I froze. “The ring? Well, Jake, I hate to say this, but that ring is gone. Somebody stole it.”
I leaped out of the truck, grabbed the bags, and didn’t look back. All I heard was squealing tires and May calling, “Jake? Jake, wait—”
CHAPTER 27
ALONE
I left early the next morning, and as sure as I live and breathe, that first day on my own lingered on so long I could have sworn there were five hundred hours in it.
Mom and Dad had stumbled out of bed to see me off, poking at my backpack, which was stuffed near to bursting and lashed with rope from which various doodads hung. My sleeping bag and tarp were rolled into a tight sausage and suspended from the bottom of the backpack, and I’d fashioned another pack out of an old flour sack, to carry the food in.
I set up camp where I’d left off the previous day, figuring that each day after working on the trail, I’d walk back to camp, and every two or three days, I would pack it all up and move farther ahead. After everything was set up, I sat there, taking in my territory. I’d looked forward to this moment for so long—all by myself up in the hills with the birds and trees and sky, with no one to bother me for ten whole days.
My “room” wasn’t a cramped box shared with three sisters, or invaded by brothers or parents—it was the whole wide-open countryside. I had my food, my water, my tarp, my flashlight, my toothbrush—all my own, and nobody was going to eat them, stomp on them, or make off with them. In the days before leaving, when I had spun this scene in my mind, I had imagined that I would sit there for hours like that, maybe the whole day, absorbing it all into my skin. But oddly, after about five minutes, I was antsy, and so I grabbed my trowel and started clearing the trail.
I was used to clearing for four or five hours at a stretch, and so this part of the day was normal for me. Whenever I was clearing, it was like when I was scything that time—I wasn’t thinking, just moving my arms and hands, which seemed joined to the trowel, the grass, the trail. But sometimes, in the middle of all that non-thinking, or as I was finishing my work, scenes would fly out, suddenly and unexpectedly, from some hidden place in my brain, like little birds rising suddenly from the branches of a tree.
One of these scenes that flew out that day was an image of my parents, sitting there at the table, with my mother saying that I’d always talked to Jessie. In the quiet of the woods I could see my mother’s face again, and I saw that hurt look. She had minded that I’d talked to Jessie. This came as such a shock. And just before this scene disappeared, I wondered if my mother were replaying that same scene, if she could see me again, and if she heard me saying that she and my father hadn’t talked to me. I was hoping she wasn’t hearing that, because I was sorry I had said it. And then I started thinking that maybe I had wanted them to talk to me more, to notice me more. But I could hear May again: Oh, Zinny, how immature!
I stopped working at four o’clock, the time I’d usually start for home, and it took me a few minutes to realize that I didn’t need to go home, that I was home. I didn’t even need to stop working, if I didn’t want to. I could go on for hours—why, I could work all through the night if I wanted.
On my way back to my makeshift campsite, I collected wood for my fire, and decided what I would eat. I’d heat up a can of beans and have a slice of bread and a piece of fruit, topped off with water, and, for dessert, half a chocolate bar. It sounded magnificent. I ran it all through my mind again, how I would build the fire, and open the can of beans. Open the can? With a sinking feeling, I knew I’d forgotten to include a can opener.
Why hadn’t I thought of such an obvious thing? Why hadn’t anyone reminded me? Then I remembered all the things they did remind me to include, and how they all seemed concerned that I not be cold or hungry, that I be safe. I turned the scene around and saw how muley I’d been, how eager to get away from them. I was feeling like a low-down worm.
I had trouble with the fire. I fumbled and coaxed and pleaded, begging that wood to catch. I tried everything, even yelling at it, but the wood was too damp and too big. Jake probably knew how to build a fire. Maybe I should have let him help me. That thought made me really prickly. I didn’t want to think about Jake. I scaled everything down and started with a few dry leaves and two skinny twigs, and once that was going, I added bigger and bigger pieces until it was a roaring bonfire. I overdid it, I admit. Ravenous for those beans, I stabbed and punched one can until it splattered open.
It doesn’t take long to eat when you’re by yourself. You don’t have to wait for anyone to pass things, and you don’t have to answer questions. I wished I’d brought a cup, but at least I could swig water out of the bottle. When I finished eating, I wiped off my fork and buried the empty can. There! I didn’t have to clear the table or wash the dishes! I was a free and independent person and I could do whatever I liked.
I looked around. What exactly did people do when they had all the time in the world and could do whatever they liked?
From far below came the mournful train whistle, and I instinctively turned in the direction of the farm, thinking of the ash tree and the cardinals and Aunt Jessie and Uncle Nate. My family would be clattering around the dinner table, and I wondered if anyone would notice that I was gone.
Out flew another scene: my parents getting up early that morning to see me off. And another: Sam slurping his soup. And more: Ben in his garden, Gretchen hunched over her computer. Stop! I pleaded with my brain. Stop it!
It was way too early to sleep. I walked around my campsite, straightening my sleeping bag, stoking the fire, and deciding what I would have for breakfast. When I realized I would need more wood for the fire, I was thrilled. Something to do! Gather wood!
While I was searching for wood, I remembered the zinnia seeds I had brought. Something else to do! Dragging a stick in each hand, I made a groove along each side of the trail I had cleared that day. As I walked back to my camp, I scattered seeds in the grooves, and then I retraced my steps, tamping the dirt. The seeds should have been watered, but I didn’t want to waste my drinking water, so I hoped for rain soon.
These were trivial things my mind focussed on, and I knew it, but they kept me from thinking about the bigger things that were lurking behind this clutter. I felt that if I didn’t keep busy, a million, million scenes were going to burst out of my head all at once. Part of me was curious to see what was in there, but I wanted to see them slowly, one at a time.
My watch said that it was only seven o’clock, and I shook it, thinking it must have stopped. On another wood search, I found an old maple tree, which would be a great climbing tree, with its sturdy, well-spaced branches. I thought, hey, I can just climb right up there. It might seem like a dumb thing to think, but at the time it was a thundering revelation—that I had seen something I wanted to do, and I could go ahead and do it, without worrying that I’d be late or had to finish something else first or that someone might tell me it was dangerous.
So I climbed the tree. Up and up I went, telling myself, Go on, go higher, you can go as high as you want. I settled on a branch, high, high above the ground. Birds were chattering, diving and swooping among the trees. Two gray squirrels chased each other up a nearby oak tree, their tails flicking like feathery whips.
Way off and far below was a thin ribbon of the river, and scattered here and there were rooftops and silos and pastures. From my perch, I spotted my trail and my campfire. As I turned to look farther up the hill, a dark shape fluttered at the corner of my vision. I turned back to my campsite and again thought I saw a shifting shadow, brief and wavering, like the whisk of a dark cape.
I listened and watched, and although I saw no more movement near my campsite, what I heard made me uneasy. There were creaks and groans that I’d not heard before, snaps and crackles, rattles and drones—a pulsing, thrumming of sound all around me. In a few hours it would be dark, and there I was, alone in a tree high up in the hills, and I was afraid.
I remained there a long time, in a sort of stup
or, and might never have moved from that spot, but when the tree itself groaned as if it were tired of supporting my weight, I sat up with a start. My campfire was barely a glow below, and the sun had set, dropping an orange curtain over the sky.
I climbed down, trying to ignore the sounds of the woods and its creatures, and hurried back to my campsite, stoked the fire, and slipped into my sleeping bag. I lay flat on my back staring at the sky, watching the blinking fireflies, and the moths which darted on the fringes of the campfire. Bats swooped overhead. I was waiting for the moment when it would be dark. Then I would close my eyes and sleep.
But there was no moment of dark. Instead, what I saw was the most subtle shading in the sky, a gradual deepening of color, so gradual that you could not actually see the changes, but could only think, Is that the color it was a moment ago? Isn’t it deeper now? Is it dark yet? Is this dark? Soon I noticed the white specks of stars, but still they weren’t draped on a black sky, still it wasn’t dark. And although I watched intently, I did not see the moment of dark, and I wondered if maybe it wasn’t a moment at all.
CHAPTER 28
BABY IN THE BAG
Once in the night I heard a crackling of twigs, as if someone were near. I was burrowed in my sleeping bag, too sleepy and too afraid to look, but I listened. Hearing nothing more, I decided it had been the fire settling, and went back to sleep. I dreamed of baby Rose and the shopping bag.
I must have had lots of memories of Rose, because we were raised like twins, always together. Sometimes we even slept together because we’d put up such a fuss when we were separated. It bothered me that I couldn’t resurrect these memories.
One of my teachers once said that we can’t get at very early memories because our brains file memories by words, and when we’re infants, we don’t have enough words. I wasn’t sure I believed this, because sometimes I saw baby Rose’s face, an infant face, from before either of us knew any words at all.
Maybe it was like Gretchen’s computer. Sometimes when she tried to open up a file, the screen flashed Locked! or No access! Gretchen then pleaded and coaxed, talking to her computer as if it were a naughty child, and if it continued to resist her, she scolded it and flicked it off.
Memories of Rose were locked somewhere, and I was denied access. That night, however, one snuck out of its locked drawer:
Aunt Jessie emptied a shopping bag and placed it on the floor. It was one of those fancy, sturdy ones, wide and tall, made of heavy-duty paper with two handles. Rose crawled into it, and Aunt Jessie picked it up, saying, “Oh, I guess I’ll go shopping, la-de-da,” and swinging the bag back and forth. “Has anyone seen my Rose?” she said. “La-de-da.”
I peeked into the bag and there was Rose all curled up, grinning away, and I looked up at Aunt Jessie, and she, too, was smiling and laughing, and it was the most wonderful thing to see. Aunt Jessie asked me if I wanted a turn in the bag, but I didn’t. I wanted to see Rose in it, grinning, and Aunt Jessie swinging that bag saying, “La-de-da.”
My dream was exactly how it had been, except that in the dream, the scene played over and over, and I stood to one side, praying that it would never, ever end.
In the morning a thin band of copper seeped above the horizon, and dew clung to cobweb bridges woven through the grass. In this peaceful scene, I wondered how I could have been so afraid the night before.
That day, I fell into a routine that I followed for the next eight days. I’d head out early, admiring my recently cleared stretch of trail, which I was clearing more rapidly—at least a half-mile a day, and sometimes twice that much.
Each day, I’d find something to add to my growing collection of things found along the trail: arrowheads, flints, strips of leather, bits of rope, a bowie knife, and a slingshot. I knew that the lady at the historical museum would blow a gasket if she could see these things. I also found fossils. In low-lying areas, there were plant fossils and brachiopods that looked like clams. Aunt Jessie would have had a grin a mile wide, and she would’ve said these were sure-fire proof that the area had been a huge sea millions and millions of years ago.
Depending on what I’d find, I’d be, for the rest of the day, a trapper cat-stepping through the forest, or an archeologist on a major dig, or an escaped convict fleeing his jailers. Often I returned to being Zinny Taylor: detective, searching for Jake’s ring and the medallion. The more I thought about them, the more I believed they were connected to the trail, and if I kept going, I would find more clues.
I wondered about Uncle Nate’s treks through the hills, and if he might have taken the medallion and the ring, but I couldn’t imagine why he’d want them or what he would do with them.
Shortly after noon on that second day, the quiet was disturbed by the buzz of a small plane. A single-engine crop duster zipped over the trees, and I thought I was about to be sprayed with insecticide, though I couldn’t imagine why anyone would be spraying up there. The plane circled overhead, and the two men seated up front waved. As I waved back, the plane dipped and turned, and I saw that the passenger was my father. “You don’t have to check on me!” I shouted. He couldn’t hear me, but he smiled and waved again. Every couple days after that, he’d buzz by, hitching a ride with the crop duster, and it got so I missed him on the days he didn’t come.
In the evenings after dinner at the camp, I’d gather wood and plant zinnia seeds along the new stretch, and usually I’d climb a tree and wait for the six o’clock train whistle. The next few hours—between the whistle and dark—were the hardest, and for the first several days at this time, I had to force myself not to flee down the trail for home.
On the fourth day, I moved my camp ahead. During the early evening hours, I began to notice things in the woods, little things, normal things, like grasshoppers, crickets, butterflies, and moths zinging through the grass. Bordering the sentries of oaks, elms, beeches, and larches grew scores of wildflowers: buttercups and goldenrod; daisies and black-eyed Susans; goatsbeard and lady’s slippers. In my head I could hear Aunt Jessie saying “Bingo!” and “What a wonder!” She and Uncle Nate had taught me to recognize all these things.
Sometimes, one grasshopper or one fossil or one maple would be mesmerizing. You could look at any one of these for days and weeks and months, and you’d see something different each time. Maybe it was the same with people: if you studied them, you’d see new and different things. But would you like what you saw? Did it depend on who was doing the looking?
I marked my progress on the trail maps. Already I’d passed through all of Maiden’s Walk, which straddled the fenced meadow (though the meadow wasn’t on the original map), and dipped through Crow Hollow, a shallow valley ringed with tall maples and inhabited by hundreds of jabbering crows.
I’d cleared straight across Baby Toe Ridge—weak-kneed and cringing, because on the back of the map was a handwritten legend which made me uneasy. A baby had been kidnapped by a wolf, and the only remains of the baby ever found were three toes, discovered on this ridge. As if that wasn’t gruesome enough, this note was added: Several sightings of baby’s ghost on ridge.
Twice, after working on this stretch of trail, I dreamed about baby Rose. In one of these dreams, someone was peering at her in the dresser drawer and saying, Where are her toes?
The old logging railroad was now rusted tracks ending abruptly in the middle of the woods. On either side of the railroad yawned clearings where trees had been felled. Old stumps still bearing the marks of cross-cut saws squatted here and there. There were also apple trees, which seemed out of place. I wondered if maybe loggers had brought apples up the hill with them, and tossed their cores aside, and after the men were long gone, after the railroad was shut down, apple saplings snuck out of their dark caves.
I was always in a muddle about time. It didn’t seem like a series of days, but one stretch of time, with light and dark blending into each other. Time went on and on; it didn’t start and stop, as I had thought. If time didn’t start and stop, I thought, maybe life
didn’t either. Maybe it just went on and on and on.
And I’d dream about Rose going on and on and Aunt Jessie going on and on, and I’d dream about my family, and Jake, and everyone was going on and on, and I’d wake up and I’d look around and I’d be surprised that there wasn’t a whole gang of people sitting there staring at me.
CHAPTER 29
GLIMPSES
On a maple stick, I carved a notch each morning, fearing that if I didn’t, I’d lose all sense of time, and might forget to go home on the tenth day as I had promised. Whenever I heard the train whistle, I still had terrible longings and would think about running down the trail and seeing the farm below and dashing into the kitchen and there everyone would be.
There was another source of unease, more difficult to explain. Several times I glimpsed a fluttering at the corner of my sight, or a moving shadow, or a spot of color—often red—as of someone’s sleeve or cap, ducking behind a tree. I’d halt, wait, listen, suspecting that someone was near, watching me, spying on me. Sometimes I thought it was Aunt Jessie I was seeing, and that she was there in the woods, watching over me. Once, I confess, I chased after that flicker of red, hoping it was her red hair I’d seen, but when I found nothing, I worried that I was becoming like Uncle Nate, chasing air. Pretty soon I’d be carrying a stick and beating lifeless things to death with it.
I felt guilty when I thought about Uncle Nate. I kept thinking that if I’d never been born, Rose wouldn’t have caught whooping cough and Aunt Jessie wouldn’t have been scared by a snake and crawled into a drawer, and Uncle Nate wouldn’t be alone, chasing after his Redbird day and night, and he wouldn’t ever need another sweetheart. I wanted to put Time on a big reel and wind it back so that the three of them could be together again. Whenever I imagined this, I’d think maybe I could just snip me out of it, but I’d keep seeing myself there with Rose and Uncle Nate and Aunt Jessie, and I didn’t want to snip myself out of it. I wanted to be there, and I wanted to be here now, and I didn’t want to be erased.