Darby (14 page)

Mr. Salter said, “Sherman, that’s why I wanted you to see it.”

Daddy said, “In a way, I wish you’d run it without asking me. I suppose I’m as chicken as the next guy.”

My mouth flopped open. “You are not, Daddy.”

Daddy glanced at Mr. Salter, then down at me. “Heck, Darby, if this got run, it would upset your mama something awful, that’s for sure. She’d be real upset. Not that she sides with the Klan, she just hates things being stirred up.” He scratched his chin again and considered. “Funny, I wish it wasn’t so, but as it stands, my best judgment says this should be in the paper. It’s a real eye opener when a child sees things more clearly than adults. It really is.”

“That’s what I thought,” Mr. Salter told him.

“Go on and run it,” Daddy instructed.

“You’re sure, Sherman?”

Daddy thought for a second more. “I am,” he stated.

Jumping into the air, I shouted, “This is the best day of my whole life!”

Mr. Salter smiled. He said, “She’s a little muckraker, Sherman. You better watch yourself.”

Daddy laughed. “Heck, I can handle it. I’m used to it. Both my kids are attracted to trouble.”

Not so long after that, when Mr. Salter was gone and my daddy was waiting on a customer, I heard a familiar sound outside. Tiny hooves clip-clopped on the sidewalk. Happy and daring, I went to the door and looked out to see Chester roll past with Mercury pulling him in the goat cart. Yanking the door open, I stepped outside, and called, “Chester.” He kept rolling. “Chester!” I shouted, and everyone around looked at me.

He stopped.

I caught up and put my hand on Mercury’s nose. I said, “Chester?”

“Yeah?” he answered shyly.

“Chester, I wanna ride with Mercury sometimes. Like before.”

He nodded.

Brave from happiness, I said, “I know you got a crush on me, but I don’t mind. I just wanna ride. I don’t mind that you got a crush.”

Peeking up at me, he said, “You don’t?”

“It’s sorta nice,” I said.

“You . . . think?”

“Yeah,” I said. Then, glancing all around to see if anyone was looking, I stepped close and gave him a quick hug. I don’t even know why I did it. Mama would have killed me forever if she heard about it. “See. We’re friends. It doesn’t matter about that other stuff.”

Smiling and red, Chester stuttered, “You . . . you wanna ride right now?”

“I gotta go help my daddy. Maybe I can ride tomorrow?”

He said. “I . . . sorta missed not talking to you.”

“Same here,” I said back, smiling.

That was the night of the storm, when all the farmers in Marlboro County lost at least one shed and Crooked Creek rose up and flooded the Gulf, where most of the black-owned shops in Bennettsville are built. It was the night a bunch of tornadoes twisted across the fields, and a farmer named Mr. MacKnight thought he’d lost all of his mules in a barn near Tatum. It was the night that a gigantic tree fell on one of the best homes in town and about ten tenant houses crumbled in. It was an awful, awful storm, and Daddy and me drove home just as it was kicking up.

Watching the thunderhead clouds climbing higher and higher into the sky, all the shopkeepers, including Daddy, closed their stores early. Nervous, me and Daddy got into the Buick and clanked across town toward Ellan. Just about halfway home, the wind started gusting. Then sheets and sheets of rain drummed the ground so that you could hardly see. Daddy drove as fast as he could, but branches were cartwheeling into the roadway, making him weave like a chased chicken. Out on the open highway, as we raced between fields of cotton, it was nearly as pitch-dark as midnight. Then lightning began crackling and combing the fields and trees, giving everything a gleaming whiteness. After ten minutes, we turned onto Ellan’s drive and banged down the muddy path to the back of the house. The car barn’s doors were swinging wildly back and forth, but Daddy didn’t even slow. He drove right in between them just as one caught in a gust, crashing closed behind us.

“I got to get the doors locked before they blow off,” Daddy called to me, and I got out and we struggled and wrastled the one closed while the rain stung our cheeks. Then, in a hail of blowing camellia blooms and hard-as-stone pecans, we ran toward the house. At the back door, Daddy shoved me inside, and called, “I need to go check the cows.” Then his big body disappeared into the gray, sideways rain.

Rushing upstairs, I heard someone screaming and crying, and in the kitchen I found Mama holding tight to Aunt Greer, whose eyes were as big as bottle tops. Over my aunt’s howls, Mama yelled for me to help McCall and Annie Jane shut the upstairs windows.

I raced into the hallway and jumped up the steps. Halfway to the top, something crashed in the parlor, bringing me to a stop. Confused, I turned and skittered back down the stairs. I was near the bottom when the lights shut off, and in the sudden darkness, I missed a step and found myself rolling and bouncing into the foyer. Getting up, I chased into the parlor, where I could see that the window was poked through with a busted tree limb.

As the curtains blew as crazy as a ghost, the rain swished in and was getting everything wet. Scared, I gathered in the slippery-as-an-eel drapes and tried to keep the rain from soaking the floor. On the roadway out front, lightning fireballs sizzled. Thunder shook Ellan. A few minutes passed that way, and McCall and Annie Jane came rushing down the steps. Together, we gathered the twisty, fluttering drapes and pushed the limb out the window.

“Where’s Daddy?” McCall shouted in my ear.

“He’s gone out to the dairy barn,” I yelled back.

“Lawd, Lawd, Lawd,” Annie Jane was saying.

The storm licked and growled over the top of us, but we blocked the rain good, even when it turned to hail. Pushing hard, we held the heavy curtains flat against the wall. Then the wind gave out the nastiest of gusts and snapped the thick curtain rod, sending the drapes spinning and flopping down on top of Annie Jane’s head. Stumbling and bleeding a little, she grabbed up a blanket and helped us hold that into place.

Shortly, Daddy was alongside us and taking over. He directed Annie Jane to sit, and we watched her fall into a chair. By himself, Daddy held that blanket in place, so that I was all the sudden so tired I began to shiver. Stumbling backward on the slick floor, one of my arms began to throb something awful. It went
bonk, bonk, bonk,
and my eyes watered. Then my teeth started clicking, and that
click-click-click
sound filled my ears.

The storm lasted only about an hour, but when it was over the air was thin and freezing cold so that you could see steam when you breathed. Then the prettiest thing happened. Way on the horizon, the clouds scattered like the shreds of Evette’s dresses, and the last rays of daylight shot into the house. Like a hot dot in the cold air, the top part of the yellow sun fell into the bare trees. I held my achy arm and began to cry.

Dropping the drenched blanket out the window, Daddy checked on Annie Jane. He put a thumb against the bump on her head. “You got it pretty good, huh?” he said.

“It ain’t nothing, Mr. Carmichael, but a good knot and a scratch.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Carmichael. You go on and mind Darby,” she instructed.

Directly, Daddy turned and came over to me. “Darby, sweetheart, you okay?”

“Daddy,” I sniffled, “my arm . . . it hurts to high heaven.”

Daddy gently lifted my throbbing wrist and gave it a good inspection.

I grunted in pain.

Daddy whispered, “Darby, sweetie, you did something to it, that’s for sure.” He touched around a swelled-up area.

Whimpering, I said, “I tumbled down the steps is how. That’s how I did it, I guess.”

It turned out a lot of people got it worse than me during the storm, but being that my daddy is considered a real important person, an hour later Dr. McNeil came out to Ellan and wrapped my arm with a long, narrow strip of cotton. With his glasses hanging on the tip of his nose, he told me it wasn’t a break but a sprain and that I’d be feeling better so quick it wasn’t worth me going to his office. From out of his doctor’s bag, he found a clear bottle of medicine. “You drink a tablespoon of this before bed,” he instructed. But that stuff tasted so bad I couldn’t even stand to smell it. I’d have rather hurt all over than swallow a tiny thimbleful.

Marlboro County was a mess. Things were flooded and trees were all the sudden bare, their colorful November leaves torn off in the wind. At Ellan, two shutters had been ripped and tossed into the backyard, and a whole row of shingles had cracked and slid off the roof. Plus, Daddy said that the window in our parlor was ruined. On the ground, tree limbs were scattered, and all of the flowers on my daddy’s camellia bushes had been blown clean off. Worse, my mama’s pecans were littered across the yard and down past the dairy barn. It took us days to gather them up.

All over, people had stories, the best being old Mr. MacKnight’s. He says that after the storm passed, he went about checking his outbuildings, and when he got to where his mule barn was supposed to be, the whole thing was missing. Scared, he looked everywhere for it. At daybreak, he says he rose and drove the fields around his house, looking and looking. Finally, just as he was giving up, he spotted the barn way down a dirt lane in the middle of a cornfield. When he reached it, he said that the outside looked fine, like nothing at all had happened. Excited, he flung open the barn doors . . . and there were all his mules, happy as can be after getting picked up and carried for almost half a mile. He says he was so relieved that he trembled like the biggest baby you ever saw.

Daddy told me that people don’t believe Mr. MacKnight’s story. A man who should know says that the barn always was right there and that Mr. MacKnight was getting too old and lonely to remember where his own outhouse was. Still, I believe him. I believe that a tornado could’ve done that sort of thing, because if one did, it means there’s a small amount of magic in the world.

The morning after the storm, the front page of the Bennettsville Times announced, “Massive Front Brings Storms and Tornadoes.” A smaller headline explained, “Tree Falls on One of Bennettsville’s Finest Homes and the Gulf Floods.” The whole top portion of the front page was filled with that stuff. It even had a picture of a tornado in a cotton field. Still, there was plenty of room left for other articles. Underneath the top half of the paper, there was a story about the price of cotton falling and falling and another that told how a dog in Brownsville could bark “The Star-Spangled Banner” nearly perfect. At the very bottom, in a box, Mr. Salter had run my column. Above it, he’d written in medium-sized letters, “The Enlightened Views of a Child.” In smaller words was written, “Another article by Marlboro County’s favorite columnist, Little Darby Carmichael, with editorial assistance from Evette.”

My daddy calls my article the second big storm in as many days, but I don’t exactly agree; my story didn’t push over trees or knock down houses. It didn’t do what the cold front did.

The funny thing is, when I went to school in the morning, I didn’t even remember that my newspaper article was coming out. All I could think about was the storm and tumbling down the steps. I was telling everyone about that. I said, “Then the lights went out, and I nearly flew through the air, bashing my arm on the floor.” When Principal Casper requested my company halfway through arithmetic, I had no idea what he wanted. Shuffling down the hall, I figured he was mad at me for calling an older girl “dumb as dirt” the day before.

Closing his office door, Principal Casper didn’t say a word, not right off. He sat down behind his desk and stared at me.

“Yes, sir?” I asked him, nervous.

He fanned a hand above the newspaper on his desk.

When I saw my article, I spouted, “It came out!”

Cracking his knuckles, he growled, “Yes, it did.” His eyes flared. “You do realize that this is going to cause a certain amount of uproar? You do realize that?”

I was so surprised, I couldn’t move or speak.

“It’s the kind of thing a lot of parents aren’t going to like. It’s the kind of thing some of your friends might not like, either. This story could make you very unpopular.”

I whispered, “Saying the truth is what newspaper girls do.”

“Maybe and maybe not, Miss Carmichael. Listen, I won’t beat around the bush here.” He leaned forward so that all I could see was his big head. “I’m glad you enjoy writing for the newspaper, but I don’t ever want you doing something like this again. I don’t need this kind of headache. You hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“After church on Sunday, I’ll talk to your parents about this, too. Now, please, Miss Carmichael, return to your class.”

Worried, I scuffed down the fancy hallway and up the steps and scooted back into my desk alongside Beth, who I smiled at. I looked around the room at my friends and the Lint Heads from the Mill Village, and I wondered which of them would hate me now. I wished I’d kept my big trap shut and that Mr. Salter hadn’t put my column in his paper.

Before leaving for lunch, Beth asked, “What did Principal Casper want?”

Staring at the floor, I answered, “To talk about my newspaper column.”