Ghost Girl Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  1929

  One

  Two

  Three

  1930

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  1932

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2003 by Delia Ray

  All rights reserved. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Clarion Books, an imprint of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2003.

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Cover art © by Julia Denos

  Cover design by Whitney Leader-Picone

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Ray, Delia.

  Ghost girl : a Blue Ridge Mountain story / by Delia Ray.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Eleven-year-old April is delighted when President and Mrs. Hoover build a school near her Madison County, Virginia, home, but her family’s poverty, grief over the accidental death of her brother, and other problems may mean that April can never learn to read from the wonderful teacher, Miss Vest.

  [1. Schools—Fiction. 2. Teachers—Fiction. 3. Grief—Fiction. 4. Hoover, Herbert, 1874–1964—Fiction. 5. Hoover, Lou Henry, 1874–1944—Fiction. 6. Virginia—History—20th century—Fiction. 7. Skyline Drive (Va.)—History—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.R2101315Gh 2003

  [Fic]—dc21

  2003004 1 1 5

  ISBN: 978-0-618-33377-6 hardcover

  ISBN: 978-0-544-70633-0 paperback

  eISBN 978-0-547-53365-0

  v1.0616

  For Dad

  a true mountain man in deed and spirit

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the staff at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, for patiently guiding me through their fascinating collection of Hoover letters, diaries, and photographs. I am grateful to George Nash for reviewing my manuscript and sharing his extensive knowledge about the Hoover family. During the initial stages of this project, Darwin Lambert and the staff at the Shenandoah National Park Archives provided valuable answers to my questions about the park’s history. I also owe a great deal of thanks to the sons of Christine Vest Witcofski—Robert and Richard Witcofski—who so graciously provided details and information about their mother’s life.

  Thanks to my wonderful writing group—Terri Gullickson, Carolyn Lieberg, Jennifer Reinhardt, Julie Wasson, and Adeline Hooper Samuels—for generously giving your talents and support. And finally, thank you again to my faithful team of undercover editors—Matt, Caroline, Susanna, Lily Howard, and especially Bobby Ray—for serving as a constant source of inspiration, encouragement, and writing wisdom.

  One

  ’Course I never believed Dewey Jessup when he said he had met the president of the United States. Dewey was always telling tales about one thing or another—about his pa being the best preacher in the whole Blue Ridge. About how fast he could run, how far he could spit.

  But there he was, standing like a hickory stump in my way, boasting about how he had just spent the afternoon with President Herbert Hoover, how he got to see every little hidey-hole of Camp Rapidan, the president’s new summer place down the mountain.

  “I brung him a baby possum for his birthday,” Dewey told me.

  I looked sideways at his dusty feet and worn-out overalls. “You brung the president a possum?”

  “Yep,” he said, poking his chest out. “Pa told me he heard it was Mr. Hoover’s birthday and that he was at Camp Rapidan to go fishing. So I caught a little bitty possum hiding up under our shed. Then I throwed him in a gunnysack, went right over there, and gave that possum to the president.”

  “What about all them marines they got watching the place?” I asked. “They just let you walk right past?”

  Dewey was ready with his answer. “None of them marines even seen me,” he bragged. “I snuck through the woods, round the back way. Pretty soon I was settin’ on their settin’ porch, with my feet up, eating on a big piece of layer cake.”

  “Huh” was all I said. I pushed by him. Mama wanted me to go fetch some snap beans from Aunt Birdy’s garden and get back before dark, so I had to hurry. Night always came an hour early to our hollow over on Doubletop Mountain.

  “Don’t you want to know what-all me and the president talked about?” Dewey asked. He stuck right to me like a mayfly, but I never even turned my head.

  “Miz Hoover asked where me and all the kids round here go to school. You should have seen her face when I said there weren’t no school to go to. She turned just as white as your hair, April Sloane.”

  I kept marching straight up the trail, holding tight to Mama’s best oak-split basket. Dewey and his friends were always teasing me about my towhead and my light eyes and my skinny arms. They called me ghost girl.

  “Better watch out, ghost girl!” they’d holler. “We can see right through you!”

  Dewey was still following, practically breathing down my back. “Miz Hoover says since we don’t have a school, the president and her might just have to see about getting us one.”

  I stopped cold, then turned around real slow. “What did you say?” I asked.

  A big grin spread out over Dewey’s wide face. “I said, the Hoovers say they’re gonna build us a school.”

  “You’re lying again, Dewey Jessup,” I whispered.

  His grin turned sour. “That so?” He smirked at me and reached down into the pocket of his overalls. “If I’m lying, ghost girl, then where’d I get this?” He waved something green at me.

  It was cash—a five-dollar bill. I had seen a five-dollar bill only a few times before—hiding down in Mama’s money jar, when Daddy had steady work at the tannery.

  I was already halfway to Aunt Birdy’s place, and Dewey was still crowing. “Five dollars!” he hollered after me. “President Hoover give me five dollars for that little bitty possum!”

  I first heard the hammers a couple months later when I was out hunting ginseng root. Kneeling there in the hickory shadows, in the finest patch of sang I had come across all October, I felt a chill run up my neck. A little voice breezed through my head. “He weren’t lying after all,” it said. “He weren’t lying after all.”

  Right away, I wanted to track down the pounding of those hammers and make sure it was true—that we were getting our very own school—but I knew Mama would be hot if I came home without my sang sack full. She was planning on drying the roots and fetching a good price for them down at Taggart’s store. Folks with rheumatism would pay their last dime for a chance to brew the ginseng into tea and ease the ache in their joints. So I grabbed up my sang stick and went back to digging the spidery roots out of the ground, trying to push the echo of those hammers out of my head.

  It wasn’t until after we’d had a few hard frosts that I managed to get away from chores long enough to see for myself what was happening. I found the workers up on the ridge above Aunt Birdy’s place. They had already laid down
a layer of stone, and a frame of timbers was rising high up over it, higher than any cabin or barn I’d ever seen. I reckoned that if you stood on the roof you’d be able to see all the way over our rolling mountains—over Fork Mountain and Doubletop and Stony—maybe all the way to Criglersville.

  I climbed a little closer and saw that Preacher Jessup, Dewey’s pa, was there, working alongside the other men. Then, the next thing I knew, Dewey himself was coming up over the ridge, bringing his daddy supper in a tin pail. He was whistling, like always. And like always, I knew the tune right off.

  Whistling was one of the reasons I despised Dewey Jessup. He didn’t just whistle any old songs. They were my songs—ones that Mama and Daddy and Riley and I had listened to over and over on our Victrola.

  I’ll never forget the day when Daddy brought the Victrola home in the back of the wagon. At first Mama was angry when she heard he’d traded a month’s work down in the valley for a phonograph. But when Daddy cranked the handle and the first notes of sweet music filled up our cabin, even Mama had to smile.

  That was all before my little brother died and Mama made Daddy sell the Victrola and our stack of records to the Jessups because they reminded her of Riley and because we needed the extra money. Now that smooth red mahogany case with the turntable inside was sitting in Dewey’s front room, and every day he walked around whistling the tunes that rightly belonged to me.

  Before Dewey saw me, I scooted behind a pile of lumber and watched him through a chink in the boards. While the workmen sat down to eat their supper, he walked around the building two or three times with his chest pushed out farther than ever. I smiled to myself, thinking about what my Aunt Birdy would say—“just a backyard goose struttin’ like a front-lawn peacock.”

  I was feeling antsy and getting ready to sneak off when I heard a low rumbling sound that made my stomach flip-flop. I peeked through the boards again, and pulling up in front of me was a shiny black automobile, long and sleek as a bull snake. The workmen were just as shocked as I was. They froze in the middle of chewing, with biscuits and drumsticks halfway up to their faces.

  The car rolled to a stop, and a man in a black suit hopped out of the driver’s seat. He hurried around to open up the back door, and then out stepped two city ladies bundled up in thick coats with fur collars. I could almost hear the squeak of Dewey’s jaw dropping open.

  One of the women marched right up to all those fellows staring and introduced herself as Miss Fesler, personal secretary to Lou Henry Hoover. She shook hands with a tall man, who said he was the building foreman, and then with Preacher Jessup. I was so anxious to hear what they were talking about, I almost forgot to stay hunkered down behind my woodpile.

  “That’s right,” the woman was saying. She spoke fast, with a voice full of good manners. “We drove down from Washington just this morning. The first lady wanted me to check on the progress of the school and bring along one of our candidates for the teaching position here.”

  The other woman stepped forward to shake hands. “How do you do?” she said. “I’m Christine Vest.” Preacher Jessup bobbed his head hello. I could see Dewey sliding closer, trying to get noticed.

  “Mrs. Hoover wanted Miss Vest to come for a visit,” the secretary went on, “so she could see what she might be getting into.” She gave a tinkly little laugh. “She might head straight back home after the drive this morning. With the condition of these roads up here, sometimes those hundred miles from Washington seem more like a thousand.”

  Christine Vest. The sound of her name was so clean and crisp, I couldn’t help whispering it back to myself. She was pretty, too, with big, soft deer eyes and wavy brown hair tucked up under a hat with a tiny red feather peeking out the side.

  “We were hoping you could take us on a little tour of the building site,” Mrs. Hoover’s secretary said to the foreman. “I’d like to give Miss Vest a better idea of what the schoolhouse will look like once it’s finished.”

  I strained to hear more, but soon they were drifting away and I could make out only snatches of talk about the classroom and electric lights and the adjoining teacher’s quarters, about the finest this and the best of that. My legs were aching with cold and so much squatting. If it hadn’t been for Dewey standing a stone’s skip away, gawking at that long black car with the driver sitting inside, I would have tried to make a run for Aunt Birdy’s.

  But then I saw Miss Vest, the teacher lady, heading toward me, wandering over to take in the view. She stopped right alongside my lumber pile, close enough for me to hear her sigh when she looked out over the mountainside. When I calmed myself enough to peek out again, she was biting her lip and pulling her fur collar tighter around her neck. I saw her frown down at her high-heel shoes sinking into the red clay.

  I wondered if what the secretary said was true, if Miss Vest might want to head straight home after seeing our mountains. I glanced over my shoulder at the valley, and all of a sudden I saw things the way she might be seeing them. Everything was winter-brown and lonely looking, especially with all the dead chestnut trees standing like skeletons below.

  Before the blight came and started killing all the trees off, folks on the mountain used to pick up chestnuts by the bushel to sell down at Taggart’s. Mama said when she was a little girl, she could earn enough money from the nuts to buy all her family’s shoes plus sugar and coffee for the year. And like a lot of other men, Daddy worked at the tannery, where they used the acid from the chestnut bark to cure animal hides and turn them into leather.

  But then the blight hit and the tannery closed down. Daddy had to start taking odd jobs to make ends meet. By the time I was old enough to go chestnut hunting, nuts were hard to come by and I was used to seeing whole forests of dying trees. Sometimes at night the mountain looked near haunted, with all those bare, towering trunks shining silver under the moon.

  Pretty soon people started calling the chestnuts ghost trees, just like they took to calling me ghost girl right about the time my little brother, Riley, passed on. But I never used that name—ghost tree—myself. I knew there was life still hiding way down inside those old chestnut trees.

  I was so sad and lost in thinking about the chestnuts and Riley and our old Victrola that I didn’t even notice that Miss Vest had turned and was staring straight at me. My white hair must have caught her eye. She took a step closer and smiled. I stared back for a second, soaking up her sweet face. But then I saw Dewey coming, looking like he had just smelled something rotten.

  So I tore out of there, with the shoestrings on my boots flapping, and I ran off down the mountain, leaving Dewey and Miss Christine Vest gazing after me.

  Two

  When I got home to Doubletop, Mama was standing out back at the battling bench, pounding dirt out of Daddy’s overalls. Even with the cold bite in the air, I could see that her face was hot and shiny with all the pounding and standing over the steaming wash pot. “Shoot,” I whispered to myself, knowing I was already in trouble. Ever since I turned eleven back in April, the washing had been left to me. But now Mama was near halfway through the basket of dirty clothes sitting at her feet.

  Mama hardly looked up when I came running around the side of the cabin. Still, I could see her mouth tightening up into a hard little line—the same one that seemed to have been marking her face like a scar for the past year. I hurried back and forth, throwing more kindling into the fire under the big iron wash pot.

  Pretty soon Mama hoisted Daddy’s wet overalls into the pot. I grabbed up the paddle and gave them a stir in the boiling water and lye soap. “Where you been all morning?” she finally asked.

  I was still trying to get my breath back from running so far. “I been up to where they’re building the new schoolhouse, Mama,” I said, panting. “And wait till you hear. There was two ladies up there from Washington, D.C. One of ’em might be the new teacher for President Hoover’s school, if she decides to come. And you should have seen her, Mama. She was wearing stockings and high-heel shoes with a han
dbag to match and—”

  Mama cut me off with her look, staring at me like I was addled. “What are you thinking about, April? You think when those Hoovers finish building that schoolhouse that me and your daddy are just gonna let you traipse up there for lessons all day long?”

  I was too surprised to answer. Mama sighed and wiped a lock of sweaty hair off her forehead with the back of her hand. “Just look at this place,” she said. I watched her glancing round at the pile of dirty clothes, the chickens waiting to be fed, the door of the springhouse hanging off its hinges.

  “You’re the only help I got now,” Mama went on in a sagging voice. “I can’t be sending you off to spend all your time with some lady in stockings and high heels. So you best just clear that idea right out of your head.” Then she wiped her hands on her apron and headed inside, letting the screen door bang shut behind her.

  There was no use running after her trying to argue. Mama never listened. All I could do was swallow down my words and add a few tears to the water boiling away in the wash pot.

  I ended up where I always did when some worry or another kept chewing at me. I ended up at Aunt Birdy’s. As soon as she opened the door of her little clapboard house, I held out the stone I had been saving for her. She plucked it out of my hand, then raised it up to a streak of sunlight pouring through the tangle of old wisteria vines.

  “I found it up at the falls,” I told her.

  Aunt Birdy’s face crinkled into a smile. “Look a’there,” she marveled. “Looks like one of them scairdy little brook trout that nobody can ever get their hands on.”

  “You think it’s good enough for your porch railing, Aunt Birdy?”

  “Well, let’s see how she shines up,” she said, and pulled her polishing rag and tin of beeswax from her sweater pocket. Even though a cold breeze was rustling through the vines, she stepped out on the porch and settled herself down in her old cane rocker.