Moon Over Manifest

The stairs emptied into a small back room. More of a porch, really, with a black cookstove, a washtub, and a cot. It appeared Shady could do his eating, bathing, and sleeping all in one place. There was a plate of biscuits, slightly burnt, and bacon, just as warm and pleasant as you please, on the cookstove. Having someone cook my meals made me feel like I was at a fancy hotel.

“There’s some of Velma T.’s blackberry jam in the cupboard,” Shady called from the big room with the bar top and pews. I spread on a modest amount and set it on a pink glass plate, the kind that came free in bags of sugar or flour or laundry soap.

Since there was no table, I took my pink plate into the big front room. With the light of day shining through those stained-glass windows onto the gleaming bar top, I didn’t know whether to kneel down or belly up. Shady was tinkering at his workbench as I ate my breakfast. He was looking real close at a tiny something, cleaning it off with a wire bristle brush. “What’re you working on?”

“The letter L,” he said, squinting at his task at hand. “Hattie Mae’s been writing her column for almost twenty years; it’s no wonder that typewriter’s about give out.” He blew on the metal key and eyeballed it from a distance. Wiping off the piece with a cloth, he placed it beside the typewriter. “Now she can get back to her whos, whats, and wheres and I can get the L out of here.”

Gideon hadn’t told me that Pastor Howard had a sense of humor. Seemed nobody had told Pastor Howard either, as he didn’t let on like he thought it was funny.

I finished off the last of my biscuit. It was hard going down, as my mouth had gone dry. Maybe if I made myself useful, I wouldn’t have to go to school. I’d been in and out of schools before, but I’d always been in the protective shade of my daddy. Here I was alone and exposed to the heat and clamor of the day.

A bell started clanging from a distance, jarring me out of my thoughts.

“Better get on over to school. You don’t want to be late.” He studied the splayed-out typewriter in front of him. “Here’s a couple things for you to mind while you’re there.” He handed me the letters P and Q.

I studied them. “If I took these, it’d sure leave Hattie Mae in a pickle and a quandary and she wouldn’t be able to type either one.”

Shady smiled a half smile. As I put the letters back on the table, I noticed that day’s newspaper lying off to the side. It was folded open to “Hattie Mae’s News Auxiliary.” I picked it up and read the line at the bottom. All the whos, whats, whys, whens, and wheres you never knew you needed to know.

I headed out, giving the cowbell above the door a mournful clang as I left.

Sacred Heart of the Holy Redeemer Elementary School

MAY 28, 1936

You’d have thought I’d be used to this by now. Being the new kid and all. I’d been through this umpteen times before but it never gets any easier. Still, there’s certain things every school’s got, same as any other. Universals, I call them. Walking into the schoolhouse, I smelled the familiar chalky air. Heard fidgety feet rustling under desks. Felt the stares. I took a seat near the back.

My one consolation was that I knew these kids. Even if they didn’t know me. Kids are universals too, in a way. Every school has the ones who think they’re a little better than everybody else and the ones who are a little poorer than everybody else. And somewhere in the mix there’s usually ones who are pretty decent. Those were the ones who made it hard to leave when the time came. And sooner or later, it always came.

I guessed I’d never find out who was who around there, it being the last day of school and all. The books were already stacked on shelves for the summer. The blackboard was just that: black. No math problems. No spelling words. Then a girl with a rosy round face spoke up.

“I bet you’re an orphan.”

“Soletta Taylor!” a skinny, red-haired girl scolded. “Why would you say such a thing?”

“She came in on the train without a mama or a daddy, didn’t she? It was all the talk at the five-and-dime.”

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t be listening to ‘all the talk.’ Besides, that doesn’t mean she’s an orphan.” The girl twisted one of her red braids and looked at me. “Does it?”

My face was hot and probably red, but I squared my shoulders. “My mother’s gone to that sweet by and by.” I said it loud enough for everybody to hear, since they were all ear cocked anyway. Some gave kind of sympathetic looks for my loss. I didn’t figure it was a lie, since who knew for certain what the sweet by and by was? Most folks seemed to think it meant she had died and gone to a better place. But in my book it just meant she had decided that being a wife and mother wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, and when I was two, she joined a dance troupe in New Orleans. But since I had no memory of my mother, it was hard to miss her.