I was so happy when I finally got to get out of isolation. I’m now bed number two in a twelve-bed ward with eight other polios.
My legs don’t hurt as much anymore, but they don’t work too well. Nurse Margie promises me I will walk again. She helps me in the pool they have here. It’s a pool that is inside! Can you believe that? It’s warm and really feels good. When I’m in it, I forget I can’t walk. But then I get out again.
But I know I’m lucky. In the ward next to me are boys and girls who can’t breathe on their own, so they have to lie in these machines the size of Daddy’s old coffin boxes, with just their heads sticking out. They call it an iron lung.
I’m lucky my lungs are still working. I’m also really tired. I hope so much that I can see you this weekend and hand this right to you. But if I can’t, know I miss you something fierce.
Sorry I won’t be there for Halloween. What are you going to be? I remember last year you liked my princess costume better than your clown one, so you can have it if you want.
Maybe I’ll be home by Christmas—or even sooner—the good Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.
Love,
Charlotte
Yep. My sissy is in a faraway hospital, full of pain, but she still called herself lucky. That’s my sissy.
I’d plumb forgot Halloween was so close. We always loved dressing up for it. Last year, we couldn’t go trick-or-treating, since our old town decided, what with the wartime sugar shortage, it didn’t make sense. We still dressed up and did some fun tricks, though—throwing corn kernels at houses, Ivory-soaping the windows. But never the screens—that wasn’t allowed.
It didn’t even matter that we didn’t get treats because of the sugar rationing. With Charlotte, everything was fun.
I had no idea what this town did for Halloween. But no matter what they did, I wouldn’t be wearing Charlotte’s princess costume. She didn’t know all her clothes got burned. Grandma’d probably tell me to be a dang clown again.
Looking at her letter once more, I remembered Charlotte sitting in that wheelchair with her hand on the window—and felt guilty that I’m the reason she got polio in the first place. That’s when the letter started to get all blurry, as I realized I would dress as a clown for the rest of my life if only I could get my princess back.
CHAPTER 8
I was right—Grandma said the clown costume still had life in it, and she had nothing else to offer.
“But it’s so scratchy—and too small,” I complained when I tried it on.
Grandma inspected me from head to toe. “Does look like you’ve grown a foot, doesn’t it?” She clucked her tongue and cocked her head to one side as my hope grew that she was seeing my side of it for once. Unfortunately, it didn’t last. “But with wartime rations, we don’t have the material . . .”
Once Grandma starts talking wartime rations, I know I shouldn’t even try to argue. But I still do.
“Maybe you could cut up an old dress or something?”
Grandma gasped. “Oh, now I should put scissors to one of my dresses so you can wear it for one day? It’s not your wedding day, Prudence Ann; it’s just Halloween.” She shook her head. “And there’s no extra money right now.”
“What about the piggy bank?” I remembered the coffee can Daddy put in the kitchen last month, telling us it was now the farm’s piggy bank. “Could we use some of that money?”
“I reckon when your daddy said that was to be for improvements around here, he wasn’t talking about costumes.” She patted my shoulder, which was already itching under the too-tight costume. “This will do just fine.”
* * *
* * *
So on Halloween, there I was at school dressed as an itchy overgrown clown.
After lunch, there was a party in the gym with paper skeleton and pumpkin decorations and cookies and punch. I was sitting by myself eating a cookie when Rotten Ricky walked up to me. I’d managed to avoid him since that day in the closet, as he’d been absent for a couple weeks. When he returned to school, he seemed quieter—but I figured him to be still as rotten.
He was wearing his usual clothes. All around us stood ghosts and witches and cowboys and cats, but there he was, looking like it was just any old day of the year. I really couldn’t have cared less, but I had to ask: “Why aren’t you dressed up?”
Rotten Ricky blushed a bit and then puffed up his chest, reminding me of Teacher, before he answered, “Halloween stinks.”
I don’t know why that bothered me. What with Charlotte gone and my awful costume, I wasn’t feeling particularly fond of Halloween myself. But when Rotten Ricky said those very words, I felt myself bristling like he’d insulted my kin. “What do you mean—stinks?”
He shrugged. “Just does.”
“Well, maybe you stink.”
He sighed the way Grandma sighs sometimes. Then he looked away from me as he said, “I just come over to tell you Miss Beany says it’s our turn to help at the children’s table.”
I’d forgot we all had to take turns cutting out and coloring jack-o’-lanterns with the first and second graders. But how’d I forget I was assigned to help them with Rotten Ricky?
Miss Beany’d been nice enough to me the last week or so that I’d decided Granddaddy was right and stopped calling her Meany-Beany. But I hadn’t changed my mind about Ricky.
“Prudence . . . Ricky . . .” Miss Beany said. “You’ll have so much fun helping the children cut these darling jack-o’-lanterns!”
Before I could ask her why we might like that so much, Big-Mouth Berta practically danced over to the table in her perfect princess costume. “Miss Beany, do you want me to help? I’d be happy to help.”
“Berta, you are so thoughtful to ask,” Miss Beany told her. “But maybe you can go to the bobbing-for-apples bucket and help there. This year, we’re using blindfolds and letting the children use their hand to reach into the water, instead of the usual bobbing, since everyone’s worried about the threat of polio.” With that, Miss Beany put her hand over her mouth like she’d said a bad word. “Oh, I’m sorry, Prudence. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s okay. I-I’m okay,” I told her, even though my cheeks had started burning and I didn’t feel okay at all. Especially when Berta kept talking.
“How ’bout if Prudence helps over at the bobbing-for-apples bucket?” she said. “Seems to me her clown costume is better suited for that job than my princess one.”