I waited for her to tell me the story of the fires that had taken our homes, or at least say what a “reckoning” was, but she turned and started across the yard and the only thing was to go after her. For a second, though, I just kept staring at the house.
The flowerbeds were choked with weeds, and a dirt lawn wrapped around the front, ending a good hundred feet before the road. The porch roof was strung all the way along the eave with wind chimes and tin cans clanking against each other.
Standing there at the bottom of the steps, I had a funny kind of double vision, like I could see the shape of the house as it had once stood, big and yellow, three stories against a tick-gray sky, with hollyhocks and sugar-pink peonies growing in the yard. I remembered playing in the shade of the porch, lying in the peony beds, looking at the way little clusters of ants swarmed up the stems, and for a second, it was like coming back to the Blackwood house of my memory, as though I’d never left it.
Then the picture went fuzzy and I looked away. It didn’t matter what the house had been when it was whole. It wasn’t that anymore.
I followed Shiny out to the end of the driveway, where the turn-off was marked by a faded board nailed to a post. All it said was BLACKWOOD and then under that, WEEPING ROAD.
Ordinary folks might be disinclined to call a place Weeping, but this was the lowlands, and Myloria’s house was set even closer to the creek than mine had been. In another county, they might call the whole place just that—the lowlands—or else the bottoms. Around here, though, everyone called it the Willows, after the thickets that grew along the creek, and with that in mind, Weeping didn’t seem quite so strange or so unlucky.
Out on the road, the air was damp and hazy. Shiny walked with a purpose, like going into town was nothing, when I’d never even been allowed to walk down past the gate by myself. I followed her, trying to work out if the pale shimmer that hung over the fields was really the air or just my eyes. The day was sticky, and cicadas screamed in the trees.
We’d only gone a little ways up the road when we came to a house. I knew it, but like everything else, it was changed.
People down in the Willows tended toward the wild, the headstrong, and sometimes toward the trashy, and Greg Heintz was all three. More than once, my mama and Myloria had stood comfortably in our kitchen, mixing medicines or peeling peaches and talking about Greg and the devilment he went in for—his nasty way of chopping down trees and trapping rabbits and squirrels and all living things.
The Heintzes’ gate was right up by the ditch, but the house itself was set far back from the road. It was small and narrow, with a covered porch, but even as ramshackle as it was, there were no missing walls or broken windows or burned places. It was hemmed in by trees, not nice ones like Myloria’s beeches, but mostly loblollies and red cedars.
Greg lived there with his half a dozen mangy dogs and his daughter, Davenport, who was a shade younger than Shiny and a shade older than me. She’d been the kind of girl who always looked blurry and a little bit tangled, and even though she lived directly between my house and Shiny’s, she hadn’t been allowed to play with us. That wasn’t such a remarkable thing, though. To the best of my recollection, Davenport hadn’t really been allowed to play with anyone.
Now the house looked smaller and shabbier than ever, and under the big cedars near the gate was one of the oddest sights I’d seen in my life. Instead of weeds or grass, the whole yard was just a big dirt patch, filled with a collection of coops and pens and cages.
There were so many that at first I thought it must be some kind of farm. After all, sometimes farmers did keep rabbits and birds, and there were a fair few in the cages. But there were other things too, and they were not the kind of creatures you ever raised for eggs or meat.
The whole place was built from scrounged boards, all painted a peeling, bubbly green that flaked off and ran to black in places. I stopped in the road, tasting metal in my throat. I knew the color and the burned, blistered paint.
The Heintz zoo was made from pieces of my ruined house.
I climbed down through the ditch and came all the way up to the chain-link fence. On the other side, the animals crouched in their cages, staring back at me. There were doves and quail and a scraggly possum, some baby raccoons and a white peacock, but those were nothing—they were almost normal—compared to the weasels and the foxes. There was a speckled bobcat in a wire run, and a coyote, and there in the back corner of the yard, a bony-ribbed creature too big to be anything but an actual cougar. It crouched in the dirt, glaring out from under a tin-roofed lean-to like it wanted to tear me down.
Up close to the fence was a badger in an ugly little hutch that had been hammered together with pieces of my own front door. I’d never seen a badger anywhere but in books, and its face was broader and shrewder than I’d pictured. It peered out at me with small, bright eyes. Not pitiful, but patient, like it was just waiting for the right moment to break out and get going.
I stared over the mismatched roofs of the zoo and toward the house. With a start, I realized that a girl was watching us from the porch, slumped on the bench swing with her pale hair in her face. She raised her head and even from the ditch, I could tell that it was Davenport, as see-through and wispy as ever.
Behind me, Shiny made an ugly noise. “The weird-as-shit apple does not fall far from the crazy-tree.”
“It’s not her fault,” I said, because the way Davenport sat huddled on the swing was as sad as any of the animals in their cages, and I could think of nothing worse than having to live in the middle of it.
Shiny just shrugged and turned away. “Her dad is plain out of his mind. Shit like this should be illegal.”
“Isn’t it? Illegal?”
“I don’t know. I guess maybe, but it doesn’t matter. It’s not like anyone ever comes out here and does anything about it.”
“Why not?”
“Well, it’s his business, wanting to own every kind of creature around. And anyway, to do something, they’d have to go up on his property, and no one’s going to risk that. He will shoot you.”
I knew that was probably true—folks in the Willows could be very particular about their land—but still, it seemed to me that some things were ugly enough that fixing them was worth trespassing. I didn’t tell Shiny that if I had my way, something was going to be done about it.
We turned our backs on the house and started walking. The county road that led into town was number 5, but everyone called it the Crooked Mile, though it was more wiggly than crooked and quite a bit more than a mile. We walked along the gravel shoulder, because even though it was faster to take a straight line through the woods, I’d had it hammered into me from birth not to step in other people’s pastures.
The way into town was marked by bridges. The Blue Jack Creek wound down through the hills and hollows, snaking back and forth across the lowlands and the road, all the way down to the county line. The land around the creek was mostly pasture, marked by nothing and nothing, with one rickety water tower rising in the distance.
As we got closer to town, the road got paved and the woods got thin. We crossed the last bridge, past a faded tin sign that said WELCOME TO NEW SOUTH BEND: HOME OF GOOD PEOPLE AND GOOD WATER.
Town itself was ten blocks long, low and slow and sleepy. You could walk from one end to the other in less than a heartbeat. As we went, I tried to see the place as it had been, but it was older and deader than the town in my mind. Everything was smaller than I remembered.
I read off the names of the streets we passed, Chester and Peyton and Main—names like old songs or people I’d known once. At the corner of Broom Street, a pair of ribby dogs loped slowly down the sidewalk. Their shadows made long slashes on the pavement.
A truck went rattling by with a stack of metal poles laid out in the back, and on top of that, a big roll of canvas, striped like a circus tent.
Shiny saw
me looking after it and said, “That’s the public works crew. They’ll be setting up revival tents and all the bake sale tables and the booths for Green Week.” Then she stopped and squinted at me. “Do you remember Green Week?”
I started to nod, but it wasn’t really true. Mostly, I remembered a bobbing rainbow of balloons and the warm, sugary smell of cotton candy. No revival or anything green.
She shrugged. “It’s mostly just like a fair, you know? A carnival. There’s a big camp meeting on Friday night, but no one goes to that, and some games and rides and a funnel cake stand.”
We crossed the road and turned down Main Street. So many of the stores were empty now, with boarded-up doors or missing windows—a hardware store and a bar and the Tracy Ann Boutique, where Mrs. Ralston had sold perfume and magazines and smoked long, skinny cigarettes that turned her fingers yellow. Now it was nothing but empty shelves.
Farther down, though, things were more lively. Men in dusty shirts were unloading boxes and sawhorses from flatbed trucks.
Behind them was another long stretch of deserted buildings, but someone had been hanging up a set of huge painted canvases on the fronts of these ones, at least. All along the block, the canvases hung down almost to the sidewalk.
Most of the paintings were everyday scenes—bright, pretty gardens and flowery orchards—but the one hanging over the old train depot was disturbing. In it, a dark, proud woman with long hair and a hard face was in the middle of cutting a man down from a bony winter tree. He had a rope looped around his neck and the woman stood on a little stepladder, sawing at the knot with a buck knife. She wore a dark green dress, and at her feet, a whole mess of vines were climbing up the bottom of the ladder, twining around her legs.
I was inclined to stop and look, but Shiny hurried past like she had someplace to be, so I turned and followed her.
In front of Carter’s Garage, a bunch of boys were sitting out on the metal bike rack, looking bored and sunburned. They were a few years older than us, hard to tell if they were boys or men, and I didn’t like to get too near, but Shiny strode past like they weren’t even there, although one of them whistled loud enough to make me jump.
“Hey, crafty girl,” he called, with his hand on the front of his jeans. “I’ve got a piece of craft for you and it’s a doozy!”
Shiny whipped around so fast her boots left scuff marks on the sidewalk. “You couldn’t find your piece with a jacklight and three hands.”
She was smiling, but there was an edge in her voice that made me think the smile was mostly for show. Her hand had moved to the pocket of her cutoffs.
I stood beside her, wishing we’d leave, but she didn’t move as he pushed himself away from the wall and came rambling over. He had a loping, uneven gait, like he’d just gotten off a horse.
“Shiny Blackwood,” he said, and I did not like his grin, not one bit. “You’ve got a nice little walk on you. I’ve only got two hands, though—maybe you can lend me one of yours.”
Shiny sighed and pulled out a silver cigarette lighter. “You do not want to test me, Michael Faraday, so step away while you still have your eyebrows.”
And for a second, it seemed like he would step back, but the other boys had followed him and were elbowing each other. I knew that whatever happened next would be less about what he felt like doing and more about saving face.
He smiled, moving toward her with his hands held out. “Aw, Shiny, don’t be like that.”
“I will be however I want to be,” she said, hammering down on each word.
He was nearly on top of her now, but Shiny wasn’t giving him an inch. Then, without warning, his hand snaked around to land square on her bottom.
She sucked in her breath.
The moment seemed long. It seemed so long it was impossible. Something white-hot was happening in the air around her. Her smile was a fixed, blazing thing that burned through her eyes and shone in her skin like starlight. I wondered how he could possibly stand to be so close to it.
Then she flicked the lighter.
It was hard to say where it started. It was like the air between them went up in flames, burning in an orange sunburst, and he yelled and stumbled back. The wall of fire climbed toward the sky and then went out, leaving a trail of smoke that floated over them in a wash of dry, scorching air.
“I hate this place,” Shiny said, turning on me with an expression so ruinous and black that I leaned away from her. “Some days, I would not be sorry if it burned right to the goddamn ground. Some days, I’d happily to do it myself.”
Behind her, I watched Mike Faraday and the others take off rambling down toward the end of the block, trying hard to look like they were only going because they felt like it.
I knew all kinds of stories about people from the old families who had a special way with fire. I had just never known a person to actually be able to do it in real life. Certainly no one in my own family.
“Shiny,” I said, and even to myself, I sounded awed and out of breath. “That was amazing.”
She just shook her head and stared down the sidewalk like it might still be worth her while to go stalking after the boys and really light them up. The air around her smelled like matches, and I was glad when she finally turned her back on them and headed for the park.
Union Park was square and grassy, taking up nearly the whole block. Over by the picnic shelter, a bunch of women in capri slacks and sleeveless blouses were gathered, hanging green and white crepe paper and laying out covered dishes. The sight was familiar, and although Shiny and I had never been invited to attend church picnics even when we were little, it heartened me to see that at least some things hadn’t changed.
Shiny cut across the lawn to the war memorial, where a skinny black girl in a yellow sundress sat on the little wall in front of it, holding a big wicker bag with a wooden handle. Her hair, which had been rolled into fat twists the last time I’d seen her, was cut so short now that it stood out an inch from her head. She was fiddling with it, twisting a piece between her fingers.
As soon as we got close, she slid down from the wall. “Punctuality is not an empty virtue, Shiny Blackwood.”
She was a little shorter than me, which made her a good deal shorter than Shiny, with tiny wrists and narrow shoulders. The wicker bag looked nearly as big as she was.
Shiny waved her off. “Punctuality is for people with reliable transportation. You remember my cousin, Clementine?”
The question sounded so casual that suddenly, it wasn’t casual at all, and Rae came closer, taking tiny, careful steps.
“Well, sure,” she said after a moment. Her voice was unexpectedly low, like the sound of a bell. “Of course I do. You don’t just forget a person. Although, to be fair,” she said, turning to me, “I can’t say that I’d have known you on the street. But that’s mostly the hair. And also that I’ve not seen you in a very long time. Would you like to say where you’ve been?”
Her way of talking was slow and precise, almost like a grown-up. Or at least, someone playing a game about grown-ups. She was standing with her bag hooked over her arm and her head cocked, like a cat will watch a pot simmer on the stove.
“I was hidden down in the cellar,” I said, wondering if it would ever get easier to say the circumstances aloud. If it was possible to ever stop feeling like I was waking up into some kind of new and bewildering dream, going from nothing to everything all at once. “For a long time. Kind of like in a story.”
Rae frowned, then reached out and touched my arm like she was feeling for an edge or a seam. “Well, that is a situation.”
Beside me, Shiny was looking grim. “And it’s worse. Even now that she’s out, Myloria still doesn’t remember her.”
Rae’s eyebrows went up. “She doesn’t recognize her at all, not even as family? Well, I supposed it could be that hair.”
Shiny shook her head. “What I??
?m saying is, Myloria thinks Clementine never existed, and that’s got to be some pretty serious craft, to keep working even once it’s broken. Show her, Clementine.”
I pulled out the trickbag and offered it to Rae. The little knot of cloth seemed very shabby suddenly, not nearly remarkable enough to account for the hugeness of what had befallen me.
Rae only leaned closer and then took it, looking shrewd. “Now, that is something. Let’s find someplace we can lay this out.”
She led us over to the playground, where a red plastic play-tunnel, with a curve in the middle and round openings all along the side for windows, stretched between the jungle gym and the slide. She tromped up the ladder with her bag slung over her arm.
“Well, come on,” she said when she’d reached the top and Shiny and I were still on the ground. “I’m not doing this out where just anyone can see.”
Shiny and I followed her up into the play-tunnel, scrunching our knees to fit. Rae was already sitting cross-legged, picking at the knotted string, then dumping the bag onto the sandy floor.
At first, it was hard to say what we were looking at. The insides of the bag were just the kind of odds and ends that always seemed to wash up in the back of a junk drawer or get lost under sofa cushions.
Rae hunched over the little heap of knickknacks. “Now there’s a funny thing,” she said, but she said it strange and slow, like she was talking to herself.
She was studying a plastic baby doll head. Just a bitty one, about the size of a shooter marble, but I could tell its eyes were meant to open and close when you laid it on its back. They didn’t, though, because they were glued shut.
“Ick,” said Shiny. “More like creepy.”
“That’s from the Tiny Tot doll,” I said, touching the plastic head, covered all over with coarse, slippery hair. “I had one from Spangler’s.”
Rae was sorting through the junk, moving each piece around like she was working a jigsaw puzzle. There was a cut-up playing card—just the middle part of a suicide king, knife jammed into the side of his own head. Stuck to it with yellowy Scotch tape was a scrap of paper that said Danger Begets Caution, with a bunch of tiny stars and crosses drawn around it.