Walk Two Moons

43 OUR GOOSEBERRY

Instead of taking me to jail, the sheriff drove me to Coeur d’Alene, with the deputy following us in Gramps’s car. The sheriff gave me a lengthy and severe lecture about driving without a license, and he made me promise that I would not drive again until I was sixteen.

“Not even on Gramps’s farm?” I said.

He looked straight ahead at the road. “I suppose people are going to do whatever they want to on their own farms,” he said, “as long as they have a lot of room to maneuver and as long as they are not endangering the lives of any other persons or animals. But I’m not saying you ought to. I’m not giving you permission or anything.”

I asked him to tell me about the bus accident. When I asked him if he had been there that night and if he had seen anyone brought out of the bus, he said, “You don’t want to know all that. A person shouldn’t have to think about those things.”

“Did you see my mother?”

“I saw a lot of people, Salamanca, and maybe I saw your mother and maybe I didn’t, but I’m sorry to say that if I did see her, I didn’t know it. I remember your father coming in to the station. I do remember that, but I wasn’t with him when—I wasn’t there when—”

“Did you see Mrs. Cadaver?” I said.

“How do you know about Mrs. Cadaver?” he said. “Of course I saw Mrs. Cadaver. Everyone saw Mrs. Cadaver. Nine hours after that bus rolled over, as all those stretchers were being carried up the hill, and everyone despairing—there was her hand coming up out of the window and everyone was shouting because there it was, a moving hand.” He glanced at me. “I wish it had been your mother’s hand.”

“Mrs. Cadaver was sitting next to my mother,” I said.

“Oh.”

“They were strangers to each other when they got on that bus, but by the time they got off, six days later, they were friends. My mother told Mrs. Cadaver all about me and my father and our farm in Bybanks. She told Mrs. Cadaver about the fields and the blackberries and Moody Blue and the chickens and the singing tree. I think that if she told Mrs. Cadaver all that, then my mother must have been missing us, don’t you think?”

“I’m sure of it,” the sheriff said. “And how do you know all this?”

So I explained to him how Mrs. Cadaver had told me all this on the day Phoebe’s mother returned. Mrs. Cadaver told me about how my father visited her in the hospital in Lewiston after he had buried my mother. He came to see the only survivor from the bus crash, and when he learned that Mrs. Cadaver had been sitting next to my mother, they started talking about her. They talked for six hours.

Mrs. Cadaver told me about her and my father writing to each other, and about how my father needed to get away from Bybanks for a while. I asked Mrs. Cadaver why my father hadn’t told me how he had met her, and she said he had tried, but I didn’t want to hear it, and he didn’t want to upset me. He thought I might dislike Margaret because she had survived and my mother had not.

“Do you love him?” I had asked Mrs. Cadaver. “Are you going to marry him?”

“Goodness!” she said. “It’s a little early for that. He’s holding on to me because I was with your mother and held her hand in her last moments. Your father isn’t ready to love anyone else yet. Your mother was one of a kind.”

That’s true. She was.

And even though Mrs. Cadaver had told me all this and had told me how she had been with my mother in her last minutes, I still did not believe that my mother was actually dead. I still thought that there might have been a mistake. I don’t know what I had hoped to find in Lewiston. Maybe I expected that I would see her walking through a field and I would call to her and she would say, “Oh Salamanca, my left arm,” and “Oh Salamanca, take me home.”

I slept for the last fifty miles into Coeur d’Alene and when I awoke, I was sitting in the sheriff’s car outside the hospital entrance. The sheriff was coming out of the hospital. He handed me an envelope and slid in beside me on the seat.

In the envelope was a note from Gramps giving the name of the motel he was staying at. Beneath that he had written, “I am sorry to say that our gooseberry died at three o’clock this morning.”

Gramps was sitting on the side of the bed in the motel, talking on the telephone. When he saw me and the sheriff at the door, he put the phone down and hugged me to him. The sheriff told Gramps how sorry he was and that he didn’t think it was the time or place to give anybody a lecture about underage granddaughters driving down a mountainside in the middle of the night. He handed Gramps his car key and asked Gramps if he needed help making any arrangements.

Gramps said he had taken care of most things. Gram’s body was being flown back to Bybanks, where my father would meet the plane. Gramps and I were going to finish what had to be done in Coeur d’Alene and leave the next morning.

After the sheriff and his deputy left, I noticed Gram’s and Gramps’s open suitcase. Inside were Gram’s things, all mixed in with Gramps’s clothes. I picked up her baby powder and smelled it. On the desk was a crumpled letter. When Gramps saw me look at it, he said, “I wrote her a letter last night. It’s a love letter.”

Gramps lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. “Chickabiddy,” he said, “I miss my gooseberry.” He put one arm over his eyes. His other hand patted the empty space beside him. “This ain’t—” he said. “This ain’t—”

“It’s okay,” I said. I sat down on the other side of the bed and held his hand. “This ain’t your marriage bed.”

About five minutes later, Gramps cleared his throat and said, “But it will have to do.”