As much as I didn’t want to be stuck with Rotten Ricky, even more I didn’t want Berta to get her way. I stepped closer to Ricky. Me and Big-Mouth Berta probably looked like two hunting dogs fighting over who cornered the raccoon. Not sure how long we stood like that, but it was long enough for Rotten Ricky’s cheeks to blush a deep shade of red.
Lucky for me, Miss Beany was as stubborn as Berta. “I’ll go with you to help you get settled over there, Berta,” she told her. “I’m sure your lovely princess dress will be fine.”
I tried not to smile too much as I watched Miss Beany lead her across the room. By the time I turned back to the table, a little girl dressed as a cat was hugging Ricky.
“Hey, Betsy! Or should I say, ‘Hey, kitty’?” he said, and with that, the little girl began meowing.
“Hey, clown, can you help me?” a voice behind me said.
I turned to find a first-grade boy holding a jack-o’-lantern scribbled with blue crayon.
“Tommy, right?”
He smiled at me remembering his name and nodded.
“Don’t you want your jack-o’-lantern to be orange like everyone else’s?”
“Why would I want it to look like everyone else’s?” Tommy asked, and I didn’t have a great answer for that.
As I sat with Tommy, helping him cut out his blue pumpkin, I listened to Rotten Ricky and Betsy, who I learned was his little sister. “Mama says she won’t take us into town to go trick-or-treating tonight, Ricky. But you’ll take me, right? I just gotta go trick-or-treatin’! I never been before. Oh, please, Ricky—there’s a party at church too. Please talk to Mama. Please!”
“Why won’t your mama take you trick-or-treating?” I asked Betsy.
“No reason,” Rotten Ricky mumbled.
But Betsy seemed to know a reason. “Mama’s been extra sad since Daddy left, and now that Billy’s in the—”
“Betsy, that’s enough. Don’t go telling our family business to everybody.”
Betsy stuck her bottom lip out in a pout. “I wasn’t tellin’ our family business—I was tellin’ my business. I can’t go trick-or-treating ’cause Mama’s sad about Daddy being gone and Billy being in the war. She never wants to do anything, and that’s not fair.” Tears started rolling down her face.
Rotten Ricky looked like he might be fighting back a few of his own tears, and so I felt the need to look away. But I could still hear him comforting his sister. “It’s okay . . . I promise . . .” Somehow in my head those words started mixing with Granddaddy’s words about not deciding who someone is before they have a chance to show you.
And at that moment, Ricky didn’t seem so rotten anymore.
CHAPTER 9
A cold November wind blew against me as I brought the egg basket to Grandma after school. Wearing my mittens made it safer to get the eggs from Teacher, but it sure didn’t make that grumpy old hen any more pleasant. I’d hoped to warm up inside by the fire, but Grandma said Granddaddy could use help with the firewood.
Walking toward the sound of Granddaddy’s chopping, I spied Daddy way out in the field. It turned out that Daddy liked working on the farm and was real handy. Staying busy all the time seemed to suit him. It suited him so much that lots of days I’d barely see him.
“Afternoon, Pixie,” Granddaddy said, between firewood chops. “How was school?”
“Okay,” I answered. “But what’s Daddy doing out there? I thought the crops were all done, what with it being so cold.”
“Harvesting the field corn. It grows later than sweet corn, and it isn’t for our eatin’—it’s for the livestock and chickens.”
Even though I shivered in the cold, I noticed the beads of sweat on Granddaddy’s forehead from all the ax swinging. I began stacking the cut wood in the wheelbarrow.
“Careful there,” Granddaddy said as he nodded toward the extra-big pile of wood I was planning to move to the wood box up by the house.
“It’s fine,” I told him.
But as soon as I turned the wheelbarrow around, the dang thing fell to its side, spilling every last log out on the ground.
The next time, I put half the wood in the wheelbarrow and made two trips.
When I returned, Granddaddy was wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. “Sometimes, Pixie, we make things harder than they need be.”
I knew he was talking about more than wood in a wheelbarrow.
Some people talk to me like I’m just out of diapers—but not Granddaddy. I like how he talks to me like I have opinions.
“I suppose I might do that sometimes,” I said. “But it’s awful cold out. How much more chopping do you have to do?”
Granddaddy motioned to the already-chopped wood. “This here wouldn’t get us very far in a usual winter. And this winter’s fixin’ to be a bad one.”
“How do you know it’s going to be so bad?” I asked.
“Crab apples,” he told me.
“What?” I smiled, figuring this was going to turn into a story.
“Every time there’s lots of crab apples on the trees in the fall—winter’s gonna be tough.”
“You can tell that just by looking at the crab apples?”
“Well, no. I also look for the rabbits,” Granddaddy said as he began helping me stack the wood in the wheelbarrow.
“And what do the rabbits tell you?”
“They’re fattening up and telling me this coming winter’s gonna be colder than Grandma’s homemade ice cream.”
I laughed. “How do they tell you that?”
“Well, Pixie, if the rabbits are fat now, it’s ’cause they know winter’s gonna be a long one. When we pay attention to nature, it can tell us a lot. So I’ll pay attention and chop a little bit longer every day to get us through to at least Thanksgiving.”
At the mention of the holiday, my stomach sank, and it felt like the logs toppling over again—but this time on me. I shook my head. “I don’t think we should celebrate Thanksgiving this year.”
Granddaddy snorted. “Now, don’t tell me you aren’t looking forward to Grandma’s pumpkin pie.”
But that wasn’t it. “Of course I love eating all Grandma’s yummy Thanksgiving food, but should we . . . I mean . . . with everything that’s happened, maybe we shouldn’t be celebrating.”
Granddaddy motioned toward the fields. “Maybe we can borrow another lesson from those rabbits.”