The Great Gilly Hopkins

If you mean “never” Trotter, say so. Is that it? Will I never see the three of you again? Are you going to stand by and let them rip me out and fold me up and fly me away? Leave me a string, Trotter, a thread, at least. Dammit. She’d tie her own.

“I’ll write you, W.E. The mailman will bring you a letter with your name on it. Just for you.”

“Me?” he said.

“Nobody else.” She looked belligerently at Trotter, but Trotter was so busy making the meat platter and the salad bowl switch places that the expression was wasted.

After supper Gilly did her homework, knowing it was useless, that Miss Harris would never see the neat figures, row on row, that proved that Gilly Hopkins had met and mastered the metric system. When she finished, she thought briefly of calling Agnes, but what should she say? “Good-bye” when she’d never really said “hello”? Poor Agnes, what would become of her? Would she stomp herself angrily through the floor, or would someone’s kiss turn her magically into a princess? Alas, Agnes, the world is woefully short on frog smoochers.

No, she wouldn’t call, but maybe, someday, she’d write.

William Ernest walked Mr. Randolph home and returned carrying The Oxford Book of English Verse for Gilly—a farewell present from Mr. Randolph.

“Gilly, honey, do you know what kind of present that is?”

Gilly could guess.

“Like he tore a piece off hisself and gave it to you.”

Gilly ran a finger over the wrinkled brown leather, which could almost have been a piece of Mr. Randolph, but the observation seemed too raw, so she kept it to herself.

She waited for Trotter to puff up the stairs to take W.E. to bed before she began to look for the poem:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home.

She didn’t understand it any more than she had the first time. If birth was a sleep and a forgetting, what was death? But she didn’t really care. It was the sounds she loved—the sounds that turned and fell in kaleidoscopic wonder.

“And not in utter nakedness.” Who would have thought those five words could fall into such a pattern of light? And her favorite “But trailing clouds of glory do we come.” Was it all the l’s that did it or the mental picture that streaked cometlike across the unfocused lens of her mind?

“From God, who is our home.” Again the lens was unfocused. Was that God with the huge lap smelling of baby powder? Or was that home?

She awoke in the night, trying to remember the dream that had awakened her. It was a sad one, or why did her heart feel like a lump of poorly mashed potatoes? It was something about Courtney. Courtney coming to get her, and then, having seen her, turning away sorrowing: “Never, never, never.” But the voice was Trotter’s.

She began to cry softly into her pillow, not knowing why or for whom. Maybe for all the craziness she had tried so hard to manage and was never quite able to.

And then Trotter was beside her, making the bedsprings screech at the burden of her body. She leaned over, her hair, loose from its daytime knot, falling across Gilly’s own hair.

“You OK, baby?”

Gilly turned to face her, this mountain smelling of Johnson’s baby powder and perspiration. In the dark, she could hardly make out the lines on Trotter’s face.

“Yeah,” she sniffed. “OK.”

Trotter took the hem of the striped pajama top and gently wiped Gilly’s eyes and nose. “I ain’t supposed to let on how I feel. I ain’t got no blood claim on you, and the Lord in Heaven knows I want you to have a good life with your own people. But”—her huge bass voice broke up into little squeaky pieces—“but it’s killing me to see you go.” The whole mammoth body began to shake with giant sobs.