.. Contact: Debbie at mdab@uisreno.com
by Debbie Bumstead
"I'm not."
"You are."
"Give it to me then."
And with a rough grab, Joby scrambled into the red metal bed of the wagon with one foot out on the sand and both hands on the handle bent back to steer. She pushed off and careened down the hard sandy road over half-buried rocks and past ditches made by the rains and never repaired and under the oaks that leaned out with their stickery-pointed leaves scratching at her face. Her heart widened with fear until it lifted in the air, joined the hot blue sky. She leaned with the curve of the path, bumping, rattling, skidding bravely to a stop on the softer earth at the foot of the hill. The earth spread there into a hollow, McCanns' Hollow, where, shaded by oaks, surrounded by gray boulders, the adobe house of Joby's grandparents glowed white and pink in the gloom. On the patio Granna sat, nodding at Joby and shaking to left and right sometimes suddenly in her chair and grimacing -- that was her smile -- while Joby waved, as if unafraid.
"Granna, did you see!"
"Ye-eh-eh-ss," and something else that probably meant, "I'm worried; you children are going too fast; what if you fall and scrape your hands and knees?" Worries Joby had had herself at the top of the hill, before.
"It's OK, Granna."
Below the patio stood the outdoor tables in a row next to the kitchen stairs, and Mama and the Aunts and the older cousins went up and down with dishes and cloths and silverware. Grandpa and Daddy and the Uncles stood around the barbecue, a stonebuilt cube with fire and grill nestled inside, and watched a new experiment in hamburger-making, hamburger mixed with crunchy cereal and onions and chive. The smoke curled up in the still air, Joby sniffed like a pup, and --
"Come on, you got to bring it back up, that's the rule," some cousin cried. Joby turned to see them all waiting impatiently, up on the hilltop by Grandpa's studio, one cousin slipping and falling on the sand and sitting startled, and Mike, one of her brothers, hands on hips and scowling. "Come on, dope!"
In groups they called each other names, never the right name, except for Joby and Mary, the two girls, who didn't call names, but were called names twice as often. But the two girls could sneak away sometimes to the place only they were allowed: Granna's bedroom nook with its white chaise lounge and its bookcases and its wall filled with tacked-up pictures by the grandchildren. They played anagrams and made paper dolls. And Granna, supporting herself on door frames and furniture sometimes stumbled in, grimacing, to rest on the chaise.
"Look, look, Granna."
"Look at mine, Granna."
And Granna always grimaced spectacularly, brought her hands together, and told them something, they with their eyes and ears seeming to stretch, searching intently for her meaning and usually finding it. Granna would point to a notebook on a shelf; it was her manuscript, a carbon copy on thin yellow pages, of Prairie Doll, written before the Huntington's struck, and she'd ask that the girls read aloud to her. Hard, making words out of the messy blue carbon letters -- the original was kept by Aunt Lena to be corrected and sent out to a publisher, someday, if Aunt Lena could ever find time -- but paragraph by paragraph Joby and Mary had read the book aloud once and a half times through, all about Dolly and her doll adventures with Elizabeth, Granna disguised and young, out on the prairie in the old days. Joby and Mary thought Granna famous for having written a book, not requiring in their childish minds that it be published and bound in order to admire her and wish to do likewise, as they tried sometimes in the bedroom nook with their papers while Granna lay back on the lounge, surprisingly still.
The red wagon, though, was a new addition to their visits to Granna and Grandpa's; the cousins had never brought it before, never thinking how fun it would be to rattle fullspeed down the hill. Most of their time had been spent before climbing the granite boulders which lay scattered over the rough hills and piled one on the other in the ravines. As Joby trudged now onto the flat area in front of the studio, the wagon's launching pad, the cousins and Mike laughingly fell onto the red metal cart, pushing each other and crying out for a turn, even Mary. Joby left them and went behind the little adobe building in which Grandpa had set up his painting studio. The floor of the studio was cool concrete covered with dark red paint, and it extended behind the building to provide a back porch enclosed by the banks of the hill and the boulders above.
"Hey, punk."
It was her oldest brother, Doug, busy with his twin cousin, Mac, shoveling the earth of the hill bank into steps.
"Why are you doing that?" she asked.
Doug was old enough now to be nice. "We're making a path," he said. "It starts here, and we have a map of where it will go. Around rocks, past a certain tree, like that."
"And the rule is: we can never again use the road," Mac put in. "We have to go by secret wild ways, like the animals do."
"Neat. Can I do something?"
"Naw. You'd just get in the way."
As usual, Joby thought. She pushed her hands into fists down into the pockets of her corduroys. She scuffed around the little porch a few times, stopped in front of the back door of the studio. I'm going in, she thought, reached out, turned the knob and slipped inside, all in an instant, never minding that it wasn't allowed. The shouting of the other kids fell muffled as she shut the door; the heat of the day, too, left behind and closed off at the window by dark curtains receded forgotten as she leaned against the coldness of the lumpy whitewashed wall. There was the red leather couch Grandpa napped on; she'd seen him one day as she looked in the opened front door while he lay snoring gently in the oily air. There were the two easels and the chest of drawers between them with the top drawer open and showing all the paraphernalia of oil painting inside, squished tubes of paint, bottles of turpentine, messy palettes, different sizes of brushes. She picked up a clean soft-bristled brush to idly tickle around her lips. One easel held a snow scene, the other a landscape of red rock with an Indian on a horse in the distance.
I want to paint a picture, she thought. I want to make a picture for Granna. A horse. And Joby visualized a painting of a horse framed at the frame shop and hung in Granna's bedroom nook with all the other paper drawings by cousins and brothers and herself taken down.
The dinner bell rang, clanging over the hills, up into the sky, calling. Doug and Mac yelled to each other, something about the new rule, and Joby, in a hurry to follow them along their path, dropped the paint brush, and dashed out into the heat again.
"Can I go?" she cried yearningly. The boys had leaped up the bank, but turned at her piteous cry.
"Come on."
They did go around rocks and a certain tree. They climbed the flat gray expanse of a rock that lay covering the earth like a bumpy blanket. They skidded on sand, pushed by the wild buckwheat and sage, and when they came to the road higher up where it led way back deep into the warm beloved wilderness of more hill and brush, they rushed across as if it were a zone laid with mines. They galloped down a grassy meadow, the only meadow they knew in all these hills, and only green briefly, as now, in spring. They reached a path already made which had been used through the years enough that they could run along it like ponies following their trails home, across the ravine on this rock that led to this one, along the side of the hill under the three-boulder arch -- beautiful the way they knew their way, even young Joby. The path led past a pinkish boulder where she often sat in the sun, and then it dipped into the cool mossy stretch where the clothesline stood. On past the laundry room and the storage room Joby trotted with Doug and Mac till they came out suddenly onto the group of family around the tables, all standing ready for the prayer, except for Granna, who had to sit in the chair with arms to keep her safe by Grandpa's side.
"Heavenly Father," Grandpa said. "We ask your blessing as we gather today in family fellowship. Thank you for the beautiful day and the good food. We ask that you come to each of us in spirit and guide us to follow your Word. This we pray in Christ's name, amen."
"Amen."
"Amen."
"Aaa-me-me-nn."
But Joby never said amen, because Daddy didn't. Her father stood silently, head inclined, but his curly brown hair gave him a rascally look and his eyebrows went up at the ends like a devil's. He was tall and too thin, but all the McCanns were thin, like the wire people Daddy made for Joby and her brothers in the garage at home with bodies of wire looped at the head, hands, and feet, and then bent into different poses and stapled by one foot to a scrap of wood so they could stand. Granna, though, was the very thinnest, seeming to be only skin-covered bone with elbows and knees bent like the wire at odd angles, brown and gray hair brushed back in a ponytail, and green eyes gazing sideways out of a twitching face.
Granna had had that Huntington's, as they called it, for longer than the whole length of Joby's life so far, and Joby was nine. The disease had come to Granna through her father, had come to him through his father, and so on through father or mother back to the Dark Ages, Daddy had told Joby. He said that sometimes people with that Huntington's had been accused of being witches because of the way it comes on in midlife with no forewarning, and the people who suffer are often thin and move and talk strangely like witches supposedly do. And even though Daddy had told her this, Joby didn't realize this curse of the Dark Ages could go on to those born to Granna: Uncle Henry, Aunt Lena, and Daddy. She hadn't yet realized that sometimes one child inherited the disease and sometimes another didn't and each would never know until half a lifetime had passed.
Everybody sat down after prayer, jostling and laughing and exclaiming at the food, Grandpa, Uncle Henry and Aunt Mary, Aunt Lena and Uncle Fred, and cousins, Doreen and Leslie, Mac, Donald, Pete, Bobby, Mary, and the Rob McCanns, Daddy, Mama, Doug, Mike, and Joby, who had been named by Daddy after Job in the Bible.
"Corn on the cob," Joby told Granna, "my favorite."
"Baked beans," someone else said, "Granna's recipe."
"Grandpa's special Hamburger Spearment," Uncle Fred said, "very good."
"Mustard, please."
"Chips!"
But suddenly Daddy's glass of lemonade tipped in his hand, everyone turned from Granna to look at her youngest son, and reached as if to catch, but the ice clinked and the liquid splashed across the tablecloth. Joby drew in her breath, but she didn't realize what it might mean.
"Just a spasm," Daddy said.
"I have them, too; I have them, too, Rob," Uncle Henry and Aunt Lena said, "everybody does." Everyone nodded. Mama sopped up with a napkin.
"No harm done."
"Don't cry over spilt milk." Daddy winked at Joby.
"But that's not milk," Joby said, and everyone laughed.
But Joby saw Grandpa duck his head, hold still a moment as if praying again, while Granna, her eyes looking wet, carefully drank from the straw of her special shake. And in the silence the quail could be heard calling their far away songs, and the rock wren singing his descending whistle that ended off-key.