Rhoda Page 6

  “Why don’t they put him to sleep first?” Letitia said. “I’d make them put me to sleep.”

  “They can’t,” I said. “They can’t put you to sleep unless they operate.”

  “My father could,” she said. “He owns the hospital. He could put me to sleep.” She was always saying things like that but I let her be my best friend anyway.

  “They couldn’t give them to me,” I said. “I’d run away to Florida and be a beachcomber.”

  “Then you’d get rabies,” Letitia said. “You’d be foaming at the mouth.”

  “I’d take a chance. You don’t always get it.” We moved closer together, caught up in the horror of it. I was thinking about the Livingstons’ bulldog. I’d had some close calls with it lately.

  “It was a pet,” Letitia said. “His brother was keeping it for a pet.”

  It was noon recess. Billy Monday was sitting on a bench by the swings. Just sitting there. Not talking to anybody. Waiting for two o’clock, a small washed-out-looking boy that nobody paid any attention to until he got bit. He never talked to anybody. He could hardly even read. When Mrs. Jansma asked him to read his head would fall all the way over to the side of his neck. Then he would read a few sentences with her having to tell him half the words. No one would ever have picked him out to be the center of a rabies tragedy. He was more the type to fall in a well or get sucked down the drain at the swimming pool.

  Fourteen days. Fourteen shots. It was spring when it happened and the schoolroom windows were open all day long and every afternoon after Billy left we had milk from little waxy cartons and Mrs. Jansma would read us chapters from a wonderful book about some children in England that had a bed that took them places at night. There we were, eating graham crackers and listening to stories while Billy was strapped to the table in Doctor Finley’s office waiting for his shot.

  “I can’t stand to think about it,” Letitia said. “It makes me so sick I could puke.”

  “I’m going over there and talk to him right now,” I said. “I’m going to interview him for the paper.” I had been the only one in the third grade to get anything in the Horace Mann paper. I got in with a story about how Mr. Harmon was shell-shocked in the First World War. I was on the lookout for another story that good.

  I got up, smoothed down my skirt, walked over to the bench where Billy was sitting and held out a vial of cinnamon toothpicks. “You want one,” I said. “Go ahead. She won’t care.” It was against the rules to bring cinnamon toothpicks to Horace Mann. They were afraid someone would swallow one.

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “I don’t need any.”

  “Go on,” I said. “They’re really good. They’ve been soaking all week.”

  “I don’t want any,” he said.

  “You want me to push you on the swings?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

  “If it was my brother’s squirrel, I’d kill it,” I said. “I’d cut its head off.”

  “It got away,” he said. “It’s gone.”

  “What’s it like when they give them to you?” I said. “Does it hurt very much?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t look.” His head was starting to slip down onto his chest. He was rolling up like a ball.

  “I know how to hypnotize people,” I said. “You want me to hypnotize you so you can’t feel it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He had pulled his legs up on the bench. Now his chin was so far down into his chest I could barely hear him talk. Part of me wanted to give him a shove and see if he would roll. I touched him on the shoulder instead. I could feel his little bones beneath his shirt. I could smell his washed-out rusty smell. His head went all the way down under his knees. Over his shoulder I saw Mrs. Jansma headed our way.

  “Rhoda,” she called out. “I need you to clean off the blackboards before we go back in. Will you be a sweet girl and do that for me?”

  “I wasn’t doing anything but talking to him,” I said. She was beside us now and had gathered him into her wide sleeves. He was starting to cry, making little strangled noises like a goat.

  “Well, my goodness, that was nice of you to try to cheer Billy up. Now go see about those blackboards for me, will you?”

  I went on in and cleaned off the blackboards and beat the erasers together out the window, watching the chalk dust settle into the bricks. Down below I could see Mrs. Jansma still holding on to Billy. He was hanging on to her like a spider but it looked like he had quit crying.

  That afternoon a lady from the PTA came to talk to us about the paper drive. “One more time,” she was saying. “We’ve licked the Krauts. Now all we have left is the Japs. Who’s going to help?” she shouted.

  “I am,” I shouted back. I was the first one on my feet.

  “Who do you want for a partner?” she said.

  “Billy Monday,” I said, pointing at him. He looked up at me as though I had asked him to swim the English Channel, then his head slid down on the desk.

  “All right,” Mrs. Jansma said. “Rhoda Manning and Billy Monday. Team number one. To cover Washington and Sycamore from Calvin Boulevard to Conner Street. Who else?”

  “Bobby and me,” Joe Franke called out. He was wearing his coonskin cap, even though it was as hot as summer. How I loved him! “We want downtown,” he shouted. “We want Dirkson Street to the river.”

  “Done,” Mrs. Jansma said. JoEllen Scaggs was writing it all down on the blackboard. By the time Billy’s mother and Mr. Harmon came to get him the paper drive was all arranged.

  “See you tomorrow,” I called out as Billy left the room. “Don’t forget. Don’t be late.”

  When I got home that afternoon I told my mother I had volunteered to let Billy be my partner. She was so proud of me she made me some cookies even though I was supposed to be on a diet. I took the cookies and a pillow and climbed up into my treehouse to read a book. I was getting to be more like my mother every day. My mother was a saint. She fed hoboes and played the organ at early communion even if she was sick and gave away her ration stamps to anyone that needed them. She had only had one pair of new shoes the whole war.

  I was getting more like her every day. I was the only one in the third grade that would have picked Billy Monday to help with a paper drive. He probably couldn’t even pick up a stack of papers. He probably couldn’t even help pull the wagon.

  I bet this is the happiest day of her life, I was thinking. I was lying in my treehouse watching her. She was sitting on the back steps putting liquid hose on her legs. She was waiting for the Episcopal minister to come by for a drink. He’d been coming by a lot since my daddy was overseas. That was just like my mother to be best friends with a minister.

  “She picked out a boy that’s been sick to help her on the paper drive,” I heard her tell him later. “I think it helped a lot to get her to lose weight. It was smart of you to see that was the problem.”

  “There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you, Ariane,” he said. “You say the word and I’ll be here to do it.”

  I got a few more cookies and went back up into the treehouse to finish my book. I could read all kinds of books. I could read Book-of-the-Month Club books. The one I was reading now was called Cakes and Ale. It wasn’t coming along too well.

  I settled down with my back against the tree, turning the pages, looking for the good parts. Inside the house my mother was bragging on me. Above my head a golden sun beat down out of a blue sky. All around the silver maple leaves moved in the breeze. I went back to my book.

  She put her arms around my neck and pressed her lips against mine. I forgot my wrath. I only thought of her beauty and her enveloping kindness.

  “You must take me as I am, you know,” she whispered.

  “All right,” I said.

  Saturday was not going to be a good day for a paper drive. The sky was gray and overcast. By the time we lined up on the Horace Mann playground with our wagons a light rain was falling.
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  “Our boys are fighting in rain and snow and whatever the heavens send,” Mr. Harmon was saying. He was standing on the bleachers wearing an old baseball shirt and a cap. I had never seen him in anything but his gray suit. He looked more shell-shocked than ever in his cap.

  “They’re working over there. We’re working over here. The Germans are defeated. Only the Japs left to go. There’re canvas tarps from Gentilly’s Hardware, so take one to cover your papers. All right now. One grade at a time. And remember, Mrs. Winchester’s third grade is still ahead by seventy-eight pounds. So you’re going to have to go some to beat that. Get to your stations now. Get ready, get set, go. Everybody working together . . .”

  Billy and I started off. I was pulling the wagon, he was walking along beside me. I had meant to wait awhile before I started interviewing him but I started right in.

  “Are you going to have to leave to go get it?” I said.

  “Go get what?”

  “You know. Your shot.”

  “I got it this morning. I already had it.”

  “Where do they put it in?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t look.”

  “Well, you can feel it, can’t you?” I said. “Like, do they stick it in your navel or what?”

  “It’s higher than that.”

  “How long does it take? To get it.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Till they get through.”

  “Well, at least you aren’t going to get rabies. At least you won’t be foaming at the mouth. I guess you’re glad about that.” I had stopped in front of a house and was looking up the path to the door. We had come to the end of Sycamore, where our territory began.

  “Are you going to be the one to ask them?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “You want to come to the door with me?”

  “I’ll wait,” he said. “I’ll just wait.”

  We filled the wagon by the second block. We took that load back to the school and started out again. On the second trip we hit an attic with bundles of the Kansas City Star tied up with string. It took us all afternoon to haul that. Mrs. Jansma said she’d never seen anyone as lucky on a paper drive as Billy and I. Our whole class was having a good day. It looked like we might beat everybody, even the sixth grade.

  “Let’s go out one more time,” Mrs. Jansma said. “One more trip before dark. Be sure and hit all the houses you missed.”

  Billy and I started back down Sycamore. It was growing dark. I untied my Brownie Scout sweater from around my waist and put it on and pulled the sleeves down over my wrists. “Let’s try that brick house on the corner,” I said. “They might be home by now.” It was an old house set back on a high lawn. It looked like a house where old people lived. I had noticed old people were the ones who saved things. “Come on,” I said. “You go to the door with me. I’m tired of doing it by myself.”

  He came along behind me and we walked up to the door and rang the bell. No one answered for a long time although I could hear footsteps and saw someone pass by a window. I rang the bell again.

  A man came to the door. A thin man about my father’s age.

  “We’re collecting papers for Horace Mann School,” I said. “For the war effort.”

  “You got any papers we can have?” Billy said. It was the first time he had spoken to anyone but me all day. “For the war,” he added.

  “There’re some things in the basement if you want to go down there and get them,” the man said. He turned a light on in the hall and we followed him into a high-ceilinged foyer with a set of winding stairs going up to another floor. It smelled musty, like my grandmother’s house in Clarksville. Billy was right beside me, sticking as close as a burr. We followed the man through the kitchen and down a flight of stairs to the basement.

  “You can have whatever you find down here,” he said. “There’re papers and magazines in that corner. Take whatever you can carry.”

  There was a large stack of magazines. Magazines were the best thing you could find. They weighed three times as much as newspapers.

  “Come on,” I said to Billy. “Let’s fill the wagon. This will put us over the top for sure.” I picked up a bundle and started up the stairs. I went in and out several times carrying as many as I could at a time. On the third trip Billy met me at the foot of the stairs. “Rhoda,” he said. “Come here. Come look at this.”

  He took me to an old table in a corner of the basement. It was a walnut table with grapes carved on the side and feet like lion’s feet. He laid one of the magazines down on the table and opened it. It was a photograph of a naked little girl, a girl smaller than I was. He turned the page. Two naked boys were standing together with their legs twined. He kept turning the pages. It was all the same. Naked children on every page. I had never seen a naked boy. Much less a photograph of one. Billy looked up at me. He turned another page. Five naked little girls were grouped together around a fountain.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “Come on. I’m getting out of here.” I headed for the stairs with him right behind me. We didn’t even close the basement door. We didn’t even stop to say thank you.

  The magazines we had collected were in bundles. About a block from the house we stopped on a corner, breathless from running. “Let’s see if there’re any more,” I said. We tore open a bundle. The first magazine had pictures of naked grown people on every page.

  “What are we going to do?” he said.

  “We’re going to throw them away,” I answered, and started throwing them into the nandina bushes by the Hancocks’ vacant lot. We threw them into the nandina bushes and into the ditch that runs into Mills Creek. We threw the last ones into a culvert and then we took our wagon and got on out of there. At the corner of Sycamore and Wesley we went our separate ways.

  “Well, at least you’ll have something to think about tomorrow when you get your shot,” I said.

  “I guess so,” he replied.

  “Look here, Billy. I don’t want you to tell anyone about those magazines. You understand?”

  “I won’t.” His head was going down again.

  “I mean it, Billy.”

  He raised his head and looked at me as if he had just remembered something he was thinking about. “I won’t,” he said. “Are you really going to write about me in the paper?”

  “Of course I am. I said I was, didn’t I? I’m going to do it tonight.”

  I walked on home. Past the corner where the Scout hikes met. Down the alley where I found the card shuffler and the Japanese fan. Past the yard where the violets grew. I was thinking about the boys with their legs twined. They looked like earthworms, all naked like that. They looked like something might fly down and eat them. It made me sick to think about it and I stopped by Mrs. Alford’s and picked a few iris to take home to my mother.

  Billy finished getting his shots. And I wrote the article and of course they put it on page one. BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR MAD SQUIRREL, the headline read. By Rhoda Katherine Manning. Grade 3.

  We didn’t even know it was mean, the person it bit said. That person is in the third grade at our school. His name is William Monday. On April 23 he had his last shot. Mrs. Jansma’s class had a cake and gave him a pencil set. Billy Monday is all right now and things are back to normal.

  I think it should be against the law to keep dangerous pets or dogs where they can get out and get people. If you see a dog or squirrel acting funny go in the house and stay there.

  I never did get around to telling my mother about those magazines. I kept meaning to but there never seemed to be anywhere to start. One day in August I tried to tell her. I had been to the swimming pool and I thought I saw the man from the brick house drive by in a car. I was pretty sure it was him. As he turned the corner he looked at me. He looked right at my face. I stood very still, my heart pounding inside my chest, my hands as cold and wet as a frog, the smell of swimming pool chlorine rising from my skin. What if he found out where I lived? What if he followed me ho
me and killed me to keep me from telling on him? I was terrified. At any moment the car might return. He might grab me and put me in the car and take me off and kill me. I threw my bathing suit and towel down on the sidewalk and started running. I ran down Linden Street and turned into the alley behind Calvin Boulevard, running as fast as I could. I ran down the alley and into my yard and up my steps and into my house looking for my mother to tell her about it.

  She was in the living room, with Father Kenniman and Mr. and Mrs. DuVal. They lived across the street and had a gold star in their window. Warrene, our cook, was there. And Connie Barksdale, our cousin who was visiting from the Delta. Her husband had been killed on Corregidor and she would come up and stay with my mother whenever she couldn’t take it anymore. They were all in the living room gathered around the radio.

  “Momma,” I said. “I saw this man that gave me some magazines . . .”

  “Be quiet, Rhoda,” she said. “We’re listening to the news. Something’s happened. We think maybe we’ve won the war.” There were tears in her eyes. She gave me a little hug, then turned back to the radio. It was a wonderful radio with a magic eye that glowed in the dark. At night when we had blackouts Dudley and I would get into bed with my mother and we would listen to it together, the magic eye glowing in the dark like an emerald.

  Now the radio was bringing important news to Seymour, Indiana. Strange, confused, hush-hush news that said we had a bomb bigger than any bomb ever made and we had already dropped it on Japan and half of Japan was sinking into the sea. Now the Japs had to surrender. Now they couldn’t come to Indiana and stick bamboo up our fingernails. Now it would all be over and my father would come home.

  The grown people kept on listening to the radio, getting up every now and then to get drinks or fix each other sandwiches. Dudley was sitting beside my mother in a white shirt acting like he was twenty years old. He always did that when company came. No one was paying any attention to me.