drawings of hairy cavemen in a book about Charles Darwin. They do look like apes, but so far I’ve been agreeing with the preacher. I’ve never seen a real person who looks like a monkey and I’ve seen some ugly people in these hills.
Suddenly the preacher shouts a string of strange words, leaps into the air, and comes back down on the edge of the stepping-up place. He tumbles out of the pulpit and onto the organ.
“Lord have mercy!” Miss Perkins screams and the whole choir stands up at once like they’ve been told to rise.
The preacher’s face is red and pinched up in pain. He jerks like he’s been stung by a hornet and keeps callingout to the congregation in a language that nobody understands. Momma says he’s talking in tongues.
“Hallelujah, he’s alive!” Little Clyde Cummings shouts from the back of the church. “Call the ambulance!”
Frances Perkins shuts off the organ and sits weeping loud enough for everybody to hear. Finally, some men come and carry the preacher away on a stretcher with the sirens blaring.
It’s quiet in the car on the way home and I’m thinking about last summer when the traveling carnival came through town and Pop gave me money to buy a bag of peanuts for the monkeys. They’d crack the shells and slip off the hulls before popping those nuts into their mouths. I remember their round, beady eyes full of water.
“The preacher shouldn’t get so upset about monkeys,” I say.
Momma shrugs. She’s sitting in the front seat with her back to me. “Those apes do look a little like people, don’t they?” she says.
I look over at Lenny, but he doesn’t say a word about Darwin and the ape-men.
“Maybe it’s their eyes,” I say. “It’s the way they stare at you.”
U ncle Lucius and the Kites …
The March wind is fierce. Every morning Uncle Lucius goes to the meadow with a cart full of kites and sets them flying until the sky is filled with color. Diamond shapes, boxes, some with long tails and others that swirl round and round like whirligigs. All day long Uncle Lu sits in his fold-up chair hidden amongst the grasses between the mountains and the river. He sits with his kites in the air against the blue sky, working the strings, as if this were a real job. When the sun sets, he brings them down again and loads them onto his two-wheeled cart and heads back to the house, his hair a ball of cotton torn apart in the March wind.
At breakfast I ask Uncle Lu what he’s doing in the meadow when the kites are flying all by themselves.
“Thinking,” he says.
“I wish I could stay home all day and fly kites,” I say.
I grab my backpack and head for the school bus, imagining all those colors blowing across the sky and all that time to do nothing but think. Somehow I’ve gotto drag myself through math and history before English/geography which is the only class I’ve ever had that goes by too fast.
All day the rain starts and stops, pours and drizzles, the sky gray and cold-looking like a slate dump. No kite flying today. At last bell we all get soaked running from the classroom building to the school bus, but the bus driver won’t turn on the heat. He’s wearing a green jacket with a hood, says we need to remember to bring our own jackets, and makes it sound like the rain’s our fault.
Halfway home the sun comes out and melts the gray clouds with its heat. In patches high above the holes in the clouds, the sky is blue like the ocean must be.
At the supper table Pop unfolds the newspaper and hands Lucius a section, trying to get him interested in what’s going on in the real world, but Uncle Lu stares out the window and sips his coffee. He doesn’t even care about what’s going on in this room.
After a while he gets up, walks into the front hallway, and pulls something from his coat pocket. A long cylinder wrapped in blue tissue with a red ribbon. He smiles and hands it to me, even though it’s not my birthday or anything.
I peel off the paper and find a
Chantal Fernando, Dawn Martens