Mirage 2012
27
Up in their room, Geraldine ran the bath. The girls peeled off their suits and got into the tub together, something they hadn’t done in years. Geraldine sat on the toilet next to the tub, wrapped in a towel, watching them wring out washcloths over each other’s head. “Mom,” Mia asked, “was Herbert Hoover a bad president?” “Some people thought he was.” Mia lathered her sister’s hair with shampoo. “But was he?” Geraldine thought of a story she’d seen as she’d flipped through the Musings on the Boy, “Bert” Hoover book. She found it in her suitcase and read out to the girls the story told by Esker Thornock, a farmhand who boarded with the Hoovers after Herbert’s father died of heart failure when Herbert was six. Esker remembered the boy finding a wounded possum under the porch one spring, a victim of the dog. “He brung it to me because he knowed I had a way with animals. He seen me raise Mrs. Perkins horse from near death a few weeks before. But a sour stomach in a horse is a sight different from a halfeaten possum with the mange. Bert wrapped the thing up in a blanket. Asked to keep it in my room so his mother wouldn’t find it. He just prayed and prayed over that animal. Even when it died after supper, he kept on praying.” Geraldine paused. “Oh,” Mia said, relieved. Geraldine’s mother had taught her granddaughters that faith was a powerful virtue. A saving belief that covered many sins. Mia rinsed Tanya’s hair with a cupful of water. The suds collected around the girl’s thin waist. Geraldine read on silently the rest of Esker’s story—about Bert burying the possum in a corner of the garden with a handful of rhubarb seeds. That summer, when the plant shot up—dark purple and green—Herbert brought the stalks to his mother to make a pie. But Esker “didn’t fancy tasting rotten possum in my pie.” He couldn’t have known Hoover’s mother would contract typhoid fever and die the following year, but he took pity on the boy, so insistent that Esker try a slice. “I was glad I did,” he told Mrs. Ursula G. Jones, who took his story down longhand, “for it was the sweetest thing I ever et.”