Gramps says that I am a country girl at heart,
and that is true. I have lived
most of my thirteen years in Bybanks, Kentucky,
which is not much more
than a caboodle of houses roosting in a green
spot alongside the Ohio River.
Just over a year ago, my father plucked me
up like a weed and took me and
all our belongings (no, that is not true - he
did not bring the chestnut tree or
the willow or the maple or the hayloft or
the swimming hole or any of those
things which belong to me) and we drove three
hundred miles straight north
and stopped in front of a house in Euclid,
Ohio.
'Where are the trees?' I said. 'This is where
we're going to live?'
'No,' my father said. 'This is Margaret's
house.'
The front door of the house opened, and Margaret,
the lady with the wild
red hair, stood there. I looked up and down
the street. The buildings were all
jammed together like a row of birdhouses In
front of each one was a tiny
square of grass, and in front of that was
a long, long cement sidewalk
running alongside the cement road.
'Where's the barn?' I asked. 'Where's the
river? Where's the swimming
hole?'
'Oh, Sal,' my father said. 'Come along. There's
Margaret.' He waved to the
lady at the door.
'We have to go back.' I said 'I forgot something.
The lady with the wild red hair opened the
door and came out on the porch.
'In the back of my closet.' I said, 'under
the floorboards. I put something
there, and I've got to have it.
'Don't be a goose,' he said. 'Come and see
Margaret.
I did not want to see Margaret. I stood there,
looking around, and that's
when I saw the face pressed up against an
upstairs window next door. It was
a girl's round face, and it looked afraid.
I didn't know it then, but that face
belonged to Phoebe Winterbottom, the girl
who had a powerful imagination,
who would become my friend, and who would
have all those peculiar things
happen to her.
Not long ago, when I was locked in a car with
my grandparents for six
days, I told them the story of Phoebe, and
when I finished telling them - or
maybe even as I was telling them - I realized
that the story of Phoebe was
like the plaster wall in our old house in
Bybanks, Kentucky.
My father started chipping away at a plaster
wall in the living room of our
house in Bybanks, shortly after my mother
left us one April morning. Our
house was an old farmhouse, which my parents
had been restoring, room by
room. Each night, as he waited to hear from
my mother, he chipped away at
that wall.
On the night that we got the bad news - that
she was not returning - he
pounded and pounded on that wall with a chisel
and a hammer. At two
o'clock in the morning, he came up to my room.
I was not asleep. He led me
downstairs and showed me what he had found.
Hidden behind the wall was a
brick fireplace.
The reason that Phoebe's story reminds me
of that plaster wail and the
hidden fireplace is that beneath Phoebe's
story was another one. It was about
me and my own mother.
It was after all the adventures of Phoebe
that my grand- parents came up
with a plan to drive from Kentucky to Ohio,
where they would pick me up,
and then the three of us would drive two thousand
miles west to Lewiston,
Idaho. This is how J came to be locked in
a car with them for nearly a week.
It was not a trip that I was eager to go on,
but it was one I had to take.
Gramps had said, 'We'll see the whole ding-dong
country!'
Gram squeezed my cheeks and said, 'This trip
will give me a chance to be
with my favorite chickabiddy again.' I am,
by the way, their only
chickabiddy.
My father said that Gram couldn't read maps
worth a hill of beans and that
he was grateful that I had agreed to go along
and help them find their way. I
was only thirteen, and although I did have
a way with maps, it was not really
because of that skill that I was going, nor
was it to see the 'whole ding-dong
country' that Gram and Gramps were going.
The real reasons were buried
beneath piles and piles of unsaid things.
Some of the real reasons were:
1. Gram and Gramps wanted to see Momma who
was resting peacefully in
Lewiston. Idaho.
2. Gram and Gramps knew that I wanted to see
Momma, but that I was
afraid to.
3. Dad wanted to be alone with the red-headed
Margaret Cadaver. He had
already seen Momma and he had not taken me.
Also - although this wasn't
as important - I think Dad did not trust Gram
and Gramps to behave
themselves along the way unless they had me
with them. Dad said that if
they tried to go on their own, he would save
everyone a lot Of time and
embarrassment by calling the police and having
them arrested before they
even left the driveway. It might sound a bit
extreme for a man to call the
police on his own tottery old parents but
when my grandparents get in a car
trouble just naturally follows them like a
filly trailing behind a mare.
My grandparents Hiddle are my father's parents,
and they are full up to the
tops of their heads with goodness and sweetness,
and mixed in with all that
goodness and sweetness is a large dash of
peculiarity. This combination
makes them interesting to know, but you can
never predict what they will do
or say.
Once it was settled that the three of us would
go, the journey took on an
alarming, expanding need to hurry that was
like a walloping great
thundercloud assembling around me. During
the week before we left, the
sound of the wind was hurry, hurry, hurry,
and at night even the silent
darkness whispered rush, rush, rush. I did
not think we would ever leave,
and yet I did not want to leave. I did not
really expect to survive the trip.
But 1 had decided to go and 1 would go, and
I had to be there by my
mother's birthday. This was extremely important.
I believed that if there was
any chance of bringing my mother back home
it would happen on her
birthday. If I had said this aloud to my father
or to my grandparents, they
would have said that I might as well try to
catch a fish in the air, so I did not
say it aloud. But I believed it. Sometimes
I am as ornery and stubborn as an
old donkey. My father says I lean on broken
reeds and will get a face full, of
swamp mud one day.
When, at last, Gram and Gramps Hiddle and
I set out that first day of the
trip, I clutched seven good-luck charms and
prayed for the first thirty
minutes solid. I prayed that we would not
be in an accident (I was terrified
of cars and buses) and that we would get there
by my mother's birthday -
seven days away - and that we would bring
her home. Over and over, I
prayed the same thing. I prayed to trees This
was easier than praying directly
to God. There was nearly always a tree nearby.
As we-pulled onto the Ohio Turnpike, which
is the flattest, straightest
piece of road in God's whole creation, Gram
interrupted my prayers
'Salamanca--'
I should explain right off that my real name
is Salamanca Tree Hiddle.
Salamanca, my parents thought, was the name
of the Indian tribe to which
my great-great grandmother belonged. My parents
were mistaken. The name
of the tribe was Seneca, but since my parents
did not discover their error
until after I was born and they were, by then,
used to my name, it remained
Salamanca.
My middle name, Tree, comes from your basic
tree. a thing of such beauty
to my mother that she made it part of my name.
She wanted to be more
specific and use Sugar Maple Tree, her very
favorite because Sugar Maple is
part of her own name, but Salamanca Sugar
Maple Tree Hiddle sounded a
bit much.
My mother used to call me Salamanca, but after
she left, only my
grandparents Hiddle called me Salamanca (when
they were not calling me
chickabiddy). To most other people, I was
Sal, and to a few boys who
thought they were especially amusing, I was
Salamander.
In the car, as we started our long journey
to Lewiston, Idaho, my
grandmother Hiddle said, 'Salamanca, why don't
you entertain us?'
'What sort of thing did you have in mind?'
I hoped they would not expect
me to do something thumpingly embarrassing,
like climb on top of the car
and sing a little ditty. You can never tell
with my grandparents.
But Gramps said, 'How about a story? Spin
us a yam.'
I certainly do know heaps of stories, but
I learned most of them from
Gramps Gram suggested I tell one about my
mother. That, I could not do. I
had just reached the point where I could stop
thinking about her every
minute of every day. I wasn't ready - or at
least I did not think I was ready -
to talk about her.
Gramps said, 'Well, then, what about your
friends? You got any tales to
tell about them?'
Instantly, Phoebe Winterbottom came to mind.
There was certainly a hog's
bellyful of things to tell about her. 'I could
tell you an extensively strange
story,' I warned.
'Oh, good!' Gram said. 'Delicious!' And that
is how I happened to suspend
my tree prayers and tell them about Phoebe
Winterbottom, her disappearing
mother, and the lunatic. It is also how I
discovered that beneath Phoebe's
story was another story.
Because I first saw Phoebe on the day my father
and I moved to Euclid, I
began my story of Phoebe with the visit to
the red-headed Margaret
Cadaver's where I also met Mrs.. Partridge,
her elderly mother. Margaret
nearly fell over herself being nice to me.
'What lovely hair,' she said, and
'Aren't you sweet!' I was not sweet that day.
I was being particularly ornery.
I wouldn't sit down and I wouldn't look at
Margaret.
As we were leaving, I overheard Margaret whisper
to my father, 'John,
have you told her yet - how we met?'
My father looked exceedingly uncomfortable.
'No, he said. 'I tried - but she
doesn't want to know.'
Now that was the truth, absolutely. Who cares?
I thought. Who cares how
he met Margaret Cadaver?
I was standing on the porch, and I saw Phoebe's
face again at the window
next door. At the time, all I could think
of was getting to our new house,
which I hoped would be miles and miles away,
out in the green countryside.
When at last we left Mrs. Cadaver and Mrs.
Partridge, we drove for
approximately three minutes. Two blocks from
Margaret Cadaver's was the
place where my father and I were now going
to live.
If someone had blindfolded me and spun me
around a few times and
driven me around for an hour and then removed
my blindfold, I would have
thought that I was still in front of Margaret's
house. Tiny, squirt trees. Little
birdhouses in a row - and one of those birdhouses
was ours. No swimming
hole, no barn, no cows, no chickens, no pigs.
Instead, a little white house
with a miniature patch of green grass in front
of it. It wasn't enough to keep
a cow alive for five minutes.
'Let's take a tour,' my father said, rather
too heartily.
We walked through the tiny living room into
the miniature kitchen and
upstairs into my father's pint- sized bedroom
and on into my pocket-sized
bedroom and into the wee bathroom. I looked
out the upstairs window down
into the back yard. Half of the tiny yard
was a cement patio and the other
half was another patch of grass, which our
imaginary cow would devour in
two bites. There was a tall wooden fence all
around it, and to the left and
right were other, identical fenced plots.
We sat on the front steps and waited for the
moving van. When it arrived,
we watched the men cram our Bybanks furniture
into our birdhouse. After
they finished, my dad and inched into the
living room, crawling over sofas
and chairs and tables and boxes, boxes, boxes.
'Mm,' my father said. 'Mm. It looks as if
we tried to squeeze all the animals
into the chicken coop.'
Three days later, I started school and that's
when I saw Phoebe again. She
was in my class. The students in my new school
spoke in quick, sharp bursts
and dressed in stiff new clothes. The girls
all wore their hair in exactly the
same way: in a shoulder-length 'bob' (that's
what they called it) with a long
fringe which they repeatedly shook out of
their eyes. We once had a horse
who did that.
Everybody kept touching my hair. 'Don't you
ever cut it?' they said. 'Can
you sit on it? How do you wash it? Is it naturally
black, like that? Do you
use conditioner?' I couldn't tell if they
liked my hair or if they thought I
looked like a whang-doodle.
They all seemed to talk quite a lot, and everyone
seemed to have braces on
their teeth. One girl, Mary Lou Finney, said
the most peculiar things, like out
of the blue she would say, 'Omnipotent!' or
'Beef brain!' I couldn't make any
sense of it. There were Japanese twins (a
brother and sister), who didn't
speak at all except to say 'Yes, yes,' and
'Yes, yes.' There were Megan and
Christy who jumped up and down like parched
peas, moody Beth Ann, and
pink-cheeked Alex. There was Ben who drew
cartoons all day long, and a
most peculiar teacher named Mr. Birkway.
And then there was Phoebe Winterbottom. Ben
called her 'Free-Bee Ice
Bottom' and drew a picture of a bumble-bee
with an ice cube on its bottom.
Phoebe tore it up.
Phoebe was a quiet girl. She stayed mostly
by herself and seemed quite
shy. She had the most pleasant face and huge,
enormous sky-blue eyes.
Around this pleasant round face, her hair
curled in short ringlets as yellow as
a crow's foot.
During that first week, when my father and
I were at Margaret's (we ate
dinner there three times the first week),
I saw Phoebe's face twice more at
her window in the house next door. Once I
waved at Phoebe, but she didn't
seem to notice, and at school she never mentioned
that she had seen me.
Then, one day, at lunch, she slid into the
seat next to me and said. 'Sal,
you're ever so courageous. You're ever so
brave.'
To tell you the truth, I was surprised. You
could have knocked me over
with a chicken feather. 'Me? I'm not brave,'
I said.
'You are. You're ever so brave.'
I was not. I, Salamanca Tree Hiddle, was afraid
of lots and lots of things.
For example, I was terrified of car accidents,
death, cancer, brain tumors
nuclear war, pregnant women, loud noises,
strict teachers, elevators, and
scads of other things But I was not afraid
of spiders, snakes and wasps
Phoebe, and nearly every- one else in my new
class did not have much
fondness for these creatures.
On the first day of class, when a dignified
black spider was investigating
my desk, I cupped my hands around it, carried
it to the open window, and set
it outside on the ledge. Mary Lou Finney said,
'Alpha and omega, will you
look at that!' Beth Am. was as white as milk.
All around the room, people
were acting as if I had single-handedly taken
on a fire-breathing dragon.
During that next week, if an innocent spider
was crawling toward
someone's desk, they would all yell, 'Sal,
get it!' When a wasp flew in the
window for a peek around the room, they said,
'Sal, it's a wasp, get it!' And
once, a tiny green garden snake slithered
along the baseboard and everyone
screamed, "Sal, a snake, oh, Sal, get it!'
As I was trying my best to assist these various
creatures in finding their
way out of our classroom and back into the
wide open spaces, people would
say, 'Sal, kill it, kill it!' I wondered how
they would like it if someone
smooshed them just because they happened to
stray into someone else's
room.
I suppose that just because I was not afraid
of these little creatures, people
thought I was brave. I suppose they didn't
know how I felt about cars,
cancer, nuclear war and all those other things.
What I have since realized is
that if people expect you to be brave, sometimes
you pretend that you are,
even when you are frightened down to your
very bones. But this was later,
during the whole thing with Phoebe's lunatic,
that I realized this.
At this point in my story, Gram interrupted
me to say, 'Why, Salamanca, of
course you're brave. All the Hiddles are brave.
It's a family trait. Look at
your daddy - your momma-'
'My momma is not a real Hiddle,' I said.
'She practically is,' Gram said. 'You can't
be married to a Hiddle that long
and not become a Hiddle.' That is not what
my mother used to say. She
would tell my father, 'You Hiddles are a mystery
to me. I'll never be a true
Hiddle.' She did not say this proudly. She
said it as if she were thumpingly
sorry about it, as if it was some sort of
failing in her, some sort of loss
My mother's parents - my other set of grandparents
- are Pickfords, and
they are as unlike my grand- parents Hiddle
as a donkey is unlike a pickle.
Grand- mother and Grandfather Pickford stand
straight up, as if sturdy, steel
poles run down their backs. They wear starched,
ironed clothing, and when
they are shocked or surprised (which is often),
they say, 'Really? Is that so?'
and their eyes open widely and their mouths
turn down at the corners.
Once I asked my mother why Grandmother and
Grandfather Pickford
never laughed. My mother said, 'They're just
so busy being respectable. It
takes a lot of concentration to be that respectable.'
and then m~ mother
laughed and laughed, in a friendly, gentle
way, and her own spine was not
made of steel, you could tell, because she
bent in half, laughing and
laughing.
My mother said that Grandmother Pickford's
one single act of defiance in
her life as a Pickford was in naming my mother.
Grandmother Pickford,
whose own name is Gayfeather, named my mother
Chanhassen. It's an
Indian name, meaning 'tree sweet juice', or
- in other words - maple sugar.
Only Grandmother Pickford ever called my mother
by her Indian name,
though. Everyone else called my mother 'Sugar'.
Most of the time, my mother seemed nothing
like her parents at all, and it
was hard for me to imagine that she had come
from them. Only occasionally
- very, very, rarely - in small, unexpected
moments, the corners of my
mother's mouth would turn down and she'd say,
'Really? Is that so?' and she
sounded exactly like a Pickford.
On the day that Phoebe sat next to me at lunch
and told me I was 'ever so
brave', she invited me to her house for dinner-that
night.
'Sure,' I said. To be honest, I was relieved
that I would not have to eat at
Margaret's again. I did not want to see Dad
and Margaret smiling at each
other. I knew that Margaret and her elderly
mother, Mrs. Partridge, were
trying their best to make me feel welcome,
but they were a bit odd, and I
was feeling sad and ornery all the time.
I wanted everything to be like it was. I wanted
to be back in Bybanks
Kentucky, in the hills and the trees, near
the cows and chickens and pigs I
wanted to run down the hill from the barn
and through the kitchen door that
banged behind me, and see my mother and my
father sitting at the table
peeling apples.
Phoebe and I walked home from school together.
We stopped briefly at my
house so that I could call my father at work.
Margaret had helped him find a
job selling farm machinery. When I phoned
him that day, he said it made
him happy as a clam at high water to know
I had a new friend. Maybe this is
really why he was happy, I thought, or maybe
it was because he could be
alone with Margaret Cadaver.
Phoebe and I then walked to her house. As
we passed Margaret Cadaver's
house, a voice called out 'Sal? Sal? Is that
you'!'
Phoebe put her hand up to her mouth and said.
'Oh!'
In the shadows on the porch. Margaret's mother.
Mrs. Partridge, sat in a
wicker rocker. A thick, gnarled cane with
a handle carved in the shape of a
cobra's head lay across her knees Her purple
dress had slipped up over her
bony knees, which were spread apart, and,
I hate to say it, you could see
right up her skirt. Around her neck was a
yellow feather scarf ('My boa' she
once told me, 'my most favouritest boa').
As I started up the walk, Phoebe pulled on
my arm. 'Don't go up there,' she
said.
'It's only Mrs. Partridge,' I said. 'Come
on.'
'Who's that with you?' Mrs. Partridge said.
'What's that on her face?' I
knew what she was going to do. She did this
with me the first time I met her.
Phoebe placed her hands on her own round face
and felt about. 'Is it beans?
Is it the beans from that red bean salad I
had at lunch?'
'Come here,' Mrs. Partridge said. She wriggled
her crooked little fingers at
Phoebe.
Phoebe looked at me, and I pushed her a little
closer. Mrs. Partridge put
her fingers up to Phoebe's face and mashed
around gently over her eyelids
and down her cheeks. Then she said, 'Just
as I thought. It's two eyes, a nose
and a mouth.' Then she laughed a wicked laugh
that sounded as if it was
bouncing off jagged rocks. 'You're thirteen
years old.'
'Yes' Phoebe said.
'I knew it,' Mrs. Partridge said. 'I just
knew it.' She patted her yellow
feather boa.
'This is Phoebe Winterbottom,' I said. 'She
lives right next door to you.
When we left, Phoebe whispered, 'I wish you
hadn't done that. I wish you
hadn't told her I lived next door.
'Why not? You don't seem to know Mrs. Cadaver
and Mrs. Partridge very
well--'
'They haven't lived there very long. Only
a month or so.'
'Don't you think it's remarkable that she
guessed your age like that?'
'I don't see what is so remarkable about it,'
Phoebe said. Before I could
explain, she started telling me about the
time that she and her mother, father
and sister Prudence, had gone to the State
Fair. They went to a booth where
a crowd was gathered around a tall, thin man.
'So, what was he doing?' I asked.
'That's what I'm telling you,' Phoebe said.
Phoebe had a way of sounding
like a grown-up sometimes. When she said,
'That's what I'm telling you,' she
sounded like a grown-up talking to a child.
'All around, people were saying,
"Oh!" and "Amazing!" and "How does he do that?"
What he was doing was
guessing people's ages He had to guess your
correct age within one year or
else you won a teddy bear.
'How did he do it?' I asked.
'That's what I'm telling you,' Phoebe said.
'The thin man would look
someone over carefully, close his eyes, and
then he would point his finger at
the person and shout, "Seventy-two!" '
'At everyone? He guessed everyone to be seventy-
two?'
'Sal,' she said. 'That's what I am trying
to tell you. I was just giving an
example. He might have said, "ten" or "thirty"
or "seventy-two". It just
depended on the person. He was astounding.
I really thought it was more astounding that
Mrs. Partridge could do this,
but I didn't say anything.
Phoebe said that her father wanted the thin
man to guess his age. 'My
father thinks he looks very young for his
age, and he was certain he could
fool the man. After studying my father closely,
the thin man closed his eyes,
pointed his finger at my father and shouted.
''Fifty-two!" My father gave a
little cry of astonishment. and all around
people were automatically
beginning to say "Oh!" and "Amazing" and all
that. But my father stopped
them.
'Why did he do that?'
Phoebe started pulling on one of her yellow
curls I think she was wishing
she hadn't started this story in the first
place. 'Because he wasn't anywhere
near fifty- two. He was only thirty-eight.'
'Oh,' I said.
'And all day long, my father followed us through
the fair, carrying his
prize, a large, green teddy bear. He was miserable.
He kept saying, "Fiftytwo?
Fifty-two? Do I look fifty-two?" '
'Does he?' I said.
Phoebe pulled harder on her hair. 'No, he
does not look fifty-two. He looks
thirty-eight.' She was very defensive about
her father.
Phoebe's mother was in the kitchen baking
pies On the counter were two
cartons of blackberries I couldn't keep my
eyes off the blackberries. Mrs.
Winterbottom said, 'I'm making blackberry
pie. I hope you like blackberries
- is there something wrong? Really, if you
don't like blackberries, I
could-'
'No,' I said. 'I like blackberries very much.
I just have some allergies, I
think.'
'To blackberries''' Mrs. Winterbottom said,
'Oh, no. not to blackberries.' The truth is,
I do not have allergies, but I
could not admit that the sight of blackberries
reminded me of my mother.
Mrs. Winterbottom made me and Phoebe sit down
at the kitchen table and
tell her about our day. She brought out a
plate of homemade cookies. Phoebe
told her about Mrs. Partridge guessing her
age.
'She's really remarkable,' I said.
Phoebe said, 'It's not that remarkable, Sal.
I wouldn't exactly use the word
"remarkable".
'But, Phoebe,' I said, 'Mrs. Partridge is
blind.'
Both Phoebe and her mother said, 'Blind?'
Later, Phoebe said to me, 'Don't you think
it's odd' that Mrs. Partridge,
who is blind, could see something about me
- but I, who can see, was blind
about her? And speaking of odd, there's something
very odd about that Mrs.
Cadaver.
'Margaret?' I said.
'Is that her name? Margaret Cadaver? Mrs.
Margaret Cadaver?'
'Yes'
'She scares me half to death,' Phoebe said.
'Why?'
'That's what I'm telling you,' she said. 'First,
there is that name: Cadaver.
You know what Cadaver means?'
Actually, I did not.
'It means dead body.'
'Are you sure?' I said.
'Of course I am sure, Sal. You can check the
dictionary if you want. Do
you know what she does for a living - what
her job is?'
'Yes.` I was pleased to say. I was pleased
to know something. 'She's a
nurse.
'Exactly.' Phoebe said. 'Would you want a
nurse whose name meant dead
body? And that hair. Don't you think all that
sticking-out red hair is spooky?
And that voice. It reminds me of dead leaves
all blowing around on the
ground.'
This was Phoebe's power. In her world, no
one was ordinary. People were
either perfect - like her father - or, more
often, they were weird lunatics or
axe murderers She could convince me of just
about any- thing - especially
about Margaret Cadaver. From that day on,
Margaret Cadaver's hair did look
spooky and her voice did sound exactly like
dead leaves. Somehow it was
easier to deal with Margaret if there were
reasons not to like her, and I
definitely did not want to like her.
'Do you want to know an absolute secret?'
Phoebe said. (I did.) 'Promise
not to tell.' (I promised.) 'Maybe I shouldn't,'
she said. 'Your father goes over
there all the time. Your father likes her,
doesn't he?'
'Yes Probably. Maybe.'
'I won't say, then.' She twirled her finger
through her curly hair and let
those big blue eyes roam over the ceiling.
'Her name is Mrs. Cadaver, right?
Have you ever wondered what happened to Mr.
Cadaver?'
'I never really thought about--' 'Well, I
think I know.' Phoebe said. 'And it
is awful, purely awful.'
At this point in my story about Phoebe, Gram
said, 'I knew somebody like
Peeby once.'
'Phoebe,' I said.
'Yes, that's right. I knew someone just like
Peeby, only her name was
Gloria. Gloria lived in the wildest, most
pepped-up world - a scary one, but
oh! - scads more exciting than my own.
Gramps said, 'I remember Gloria. She's the
one who told you not to many
me. She's the one who said I would be your
ruination.'
'Shoosh,' Gram said. 'Gloria was right about
that at least.' She elbowed
Gramps. 'Besides, Gloria only said that because
she wanted you for herself.'
'Gol-dang!' Gramps said. He pulled into a
rest stop along the Ohio Turnpike.
He wanted to check the map.
'I don't think we'll get lost on the Ohio
Turnpike,' I said. 'It's one long
straight road that goes straight across Ohio.'
I did not want to stop. Rush,
rush, rush, said the wind, the sky, the clouds,
the trees. Rush, rush, rush.
'Well, there, chickabiddy, I only want to
be sure,' Gramps said.
If all he wanted to do was check the map,
that seemed a safe enough and
quick enough thing for him to do. My grandparents
can get into trouble as
easy as a fly can land on a watermelon.
Three years ago when they drove to Florida,
they were stopped by the
police for driving in their underwear. The
air conditioning, had 'completely
fizzled and pooped.' my grandfather explained.
They were hot. Two years
ago when they drove to Washington, D. C.,
they were arrested for stealing
the back tyres off a Senator's car. 'We had
two flat, sprunkled tyres' my
grandfather explained. 'We were only borrowing
the Senator's tyres. We
were going to return them.' In Bybanks, Kentucky,
you could do this. You
could borrow someone's back tyres and return
them later, but you could not
do this in Washington, D. C., and you could
especially not do this to a
Senator's car.
Last year when Gram and Gramps drove to Philadelphia,
they were
stopped by the police, for irresponsible driving.
'You were driving on the
shoulder,' a police- man told Gramps Gramps
said, 'Shoulder? I thought it
was an extra lane. Look how smooth it is you
don't get nice smooth
shoulders like this back in Kentucky. 'That's
a mighty fine shoulder.
So, there we were, just a few hours into our
trip out to Lewiston, Idaho,
and we were safely stopped in a rest area
and we were quietly and safely and
quickly checking the map. Then Gramps noticed
the back end of a woman
leaning over the fender of a car parked next
to the water fountain. The
woman was peering at her engine and dabbing
a white handkerchief at
various greasy items inside.
'Excuse me,' Gramps said, gallantly. 'I believe
I see a lady in some
distress,' and off he marched to her rescue.
Gram sat there patting her knees and singing,
'Oh, meet me, in the tulips,
when the tulips do bloooom...'
The lady's white handkerchief, now spotted
with black grease, dangled
from her fingertips as she smiled down on
the back of Gramps, who had
taken her place leaning over the engine.
'Might be the car-bust-er-ator,' he said.
'or maybe not.' He tapped a few
hoses. 'Might be these dang snakes,' he said.
'Oh, my,' the woman said. 'Snakes? In my engine?'
Gramps waggled a hose. 'This here is what
I call a snake,' he said.
'Oh, I see,' the woman said. 'And you think
it might be those - those
snakes? That might be the problem?'
'Maybe so,' Gramps said. He pulled on one
and it came loose. 'See there?'
he said. 'It's off.'
'Well, yes, but you--'
'Dang snakes' Gramps said. He pulled at another
one. It came loose.
'Lookee there,' he said. 'Another one.'
The woman smiled a thin, little, worried smile.
'But--
Two hours later, there was not a single 'snake'
still attached to anything to
which it was supposed to be attached. The
'car-bust-er-ator' lay dismantled
on the ground. Various other pieces of the
woman's engine were scattered
here and there.
The woman was in the phone booth. Gramps was
still pulling things out of
the engine. I was lying in the grass praying
to a sugar maple tree and
listening to its response: rush, hurry, rush.
The tree's mapley smell reminded
me of Bybanks Kentucky. Gram was singing about
the tulips.
We had left home six hours earlier and were
now precisely eighty-two
miles along our two-thousand mile journey.
'Let us get there in time.' I
prayed, 'and don't let u~ get in an accident,
and let my mother come home
with us.'
At last, the woman with the dismantled engine
called a mechanic, who
took one look at ah the pieces of her engine
lying on the ground and said,
'You have a credit card?'
'Yes' she said.
Gramps pulled out his wallet. 'If you need
some cash--'
'Oh, thank you,' she said. 'That's very kind
of you, but I'm all set. Thank
you for - for' - she looked around at all
the pieces of her car - 'for everything.
I'm sure you have to be on your way.
And, once Gramps was satisfied that the mechanic
was an honest man who
might actually be able to repair her car,
we started on our trip again.
'Salamanca,' Gram said, 'tell us more about
Peeby.'
'Phoebe,' I said.' Phoebe Winterbottom.'
'Yes, that's right,' Gram said. 'Peeby.'
'What was the diabolic thing that happened
to Mr. Cadaver?' Gramps
asked. 'You didn't tell us that yet.'
I explained that just as Phoebe was going
to divulge the purely awful thing
that had happened to Mr. Cadaver, her father
came home from work and we
all sat down to dinner: me, Phoebe, Mr. and
Mrs. Winterbottom, and
Phoebe's sister, Prudence.
Phoebe's parents reminded me a lot of my other
grandparents - the
Pickfords Like the Pickfords, Mr. and Mrs.
Winterbottom spoke quietly, in
short sentences, and sat straight up as they
ate their food. They were
extremely polite to each other, saying 'Yes,
Norma,' and 'Yes, George,' and
'Would you please pass the potatoes, Phoebe?'
and 'Wouldn't your guest like
another helping?'
They were picky about their food, too. Everything
they ate was what my
father would call 'side dishes': potatoes,
courgettes, bean salad, and a
mystery casserole that I could not identify.
They didn't eat meat, and they
didn't use butter. They were very much concerned
with cholesterol.
From what I could gather, Mr. Winterbottom
worked in an office, creating
road maps. Mrs. Winterbottom baked and cleaned
and did laundry and
grocery shopping. I had a funny feeling that
Mrs. Winterbottom did no
actually like all this barking and cleaning
and laundry and shopping, and I'm
not quite sure why I had that feeling because
if you just listened to the words
she said. it sounded as if she was Mrs. Supreme
Housewife.
For example, at one point Mrs. Winterbottom
said. 'I believe I've made
more pies in the past week than I can count.'
She said this in a cheery voice,
but after- wards, in the small silence, when
no one commented on all these
pies she had been busy making, she gave a
soft sigh and looked down at her
plate.
A little later, she said, 'I couldn't find
exactly that brand of muesli you like
so much, George, but I bought something similar.
'Oh?' Mr. Winterbottom said.
'I'm sure it's quite similar to what you wanted.'
Mr. Winterbottom kept eating and again, in
that silence, Mrs.
Winterbottom gave a soft sigh and examined
her plate.
I was sort of happy for her when she announced
that since Phoebe and
Prudence were back in school, she thought
she would return to work.
Apparently, during the school terms she worked
part-time at Rocky's Rubber
as a receptionist. I thought this might be
a nice change for her, to be out of
the house, but when she mentioned going back
to work and no one said anything
about it, she sighed again and pushed her
potatoes to one side of her
plate.
A few times, Mrs. Winterbottom called her
husband, 'sweetie pie' and
'honey bun'. She said, 'Would you like more
courgettes, sweetie pie?' and
'Did I make enough potatoes, honey bun?'
For some reason, that surprised me, those
little names she used. She was
dressed in a plain brown skirt and white blouse.
On her feet were sensible,
wide, flat shoes. She did not wear make-up.
Even though she had a pleasant.
round face and long yellow curls, the main
impression I got was that she was
used to being plain and ordinary, that she
was not supposed to do anything
too shocking.
Another odd impression I got was that Mr.
Winterbottom was playing the
role of a Father, with a capital 'F'. He sat
at the head of the table with his
white shirt cuffs rolled back neatly. He still
wore his red and blue striped tie.
He kept his face very serious throughout the
entire meal. His voice was
deep, and his words were clear. 'Yes, Norma,'
he said, deeply and clearly.
'No, Norma.' He looked more like fifty-two
than thirty- eight, but this was
not something I would ever call to his - or
Phoebe's - attention.
Phoebe's sister Prudence was quite a bit like
her mother. Prudence was
seventeen years old, but she acted like she
was almost a mother herself. She
ate primly, she nodded politely, she smiled
a small, polite smile after
everything she said.
It all seemed peculiar. They acted so thumpingly
tidy and respectable.
At the end of the dinner, Mrs. Winterbottom
brought in the blackberry pie.
I ate it, even though the black- berries did
not have as much flavour as they
did in Bybanks, Kentucky. Mr. Winterbottom
asked Phoebe who was in her
class at school. She started naming everyone,
and when she got to Mary Lou
Finney, Mr. Winterbottom said, 'Finney? Finney?'
He turned to Mrs.
Winterbottom. 'Norma, is Mr. Finney the one
who wears blue jeans? The
one who is always throwing that football?'
'Yes George.'
To Phoebe, he said, 'Is Mary Lou the one who
goes around saying
'Omnipotent!'?
Phoebe said, 'Yes.'
Mrs. Winterbottom said, 'I suppose - they
probably don't seem - they
probably appear a bit odd-'
Mr. Winterbottom said, 'Norma, I wouldn't
want to judge.' But he was
judging, I could tell. He didn't like the
Finneys, or maybe he was jealous of
them.
Mrs. Winterbottom gave her soft sigh and folded
her napkin. I had the
feeling that there was something she really
wanted to say, but she had
already decided that no one would listen.
After dinner, Phoebe walked me home, and on
the way, she talked about
Mrs. Cadaver. She said, 'You wouldn't think
it to look at her, but Mrs.
Cadaver is as strong as an ox.'
'How do you know that?' I said.
Phoebe looked behind her, as if she was expecting
someone to be
following us. 'Because,' she said, 'I have
seen her chop down trees and lug
the remains clear across her back yard. Do
you know what I think? I think
maybe she killed Mr. Cadaver and chopped him
up and buried him in the
back yard.'
'Phoebe!' I said.
'Well, I'm just telling you what I think,
that's all.'
That night, as I lay in bed, I thought about
Mrs. Cadaver, and I wanted to
believe that she was capable of killing her
husband and chopping him into
pieces and burying him in the back yard.
And then I started thinking about the blackberries,
and about how spoiled I
was by the blackberries in Bybanks, Kentucky.
I had a vision of my mother
and me. walking around the rims of the fields
and pastures, picking
blackberries in the summer, just as we used
to. We filled our pockets with
blackberries, but we did not pick from the
bottom of the vine or from the
top. The ones at the bottom were for the rabbits,
my mother said, and the
ones at the top were for the birds. The ones
at people-height were for people.
Lying in bed, remembering those blackberries,
made me think of
something else too. It was something that
happened a couple of years ago,
on a morning when my mother slept late. It
was that time she was pregnant.
My father and I had already eaten breakfast,
and he was out in the fields. On
the table, my father had left a single flower
in each of two juice glasses - a
black- eyed susan in front of my place, and
a white petunia in front of my
mother's My father must have gone out to the
field and picked them as soon
as he had awakened.
When my mother came into the kitchen that
day, she saw the flowers
immediately. 'Oh!' she said. 'Glory!' She
bent her face toward each flower.
She looked out the window and said, 'Let's
go find him.'
We climbed the hill to the barn, crawled between
the fence wires and
crossed the field. My father was standing
at the far end of the field, his back
to us, hands on his hips, looking at a section
of fence.
My mother slowed down when she saw him. I
was right behind her. It
looked as if she wanted to creep up and surprise
him, so I was quiet too and
cautious in my steps. I could hardly keep
from giggling. It seemed so daring
to be sneaking up on my father, and I was
sure my mother was going to
throw her arms around him and kiss him and
hug him and tell him how
much she loved the flower on the kitchen table.
My mother has always loved
anything that normally grows or lives out
of doors - anything - lizards, trees,
cows, caterpillars, birds, flowers, grasshoppers,
crickets, toads, dandelions,
ants pigs.
Just before we reached my father, he turned
around. Maybe he heard
us.This seemed to surprise my mother and throw
her off-guard. She stopped.
'Sugar--,' he said.
My mother opened her mouth, and I was thinking,
'Come on! Throw your
arms around him! Tell him!'
But, before she could speak, my father pointed
to the fence and said, 'Look
at that. A morning's work.' He indicated a
new length of wire strung between two new
posts. There was sweat on his face and arms.
And then I saw that my mother was crying.
My father saw it too. 'What?' he said.
He stepped toward her, and she said, 'Oh,
you're too good, John. You're too good. All
you Hiddles are too good. I'll never be so
good. I'll never be able to think of all the
things - I can never do like you do--'
My father looked down at me.
'The flowers,' I said.
'Oh,' he said. He put his sweaty arms around
her, but she was still crying and it wasn't
what I had imagined it would be. It was all
sad instead of happy.
The next morning when I went into the kitchen,
my father was standing beside the table. He
was looking at two small dishes of blackberries
- still shiny and wet with dew - one dish
at his place and one at mine.
'Thank you,' I said.
'No, it wasn't me,' he said. 'It was your
mother.
Just then, she came in from the back porch.
My father put his arms around her and they
smooched and it was all tremendously romantic,
and I started to turn away, but my mother
caught my arm. She pulled me to her and said
to me - though it was meant for my father.
I think - 'See? I'm almost as good as your
father!' She said it in a shy way, laughing
a little. I felt betrayed, but I didn't know
why.
After that dinner at Phoebe's where we had
the blackberry pie, I started wondering about
all of this. I had been part of my mother
- she was me and I was her - more than I was
part of my father. So anything that was true
of her was true of me. It was as if she had
said, 'We're almost as good as your father,'
and I wanted to say 'We're as good as - We're
better,' but why I wanted to say this, I don't
know. I love my father.
It is surprising all the things you remember
just by eating a blackberry pie.
