The storm finally passed, as storms so often do. After supper the three of us sat out by the walnut tree and talked until well after dark. A travel brochure had arrived a few days earlier, and Sallie and Silas were debating where to take their fall vacation. Sallie wanted to go snorkeling off the coast of Bohalia, but Silas said he'd like to see Minet.
Minet, he explained to me in some detail, was a community that had been founded during the late Middle Ages. There were three castles in the region, and pre-Renaissance villages scattered all around.
Maybe they'd just take separate vacations, Sallie suggested. Silas frowned at her suggestion and said maybe Minet could wait another year or two. Besides, he reasoned, it had stood there for hundreds of years, he was sure it wasn't going anywhere.
"Well," Sallie said, "We'll see when it gets closer."
"So, you're really going on a vacation, huh?" I asked
"Oh, yes, indeed," Sallie answered. "We vacate for a month every year. Just after Silas finishes up with the season's bluebonnets."
"Won't you have your new newbies by then?" I asked. "The ones from China?"
"Oh, they can come along if they like," Sallie said.
"But if you're only gone a month," I asked "what will you do with the rest of the winter?"
"Why, it takes at least two months just to get to Bohalia, and of course two more to get home," Sallie said.
"A month and half in the opposite direction to get to Minet," said Silas. "Each way."
"That's a lot of walking," I said.
"Well, the journey's just as much fun as the destination," Sallie said.
"If you know how to walk right," Silas added.
The stars had just started sprinkling the sky, little by little.
"Oh, look, Sy!" Sallie pointed up and toward her left. "Isn't that the constellation of Isis?"
I followed her finger to a cluster of twinkling stars. It looked like a little glob of stars to me. I had never heard of the constellation of Isis, and if I had, chances are I wouldn't recognize it anyway.
"Uh huh," Silas said. "Oh, and there, what's the name of that one? I can't remember."
"Me, neither," Sallie said.
The only constellation I had ever been able to pick out was the Big Dipper. Mom had shown it to me when I was a young girl. During the years I lived away from Kentucky, I would look up at the sky at night and wonder if Mom and I were looking at the Big Dipper together. And later, after Mom died, I still looked up at it at night and wondered if she was looking at it, too.
Apparently not, I smiled thinly. And then, remembering that she had already reincarnated, my thin smile fattened up.
I wondered if Mom was looking at the Big Dipper tonight.
"I don't see the Big Dipper," I said. "It's not there."
"Oh, it's there alright," Silas said. "Just 'cause you can't see it don't mean it ain't up there. Lot's of things are plain as day when you're one place, absolutely invisible when you're somewhere else. But they're nearly always there. Besides, you might think you're looking at one thing when you're really looking at something different altogether."
"Well, that's true enough," Sallie agreed. "It's all about perception, I reckon."
"Just like your armadillo, Newbie."
"How'd you know about the armadillo?" I asked.
"It's in your packet," Silas said. "Well, not the whole story. Just a little handwritten note. It says, Perception - things are always, usually, frequently, sometimes, occasionally, every now and then actually something else. Ask her to tell you about the armadillo."
"You know," I countered, "my packet isn't that thick. No more than maybe fifteen, twenty pages at most. You'd think if someone was going to condense my life into less than twenty pages they'd include more important things than a silly little story about an armadillo."
"That armadillo might have been one of the most important things that ever happened to you," Sallie said with a smile.
"Tell us the story," Silas leaned in his chair. "I believe I'd like to hear it."
Sallie leaned toward me, too. "Oh, me, too!" she squealed. "I want to hear this!"
I hesitated a minute. I looked at my little audience, their eagerness dripping onto the grass.
"It's really not that great of a story," I hedged.
"Tell us anyway," Silas said, and Sallie nodded.
"Well, it was when I lived in Texas. I was in my early twenties at the time."
The first time I told this story was to my friend
Jennifer. She had lived in Texas all her life, but I had only been there two and a half years. I lived in Lubbock for exactly one year, to the day, then moved to Keller, just north of Ft Worth.
I hadn't been in Keller but a few months when I saw the armadillo.
I usually took a long walk after work. Keller was a small town back then, not like it is today. Back then I could leave my front door in the middle of town and three minutes later be walking on a long, lonely back road.
From my house up to the first stop sign on that quiet little road was exactly one mile. You walk it a time or two every evening, you get cobwebs and all sorts of other irritations out of your head, and you sleep better at night.
I got so frustrated with my job sometimes it would take five or six trips to the stop sign and back to clear my mind.
One evening I was taking my walk after work. Just before I reached the stop sign I heard a slight rustle in the grass to my left. I stopped and looked, and there it was. An armadillo. It looked at me, and I looked at it, and we neither one moved.
In Kentucky we have rabbits and deer, squirrels, racoons, 'possums. These are the kinds of animals you're more likely see when you're taking a long walk after work in Kentucky.
We don't have armadillos in Kentucky. Everything I knew about armadillos I had learned from a radio station in Lubbock the year before.
It seems they had what they called armadillo races in Lubbock, a promotional event for one of the local bars. I didn't go to bars in Lubbock, and I never saw an armadillo. And yet, here I was in Keller, facing one. I knew it was an armadillo because I had seen a picture of one in an encyclopedia. I hadn't read the accompanying article.
The armadillo and I were less than ten feet apart.
Without a doubt, it was the ugliest animal I had ever seen in my life. I prefer my animals to be soft and furry. I don't think this animal owned a follicle.
The armadillo's face was thick and long, its ears puny and leather-like, and its body sheathed in layers of what looked like a steel-plated armor. A little slither of tail was hanging out the back. I couldn't see its feet or legs.
The armadillo didn't take its little black eyes off me. Despite its deplorable appearance, it seemed harmless enough, and I wanted to get a better look at it. I stepped forward. It didn't flinch. I took another step. It didn't move. One more step. Its left ear perked up at me, and I'm pretty sure if it had had eyebrows one of them would have raised at that moment.
With lightening speed, the armadillo lunged at me.
Now, I'm not a sprinter. I don't run fast, never have.
I was back in my house a mile away in less than three minutes.
I bolted from that animal, and I did not even consider glancing back. I could feel its nasty little breath at my feet, and I ran faster, harder. Little mercury wings sprouted off the back of each my ankles.
I flew home.
Once inside, I locked the door and the dead bolt, and barricaded the door with my couch, two end tables, and a cedar trunk full of blankets. Huffing, puffing, panting, I peered anxiously onto the front porch through the window.
I didn't see the armadillo, but I was sure I could still hear it breathing.
That night I slept on the couch, still smacked up against the door, clutching a baseball bat.
I told Jennifer this story a year or so after it happened. I had always been a little proud of surviving my attack by the armadillo, and I guess I was trying to impress my new friend.
Jennifer was not impres
sed. Instead, Jennifer laughed. She laughed so hard she made those gasping, gagging little sounds people make sometimes when they can't catch their breath. She held her sides to keep them from splitting, and then she laughed some more.
I grew impatient after a few minutes of watching her hysterics. My story was heroic, not comical.
"What's so funny?" I demanded, when her laughter was finally starting to subside. Jennifer looked at me, and she burst out laughing again. She was crying now. She kept laughing.
Laughter, even over the very funniest of things, has a life span. Thankfully, Jennifer's laughter finally died.
Her face was contoured up and she could barely squeeze the words out. Tears were trickling down both cheeks.
"Armadillos can't run," she said. "Armadillos jump. They're too heavy to run. When they get scared they jump one time, maybe twice. Armadillos don't run."
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO