out by the pump, so she’d always have some to add to the lemonade.”
“Can you remember her voice?”
He thought for a moment. “Not really. She was soft-spoken. I do know that.
Never heard her raise her voice. And Father always spoke real gentle-like when
he was talking to her.”
“I remember her brushing my hair with this brush. She’d sit me between her
knees and brush and brush. That’s the only touch of hers I remember. The only
thing at all. Except for her humming. In my mind she always seems to be
humming. I’ve got her watch too,” Olivia said.
“Yeah, I do remember that. The gold one you can open up and put a picture
in. Has a little gold pencil on the same chain.”
Olivia nodded. “Gram Sessions gave her that too. Do you think our father
ever gave her any nice presents?”
“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t imagine it too likely. Wasn’t his way.”
She rested her head on Tobey’s shoulder and felt like crying. “I just hate it that I don’t remember her at all. I wish I had one clear memory. Just one. One
thing that I knew was me truly remembering my mother and not a story I heard,
or something I dreamed up.”
Tobey patted her knee and she rose to leave. Back in her room she searched
for Nola June’s watch in the top drawer of her bureau and her fingers brushed something hard under a neat stack of handkerchiefs. Her mother’s combs. She’d
forgotten about them. They were not for combing one’s hair, but the kind women
use for decoration, a narrow row of seven or eight teeth, six inches long. One was of tortoise shell, the other two of bone. Bright red, green, and yellow stones
sparkled at their crowns.
Suddenly Olivia’s mind opened to an image of Nola June, the way she had
worn her hair every day, pinned up with simple hairpins, sometimes with a
length of ribbon or flowers twined through it. Then she saw her mother
descending the stairs on Christmas Eve, something shiny draped over her
shoulders and two bone combs extruding from an intricate pile of hair. A
princess. She was not a crazy lady. People only said those horrible things because they were so jealous of how elegant she was, the way she moved in an
aura of light. Nola June would have hated Mabel Mears.
Olivia sighed and set the watch and combs on the bed next to the brush. She didn’t want to take them with her, for fear of losing them out in the wilderness,
but neither did she want to leave them behind. She frowned for a moment, then
returned one of the combs to the drawer and rolled the others up, together with
the watch and hairbrush, in a flannel petticoat and tucked it into one of the baskets.
Later, when everyone was asleep, she lit a candle and slipped downstairs to
take her Bible from the bookshelf, moving the other books farther apart, to hide
the empty space. The writing on the inside cover, noting all the marriages, births,
and deaths in the family, was in Nola June’s delicate hand. Olivia had added the
deaths of her mother, Uncle Scruggs, and now her father. She took the Bible upstairs, wrapped it in a petticoat, and tucked it into the basket next to the money
bag she had sewn. It was a cloth belt, from which four long pockets hung, that
she planned to tie around her waist, under her skirt and petticoats. She would keep ten dollars emergency money in her stockings and the rest of the heavy gold coins in those pockets.
