When I Crossed No-Bob Read online

  It is a long first day.

  In my second week of attending Mr. Frank's school, I decide to play teacher. Surely this will win me friends.

  Mr. Frank's desk is supplied with drawers in which he stores his books and what he calls the other et ceteras of his profession. He has a pipe he smokes, and while everyone files in, I light Mr. Frank's pipe with a match I find in his drawer, and I take to puffing it before Mr. Frank comes into the room. Everyone laughs. Everyone, even the older ones. Then, from the back of the room, Little Bit shouts, "Hey, Addy. You're turning green." And I commence to getting sick all over Mr. Frank's desk, and when I look up, there he is, standing in the doorway, Mr. Frank watching, shaking his head.

  ***

  That evening after supper Mr. Frank catches me crying with the chickens. We sit together on a log under a tree and I am nothing but ashamed. Mr. Frank, he smiles at me, and from where I sit I can see that one of his front teeth sticks out past his bottom lip just a tad. I have not seen this before and it makes me smile because now that I seen this I think that Mr. Frank looks to be about twelve years old. I think of what he must have been like when he was my age, a little boy messing around, him and his pa sitting around the family table all happy-like, his ma feeding them pickled peaches, but as soon as I start thinking on that, I stop.

  "I wish I had Momma back." The sun is not down yet and the sky is pinkish.

  "But she punished you so much, Addy. You told me so yourself."

  I close my eyes, wishing away what I've said. I should not have talked about Momma while I worked alongside Mr. Frank. I should have stayed loyal to her. Already I have told Mr. Frank too much. I have told him about Momma's seasons of sickness. I have told him how she locked me up in the chifforobe.

  I tell Mr. Frank that it wasn't so bad, being in the chifforobe. It smelled of pine, and if I moved Momma's two hanging dresses and the folded-up quilt, it was big enough to stand up in, and because it was an old chifforobe, there were cracks for air and plenty of turning-around room to change positions every once in a while. When Momma shut me up in the dark after I did something wrong, I had time to think. I rubbed my eyes with my knees to see the pictures behind my eyelids. I counted the stars inside my mind.

  "With all due respect to your momma, Addy, that's no way to punish a child."

  "I know. But she made me. She could do what she wanted with me."

  "God made you too, Addy."

  "Did God make you?"

  "Yes, Addy, he did."

  "So we're kin?"

  "You could say that."

  We're looking down at the bald ground where the chickens are scratching. I have these dark feelings and I wish it was spring again instead of fall. The best thing to do is do like Mr. Frank and Miss Irene. Grow up, get married, and try to make a home for yourself. But what if I have a fierce love and a fierce marriage like Momma and Pappy's? But who would ever marry me, anyway? An O'Donnell. A termite.

  "I'm mad at God. I don't think I like him."

  "Why not, Addy?"

  "'Cause he makes some of us rich and some poor. Some O'Donnells, some not. Why can't he just make us all pretty and rich?"

  "I don't know. Maybe you need to ask him yourself. Talk to him."

  "Talk to him how? Once, I knew a prayer called the Lord's Prayer, but I forget all the words."

  "Talk to him like you would your own pa or ma."

  "I don't know. He don't seem to be like most folk."

  Mr. Frank puts his arm around me and squeezes me to him tight, so tight I think I might cry. "Start with thanking him."

  And before I can say, "For what?" Mr. Frank says, "You need a pair of shoes, Addy. I'll make you a pair myself. But for now, let's just sit here for a while."

  He doesn't say anything. I watch the leaves fall. A ladybug sets to crawling on my leg. Sitting here with Mr. Frank feels the way I think holding hands with the Lord would feel. Good. Close. Like you know you're going to be OK because you're with someone. I imagine that's what being married feels like too. Being in love must feel like sitting on a log with someone special, someone a little like yourself.

  Chapter 4

  I don't seem able to sit still and do my reading and writing work like the others. Even at Mr. Frank's house, Miss Irene wants me to sit on the stool in front of the weaver and spin thread and run the loom and I hate hate hate it because I'm bad at both weaving and sitting still. Miss Irene says I won't get good at it unless I stay at it. She says that's what her mother did for her. She says her mother says a woman's worth is determined by her tiny, even rows of stitches. I let that sit for a minute. But then Miss Irene laughs and lets me go outside. She says around her house, people ought to do what they're naturally good at.

  I feed the chickens and collect their eggs, milk and feed the cow, and clear out the stalls every day. I feed the new hogs corn to keep them tame, and when the acorns fall I take the hogs to the woods and let them root around some. I know it's time to cut a good supply of firewood when I see the hogs raking and toting straw, a sure sign of a cold spell.

  Mr. Frank, he got himself some good land here with plenty of nut-bearing trees: big-bud and scaly-bark hickories, black walnut, chestnut, beech, pecan, and chinquapin. I pick plums from under the trees too and tote them to the two hogs so they'll taste better. I gather red-oak, elm, maple, and juniper bark. I set it out to dry and then grind it up so we can stew it down and use it to dye. We use borax, alum, and bluestone to set the dye. I set aside some red-oak bark for fevers and colds. Lots of things you can do to get ready for colds, like collecting and drying mullein and horsemint for teas. Momma taught me about such things that Miss Irene isn't so keen on.

  One afternoon, I am sweeping the yard with a brush broom when Little Bit stops by, picks up another of Miss Irene's brooms, and starts sweeping alongside me, humming some song.

  "After this, you want to play marbles?"

  "Don't you got chores?" I say. Little Bit is pretty and young, so she gets spoiled. She plays. I work.

  "I climb trees," she says, moving a pigtail. "I'm not a Miss Priss."

  Miss Irene hails us from the porch. She sweeps and tells me to go on off and play. She says I've already done a fine job.

  Little Bit and me, we don't say much. We just are and we are that together. We already had our fight down near Clear Creek at her brother's wedding, so it's like we've gotten that out of the way, and it was a good fight, because we were equal and neither one of us won and the two of us, we know how strong and how weak the other is.

  While we are out and about we pick and collect the last of the wild plums that grow along a ditch in the thickets. We can help Miss Irene make jelly and pies.

  You work and you work and you work and you eat some and you sleep some and you get up and start all over. Every now and then you get hit with hard times or good—who's to say? But then there are these tiny times in between when you look up at the tops of trees swaying or you sit down to a fine meal with a new family or you wake up alone and by the end of the day, you got yourself your first friend.

  ***

  At my seat in the schoolhouse I look down at my slate board and I think and think. Each Monday we are to write a composition. So far our titles include "The Past," "Napoleon Bonaparte," and "A Snow Scene." Each Friday we have to memorize and recite a poem. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. "A Psalm of Life" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The title for our composition today is "Egypt."

  I stare back down at my slate board. There is all that blank space that looks like my life. It is easier to look at that slate and think up funny things to do. It is easier to make mischief.

  "Addy?" Mr. Frank says to me.

  Everyone looks up.

  "Just start. The words will come once you get started."

  "I don't have any words for Egypt, Mr. Frank."

  Mr. Frank, he thinks on this.

  "Then write about your mother, Addy. Just talk to me. Write like you talk. Write everything you t
old me when we were working outside." He doesn't wait for me to complain. He just lets me sit there, picturing Momma kneeling in the front yard every morning to set up a new egg. I think of where she might be now. Somewhere in Texas where there's nothing but cowboys and tumbleweeds.

  I don't follow Mr. Frank's advice. I don't want to bore him with what I already told him.

  I set out to write. I write down the pictures in my head. I write about Momma and how she lifts her feet up feeling powerful whenever she wore her shoes. I write how Momma gave me sage and catnip to break my hives when I was a baby, and how later she showed me the ways to heal because, she told me, living amongst O'Donnells you need to know all the ways of healing.

  I write about how right before he left, Pappy got into that brawl with Garner O'Donnell, the brother he plowed. I write how Garner shot Pappy. I write how exactly Momma sewed Pappy up and made a poultice of mullein and other healing herbs. And with that poultice, he left. Pappy up and left us.

  I write and write. I write about Uncle Nub and Uncle Stick, who lived across the way from each other. Neither one of them had ears. I write until my hand hurts.

  After the noon meal, while Mr. Frank naps against one of the bigger trees in the schoolyard, me and Little Bit drape a black snake across his ankles. All the schoolchildren stop the games they would not play with me. They come have themselves a look, and already they are giggling. The snake is dead, but Mr. Frank doesn't know that.

  He wakes up all right and he keeps still the way you are supposed to around a snake. He lays there, waiting for it to slide away, and we children can hardly stand it. Maybe he hears someone giggle, or maybe he figures things out his own self, but when he sees that the snake is a might slow and it's not spitting out its forked tongue, licking its snake lips, Mr. Frank carefully lifts a stick and flips that snake fast. He sees that snake flop dead with a thud, and this is when we all laugh. Maybe Mr. Frank doesn't know what I know about snakes. King snakes and black snakes and green snakes aren't poisonous here. But watch out for a water moccasin, a copperhead, or a ground rattler. They are plenty harmful.

  When we children see that Mr. Frank is not laughing, not even smiling, everyone around me runs and hides, leaving just me and Little Bit standing there.

  Turns out Mr. Frank doesn't like the joke.

  I can see from Mr. Frank's eyes that he wants to whup us both good, but he does not. He sits us down in seats in the front of the schoolhouse and he has me and Little Bit copy down over and over what he calls the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

  Then he takes Little Bit to the back of the room where I hear him whisper "Shameful."

  I feel terrible bad about what I done. Mr. Frank and Miss Irene took me in on their wedding day, and what do I do? I lay a dead black snake across his legs. What kind of a thank-you is that?

  How come being nasty comes so easy to me?

  As I copy the words, I slip the heels of my feet out of my shoes. Mr. Frank gave me these shoes. He made them himself, and darn it all if they are not the hardest, stiffest, most uncomfortable things I ever wore. They are brown brogans that come up just above my ankle and they are no good for running or climbing. He made them from cowhide, tanned on his own place, but I slip them off and wiggle my toes in the air.

  I think about No-Bob then, where I always went barefooted. My feet know the land there. I know the houses, the people—my people. I know every stream, field, tree, animal, and a good many rocks too. Not knowing such things here in this place, always having to consider right from wrong, wears me out. Every day there is so much thinking to do, figuring, conjecturing. And that is outside the schoolhouse.

  On the walk home from school, Mr. Frank tells me he has read what I wrote today in school and he says I did a good job. At first I think he's talking about the golden rule lines, but then I remember the other things I wrote about No-Bob.

  "I know it's hard for you to be away from your home and your people and everything that you know so well," he says. "It must be especially hard to learn new ways of doing things."

  I stare at a magnolia tree then and notice the buds turning red, and it doesn't seem right or real that Momma's not seeing it too. These days feel mixed up because Momma's not here, not beside me looking, watching, telling me about the leaves on a magnolia and how they're so stiff and waxy, they almost never fall apart and come undone.

  We pass the creek where we say bye to Little Bit, who walks alone the rest of her way home. Mr. Frank and I take a minute to wash our hands. I splash my face with water and rub hard on the scar that runs down the side of my nose. Dirt and water go there first and run through it like a river. I reach down to take a sip of water and catch a water beetle with my fingers, and something comes out of it because that water beetle stings me. I wonder if it hurt me because I hurt it.

  "Come on, Addy," Mr. Frank says. "I'm hungry." He looks at me, takes a handkerchief from his pocket, dabs my face dry. I want to tell him how much I miss Momma, but I don't. We look at each other and smile. I guess me and Mr. Frank, we don't have to say much.

  I set the water beetle in the water and turn it loose.

  ***

  That night Miss Irene confides that she has not gotten much sleep of late because she is not used to sharing her bed with Mr. Frank, who kicks in his sleep. I decide to help out.

  In the middle of the night, I sneak into their room and tie Mr. Frank's big toe to the bedpost just like Momma done me once to keep me from kicking her. But the next morning when Mr. Frank gets up and trips and falls because he didn't know his toe was hooked up with the bed, neither he nor Miss Irene think I've helped.

  At school, we relearn some about the war. It all started because Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard fired the first shot, a man with a too-long name. We look at pictures of Ulysses'S. Grant. I always did think Mr. Grant was a might better-looking than Robert E. Lee, but I keep that bit to myself.

  Then, finally, we put the past behind us and we begin a new subject called geography. Mr. Frank stands in front of the schoolroom with his nose bandaged up from his fall just that morning. He shows us a map from a book called Atlas, and it is there that we children see the world all charted out. On the page, in this book, the lines are so clear. There is the United States of America with the shapes of each state marked with straight lines, but when you get up close, they squiggle here and there. There are lines for rivers and jig jags for mountains.

  "There's still a lot of room here," I say, pointing to the West, wide open and unlined.

  "Yes, there is, Addy." With the bandage and his nose all plugged up, he talks like he has a cold. "Many go out there to seek their fortunes and maybe even mark the land with their own names."

  "Didn't your grandpa go out west?" Rew Smith asks Mr. Frank.

  "Yes, he did, Rew. To Texas."

  "That's where my pappy went." For a minute, me and Mr. Frank, we look at each other. This might be the first thing we have in common. I wonder if he misses his grandpa like I do my momma and pappy.

  "Where's No-Bob? Where's Smith County? Where are all our roads and rivers?" Little Bit wants to know.

  "They're not on this map. A lot of the smaller places don't get put on a big map like this. But there are the big rivers here." Mr. Frank, he points out all the big rivers. He calls them sources for the little rivers. He says if a river forgets its source, it dries up. He points to the river Strong. I remember what Little Bit told me. Their slave, Buck, crossed that river called Strong.

  Mr. Frank, he starts explaining our assignment. He says he'd like each of us to decide on a place and make a map of it. It can be our house, our neighborhood, our town, or even a road.

  "Draw it out like you see here," Mr. Frank says. "Write the names of the rivers and paths if you know them. Write down what you know about this place. You can work individually or with partners." I have a feeling that today Mr. Frank wants us to do our work and leave him alone. Especially me.

  "How long do we have?" Li
ttle Bit wants to know. Already we know we'll be partners. We're leaning forward ready to run out of the schoolhouse. I want to take Little Bit where I know no one else goes. We want to map uncharted territory.

  Mr. Frank eyes us all there in the room. His eyes look puffy from the fall. He should be more careful when he gets out of bed.

  "You got two days."

  We children scatter, making big plans to chart out our own slice of Smith County.

  ***

  Late that afternoon, Little Bit and me walk home with Mr. Frank. At the creek, Little Bit goes her own way toward her own house. As we near our house, Mr. Frank perks up when he sees who's on the front porch.

  "Well, look who we have here. Addy, come meet an old friend of mine, Tempy." A small-headed, red-haired man and a pretty sand-colored woman sit on the front porch with Miss Irene, sipping coffee.

  Mr. Frank makes the introductions. The pretty sand-colored woman is called Zula and she looks to be full-blooded Choctaw. She looks at me and says, "I know you," and I look back and say, "I don't think so."

  She is expecting a baby and I'm guessing she's this Mr. Tempy's wife. I have never seen nor thought of a white man marrying a Choctaw woman. I think of what Pappy and Momma would say, how they would call her a bone picker, how they would wonder about this Mr. Tempy, but still, I can't help but wonder why such a pretty lady would marry that small-headed, red-haired man.