Chapter 9 Countdown
Countdown
Kate Shaw
The first Monday in June feels different from any that came before.
For one thing, fewer students come to school.
Three of the Mayhew girls have been attending, but now only two are here.
Crystal tells me that Peggy, the oldest at fourteen, won’t be going to school in Burnsville come fall.
She’s needed at home to help with the new baby coming.
She could have attended school here while doing that, but now she can’t be so far away.
For Peggy there’s no more book learning, so she stops now.
Her family won’t be following North Carolina school laws—they follow the code for survival.
Harlan Biddle, the twelve-year-old nephew of Jerome Biddle, won’t be back either.
After hearing the good news at church last Friday, he told the preacher he’d rather play hide-and-seek with that dern gov’ment man than miss hunting and helping at the still.
He declared he’s already got more learning than he needs.
Two children down and ten sitting here with fear in their eyes.
I don’t tell them it’s against the law to drop out of school before they’re eighteen.
That their parents or grannies or aunts will be breaking the law if they don’t comply.
To say that sounds like the police-state nobody appreciates.
Besides, the last time anyone saw an officer of the law up here was last year when Sheriff Sykes led a raid on a still that had already been moved to a different hiding place.
Up here, folks take matters in their own hands.
I doubt they’d believe that something like skipping school would get the sheriff to ford the creek on official duty.
Maybe we didn’t need a full school year to ponder the closing.
Maybe in that span of time I would have lost every student.
All these years my jar of penny candy has been used as a bribe for answers, so it’s nothing new for the children when I set it on my desk.
They don’t even smile. But this time, I surprise them when I say, “Take a handful. Take two if you’re extra hungry.
” This isn’t the time to be stingy; plus I’ll have little need for penny candy in two weeks.
I pull my chair in front of my desk and watch them grin at their good fortune. They become children again with loose shoulders and a twinkle in their eyes all because of a dime’s worth of sweets.
“Who wants to go first?” I say without explanation because I want to hear what folks have been talking about since Friday’s meeting.
Sassy Wright starts first, fiddling with the Tootsie Roll paper she unwrapped, the candy a bulge in her jaw.
At twelve, she lives up to her sassy name, and I’m going to miss her forthright speaking.
“Aunt Fleta say she don’t want me to look like a ragamuffin and a scalawag so I need me some new clothes. I don’t wanna look different from the townies. I ain’t never rode a bus, neither. Think it’s gonna fall off the edge and we get kilt?”
Before I can answer, Mary Harris, the usually shy middle child of Sadie Blue and Buck Dillard, speaks up bravely. “Cain’t I be with Loretty? Mama says we ain’t gonna be together cause I’m behind.”
“You’re not behind, Mary Harris. You’re younger than Loretty, that’s all. It’s your age that decides what grade you’re in.”
I need to start at the beginning because these children are confused.
“Does everybody know the difference between our one-room schoolhouse and the Burnsville school?” The only time the children saw the county school was when Eli and I took them to town for October Festival to get free candy.
They didn’t see the classrooms. They didn’t see neat rows of desks and chalkboards that aren’t cracked, and hallways with posters and glass-fronted display cases holding trophies and sports jerseys.
Eddie Dillard, age fourteen and uncle to Mary Harris and Loretty, answers. “County school’s got a lotta kids.” He looks at Mary Harris and winks. “More than you can count on your ten little fingers.”
I nod. “That’s right. And where you’re going there will be more children the same age as you.
You might have twenty-five boys and girls in your class, all the same age, all studying from the same books, doing the same figures, and reading the same stories.
And every boy and girl will be a chance to make new friends,” I lie, knowing all it will take is one outbreak of head lice and deep lines will be drawn in the dirt.
While they munch on candy and chew wads of bubble gum, I go to the blackboard and write their names from the youngest to the oldest. Beside their name I write the grade they will be going into, at least in theory.
I draw lines between elementary and middle and high school.
This is a new way of looking at each other, not alphabetized or grouped by family or gender.
Eddie is the brightest of the lot. He’s Buck’s youngest brother, mannerly, reliable and smart, so doors in the new world will open more easily for him than for others. But he is tender-hearted and a champion for the weak. He will be tested.
The child who concerns me most is eight-year-old Loretta Lynn Dillard, who doesn’t belong anywhere but here. She was born old and odd.
Once I witnessed that oddness when she sat by her great-granny’s sick bed.
I’d come to visit Sadie Blue and bring her a book in the Narnia series, Prince Caspian.
The winter before, the Dillards had moved into the broken-down farmhouse to give a dying woman a modicum of peace.
Gladys Hicks lay in the parlor by the heat of the woodstove while Buck replaced rotten stair treads and broken windows, patched holes in walls and leaks in the roof.
Loretty sat by the old woman’s side in the darkened room while Gladys mumbled on and on.
I sat at the kitchen table with Sadie and saw shades of the tender girl I first met who collected oxymorons like bittersweet, old news, and awfully good and glowed with a hunger for book learning.
But that day, her face was etched with gravity.
“Loretty don’t leave her side,” Sadie whispered, while laying a piece of muslin on the table and smoothing it over and over, then folding it precisely with the corners lined up. “When she ain’t got school or chores or church, she sit by my dying granny,” she said. “You know what she doin’?”
I shook my head because, in part, I couldn’t fathom kindness or patience being given to such a spiteful person. I’d never heard one good deed Gladys Hicks had done, and her greatest cruelty had been inflicted on her granddaughter, Sadie Blue, who is more forgiving than I am.
“She pulling Granny’s sins into her own little heart. Pulling out them black sins what come from living long.”
I’m only partially confused. I’ve come to expect preposterous statements from simple folks. Still I say, “How can that be?”
“It be her divine gift from God,” Sadie replied, as easily as a mother would talk about a child’s lovely singing voice or a talent with figuring numbers.
Eli had told me Loretty’s birth was special.
That she was born encased in a bubble that held her birth fluid intact.
With a straight face, he said that birthing veil declared the girl was protected from malevolent forces and it came with a rare gift: She was a sin-eater.
I’d come across that archaic term in Greek mythology once in graduate school.
Eons ago, every village had a sin-eater who did necessary work to help sinners cross over.
Whether I believe it’s true or not, that need persists in dark hollers today.
I sipped weak coffee and nibbled on a day-old scone, unsure how to participate in this bizarre conversation without crossing the line that divided common sense and fairy tales. But curiosity got the best of me.
“What does she do with their sins?”
Sadie gazed out the back window and up to the ridge.
“They be a laurel hell up that’away called Peavine Gap.
Don’t nobody go on purpose partly cause a wild boars and that laurel hell.
When a hunter be fool enough to shoot a boar, it knowed to worm its way inside that thicket.
A hunter goes in to git it, but gets turned around and c’aint git out. ”
“What do you mean? He dies there?”
Sadie didn’t answer, but said, “Folks know to stay away, but my girl listen and take ’em to that laurel hell at Peavine.
She dig a hole and hurl them sins in, covers ’em up and tamps ’em down.
That laurel hell holds pain as good as a bear trap clamps a paw.
Folks be at peace cause they sins be left behind. ”
I didn’t dispute Sadie’s story because to argue was pointless. I tried to offer sympathy. “Aren’t you frightened for her?”
“Naw. Angels watch over my girl,” said Sadie Blue with a beatific smile—but I was never sure angels were enough.
Today, at the start of our two final weeks, Loretty stares out the window.
She is disconnected from our conversation about class size and grades and the last Creekrise newsletter.
Besides the story about a taxidermist that Eli arranged, each child is to write a paragraph about their greatest talent.
“Like what, Miz Shaw?” Luke asks, puzzled.
“Can anybody help Luke?”
Eddie says singing good and wood carving, then Sassy adds playing the fiddle and banjo. Pretty soon our options are substantial with the addition of storytelling, basket weaving, and quilting. I want to emphasize the mountain gifts these students will bring to their expanded community.
I watch Loretty take three suckers from the candy jar when it reaches her, but she doesn’t eat them.
She’s not as easily tempted as the other children.
She places them on her desk in the shape of a triangle.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen her make the trigon shape.
It’s a common doodle in the margin of her papers.
Sometimes it’s an outline. Sometimes it’s filled in.
I worry that the girl will only feel at home in Baines Creek.
If any of her uniqueness comes to light in town they will call her terrible names.
They might do terrible things. Loretty Dillard doesn’t belong off this mountain, but I don’t know how to stop her from leaving.
Sadie and Buck are law-abiding people who want more for their children. But more can be a dangerous thing.
At the close of the day, when she’s leaving school with the suckers in her pocket, she speaks for the first time. Through bangs of limp hair, her hazel eyes glint and she says, “A kinship sorrow gotta be undone, Miz Kate, and it’s me what gotta fix it.”
“What do you mean?” I call after her, “What kinship sorrow? And why do you have to be the one to fix it?”
But she’s walking away, holding Mary Harris’s tiny hand, their delicate bodies heading home, and I think, What are we to do with this odd child who lives in a world apart?