Read Online A Girl from Yamhill by Beverly Cleary - Free Book Online Page B

how fortunate I was to be unpitted by scars.
    Once more I was shoved out the door to go to school. By then I was hopelessly lost in reading. The class had been divided into three groups: Bluebirds, who found happiness in seats by the window; Redbirds, who sat in the middle seats; and Blackbirds, who sat by the blackboard, far from sunlight. I was not surprised to be a Blackbird.
    The worst part of the day was the reading circle, where the Blackbirds in turn had to read words from the despised and meaningless wordlists: “shad, shed, shod, shin, shun, shut, shot, ship, shop, shift, shell.”. We all feared and hated our turns at that circle of chairs in the front of the room as much as we dreaded trying to say the words on flash cards Miss Falb held up in front of the class. With luck, party or mamma , words I could read, were flashed at me. Oh, the relief!
    From a country child who had never known fear, I became a city child consumed by fear. A three-year-old boy named Bobby, whose divorced mother lived across the street, came to stay with us for a few months while his mother was away looking for work. A disturbed little boy who wet his bed, Bobby needed the love and attention that Mother gave. I felt left out, as if Mother did not have enough love to go around.
    An uppity Bluebird in the neighborhood made fun of me for naming my doll Fordson-Lafayette after a Yamhill neighbor’s tractor and the town where Great-grandfather Hawn had settled. Dolls were supposed to have nice names like Alice or Betty. Nobody named a doll after a tractor. When children discovered I still believed in Santa Claus, everyone laughed at me. I had never endured ridicule in Yamhill. When I asked Mother about Santa Claus, she smiled and admitted there was no such being. How was I to know, alone on a farm where I believed so muchthat Mother told me? I did not mind disillusion in Santa Claus, but I felt that Mother had made me the butt of other children’s derision.
    Fear was intensified by adult talk of a terrible earthquake in Japan, where the earth shook, buildings crumbled, and thousands of people were killed. What if an earthquake happened in Portland? Suddenly I did not want my father to work nights. I wanted him home, safe, after dark.
    And like the good little girl I struggled to be, I said my prayers at bedtime. “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake…” If I should die before I wake . The words suddenly were not just something I recited. They had meaning. I did not want to die like those poor people in Japan. If an earthquake came, I wanted Father there to save me. He could. I knew he could.
    I lay in bed, determined to stay awake until he came home. I could not die if my father were home. I lay as flat and as still as I could so Death would overlook me, or a Thing hiding under the bed would not know I was there. I fought sleep, praying for dawn, for the first twitter of a bird.
    I could not confess my terror. Mother had impressed upon me that I must never be afraid. If I told, she might love me even less than I felt she loved me since Bobby had come to live with us. When I did sleep, I frightened Mother bywalking in my sleep down the stairs and out the front door. She said the sound of a sleep-walking child was the most ghostly she could imagine, and she began to sleep lightly, listening as she slept.
    Meanwhile, at the bank, Father spent his nights quietly working with an unabridged dictionary on a contest to make the most words out of letters in a phrase I have now forgotten. He turned page after page of the big dictionary, writing thousands of words on tablets of paper, hours of labor that won him a Bee-Vac vacuum cleaner. He had expected a bigger prize—who else had such a big dictionary or such long nights for uninterrupted work? Mother said the Bee-Vac kept the rugs much cleaner than the carpet sweeper.
    Between my fear of falling asleep, and not eating