Spencer's Mountain (10 page)

A chorus of
Amens
joined John's, followed by a clatter as knives and forks, were picked up and each child assaulted the plate in front of him.

“Becky didn't say
Amen
,” tattled Shirley. Shirley was the extremely pretty one. Her long auburn curls fell almost to her waist and even at nine it was plain that some day she would be beautiful.

“I did too say
Amen
,” said Becky, the smart one. Her face was thin and her hair bright red. One of her eyes had been blackened recently at school when she had been involved in a fight. The black eye was a great pride to her because she won it protecting Luke from some boys who were bullying him.

“You did not say
Amen
,” insisted Shirley. “If you did nobody heard you.”

“The reason you didn't hear me was because I whispered it,” replied Becky.

“Why did you whisper
Amen
, Becky?” asked Luke. Luke was the musical one. At eight he could already play the piano. The Spencers did not own a piano, but one day at school Luke had climbed up on the piano bench and simply begun to play a tune. The tune was “You Are My Sunshine,” and of course he had not played it perfectly, but still it was recognizable. It had amazed everybody but Olivia who, when told, simply stated, “Oh, he's always been musical.”

“I whispered it to see if God could hear me,” replied Becky.

“Did He hear you?” asked Luke.

“I don't know,” answered Becky. “I'm testing Him.”

“Of course He heard you,” said Olivia. “God hears everything.”

“I hope He didn't hear Matt today,” said Becky.

Matt had been bent over his soup. Hearing Becky's comment he raised his head and looked at her fiercely.

“You better shut your yap if you know what's good for you,” he said.

“That's no way to talk to your sister, Matt,” admonished Olivia, who was trying to eat her supper with one hand while she fed the baby with the other.

“Matt's goen to hell,” continued Becky. “Today he mashed his finger and he said somethen bad.”

“What did he say?” asked Olivia.

“He said ‘Damn, damn, double damn, triple damn, hell!',” answered Becky with some satisfaction.

“Did you, Matt?” asked Olivia.

Matt pretended he had not heard his mother and continued to eat his soup.

“Did you say what Becky said you did?” asked Olivia.

“Daddy says it all the time,” answered Matt.

“That is no excuse for you to say it,” said Olivia. “If I ever hear you say such a thing again I'm goen to wash your mouth out with Octagon soap.”

“Why is Matt goen away?” asked three-year-old Pattie-Cake, who was struggling with some food in front of her. Pattie-Cake waged a constant fight with gravity, and most of the time she was so busy keeping things from falling down that she did not often have time to enter a conversation. Sometimes her milk fell over. Usually the floor around her was littered with meat that started for her mouth and had fallen to the floor in transit. She even had trouble keeping her pants on; those too kept falling down and half the time she ran around with her chubby little rear bouncing in the wind. “I don't want Matt to go away,” she said through the hamburger she had somehow safely managed to get to her mouth.

“Matt's not going anywhere,” said Olivia. “Now you eat your supper and watch what you're doen.”

“Where's he goen?” demanded Pattie-Cake loudly.

“He's goen to hell,” said Becky. “For sayen bad words.”

“I want to go too!” said Pattie-Cake. “I want to go with Matt!” Her eyes filled with tears at the thought she might be left behind. Suddenly she burst into loud angry screams.

“Now, see what you've done,” said Shirley.

“Donnie, you sit!” said Olivia to the baby, who somehow found it impossible to remain seated in his high chair but much preferred to stand and reach for everything within the radius of his arms. Olivia stuffed him down in his high chair, went around the table, picked up Pattie-Cake and attempted to quiet her.

Mark, the quiet seven-year-old, remained oblivious of the activity going on around him. Paying not the slightest attention to the hubbub on all sides, he reached quietly for a second biscuit, buttered it and went on eating. Mark was the businessman of the family. During the summer months he spent all his time collecting junk, pieces of iron from discarded automobiles, old aluminum pails, mountains of newspapers, magazines, wrapping paper, string, balls of yarn, strips of cloth and metal. All these he sold to the junkman who made a stop in the village once a month. When he wasn't collecting junk Mark was selling pigweed to the neighbors, all of whom kept at least one pig, or in season he would pick berries and sell them. None of the rest of the family knew exactly how much Mark was worth except Olivia, who had discovered his hoard one day underneath the mattress in a Sir Walter Raleigh tobacco container. She had counted five dollars and eighty cents, his life's earnings and savings. Olivia worried about him. She could never figure out what was going on in his head.

By now Olivia had quieted Pattie-Cake, who was satisfied that Matt would not go to hell and leave her behind. Olivia was starting back to her place at the foot of the table just as Donnie leapt headlong from his high chair. Olivia shrieked at the top of her lungs and so did the children as they all rushed to the spot where Donnie lay quiet, white and unmoving.

Olivia seized the baby and held him in her arms but he did not respond. His little head lolled drunkenly to one side.

“Oh God!” screamed Olivia. “He's broke his neck.”

All the children burst into tears and milled around the room screaming and crying.

“Run for the doctor, Clay-Boy,” shouted Olivia.

Clay-Boy scrambled over the weeping children, the benches, the table and out the screen door. Going up through the back yard he fell over an exposed root of an old oak tree and cut his hand on a bed of white flintrock. Across the hill he could see the light of the doctor's house, and he decided to take a short cut through Luke Snead's pasture even though Luke kept a vicious horse pastured there. Clay sprinted through the high broomsage and through little clusters of Scotch pine, tearing his clothes and his skin on barbed wire and cornstalks and blackberry vines.

The local doctor, maintained by the company, was Dr. Amos Campbell. He was a kind, able gentleman as well as an excellent doctor. He had come to the village from Amherst County, where his family had been original settlers. He was greatly respected by the men of the village, and the women held him in such esteem that they would do everything humanly possible to hold onto their babies until he returned from vacation rather than allow someone else to deliver them.

Reaching the house the company maintained for the doctor, Clay-Boy found it empty. On a note pad which hung outside the main door Clay found penciled, “Am delivering the Bibb baby. Leave word if you need me and what the trouble is.”

His hands were trembling but Clay-Boy managed to write: “Please come to Clay Spencer's. Donnie has broke his neck.” He dropped the pencil and ran back along the path he had come by. His anxiety increased with every churning step and by the time he reached the kitchen door he was sure the baby would be dead and that he would find the house in a frenzy of grief.

The kitchen was empty of people and the house completely quiet as Clay-Boy opened the screeching old screen door and walked in. All the supper dishes had been washed and put away and the kitchen was spotless.

As the screen door slammed shut he heard his mother's voice from the living room, “That you, Clay-Boy?”

“Yes ma'am,” he answered. He walked into the living room and there sitting in a rocking chair was his mother holding Donnie, who was wide awake and, from the way he was holding his head up, showed no signs of a broken neck. The baby's face broke into a grin as Clay-Boy walked in.

“Looks like I sent you on a wild goose chase, boy,” said Olivia. “You hadn't been gone two minutes when Donnie came to. All he had was a bad knock on the head. I tried to call you but I reckon you didn't hear me.”

Relief flooded the boy's face for a moment, then it changed to anger. His face and hands and clothes were torn from the briers and barbed wire he had run through. His breath was still coming in long panting gulps, and seeing the cause of his condition he walked over to the grinning baby and said, “You scrawny little pup, what do you mean by scaring me that way?”

“Clay-Boy!” Olivia exclaimed, “Don't you ever let me hear you talk like that in this house again.”

“Mama, I'm just tired of it,” Clay-Boy complained. “All I do around here is run for the doctor and go to the store and wash the dishes and dress the children and churn the butter and do a little homework after everybody else is in bed.”

“You're the oldest, son,” said Olivia.

“I'm tired of being the oldest,” he replied.

“I can't help that,” said Olivia. “What you get in life is what you're stuck with and you're stuck with being the oldest. You had just better make the most of it.”

“I'm goen away from here, Mama,” the boy said with a sober voice.

“What are you talken about?” demanded Olivia.

“I'm goen away. That's why Miss Parker and Mr. Goodson are comen here tonight. To ask you and Daddy to let me go.”

“Go where?”

“To Richmond.”

“I didn't have my babies to send them off to all corners of the world. What do they think they're doen putten ideas like that into your head?”

“They think they can get me a college education, Mama.
They think they can get me a scholarship at the University of Richmond. I wasn't supposed to tell you but that's what they're coming here tonight to talk about.”

“I vow,” said Olivia wonderingly. “Sometimes I think educated people have got less brains than us fools.”

“Wouldn't you like to see me go to college, Mama?”

“Clay-Boy, I rather see you go to college than fly to the moon, but where do they think we're ever goen to raise that kind of money? It costs money to go to college. Didn't you ever see those boys over there at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville? Them boys is rich boys. Their daddies have got money or they wouldn't be there in the first place.”

“But with a scholarship you don't have to have money. Miss Parker and Mr. Goodson think they can get me one.”

“I've read enough to know what a scholarship is. That don't take care of half the expenses. You've still got to eat. You've got to have clothes on your back. You've got to have books and pencils and ink and a fountain pen. We're poor people, son. Where we goen to get money for things like that?”

“Miss Parker said chances are I could find a job of work on the side. She and Mr. Goodson got it all planned out.”

“Clay-Boy, you know I'd love you to go to college. If anybody in the world ever deserved an education you do, but it's wishen for the moon to even think about it.”

“Mama, all I want to ask you and Daddy to do is listen to what Miss Parker and Mr. Goodson have got in mind.”

“If they've got in mind to foot all the bills for getten you a college education then I'm all for it, but if they're just comen down here to put foolish ideas in your head then they can just say their piece and go home early.”

“That's all I want you to do, Mama—listen to them.”

“I'll listen,” declared Olivia. She rose to take the sleeping baby to his bed. As she went up the stairs she called, “Clay-Boy, come here and take care of Pattie-Cake.”

Clay-Boy went into the hall and there, seated halfway down the stairs, holding her head in her hands and looking forlorn, was his three-year-old sister.

“Get back in bed,” Clay-Boy scolded. “You're supposed to be asleep.”

“I can't sleep,” she said mournfully.

“Why not?”

“I got to wee-wee,” she explained patiently.

“Then go do it,” he said. “You know where the bathroom is.”

“Will you lift me up, Clay-Boy?”

“All right,” he said impatiently. Pattie-Cake descended the stairs, procrastinating by pretending to find each rung of the banister so fascinating she could hardly bear to leave it. Clay-Boy followed her wearily to the bathroom, took off her pajama bottoms and set her on the toilet.

“Now, you go out and wait in the hall,” she directed. “I want to be by myself.”

“Oh Lord,” mourned Clay-Boy loudly, “You'll be in here all night.” He went out into the hall and was heading for the kitchen sink where he planned to wash his face and hands when there came a polite knock at the front door. He went to the front-porch door, turned the switch that connected with a naked bulb that hung in the center of the porch and saw Miss Parker and Mr. Goodson.

“You-all come in,” Clay-Boy said, and held the door open for them. As he ushered the visitors into the living room, he explained that his mother was putting the baby to bed but would be down in a moment.

Miss Parker sat down and smiled reassuringly at Clay-Boy. She was an institution in the community. Some of the people regarded her with mirth, but those parents who had any concern about their children's education had high praise and respect for her. She was in truth a dedicated and gifted teacher and gave a dignity and purpose to learning that most of the children in New Dominion would never have known otherwise. The reason she was laughed at by some of the people was that she dyed her hair to keep the gray from showing and every time she dyed it it came out a different shade. That she was a spinster others found amusing simply because there were no other spinsters in the community. A girl grew up and found herself a husband. There was no other way.