Hope in the Holler Read online

  Besides being filthy and cold, the house smelled like rotten eggs.

  I’d never been under the impression that Mama and I were rich—you don’t qualify for free lunches at school or get a food card from the fine folks at the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services unless you have financial difficulties—but this house was a whole new level of despair.

  “Don’t just stand there with your mouth open,” Samantha Rose said. “Follow me.”

  I held my breath and concentrated on Samantha Rose’s broad back as I followed her down a dim hallway.

  “That there is your uncle Philson.” Samantha Rose gestured toward a room on the right. “Best to leave him alone.”

  I caught a glimpse of a thin, bald man lying in a recliner with a newspaper spread across his chest. He looked at me without speaking, then yawned and closed his eyes.

  “Your room is down at the end and Hoyt’s is up in the attic. I wouldn’t go up there if I was you.”

  I nodded. So far I hadn’t seen a part of the house that I would want to go to.

  Samantha Rose continued with her tour. “We only got one bathroom, so don’t hog it. If you can’t wash it in five minutes you ain’t trying hard enough.”

  I cleared my throat. “I brought a toothbrush but we were out of toothpaste.”

  “Look under the sink.” She stopped in the middle of the hallway and put her hands on her hips. “I only go to the store once a month and when we’re out, we’re out, so there’s no need to ask.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I adjusted my backpack and it knocked against a frame hanging on the wall. As I reached out to straighten it, my heart skipped a beat. “Oh my gosh! This is Mama, isn’t it?” I studied the school picture. “How old is she in this?”

  Samantha Rose frowned. “Second grade, I think.”

  The hallway was lined with faded photos. I turned in circles, trying to take them all in at once. I stopped to study one that showed two girls in Christmas dresses. The younger girl was tiny, around two years old, with dark hair. Standing behind her was a blond girl of around seven. I recognized the frown. “This is you and Mama? You look so different.”

  “Everybody says that,” she huffed. “Ronelda always was jealous of my long blond hair.”

  I used my fingers to wipe a path through the dust. “I liked Mom’s hair—it came back even curlier after the last round of chemo.” I took another step and stopped in front of a picture of two men sitting on a porch. “Is this this house?”

  Samantha Rose sighed. “Yeah. That’s Daddy on the left.”

  I peered closer. “So that’s my grandpa.”

  She shook her head. “Dang! Don’t know what I was thinking. Your grandpa is the one on the right.”

  “Oh. Who’s the other guy, then? A brother?”

  “Just a friend. Now how ’bout you save your questions till the conclusion of the tour?” She walked to the end of the hall. “Here.” She pushed open a door. “This is your room.”

  I dreaded crossing the threshold, but compared to the rest of the house, it wasn’t bad. A twin bed stood against a wall that looked like it was made from an old billboard. Someone had painted it white but I could still make out the faint words: Marlow’s Auto Parts. A wooden desk and chair were tucked underneath a window. The room was full of old newspapers and piles of clothes, but there was no rotting food, and I could see a path to the window.

  “This was Ro’s side. Daddy put in that wall to divide it into two rooms years ago, so it’s not big enough to swing a cat around in, but that there was Ronelda’s bed.”

  There were several black trash bags of clothes on the bedspread, but I moved them aside and ran my hand along the wooden headboard. It was scratched and dusty, but it had belonged to my mother. I wouldn’t have traded it for a golden feather bed.

  “You can settle in. Later, I’ll show you how to work the washing machine. There’s a line out back, so you’ll want to check the weather before you do your laundry.”

  When I’d first walked into the house, it had crossed my mind to call Mrs. Chipman and ask about my other living options. But now it didn’t really matter. Nowhere was going to seem like home, and at least here I’d be surrounded by Mama’s pictures and things.

  “Thank you.” I stared at Samantha Rose. “For giving me a place to stay, I mean.”

  Samantha Rose grunted once and closed the door behind her.

  • • •

  I THREW THE trash bags on the floor. Tomorrow I’d clean, but for now I dumped the contents of my backpack onto the bed. There was no closet, but the drawers of the desk were empty and would hold what little clothes I’d brought. I put my school yearbook on the floor near my bed and set the peony on the desk in front of the window. It needed light, so I pulled back the curtain. My room was on the front of the house, giving me a good view of the weeds and trash. I counted three lanky dogs, two spotted and one brown, snoozing.

  Last year my class had studied President Johnson’s War on Poverty. If the war was over, my new neighborhood was proof we’d lost.

  Find a good life, Mama had said.

  I looked out the window, imagining her as a girl wishing for the very same thing. Was she happy here? I had to guess not, since Conley Hollow hadn’t been mentioned once in all my eleven years.

  “What did you dream about, Mama?” I whispered against the glass.

  My breath frosted the window and I drew a small heart in the moisture. I only had one dream, that Mama was still alive.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I spent my first weekend with Samantha Rose feeling like I’d ridden a Tilt-A-Whirl for too long—dizzy and sick to my stomach. With the loss of Mama and the shock of a new family, I figured the teeter-tottering sensation was normal.

  I tried to balance myself by learning the 411 on life in Conley Hollow.

  The coal train would roust me from bed, but I didn’t mind. I wanted to be the first one up and out the door. With a five-minute limit on the bathroom, I didn’t want to take a chance on anyone walking in while I was toweling off.

  Hoyt was easy to figure. He’d smacked Gilbert on the back of the head and called him a name, so I liked him about as much as a toothache. He only had one gear and it was s for stomp. He stomped up to his room, stomped back and forth overhead and stomped back down for meals. He glared at everybody, me most of all. Even when I tried my sunniest fake smile on him, he just glared so hard I thought his eyes would fall out and roll off the table.

  Uncle Philson was still an unknown. The only time he moved out of his recliner was to drag himself to dinner in his walker. And even then he didn’t talk much, mostly sticking to one-word comments, like “Vinegar!” and “Milk!”

  And Samantha Rose reminded me of rock candy, sugary sweet and hard enough to crack a molar. She threw around a lot of honeys and darlin’s but they were always added on top of something bad.

  “The toilet is clogged. How about trying your hand with a plunger, honey?”

  “You’ll be getting free meals at the school, so it’d help if you left the cereal for your uncle, darlin’.”

  “Detergent is expensive, so stuff as much laundry in as you can, honey,” she told me. She pointed to the piles of clothes at our feet in the laundry shed. “Be careful picking it up. Mice like to hide in there.”

  Oh, okay. Also, gag.

  I killed time by hanging out in my room (after I cleaned it, adding to the mountain of trash already in the backyard).

  I was quickly filling my notebook with words that could be made from SAMANTHA ROSE. I knew there had to be hundreds and hundreds of them.

  I’d written TRASH, TORN, TEARS, RAN, MET, RANTS, MONSTER on my first night.

  Now I added HAMSTER, HORNET, MARATHON, SMOTHER, SNORE as I spied on my neighborhood through the window. I watched Frank and Beans playing tag, and Gilbert head off into the woods carrying a shovel
and humming an off-tune country song, and the Farley Methodist Church bus come and go.

  By Sunday afternoon my brain hurt from trying not to think, and I was ready to take a walk outside. I hadn’t decided if I was staying, so there was no need to plant Mama’s peony yet, but I wanted to look around for a good place just in case.

  There was no sign of my grandmother’s peonies anywhere, but the bushes Samantha Rose had mentioned turned out to be roses, with wild thorny stalks sprouting in every direction. I decided I would try to prune them later if I could find a thick pair of gloves. A bed by the steps held black-eyed Susans and lamb’s ears, but they’d been nearly choked out by weeds. I was debating whether to start clearing it out when Gilbert turned the corner holding a pair of rusty binoculars. He was wearing the same Dollywood sweatpants and both knees were now grass stained. “Hey. See what I found?”

  “Binoculars? Where’d you get them?”

  “Found them exploring in the woods.” He grinned. “You want to go spy on Angel Davis?”

  “I thought you said he ate pets.”

  “Well, we ain’t dogs, are we?”

  I looked toward the path, hesitant. I was still figuring out life with Samantha Rose. She hadn’t said anything about where I could go. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure that she’d notice if I jumped on the coal train and never came back, but I didn’t want to get in trouble.

  A stomp sounded from inside the house signaling Hoyt was on his way downstairs. So far today I’d managed to avoid His Surliness and I wanted to keep it that way.

  “Okay,” I said. I followed Gilbert out of the yard and toward the path. Wildflowers grew in lacy white clumps and I picked a handful as we walked.

  “How far is it?” I asked.

  “Just past the cemetery.”

  I stopped. “What?”

  Gilbert jumped up and smacked a low-hanging limb. “Don’t worry. It’s not that big, just Holler people. And it’s faster if we cut through it. You’ll see Conleys make up a lot of the cemetery,” Gilbert continued. “But there are others. Everybody in the Holler is connected in some way, even if it ain’t blood.” He turned to look at me. “Your mom’s not buried there, right?”

  “No, she’s buried in Andro, where I used to live.” I started walking. “She was cremated. Do you think that counts as buried?”

  “Was she in the ground?”

  “Her ashes were. In a biodegradable urn.”

  “If she was in the ground, I’d say it counts,” Gilbert said. “What’d she die of?”

  “Cancer.” The word sounded just like the disease, hard and ugly.

  “That stinks,” Gilbert said. He picked up a stick and swung it back and forth like a baseball bat, smacking briars. “Almost there.”

  A few minutes later the path widened and we came to the cemetery.

  “You too scared to go in?” Gilbert asked.

  “No,” I said. It was true. Once you’ve had the worst happen, there isn’t much else to bother about.

  Two redbud trees bloomed at the entrance. Their festive purple flowers announcing spring was here looked out of place against the scraggly ruins of the cemetery.

  I pushed the gate open, and we passed a small concrete bench almost completely covered with weeds.

  Gilbert pointed to two headstones and said, “Those say Conley,” like I couldn’t read.

  “Hap and Louella Conley,” I said. “My grandparents.” I read the dates. “They died within a couple of years of each other. Samantha Rose said the last time my mom came back here was for my grandmother’s funeral.” I did the math. “I would have been two.”

  “Since you’re not afraid, you want to come up here some night and camp out? We could do a séance!”

  “Not for a million dollars,” I said.

  Gilbert laughed. “For a million dollars I’d swim in Angel Davis’s outhouse!”

  “Gross!”

  I walked around the other tombstones. “These say Conley, too. Check it out—this is for a kid. Darlene Conley, January 15, 1977, to April 17, 1979. Oh, how sad. She was just two years old.” I bent down and pulled a couple of weeds from the front of the tombstone. There was something familiar about the story, tickling my brain just out of reach.

  Gilbert looked around. “That one over there belongs to Alma Savage.”

  “Is that a relative, too?”

  “No. She lived in the house where Frank and Beans are now. Gran said she got hit crossing the street in Lexington. Her husband went nuts. Took off into the woods one day and never came back.” He held up the binoculars. “These are probably his.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Gilbert said. “Who else would leave a perfectly good pair of binoculars laying around? Doesn’t make sense unless you’re”—he drew a finger across his throat—“D-E-A-D.”

  “Perfectly good? They’re rusty.”

  “Well, they wouldn’t have been when he left them. It’s been over thirty years since he disappeared!”

  I looked at the gravestone. “Alma Savage, 1948 to 1980. She was only thirty-two when she died. Are there any happy stories in Conley Hollow?”

  He bit his lip, thinking. “Nope.”

  I pointed to a headstone in the corner that looked more cared for than the others. “Whose is that?”

  “Angel’s son, Delmore.”

  I walked over and looked closer. Weeds grew around all the headstones except this one. Someone had left a vase of flowers on top, and I pulled the dead blooms out of it, replacing them with the wildflowers I’d picked. I liked to think that someone in Andro was keeping an eye on Mama’s plaque.

  “He was young, too! What happened?”

  “I forget. Gran would know.” Gilbert headed toward the iron fence and hopped over. “If you want to see Angel’s place we better hurry. It’s going to be dark soon.”

  I climbed over and stood beside him. “Just for a minute.”

  We walked the path in single file, and just when I was about to say never mind, Gilbert stopped and handed me the binoculars. “Look through those trees over there.”

  The binoculars’ lenses were caked with dirt. I pulled a leaf off the closest tree and wiped them. With three shirts to your name, you don’t use them as napkins. I looked through the eyepiece. “I think I see a porch,” I whispered. “And a rain barrel.”

  Gilbert nodded. “He sits outside a lot. Look for a cane chair on the left side.”

  I swerved the lens to the left and played with the mud-caked dial. A very thin, very old man came into focus. “He looks huge.”

  “Almost seven foot tall,” Gilbert said. “I tried to send a picture of him to the paper saying he was Bigfoot but they wouldn’t print it. Too skinny.”

  “Is Bigfoot supposed to be fat?”

  “I guess the editors of the Farley Gazette think so. What’s he doing now?”

  I put the binoculars back to my face. “I don’t see him anymore.” I searched right to left. Suddenly he came into view, much closer to us, and staring straight at me!

  I threw the binoculars to Gilbert. “He’s walking this way,” I said in a harsh whisper.

  “Let me see,” Gilbert whispered. He brought the binoculars up to his eyes and back down again. “Run!”

  He didn’t have to say it twice. I took off and didn’t stop until I had jumped the fence, passed through the cemetery and was back on the road leading to Samantha Rose’s house. Gilbert skidded to a stop beside me, gasping for air.

  “For somebody who’s not afraid, you sure run fast.”

  I grinned, then realized what I was doing and quit. Mama was barely gone and here I was moving on. Ugh. I had to be the worst daughter ever.

  I picked another handful of flowers from the side of the road. “I better go inside.”

  “You starting school tomorrow?” Gilbert asked.<
br />
  “Yeah.”

  “We wait on the bus down by the mailboxes. Be there early.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re the new kid and I met you first. I want to show you off!”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Spaghetti noodles and ketchup, again. I tried not to groan. Mama hadn’t made a lot of money working at Walmart, but she’d always managed to see that we ate well. My mouth watered thinking about her meat loaf. We’d even had lasagna on special occasions.

  “Napkin!” Uncle Philson yelled.

  Samantha Rose tore a paper towel off the roll and passed it over. “Would you look at these pretty flowers on the table? Wavie’s only been here a couple of days and she’s already trying to improve us.” She twirled her fork in the noodles. “Conley Holler must seem like a step down from that fancy trailer park you’re used to.”

  I shook my head. “I just thought they were pretty,” I said softly.

  “Pretty weeds,” Hoyt said, chewing. He had a blob of ketchup on his chin.

  “There’s a school bus runs by here about seven fifteen a.m., and if you miss it you’ll have to walk, sugar,” Samantha Rose said. “Hoyt will show you where to stand.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Hoyt made a face. “I don’t ride the bus, remember? Zane picks me up on his way to the mine.” He scowled in my general direction. “Just go down the hill until you hit pavement. If you get hit by a car, you’ve gone too far.”

  Samantha Rose snorted. “Hoyt, be nice.” She took a sip from her cup and smacked her lips. “Wavie’s got the right idea, make this place nicer. When y’all get home from school tomorrow, you can start helping with the cleaning. Wavie can take the kitchen.”

  I looked at the mess falling off the counter and onto the floor. The only way to make it look nicer would be to set it on fire and start from scratch.

  Samantha Rose pointed her fork at Hoyt. “You can begin by picking up the trash outside. Right after school tomorrow.”

  Hoyt slammed his cup on the table. “Why do we have to get things all gussied up just ’cause she’s here? Besides, I’ve got baseball practice!”