, or you got to live another day. There was rarely any middle ground with the girl.

  And yet all she said was “My name is Lou.” And then she took her seat.

  Billy leaned over and said, “Welcome to the mountain, Miss Louisa Mae.”

  The school day ended at three, and the children didn’t rush to go home, since it was certain only more chores awaited them there. Instead, they milled about in small packs in the schoolyard, the boys swapping pocket knives, hand-whittled yo-yos, and homemade burley chew. The girls exchanged local gossip and cooking and sewing secrets, and talked about boys. Billy Davis did pull-ups on a sapling that had been laid across the low branches of the walnut tree, to the admiring look of one wide-hipped girl with crooked teeth, but also rosy cheeks and pretty blue eyes.