Summer Girl

Summer Girl 24 by Anne Billson Ellamae lived on the side of a mountain . There were two steps leading to the porch from the bare dirt of her front yard, but the back of the house was propped up on stilts with stairs leading down to the patch of greens and sweet potatoes. Underneath the kitchen was a shadowy open space that smelled of dark earth hidden from light and the flow of time, holding its deep secret treasures unknown to anyone but Ellamae and her dog Coon. Ellamae found an old apple crate by the side of the road and fixed it up with small furniture made from twigs. Her mother taught her to dig a large clump of grass carefully out of the side of the mountain, tie a rag over the round knobby root and paint a face on the cloth with a piece of charcoal from the cooking stove. It made a fine looking doll with the long green skirt slowly drying and fading to brown with the long green days of summer. Ellamae and Coon spent most of the time under the back of the house, listening to the footsteps of her mother as she moved through the two rooms above them. They could hear the creaking of the front porch swing where her daddy sat during the day. The rhythm of the swing was as steady as his cough until his head fell forward every now and then for a few minutes of sleep. In the middle of the afternoon, Ellamae and Coon walked to the bank overlook25 ing the railroad tracks that curled into the blue mountains ahead like mist trails. At four o'clock the train stopped for a few minutes in Saluda on its way to Asheville and whatever was north of that. The engineer always waved his striped cap up at them on the yellow clay hill and nodded "hello." The smells of the train hung in the air for a long time after it twisted itself out of sight ... the bite of the cinder smoke and the heart pounding scent of whatever lay beyond the mountains. Ellamae and Coon looked at each other, the smell of adventure holding their eyes together. It was certain that someday they would know what was past the last gleam of track as it snaked its way into the trees. It was on such an afternoon that Ellamae saw the summer girl step off the train with her family. She had watched them at a distance for several years, the tall, thin mother with the other older children, all piling into the town's one taxicab for the drive up the mountain. Before June was over, she and the summer girl had eyed each other carefully as they passed on the road leading down to the general store. One afternoon she picked some wild daisies for her daddy, whose cough was worse as the July rains brought cold weather to the mountains. "How pretty," the summer girl stopped her. Ellamae stared down at her bare feet. She pointed back to the hillside where the yellow flowers made their own bright paths through the field. The next day Ellamae heard the swing on the porch slow to a soft squeak and her mother's steps move to the front door. "What you want, gal?" Her mother stood with one hand on each sharp hipbone , her eyes tiny slits as she stared down at the visitor. "The little girl who lives here. I thought she might want to go to the store with me for a co-cola." "She don't like co-cola." Ellamae, standing by the side of the house, wondered if that was true. She could not remember ever having one. "I was hoping she would take a walk with me." Before her mother could answer the summer girl, Ellamae and Coon ran outside the picket fence and the three of them scattered down the road. The days moved by like the rhythm of the train. Ellamae and Coon showed the girl, whose name was Betsy, how the mountains opened up their secrets to anyone who walked softly along their private trails and...