Sunday April 13th, 2008
A boy moved into the house across the creek today. I saw him when I was out scattering feed to the chickens. I called out to him–”Hey, boy!”–but he didn’t answer, just turned his shoulder and sprinted up the hillside.
Now it’s true we don’t have a mirror in the house, but Aunt Kitty never looked at me funny before I walked out the door this morning and Ben, well, I guess Ben never notices much of anything except maybe the smell when Aunt Kitty’s making Toad in the Hole for supper. But still, I think that boy must just be weird. What kind of boy runs away from an itty bitty girl like me? A weird kind, that’s what.
While the chickens were busy pecking at their feed, I turned up six eggs in the coop, all of them white. The arauconas have taken to nesting in the haystack again, so I spent the rest of the morning scrambling over hay bales hunting for more eggs. I only turned up three more, and one mean hen who seems to be planning to sit on hers till they hatch. (Never mind that our rooster got castrated last year on account of he kept attacking Aunt Kitty’s legs and putting holes in her stockings.) But who am I to argue with an angry hen? I like my eyes in their sockets and my skin in one piece, thank you very much.
I just set those nine eggs in my apron and told Aunt Kitty there weren’t no more to be found.
Saturday April 19th, 2008
Ben returned from town yesterday with boxes full of fabric. Aunt Kitty says he has no taste at all; there’s no other explanation for the purples and oranges he came home with. She says they’ll be suitable for nothing but work and I’m to expect to spend tomorrow stitching up some gathering aprons. I groaned and told her I promised to spend the next TEN evenings sewing if only she would let me have the daytime for myself.
“That’s fine, Tevis,” she said, “but I expect to see your needle threaded before the sun goes down. And don’t you be leaving off your usual chores.”
Well, there’s two things I should have considered before I made that promise and the first and most important thing is that Ben forgot to pick up Aunt Kitty’s chocolate when he was at the grocer’s in town. Ben whispered to me one time about how chocolate is Aunt Kitty’s kindness medicine, and when she gets short on chocolate her temper gets short too.
The other thing I should have considered is how the sun has a mean habit of going down before the day’s really over. After my chores were done, I had a mind to do some spying on the new boy across the creek, but I got distracted by the wildflowers coming up on the hillside. They fell into my hands, really, a great big bunch of them–shooting stars and bleeding hearts and dandelions–and that’s just what I would have told Ben but I thought I should save him the pain and trouble of reminding me how I’m cutting their life short by yanking them out of God’s green earth. So I thought instead I would take them as a sort of welcoming bouquet to that boy across the creek. I whistled for Pilot and he fell into step beside me, his tongue wagging at the chance to dig up gophers on the other side.
I was in sight of that big yellow farmhouse when it occured to me that flowers really aren’t the thing for a boy and maybe I should go back and catch him some pollywogs from the creek instead. By that time Pilot was shoulders-deep in a hole and whined at me when I called him to come.
“Well stay here, then,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
But of course by the time I fetched a jar from the house and filled it up with pollywogs, then ran back to get another jar for water ’cause Ben would just be beside himself if I left those wildflowers just laying in the grass to die–well by the time I got back to Pilot’s hole, Pilot was no longer in it.
I found him a couple hours later digging furiously under a manzanita bush and when I grumbled at him, “Pilot, you bad dog, why don’t you come when I call you?” he just looked at me over her shoulder, his nose turned red-brown from the dirt, and there was nothing sheepish about his expression. I swear he was thinking, “Now why would I want to come with you when I’m having such a fine time right here?”
I had to pull him home by the scruff of the neck, stopping by the creek long enough to pour out the pollywogs. I confess I poured the wildflowers into the creek too, ’cause I didn’t figure I needed any help getting in trouble this time since the sun was already well below the horizon. I rushed through the door with an apology already flying out of my mouth.
Aunt Kitty harumphed and said I should consider the apostle Peter next time I’m thinking about making promises I ain’t going to be keeping, and in the mean time I could plan to spend the next ten days indoors mending and cleaning and ironing. Aunt Kitty knows how I hate ironing, and I’m just certain that’s why she carried out that big stack of ugly fabric and plunked it down right in front of me as she said the word.
Me, I think Peter more than made up for it in the end. And I’m sure I will too. But in the meantime I’ll be ironing.
Tuesday April 29th, 2008
For the longest time I thought Aunt Kitty wore her apron inside out. I was too embarrassed to say anything–embarrassed for her, I mean. Who wants a 12-year-old girl telling them their clothes are inside out or upside down? Like when a boy walks out of the privvy with his barn door open. Do you say, “Hey, boy, your livestock’s gonna get loose!” or do you just let it alone. Well, for me that just depends on the boy. If it was that boy across the creek, for instance, well I’d have no problem at all seeing him get red in the face.
But here we’re talking about Aunt Kitty and I’ll tell you it was a real dilemma for me, her putting her apron on inside out every day. Then one day, there it was, hanging off a peg in the pantry, strangely weighted to one side, and what do you think I found? Well, I’ll tell you. Pockets full of chocolate and buttered rum candies, that’s what! All this time I was worried about Auntie’s feelings and what do you know but she’s stashing treats in hidden pockets. Hiding them from whom, you might ask? Well, I can guess.
Monday May 5th, 2008
The reason I don’t call Ben “uncle” is because he’s not my uncle. Well, at least he wasn’t my uncle until he married Aunt Kitty a couple years ago. By then, I was too used to calling him just “Ben.” Besides that, Ben doesn’t really seem uncle-y. He’s taller than the doorway and when he opens his mouth every animal in sight takes cover. Probably that’s why he keeps quiet most of the time.
If I’m going to tell the honest truth though (which on this one and only subject I’m not really supposed to do), Aunt Kitty is not exactly my aunt either. She says my mama was like a sister to her and that’s close enough and then she says for goodness sake if I must keep yapping go yap at the cows ’cause she has more important work to be about.
Once she told me I was an outcast fairy. When I asked her, “Well how come I’m normal sized then and not fairy sized?” she said that’s just what happens when you leave the fairy world. You get bigger. So I said, “Well then, how come I don’t have wings?”
“Bah,” she said. “That’s just a silly myth. Fairies don’t have wings.”
I said, “How do they fly if they haven’t got wings?” and she just laughed.
What I want to know is, what’s so special about being a fairy if you can’t fly? When I asked Ben that very question, he said probably fairies had other magic talents, like talking to animals.
I spent the whole day trying to talk to the chickens. First I tried their language. “BAAAAK!” Then I tried my own, but they just kept cluck-clucking away.
So I thought, well maybe it’s not that I can understand them, but they can understand me. So I fixed my eye on one particularly bright looking chicken and I said, “Come here, chicken.” She didn’t even look at me. So I said, “Fetch me that piece of string, chicken,” and she lifted her neck and cocked her head and I thought, “Aha!” but then she just went right back to pecking at the ground.
Either Ben’s wrong, or chickens are just plain rude.
Friday May 16th, 2008
Most of the time, Pilot is a good dog. He has his moments of weakness, like anyone does, his mostly relating to critters smaller than himself. He can pounce on a mouse quicker than any cat you ever saw, and he’ll dig up a maze of gopher trails till his nose is caked clay-red and his eyes nearly crossed. Those aren’t the bad things, though.
Pilot’s taste for small creatures isn’t limited to mice and gophers. I once saw him swipe a bird right out of the air. Honest! Me and him were just sitting on the hillside one evening watching the sun go down (and pretending we didn’t hear Aunt Kitty hollering at us to wash up for dinner) when all of a sudden Pilot leaps straight up in the air. When I come to my senses–for a minute I thought he must’ve spotted a cougar–there’s a little bird caught between his teeth. Tell the truth, I think Pilot was surprised too. It was hardly a moment before he loosed his mouth and that bird went flying away. The two of us, we just watched it go, neither one of us quite believing what had happened, I think.
But what I’m trying to say is sometimes Pilot has caused us some trouble. Me and Ben and Aunt Kitty, I mean. There was the one time Pilot came home with a real working man’s tool belt and the hammer still dragging off one end. A truck come flying up the driveway that afternoon sending up a cloud of dust thicker than the tule fog. The driver didn’t even get out, just pointed at Pilot and hollered at Ben, “That dog stole my tool belt!”
We don’t have cats and you can see why. The chickens mostly stay in the coop. No bunnies. No guinea pigs. (Why anyone would want a guinea pig I can’t imagine.)
So you can see how it probably would have been a good idea for our neighbors across the creek to let us know when they decided to raise Jersey Giants. They may be big for chickens, but they’re still just chickens after all. I’m sure you can guess–when I tell you that our neighbors came outside this evening and found all but two of their Jersey Giant chickens dead in the yard and a certain dog stuck half in, half out of the chicken coop–I’m sure you can guess who that certain dog was.
Maybe there’s some people couldn’t love a dog after he committed a massacre like that. Maybe there’s some would gladly trade in that dog for half a dozen cats and chickens roaming free. I wish I could explain how it is that I love Pilot more every time he makes a mess of things, even a really big mess like this.
I brought him into my bed this evening and left the door cracked just a hair so I could better listen to what our cross-creek neighbors had to say to Ben and Aunt Kitty. I’ll admit I was afraid they’d demand we shoot Pilot or some other awful thing. I’ve read Old Yeller. I pulled the covers over us both and pretty soon Pilot was dreaming about chasing gophers and mice. I suppose he might’ve been dreaming about those chickens.
And outside my door those people weren’t talking about Pilot or the chickens at all.
“He’s a very disturbed boy,” the lady was saying.
“Julia!” the man loud-whispered back. He seemed to be shushing her, the way Aunt Kitty’s always doing to me in church when I try asking her ’bout repentance or sexual relations or other stuff while the preacher’s still preaching.
“Well, he is!” Julia said. “I don’t mean no harm by it. He just is.”
Aunt Kitty said something then so low I couldn’t make out a word and then I got distracted puzzling out who they might be talking about. I had just decided they must be speaking of that boy I saw across the creek a few weeks ago when I heard Ben turn the latch on the front door and realized I missed the whole rest of what was said.
What I want to know is, what’s disturbing that boy so much? And it better not be me, ’cause I done nothing but say hello to him, real friendly-like.
Wednesday May 21st, 2008
As Ben likes to say, it’s been hotter than Grandma Jean’s final resting place around here. When I asked Aunt Kitty what that means, she just said Ben wasn’t too fond of his Grandma Jean, ‘specially after she sneaked a whoopie cushion onto his dinner chair the night he finally convinced Lily Hawkins to come for dinner. Apparently Lily Hawkins had hair fine and yellow as cornsilk, and as such could not be expected to tolerate a boy with poor table manners.
On account of the heat though, Aunt Kitty cut short my lessons this morning. Doing math is fine, she said, and sweating is fine too, but doin’ them both together is just plain torture. She packed up my wanderin’ sack and shooed me out the door.
“Keep an eye out for rattlers,” she said, and I was on my own.
Now, I like to think of myself as pretty intelligent–smarter than the average 12-year-old girl, I mean. Least-wise Aunt Kitty’s always telling me I talk like a foreigner or someone twice my age on account of all the books I’m always reading, and sometimes she threatens to pack the books away for a while. I’m afraid no one will think I’m smart when I come to the end of this tale though. I can hardly explain to myself how I wound up at the top of that old Digger pine, bawling my eyes out over a broken egg.
First thing I did when Aunt Kitty shut the door behind me was whistle for Pilot. He came running quick enough, but when he saw that wanderin’ sack over my shoulder he knew we were going for a ramble and just like that he was off. I tried to keep up with him, but pretty soon I had to stop and pull the foxtails out of my shoes and when I looked up again, he was long gone.
That’s about when the hawk cried out, and it’s also about when I saw the egg laying on the ground at the base of that big Digger pine. I looked at that egg, and I looked at that hawk and I put two and two together. Or I guess I put one and one together. Well if I wanted to be doing math, I’da been back in the kitchen with Aunt Kitty. In any case, I searched the branches of that tree and sure enough, away up at the top, there was a big nest. That hawk let out another cry and there was just no help for it. I knew what I had to do. I put aside my stick, tucked that egg into my pocket, hitched up my pants and started climbing.
I got real high real fast. I’m a pretty good climber, on account of all the times Pilot’s chased neighbor cats up into trees and I had to rescue them to keep Pilot out of trouble. So I was real close to getting that egg back in the nest when I felt something shift in my pants and I looked down just in time to see that egg fall down, down, down until it landed with a thud and a crunch right back in that spot I first found it.
So that’s how I wound up near the top of that Digger pine, bawling my eyes out over a baby hawk that would never see the light of day. Now if you’re a tree climber you might know that getting up a tree is a darn sight easier than getting back down.
Friday May 23rd, 2008
It’s funny how a body can think she knows herself and suddenly one day some little thing happens and all at once she finds herself a stranger. All in all, I would say that moment–when I was so high up in that Digger pine and already upset over my part in the murder of that innocent hawk baby–was a poor time to learn that I was scared of high places. Ben told me once, when I asked him how come he’s still afraid of snakes and thunderstorms even though he’s all grown up, that there’s some fears we leave behind when we get older, but there’s enough things we learn to be afraid of to keep us from gettin’ too full of ourselves.
Apparently God above must’ve decided at that unfortunate time that I was a little too full of myself and at that very moment he smote me with a fear of heights. Of all things. And then He sent the devil himself to rescue me.
It was that boy from across the creek, the one who ran away when I said hello. I recognized him by his lily-livered scent–well, that and the weird black hair that hung long and straight to his shoulders. He came walking up to the bottom of the tree, looked up, and didn’t even try to hide his lousy grin when he saw me holding on for dear life.
“Hi there,” he said.
“Harumph,” I said.
“What are you crying for?” he said, and pushed his hair out of his face, probably so I could see that lousy grin a little better. I looked away, but then my eyes fell on that cracked egg and I felt those stupid tears welling up in my eyes all over again.
He followed my eyes to the broken shell on the ground. “It’s just an egg.”
How could he be so cold-hearted? “There’s a hawk baby in that egg, you meanie!”
“How would a hawk baby get inside a chicken egg?”
I looked down and sure enough it did look an awful lot like an ordinary chicken egg, but “What’s a chicken egg doin’ way out here?”
He shrugged. Not that I was looking at him, but I saw it out of the corner of my eye while I studied that egg.
“Probably that dog of yours snagged it out of the coop,” he said. “Or maybe a coyote.”
And I looked and I couldn’t deny it. That surely was a chicken egg and no baby hawk in it at all.
“Come on down now,” he said, and I just shook my head.
“Can’t,” I told him.
“Sure you can,” he said. “Just let go and I’ll catch you.”
Now it may seem, seeing as how I’m the one stuck in a tree crying about a cracked chicken egg, that I’m the dumb one, but I’m tellin’ you that boy must be dumb to think I was gonna jump out of that tree with nothin’ but his hands to catch me. I shook my head a little harder, in case he missed it the first time.
“C’mon,” he said. “Just take my hand.”
Maybe at this point, so as you’re not thinking that boy was 15 feet tall, I should admit that I hadn’t quite made it to the top of that tree. But it felt like it, it really did.
That’s when I remembered what had been said about this boy.
“What’s disturbin’ you anyway?” I asked him, and I watched his eyes glass over and his shoulders square up.
“Come down,” he said in a new voice, and it might have been Ben talking for the way my body just up and obeyed. Well, that boy did catch me, but whether he was any softer than the ground would’ve been I just can’t say. I rolled off of him and I ran all the way home without once looking back.
Saturday June 7th, 2008
I think it’s time I told you the truth about me. By that I don’t mean that I have plain brown hair and my eyes are the same. I don’t mean that I’m on the puny side for a twelve-year-old, or that my mama’s name is Katy and she’s out there somewhere in this big wide world. It’s about God. I don’t think He likes me much. Seems like every time I took the time to ask Him for something, what I’d end up getting was something else entirely.
My eyes, for instance. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that if he was going to give a girl plain old brown hair, that he’d at least make up for it with some fancy blue eyes. So one Sunday while the preacher was preaching ’bout how good God is at giving us gifts and how all we have to do is ask for something and we’ll get it, well I closed my eyes right then and there and bowed my head and asked the good Lord to give me blue eyes. I tell you it wasn’t five minutes later we were leaving the church and a honeybee flew right up and stung me right under my left eye. I spent the next three days with my eye swollen shut and Pilot looking at me funny every time I went outdoors. I decided right then that preacher must be studying the wrong book.
When Ben rushed inside this morning without first stomping the dust off his boots and asked me real calm-like if I wanted to learn to bottle-feed a goat, something stopped me from jumping out of my chair and racing him to the barn.
“Why won’t its mama feed it?” I asked him. That’s when he looked down and seemed to notice his dusty boots for the first time.
“Forgot to stomp my feet,” he mumbled and shuffled back outside.
Well it’s a sad thing when a baby comes into this world on the same day her mama is taken from it. I spent the better part of the morning trying to get that little she-goat to take the bottle and Aunt Kitty tried for most of the afternoon with no better luck. A goat’s cry isn’t so different from a human baby’s and I don’t mind telling you by the end of the day we were all frazzled, even Pilot, who took to howling like a hound dog and pacing outside the barn door.
This is the part where I get back to God. See, I decided to pray the most backwards prayer I could, thinking maybe I could trick Him. After thinking on it for a while, I finally prayed that God would bring back the goat’s daddy (who lives on some neighbor’s farm, I think), hoping God would instead bring back her mommy. I know that seems unlikely, but I think God could work a miracle sometimes just to spite me.
We none of us ate much of our dinner that night, what with the goat’s crying and Pilot’s howling. It was later, when Ben was out closing up the chicken coop for the night and I was trying to get past the first paragraph of Moby Dick, that I realized the only sound in the night was the “chink, chink” of Aunt Kitty washing dishes. I dropped my book and ran barefoot out to the barn. Ben was standing at the door and turned to hush me as I drew near. There was just enough moonlight pouring through the stall window that I could see them there on the straw, Pilot curled up around that baby goat, the both of them snoring in their sleep. What can you do when you’re looking at a tragedy and a miracle sittin’ side-by-side? Ben shook his head and grinned and I grinned back at him and together we went back to the house.
Aunt Kitty started calling the goat Wilbur before Ben told her it was a she-goat, not a buck, but we’re all pretty used to the name after spending the day saying again and again, “Hush, Wilbur. It’s going to be all right.” Turns out we weren’t lying after all.
Saturday June 14th, 2008
What is it about a boy that can make a girl do such silly things? Our little Wilbur sashays around the yard now, too good for the pasture and too curious for the barn. She never took to the bottle and we finally gave up. She prefers her vittles in a dog dish, and prefers to lap up her drink out of the trough beside Pilot. I’ve seen her trying her darndest to wag her little goat tail and yesterday I watched her turn no less than three times before she lay down in the straw. It’s not so much that she believes she is a dog; it’s more that she’s doing her best to impress one.
As for Pilot, near as I can tell he hardly knows he’s got a goat on his tail from sunup to sundown. He goes about his business like usual–waits at the door for breakfast in the morning, hunts up a little rodent snack around mid-day, and barks once or twice to let us know when he’s ready for dinner. Now you just go right on and tell me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that just how boys always are when girls are making themselves silly moonin’ over them?
That’s just why you’ll never catch me making a fool of myself over some boy. Just this morning, in fact, we were leaving church and Aaron McMillan bumped right into my backside.
“Oh, sorry Tevis,” he said, but I could tell by the blush rising up his neck that he wasn’t sorry at all. I’m sure Aunt Kitty was quite pleased with me though when I used my most mature voice and politest manners to say, “No problem at all, Mr. McMillan.” His mouth crooked up on one side then; I think he liked me calling him “Mr.” I just turned my head and strode with utmost grace across the lawn to Ben’s pickup truck. Aaron McMillan with his fair hair may be one of the finest looking boys of my acquaintance, but I see no need to make myself silly over him.
Now it’s unfortunate for my sense of maturity and gracefulness that Ben pulled onto our driveway just as that wicked neighbor boy was retrieving the newspaper from the box at the bottom corner of our property. (Of course he wasn’t at church, the heathen.)
Ben cranked down his window and called out, “Hello there, Ezekiel.”
That boy just nodded his head. Who did he think he was anyway? I swear he might’ve tipped his hat if he’d been wearing one. Thinking he’s some titled lord in regency England.
I stuck my head out the window and said, “You’re supposed to say ‘Hello, Mr. Ben.’”
For that I got an elbow in the ribs from Aunt Kitty and a whispered, “Hush, Tevis,” from Ben.
That boy–Ezekiel–he looked to his feet for just a moment and when he looked back up I saw that he’d been trying to contain a grin. He did not succeed. “Hello, Mr. Ben,” he said, but his eyes were on me all the while. Then he asked, “Been missing any chicken eggs lately?” and turned back up the road.
I fairly flew out of my seat, hollering at that boy. “Why you rotten, stinkin’, no good, snot-snivelin’, lily-livered–!” Aunt Kitty smashed her palm against my mouth at that point and I saw Ben shaking his head, muttering to himself, “Strange question to ask. Guess that boy is a mite disturbed. Best keep to ourselves, I wager.”
When we pulled up to the house Pilot and Wilbur were chasing a stray cat around the yard. The cat finally took refuge in a tree and Pilot sat back on his haunches to wait, tail wagging. Wilbur wobbled on her first try, but soon enough she was sitting on her haunches beside him and when she opened her mouth I swear the sound that came out was closer to a bark than a bleat. And who am I to judge that goat for acting like a dog? It’s all I can do to keep acting like a girl when I get around that boy.
Monday June 23rd, 2008
I’m telling you straight off that everything that happened to me on my birthday is Ben’s fault. He came into my bedroom blowing on his harmonica, singing about me turning thirteen and all. Pilot set to howling and Wilbur, who lately has been invited indoors on account of all the whining she does if we leave her in the barn like she’s just a goat, tried to croak a howl out of her own little snout. What with all the ruckus and my eyes still half shut in sleep, I missed most of Ben’s song. Here’s the part that stuck with me, like tarweed on a horse leg:
“You’re a young lady now
no more little girl.
Thirteen years old,
takin’ on the world.”
Well it’s certainly not poetry, but here’s what that song set me to thinking ’bout: By the time she was thirteen, Pocahontas had already saved a man’s life. When Joan of Arc was thirteen, she was listening to the voices of God’s saints and angels. (Now I do hear voices talking to me on occasion, but they’re generally just in my head and it’s usually along the lines of “Aunt Kitty’s gonna know if you sneak another cookie off the tray” or “God heard that awful thing you were thinkin’ about that snooty Mary Coots in church today.”) Now you could say this here’s a reason to stop reading so many books, seeing as how reading about someone else’s life can make a girl so unhappy with her own.
But let me tell you something else I know, and this not from a book at all. It was the night of Aunt Kitty’s thirteenth birthday when she met her first husband, God Rest His Soul. (Just last year I figured out that last part wasn’t actually his name. Apparently it’s something you say when you talk about a dead person.) Now it’s true that Aunt Kitty says when she met him he was driving a cherry red ’65 Mustang convertible and she didn’t really know what that boy looked like until their third date, but still. Things happen when you’re thirteen!
“Taking on the world,” Ben said, and it seemed like I ought to be doing more than chasing Pilot all over the hillside and tossing feed to a bunch of chickens. How does a girl wake up on an ordinary day and make it extraordinary? I spent the better part of that day waiting for Providence to step in and make something happen, but the chickens just kept pecking at the ground, Wilbur kept chasing her tail and Aunt Kitty kept telling me to pick up after myself. Well it shames me to tell you so, and for the life of me I can’t say what made this seem a good idea at the time, but I decided if Providence wasn’t going to take over then I would.
I ran on shaky legs all the way across the creekbed, up the hillside on down the gravel road leading to the neighbors’ house. Miss Julia was on her knees in the garden with a big brimmed hat covering her face.
“Where’s that boy?” I asked her, not announcing myself at all.
“Hmm?” she said, looking up at me.
“Where’s that boy?” I said again. She wrinkled up her eyebrows, like she was thinking hard. I curled my lip and said with utmost disgust. “Ezekiel.” Oh how I did hate to say that name.
“Oh,” she said, her brows relaxing and an easy smile spreading across her face. “Check the barn. I think he’s mucking stalls.”
Well I did hate to interrupt him, seeing as how he was right where he belonged, knee-deep in horse poop. But I was on a mission.
Fists tight, I marched up to the barn door and called him. “Hey, boy!”
He ducked out of a stall, shaking that black hair out of his face.
“Come here,” I said with some authority, but still I was a bit surprised when he set aside the pitch fork and walked right over to me.
He was taller than I expected, and maybe a little older too, but I steeled myself and glared up at him and said, “Today’s my thirteenth birthday and you need to kiss me so as I can say something happened other than chickens peckin’ at the ground and me picking up after myself.”
Now, soon as the last word was out of my mouth I started wishing I could swallow them all back up again, but I’m no coward and I stood my ground. I looked down for just a moment maybe, but that was for his sake, not mine. I thought he should have a minute to think about it without me staring him down.
I might’ve jumped just a little when he put his hand under my chin. His skin was rough and scratchy after all, and it probably had horse manure on it. But when he tugged my face up I looked and what do you think I saw? That stupid, crooked grin on his face. Oh, I could see right through him alright. It was all he could do to not laugh in my face right then and there. I slapped his hand away and ran all the way home.
We had chocolate cake that night, just Ben and Aunt Kitty and me. Ben gave me a tiny wooden jewelry box that he’d been whittling away at after dinner through most of last winter. Someday I’ll have something to put in it. Aunt Kitty gave me a pair of knitting needles and a big ball of fuzzy red yarn. We sat side by side in the kitchen and she guided my hands through the motions while she sang along:
“In through the front door,
around the back,
through the window
and out pops Jack!”
We were just getting started on the third row of stitches when there was a knock at the door.
“Who calls at this hour?” Ben said, and rose from his reading chair to open the door. He returned a moment later with a wrapped package. “No one there,” he said. “Just this.” He handed the box to me.
Here’s what the note on top said:
“Happy Birthday Tevis.
Keep this nice and warm and maybe you’ll get a baby hawk out of it.
Zeke”
I don’t have to tell you what was in there, do I? A chicken egg. A plain, old, stupid, white chicken egg. I really don’t like that boy.
Friday July 4th, 2008
Near as I can tell, being thirteen isn’t much different from being twelve. Or eleven. Aunt Kitty still won’t let me flip the pancakes on the hot griddle and Ben still won’t hear of me learning to drive the pickup truck. I even showed him just yesterday how I can reach the pedals and the steering wheel at the same time now, but all he did was shout at Aunt Kitty, who was closest to me at the time, to “Get those keys out of the ignition before she figgers out how ta start it!”
Course, I already know how to start it, but I didn’t figure right then was the best time to say so.
The thing is, I expected to be some smarter at thirteen than I was at twelve. I expected I would finally understand why God made cling peaches even though they’re nothing but trouble and don’t taste nearly as good as a freestone. I expected some privileges too. Thirteen is pretty close to grown up, you know. Ben did convince Aunt Kitty that I might stay up a mite later in the evenings, but I keep falling asleep before I’m meaning to and next thing I know it’s morning and I don’t know the first thing about what happened past my old bedtime.
I followed Pilot all the way to the road today. Aunt Kitty nearly did tan my hide when I got back, but it was worth it. I saw a bright red race car speed by with two girls in the front seat, their long hair whipping like a yellow flag in the wind.
When she was done closing her eyes and taking deep breaths and telling me why it’s not safe for me to go out to the road by myself, Aunt Kitty handed me my apron and told me to gather up some peaches.
“Mind you pick the ripe ones,” she said. Well, the best way I know to determine if a peach is ripe is to take a bite out of it. My tummy was feeling fairly sore by the time my apron was full and Aunt Kitty didn’t say even one word of thanks when I let the peaches roll out on the table. Her eyes scanned the peaches, then they closed for a minute or so, then she looked at me and whispered–yes, whispered, though there’s not a sleeping baby within a hundred miles!–
“To test a peach for ripeness, Tevis, you simply squeeze it gently–” Here her voice rose for a moment and she repeated that word–”GENTLY! If it gives, it is ripe. If it is hard, it is not ripe.”
“Well, I’ll be!” I said. “Want me to get some more?” But she didn’t answer, just stood there shaking her head at the fruit on the table.
I took that to mean no, which was just as well because I had a mind to feel the wind in my hair like those girls in the race car. Ben was busy in the barn doctorin’ up the goats and when I looked, sure enough the keys were right in the ignition like usual.
Now don’t get all worked up about it. I was only going to take that truck to the end of the driveway, turn around and come back. Just far enough to lean my head out the window and feel the wind in my hair. Pilot hopped up beside me and sure enough, Wilbur jumped in too. Well, I’m smart enough to be safe, so I buckled them into one seat belt and me into the other. I turned that key over in the ignition and we all three of us nearly jumped out of our seats at the engine’s roar. Setting my arm across the seat like Ben always does I looked over my shoulder and pressed gently on the pedal. When nothing happened I figured I was being too shy about it. Pilot and Wilbur were looking at me, tongues hanging out the sides of their mouths.
I pressed my foot down harder. That truck thundered so loud Ben came tearing out of the barn, his feet sliding sideways as he turned the corner, barely staying a step ahead of the dust he was stirring up. Turns out there’s more to driving than turning a key and pressing a pedal.
Well, Ben still hadn’t found his voice by evening time. He asked Aunt Kitty to pack a pipe for him and he took himself out to the back porch to set a spell.
While I was watching Aunt Kitty tamp the tobacco I asked her, “How come we have cling peaches when they’re so much trouble?”
“Hmm?”
“You know, they stick to the pit and they don’t taste near as good as a freestone. Why even grow them?”
“Well, they come ripe earlier than the freestones,” she said. “I suppose they make the summer longer.”
The way I see it, I’m two bits smarter now than when I woke up this morning. When I shared this thought with Aunt Kitty she just rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and whispered something like, “Lord help us.”
Monday July 14th, 2008
Did you ever know a minute that felt like a day? Have you ever had a moment swell up so big that it seemed to swallow the moment before and the moment after too?
See, while most of you have been having breakfast when you should, and supper when you should and sleeping through the night, just like you should, I’ve been stuck here in this one awful moment and it’s the moment I learned Pilot was gone. He ran off sometime in the night and every minute he stays gone I feel more sure he won’t be comin’ back.
My mama used to say bad things come in threes. I know that because Aunt Kitty’s always saying to me, “Now you’re mama always said bad things come in threes”– she says that right before she says, “but I always told her, ‘Katy, that’s just horse puckey. Bad things come and go, and counting ‘em up won’t make ‘em come or go any faster.’”
Still, I think my mama may have been on to something. If I’d've been counting, maybe I’d have taken more care.
The first thing came in the night, a peel of sirens that drew near and then faded, but was enough to stir Pilot and have him wet-nosing me till I let him outside. In the morning we woke to a red sunrise and smoke so thick you could taste it. Ben took out the truck and returned an hour later to say the fire was out on government land and should be out before it caused much trouble.
He barely had a toe to ground when Miss Julia from across the creek came high-tailin’ it up the road. She was hollerin’ and bawlin’ out the window and for a minute I thought all my prayers had been answered and that boy Ezekiel had up and died. I had just a moment to feel a smidgeon of regret before I realized that wasn’t it at all. “Cougar!” she was yelling. Then something about “My goats!” Well, Ben was quicker to catch on than me and he had his rifle and was climbing back in the truck about the time I puzzled out her words.
I guess it was the cougar that got me wondering about Pilot, and it was Wilbur whining and walking in circles around my legs that got me worrying. I still hadn’t tracked him down when Ben returned to tell us we better stick close to the house for a few days, seeing as how that cougar was gone by the time he got there. Miss Julia’s husband, Curtis, was away for the week, and that boy was nowhere to be found, so Ben was heading back straightaway to bury the goat the cougar got.
I’ve hollered for Pilot and I’ve walked circles around the house, but Ben won’t let me wander farther while there’s a cougar nearby. He’s done some poking around too, and drove up the hill aways to ask our neighbors to be on the lookout. Aunt Kitty’s done her share of whistling, but about the time the sun was set to disappear behind the hills she came out on the porch and told me to come inside. Food doesn’t hold much appeal when you’re missing someone and soon enough Aunt Kitty dismissed me from dinner. I poked my head out the window and called again.
“Tevis, dear, come sit,” Aunt Kitty said. Sit! How does a person make her body be still when her mind is a frenzy?
“Can’t,” I said.
“You can,” said Aunt Kitty. “Come here.” She patted her hand on the sofa beside her. She was pulling out my needles and yarn. They’d been away since my birthday.
I sat beside her, and she began to sing while I worked,
“In through the front door
around the back
peek through the window
and out pops Jack!”
My hands couldn’t quite keep up with my head, but they made a great effort.
Saturday August 2nd, 2008
I’ll tell you straight off that Pilot is alright now. If you’ve been worrying anything like to the way I was worrying, well it would just be mean to ramble on and on before letting you in on that.
Truth is, most of the world just kept on like usual and it may be that I’m really the only one who was lost without four legs to follow. I fell asleep over my knitting that night and when I’d finished caring for the chickens and Wilbur in the morning, I picked up the needles again. The whole day passed like that, with Aunt Kitty bringin’ me food I didn’t eat and Ben trying to start a conversation. (It’s a sorry thing when Ben tries to start a conversation, and even on a good day I don’t know that I could have joined in on talking about the bugs that are causing his lettuce to wilt or the whine the truck’s been making.)
I set up on the front porch so I could holler every once in a while and keep my eye out. Every time I called Pilot’s name, Wilbur would come running, wagging her little tail, only to turn away woebegone when she realized Pilot was not coming.
Sometime in the afternoon I finished off my ball of yarn and Aunt Kitty tied on another for me. The day was about gone and Aunt Kitty was just calling me in for bed when I spotted movement on the road.
Here’s what I saw coming over the hill: just the silhouette of a man carryin’ a burden, and the sun a red glow at his back. I stood up, I did, and squinted my eyes. My knitting fell to the floor with a woosh and a click-clack. I raised a hand to shade my eyes, but it was no use. That sun was glued to that man’s back and all I could see of him was the orange line that traced his frame. But that burden– oh, the hope that filled me then!
I fairly flew off of the porch and met him before he’d reached the barn.
“Pilot!” I said, and I said it again. “Pilot!”
When I reached for him, Ezekiel backed up a step.
“He tousled with a cougar, I’d say,” he said.
It shames me to say this was the second time that boy saw me cry. I could not seem to stop myself, though I am sorry for it today. In my defense I’ll tell you that Wilbur did not conduct herself with any more decorum. She sent up wails the likes of which I’ve only read about and imagined, of funeral processions and villages overcome with the black plague.
“He’s alive, see.” Zeke went down on one knee. I knelt there beside him, and Pilot–sweet dog!–lifted his head and nuzzled into my hair.
It’s been near on to two weeks now, and Pilot is starting to seem himself again. I can’t hate that boy near as much as I’d like to, seeing as how he brought Pilot home to me. He said Pilot was just laying on the ground, whimpering, away up the hill, at least a couple miles from home. What Zeke was doing up there I do not know, nor do I much care.
Aunt Kitty says she’s not quite sure what a four-foot girl is going to do with a twelve-foot scarf, but she reckons if I wrap it three or four times around my neck, I may not trip over it too much.
Saturday August 16th, 2008
So yesterday I got to wondering where is it all those frogs go when the creek’s all but dried up come mid-summer? Seems there’s as many tadpoles as hairs on my head in the springtime, and by April Aunt Kitty’s always saying she can’t hear herself think for all the racket they send up in the evenings. (What does a person thinking sound like anyhow?)
Me and Pilot and Wilbur got to talking about those frogs last night. I’ll admit I was doing most of the talking, but Pilot, he has his own way of making his opinions known. Goats, they aren’t none too smart, but Pilot and me, we just pretend Wilbur’s part of the talkin’ so as she doesn’t get to feeling left out.
See, we were laying in bed sweatin’–the window wide open, but not even a rumor of a breeze blowing through–and while I was trying to explain to the both of them that I loved them a whole lot, but it was just too darn hot to snuggle close, I got to thinkin’ how quiet it was out there. Pretty soon I figured seeing as how there wasn’t any sleeping happening anyway, we might as well work this out for ourselves while it was foremost in our thoughts.
We made it out the door quiet enough–well, except for Wilbur, who kept trying to curl her lips around a genuine dog whimper to let us know she was scared. Let me tell you, a goat wasn’t made to bark, and it certainly wasn’t made to whimper.
We were halfway down the hill and the moon lighting our way just fine when a rustling started up in the manzanita bushes beside us. I may have peed my pants just a little, but it was Wilbur who bolted back up the hill sending up a holler like to wake the dead. Sure enough, it wasn’t two minutes later Ben was on the back porch bellowing at us:
“Tevis! You had better be in your bed before I find my paddle!” Ben’s always saying stuff like that when he gets real mad. I don’t think he even has a paddle, but the idea of it sure is enough to get my hiney moving.
I was still puzzling over those frogs this morning and I reckon I’ll still be puzzling over them come next spring when they show up by the thousands. Now Aunt Kitty, she’d tell you there’s things on God’s earth we just aren’t meant to understand.
If I’m being real honest with you, I have to admit I get a real strong urge to spit in her eye when she says stuff like that.
Monday September 1st, 2008
I never much considered myself one to give a person the benefit of the doubt. It’s a fact I breathe easier when there’s someone to blame (other than yours truly, of course) and there’s a certain, well, a certain joy in watching a rotten person get their just desserts. Now before you go gettin’ all huffy with me and touting ’bout mercy, just hear me out. We’re not talking guillotines and hangin’ trees here, after all.
Take that morning Aaron McMillan called me Bird Legs in Sunday school. I’ll admit I felt no remorse when he tripped (without any assistance from myself, mind you!) and landed on his face and spent the better part of a week with a big white bandage on his nose. Matter of fact, I can’t rightly make myself sorry that his noggin still crooks a bit to the left and I have been known, on occasion, to make a brief mention of that fact when he gets a look in his eye that says he’s thinking of teasing me again.
But as Aunt Kitty likes to say, that’s neither here nor there. The thing is, a genuine police cruiser came screaming up the road yesterday, peeled around the corner at the mailbox and sped on up the hill to the cross-creek neighbors. Stuff like that just doesn’t happen every day and I’m sure you can understand why Pilot came runnin’ right to me and demanded I take him over the hill to investigate. I could hardly refuse him now, could I? It is after all a dog’s duty to look after his people and who am I to interfere with that duty?
We didn’t spend more than a minute listenin’ to Mr. Curtis and Miss Julia and the policeman; I know eavesdroppin’s a sin and I’d never. Besides, Pilot got restless there in the bushes and I feared we’d be found out.
We’d almost walked right on past that boy before I saw his toes stickin’ out behind a tree. I stalked around to stare him down, hands on hips. “I reckon you’re in some trouble,” I said.
Pilot whimpered a little and crawled into Ezekiel’s lap. Traitor.
“Reckon so,” he said, with a shrug that tried to say he didn’t care. I didn’t much buy it.
I sat beside him, leaves crunching beneath me. “They’re saying you cleared out the liquor supply at the market.”
“Is that what they’re saying.” He didn’t really say it question-like.
“Whatcha gonna do with so much liquor?”
He glanced down at me then, just for a moment, then fixed his eyes somewhere out in the trees. “What would you do with it?”
I had to think on that for a bit. “Well, Aunt Kitty says most of it tastes no better than goat pee. Can’t see how goat pee would be worth goin’ to jail for, so I reckon I’d give it back.”
Zeke just sat there, so still-like I started thinking he’d maybe nodded off. I bumped him with my shoulder. “Why don’tcha give it back?”
He looked me in the eye then, and he said, “I don’t have it.”
“Well, what’d you do with it?”
But he was done talking, that ornery boy, and I was left to wonder if “I don’t have it” meant he already got rid of it, or he up and drank it all, or he never done had it in the first place. I bumped him with my shoulder again, but he just scuffed Pilot’s head and then nudged him away, then shifted ’round enough to take me by the waist and hoist me up.
“Go on, now,” he said, and he gave me a little shove on my backside.
Well I left then, but it was only ’cause I wanted to. Pilot came with me ’cause I grabbed him by the collar and made him.
When that policeman came knocking on our door not five minutes after I walked through it, I hadn’t any idea the words that would be comin’ out of my mouth when he asked the last time any of us had seen Ezekiel, who, in case we didn’t know, had a police record and should be treated with some measure of caution. Here’s what I said, every word of it:
“Well, sure I have, officer. Me and Zeke been camping up the hillside since yesterday afternoon. Reckon you’ll find him at home now seeing as how we just packed up camp a little bit ago. See, I’ve had a burr under my behind since that boy said I was prob’ly afraid of the dark, being a girl and all, so I just had to show him it weren’t true. We spent the whole night up there, we did, without a flashlight between us, and I’ll tell you what, if anyone got scared, it was that lily-livered boy.”
I threw in that last part just so I’d feel better ’bout doing something nice for that rotten boy.
Tuesday September 23rd, 2008
Now about this time I reckon you’re asking yourself, “Does that girl’s life just up and stop when the radio waves go silent?”
And this would be my answer for you: In a manner of speaking, yes.
See, here’s what happened to me round ’bout three weeks ago when I’d just coaxed an ornery hen into giving up her goods. (The truth is I tricked her a bit with an old slight of hand Ben taught me once.) Aunt Kitty came slamming out the screen door, hollerin’ my name like I was somewhere in the next county ‘stead of just across the yard.
“Time for school!” is what she said next.
Well, my summer just up and died a sudden and horrible death in that moment, and I’ll tell you I’ve spent the better part of a month grieving it’s passing and trying to accept the truth of it all.
Saturday November 1st, 2008
The telephone rang today–can you imagine? I suppose you can, suppose in fact that such a happening is not so rare where you come from. But let me tell you, around these parts the phone rings about as often as Moses comes knocking at our door, which is to say, never.
It’s a fact I jumped clear out of my seat at the breakfast table when it happened, knocked Aunt Kitty’s scones clean off the table. And what would you expect?
I suppose it would have been unbearably disappointing if that telephone call turned out something boring, like a goat loose on the road, and it’s the truth Aunt Kitty eyed Ben before she lifted the phone off the cradle and mumbled quite confidently, “Wrong number.” But indeed it was not!
It was Aunt Kitty’s uncle died, and this the first I ever heard his name. Nevertheless, Aunt Kitty’s scones sat there on the floor for the rest of the day while she fussed over me and Ben and what in the name of all that’s holy were we to do about making ourselves presentable for the services.
Now why a stranger like that should merit me puttin’ on a hat–a real hat, with flowers and bows on it–I can’t say I know. But Aunt Kitty, she says it’s the proper way to show respect, and this as she pinned her own ridiculous hat to her head the next morning.
Well, I don’t mind telling you I felt a right fool, wearing a garden on my head, and maybe I argued just a little bit, and maybe, just maybe, there was a little bit of a whine in my voice. Certainly though, nothing to justify Uncle Ben telling me I was carryin’ on like a stuck pig. Anyhow, the truth is I practically was a stuck pig by the time Aunt Kitty was done with her bobby pins.
For two hours we drove, the longest two hours I ever knew. There’s no gettin’ comfortable with a hat stuck on your head and pins poking you every which way. We pulled up to the graveyard and Aunt Kitty and me ducked beneath the windows so as no one would see us when the truck let out it’s backfire. (Ben says that truck’s just like an old man–sometimes it’s just gotta clean out its pipes with a little cough. Problem is, lately it’s cleaning its pipes every time he shuts off the engine, and there’s just nothing little about that cough.)
Well, we stood around the grave and the preacher did his preaching. The wind picked up and Aunt Kitty kept elbowin’ me for fussin’ with my hat. And the wind picked up some more. Matter of fact, that wind picked up so much it carried away a bouquet of flowers. And some lady’s handkerchief. And the preacher’s notes. And while the preacher was standin’ there stuttering and flipping pages in his Bible, that wind up and carried away mine and Aunt Kitty’s hats.
I don’t know as I’d ever heard Aunt Kitty laugh before, excepting those grown-up kind of laughs that never really amount to much. This was a real laugh, the kind that shakes your belly, and I’d swear that laugh pushed our hats even farther up into the sky than the wind ever could all on its own.
All this talk about showin’ respect and do you know what I was thinking in that moment? When God showed up in that burnin’ bush, did he tell Moses to put on a hat? No, he did not. Neither did he tell him to fancy up his hair or to clean up his clothes. “Take off your shoes,” God told him, and that’s what Moses did, cause really, who’s gonna argue with a bush that’s on fire and talkin’ to you?
Well we stood there bare-headed for the rest of that service. The rain started falling about two minutes after we lost our hats. By the end would you believe I was actually wishing for that ridiculous hat? A wet head is what I got. A wet head and a look from Aunt Kitty that most certainly said “I told you so.”
Thursday November 27th, 2008
That’s Jack.
Least, that was Jack until a couple days ago, ‘fore he wound up headless and plucked and stripped of all his turkey-ish dignity.
I know I’m not the first kid to consider being a herbivore round ’bout the time I made the connection between what struts around our property all puffed up and proud eleven months out of the year, and what ends up on the platter on Thanksgiving Day. Ben tells me I need to stop namin’ all the birds, but I don’t see where that would make any difference at all. If I didn’t have a name, would he be eatin’ me for dinner?
You might suppose that my first conversation of a spiritual sort with Pastor JT would have something to do with gettin’ through the pearly gates or making some improvements to my moral character. You would be wrong. Me and Pilot and Wilbur hiked all the way over to the church this past Wednesday morning to talk with Pastor JT about a turkey. I told it to him just like that, too. He saw us comin’ up the road, me and my dog and my goat, and he called out from the church steps, “Well, good morning, Miss Tevis! What can I do for you and your friends today?” And I told him, real serious-like, “Sir, we need to talk with you about a turkey.”
Well Pilot figured since he was included in the greeting he’d go ahead and fill the pastor in on our troubles. That dog forgets sometimes not everyone converses in barks and whines, on account of he’s used to me always knowing what he’s gettin’ at. Between the two of us though, we managed to get our point across and were rewarded for our efforts with a scripture and a suggestion.
The scripture was about how God gave man dominion over the earth. And the suggestion was this:
“Thanksgiving is a time to count our blessings, Tevis. Thank the Lord for providing you with a home, a family, and provisions for each day.”
Now, don’t get me wrong. If I was 57 years old and wise, might be I’d gather some useful stuff out of his words. But I’m just 13, and all I heard was a whole lot of dodging the issue. Here’s something I do know. There was no turkey eatin’ going on in the Garden of Eden.
I don’t mind tellin’ you I think that pastor just wanted to be rid of us right quick, ‘fore we laid somethin’ on his conscience that might creep up Thanksgiving day just as he was set to take a tasty bite of bird smothered in gravy.
Left with no other choice, I had to take this problem to the Lord, and you know how anxious that makes me. Well, I came away from that time of talkin’ with God with a fine proposal for Ben, and I took it to him right away. If Jack died of natural causes before Thanksgiving day, I said, then we’d enjoy a right fine turkey dinner. If not, well, then, we’d just have to make do with our potatoes and yams and greens. I don’t mind tellin’ you I was surprised when Ben agreed to my proposal. I suspect that had more to do with him trustin’ in the Lord than thinkin’ I’d come up with a good idea.
We heard the coyotes and their “yip-yip-yaroo!” in the night and when the goats started bleatin’ (‘cept Wilbur of course, who was sleepin’ just fine at the foot of my bed) and the birds started squawkin’, Ben ran outside and fired a shot in the air. He was too late for Jack, though, who we found next morning halfway ‘cross the yard from the pen, where the coyotes must’ve left him when the shotgun scared ‘em off.
I’ll tell you what. No one, nowhere needs to spend any time convincing me we live in a fallen world. I’ll tell you what else. One day I’ll be in a place where we won’t be eatin’ any turkeys, death by natural causes or not.
But today the best I can do is give Jack a decent burial. (What’s left of him, that is, after we have our fill of supper.)
Saturday January 10th, 2009
The thing is, I’ve been reading. Aunt Kitty says I may as well have dropped off the end of the earth (and I had to bite down mighty hard on my stubborn tongue to keep it from waggling that there is no such thing.) Pilot’s eyes have taken on a mopey expression and Wilbur, well, she’s grown a bit round in the belly from all this lazing by the fireplace on foggy days.
Ben did his Christmas shopping in the attic, just as he does every year. There wasn’t even a blush on his cheeks when Aunt Kitty mentioned that the shawl she lifted out of a newspaper-wrapped box on Christmas morning bore a remarkable likeness to the one draped across his mother’s shoulders in the photo on the piano.
As for myself, Ben uncovered a stack of dusty books. Wuthering Heights. Pilgrim’s Progress. Pride and Prejudice. Little Women. Misty of Chincoteague.
I thought, at the first, that I would start straight from the top, and opened Bronte’s novel that very evening. Was this a gift? Because it seemed a punishment to me! I read it aloud so Pilot and Wilbur could share in my misery. You may wonder why I didn’t just put this book down and move onto the next. I wonder too. Pilot whined when Catherine’s ghost first appeared and Wilbur wiggled under the bedcovers until only one hind hoof could be seen poking out. I wanted to hide under those covers myself, and I would have if only I could still see the words on the page.
Three nights of this we endured, and for what? Only to wake that third morning with Heathcliff’s agony in our hearts: “You said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”
I had done nothing to deserve this pain, and I’ll tell you it was a struggle to hide my bitterness from Ben. Collecting dust in the attic, indeed. Just as it should be! My next choice would not be made so casually. I reckon anyone would’ve been convinced as I was by the declaration on the dust jacket of Pilgrim’s Progress. “A Christian classic,” it said. Uplifting, I thought, and why shouldn’t I have? Pious, that’s what it would be– good and holy and uplifting.
And I’ll tell you I near to peed my pants no less than three times in the reading of that book, and by the end I was holding onto Pilot and weeping like to start a flood with the certainty that I could be bound for nowhere other than hell–and what a dreadful, terrifying place it would be!
Two days I stayed away from books altogether, but in a moment of pure weakness, on the third day I picked up Pride and Prejudice. Aunt Kitty assured me there was nothing to fear in this one and all would be well by the time the last page was turned. And it was! Darcy loved Elizabeth and Mr. Bingham loved Jane and that rotten old lady was put in her place. There was a smile on my face when I closed the book and Pilot barked a cheerful bark, like I had not heard from him in weeks. The sun had come out after days of fog and we were settled quite comfortably against a fallen log on the hillside. I giggled and leapt to my feet. So full of joy was I in that moment, I even found a grin and a wave for that rotten boy Ezekiel when we passed him on our race back home.
That night I dreamed of Pemberley, and in the morning I woke to the sound of my own voice whispering plaintively, “Mr. Ezekiel.” Disgusted, I tossed back the blankets and recovered Pilgrim’s Progress from under my bed. Better fear of eternal damnation than mooning over some stupid boy.
Saturday February 28th, 2009
When I’m being particularly rotten or sour-faced, Aunt Kitty likes to remind me I’ve got more reasons to smile than a sinner on Sunday. Usually I get so stuck trying to puzzle out what in tarnation she’s talkin’ about that I clean forget to hold onto that grumpy face. But when you’re lookin’ death in the eye, it just ain’t so easy to be smooth-talked out of your depression. That’s right, I said death. It’s alright; I didn’t see it comin’ either.
I woke with great expectations; spring comes early to Frog Creek and likely as not the almond trees are all aglow with blossoms by February’s end. Ben tried sweet-talkin’ Wilbur into the barn for breeding this winter but I reckon she fancies herself head-over-heels for Pilot. We won’t be seein’ any kid goats this spring.
Anyhow, Ben was hollerin’ at Aunt Kitty from the barn to dig the heat lamps out of the attic; the chicks were comin’ early! Now usually I wouldn’t even have a single look in the mirror ‘fore getting on outside and starting in on my chores. As I was scrubbin’ at my teeth though, a flash of white pulled my eye up to my reflection in the glass. There it was, just springing out of my head all crazy-like. An omen. A foreshadowing. A eulogy just 10 inches long. Tell me now, just what business does a gray hair have on the head of a 13-year-old girl?
I near to burst into tears right then and there. I saw my whole life flash before my eyes– and it only took a couple seconds. I imagined what they’d hammer into my gravestone: “HERE LIES TEVIS: She died before she did much on account of she only lived to be thirteen.” What I wanted to do was throw myself into Aunt Kitty’s arms, but I reckoned the right thing to do was spare her a few days heartache and keep the news to myself for as long as I could bear.
You see things different when you’re dying. I told Ben I would not be doing my chores for a while. (What I really meant was forever, but again, it seemed kindest to withhold the truth.) To be honest, I was sorta hoping he’d ask why so as I’d have an excuse to share, but he didn’t ask why. He just said a word I reckon I can’t repeat here, and he told me to get busy.
The rest of the day I spent with the chicks, giving them all names and teaching them to be kind to one another. Pilot, you may remember, has a special fondness for chickens. He fair to filled a bucket with drool, watchin’ me and the chicks from the other side of the fence. I tried talkin’ to him about kindness too and he tried his darndest to put on an innocent face, but he wasn’t foolin’ me. I know that dog too well.
I skipped dinner and waved away cookies in the afternoon. By the time supper was on the table, Aunt Kitty’d had enough of my poutin,’ thank heaven. She marched outside with a wooden spoon in one hand and a dish towel in her pocket and I spilled out the whole truth before she even opened her mouth.
“Well is that all?” she said, and quick as a lick she found that gray hair and pulled it right out of my head. “There.”
“Ouch!” I said, and put a hand to my smarting head, but she was already on her way back to the house.
Aunt Kitty says every gray hair on her head has a name and if I picked just one, more’n likely it would be named “Tevis.” Me, I felt no particular attachment to that hair and the sooner I forget about it the better. If I were going to put a handle on it, I’d choose something like “Abomination,” but the way I figure it, a name will just hinder my forgettin’ it ever happened.
Ben, he’s always tellin’ me how the good Lord knows the number of hairs on my head. Now, I reckon there’s supposed to be some comfort in that… but here’s what it tells me: sure as you can’t make a sandwich with just one slice of bread, that white hair didn’t just pop up on my head without the good Lord knowing about it. Reckon I’ll be holdin’ that against Him for a while.
Sunday April 5th, 2009
Have you been out-country a moonless night, when it’s all you can do to find your own hand in the darkness, and the coyotes’ howls bounce off the hills till you just know you’re surrounded by those mangy creatures? It’s a disturbing feeling, I’ll tell you, but here’s something that’s more disturbing still: It’s a sound, rising up like woodsmoke to curl around that howling, almost joining in, but not quite. It’s not Pilot, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s music, and it came to me through my open window last night–came real subtle-like, sneaking in under pretense of the keening coyote and revealing itself only later, when it left off the plaintive melody and started in on a riff.
You might think you know me– might think you know me so well as to be certain I threw back my covers without thinking twice and clambered out of my window straight into that dark night.
You would be right, if you were thinking of the imaginary me, the one I wish I was, the one who isn’t just a little bit scared of coyotes, the one who, come to think of it, would actually be sittin’ out there in the darkness blowin’ on that harmonica herself.
Nah. Me, I lay in bed while that harp turned the coyotes howling into a sort of accompaniment and when I woke up this morning I remembered it as a sort of concert, the harmonica and the coyotes and the occasional owl, and I wondered if I might be in attendance again on the night to come.
Meantime, the day was sunny and long with pleasures of its own. This week the apple trees hit the season of their blossoming, and suddenly there’s these blooms bustin’ out all over the place.
I tugged a branch down low this morning and touched a finger to one of those blossoms and I said to Aunt Kitty, “If you could only have one–just this here blossom, or the apple it’ll be in a few months time, which one would you have?”
“Well,” she said, after narrowin’ her eyes a bit till I was quite certain she’d as soon wash the breakfast dishes three times over as answer another of my questions, “I reckon I’d take the apple. Cause it’s a sure thing.”
Truth is, sure things scare me a bit, and not just ’cause they include meatloaf, dying and cleaning toilets on Saturday. There’s just something ’bout knowing what’s coming that sets my teeth on edge.
I’ll let you know if the harmonica blows again tonight.
Saturday May 9th, 2009
All that gushing and carryin’ on I did about apple blossoms–well, I’ll tell you I felt downright silly when the deer came through not two days later and ate up those blossoms like they were the sweetest treat.
I took myself and my thoughts of that crispy, juicy apple I wouldn’t be biting into come October away up into the hills. Pilot, he came trottin’ along beside me, tongue a-waggin’ and not a care in the world. You just know a dog is feelin’ good when his tongue is hanging halfway to his knees. There’s days I wish I could set my own tongue to waggin’, just let it flop around against my face so everyone could know just by lookin’ at me how good I feel.
I reckon Wilbur has some tongue envy too. More’n once I’ve caught that goat walking side-by-side with Pilot, her mouth gapin’ open and her tongue just peeking out the side. I’d tell her she’s gonna bite her tongue one of these days, tell her a goat’s tongue just wasn’t made for wagging, but I reckon some things a goat just has to learn for herself.
Anyhow, that’s what I was thinking about–that, and juicy, crunchy apples–when I ran smack into that rotten boy Ezekiel from across the creek. I would’ve let him have a talkin’ to ’bout being in my way and there being a whole lot more hills he could take himself away to, but that boy wheeled around, grabbed me by the shoulders with one arm, planted one of his big, scratchy hands over my mouth and told Pilot to be quiet with just a look in his eye.
Well, and what was I to think but I was bein’ assaulted?
I wiggled and squirmed and spit in his hand and all I got outta him was a grunt and a curse.
In the silence that followed, we heard a crashing in the manzanita. Pilot’s ears perked up and his tongue slipped back inside his mouth. One thing about a wagging tongue–it just doesn’t belong where there’s rabbits to be chased.
“They’re gone now,” Zeke said, his mouth so close to my ear that I felt his sigh before I heard it.
When he let go of me I spun around and pinned him with my best Aunt Kitty you’re-in-for-it-now look.
He shrugged. “There was a whole mess of deer.” He gestured to a clearing not five feet away. “I’ve been watching them for a while now.”
My eyes darted back to where we’d last heard the crashing in the brush. “Why! Those rapscallion scallywags!” There were no pebbles on the ground, so I raised my voice–the only weapon I had. “And don’t come back!” I hollered.
**
It wasn’t till later that evening, when Ben and I were eyein’ each other over the last piece of banana cream pie, that I found out those deer had actually done us a service.
“Deer came through last night,” he told Aunt Kitty, while she scrubbed at the dinner dishes. “Saved me a whole lot of work in thinning and pruning. I reckon we’ll have some nice big apples come autumn, if the bees to their work.”
Monday June 1st, 2009
It’s a terrible thing happens round this cottage every year, ’bout this time. You might think I’d be expecting it by now, that I’d prepare myself and spare my poor heart the disappointment. But hope is a powerful thing.
I can’t be the only one who finds herself buyin’ into the promise of the sun come springtime. It tells me all sorts of lies about lazy days ahead, ice cream and picnics, nothing to do and loads of time to do it in. Then Aunt Kitty shows up by my bedside, first morning after school lets out, and there it is in her hand: The Summer Chore List.
So while I was pinning Ben’s undershorts and Aunt Kitty’s knee-highs to the clothesline, Pilot and Wilbur took themselves off on a little adventure up the hillside. Now it wasn’t till after I spent the evening cozyin’ up to Pilot on the back porch, not till after Wilbur crawled into bed with me that night, not till I woke up next morning to the sun in my eyes and a terrible itch under my skin, that I realized Pilot’s and Wilbur’s little adventure had taken them through a mighty crop of poison oak.
Now in case you’re thinking Aunt Kitty might have taken pity on this poor, rash-ridden girl, let me just wipe that thought clean out of your head. Aunt Kitty, she’s of the “Take your mind off it and it won’t hurt no more” way of thinkin’. When the preacher shared last Sunday ’bout how Martin Luther would counsel a man struck with the blues to hitch up the horses and go spread some manure, Aunt Kitty was noddin’ her head so hard she near to bounced right out of the pew.
When she found me doubled over in the kitchen, attacking those itchy spots with a potato masher and Ben’s best grillin’ spatula, she shoved a bar of Fels Naptha into my hand and sent me off to the bend in the creek to give Pilot and Wilbur a bath.
Well if you’ve never suffered from a fire under your skin, I’ll thank you to keep your judgment to yourself. By the time we reached the creek I was near to goin’ out of my mind, and I won’t be ashamed that I stripped off every lick of clothing and sat my bare, burnin’ bottom right down in that muddy bend of the creek. I scooped up a handful of that lovely, rocky silt and scraped at the redness on my arms and legs. It’s not the first time Pilot and Wilbur looked at me like I was nuts, but it may be the first time they were right.
If Pilot hadn’t perked up his ears and jogged away, I might’ve never known that boy was standin’ there in the trees.
I scrambled to the water’s edge with as much dignity as I could muster, which was hardly any at all, and I shouted at him:
“Ezekiel! What in tarnation are you doin’ here?”
That boy said nothin’, not a single word! I crouched behind Wilbur and tried to draw my clothes closer just by thinkin’ about them.
“I got some rope back home,” I told him. “We could tie up that misbehavin’ jaw of yours, ‘fore you swallow a fly or somethin’.”
Still, nothing.
“Oh, get on!” I hollered. “Ain’t you seen a girl naked before?”
His jaw was closed now, but there was somethin’ in his eyes I didn’t understand and it shut me up. He turned and left the way he came, but none too fast, and darned if I know how he left me feelin’ like I was the one who should apologize.
I’ll tell you one thing though. Aunt Kitty and old Luther may be on to somethin’. I clean forgot about that fire under my skin for a good thirty minutes or so.
Wednesday September 2nd, 2009
And what was I supposed to do, when that rat-a-tap-tapping started in on my window pane a couple hours after the sun went down? What would you have done, hearing your whispered name rising out of that darkness?
“Tevis,” came the whisper. “Come on! Tevis! Get on out here!”
Well I don’t mind tellin’ you, when I cranked that window open and saw that rotten neighbor boy standing knee-deep in our rosebushes, I near to cranked it back shut again and went back to bed.
“What’re you doin’ in our rosebushes!”
Now any normal person would have answered me, would have said something along the lines of, “Well, Tevis, the reason I came knocking on your window in the middle of the night and am standing in the middle of your rosebushes is because…”
But Zeke, he just got that crooked grin of his and wouldn’t say a word till I’d clambered out the window and stumbled after him into the darkness.
“It’s a meteor shower,” he said, not sparing even a glance over his shoulder to be certain I was there. It’s true my grumbling may have been louder than I thought.
Now I don’t care to get hit by a meteor anymore than the next person, but I reckon if they’re gonna rain down on us I ought to at least know where they’re comin’ from.
“Are we gonna die?” I asked him, and when he laughed I guessed the answer was no.
I guess that boy must have done a fair bit of night wandering, what with the way he traipsed through the darkness and led us up the hillside like there was a noonday sun lighting our path. For myself, all I could make out was the white of Zeke’s undershirt, where it peeked out at the nape of his neck.
I finally kicked a rock that got the best of me, and my hands only narrowly beat my face to the ground.
“Okay?” Zeke asked, his hands taking my shoulders to set me aright.
“Hmph,” I said.
He took my hand then, and set off at a pace maybe even faster than before. Somehow we crested that hill and settled ourselves on a mossy boulder. It may be we saw some stars fall out of the sky that night. To be honest, I can’t much remember.
“Do you believe in God?” I asked him.
He said, “Probably not.”
“What kind of a dumb answer is that?”
“Not much dumber than your question, I guess.”
We weren’t much inclined to talk after that. Some people just aren’t a right fit; some you just can’t talk to no matter how you try. If he was going to get all ornery every time I asked a simple question, well, I reckon there weren’t much point in me continuing to try.
~~~
Next morning I hurried to find Ben in the barn where he was wrestling a bale of hay out to the goats. He looked at me funny, but being Ben said nothin’ when I yanked the hay hook out of his left hand and set my palm where the handle had been. I counted to twenty, because I wanted to be sure. That whole time, from one to twenty, Ben just stood there starin’ at my little hand in his dirty one and I couldn’t begin to guess what he was thinkin’.
‘Cause my thoughts were all used up with this one: There was no magic here. Just Ben’s hand, sort of scratchy on mine. I didn’t feel it in my toes, didn’t feel it under my skin, most certainly didn’t feel it in my chest, which had been all fluttery and gasping under the stars.
I had to pry Ben’s fingers loose when I got to twenty though. He didn’t seem much inclined to let go of me.
Tuesday October 20th, 2009
I was five steps and about a dozen thoughts past that rattlesnake before my head got the message from my eyes that said, in big capital letters, “SNAKE!” The funny thing, and the thing that kept me up half the night after, is instead of hightailing it outta there like any thinking girl would do, I turned myself back around to get a closer look. By then that rattler was coiled up tight and I hope you won’t think I’m funnin’ with you when I say he had a downright mean look in his eye.
Well, soon enough here comes Pilot, leading with his nose of course and all sorts of curious. I hollered out “No!” and “Get away!” and “Get back!” and “Go!” and all the while Pilot’s ignoring me and that rattler’s tail’s gettin’ higher and before I know it there’s a sound like a mighty rushing waterfall and it’s that eight-bead tail just sendin’ up the alarm. Pilot’s gettin’ closer and that rattler’s lookin’ meaner and I’m thinkin’ this is it. This is the end.
~
Pilot first came to us by way of the Yolo County Animal Shelter away off toward the big city. We had a television back then, and maybe this is why we don’t no more, cause one Monday mornin’ Aunt Kitty had the news on and cakes on the griddle and here’s this newsman sayin’ how they’re puttin’ down animals left and right at the Yolo County shelter ’cause they just got too darn many of them. Now, I’d only been with Aunt Kitty and Ben for a few months at that time and when I think on it now I think, Whatever happened to the power I had then? Somehow they got me wound off their little fingers, I guess, cause that day it was no more than me asking that had us all piling into the car and driving through three counties to rescue Pilot.
That Pilot (and his name was Button then, of all things!), he put on quite a show, pretendin’ to be all meek and mild-mannered. Ben, he said he reckoned he’d be a decent enough dog, and we drove three counties back home with Pilot seat-belted in beside me.
I made Ben all sorts of promises, of course. I’d train Pilot up real good, and I’d take care of his feed and water. I’d bathe him every day and make sure he got exercised good and regular, and he’d be the best behaved dog this side of the Mississippi. Turns out maybe I should have said this side of Frog Creek, cause mostly he’s the only dog around these parts.
I spent a whole week trying to get that dog to sit and we weren’t gettin’ nowhere ’til I found he had a powerful affection for Fig Newtons. That’s right. I tried bribing him with hot dogs and sausages, bacon and cheddar cheese and he’d just wag and nibble if I gave him a taste. But it wasn’t something he needed, wasn’t something he’d be willing to work for. Then he snuck into Aunt Kitty’s pantry and cleaned out her package of Fig Newtons and while she was busy hollerin’ and wavin’ her broom around I was thinkin’, Hmmmm.
Ten minutes and one Fig Newton was all it took and that dog would sit before I finished sayin’ the word. To this day it’s like he can’t help himself. His face’ll be telling me how very much he does not want to, but if I tell him to sit, almost against his will he does it.
~
So after I was done screaming “Stay!” and all manner of other stuff and Pilot was closin’ in on that rattler real deliberate-like, the word finally came to me and I said it like I meant it more than ever before: “SIT!” And darned if he didn’t.
Oh, that dog gave me the pitifullest look when that rattlesnake hunkered down and hurried off. But he followed me to the kitchen door and I dropped half a dozen Fig Newton’s at his feet and must have said Good Dog more times than he’s heard in his whole life to date.
Darned if there wasn’t too much scare to be used up in that three minutes though, and I’ve spent the better part of two days still carrying that scare with me.
