Guests on Earth by Lee Smith

some more? Nobody is ever in the music room after about four thirty or so.”
    “Tomorrow,” she yelled back down to me. “They can’t pick me up till real late tomorrow anyhow, so I reckon I could come then.”
    I did a quick calculation: I would have to cancel a shopping trip with Stephanie Patterson and her mother. I would say I had cramps, I decided. “Okay. I’ll see you over there.” I waved and Ella Jean waved back before she vanished into the billowing sheets.
    T HE NEXT DAY s he had the banjo. This was a primitive-looking long-necked thing with a rawhide face and a leather strap on it. I took my seat at the grand piano at Homewood while Ella Jean stood behind me, tuning the banjo and plucking at it.
    “Slow or fast?” I asked.
    “Fast,” she said. “You know me!”
    I started right in on Camptown Races, which we had done together years before. “Camptown racetrack’s five miles long, doo-dah, doo-dah,” we sang as one. Other people suddenly began to appear from everywhere—the art room, the practice rooms, the open door from outside, drawn by the music—especially the banjo, I believe, for a banjo has a naturally happy sound that no other instrument possesses. Everybody joined in lustily on “Oh, doo-dah day!”
    A WEEK LATER, E lla Jean held the banjo carefully between her knees as we jounced about on a pile of old tobacco sacks in the back of the most beat-up truck I had ever seen, heading toward Sodom Laurel, Ella Jean’s hometown up in Madison County, north of Asheville. Finally, after much pleading and bargaining on my part, Mrs. Hodges had agreed to this overnight visit, so that I might “hear Granny sing” myself. I am sure she would not have done so had Dr. and Mrs. Carroll not been off on one of their “jaunts”—this one to Chicago, where he was to address a worldwide conference of psychiatrists, as I recall.
    I still wasn’t exactly sure who our driver, Earl, was—relative or neighbor, I supposed. He had not yet spoken. A little old man in a shapeless black hat, Earl hunched so low in the seat that whenever I looked ahead through the cab’s cracked window, it appeared unnervingly as though no one was even driving. The smoke from his cigarette floated out the window of the truck past my face, almost sweet, and somehow intoxicating. The wind blew my hair into my eyes. I had to give Ella Jean credit, because somehow she had had the sense to get Earl to park down by the gate, out of sight. Mrs. Hodges would never have let me get into that truck if she had seen it. The last thing I saw as we left was Mrs. Hodges standing out in the middle of the road in front of Homewood with arms akimbo, a worried frown on her face, as the two of us raced down the hill. Ella Jean grabbed my overnight case and hoisted it up over the side of the truck, then the sack she’d been carrying, then finally the banjo, before jumping up herself and leaning back down with hand extended to pull me up. I had clambered over the top to land sprawling among the sacks and straw and old cans and boxes and trash that filled the back of the truck.
    “Lord!” Ella Jean exclaimed. “I never thought I’d see this day come, did you?”
    “No,” I said honestly, trying gingerly to make myself a little nest, for I feared we’d go flying out once the truck picked up speed.
    “You ever been in the back of a truck before?” Evalina asked me over the rattling.
    “No,” I said.
    She grinned her jack-o’-lantern grin at me as Earl turned out of the Highland grounds and into regular Asheville traffic. We headed north, out of town.
    “You wanna dope?” Ella Jean rummaged around in her sack.
    “What?”
    She held up a strawberry Nehi pop. ”Hand me that there church key then,” she directed, at my nod.
    “What?” I asked.
    She pointed at a kind of bottle opener hung on a screw at the back of the truck with twine; I grabbed it and passed it over. That sweet hot soda was the best thing I had ever tasted, the