Anybody Shining by Frances O'Roark Dowell Read Free Book Online Page B

to know who’s sick, who’s courting, or who got in a fight on Saturday night, why, it’s to the P.O. you need to go.
    Sometimes me and James go down to the train station to watch the three o’clock train come through. It don’t stop unless there’s a mailbag hanging on the post waiting to be picked up, but it always slows down. Me and James like to take a gander at the folks inside the train. We always wave, and some of them wave back while others act like they don’t see us.
    The settlement school ain’t but a couple minutes farther down the road, and it don’t take but maybe fifteen minutes to walk from here to there. The only problem is, Daddy don’t want us to go.
    Do you always do what your daddy says,Cousin Caroline? Until the Baltimore, Maryland, children come to visit, I almost always did, partly because I try to be good when I can, and part because it don’t pay to go against my daddy. He ain’t mean, but he can be fierce as a bearcat when you vex him. James is the same way. Daddy is teaching James his habit of walking out of the room when his temper starts to rise. I have seen him do this on many occasions. To me, when Daddy leaves the room it is a sign to make yourself scarce as well.
    Well, I don’t like to go against my daddy, but I woke up this morning knowing that I must. It seemed clear to me that Tom Wells and I were meant to be friends, but how could we be such as that if I’m always here and he’s always there? No, there weren’t nothing to do but for me to go.

    I done my morning chores as quick as I could, and then I found James over to the barn throwing slop into the pigpen. When I told him ofmy plan, he shook his head. “You know there’ll be a price to pay if Daddy finds out you gone down there.”
    â€œBut my chores are all done until the afternoon,” I replied. “There ain’t no law I have to stay put till then.”
    â€œBut there is a law that says you’re not to go to the songcatchers’ school.”
    â€œAll I’m asking is that you tell Mama and Daddy I gone to the post office to visit with Miss Ellie. And to make it the truth, I’ll stop by and say hey to her on my way down the mountain.”
    James thought on that a second and said, “I won’t tell ’em you gone to the school if’n I don’t have to.”
    I knowed that was the best I’d get from James, who will joke and tell tales for fun, but when it comes to serious matters hates to be false. I didn’t reckon they’d ask my whereabouts anyway. Mama and Daddy let us roam fairly free of a morning if we done our chores and weren’t needed to take care of Baby John.
    Oh, and didn’t I feel so free as I headedtoward the creek! There was butterflies floating across the sky and a breeze lifting up the leaves, making a sweet hush sound over everything. A slew of birds chirped from their branches, the bobwhite calling “Hoyee! Hoyee!” and the mourning dove answering back with its “Who-whoooo, whoooo.”
    I started thinking on all the fine things that have come to our mountains in the last few years. There’s the settlement school and the post office, Miss Sary, the barn dances, and Doc Weems and his wife, Miss Olivia, who is a nurse. They come up last year because Miss Olivia has a lung sickness and the mountain air is good for what ails her. She was at the house on the night that Baby John was born and helped Mama with the birthing.
    And now them Baltimore children! They are just one more good thing that has come to us, I thought as I trotted down the path, and I felt lucky to be Arie Mae Sparks who lived in Stone Gap, North Carolina.
    Here is another secret: the nearer I come tothe settlement school, the shakier my insides got. I’ve been knowing most folks around here since I first entered this world, and they are as familiar to me as the ten toes on my feet. But Ruth and