Me and My Baby View the Eclipse

Author:Lee Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

It rained that morning, a cold drizzle that continued without letup for the next two days. About three-quarters of the campers left after First Session, including everybody I liked. Margaret Applewhite stayed. My last vision of the departing campers was a rainy blur of waving hands as the big yellow buses pulled out, headed for the train station and the airport. All the girls were singing at the top of their lungs, and their voices seemed to linger in the air long after they were gone. Then came a day and a half of waiting around for the Second Session campers to arrive, a day and a half in which nobody talked to me much, and the counselors were busy doing things like counting the rifle shells. So I became invisible again, free to wander about in the rain, free to pray without ceasing.

Finally the new campers arrived, and I brightened somewhat at the chance to be an Old Girl, to show the others the ropes and teach them the words to the songs. My New Best Friend was Anne Roper, from Lexington, Kentucky. She wasn’t as good as Shelley, but she was the best I could do, I felt, considering what I had to pick from. Anne Roper was okay.

But my new counselor was very weird. She read aloud to us each day at rest hour from a big book named The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand. Without asking our parents, she pierced all our ears. Even this ear-piercing did not bring my spirits up to the level of First Session, however. For one thing, it never stopped raining. It rained and rained and rained. First, we couldn’t go swimming—the river was too high, too cold, too fast. We couldn’t go canoeing either. The tennis courts looked like lakes. The horses, along with the riding counselors, stayed in their barn. About all we could do was arts and crafts and Skits, which got old fast. Lots of girls got homesick. They cried during “Taps.”

I cried then and at other odd times too, such as when I walked up to breakfast through the constant mist that came up now from the river, or at church. I was widely thought to be homesick. To cheer me up, my weird counselor gave me a special pair of her own earrings, little silver hoops with turquoise chips in them, made by Navajos.

Then I got bronchitis. I developed a deep, thousand-year-old Little Match Girl cough that started way down in my knees. Because of this cough, I was allowed to call my mother, and to my surprise, I found myself asking to come home. But Mama said no. She said,

We always finish what we start, Karen.

So that was that. I was taken into town for a penicillin shot, and started getting better. The sun came out too.

But because I still had such a bad cough, I did not have to participate in the all-camp Game Day held during the third week of Second Session.

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