I don’t ever cry about Daddy. Maybe Momma cried enough for all three of us.
* * *
“Okay, here’s the deal,” I say to Emma, trying to take charge since it’s going to be nighttime and we’re going to have to find a place to sleep. “We got to find a little cave or something so we can hide and sleep a little.”
“It’s not even close to being dark out!”
“Yeah but if we’re out walking around during the day they’ll see us,” I explain. Where this is coming from I do not know, honor bright. Thinking of Daddy makes me sure we’re never going back to Richard. “Night’s when we’re going to have to make our move.”
Emma squinches up her shoulders again and follows me. She seems so happy to be away from the house and I can’t blame her one bit.
“Tell me about Daddy again,” she says, peeling the bark off a pine branch so she can make a switch out of it.
“You deaf? We’ve got to start looking for a hiding spot! This isn’t Picnic Day, Em,” I say. Then my heart hurts like it does whenever I remember something about Daddy.
Picnic Day was Daddy’s invention and Momma tried it with Richard once but I wouldn’t let her. Picnic Day was as good as when the teacher says class is going to be outside under the sycamore tree because it’s the first warm, sunny day after the cold winter. Picnic Day was as good as peeling the skin off an apple in one long curly strip. Momma would make fried chicken and start packing the wicker basket the day before Picnic Day. Just like in bedtime stories we had a red-and-white-checkerboard tablecloth and Momma packed it first, all folded up into a perfect square. Daddy’s potato salad would be chilling in the icebox, crunchy with sweet red pepper cubes, and I would practice my fake cough so when I went into school they’d see I was “coming down with something.” I threw that part in. Momma and Daddy said I shouldn’t do it, but it was all part of Picnic Day Planning.
For that one day of the year I would play hooky from school and Momma and Daddy would take me out to the Pine Barrens on the edge of the ocean and we’d lie around all day eating Momma’s chicken and Daddy’s potato salad.
After Momma married Richard, she got it in her head that he’d just take up where Daddy left off with Picnic Day. She started frying her chicken and she even made coleslaw (to take the place of Daddy’s potato salad), but when she pulled out the wicker basket from the basement that stays cold even through the summer heat I told her what for. She never tried to start Picnic Day back up again. It died with Daddy.
“Over here!” Emma calls out to me from up ahead. She is bending over something and swooshing her arm at me, as if I was Helen Keller and couldn’t have heard her voice.
“What?” Finally getting to her. I’d been walking much slower.
“It’s perfect,” she says. “We can lie down alongside each other and cover ourselves up with pine needles and they’ll never see us.”
“I don’t know, Em,” I say. I didn’t want to make her feel bad but this is not exactly what I had in mind. “Let’s keep looking. I bet we find a cave somewhere up ahead.”
“Aw, come on.” She sighs and rolls her eyes once but she follows me so I guess it could be worse.
“I’m starving,” I say out loud.
“Me, too.”
“Hey, how come you ate that dog food? That was so gross.”
I watch Emma do the shoulder squinch. “When you gotta eat, you gotta eat,” she says.
“Just eat the peanut butter like a normal human being,” I say. But right then I remember: the last time I saw that jar of Jif was under the Godsey porch before we got found out.
“I’m so hungry I could gnaw my own arm off,” Emma says, starting a game we always play.
“I’m so hungry I could walk barefoot on sap and then bite my own toes off,” I say.
“I’m so hungry I could eat dog doo,” she says, knowing she’s beaten me. There isn’t anything worse than eating dog doo. It’s a short game today, that’s how hungry we both are.
“Start looking for those mushrooms you were picking at back there at the tree stump,” I tell her. We both study the ground ahead of each step like it’s a test we’re about to take.
We don’t talk for a long time. Every time we see a white speck peeking up from under the needles we squat down and take turns eating it. Wild mushrooms aren’t so bad when you’re really hungry.
“This isn’t making me any less hungry.” She says what I’m thinking about now, too.
“I know.”
“What was that?” Emma stops walking and whips her head around looking to right behind us. Oh, Lord.
“What?” I’m whipping my head around, too.
“Shh! Listen,” she hisses at me.
We’re standing like we’ve had a spell cast on us that’s frozen us in our tracks. I’m too scared to move my arm back down to my side, even though it wouldn’t make a sound.
“Do you hear that?” Emma whispers to me.
“No,” I whisper back. “What is it? Whatdoyouhear?” And I do say it just like it’s one word.
“There’s someone coming.” She’s not whispering anymore. Instead, she grabs my hand and starts running. “Hurry!”
And, once again, I forget about being hungry. I forget about being tired. I run like it’s a life or death situation.
“There!” Emma pants to me. She’s let go of my hand and is pointing to an old tree that looks as out of place in this pine forest as we do. It’s a perfect climbing tree.
We jump onto its trunk like we’ve got suction cups on our hands and feet. There’s no time to think about anything but climbing as high up as we possibly can. It’s easy to do because just when we’ve pulled ourselves up onto one branch the next one is so close it’s practically bending down to pick us up for the higher level. The sap is already making little pads on the palms of my hands—I can’t imagine how much turpentine it would take to get all this off!
Emma’s climbing faster than me but I have to wait for a second. I’m hugging a branch that’s almost as thick as I am, one leg is wrapped around one side of it and the other, the other side.
* * *
“Come down here, you little monkey.” Daddy’s holding his hand across his eyebrows to block the sun.
“Look how high I am, Daddy!”
“I see you, monkey. You’re doing real good. But you better come on down before you give your mother a heart attack,” he says.
“Caroline, get yourself down from that tree this very minute or there’ll be hell to pay,” Momma calls out from the back porch where she’s pouring her preserves into clean jelly jars.
“C’mon, monkey.” Daddy’s smiling at me. “Come to Daddy.”
* * *
“Psst,” Emma hisses at me. “Can you see what it is?”
“Wait a sec.” I answer her while I shimmy my rear end closer to the trunk. The bark catches on my T-shirt and pulls it in the other direction but there’s nothing I can do about that right now. I look down through the branches and it’s hard to say for sure but I don’t think there’s anything down there. So that’s what I tell Emma.
“You sure?” she calls back from above me.
“Pretty much.” And then I just wait. So does she, I guess, ’cause it’s quiet as a church on Monday. Then I hear rustling and grunting and I can tell she’s working her way down to me and my perch.
“Hey,” she says from a branch just an arm’s reach from me. If I wanted to I could push her out of the tree, that’s how close we are. “I know I heard something coming. I know it.”
I reckon it’s sap that’s gone and tangled Emma’s hair worse than before. Now she’ll most surely have to chop it all off. Looking at her I cain’t think of what to say.
“Whatever it was it isn’t here now, though” is all I say. I go back to letti
ng my cheek rest on the bumpy bark. I wish I had a mirror so I could see the marks it’s making on it.
“I heard it, Carrie,” she says again. “I swear.”
“All right, you heard something. It’s gone now. The coast is clear so let’s get down and get going.”
“Go first,” I say to her branch.
“No, you go first.”
“Jeez, Em. I’m tired of doing everything first. Why can’t for once you just do what I tell you instead of the other way around.” But I’m moving off the branch and down to the next level. I’m so tired right now I think my arms might not be able to hold on if I started falling. We have to get out of this tree quick-like. Otherwise one of us will fall for sure.
“I’m going first, but come on! You can’t wait for me to get to the bottom to start going down—you’ve got to start moving now, Em.”
This is the part I hate the most about getting down from climbing a tree. It’s the part where you have to jump the rest of the way to the ground. It always seems to me I’m going to break my leg or something. This time I’m so tired, instead of jumping, I just let myself fall to the ground and it’s not as bad as I thought it might be.
“Hey, Em, let yourself fall at the end. It’s so cool. It’s cushioned so it won’t hurt.”
Thump.
Emma’s down, too, and we’re on our way.
We’re walking along and I start thinking about how neat it would be if you could have a carpet of really soft pine needles inside your house. Wall to wall. For people who don’t live near a forest but wish that they did.
“I knew it was y’all!” A voice cries out from behind us.
Emma and I both scream and whip around. Standing there with a weird smile on his face like he just won a contest is George Godsey, the youngest of the Godsey boys.
Emma seems as relieved as I am to see that it’s only George, since he’s more a pest than a bully.
“Go on home, George,” she says real mean-like, and she shoves him in the chest. I had to keep from laughing since the sap on her hands stuck to his shirt and pulled him back to her like a rubber band.
“You can’t make me,” says George, and I swear he sounds like he’s three. “This is my forest, anyway, so I don’t have to do a thing you tell me.”
“Grow up, George Godsey,” I say.
Emma and I turn back and start walking again but we both know George won’t be leaving anytime soon. His brothers pick on him for sport, his parents ignore him altogether, and his friends, well, they don’t seem to notice whether he’s around or not, so two girls tramping through “his forest” is too good to be true for George Godsey.
“Whatcha doing, anyway?”
George has this real annoying habit of using the word anyway in pretty much every sentence. It all but drives me crazy.
“Nothing!” Emma and I say at the same time.
“Why you all the way out here by our place, anyway?”
“None of your business,” Emma says.
“Is too.”
“Is not.”
“Hush up! We got to keep our voices down out here.” I say this part mostly to Emma but George sure does need to stay quiet, too.
“Where you going?” George whispers.
Maybe if we ignore him he’ll get bored and trot off home. I can see Emma’s thinking this, too.
“Aw, come on,” George whines. “What’s the deal? If you tell me, I’ll tell you somethin’ I’m not supposed to tell a soul.”
We keep our mouths shut and our feet moving.
“It’s good, too. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Come on. Tell me what’s goin’ on that’s got you all the way out here. Tell me. I’m goin’ to keep buggin’ you till you do so you might as well go on and get it over with. Tellmetellmetellmetellmetellme…”
“Okay!” Emma spins around and slaps her hand across his mouth to shut him up. Before she starts talking, she winks at me but the trouble is she just learned how to wink and she can’t do it real well so George sees her wrinkling one side of her face up and groans under her hand.
“I saw that!” he says through her fingers. She carefully takes her hand away and inches up real close to his face.
“You better hush up, George Godsey,” she says, real low and slow. “Now, if you really want to know what’s going on then you better promise never to breathe a word that you saw us to anyone else in the whole entire universe—” George is nodding his head real fast and his eyes are practically popping out of his head like in a cartoon “—not ever. You hear me?”
Now I know Emma well enough to know that she’s not fixing to tell him what’s really happening, but deep down I’m wondering real hard, like George is, to hear what she’s going to say.
“You swear?”
“I swear.” George is holding up his right hand, like that makes the swear official or something.
“All right then.” Emma gives me a kindly grown-up look that’s supposed to make George feel like she’s telling him something reeeaaally important. “You better sit down.”
George would jump off the highest tree he could find if Emma told him to right about now, that’s how bad he wants to know. He plops to the ground and crosses his milky-white legs Indian style. He hasn’t taken his eyes off Emma.
“We found out our daddy’s killers live in this here forest and we’re on a mission to hunt them down.” She blurts this out without once looking in my direction. How’d she come up with that?
I can tell this is better than anything George ever dreamed of. He looks like he’s forgotten to breathe. After a minute he musters up some words.
“Th-this forest?” he stutters. “Are y-you s-sure?”
He’s struggling to his feet and I can tell that George Godsey won’t be bothering us much longer.
“Yep.” Emma nods her head like she’s in church, real somber-
like, as if she’s at a funeral. “They’re here somewhere. We just need to find ’em.”
George never even said goodbye. We watched those spindly little white legs of his run his body all the way out of sight.
“That fixed him,” Emma says to me.
And we’re back on track.
“How come you said that about Daddy?” I whisper to Emma, even though George is long gone by now but you cain’t be too careful, I always say. We’ve never really talked about how Daddy died—I always figured Emma didn’t think about it, her being so weensy when he was killed and all.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“‘His killers live in this forest and we’re hunting them down’?”
“Well…”
“Well, what?”
“They might live here, you never know. They never did catch ’em, did they.” But this is more an answer than a question, so I let it go. She does have a point.
“Still.” That’s all I have to say. Daddy’s my turf and she knows it.
“What was that?” She whips around, looking real scared. This girl has eagle ears or something.
“What was what?” I ask.
“Shh.”
“It’s probably George Godsey coming on back,” I say real soft-like.
“Shh.” This time she hisses it like she’s mad.
So I shush.
And sure enough I hear something, too. And you cain’t mistake it: someone’s feet are breaking branches. And the sound’s getting closer. We both look up and around for a good tree to climb but there isn’t a good one in sight. Just a ton of pines.
“Don’t move or I’ll shoot your head straight off your sorry ass self” comes the voice that almost makes me wet my pants. I’m paralyzed from the top of my hair to my toenails. This is worse than we ever dreamed of…worse than anything we were ready for, I can tell you that.
&nb
sp; “Well, well, well. What have we here,” he says, and his voice sounds like he’s smiling.
I can’t even look at Emma. I’m too afraid to move my head even a tiny, tiny inch. I almost want him to go ahead and shoot us since I know whatever he does will be ten times worse.
“You can run but you can’t hide.” The voice is right behind us now and it’s just a matter of seconds before he circles around.
Please, God. Please look out for us.
Number one is seeping down both of my pant legs but there isn’t anything I can do about that now.
And here he is, standing right in front of us like we’re a buck he’s just bagged. He’s in his hunting costume, the paint-by-numbers spots of gray and green and brown just as ugly as his face, with all its craters and moles.
Richard.
“Look at you, you filthy shit, all full of piss in them there denims,” he says, pointing his rifle down at my legs. “Turn.” He motions with the gun for us to turn back around. “Move it!”
I look at Emma for the first time and it makes me want to throw up. It’s like she’s pressed up against a wall, her back is so straight. Her head’s the same way. She’s like a little soldier marching into war. There’s nothing but a blank look on her face, like it’s made of stone.
Richard’s been talking but I haven’t been listening, I’ve just been studying my sister.
“Ain’t no more of that, now, I tell you whut…” he’s saying.
“Eatin’ dog food,” he’s muttering now. “You want dog food? You got it. Dog food’s whatchur gonna get. Yessirree…”
He pokes the tip of the gun in my back, shoving me to walk faster. I look over and he’s doing it to Emma, too.
“None a this home-cooked shit for you, you little dog…”
Emma’s tuning him out just like a radio and so I’ll try to do it, too.
And that’s the way we walk out of the woods, past the Godseys’, past the red barn and up to our dirt-packed front yard. Momma’s standing up on the front porch with her arms crossed like the wood trim on the barn our bag’s hiding in.