If my great-grandmother Ola hadn't died, I might never have known her. The day we got the news, Ginny, that's what I call my mama, said we had to leave Texas and drive up to the Ozarks for her funeral. I didn't want to go. I didn't even know her Granny Ola.
Ginny put her hands on her hips and glared at me with her eyes, greener than lime sherbet. She pushed my legs off the arm of the chair, where I lay sprawled sketching scenes for her poems. Ginny makes extra money writing verse for a card publishing outfit when she's not working at the diner. I try to help, but now all she wanted from me was to get out of the chair, leave Texas, and go all the way to the Missouri Ozarks for a funeral.
"We have to go," she said. "Granny Ola doesn't have any family left, except maybe for a cousin of mine. Besides, I don't have anyone to leave you with." She put her arms around me and said, "Josephine, we're going to Granny Ola's funeral, and that's final." Ginny usually calls me Josie, so when she used Josephine, I knew it was final, whether I liked it or not. But she was right. Since my dad ran out, I couldn't stay with him on account of no one knows where he is.
And I can't stay with Grandma Louise anymore. She died in a car wreck when I was seven. One minute she was here and the next gone. Ginny said I was too young to go to her funeral, so I stayed with a neighbor in the trailer park. This time I guess I don't have any choice but to go.
After dinner, we loaded our suitcases into Ginny's old fishtail Cadillac, the one Grandma Louise left her. Ginny said that her mama hardly ever drove it, so it was in mint condition. I told her we ought to sell it and get a Bug, one that didn't guzzle so much gas. But Ginny, being sentimental, wanted to keep her mama's car. "Anyway," she said, "we can't afford to buy a car, not even a VW."
I guess we're poor. Our trailer is the runt of the Garden Mobile Home Estates. Ginny says that we can hook up for less than we'd have to pay for an apartment. She thinks it's a lot safer for us and easier to move if she takes a mind to. We have friendly neighbors. Thing is, I'm the only kid. All my friends are older than Ginny, but I don't mind too much. They loan me books and play Gin Rummy with me whenever I want.
After we told the landlord where we were going and to please check our mail, we turned off our window cooler and headed east out of Fort Worth. It was a hot summer evening and we about sweltered as we drove through the flat countryside toward McKinney. I traced our trip on the road map for a while through onion and cotton farm country, until we drove into darkness with beaming headlights almost blinding us. We zoomed north up to Muskogee, Oklahoma, then over to Tahlequah. I remembered studying about the Cherokees, and figured these towns had Indian names.
Ginny started teaching me at home after we moved so many times trying to live close to her jobs. I told her I didn't want to go to another new school where I didn't know anybody. The last school I was in, Ginny would drop me off, and by the time she got home, I'd already run out of the building and headed for our trailer park. She finally got a few assignments with a card company, but she couldn't get any work done as she was always trying to get me back in school. That's when she decided she'd teach me herself, even if she did have to dodge the truant officers.
We go to the library once a week and check out as many books as we can carry in an old canvas bag. She lets me get books I'm interested in, then she assigns stuff for me to do, like comparing climate and food of different places, or characters in novels. I have to write a lot, and it's hard work, but we can switch our subjects around whenever we want, and even take trips to the park or museums without asking permission from anybody. That's how we became such good pals, almost like sisters. Only she's the boss.
Once we turned east out of Tahlequah, we got into hilly country. Ginny said that we would drive the whole four hundred fifty something miles without stopping. In Arkansas, the blacktop road was lined with pine trees on each side and the moon's bright face peeked through them. The trees zipped past so fast it made me dizzy.
Ginny gripped the steering wheel like maybe she could make the car go faster that way. She drank coffee from a thermos to stay awake, and listened to the radio play "Hang on Sloopy". Mostly that's what I was doing, hanging on. Sometimes I slept when I wasn't holding a flashlight and tracing the road on our map. After driving all night, we headed north into the Missouri Ozarks. "Are we almost there?"
"Not too far now. About an hour," she said, blowing her nose.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
"Oh, just a little sad, I guess."
"Are you sad because of great-grandmother Ola?"
"That, too," she answered.
I wondered if she was thinking of my dad. About his leaving us. Ginny never talked about him, except to say he didn't want to fight in Vietnam. I didn't hold that against him, but as far as we were concerned, he abandoned us and he might as well be dead, too. I didn't want to think of my great-grandmother Ola's funeral either. Watching the road as Ginny had raced through the night scared me enough. Seems like now that we were getting closer, she was in more of a hurry. The way she swerved around a sharp turn in the road and zoomed up and down hills made me feel funny, like riding a roller coaster and leaving my stomach behind.
In a while Ginny started humming along with the music on the radio again. The Grass Roots were singing "Let's Live", and I wanted to live, that's for sure. I kinda got the feeling we might be racing to our own funeral, if she didn't slow down. "Ginny, how come you're driving so fast?"
She blinked her eyes and shook her head awake. "Josie, honey, these hills are my old stomping grounds. I'd know my way around them blindfolded. When I was little, your grandmother Louise and I came up to Granny Ola's every summer. Later, I moved up here to stay with her for a while." Ginny drove silent for a stretch of miles.
I asked her why she moved in with great-grandmother Ola, and she shrugged. "Oh, seems that I was a rebel, so mama sent me to the hills. She didn't know I could get into just as much trouble up here, but I loved roaming through the woods, and riding mules with our neighbors. One time Michelle Peters hitched their mule, which was reddish brown and pretty as a horse, onto a dilapidated buckboard that Granny Ola called a Hoover cart."
"Why'd she call it that?"
"Back in Granny Ola's younger years, many people were so poor they couldn't afford to buy gasoline or the upkeep of their automobiles, so they put them on blocks to keep their tires from rotting and the metal from rusting. Then they went everywhere in a horse-drawn cart. Sometimes they removed the wheels and springs and put them on a cart making it more comfortable. Hoover was the president of the United States then, so they named the cart after him. Anyway, Michelle rode over to our place, whooping and holding the reins and bouncing around that rattling cart. I jumped on and her mule trotted us down to Swan Creek. After hitching it to a tree, we shed our clothes and skinny dipped, shivering and giggling. She was a wild thing, but we had some good times."
"Shame on you," I teased.
Ginny laughed and tickled my knee. "Nobody saw us. That was about the most fun I ever had up here. Michelle married and dropped out of high school. Never heard from her again. I did finish school, but I couldn't get out of here fast enough."