How It Happened in Peach Hill Read online

  Jane Ford:

  • husband likes fried eggs sprinkled with brown sugar

  • both parents crossed over, died of influenza

  • favorite phrase: “Whatever next!”

  Mrs. Burly:

  • son stutters

  • owes at the bank but has a teapot full of silver dollars

  • poodle crossed over, hit by a motorcar

  The smallest details make the biggest impact in the darkened room of a fortune-teller.

  But when I followed Mrs. Romero, it was the first time I’d plunged into the heart of the town with an active mission. I let my tongue flop out between my lips, I shuddered, and I hobbled onto Main Street. What did it matter how I behaved? I didn’t know anyone here and we probably wouldn’t be staying long enough to change that.

  On a Thursday after lunch, I guessed that shopping for supper would be Mrs. Romero’s quest. Sure enough, inside Carlaw’s, I saw the green jacket next to an ivory-colored sweater. I crept closer and kept my head down. The two ladies stood over the bins of onions and potatoes. I raised one melon after another to my nose, smelling each for ripeness and listening as hard as I could.

  “—just don’t know what to do,” Mrs. Romero was saying. “My Rosie is the biggest flirt I ever saw and going straight to hell if she keeps it up. That Joe Mackie had his hands all over her out on the porch last night!”

  The other woman’s voice was softer, harder to hear.

  “No surprise … pretty face … full figure …”

  “Full figure? Jane, she’s got breasts the size of cabbages, make no mistake! She takes after my Frank’s mother, God rest her soul, who had her underthings specially constructed in Boston.”

  A clerk appeared, to weigh Mrs. Romero’s potatoes. The ladies hadn’t seen me. I put down the melon and went outside to scribble some notes. My little notebook had a slim gold pen attached in a snug leather loop. I’d hammered a hole through the spine and hung the book around my neck on a length of blue ribbon.

  When the ladies came out, I leered up at them, jiggling my eyeball as best I could.

  “Well, whatever next?” The cream-sweatered lady was Jane Ford, already in my file. “I heard there was an idiot come to town. She belongs to the new fortune-teller on Needle Street.”

  “Poor witless thing,” said Mrs. Romero.

  “All the troubles in the world can’t match that, eh, Aggie?”

  “One look at this child and I’m happy to have my Rosie,” said Mrs. Romero. “Hussy or not.”

  People will say anything in front of an idiot.

  I watched through the window while the butcher wrapped sausages for Mrs. Romero. She came out of the cobbler’s carrying a brown paper package and went into the post office. She came out of the post office chatting with a woman who wore a burgundy hat. On the open street, I couldn’t hear anything more.

  I followed Mrs. Romero all the way to her home on Daly Avenue. One glance at the porch showed a pair of blue-painted rockers flanking a big pot of crimson geraniums. I passed by only once, noting the chintz curtains and the Model T in the driveway. I had plenty for Mama now.

  I wandered back to the square and found a place to sit near the statue of a soldier on a horse, as close as I dared to a group of kids my age. I knew it would take time, but I intended to learn the name of every child I encountered in Peach Hill. I was watching for who liked whom, who was mean, and who might be my friend if I weren’t my mama’s partner.

  The prettiest girls were Sally Carlaw, from the greengrocer’s family, and Delia, the policeman’s daughter, who didn’t have a mother. Those two were the honey that drew the bees. They had a gang of boys with shadowed upper lips and froggy voices who buzzed around them, showing off: Howie; Frankie Romero, who I guessed was our new client’s son; and somebody called Pitts. The not-as-pretty girls seemed to have more fun than the popular ones, making up songs and practicing the shimmy or the Charleston right there in the square. There were younger kids too, eating candy or kicking a ball around.

  Oh, and one odd person lurking behind the statue. A girl, but wearing boy’s overalls. She was not exactly hiding, but not joining in, either. I could read the signs; she was spying, like me. She saw me looking and turned her back.

  “Hey, Sammy! Sammy Sloane!”

  “Sammy’s home!”

  A boy I hadn’t seen before strolled into the park and leaned against a tree. I might as well say it; he was the most wonderful boy I ever saw. He didn’t wear a cap like the others. His black hair flopped and blew around his handsome face like, well, like shiny black hair. I quickly learned that he’d been away at his uncle’s farm for the summer and come back in time for the new school term.

  I forgot myself and stared with both eyes, admiring his face, his shoulders, his laughing voice. Someone sat on the other end of my bench. It was the peculiar girl, inspecting me.

  “Ha,” she said. “What’s your game?”

  I jerked my eyeball into motion and produced a tremor so severe that I fell off the bench by accident. I jumped to my feet with hot cheeks. The girl was gone in a flash, but the rest of them were looking at me.

  “Hey, Teddy!” called the older boy named Howie. “See the idiot over there?”

  I froze. I heard a ripple of choked-back laughter.

  “Uh-huh,” said the little one named Teddy. He was in overalls, his hair bristling like hay.

  “I dare you to touch her. That’s all you gotta do. Touch her and run for your life.”

  “What do I get?” said Teddy.

  Even in my agitation, I had to admire his practicality.

  “You get to tell us if she’s got skin like a lizard,” said Howie.

  “No, thanks,” said Teddy.

  “I’ll give you a penny.” Delia stood up and opened a pink coin purse. “I double dare you. She’s the ugliest thing I ever saw and you’d be a brave big fella to go anywhere near.” She held out a coin to the little boy, who now was tempted, I could see.

  I felt sick and sweaty all over. My eye was tired and my tongue was dry. I backed away as Teddy tiptoed forward.

  “Aw, leave her alone. What’s she done to bother you?” It was my new hero, Sammy Sloane, but too late. Teddy darted forward with his fingers outstretched. I turned and ran, pursued by hooting and jeers.

  “Hey! Moron!”

  I felt a sharp bite on the back of my arm and then another on my neck.

  “Got her! Did you see that?”

  “Good shot, Frankie! Like hitting a giant squirrel!”

  They were throwing stones at me! I clapped my hand to the stinging spot above my collar and felt a sticky dribble of blood. I kept running, jagged sobs escaping like steam from a locomotive.

  Peg found me crying in the kitchen.

  “I’m ugly! I’m so ugly!”

  “Ah, now,” said Peg. “There, there.” She washed the scratches and patted my back till I settled down. I might have been her baby sister.

  “Peg loves Annie,” she began, slowly as always when talking to me. “Peg knows better than the lunks in the square. You’d be quite pretty if you wore a cute hat that shaded your eyes, never mind there’s a vacancy between your ears. Not quite so pretty as your mama, but near enough. Try closing your mouth, if you can. And wash your hair once in a while, for pity’s sake!”

  She had me lean over the side of the sink while she gave my head a scrubbing. Is this what normal mothers do? I wondered. She doused my hair with freshly squeezed lemon juice before the final rinse.

  “Annie loves Peg,” I said, playing my part.

  Alone in my room later, I panicked. What if pretending to be stupid and clumsy was turning me stupid and clumsy? I made myself recite poems backward and the date of every battle during the Civil War. I practiced juggling, using two shoes and a hairbrush.

  I sat with the mirror in my hand, twisting my face into idiotic grimaces and then just staring at my own reflection. Was I pretty at all? Could a boy ever look at me and think so? Could Sam
my Sloane?

  In the morning, I crawled into my corner while Mama was fixing her hair. She didn’t like me nearby when she was working, but I’d found a way around that. I’d inched the big chair in the front room into such a position that I could sit behind it with my knees scrunched up and my back in the crook of the wall.

  Mrs. Romero arrived promptly at eleven o’clock. Mama sat her down and held her hands for a moment. “I could read your palm, Mrs. Romero,” Mama began. “But the vibrations from the spirit world are very strong this morning. There’s an older woman here from the Other Side, with a message for you. She has a matronly bosom and says she’s family but not related by blood.”

  Mrs. Romero gasped. “Mother Romero? Frank’s mother? She died of the influenza five years ago, May 1919.”

  “She’s worried about your daughter,” said Mama. “Your daughter who is named for a flower.”

  “That’s Rose,” said Mrs. Romero.

  “But I’m seeing another flower too,” said Mama. “Bright red, like passion.”

  “I don’t know. Rose is my only girl.”

  “It could be a real flower,” prompted Mama.

  “Oh,” said Mrs. Romero. “We have geraniums on the porch.”

  “That’s likely it. The porch … and passion …” Mama’s voice trailed off, letting the words simmer.

  “I don’t like to think of Mother Romero watching that!”

  “She is suggesting that you and your husband sit out on the porch in the evenings, in the blue rockers. Rose won’t be able to entertain her young man there, in the dark.”

  Mrs. Romero was speechless.

  “You have another child,” said Mama. “A boy. Is he named for his father?”

  “How did you know that? Young Frankie.”

  “His grandmother has a message for him, too,” said Mama. “She wants him to be a nice boy. No more rough language. No more slinging stones.”

  Mrs. Romero sighed. “I tell him again and again. He doesn’t listen to me.”

  “Stop feeding him fatty meats,” said Mama. “No more sausages. A tough boy needs cauliflower and Brussels sprouts to make him more sensitive.”

  That part was my idea. I only wished I could have watched him at supper that night.

  3

  The spouse who goes to

  sleep first on the wedding day

  will be the first to die.

  Nearly all our customers were female, as I said. We’d get the odd young man on a matter of romance, and one fellow, Bobby Pike, who begged Mama to help him bet on the horses. But when Mr. Poole arrived, in the middle of September, along with golden light in the late afternoons, we knew the season was changing in more ways than one.

  Mama had not insisted on a telephone when inquiring about rooms, as we’d not lived with one before. The fact that most people used party lines in these little towns made Mama more uneasy about sharing the service, never knowing who might be listening in. But here it was, already installed, and now Brrrp brrrp, crying for attention in the hallway.

  Women, their first visit, often tapped on the door on an impulse, courage up. Men tended to arrange things ahead of time. Mr. Poole, a businessman, called us on the telephone to reserve an appointment for two days later.

  Mama reported the conversation in full. “He is acquainted with that Mrs. Foster, who conveniently discovered she was pregnant directly after I said there was a baby in her future,” Mama told me. “He asked ‘What remuneration will you require?’ instead of ‘How much does it cost?’ I think you should visit his house this evening, Annie.”

  It was best to view the homes of our swankier patrons after dark, when I would not be disturbing anyone inside. Mama liked to hear architectural details.

  Mr. Poole lived halfway up the hill in a house with a pagoda and a lily pond, all wrapped around with a wrought iron fence. I didn’t often climb fences. Although I preferred to peek through windows from an up-close position, a fence could mean a vicious dog. I chose just to stroll by as the night grew darker. Columns flanked the mansion’s front door; there were marble steps and panes of stained glass set into the upstairs dormer windows. All these fine touches ensured that Mama would be most solicitous of poor, bereaved Mr. Poole.

  Waiting for Peg to make supper, Mama and I reread the few notes I had about the Pooles. Mrs. Poole had died a year before, from an ailment that had her looking like a skeleton long before she passed. I knew this the same way I knew everything, from listening. She seemed to have been quite a sourpuss, who spat out insults as rapidly as an auctioneer. The ladies at the market did not get hushed or teary when her name came up.

  “He never would have married her if she hadn’t been so rich!” was the general sentiment. One knobbly-nosed woman had even suggested that Mr. Poole could be forgiven if he’d hurried his wife’s death along with the judicious use of arsenic, but here the other ladies would not venture.

  Mr. Poole:

  Favors coconut hair oil.

  Mrs. Poole:

  Elbows sharp as carpet needles,

  tongue sharper still.

  Mostly there was talk of how her father must be spinning under his fancy pink granite tombstone, knowing that his estate and the inheritance from the Lovely Legs stocking factory ended up in the hands of his son-in-law.

  “So much money they use five-dollar bills for kindling.”

  “This is a big fish, Annie,” said Mama. “This demands our particular consideration.”

  “Do we do something different?”

  “Notice details,” she said, as if that weren’t already my specialty.

  Mr. Poole arrived on a Wednesday afternoon, nearly in disguise. Peg reported later that he wore an overcoat with the collar turned up and a hat with the brim tipped down. He knocked twice and then knocked again four seconds later before Peg even had her apron off. Mama thought I was reading in my room, but I was already settled behind the red chair. Thanks to my ingenuity and small frame, I knew from the start how things really stood with Mr. Poole.

  Mr. Poole began to speak without sitting down, as if Mama were an angel descended from Heaven and would disappear before he’d got his worries off his chest. He was certain his dead wife had returned to haunt him. She didn’t like the new crockery he’d chosen and she’d broken four teacups, jumping them out of his hands to the floor. She didn’t approve of his introducing new fish into the pond, so she’d left two of them gasping on the bank. Mr. Poole wanted Mama to contact his dead wife and tell her to stop.

  “You remind her that I’m alive and she’s not,” he said. “I’ve been drinking out of teacups covered in primroses for twenty-two years and it’s time for a change.”

  He was pretty ruffled. Mama tucked him into the big chair I was squeezed behind and said she could see how reaching Mrs. Poole was of the utmost importance. She leaned in so close to him that I dared not breathe. She had decided to enchant while my legs got cramps, pressing up so tightly against my chest.

  “Normally, Mr. Poole, I would have a calling here in this room to send the word to your late wife. But this sounds like an extreme situation.” Her voice was tender, urgent, making me squirm. “I believe I will be most effective if I come to your home.”

  My goodness, I thought. His watch chain must be solid gold! Or he was flashing emerald cuff links and alligator shoes. It was too risky to peek.

  “The spirits are often caught off guard when approached on their own territory,” Mama told him. “I can likely reach her without too much difficulty.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Poole, sounding nervous.

  “I expect your wife will insist on a little coaxing to move along quietly,” said Mama, making it seem she took his plight seriously. “It may not happen all in one night. But we’re most likely to succeed by using elements from her earthly home; some jewelry, perhaps, and a cup of dirt from your garden. Oh, and we’ll need a small advance to pay for other particular materials. I’ll bring my daughter as an assistant.”

  “You hav
e a daughter?” He sounded surprised—also, disappointed, perhaps.

  “You may have seen her around town,” said Mama. “She is an unusual child, and sadly touched in the head. It has been a struggle, being a lone widow caring for a needy child. But I have discovered that inhabitants of the Other Side are particularly receptive when she is with me. How would Friday night suit you?”

  Friday would be just fine with Mr. Poole, and out came his billfold. Mama named a price that would have choked a regular fortune-seeking patron, but the rustle of paper money told me that he offered no complaint. Mama continued to murmur into the hall, where she wrapped him in his overcoat and found where his hat had slipped off its hook to the floor.

  “That’s her again!” cried Mr. Poole. “She’s followed me here!”

  “Oh, no. I don’t think so,” soothed Mama. “There aren’t many spirits who dare to come here uninvited.” She chuckled and opened the front door. Mr. Poole hovered on the step, not hurrying his good-bye.

  I slipped to the window to examine this gent. He wore a wide-brimmed fedora, like a gangster, and pinstriped trousers. He patted Mama’s arm more than once, he was that grateful. Finally, with a jaunty stride, he went off down Needle Street. I lingered in the hallway as Mama came back in, humming.

  “Was that the gentleman who telephoned yesterday?” I still felt warm from listening to her flirtations. Mama pulled me into the front room and closed the door against the chance of Peg’s ears catching my normal voice.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “He was most certainly a gentleman.”

  I didn’t like the way she said that. “What do you mean?”

  “He’s rich, he’s well-spoken and his breath doesn’t stink. He really believes that his dreadful wife is hovering like incense in a Catholic church. We’re going to scare away her spirit,” said Mama. “It will be quite an effort and take several tries. It will require investment on his part, but he will be very grateful in the end.”

  “How are we going to do that?”