Jody Shipes sat slumped in a chair, pretending to read a Highlights for Children magazine she’d picked up off the table in front of the row of green vinyl upholstered chairs in Dr. Smith’s waiting room. She was as sick as a dog, the sickest she ever remembered being. Her mother had said, “She’s burning up with fever—I’m takin’ her!” The wind was blowing a gale and whipped Jody’s mother’s thin skirt against her legs and her hair across her face as she put the little girl in the car against her husband’s strong objections, which were based on the fact that it cost money to see a doctor and that Nelda, his wife, was leaving him there with their five other children—stairsteps from five years old down to a colicky six-month-old. Jody, the oldest at seven, could be trusted to tend to all of them if Nelda was out of the house. Who would tend to the brats now with their mother and oldest girl gone he didn’t know. He sure as hell wasn’t inclined to.
When they first arrived at Dr. Smith’s office, Jody had been able to hide behind her mother under the ledge of the desk and lean against the wall to hold herself up. Her mother had asked if the doctor could see her little girl without an appointment, Jody heard the woman say, “We’ll try to work you in, but you’ll have to wait. All these people have appointments.” She knew then that she and her mother would have to sit there on display in front of all these people for no telling how long.
Jody was so sick and feverish she was nearly delirious, but she wasn’t out of her head enough not to be humiliated when she heard one of the women in the waiting room—the one who’d been casting sidelong glances her and her mother’s way ever since they came into the office—whisper to the well-dressed woman sitting next to her, “You know Nelda Shipes—she’s got a houseful of cotton-headed kids and they live in that old tarpaper shack out north of town.” Then she pulled her own limp, sick little boy up in her lap to get him as far away from the offending trash as she could.
Jody sunk down even lower in the chair. She had on heavy lace-up boots, two sizes too big that had belonged to her older brother, the one who died last year of something, she didn’t know what, that had kept him from going to school or getting out of bed for the last year of his life and nearly killed her mother trying to take care of him and all her—Jody guessed—cotton-headed brothers and sisters was how everybody in town described them. She tried to tuck her feet under the chair to hide them from view but realized she couldn’t do anything to hide her apparently offending white-blonde hair or her skimpy cotton dress that had a tear along the hem. She thought it better to simply pretend even harder to read the magazine and pray they’d be called in to see the doctor soon. Sitting there as miserable as she could be, she wished the earth would open up and swallow her and her mother. Then she had a violent fit of coughing that made them even more conspicuous.
It was a school day and Priscilla Gibson wondered why Jody Shipes wasn’t at school. She’d recently become fixated with the girl and told her parents Ike and Jerry Dale repeatedly about her, saying she seemed poor and, worse, she was picked on and humiliated by some of the boys in their class. Ike and Jerry Dale knew the Shipes family, of course. They knew everyone in town. But the Shipes family was a particularly sad affair. Jerry Dale had been out to their house once with a friend of hers from the Pink Ladies. They worked the snack bar at the hospital twice a week and, rather than discard leftover food, they boxed up the still-good food and took it to families they knew were in need. Ike knew the sheriff had been called out a time or two to check on Nelda and the kids after Bud Shipes had been jailed for being drunk and disorderly, but he and Jerry Dale also knew there was only so much anyone could do to help that family, whether officially or unofficially, so they tried to dissuade Priscilla from becoming overwrought about her school mate. They told her, “Just always be nice to her, Priscilla. And anytime you want to, you can ask her to come over to play with you.”
Priscilla sat in front of Jody in their second-grade classroom and had bumped heads with her just two days before when Johnny Johnson had tripped Jody deliberately and caused her to fall down. Then yesterday, Jody had been especially quiet all day, and now she was absent. Priscilla was sure something was wrong, and it was.
Jody was absent from her second-grade class for the next three and a half weeks. She had gotten well enough to help her mother as every one of the Shipes kids in turn got sick and Nelda had taken each of them in turn to see Dr. Smith for the penicillin shots they needed to get well. The rundown, ramshackle house they lived in had been like a sick ward, filled with feverish, snotty-nosed, hacking, barefooted kids for close to a month, and when Jody was finally able to go back to school, she’d never been so happy in her life. Even if some of the kids made fun of her and called her names, school was a far sight better than staying home nursing her sick brothers and sisters.
Once in a while, Jody got a little revenge by landing some pretty good licks in dodgeball and had “accidently” bloodied the noses of two members of the unholy trinity of bullies that dogged her incessantly, although she was careful to lower the boom when the teacher, Mrs. Marshall, wasn’t looking. Mrs. Marshall, who had begun her teaching career after retiring from the Army, was as tough as nails and did not tolerate horsin’ around or rough-housing. Jody’s home-life pretty much depended on being tough and rowdy, but the strict discipline and structure of Mrs. Marshall’s class gave her a sense of well-being and security she’d never felt before but enjoyed.
Although she didn’t tolerate nonsense and misbehavior, Mrs. Marshall encouraged lively activity and participation in class. And instead of sticking to the conventional, staid lessons of her fellow teachers, she combined colorful stories about her own experiences and adventures in places all over the country and overseas, to France and England and even the Philippines and Japan. She brought in souvenirs and mementos from all these places and found a way to use them to teach everything from geography to social studies and even arithmetic and science. Even the three rowdy hellions, Johnny Johnson, Danny Wise and Willard Smith, were captivated enough by the stories of Mrs. Marshall’s exploits that they managed to behave themselves—for the most part.
Johnny Johnson’s desk was directly across from Jody’s, and he took every opportunity to taunt and torment her, making faces, sticking out his tongue, whispering hateful and hurtful remarks about her appearance or that of her siblings. He tripped her one day on her way up to turn in her spelling paper and then spelled C-L-U-M-S-Y out loud and made the whole class laugh. He got in trouble for it but still, that humiliation was the last straw. And even though Jody didn’t want to fight out of principle and out of a wariness of Mrs. Marshall, she hated Johnny Johnson with a purple passion and decided that the first chance she got—out of sight of the teacher—she was going to beat the tar out of him. And before long, she got her chance.
It was after school, and Jody was heading out to catch her school bus when she saw Johnny crouched down behind the janitor’s building. It looked like he was catching horny toads, which he and the other two boys did regularly, then mistreated them. Jody turned on her heel and headed toward him. Johnny was so intent on what he was doing, he never saw it coming when Jody leveled a blow upside his head that knocked him flat. She didn’t speak a word—just stood above him with her fists clenched, daring him to get up. He didn’t move a muscle—just laid there crying like a sissy while she let that whole boxful of horny toads loose.
The tiny herd of prehistoric-looking little toads stayed frozen for a moment, the eyes in their spiky little heads cutting around, assessing their best escape routes. Jody gently kicked up some dirt, saying, “Go on now, run!” which made the toads run madly in every direction. Some headed under the building, some into the weeds along the cinderblock wall and some headed out toward the dirt mounds on the playground where they could quickly burrow to safety underground.
“Now, YOU, git before I let you have it again,” Jody hissed to Johnny Johnson, whose face was smeared with dirt that was mixed with tears and snot, an image Jody relished and would save in her mind for years. She hollered after him as he ran for his life, “And I better not ever see you pestering another horny toad.”
Priscilla Gibson was watching the whole thing from the window just outside the principal’s office, silently rooting Jody on. She was crazy about the little lizards, too, and considered them just too cute to be classified as reptiles. She was sitting in the outer office waiting while her mother Jerry Dale met with Mr. Kirby, the school principal. Jerry Dale and Roy Kirby had known each other since kindergarten and Jerry Dale could be frank with him about an issue that needed to be handled delicately—Priscilla’s second grade teacher, Mrs. Marshall, and her insistence on keeping snakes in her classroom as a science project.
Priscilla had been a nervous wreck ever since the beginning of the school year, and that was highly unusual for the seven-year-old who, as a rule, took things at school in stride. But she had developed a genuine snake phobia, and, while her parents Jerry Dale and Ike both approved of Mrs. Marshall in every other way, they drew the line at live snakes in a classroom of second graders. The principal didn’t disagree, but he told Jerry Dale he needed a little time to work it out, neglecting to explain that what he really needed was some time to work up the nerve to approach the formidable Mary Johnitta Marshall, retired Army. But an episode the very next day took the matter out of his hands and spared him the dreaded confrontation with Mrs. Marshall. One of the snakes escaped.
Mrs. Irene Guinn, a tiny, gray-haired woman who had been a beloved lunch-lady since Jerry Dale was in elementary school, had just posted the weekly cafeteria menu on the bulletin board and was heading back to the kitchen to put out the cookies for the morning milk break. Jake LeBlanc, the school janitor, had already unloaded a handcart with crates full of ice-cold half-pint chocolate milk cartons next to the cookie table Mrs. Guinn would have ready by 10:07 on the dot, when a pair of kids from every classroom would file in to count out the cartons and deliver them, along with cookies—vanilla or chocolate—to their classmates, the ones who paid the 2-cent-a-day milk money fee and the optional 1-cent cookie tariff. It was a heartless policy that allowed some children to enjoy the treat and some to sit by, doing without.
Priscilla had done without ever since the day she broke her cookie in half and surreptitiously tried handing half to Jody. Jody didn’t look at her but slapped the cookie away. It skittered across the linoleum floor and landed under the chalkboard. The half-cookie had laid there, unnoticed—except by Priscilla—the whole rest of the day. She had not had the heart or stomach to participate in the morning treat since that day.
Apportioning out and delivering the morning’s milk and cookies was a regimented procedure that required a pair of kids—a boy to carry the milk and a girl to carry the cookies, which Mrs. Guinn would carefully count out, place on a cafeteria tray and hand over only after she’d checked the list and received the envelope containing the pennies from each class. She took the transaction seriously, counting every cent and reconciling every list before she turned the kids loose to complete their errand.
Priscilla and Allen Webster were on duty from Mrs. Marshall’s class all week, and, like all the other kids, they were just so tickled to be out of class for those few minutes they paid very little attention to anything besides their momentary liberty. Mrs. Guinn emptied out the first big pink bakery box and was opening the next one when she let out a blood-curdling scream. It echoed off the shiny linoleum floors, down every hall and past every classroom in the school. An escaped bull-snake had found its way into the box of cookies and burrowed itself under the pile of chocolate ones, leaving its tail draped over the pile of pale vanilla ones. How it had managed to get in there was anyone’s guess. It didn’t matter—the damage was done. Mrs. Guinn, who was nearly eighty years old, long, long past retirement age, had to be carried out of the cafeteria on a stretcher and taken to the nurse’s office to calm down before Jake LeBlanc could drive her home. Mrs. Guinn lived with her sister in a rambling rock house that had been added onto in a completely disjointed way to provide rooms to let and extra income for the sisters. But there were no renters now, just the two sisters in the big house.
Nola, Mrs. Guinn’s sister, kept herself plenty busy growing a garden in the summer, canning jar after jar of green beans and tomatoes and black-eyed peas—way more than the two of them could ever eat. In the fall and winter, she crocheted like her life depended on it, producing enough afghans and pillows to fill a warehouse. She baked loaves of golden-brown bread and dense, flavorful poundcakes in such large quantities she depended on friends dropping by to get it all eaten. And she was always eager to sit around her immense kitchen table and visit over cups of strong percolated coffee, talking about the old days when her family had proved up a homestead out east of town.
Nola had been imploring her slightly younger sister to give up the job at the school and retire for years, but Mrs. Guinn insisted she needed the job to keep her mind occupied and off the constant heartache of losing her son, Edward Raymond Jr.—Young Edward she called him—after he’d moved, in her exaggerated words, "plumb out of the country with That Woman.” Irene’s daughter-in-law, That Woman, was the very bane of her existence, and it was only out of desperation that Edward Raymond had moved That Woman, his wife who in fact had a name—it was Lorraine—50 miles away to another small town where he set up a thriving chiropractic practice.
Edward Raymond loved That Woman, Lorraine, madly. They met in New Jersey after he got out of the Marine Corps and married two weeks to the day afterward. Edward Raymond knew it would be a battle royal to get his mother to accept any girl he chose to marry, much less one from New Jersey—which might as well have been outer space—but he clung to the belief that he could accomplish the feat, and no one could say he didn’t try. At his mother’s insistence, they took one of the rooms in hers and Nola’s house, and, well, 15 months of it easily aged Edward Raymond by 15 years. The 50-mile buffer, while it stuck in his mother’s craw, saved his marriage and possibly saved Edward from an early grave. Lorraine was able to take an easy breath without dodging her mother-in-law’s constant wheedling and withering glances. She even got a job and before long, the couple welcomed a child. A little girl. They named her Tonya Gayle after Lorraine’s mother—well, let’s not get into that.
It had taken Edward Raymond just 20 minutes to drive the 50 miles from “plumb out of the country” to get to Dixon to see about his mother. When he got to her bedside, she was sleeping with her feet elevated and a wet rag on her head. He left her and went straight to the school superintendent’s office. Edward Guinn’s firm insistence that snakes be taken out of the school “or else” carried all the threat needed to fix the problem of Mrs. Marshall’s science project.
Later that same afternoon, Jerry Dale sat distracted in a styling chair rising by increments as Jeanne, her beauty operator, pumped her foot on the pedal of the chair and reported all the news that was fit to print. Jeanne spun her around to face away from the mirror, popped the spring on the back of the chair that let Jerry Dale’s head fall perfectly into the indentation of the sink, turned on the water and began to lather up Jerry Dale’s red hair. The sound of the water spraying and Jeanne’s running reportage mingled together into a kind of drone, so much that Jerry Dale almost didn’t register when Jeanne said Edward Raymond Guinn had been in to see Roy Kirby, and there’d be no more snakes in the second grade. Jerry Dale let out a sigh of relief as her worries evaporated. Mrs. Marshall would never get wind that it was Ike and Jerry Dale who had complained about the science project.
Jody Shipes missed her bus the day she waylaid Johnny Johnson behind the janitor’s building. It was an event that changed her life. From her vantage point in the school office, little Priscilla had watched the buses leave Jody behind, and when Jerry Dale came out of Roy Kirby’s office and took her by the hand to get in the car, Priscilla told her Jody’d missed her bus and needed to be taken home. As Jerry Dale circled the car around to the back side of the school, she said emphatically, “Now, Pris, when we get home, you’re going to stay home with me and we’re going to let your daddy take Jody home. You hear me?” Priscilla nodded and jumped out of the car almost before it had come to a complete stop beside Jody, who was playing hopscotch by herself, seemingly unconcerned about being left behind by the bus. “Jody! Come on. You’re going home with me!” Jerry Dale raised her eyes to Heaven, then joined her daughter saying, “Hi, sweetie. Get in the car and we’ll take you home.”
Jody sat silent in the backseat. Priscilla’s enthused chatter was mere static. Jody’s mind was fixated on Priscilla’s mother’s pleasant promise to take her home—the last place she wanted to be. Home was a fearful place. Neither happiness nor tenderness awaited her there. More than anything, she wished she could be like other kids and not one of Nelda and Bud Shipes’ pitied and scorned cotton-headed urchins. Jerry Dale had been watching Jody in her rearview mirror. The palpable sadness that surrounded the little girl was in stark contrast to her own animated daughter. Jerry Dale’s “more than anything” wish was that she could do something other than return her to what she knew must surely be a horrid home.
As Jerry Dale turned into the driveway of her own pretty home, she lightly honked the horn and pulled to a stop. Priscilla bolted out of the car, motioning for Jody to follow her inside. The Gibsons’ big rock house on the corner wasn’t unfamiliar to Jody, at least from the outside. Many times, she’d sat on the curb across the street—hidden by a row of bushy juniper trees along the front of Chester Weems’ house—and watched the Gibsons carry on what, to her, were extraordinary lives. Jody was especially focused on Priscilla’s mother. She wished her mother was like Jerry Dale, wished her mother came home with bags filled to the top with groceries, or an armload of freshly ironed white shirts, a new dress covered in plastic or a fresh pretty hairdo, instead of always being home, tired and haggard and sometimes with ugly bruises on her face and always smelling like baby puke. More than she wished for pretty clothes like Priscilla’s, or a swing set or a bicycle or a little dog to play with, she wished her mother could be pretty and happy like Mrs. Gibson. And she wished her daddy would go away and never come back—wished really down deep in her heart that he would die. And then she wished she’d never been born if she had to be such a horrible person as to wish someone dead.
Inside the Gibson house was like nothing Jody could have imagined. It was orderly and clean and quiet. Priscilla skipped into the kitchen and kissed her father on the cheek, then took a swig out of the mug of black coffee that was sitting in front of him at the kitchen table. When she introduced Jody, “Daddy this is my friend from school, Jody Shipes,” Jody held her breath as Ike stood up, looming above her. It was only when he reached out and patted her on the back and invited her to sit down that she let go the breath and let her eyes wander to the plate of cookies in the middle of the table. “Tater, get Jody here a glass of milk,” Ike said to Priscilla. “I don’t imagine she’s a coffee drinker like you are. Are you, Jody?” “Milk’s fine, thank you,” she said quietly, then, “Nice to meet you.” Jerry Dale gave Ike a high sign and, as they started out the swinging door that led from the kitchen, she said, “Priscilla, your Daddy and I will be in the living room. You girls visit and eat some of those cookies. You can send what y’all don’t eat home with Jody.” Once out of earshot of the girls, Jerry Dale said, “Oh Lord, Ike, that poor child is a sight. I can’t bear to send her home, but we’ve got to.”
Priscilla convinced her mother and daddy to let her and Jody ride in the back of Ol’ Red, Ike’s red pickup, when they took Jody home. Both girls promised to sit down in the bed of the truck and stay away from the sides. Ike drove slow as a snail, out of concern for the little girls in the back as well as because he wanted to put off as long as he could splitting them up. Jody had warmed up to Priscilla over the last hour. Cookies and milk, smiles and hospitality had broken the ice
The road that led to the Shipes’ house ran alongside the cemetery out north of town. It was a narrow dirt road and bumpy. Jody and Priscilla were giggling and squealing with each bounce of the bed of the pickup. Ike could see the tops of their heads. Jody’s flyaway white-blonde hair flew straight up and floated back across her face like duck down, while Priscilla’s dark, shiny hair stayed put in a disciplined ponytail.
Heavy dread pressed Ike’s chest as they got closer to the Shipes place, along with a deep, near-painful tug of love for his child, his only child. Old, old, better-left-forgotten memories began to beat to the rhythm of the girls as they sang, “One little, two little, three little Indians, four little, five little, six little Indians.” The cadence of the words that carried little meaning to two laughing girls slowed as they reached Ike’s ears. The words seemed to drag. They flooded his insides with shame and pent-up anger. Seven-little-eight-little-nine-little-Indians’ faces became images of himself and children like him transported to institutions, regimentation, judgment…all the tools required to civilize, assimilate, isolate, break down culture and language…all done within the confines of cold boarding schools that provided too little nutrition and exploited the free labor of children…little children far from their homes, families, mothers and fathers. Ike closed his eyes for a second. Priscilla and Jody dramatically punctuated the last words of their song, and in Ike’s mind it turned into a dirge. “Ten little In-dian boooys.”
When Ike opened his eyes, he could see the front of the old tarpaper house where he was to deliver his wan little passenger. Priscilla’s new friend. Flashing red lights flooded the drab tarpaper facade. Ike saw the lights before the girls did, saw the sheriff, Ben Wattle, standing outside the house talking on the radio. As he pulled on the brake, Ike saw two more men, deputies escorting Bud Shipes from the house. A second car was packed with the Shipes children, and a uniformed woman was coming out of the house carrying a toddler in her arms.
Jody leaped from the bed of the pickup, running to the front door of the house and inside before anyone could stop her. Lying on the bed in the front room was her mother, white as the sheet that covered her, her still-open eyes staring unseeing at the peeling, rotting ceiling above her. In the corner, Dr. Smith stood over a woman Jody had never seen before. She was wearing a blood-soaked apron and sitting in a kitchen chair. An array of crude instruments were strewn out on a dingy dishtowel on the kitchen table in front of her. Dr. Smith murmured something to the woman that Jody couldn’t quite hear, and the woman shook her head adamantly and began to sob.
Ben Wattle came through the door, said something to Dr. Smith that again Jody couldn’t make out, then he took her small hand and compelled her out the door. Out of the corner of her eye, Jody saw the remains of the breakfast her mother had put in front of her that very morning—a toast soldier dipped in deep yellow, runny egg yolk on a chipped plate, her favorite Peter Rabbit plate.
It had gotten cold outside. A gust of wind blew cotton-colored hair across Jody’s eyes. She straightened her back and walked to the car where she joined her brothers and sisters.
The Shipes kids were taken by County Welfare, then eventually farmed out to foster homes or grudging relatives. Jody and her next-younger sister, Debby, were sent to live with her grandmother—their father’s mother—where Bud Shipes also lived off and on when he wasn’t in jail or simply absent, which was preferable to the times he was there. Their grandmother was a mean-spirited, slatternly woman who mistreated the girls either by sheer neglect or by slaps across the face—for real or merely perceived misdeeds. The girls loathed her as much as she loathed and resented them. She never failed to remind them that their mother was no good and got what she had coming for, as she said, “killin’ that poor, innocent unborn baby.” Jody spent more and more time with Priscilla and Jerry Dale and Ike Gibson in the big rock house she’d fantasized about so often. Debby was different and more vulnerable to the pull of her father and grandmother’s ilk. Jody and Debby became very different people.
On the Christmas Eve after her mother’s death, Jody spent the night and next Christmas Day with her new and, as it turned out, lifelong friend Priscilla Gibson. On Christmas Eve, unmissed by her grandmother or father or even her little sister, Jody and Priscilla sat wrapped in quilts in the back of Ol’ Red to see the Christmas display on Third Street and Avenue A. Ike poured steaming mugs of hot chocolate from his thermos that Jerry Dale passed out the window to the back, along with big slabs of her Christmas fudge.
The whole town, it seemed, was lined up to see the fanciful display—the carousel with dancing children going up and down, the spokes of the Ferris wheel lit with tiny white lights that illuminated the little swinging seats that went ‘round and ‘round. The little seats carried teddy bears, dolls, kitty cats and, in one, a rubber Indian with a big nose and a wide toothy grin, a tomahawk in one hand and a scalp in the other. Ike stuck his head around and said to his child, “Well, Sugar Woog, at least they put us Indians in there.”
Christmas music floated out from the speakers on the roof and filled the crisp air with messages of goodwill to all men. The girls joined in the chorus of “O come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant.” In her short life, Jody couldn’t remember ever being so happy.
Jody Shipes graduated high school and, with the help of her second-grade teacher—Mary Johnitta Marshall, U. S. Army retired, who had taken a special interest in her—and the Gibsons—her surrogate family, she completed college at TCU, whose mascot was the Horned Toad.
Jody Shipes became a renowned civil rights lawyer, specializing in women’s issues.
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