The Painted Table(30)
Saffee hesitates, stays curled in her chair, then calls, “April!”
April immediately comes leaping onto the porch. “Hi, Lena! You came!”
Before Saffee can think what to say, the two take hands and head toward the brilliant pink and orange sky over Bridge Street. For a moment, Saffee watches them. Lena shambles, April jigs.
Miller’s Ford offers indifference to Lena Bevins and other quiet, reclusive women like her, while Joann, voluble and apt to be bizarre, feeds the town’s appetite for gossip. This matter, however, is beyond Saffee’s young perspective. She resumes her own travel, down a yellow brick road. When it becomes dusk, she squints at the pages as long as possible, then retreats to lamplight in the house, where she is terrorized along with Dorothy by the Wicked Witch of the East.
April! How long has she been gone? Lena is not the Wicked Witch, she tells herself, but still, weren’t the two headed toward the bridge over Blue River? Saffee has glimpsed the cavernous, spooky spaces between the massive cement supports under the bridge. She had shrunk away, recoiling at the mysterious graffiti emblazoned on the giant slabs of concrete. It is a place where a little sister could be swallowed up in darkness in the company of . . .
In a storm of anxiety, she runs to the kitchen. “Mother! Daddy! April’s gone, it’s dark!” Nels turns off the radio. “She went with that Lena. That strange woman from across the street. And they’ve been gone a long time. Maybe Lena’s going to kill her under the bridge!”
Joann rushes from the bedroom. “Nels!” she shrieks. “What should we do?”
The three stride through the living room and across the porch—just as Lena and April, still hand in hand, come up the walk.
“Here they are,” Nels says so only Joann and Saffee hear. “Now, botha you, don’t look so upset. It’s nothin’.” Lena looks intimidated as Joann, arms outstretched, hurries down the steps toward April. Nels and Saffee remain at the open screen door.
“Mommy! I visited Lena in her garden this morning, so now she came to visit me.” As is common with April, she doesn’t merely speak, she chortles, adding her signature bouncy dance. “We saw the most bea-oo-tiful sunset.”
Saffee fumes within; April hasn’t an inkling that she has caused her family to worry.
“Tomorrow Lena’s gonna let me find ladybugs on her potatoes!”
“The girl sure can sing,” Lena intones, it seems with some fondness. “Well . . . bye.” She turns and shuffles away into the twilight.
Now that it has turned out to be “nothin’,” her parents don’t seem concerned that April went off without informing them. Instead, to Saffee’s chagrin, Joann says as they enter the house, “Nels. Did you hear how upset Sapphire was? She does love her sister. She just acts like she doesn’t.”
Saffee is surprised to hear that her mother has even noticed her lack of sisterly affection, especially since her rudeness has never been corrected. But it is true, something different (perhaps caring?) had bubbled up quite unexpectedly during April’s brief disappearance. Saffee is profusely embarrassed and determines not to let it, whatever it was, show again.
A few days later, on a bright steamy morning, one of April’s play-mates dashes into the Kvaale house, yelling, “April’s been hit by a car!”
Joann bolts outside and dashes around the house to cross the alley parallel to Bridge Street, the main road that leads through town. Saffee follows close behind. It’s true. Vernon, an attendant at the intersection’s service station, saw the impact. He rushed into the street and now kneels beside April’s unconscious form. Her customary morning curlers are flattened over the top of her head, forming a crude metal helmet. A tan and maroon Oldsmobile, motor still running, is stopped nearby and its elderly driver stands wringing his hands.
April moans and, with help, is able to sit up. Watching intently, Saffee trembles but this time does not speak out her relief.
CHAPTER TWENTY
MR. MASON
1952
A man. Her sixth-grade teacher is a man! Saffee is dumbstruck by the novelty of it. And Mr. Mason is not just any man, but a beautiful man who looks steadily into faces and speaks with an arrestingly gentle voice. The best part is Mr. Mason refers to and addresses each student as “young man” or “young lady.” To Saffee, to be so addressed is stunning, revelatory, and dignifying. For the first time in her life she considers that perhaps she is a person of worth. No one before, certainly not her parents, has made an effort to convey that she is.
Furthermore, Mr. Mason goes beyond the customary rote teaching that the class is used to. Instead, he opens to them a world of historical and current events and encourages them to form opinions on issues. Saffee’s undeniable crush causes her too much fluster to permit more than minimal classroom participation, but her homework has never been so carefully prepared.