Читать книгу Ludell - Brenda Wilkinson - Страница 7

1.

“TODAY IS THURSDAY, October 25, 1955,” Mis Rivers had all stretched out across the top of the blackboard, like they were first graders instead of fifth.

Ludell gazed at the sentence shaking her head (as she’d done many times before), then focused her eyes to the window, where they’d been off and on all morning. Hearing the sound of the others’ pages turning, she automatically flipped hers, without as much as blinking down at the history book.

“Shoot! Look at all that rain coming down out there,” she said to herself, watching it come down like cats and dogs. “Aine no way in the worle it’s gon stop ’fore twelve o’clock, and we gon hafta have recess in the room. Dog! I sho don’ feel like eating and playing in here today, and just look at it—look at allll that rain!”

“Ludell, LUDELL WILSON—READ!” shouted Mis Rivers, so loud that not only Ludell but half the class jumped.

Turning her head from the window in a flash, she read, “Ponce, Ponce de Le-on . . .”

“We’re not there!” shouted Mis Rivers.

Ludell then darted her eyes to her right, attempting to see where Bobbi Jean Copeland had her finger, but Bobbi Jean pulled the cover of her book up, deliberately blocking her view.

“Hussy!” Ludell mumbled to herself in response.

“I knew you didn’t know where we were—probably don’t even know who was reading when I called on you!” hollered Mis Rivers. “You forever got your eyes out that window daydreaming! Let me have to speak to you just one more time about it and I’m gonna give you something that’ll bring you back down with the rest of us! And you know I’ll do it too—cause I got your parent’s permission!”

Mis Rivers would always add that about the “parents’ per-mis-sion!” since the Board of Education had passed the new ruling that you couldn’t whip children unless their parents said so.

Ludell’s grandmother (who was her mother so-to-speak) hadn’t sent any word one way or the other, but as long as your mama didn’t say she couldn’t, Mis Rivers called that permission and did.

Pulling her chair out from the desk, she got up and went to the window to spit out some of the snuff packed tightly in her lower lip. As she walked back over to her desk, she was eye-balling Ludell in such a manner that Ludell felt she was going to go ahead and beat her right now. Ludell’s fear mounted as Mis Rivers stared harder and harder. Then the bell sounded, bringing her relief.

At their teacher’s order, the children began to put their history books away, and as Ludell leaned down to stick hers under the desk, she caught Bobbi Jean’s attention. Since covering up the place from her, Bobbi Jean had avoided Ludell’s eyes. She looked now, smiling innocently, and Ludell cut her eyes dead to let her know that she didn’t appreciate what she’d done one bit! Bobbi Jean frowned back puzzlingly as if to say, “Why you looking at me mad?”

Ludell knew then that Bobbi Jean would come up with some phoney-baloney reason for blocking her view. “Wit her some-timey-behind-self,” she was thinking.

“We won’t be going out because it’s raining,” said Mis Rivers as if only she could see. “I’ll take orders for cookies, drinks, and ice cream,” she added.

“May I go pick it up Mis Rivers please mam?” Ludell shouted, anxious for the temporary freedom going would bring. “May I go pick it up plueeze?” she repeated, waving her hand madly in the air.

“Would you first let me get it down young lady?” replied Mis Rivers in the slow deep bass voice she often used in place of screaming when a person got on her nerves.

“Yes mam,” she said, easing her hand back down on the desk.

“Orders?” went Mis Rivers.

Ludell’s hand along with about five more persons’ flew up. A few of the other twenty children in the class had brought lunch from home. The rest of them (on whom staying on the inside was always hardest) wouldn’t have anything. They’d have to just sit around watching other people eat, wishing they were outside where they could go on and play after they’d filled up on water; or maybe begged somebody; or bullied some scarey person into giving them something.

People had started calling out their orders.

“A Dixie Doodle and a RC, a pack of pee-cheez and a grape, a coconut bar, a fudge bar, two R-er Cees and five cent worth of BIG MO-OOONS, a package of cheese squares, and a strawberry.”

“A orange and a nickel’s worth of two-for-a-pennies,” Ludell said when Mis Rivers got to her. She really wanted to get five big moon cookies cause they tasted the best and made you full in-a-minute; but everytime somebody bought, or even said “big moons,” some of the children would laugh—even some of the ones who didn’t have nothing!

Monkey Juice didn’t care though. He bought them all the time. He knew they were going to laugh when he ordered them. Especially when he said “BIG MO-OOONS” so loud like he had. Even Mis Rivers had smiled.

Mis Rivers was letting her go, even though her tone when she called Ludell up was none too pleasant.

“Long as she aine said no,” Ludell thought, strolling up to the desk.

“Let me seeee,” Mis Rivers said, looking at the list. “I don’t think you’ll be able to carry all this. Hmmmm, Bobbi Jean, come go with Ludell.”

“Now why she had to go pick her?” she thought. “I’d rather go with a boy to get the order than to go wif that hussy!’

Bobbi Jean grabbed the envelope and list before Ludell could, but Ludell didn’t care. “If I hadda got it,” she thought, “I sho wouldn’t be holding it cross the back like she doing, where Mis Rivers snuff mouf been—ugh!”

A roof covered the sidewalk that stretched around the seven classrooms making up Hunter Hill Elementary, so normally you didn’t have to worry about getting wet going from one place to the next. But today it was pouring so hard you had to walk right up against the wall to keep from getting splashed.

“You didn’t have to try to act so funny when I tried to look and see where we was,” Ludell said to Bobbi Jean as they single-filed along the wall.

“When?” she asked, continuing to walk without looking back at Ludell.

“Girl don’ try ta play dumb wit me,” Ludell shouted, stepping beside her in spite of the rain. “You know what I’m talking bout!” she said. “When I was trying to see the place, you pulled yo book up like this!” she shouted, demonstrating for her. “And I’m gon fix you for that!”

“Oh—you talking about then?” went Bobbi Jean. “I—I wasn’t trying to keep you from seeing; my arm was getting tired from laying flat and I was just lifting it up to rest it,” she said, looking all pitiful.

Ludell just shook her head and left her alone because she could tell how scared Bobbi Jean was already. Besides, they were at Mis Stevanson’s room now.

Mis Stevanson had one of the seventh grade girls at the drink and ice cream boxes and was selling the cookies herself as usual. She had all the cookies lined up on the floor along with her money jar. In her lap was her big bowl of food, and she was just selling and chopping away!

As Mis Stevanson leaned over to pick out a piece of chicken skin she’d dropped into one of the cookie boxes, Ludell frowned disgustedly. She was relieved to discover that it hadn’t been the two-for-a-pennies into which the greasy skin had fallen. “I ’on see why she got ta eat ’n sell at the same time,” she thought staring. “Look so nasty!”

“Speak up! Speak up!” Mis Stevanson shouted to a nervous-looking Bobbi Jean, who was reading off the list.

Everybody was scared of Mis Stevanson! Besides teaching seventh grade, she also was principal. Plus she sold everything. Sometimes she would holler at the other teachers, and at Mr. Carswell, the janitor, like they were pupils too! Word was that once she’d screamed so loud at a substitute teacher that the lady started crying. Every summer someone would put out that Mis Stevanson was retiring because she was getting too old, but come the next September she’d still be sitting there.

She was a strange-looking woman, over six feet, and very broad backed. She wore black platform shoes that laced and tied at the sides, and all dark dresses made out of a shaky jersey-type material that wiggled when she walked. Her skin was rough and wrinkled like over-cooked hog maws; her hair always slick and shining in a page boy that she pressed daily.

As she directed them to the back for the rest of their order, Ludell gazed into her wrinkled face and tried to imagine what she might have looked like young; and as was the case with mama, or other old people, she just couldn’t for the life of her picture a young Mis Stevanson.

When she and Bobbi Jean got back with everything, most of the children with lunch from home had started eating. Bobbi Jean opened hers and offered Ludell some potato chips, trying to get back in friends, but Ludell refused. She wanted them, but wasn’t about to let Bobbi Jean slide back in friends that easily.

Mis Rivers had some kind of sandwich and was eating it fast, her head practically buried in the wax paper. She looked up long enough to check that everyone got what they ordered, then went back to downing her food. So she wouldn’t spoil her appetite by watching Mis Rivers, who looked right doggish, Ludell turned sideways in her seat, only to discover Ruthie Mae, her next door neighbor and best friend, staring at her. Just as she was about to say something to her, she dropped a cookie. “Dog!” Ludell said to herself as she reached down to pick it up. “That Ruthie Mae done stared my food clean out my hand!”

“You didn’t have no money to buy nothing today, Ruthie Mae?” she asked, knowing obviously that she hadn’t.

“I aine hungry,” Ruthie Mae replied.

“Well I aine hungry that much myself, so you can have part of these cookies,” Ludell said, passing some back. She felt that Ruthie Mae might have been thinking she gave her the one she’d dropped, so she got up right away and let her see her putting that one in the wastebasket, even though in her estimation it was still eatable.

Finishing off the remains of what she had, Ludell tried not to notice the people without lunches. Some of them could look so hungry that it made it hard for her to swallow. She could hear Ruthie Mae behind her briskly brushing her hands, as though finishing a big lunch instead of four cookies. “Pore-ro Ruthie Mae,” she thought, wondering which hurt most—the shame of not having a lunch or just the plain being hungry. Her mind wandered to that day when it was raining and Johnnie Higgins had brought this piece of upside-down cake. He had opened it and the smell of the cake just took over the room! She had bit into her cookies just pretending all the while that her teeth were sinking into that juicy caramel iceling. Like today, Ruthie Mae had been without lunch and was staring ever so longingly at the boy’s cake. Gradually her eyes had become watery. Just before the tears were about to roll down her cheeks, she had leaned over to Ludell, rubbed her eyes, stretched both lids, and went, “Ludell, you see anything in my eyes?”

“Seem like I do,” Ludell had answered pathetically. Then she blew into them as though she saw something. “Now, is that better?” she asked when done.

Ruthie Mae blinked both eyes, rubbed them a little more, and said, “Yeah, much better—I think it’s all gone.”

And thank goodness, so was Johnnie Higgins’s cake. . .

Kids were playing tic-tac-toe, trying to draw paper dolls, planes, trains, or were playing hand games. That was about all you could do on the inside. Everybody had read about a thousand times the three or four books Mis Rivers kept on the shelf and had looked up and giggled over the one sex word listed in the big red Webster’s. That dictionary had been messed with so much that the instant you opened it, it automatically fell to the Is.

“Guess she pretty hungry,” Ludell thought as Ruthie Mae’s stomach growled out ferociously on their way from the rest room. “I’d hate to have to come to school with nothing. I feel like I’d starve clean to death!”

As the bell rang ending recess, Mis Rivers was finishing up what appeared to be a piece of sweet bread. “Long as it took her to finish,” Ludell thought, “she must have had enough lunch to share with everybody who didn’t have nothing! Cause she sho wasn’t eating slow!” She kept staring at Mis Rivers, thinking, “Look at her! Just chopping like somebody mad! If I was a teacher and had so many children in my class who didn’t have no lunch, I’d buy a big loaf of light bread everyday and keep a big thing of peanut butter in the room! It couldn’t cost that much! I ’on see how she can sit there and enjoy . . . maybe that’s it! Maybe that’s why she always eat like she do—fast ’n face down.”