Belle Prater's Boy by Ruth White Page A

a real fancy ruffled red apron, red sandals, and red ribbons in my hair. Everybody oooed and ahhed over me. Woodrow was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, black pants, and a red bow tie, and he took his job very seriously. He wouldn’t let anybody run out of anything.
    There were about fifty women there, counting Mama and Granny and the five eighteen-year-old debutantes who were coming out that year. That meant they were now considered young women of marriageable age and could be included in all the right gatherings with the other women who had a certain social standing in town. It was a tradition that went way back, all the way across the water to the old countries. Since Coal Station was a mining town, I asked Mama one time how come none of the miners’ daughters were ever invited to be a debutante. Mama just looked at me and said, “When you’re a debutante yourself, you’ll understand.”
    I figured I wouldn’t be a debutante if I could help it, but to say that to Mama would be like saying I didn’t want to live past the age of eighteen.
    Woodrow was immediately smitten with the debutantes, so I let him serve them. They really were pretty and smelled almost as good as the gardenias. They were all wearing sweet sundresses in pastel colors, with crinolines underneath, high heels, summer hats, and white gloves, which they very carefully removed before
eating the delectables Woodrow spread before them. They fussed over Woodrow and called him “darling” and “dearest” and “precious,” which were not your routine Coal Station words. Woodrow soaked them up like sunshine.
    Mrs. Osborne, Buzz’s mama, was a jolly, wee woman, who favored Mammy Yokum in Li’l Abner the way she jerked herself around like a puppet and tended to wrap her arms and legs around her own self, and the way she smoked cigarettes one after the other. Buzz, her oldest boy, was her favorite topic of conversation; whether anybody was listening or not made no difference to her.
    â€œHe had such a case of the scratchies a while back,” she said at one point. “I don’t know if it was poison ivy or chiggers—or maybe even the itch. He never would let me see it.”
    Woodrow and I looked at each other with perfectly straight faces.
    Mrs. Cooper, the principal’s wife, who had grabbed Woodrow under the chin that first day at church, said, “It’s no tellin’ what a child might pick up going to school with those hillbillies.”
    She complimented me nearly to death, patting me on the head like I was a poodle, and called Woodrow Angel Face till I thought he would puke on her if she said it again. But when Mama was far enough away, and seeing to the needs of her guests, Mrs. Cooper
leaned over casually and said to Woodrow, “What do you hear from your mama, boy?”
    Woodrow’s face flushed.
    Mrs. Cooper would never have said a thing like that in front of my mama, Love Ball Dotson, sister to Belle Prater and leader of Coal Station’s social set.
    â€œNothin’,” Woodrow mumbled, and tried to move on.
    â€œAnd I doubt you ever will!” she called after him. “She was an impulsive thing! Hard to tell what she’s done this time!”
    The debutantes who were standing nearby looked away and pretended they didn’t hear or see, but they did. And Woodrow knew they did.
    I watched him walk toward Mama’s kitchen.
    â€œShe called me a cow, you know,” Mrs. Cooper said to me.
    â€œWho did?” I said.
    I was thinking to myself I would never insult a cow in that manner, but I didn’t say such a thing.
    â€œBelle Ball!” Mrs. Cooper went on. “She was in the ninth grade and I was her English teacher. She said it right in front of Mr. Cooper. That was before we were married. I’ll never forget it. And I said to myself then and there, ‘This girl will never amount to a hill of beans!’ And you see? I