WIDEMEADOWS: WHO SHALL WE BE TODAY? (A CONTINUING SERIES

Editor's note: This is a chapter from Jean Bell Mosley's book "Wide Meadows" that was first published in 1960.

Dad waves to us from the camp site where he is just putting the finishing touches on the rustic chairs, and we wave back, wondering what queer peasant that could be, for we are Helene and Sylvia, skipping across the greensward of our stage, deftly avoiding the crawdad holes and other impedimenta of a cow pasture.

Sometimes we were Hans Brinker and skated all the way down the river to school. Gabriel and Evangeline we did with much aplomb, and once we even did Moses, climbing to the very tiptop of Stono Mountain and scratching some of the Ten Commandments on the limestone outcroppings there. Lots of times we were Christian in Pilgrim's Progress, especially when there were hard chores to do.

The very thought that we could be anyone we wanted to gave us a great sense of freedom. We were not just two little girls on a remote hill farm. We moved in and out of the pages of history and literature as blithely as a bluebird flew from one tree to another.

Once we got into roles that called for the addressing of one another as "thee" and "thou," and we went about for weeks with those words on our tongues.

"What's the matter with those kids?" we heard Dad ask Mom.

"Shhh, leave them alone. It's good for a person to believe he can be anyone he wants to."

But there was one role we had difficulty with. We discovered that the day the train jumped the track over by the Fifteen Acre Field. Lou and I were hoeing corn there. She was Alma Gluck and I Caruso and we were rendering "Sourwood Mountain." We stopped our hoeing to wave to the engineer and passengers as they went flying by. But right in front of our shocked and horrified eyes, the center car jumped the track and such a crash and bang and general hullabaloo you never saw. We rushed over to get a closer view before running home with the news, taking ringside seats on top of the right-of-way fence. People stood around in little groups talking excitedly. The conductors were passing through the crowd telling them that no one was injured and nothing was damaged but that it would be about an hour before help would come, so to make themselves comfortable in the shade.

A woman with a little boy spied us sitting on the fence and came over to ask if we knew how far they were from Fredericktown.

"Twenty mile," Lou said.

"You little girls live around here?" the lady asked.

"Yes," Lou replied.

The little boy, dressed in velvet pants and white ruffled shirt kept staring at us without blinking an eye. We thought him awfully rude.

"How far away is your home?" the lady asked.

"Mile," Lou replied, examining her tied-up toe.

"You scared or something?" the lady asked Lou.

"Nope."

The boy continued to stare. Finally he began tugging at his mother's sleeve and they turned and walked away.

"Are they hillbillies, Mother?" we heard Fauntleroy ask.

"Shh," she cautioned, looking back to see if we had heard. "Yes, they're hillbillies, but don't let them hear you."

Lou and I turned questioning eyes upon each other. Then we rushed home to tell the news.

That night, as we were sitting on the porch watching the fireflies down in the meadow and listening to the whippoorwills along the creek, Lou asked, "Mom, what are hillbillies?"

"Well, they are just hill folks. They maybe live a little farther away from cities and towns than most folks. They mostly eat what they raise or find growing in the mountains. They live close to the earth and they don't like to owe money. They have a set of stories they pass on to their children, and a set of songs, too."

"Like what?"

"Oh, Barbara Allen,' Sourwood Mountain.'"

"We know those," I exclaimed.

"Why, of course," Mama says, then turning to Dad, she told him, "Wilson I had a letter from some folks interested in the camp site. They say they'll be along any day now.

The next morning when we got up, I asked, "Who we gonna be today?"

Lou thinks long and hard. "Let's be hillbillies."

So we try to be hillbillies. We don't know too much about these people, but we certainly have all the characteristics Mama described. We try and try to be hillbillies but we can find such little fun in it. What is there to do different from what we're doing? So we discard hillbillies and go on to the more glamorous Hansel and Gretel, Pocahontas and John Smith, and Rumpelstiltskin.

"Isn't it good to be able to be anyone you want to?" Lou asks.

"Yeah," I say, only faintly worried about the difficult role of the hillbillies.

"Do you want to try hillbillies again?" I ask the next day while we're sitting beside the road waiting for the mail carrier.

"Naw."

"Why not?"

"Aww, it's too easy. It's just like pretending to be a frog when you are a frog." "Then we are hillbillies?" I ask.

She shakes her head affirmatively.

"Well, good. I was beginning to doubt that we could be anyone we wanted to." "Let's be Ananias the Liar." she proposes. We'd just studied about him in Sunday school.

"Oh, I don't think we ought to," I said, alarmed.

"It's all right, just as long as we're pretendin'."

"Yeah, but maybe people won't know we're pretendin'."

"We can tell 'em later." I sit pondering about this while a car comes lumbering down the rough, rocky road. To our surprise, it stops in front of us.

"How far is it to the St. Francis River?" the driver asks.

"'Bout fifty miles," Lou says, and I clap my hand to my mouth in shock. We are exactly a half mile from the river now.

"You sure?"

"Yep," Lou vouches.

"Ever hear of a place called the Rooks Hole?" the man inquires.

"Never heard of it," Lou declares.

"Well, I'm a son-of-a-gun, I've been looking all over for it," the man says and lumbers on down the road that takes him back to town.

"How you going to tell him you were just pretendin'?" I ask Ananias.

Lou looks only faintly worried. The mail comes and we hurry back home. We are the Pony Express and Apaches are on our trail. Ananias has played his brief role.

"Will thee pass me the tomatoes?" Lou asks me at the supper table.

"Thou hast had more than I and there are only two slices left," I reply.

"Thee take one and I will take one," Lou offers.

"Thou first." I pass her the platter.

"I just can't understand it," Mom says.

"I can't either. Can't you kids talk like the rest of us?" Dad asks.

"No, I mean about the campers, Mom says. "They should have been here by now. You reckon they got lost?"

Ananias paused with a slice of tomato in mid-air. She turns slow eyes toward mine. "I tell you what," she says, appeasingly, "Let's play the Dutch Twins."