Tagging along behind came Fanny with her boyfriends swarming like bees around the sweetest flower. I had only a devoted brother. Keith lagged about twenty yards behind Fanny and her friends, reluctant to stay with us, but not for the same reasons as Fanny. Keith was in love with nature, with the sights, sounds, and smells of earth, wind, forest, and, most of all, animals. I glanced behind to check, and saw he was so absorbed in studying the bark of a tree he didn't hear me calling his name. "Keith, hurry up!"
He ran a short way before he stopped to pick up a dead bird, examining it with careful hands and observant eyes. If we didn't constantly remind him where he was, he would be left far behind, and never find his way home. Strange how absentminded Keith was, never noticing where he was, only where the objects of his interest grew, lived, or visited.
"Which is heavier, Tom, the books or Our Jane?" I asked, lugging along six.
"The books," he said quickly, setting down our frail sister so I could empty my arms of books and pick up Our Jane.
"What are we gonna do, Ma?" Tom asked when we reached our cabin, where the smoke belched out and reddened our eyes immediately. "She gets so tired, yet she needs to go to school."
Sarah looked deep into Our Jane's tired eyes, touched her pale face, then gently picked up her youngest and carried her into the big bed and laid her down. "What she needs is a doctor, but we kin't afford it. That's what makes me so damned mad with yer pa. He's got money fer booze, an money fer women .. . but none fer doctors to heal his own."
How bitter she sounded.
.
Every Sunday night I had nightmares. The same one repeated over and over, until I grew to hate Sunday nights. I dreamed I was all alone in the cabin, snowed in and alone. Every time the dream came I woke up crying.
"It's all right," comforted Tom, crawling over from his place on the floor near the stove and throwing his arms about me after one of my worst nightmares. "I get those bad dreams, too, once in a while. Don't cry, we're all here. Ain't no place for us to go but to school and back, and to church and back. Wouldn't it be nice if we never had to come back?"
"Pa doesn't love me like he loves you, Fanny, Keith, and Our Jane," I sobbed, and even that made me feel weak and ashamed. "Am I so ugly and unbearable, Tom? Is that why Pa hates me so?"
"Naw," scoffed Tom, looking embarrassed, "it's somethin about yer hair he dislikes. Heard him tell Sarah that once. But I think yer hair is beautiful, really do. Not so hatefully red as mine, nor so pale as Our Jane's. Or so black and straight as Fanny's. You've got an angel look, even if it is black. I think you are, no doubt, the prettiest girl in all the hills, and Winnerrow as well."
There were many pretty girls in the hills and in the valley. I hugged Tom and turned away. What did Tom know about judging beautiful girls? Already I knew there was a world beyond the hills--a huge, wonderful world I was going to know one day.
"I'm sure glad I'm not a girl," shouted Tom the next day, shaking his head in wonder at a sister who went so easily from frowns to laughter, "made happy by silly compliments!"
"You didn't mean what you said last night?" I asked, crestfallen. "You're not gonna like me either?"
He whirled about and made an ugly face. "See--yer almost as pretty as this face of mine--and I'd marry ya when I grow up--if I could."
"You've been saying that since you learned how to talk."
"How would ya know?" he shouted back.
"Tom, you know Miss Deale doesn't want you to say yer or ya. You must remember your diction and your grammar. Say instead you are or you. You must learn to speak properly, Tom."
"Why?" he asked, his green eyes sparkling with mischief. He tugged the red ribbon from my ponytail and set my hair free to blow in the wind. "Nobody round here cares about grammar and diction, not Ma, not Pa, not anybody but ya and Miss Deale."
"And who do you love most in the whole wide world?" I asked.
"Love you first, Miss Deale second," Tom said with a laugh. "Can't have you, so settle for Miss Deale. I'm gonna order God t'stop her from growing old and ugly. Then I can catch up and marry her, and she'll read to me every book in the whole wide world."
"You'll read your own books, Thomas Luke Casteel!"
"Heavenly," (he was the only one to combine my two names in this flattering way) "the others in the school whisper about you, thinking you know more than you should at your age, and that's my age too. I don't know as much. How come?"
"I get the A's, and you get the B's and C's because you play hooky too much--and I don't play hooky at all." Tom was as thirsty for knowledge as I was, but he had to be like others of his sex once in a while, or fight them each day so they wouldn't call him teacher's pet. When he came back to the cabin from his wild days of fun in the woods or on the river, he'd spend twice as much of his free time poring over the books Miss Deale allowed us to bring home.
Other words Miss Deale had said to Tom and me lingered in my head, to comfort me when my pride was injured, my self-confidence wounded. "Look," she'd said, her pretty face smiling, "you and Tom are my very best students. The very kind every teacher hopes for."
The day Miss Deale gave us permission to take books home, she gave us the world and all it contained.
She gave us treasures beyond belief when she put in our hands her favorite classics. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, Moby Dick, A Tale of Two Cities, and three Jane Austen novels and they were all for me. On the days that followed Tom had his own selection, boy books, the Hardy Boys series, seven of them, and just when I'd begun to think he'd select nothing but fun books, he picked up a thick volume of Shakespeare, and that made Miss Deale's
blue eyes glow.
"You don't, perchance, hope to be a writer one day, do you, Tom?" she asked.