“Cripes—”
“Zinny—pumpkin,” Uncle Nate whispered.
Jake clutched Uncle Nate’s hand. I leaned close.
“That ring was from Rose.” He gurgled. “Rose was calling—” His mouth formed a thin smile. “I like it here, and I’ll like it over yonder, but—” Again his arms twitched. “I don’t wanna be in that drawer—”
I glanced back at the dresser, but as I did so, Uncle Nate’s whole body jerked and convulsed, and then he was still and quiet and I feared he was gone, gone, gone.
CHAPTER 43
DRAWERS
Jake took the horse and raced to find my parents, while I stayed with Uncle Nate. His eyes were closed, his body still, and on his face the look of purest calm, as if he’d finally gotten to the place he’d been longing for. He wasn’t dead, but I was afraid that death would slip in the way night overtakes day, subtly, quietly. I opened the drawers of the dresser one by one. In the thin top drawer were dozens of letters. They all began: To my dearest Rose. Some ended, From your loving mother, and the rest ended with From your loving Pa.
They were written over the course of the last nine years, ever since Rose had died. They were alternately newsy:
We planted corn today,
and affectionate:
Your skin is like silk,
and filled with longing:
We miss you so—
Many of them mentioned me:
Zinny can read! She read the whole of your Baby Bear book to us tonight. Are you reading, Rose?
and:
Today Zinny found two brachiopods, but she calls them “broken pods.” We saved one for you.
and:
Zinny has the flu, and we are terribly, terribly worried. Are you well, Rose?
In the second and third drawers were baby Rose’s clothes, from infant gowns to the dresses and rompers of a four-year-old. All were neatly folded, and scattered among them were sprigs of lavender.
I wasn’t prepared for what was in the bottom drawer. When I pulled it open, I cringed. There, lying side by side, were me and baby Rose. Our hands were pressed together in a friendly clasp.
These were the dolls Aunt Jessie had made, but they were so lifelike, so rounded and soft like real toddlers, that it wasn’t hard to imagine that they were real children sleeping.
I touched their clasped hands, and as I did so, a coin slipped from within. It was a duplicate of the medallion, with TNWM engraved on it.
’Til Next We Meet. And then more of the memory poured forth, in a stream of images. We’d been at the circus, Rose and I and Aunt Jessie and Uncle Nate. We’d stopped in a fortune-teller’s booth and gazed into her crystal ball. She’d held our hands, examined our palms, Rose’s and mine. The fortune-teller pressed a medallion into each of our palms, and she’d said, “’Til Next We Meet.”
I had touched Rose’s hand in the drawer and taken her medallion. I’d run through the woods and I’d buried it. And later—days? Weeks? I’d taken my own medallion and pressed it into Aunt Jessie’s hand. “For Rose,” I’d said, and Aunt Jessie had hugged me, hugged me so hard and so long, and I didn’t want her to stop.
And remembering this, I could feel Aunt Jessie there in the cabin, near Uncle Nate lying so still on the bed, and I could feel Rose there, too. I took Rose’s medallion from my pocket, and my own medallion from the cabin drawer, and I held them a long time, a long, long, long time.
It seemed a shame that Aunt Jessie and Uncle Nate spent so much time chasing the dead. And yet, I could see how they were trying so hard to keep the dead alive, to defy that darkness sweeping in and overtaking them.
I went over to Uncle Nate and put my face up close to his. “Uncle Nate? Uncle Nate—Make the company jump! Make that dag-blasted company jump!”
One eye opened. Closed. Opened. He said, “You gonna put that pillow over my face again?”
CHAPTER 44
PETUNIA
When my parents arrived, Uncle Nate was sitting up in bed, looking through the photo album with me.
“Just had a little spell, is all—” he told them.
Dad said, “Maybe you ought to spend the night in the hospital—”
“That’s about as likely as a hog taking wing,” Uncle Nate said.
“How are you going to get back down that trail, anyway?” Mom asked.
“Same way I got up here, on that horse.”
“Where is the horse?” I said. “Where’s Jake? How’d you find us?”
“Mm—” Dad said. “Jake showed us where to go. Then he went along with the sheriff.”
“The sheriff? Why the sheriff?”
Dad cleared his throat. “Seems there was something about a stolen horse—?”
Oh, Jake!
Dad, Mom, and I spent the night in the cabin with Uncle Nate.
In the morning, at first light, we carried Uncle Nate down through the larch grove to where Dad had left his car, at the side of a dirt road at the bottom of a long hill. When we got home, there was the sheriff, waiting to talk to me about “matters concerning trespassing and a stolen horse.”
Jake, he said, was in real trouble. First, the car, and now trespassing and stealing the horse. When I told the sheriff that I was responsible for the fence and that I’d taken the horse, my parents nearly fainted away there in our kitchen.
If we lived in a bigger town, Jake and I probably would have had to go to Juvenile Court to tell our different stories. Instead, because this was Bybanks, we spent the afternoon with the sheriff, trying to explain. It was such a muddle, what with Jake going on about how he had only wanted to give me presents to get my attention, and me trying to explain about the trail and the hand of God and Aunt Jessie, baby Rose, and Uncle Nate.
The sheriff said he had a powerful headache. He ordered us to go home and write down our separate accounts of what we had done and why we had done it. After he had a chance to read these, he’d decide on our punishment. Meanwhile, we had to repair the fence (Willow had already been returned to her owner), and the sheriff said I’d better finish the trail.
A week later, I did finish it. I cleared on down Hogback Hill, and across Surrender Bridge on Doolittle Creek. The exact end of the trail was just a little bit farther on, the final stone unearthed in the back garden of the mayor of Chocton, who was not particularly pleased to see me clearing away his prized lavender border. When I told him this was one end of the historic Bybanks–Chocton trail, however, his ears perked up. He made his wife come out and take a picture of him standing beside the final stone, and then, as an afterthought, he allowed her to take a picture of him and me together, beside the trail.
He immediately phoned The Chocton Herald, who sent over a reporter and a photographer. The following week, an article appeared. Suddenly our phone was ringing off the wall, with people wanting to talk to Petunia. The reporter had my name wrong. Instead of Zinnia, it was Petunia. Typical.
Another reporter called, astounded that I’d cleared the trail all on my own. “Why did you do it?” he asked.
I didn’t think he’d understand about the hand of God any more than the sheriff would have, and I didn’t want to tell him about Aunt Jessie and Uncle Nate and baby Rose and the medallions. The only thing I could think of to say was, “I like it up there. You can hear yourself think.”
The following week, I put up a wooden sign at each end of the trail, identifying it as The Redbird Trail.
Strangers started using the trail. One day two women clomped onto our porch asking to use the bathroom. “There’s no facilities on that trail,” they said.
The next day, two boys asked for Band-Aids for the blisters on their feet, and an elderly man asked for a ride home. “Didn’t realize it was so far,” he said. “Thought there’d at least be a bus at this end to take people back to Chocton. Why isn’t there a bus?”
One day the Butler family showed up: Bill Butler, Mrs. Butler, and Old Mrs. Butler. With them was Gobbler. “It’s really Bingo,” Ben said. “Did you know
that, Zinny? Jake told us all about it.”
Bill Butler asked if he could leave Gobbler and Old Mrs. Butler on our porch while he and his wife went up the trail. My parents were beginning to lose it. “Something’s got to be done about this,” my father said. “We’ve got strangers in our bathroom, old ladies on our porch—why, today somebody asked if he could borrow my jacket because he’d forgotten his!”
Jake and I were each assigned a hundred hours of community service to atone for our stealing. Each week, Jake had to wash Mrs. Foster’s “beaut” of a car, groom and walk Bingo, and work one free hour for Mrs. Flint. My job was to keep the Redbird Trail clear of trash from all the new hikers who were using it.
I tried to tell the sheriff that I would have done that anyway, without being told to, and maybe he should assign me something else in addition, but he told me not to argue with him. Then he said, “I thought you were the one who didn’t talk much.”
Alone, I hiked the whole length of the trail, scooping up trash and propping up trampled zinnias. When I got to Surrender Bridge, I stood there studying that water running underneath. It was an odd feeling, knowing I was done, knowing I’d cleared the whole trail.
I looked back up the hill, and in my mind I saw that trail winding through the hills, up and down, in and out, all the way back to Bybanks. Every spot on that trail was part of me.
For several glorious minutes there, I was about the happiest person on the face of this planet. The trail was beautiful and it was good. I looked up into the trees and the sky, and the sky was vast and wide. I heard, in my head, the soft refrain of a song Aunt Jessie used to sing:
Lay your burden down, girl,
lay your burden down.
In the soft cool morning,
lay your burden down.
And then I had the oddest feeling, warm and comforting, as if a gentle hand had reached down from the heavens and stroked my hair.
CHAPTER 45
CHICORY
Uncle Nate was getting better each day. He was walking around with a cane in one hand and his stick in the other. Since he might not be able to make it up the trail for a while, he said I could bring the photo albums down from the cabin. He wanted to have those pictures beside him. They were his medicine, he said.
I wondered if he’d start chasing his Redbird again when his leg mended. In a way, I hoped he wouldn’t. I hoped he’d just stay close to us. But it was hard to imagine him giving up his chase; it was hard to believe he wouldn’t catch her one day.
One evening in September, we were all sitting around the table eating spaghetti, and I was talking about seeing Aunt Jessie in the larch grove, but only Ben and Uncle Nate believed me. I had hoped my pictures would offer proof that I’d seen her up in the woods, but when I had them developed, there was no sign of her in any of them. A couple pictures showed a flash of red, which I tried to tell my family was her hair, but they insisted it was a bird or a leaf.
Ben and Uncle Nate, however, studied the pictures closely.
“I think that’s her, all right,” Ben said, tapping a dot of red.
“Of course it’s her!” Uncle Nate said. “Any noodle can see that!”
Will said, “Zinny, you’re getting just like Uncle Nate, you know that? Proof! Hah! Like that picture Uncle Nate took—”
Uncle Nate tapped Will on the shoulder. “Well, if Jessie didn’t take that picture of me, who did?”
No one had an answer for that.
And it seemed there were a whole lot worse things than to become like Uncle Nate. I kind of liked the idea of me dashing around with a stick and a camera, chasing someone I love.
I swirled my spaghetti around my fork, eyeing those meatballs buried underneath. That spaghetti swirled around in loops and waves. You could follow one strand to its end and then you could hop to the next piece and the next and the next. I stabbed a meatball, and bit into it, anticipating that delicious bonus, but instead I chomped down on a piece of gristle. “Eck—”
“Zinny,” Ben said, bending close to me. “You have your good meatballs, and then you have your bad meatballs—”
Exactly.
Ben was beside himself one day when he discovered plants growing in his squirt garden, right where he’d planted the eggs. A couple weeks later, when pale blue flowers emerged, Ben raced to the library for a wildflower book and came home waving it and shouting. “Look! It’s chicory! It grew from chicken eggs!”
There on the open page was a chicory plant, identical to the ones growing in Ben’s garden. The description beneath included the legend of Chicory, who was once a lady named Florilor. Florilor was turned into a flower because she rejected the sun god’s love. As a flower, Florilor/Chicory opens up until noon, watching for the sun god, but when he is overhead, she closes her petals, ignoring him.
Another legend claimed that the seeds could be used as a love potion. If you fed them to someone, you could get them to love you.
Dad confessed to me that he planted the chicory. He thought it was funny, but he didn’t dare admit that he planted it, because Ben took it all very seriously. Ben was doing a report on it for school. I wasn’t sure what his teacher would make of his claim that chicory grows from chicken eggs.
One day I got a good “meatball” in the mail. It was a postcard from my friend Sal Hiddle, with this one line: Coming home to Bybanks!
In a burst of unaccountable goodwill that same day, I gave away all my collections: the bottle caps and buttons went to Sam; the lucky stones to Will; the bookmarks to Gretchen; the colored pencils to May; the shoelaces and bottles to Ben; and the keys and postcards to Bonnie. No one, not even Gretchen or May, said anything about their new collections being immature. I was surprised by that.
The woman at the historical museum was beside herself with excitement over the flints, arrowheads, and fossils from the trail. Her nose had been deep in books ever since, researching my finds. Occasionally I went in to help her, but it was hard to stay in that musty room very long.
I planned on putting Poke and his mate in my closet, in a box, to hunker down for the winter, and hoped the cricket would find its way into the house and spend the winter with us too. Jake said it was good luck to have a cricket on your hearth. At first I thought he said “a cricket on your heart,” which seemed a bit odd, but when he repeated it, I heard him right.
One day, not long after I’d finished the trail, Jake came over and sat with me on the porch swing. I’d been dreaming about Jake, wishing for him to come.
We swung back and forth in silence for a while. At last he put his hands together and said, “Zinny, I want to tell you something.”
My heart was thumping away.
“You said I was a dag-blasted fool—” he began.
“I didn’t really mean—”
“And maybe you were right,” he said. “Maybe I just lost my head.”
“That can happen,” I said, wishing he’d stop talking. I prepared my mouth to receive a kiss.
“Maybe you were right about something else, too.”
“Mm—?” I got my lips ready.
“Maybe I’m too old for you,” he said, staring out across the yard.
“Not that old—just a few years—”
“Don’t try to make me feel less foolish.”
“But—”
He chewed on his lip. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.”
May leaned out the upstairs window. “Jake?”
He stood up and leaned back to get a better view. “Hi,” he said.
“You wanted to see me?” she asked.
“Yup.”
“I’ll be right down!” she yelped.
“What?” I said. “What do you want to see May for?”
He rubbed his hands through his hair and scratched the back of his neck and chewed on his lip some more. “I thought I’d ask May to the movies. That ought to make you happy.” He grinned, then instantly frowned. “Get me out of your hair, at least!”
I grabbed his arm. “Ja
ke Boone,” I said. “If you take May to the movies, I’ll punch your brains in.”
Oh, the look on his face! You’d have thought I’d slung a bucket of hog slop on him.
“I mean it, Jake Boone,” I said. “If you go and tangle up my spaghetti again, I’ll shove ten tons of chicory down your throat!”
“Spaghetti?” he said. “Chicory?” He stared at me. “Are you trying to tell me you like me?”
May burst through the door. “Here I am!” she announced.
“Cripes!” Jake said.
CHAPTER 46
THE CHASE
Up on the trail is the most beautiful sight you ever did see. The zinnias are like bright little sentries marching along the trail, and the trees have burst forth in brilliant reds and yellows, so that all around you is an explosion of color. I know the leaves will fall soon, and our squirt gardens will fade, and I wish I could freeze it, capture it. I hope I can save it all in my mind, until the spring, when things will bloom all over again.
And even when I’m not on the trail, it’s with me, in my mind. On the trail I can think, and on the trail I am me, and on the trail I can touch the ground and climb to the sky.
Sometimes I wonder about other trails. Maybe I’ll check at the museum for more maps. I can see myself running across the whole country, chasing—what? Who?
Uncle Nate has left the cabin in my care, for the time being, until he can get back up there. He said I could take the family there to show them the shrine to baby Rose and Aunt Jessie. My brothers and sisters were pretty surprised to see all that stuff up there. Mom and Dad, even though they’d seen it before, cried. And after they’d all left, I stayed behind, and I curled up on the bed, hugging the dolls, as if I were four years old.
But now, Jake and I go up there from time to time. One day we had this conversation on the way up the trail:
Jake said, “I guess you don’t know me all that well—”