A Blue-Eyed Daisy Read online

  A Blue-Eyed Daisy

  Also by the Author:

  PICTURE BOOKS

  Night in the Country

  Relatives Came

  This Year’s Garden

  POETRY

  Waiting to Waltz: A Childhood

  Atheneum Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Text copyright © 1985 by Cynthia Rylant

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  The text of this book is set in 11-point Bembo.

  Printed in the United States of America

  20 19 18 17 16

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rylant, Cynthia. A blue-eyed daisy.

  Summary: Relates episodes in the life of eleven-year-old Ellie and her family who live in a coal mining town in West Virginia.

  1. Children’s stories, American. [1. Family life—Fiction. 2. West Virginia—Fiction]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.R982B1 1985 [Fic] 84-21554

  ISBN 0-689-84217-1

  eISBN: 978-1-439-13255-5

  978-0-689-84217-7

  Dedication

  For Gerry

  Fall

  The Prettiest

  Evening

  At the Supper Table

  Winter

  Uncle Joe

  Ellie’s Christmas

  Crazy Cecile

  Ellie’s Valentine

  Spring

  Okey’s Song

  Best Friends

  Ellie Sees a Fit

  A Lovely Night

  Summer

  The Accident

  Old Lady Epperly

  Some Year

  Fall

  The Prettiest

  ELLIE’S FATHER WAS A DRINKING MAN. EVERYBODY knew it. Couldn’t help knowing it because when Okey Farley was drunk he always jumped in his red and white Chevy truck and made the rocks fly up and down the mountains.

  He had been a coal miner. Drank then, too, but just on weekends. A lot of miners drank on the weekend to scare away the coming week.

  Okey had been hurt in a slate fall, so he couldn’t work anymore. Just stayed home and drank.

  Ellie was his youngest daughter, the youngest of five. She didn’t look anything like Okey or her mother, both of whom had shiny black hair and dark eyes.

  Ellie was fair. Her hair was nearly white and her skin pale like snow cream. Ellie was a pretty girl, but her teeth were getting rotten and she always hid them with her hand when she laughed.

  Ellie loved her father, but she was afraid of him. Because when he drank he usually yelled, or cried or hit her mother. At those times Ellie stayed in her room and prayed.

  One day Okey did a strange thing. He brought home a beagle. Her father couldn’t hunt because his right arm wasn’t strong enough to manage a rifle anymore. But there he was with a beagle he called Bullet.

  He made Bullet a house. Spent the whole weekend making it and didn’t even stop to take a drink.

  Then Bullet was tied up to his house, and he kept them all awake three nights in a row with his howling.

  Okey would not explain why he’d bought a hunting dog when he couldn’t hunt. He just sat on the porch with a bottle in his hand (he’d taken it up again) and looked at Bullet.

  Ellie was the only one of Okey’s children who took an interest in his pet. The older girls were not impressed by a dog.

  But Ellie, fair and quiet, liked the beagle and was interested in her father’s liking for it. And when Okey was sober, she’d sit with him on the porch and they’d talk about Bullet.

  Neither of them could remember later who mentioned it first, but somehow the subject of hunting came up one day, and, hardly knowing she was saying it, Ellie announced she wanted to learn how to hunt.

  Okey laughed long and hard. In fact, he had a little whiskey down his throat and nearly choked to death on it. Ellie slapped his back about fifty times.

  The next time they sat together, though, she said it again. And this time more firmly, for she’d given it some thought. And Okey set down his bottle and listened.

  He tested her. He set up some cans, showed her how to handle his rifle, then stepped back to watch. The first day she missed them all. The second day she hit one. The fifth day she hit four out of nine.

  So when she brought up hunting again, they fixed the date.

  They went out on a Saturday about five-thirty in the morning, just as the blackness was turning blue. Ellie was booted and flanneled like her father, and she had her own gun.

  Okey held his rifle under his left arm. They both knew he’d never be able to shoot it. But neither said anything.

  It was just getting light when they made the top of the mountains, their breaths coming fast and smoky cold. They each found a tree to lean against and the wait began.

  Bullet had traveled far away from them. He was after rabbit, they knew that much, and they were after squirrel. Okey told Ellie she might have half a chance of hitting a squirrel. Rabbit was out of the question.

  Ellie flexed her fingers and tried not to shiver. She was partly cold and partly scared, but mostly happy. For she was on a mountain with her father and it was dawn.

  Neither Okey nor Ellie expected a deer to come along. So neither was prepared when one did. But less than twenty feet away, stamping its front hoof in warning, suddenly stood a doe. Okey and Ellie looked across the trees at each other and froze themselves into the scenery.

  The doe did not catch their scent. And she could not see them unless they moved. But she sensed something was odd, for she stamped again. Then moved closer.

  Ellie looked at the animal. She knew that if she shot a deer, doe or buck, her father would never stop bragging about it. “First time out and she got a deer.” She knew it would be so.

  The doe was nearing her tree and she knew if she were quick about it, she could get that deer. She knew it would be easier than shooting a squirrel off a tree limb. She could kill that deer.

  But she did not. The doe moved nearer; it was a big one, and its large brown eyes watched for movement. They found it. Ellie raised her arm. And she waved.

  The deer snorted hard and turned. It was so quickly gone that Ellie could not be sure in which direction it headed.

  “Godamighty!” she heard Okey yell. She knew he might be mad enough to shoot her, if he could hold onto his rifle. She heard his crashing across the ground.

  “Now wasn’t that,” Okey gasped as he reached her tree, “wasn’t that the prettiest thing you ever seen?”

  Ellie hesitated, wondering, and then she grinned wide.

  “The prettiest,” she answered.

  And they turned together and went quickly down the mountain to find Bullet and go on home.

  Evening

  ELLIE WISHED FOR ONE THING: A ROOM OF HER OWN. She had to share a bedroom with her sisters Linda and Martha, while Eunice and Wanda had another room for themselves. Ellie had one skinny bed, one skinny piece of wall for her pictures and two of the drawers in the bureau.

  It was not enough.

  She often imagined what it would be like if by some miracle her four sisters disappeared. She and Okey would go shopping for wallpaper for her room. They would walk into the paint and wallpaper store:

  ‘Okay, darlin’. See what catches your eye.” (Okey would call her “darlin’,” Ellie figured, if the other girls vanished.)

  Ellie imagined hundreds of rolls of wallpaper on display, each with a little piece pulled down from the roll for a good look.

  Ellie would walk among them all.

&n
bsp; “Daddy, do you think I’m daisies? Or maybe rainbows?”

  Okey would shake his head and laugh.

  “Just get what you want, darlin’.”

  Ellie would look slowly and carefully at each of the hundreds of rolls. Which design suited her best? Okey would patiently sit in one of the store’s chairs, his legs crossed, and wait.

  Then Ellie would find the right paper. She’d pick up the roll and head toward Okey, smiling.

  And in the evening, she would fall asleep in her own bedroom, surrounded by a wall full of owls—barn owls, snowy owls, mother owls, baby owls—and beneath the ruffled canopy of her big bed, she would dream.

  This is what Ellie thought about as she lay awake in her skinny bed each night, surrounded by sisters who sneezed, grunted, ground their teeth and snored. To have her own room.

  She would have liked a little lamp, too. There was just one overhead light in the bedroom, since Okey had said they couldn’t afford to put a lamp beside “every blame bed” in the house.

  The overhead light made Ellie’s eyes hurt.

  And she would have liked a bedspread with roses. She had seen one in a Sears catalog once. It had roses about the size of her hand all over the spread, and there were little red satin ribbons on the bottom corners.

  Ellie wondered what kind of girl she would be if she had these things. She lay in bed at night, beneath her plain blue bedspread covered with lint balls, and hugged her pillow as she thought about it.

  Owls on the walls, roses on the canopy bed, a pretty little lamp and Okey calling her “darlin””

  At the Supper Table

  AT EXACTLY FIVE O’CLOCK EVERY DAY, ELLIE’s MOTHER had supper on the table. They had exactly forty minutes to eat and twenty minutes to wash the dishes before “The Channel 4 News” came on. Okey never missed the news unless he was in bed recovering from a drinking bout the night before. Even those evenings, he sometimes staggered out to lie on the couch while Dick Strange gave the report and then staggered back into bed when it was over.

  When Ellie was small, suppertime had been the best part of being a Farley. That was when Okey was still working. They had supper late then, almost seven, to give him time to come home from the mine and wash up. Ellie’s mother would be frying some pork chops at the stove, Eunice would be cutting up potatoes, Martha would be setting the table, Wanda and Linda would be bickering over who washed dishes last and Ellie would be hiding under the kitchen table, beneath the heavy brown cloth, smelling and listening and waiting for Okey.

  It was hard on them all when those days ended. Hard in different ways for each of them. But hardest for Ellie. For she just hadn’t had the time the other girls had had to know that kind of suppertime before it all stopped. And it seemed just as she had crawled out from under the table to become part of it all, Okey got hurt and the Farley family, the one she had known, was gone.

  And so now suppertime was a somber affair. No one came home for dinner. They were all already there. No worker to come through the door tired and dirty and hungry. By the time supper was put on the table, the seven of them had been in the house together a good two hours, usually, with little left to say to each other. Or if one of them had thought of something to tell, it was usually forgotten by five o’clock. Having an outsider (Okey, when he was working) at the table had opened them up to talk. But now there was no outsider, and they all felt too much the heaviness of being alike.

  And so the talk at the table was of more practical matters. “Pass me some of them beans, Linda,” or, “I don’t know about that beef Mr. Facemire is raising—this stuff’s pretty tough,” and such as that.

  It seemed also to Ellie that as her sisters grew older, they grew even quieter at suppertime. Ellie wondered if each of them had some large secret spreading out inside her body which had to be held tightly from five o’clock to six. Now that her sisters had all turned into teen-agers, Ellie wondered how much they knew about important things and how much they were unwilling to tell her, only eleven. Eunice, the oldest, and Wanda, the next, sometimes gave each other a look over the mashed potatoes, and Ellie never missed it. It usually followed some remark Okey had made.

  So there were the silence and the secrets of four teen-age girls at the supper table.

  Ellie’s mother had always been quiet. She was a nervous woman with a nervous laugh, and though she had been welcoming with her warm arms when the girls were all small, she had withdrawn those arms more and more as the girls grew. Now Ellie couldn’t remember the last time she had been hugged by her mother. And she saw, when she looked at her, a woman with a thin, set mouth and a wall around her. Okey sometimes broke through that wall when he was drunk and gave her a hard knock on the shoulder. But mostly the wall was there and solid.

  After Okey got Bullet, though, the supper table changed some. First, there started some talk between Ellie and him about the dog and about the hunting over on this mountain or that ridge. Ellie loved this talk with Okey in spite of the food and her silent sisters. She actually began to look forward to suppertime and during the day thought of things she could bring up with Okey about the dog or hunting.

  And Bullet affected the way the meal ended, too. They all gave the dog table scraps, so when they finished and began scraping the plates over the scrap bowl, there was some talk among them of Bullet’s treats:

  “Bullet sure better be thankful for this chunk of fat I saved him.”

  “You think Bullet’11 eat these greens?”

  “I swear, that dog eats better than most people.”

  And saying these things, talking, finally, to each other, they all left the table feeling that it had been a good meal—and that there had been a lot of talk among them, after all.

  They all watched “The Channel 4 News” together then, and though the program bored Ellie and probably her sisters, it was worth sitting through to hold that warm feeling that had come from filling Bullet’s scrap bowl together.

  Winter

  Uncle Joe

  ELLIE’S UNCLE JOE WAS A TALL YOUNG MAN WITH blond hair and blue eyes. He was the one who told Ellie her parents found her under a big rock in the hog lot.

  Ellie thought the world of her Uncle Joe.

  When he graduated from Monroe County High School the spring before, Joe had joined the Air Force. He left home, promising Ellie and her sisters he would send them things from far-off countries. After he had been gone a while, he sent them a picture of himself wearing a jacket with a little fur collar and a cap with funny fur earflaps. Ellie got permission to borrow it for a day and she took it to school with her to brag.

  Ellie sometimes liked to call Joe her big brother. But never aloud.

  It was when she was walking home from the grocery with her sisters one afternoon in July that Ellie had seen both Okey and her mother sitting on the front steps together. And talking. With each other. Okey wasn’t drinking and her mother wasn’t crying. They were just talking together like normal people and it had made Ellie positive something was really wrong.

  “What’s wrong?” she yelled at them before she even came in the yard. They just looked back at her and the other girls and waited for them to get to the house.

  “Well?” Ellie asked when they’d reached it.

  Okey had looked at her with his head cocked to one side. “Well, Miss Smarty, what makes you figure there’s something wrong?”

  “You just look it, that’s all,” she had answered.

  “Well, fact is,” said Okey, gazing directly at her as the other girls climbed on up the steps, “they’re shipping your Uncle Joe into a pretty bad place.”

  “Bad?” echoed Ellie.

  “Where there’s a war going on.”

  “War?”

  “Girl, would you stop repeating me? You heard me.”

  Martha asked if Joe would likely get killed.

  “Killed?” Ellie had nearly shouted. Everyone looked at her in disgust. She just couldn’t talk in sentences.

  “You mean, they’re shoo
ting at our soldiers there? Like a real war?” There. That had made sense.

  Okey looked out past Ellie and all of them.

  “Hell, I don’t know what a real war is,” he had answered.

  They had to wait a long time for letters from Joe after he went to the war. Sometimes he’d send them a picture. He had grown a beard. And in one picture, he was holding a board on which sat a live (so he said) scorpion.

  Ellie would lie awake at night and be afraid for him. She’d beg God not to let him be shot. Or if he had to get shot, then to let the bullet hit his arm or his foot.

  At school in the fall she had told her friends about her uncle who’d gone to war.

  One boy told her what his father said about the war. He told her his father said it was stupid. That soldiers were dying for nothing. That it wasn’t even a real war. The boy told Ellie that it must mean her uncle was not a real soldier.

  Ellie shoved him hard into the wall. And she called him one of Okey’s best cuss words. The boy was so surprised he didn’t even fight back—just stared at her with his mouth hanging open.

  It seemed, after that, the time would never pass quickly enough until Joe came home. Ellie missed him, but more than that, she wanted him to tell her that he had been a real soldier.

  And finally, one afternoon in December when they were nearly snowed in, Joe walked in on them all. He had on his blue uniform and his beard was gone. He seemed a foot taller. And to Ellie, he seemed as old as Okey.

  In the night he made fudge in the skillet the way he used to and poured it into a buttered plate to cool. They all sat around the kitchen table, talking. Okey would not talk of the war. Joe would not talk of the war. So no one did.

  But before she could sleep, Ellie had to ask him. He was sitting alone in the living room, watching the late news after everyone had gone to bed. All the lamps were off and only the television lit the room, making it blink black and white like the set.

  Ellie tiptoed to the doorway. Joe sat on the couch, his long legs sprawled in front of him, and listened to the latest report of soldiers dead. The walls blinked and his face, too, went black, white, black, white, as the pictures crossed the television screen.