I walked Ruth Ann home after the first day of school. She looked a little pale, a little droopy. But she’d hung on to her Davy Crockett lunch bucket. Which was better than what happened to me. Two big bozos who were repeating sixth grade stole my lunch.
They were Newt Fluke and Elmo Leaper, Jr. Both about five ten, and Newt shaved. They also happened to be a couple of the big uglies who’d thrown me into Salt Crick. Anyway, I’d saved back an apple in my desk, the way you do when you’re not one of the bigger kids.
Ruth Ann took my hand across the street, and I let her. Nobody was looking.
“How’d you like first grade?” I asked because she wasn’t saying.
“It was all right. We cut out fall leaves from construction paper,” she said. “But I thought by afternoon we’d be reading. What are nits?”
Nits? “Ah,” I said. “Well, they’re louse eggs or baby louses. Lice. Something like that. Why?”
“The teacher checked in our hair for them.”
Oh. “Did she find any?”
“She found a lot on a girl named Ida-Belle Eubanks. My desk has a name.”
“Roscoe?”
Ruth Ann nodded.
* * *
Mrs. Dowdel had fired up her cauldron that afternoon. I noticed from my window when I was upstairs messing around in my room. She was boiling shucked sweet corn in batches. She pitchforked the ears in and out. Smoke billowed up around her.
I looked again, and there was Ruth Ann on the far side of the cannas. Mother had captured her long enough to get her out of her school dress and into coveralls. Now Ruth Ann was over by the hollyhocks, already deep into Mrs. Dowdel’s territory.
She’d pulled off a few blossoms to make up a little family of hollyhock dolls. Without Grachel, Ruth Ann was kind of lost and alone in the world. She used hollyhock buds for heads and upside-down flowers for the skirts. That kind of business. Toothpicks for arms.
Ruth Ann was helping herself to the hollyhocks, and Mrs. Dowdel was pitchforking her bubbling corn. The distance was narrowing between them. But each one was in a separate world—busy.
Then pretty soon Mrs. Dowdel dropped her pitchfork and headed off to her cobhouse. She practically ran Ruth Ann down. But neither one paid any attention to the other. When Mrs. Dowdel came back, she was lugging a crate with something on top. A big mixing bowl? Who knows? She did all kinds of things in her yard most people do indoors.
She planted the bowl on the ground and tipped the crate. Something rolled out. From up here it looked like a rusty hubcap, but bigger. It was there in the grass. Then it moved, by itself. Ruth Ann watched.
It was a turtle, a great big thing. It started crawling toward the fire, thought better of that, and made a slow turtle-turn. Mrs. Dowdel stood over it, keeping an eye on it, taking her time. Ruth Ann was right there, in her shadow.
There was a stick in Mrs. Dowdel’s hand, no longer than a clothespin. She bent to tease the turtle with it, and I guess he fell for it. I couldn’t really see from up here, but he stuck his neck out of his shell. Bad idea. A turtle will take your finger off, especially if you bother it. Mrs. Dowdel, bent double, invited the turtle to take a bite out of the stick she was offering between two careful fingers.
Ruth Ann tucked her fingers into her armpits. She was all eyes.
The turtle must have chomped down on the stick, because Ruth Ann jumped.
Out of her apron Mrs. Dowdel drew a businesslike knife. It flashed once, and the turtle, who wouldn’t stop biting the stick, couldn’t pull his head back in his shell. The head flew. Ruth Ann jumped a foot. With a big shoe Mrs. Dowdel kicked the turtle head into the fire.
Now she was squatting in the yard. A turtle can crawl till sunset after it’s lost its head. She flipped it over, and it lolled.
I couldn’t see this part at all, but Mrs. Dowdel had gone to work running the knife around the shell to cut it loose from the skin, sawing in a circle. I could only see this happening in Ruth Ann’s face. She was as interested as she’d ever been in anything in her life.
Mrs. Dowdel seemed to work the skin off the turtle’s feet. She lifted the shell like the lid off a stew pot and set it rolling away toward a garden row. Ruth Ann watched it go.
Finally Mrs. Dowdel heaved herself upright. With a small mess of turtle guts in her cupped hands, she went over to the fire and threw them in. Ruth Ann’s mouth hung open. She was all eyes and mouth. Even her braids looked interested.
Mrs. Dowdel worked over the rest of the turtle, carving up the parts you can eat to fry for her supper. She didn’t bring over any for us, but there’s not a lot of eating in one turtle.
But the point is from that day on, the afternoon of the turtle, Ruth Ann was Mrs. Dowdel’s shadow. And Mrs. Dowdel let her be. Ever after, Ruth Ann seemed to forget she’d ever lived in Terre Haute, or anywhere but here.
Phyllis didn’t get home till five on that particular afternoon. There’d been high school meetings about upcoming fall events: a sock hop, a hayride, corn-husking, homecoming. Somebody gave her a ride home.
* * *
Counting us Barnharts, nine people showed up at Dad’s first service that next Sunday. I ushered, wearing a white shirt and a necktie of Dad’s. It was longer than my fly. I could have put everybody in one pew, but I scattered them around. Still, Dad could count, and it wasn’t much of a turnout.
One lady wore a Mackinaw jacket and a hat with a veil. Her eyes were all over the place, and her teeth came out to meet you.
“I ain’t Methodist,” she warned me as I steered her at a pew. “I’m from the church across the tracks, so I’m wash-foot. I’m just here to see how the heathens worship.” She grinned quite friendly through her veil, and her teeth were a real assortment. She said she was Mrs. Wilcox.
Mother sat up front in her summer dress. Next to her was Ruth Ann with six or eight hollyhock dolls to fill out the pew. Phyllis sat on the back row, writing a letter. I passed the plate. Pollen blew in through the torn windows. Dad said, “Let us make a joyful noise,” and we tried a hymn, “Blessed Assurance.” But we tapered off.
Dad cut his sermon short so we’d be out ahead of the United Brethren. The wash-foot congregation across the tracks went on for another hour. Mrs. Wilcox had time to catch it on her way home.
After church we counted out the offering on our kitchen table. A dollar twelve, and two meat ration tokens from World War II and a small scattering of S&H Green Stamps.
“Great oaks from little acorns grow,” Dad said, not too certain. Mother didn’t look certain at all.
Mrs. Dowdel hadn’t turned up, but it was well known that she wasn’t a church woman. Where would she find the time? As the fall days got shorter, hers got longer. She’d put up a carload of corn relish. The labels on the Ball jars were written out in a hand that looked like Ruth Ann’s printing, though she’d had help with the spelling.
CORN RELISH
1958
It was getting harder to keep Ruth Ann home. Mother about gave up trying.
A jar of corn relish rolled all the way over onto our porch. The tarp I’d once worn was stretched on Mrs. Dowdel’s side yard, thick with drying black walnuts. The stove lengths began to rise in piles on her back porch. She could see winter from here.
I couldn’t, of course. I couldn’t see a day ahead. Typical of me, the next time trouble broke out next door, I was sound asleep.
