“How is she?” he whispered.
I stepped onto the porch, shutting the screen door behind me. “She’s going to have a reminder of tonight for the rest of her life, I’m afraid,” I said, running my finger down my own cheek.
He looked at me grimly. “In more ways than one, most likely.” He nodded toward the steps. “Wanna sit?” he asked. “You can see the moon from here.”
I sat down near him on the top step. “Have you ever been through anything like this?” I asked. “What happened tonight?”
He shrugged. “A few times. This was just a skirmish in comparison to some others I’ve been through,” he said. “This was nothing really. Poor DeeDee got the brunt of it.”
“I think they were aiming at me.”
He nodded. “They don’t like seeing white and Black together, uh-uh. That taps into something primal in them. Sets them off.”
I sighed. Looked over at him. “Are we … the white students … are we just making things worse?”
“What do you think?”
I looked down the road toward the raggedy little house where he was staying. The way the moonlight settled on the roof made it look almost pretty, like old silver. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe in some ways. But … I think Black people need to know that a lot of us are on their side.”
For the longest time, he said nothing. The sound of the cicadas rose and fell in the fields and trees.
“Why are you doing this, Ellie?” he asked finally. “It’s got to be costing you. Your father last night…” He shook his head. “That was one angry man. I mean, he was holding it all in, I could tell, but I could still see the sparks flying off him.”
“He’s a really good person,” I said. “He’s just worried about me, that’s all.”
“So why?” he pressed. “Why are you here?”
I thought of Aunt Carol and how she influenced me with her passion and commitment, but I knew my love and admiration for her was not the complete answer to Win’s question, and tears started running down my cheeks before I even knew they were coming. I turned my head away from Win, but he knew. The moonlight wouldn’t let me hide anything tonight.
He let me cry for a while before he asked, “You going to tell me what’s got you like this?”
I’d never told a soul the truth about Mattie, but suddenly I knew I had to. I couldn’t carry it around with me any longer, and I trusted Win. I swallowed hard. Brushed the tears away, then smoothed my hands over the hem of my skirt, my fingers trembling.
“When I was little, we had a maid,” I said, glancing at him before focusing on the way the moonlight played on the cornfield across the road. “Her name was Louise. I didn’t have many friends back then. I was extremely shy and we lived—still live—on this country road not close to the other kids in my school. I wanted to fit in with the popular girls, but I just didn’t. So, whenever school was closed for a holiday, Louise would bring her daughter, Mattie, with her to our house. I knew Mattie was … well, I was old enough to understand she was slow. Later I realized she was mildly mentally retarded, but all I knew then was that I loved playing with her. She was fun. So inventive—she didn’t seem to see limitations, you know?” I looked at him and he nodded as if he understood. “And she was always so positive. It was like she didn’t know she was different.” My throat tightened, but I smiled at the memory of Mattie trying to learn to ride my bike on our dirt road. Mattie trying to run through the kudzu. “I really loved her.” I glanced at Win again. His face was unreadable. “There was a lake by our house,” I said. “Little Heaven Lake. Mattie and I would fish in it and catch absolutely nothing.” I chuckled to myself. “I don’t think there was anything in that lake to catch. But it was just fun, being with her. She didn’t care that I was shy.” I knotted my hands together in my lap until they hurt. “So, sometimes in winter, the lake would freeze. Not often. I haven’t seen it frozen in years, but that year—I was eleven—it froze, and some kids would skate on it. Just on their shoes. Nobody had skates in Round Hill. This was during the Christmas holiday, so Mattie came to our house with Louise, and she and I went to the lake to play, and these two very popular girls from my school were there. They looked down their noses at Mattie and me but then they called me over to skate with them. To hold hands and spin around, that sort of thing. I was so thrilled they asked me. I wanted to ask Mattie to join us, but one of them said flat out, ‘Don’t call that … colored retard over here.’” Of course, she hadn’t said “colored” and I was sure Win knew I was cleaning up the language for his sake. “I hate myself for this, Win,” I said. “I hate myself for every part of it. And I’ve never told anyone before and I don’t know why I’m telling you. I just—”
“Go on,” he said.
“The girls … the popular girls wanted to go to one of their houses and they asked me to come. I couldn’t believe they were actually inviting me. But I looked over at Mattie and she was skating toward the thin ice and I called to her to say I was leaving for a little while and to stay on the thicker ice, and she nodded, and then I just left with the girls. We walked toward one of their houses, but I really couldn’t hear a thing they were saying because my mind was back on Mattie. I kept picturing how she must’ve felt, watching me walk off with other friends when I’d come to the lake with her. And I wasn’t sure she understood what I meant about staying off the thin ice. So finally I stopped walking and I told the girls I had to go home. I ran back down the path to the lake and Mattie had fallen in the water. She was struggling to get out. She was already too exhausted to even call to me, and she grabbed on to the ice but it kept breaking. I laid down on the ice to try to pull her out. She was crying … I’d never seen her cry before … and her wet clothes were dragging her deeper. Then the ice gave out under me, too. I fell in. I grabbed on to Mattie and tried to get both of us to the bank. There was this old farmer who lived near the lake and he heard me shouting and came running. He saw me in the water, trying to pull Mattie to safety. He had a hoe and I was able to grab on and he pulled me out, but Mattie was under the water by then. She was gone.” My breath caught in my throat. Win was quiet. Waiting. “And the worst part,” I said, twisting my hands together in my lap, “was that the farmer told everyone how I risked my life trying to save this little colored girl. And it was written up in the paper. My mother still has the article. They called me the ‘heroic Round Hill girl.’”
I looked up at the sky, remembering how my mother cried when they gave Louise the news. “Louise left us soon after,” I said. “She was destroyed. She hugged me and kissed me and thanked me for trying to save her daughter.”
My tears started again and I rubbed them away with my hands. I wished Win would say something. Touch me. Rest a hand on my shoulder. Absolve me. But he was still as stone next to me. I looked over at him, wiping my eyes with my fingers. “It wasn’t really a conscious decision,” I said, “SCOPE. I wasn’t sitting around looking for an opportunity to do something good, but when I heard about it, I … it felt like a way to…”