Ghost Girl

By Delia Ray

Eleven-year-old April Sloane has never set foot in a school before, and now that President Hoover and his wife are building a one-room schoolhouse in the hollow of the Blue Ridge Mountains where April lives, she is eager to attend it. But these are the Depression years, and Mama, who has been grieving ever since the accidental death of her seven-year-old son, wants April to stay home and do the chores around their dilapidated farm. With her grandmother's intercession, April is grudgingly allowed to go. The kind teacher encourages her apt pupil, who finds a new world opening up to her. But at home, April cannot repair the relationship with her mother, and worse, her mother overhears the dark secret April confesses to her teacher regarding the true cause of her brother's death, for which April feels responsible. The author has used her own experience growing up in a rural area of northern Virginia to create the vivid characters and authentic dialogue and background detail that characterize this finely honed debut novel. She has based the one-room schoolhouse on papers in the Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, which include letters between the White House and the young teacher who taught at the school.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 7, 2016
• ISBN: 9780547533650

Delia Ray

Delia Ray's novel GHOST GIRL: A BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAIN STORY has been nominated on state lists in Oklahoma, Kansas, South Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, and New Hampshire. Ms. Ray is also the author of three young-adult nonfiction books about American history. Her novel SINGING HANDS is based on her mother's experiences growing up as a hearing child with deaf parents. Ms. Ray lives with her family in Iowa City, Iowa.

Book preview

One

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’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

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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 handbag 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

Reviews for Ghost Girl

[gi142984 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book takes place during the great depression when Hebert Hoover was president. A girl name April is a hard working young girl who does nothing more than do chores for her mother. Living in the Blue Ridge Mountains is what all the families do; work just to make it. President Hoover decided to build a school for the children of Blue Ridge and April is just ecstatic about attending, only if she is allowed. Her mother is not all for the idea since her brother’s death her mother prefers her home doing chores but April’s grandmother Aunt Birdie knows better for April. April finds a friend in their new teacher Miss Vest but the relationship with her mother grows dark after her mother hears the truth of death of April’s brother. The book just describes the lifestyle of people during the depression and the adversities a young girl had to over come. I enjoyed reading this book it was very touching. I story line was so surprising I just didn’t know what was going to happen. The fact this was based on a true story just makes it that much more interesting. The author was so descriptive and I could just see the images in my head as I read. This would be a great book to have students read when discussion the great depression and how children then had to live. Students could also draw a scene from the story to show what they believed to see when reading.