Jackson
Standing on the mossy edge of a rocky overhang, I can see for miles. I lock my eyes on each mountain in the distance, the closer green ones to the far-yonder ones veiled in hazy blues and purples. Is someone on one of those hills looking back at our ridge?
“What do you reckon, Jackson?” I say. “Is a girl out there who’d like to be my friend? Or a boy who’d want to court me?”
My brother Jackson doesn’t answer. He never does, on account of he died when he was three days old. I wasn’t much older than two, but I remember Mama and Daddy burying his tiny body in the family cemetery with Rebecca and the other ancestors. What I recollect most is the tiny wiggle in Mama’s arms, who cried the puniest cry like a kitten whose eyes are barely open. But his eyes were open. When I climbed up in the bed beside Mama, he looked right at me, his eyes big in his pinched little face.
I stroked his arm and pressed the palm of his hand, still slimy from his birth. His teensy hand wrapped around my finger and his spirit took hold of my heart.
To me, he’s not dead. He’s my brother I talked to when I pined for someone to share my childhood with. Now, he’s the one I tell my thoughts to, to ease the day-by-day sameness that hangs heavy in the very air I breathe.
“I’m not a young’un anymore, Jackson,” I tell him today. “It’s my fourteenth birthday, one year closer to courting and getting married.” I already ponder on kissing. Will I ever meet a boy whose lips I’d like to feel on mine?
I lean out to peer into the deep hollow beneath our ridge. I might could see the Willoughby house if I paid it any mind. Grandpa reckons their next of kin is the devil himself. I cross paths with Jess Willoughby now and again, but I don’t pay him any heed. He’d friendly up to me if I gave him so much as half a Howdy, but his friendship isn’t worth Grandpa’s wrath.
“Know what Nellie Finch told me today, Jackson? She said Jess Willoughby’s daddy married Nancy Tucker. Nancy Tucker, for corn’s sake! She’s scarcely older than Jess, a mere handful of years older than me.
“What makes a girl, who’s butterfly pretty, marry up with an old man like Harmon Willoughby? Are the pickings that poor around here? I reckon I’ll have to get far away from Skitter Falls if they are. I will not marry an old man. I just won’t.”
On my way back to the house, I see Grandpa walking through the cemetery. “No lessons today, Ginnie Lee?” he calls, heading toward me.
I shake my head. “Not on my birthday.”
Mama and I do lessons every day, unless she’s sick. The school in Skitter Falls is a two-hour walk away, and Mama says they can’t teach me anything she can’t teach me better. She sets great store by education, Mama does. But I don’t know what she expects me to do with what I learn. Folks around here don’t care what I know.
Before Daddy courted Mama and brought her here, she taught school in Charleston. He told her he lives so far up in the hills that it rains here two days before drops fall in the hollows. She said she’d like living close to rainbows. Might be I’ll go to a city like Charleston someday. And might be I’ll find more than rainbows.
I wait for Grandpa by the plank bridge that crosses the stream running between our ridge and higher mountains east of us. Folks call the stream—and our ridge—Rebecca’s Branch.
“Git yourself ready for a special surprise at your birthday supper,” Grandpa says.
“I’m ready. Any hints?”
“Onliest hint I’m a-givin’ is it’s different from anything ya ever had.”
“That could be a whole heap of things.” Something different at Rebecca’s Branch just plain doesn’t happen.
“That’s all I’m a-tellin’.”
I plant a kiss on the part of Grandpa’s leathery cheek that isn’t hidden under his beard, and traipse into the house to help Mama with supper.
My birthday is near as special to Mama as it is to me. On Jackson’s birthday, she adorns his gravestone with daisies and everlastings, but she makes a fuss for mine, fixing my favorite meal of stewed chicken and dumplings. The chickeny smell greets my nose as the screen door slams behind me.
“Mind that door,” Mama says.
“Sorry, Mama.”
“There’s a birthday gift from me on the table.”
I spot the flat package, sitting on Mama’s best tablecloth. My fingers feel the outline of a book beneath the newspaper wrapping. I hope it’s a book of stories, not just a lesson book.
When I rip off the paper, I see it’s neither. It’s a book of empty pages, each one clean and white with straight lines across it.
Mama looks over from the stove. “A girl of fourteen ought to have a place to write her private thoughts.”
It seems wasteful to write words for no one to read, and I tell most of my thoughts to Jackson, but I don’t say so.
“I kept a remembrance book when I was a girl,” Mama says.
“What did you write, Mama?”
Her forehead breaks out in thinking lines. “Girlish things, as I recollect. Things boys said to me…”
“Sweet talk?”
It isn’t just the hot stove that reddens her cheeks. “Sometimes,” she says, “but other times I wrote about things I did with my friends. Parties and such.”
I have never heard a boy’s sweet talk, though I confess I sometimes hanker to. My only friends are Mama, Daddy, Grandpa, and Aunt Freddie. Unless you count the dogs, General and Custis. Or the departed ones buried up on the hill. It’s a rarity to see someone my age, except when the circuit-riding preacher comes through Skitter Falls and we walk down the long trail to church services.
My birthday supper will be a mite like a party. Grandpa and Aunt Freddie will traipse over for it from their log house, just a hound’s sniff away.
Mama lifts the heavy lid from her stewpot. Steam rushes her face and dots her forehead. She’s a puzzlement, Mama is, who plans a special birthday meal as if I were a young’un, but expects I have the private thoughts of a woman.
And the young’un part of me can’t stop wondering about Grandpa’s gift.
