“‘Yessir,’ I said.
“‘And I seen a red chicken and a red pig—you see that?’
“‘Yessir,’ I said.
“‘Now what are we gonna do about a red cat and a red chicken and a red pig?’ my father said.
“And so I had to explain to him how I was going to get rid of that red paint. And then I had to do it. Took me nigh-on two weeks to get all that red paint out of all those animals.”
“But you didn’t get a whupping?” Florida said.
“Nope.” Tiller was surprised that he’d rambled on, telling Florida about the long-forgotten red-paint incident. He felt as if the girl had tricked him somehow. How’ d she do that?
Florida looked around the barn and out through its wide open doors at the far end, toward an arch of tall leafy trees. “You lived here since you were born?” she asked.
“Nearly,” Tiller said. “I was born on a boat.”
“On a boat? What happened? Your momma get thrown out of the house and was running away and she stole a boat and—”
“Erm, no. My parents lived on a boat, a little houseboat. Lived there until I was seven. Then we found this place, this land, I mean. We built that cabin and this here barn.” There she goes again, Tiller thought, tricking me into talking about old stuff.
“And your own kids grew up here?” Florida said.
“Yep.”
“Then why did they leave?”
Tiller shrugged. “Got married. Got jobs in big cities.” He put his hand to his chest, surprised by the sudden sadness he felt. It was as if there were a big empty well inside where his children used to be.
Florida smoothed her hand over the piece of trim she’d been working on. “You didn’t whup them, did you?”
“Nope.”
“Well, they must be crazy,” Florida said, “to leave a place like this, where they could be outside all day, and they could run all they wanted, and they could shout and spit and stuff.”
Tiller put down his brush and went to the open barn doors and gazed out across the holler. He tried to picture it as Florida was seeing it, and as his own children had seen it, and as he had seen it as a child.
On the back porch, Sairy read through the list of equipment Dallas had made.
“I believe you’ve thought of everything, Dallas,” she said. “You’ve got some real good ideas here, things I wouldn’t have thought of.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
In school, Dallas sat in the back. The children in the front had ideas. If Dallas had to do a report, the teacher would say, “Here, John will help you get an idea,” or, “That’s not what I meant. Let Bonnie show you how to do it,” or, “If you can’t do the assignment, just sit quietly.”
Dallas didn’t have parents to come in and look at his work on conference days, or anyone to worry over his report card, so it had never mattered very much to him whether he did the work or not. He daydreamed at school, imagining quiet places in the woods or how cookies were made or how trees grew. He didn’t know that these things in his head were all ideas.
But here on the porch in Ruby Holler, Sairy was saying, “No, I’m not kidding. You’ve got some, erm, interesting ideas. I’m not sure we really need a skateboard, and we might want to add a few things, of course, like maybe sleeping bags and little things like that.”
She retrieved a book from a stack by the window. “I want to show you the best thing now. This is what we’re going to find in Kangadoon—this is the red-tailed rocking bird.” She opened the book and held it before him.
“Uh-huh,” Dallas said, but a flutter in the trees distracted him. “Whoa!” he said. “You see that bright blue bird?”
“Dallas, that’s just an old blue jay.”
“Well, it’s a mighty incredible blue jay.”
“It is?” Sairy said, following his gaze.
Dallas made a deep well in his mashed potatoes and ladled in the smooth caramel-colored gravy. “You sure make good gravy, ma’am,” he said. “No lumps or anything.”
“And it don’t taste like possum feet, neither,” Florida added.
“Eww—” Tiller said.
“That’s a compliment, I think,” Sairy said.
In the loft that night, Dallas and Florida added two sweet rolls and two apples to their stash beneath a loosened floorboard.
“I don’t get hungry in the night here,” Dallas said. “Do you?”
“No, but just in case—”
Dallas counted his money again. “If we got this much money in a week, think how much we’d get in two weeks—”
“A bundle,” Florida said. “We’re going to be gazillionaires.”
“What do you think gazillionaires do with their money?”
“Heck, I don’t know,” Florida said. “They probably buy lots and lots and lots of food.”
The following night at dinner, as Tiller passed him a bowl of spaghetti, Dallas said, “You two sure go to a lot of trouble cooking.”
“Trouble?” Tiller said. “We like to cook.”
“‘One person’s trouble is another person’s joy,’ that’s what Tiller’s mom used to say,” Sairy added. “Besides, we don’t get to cook that much now that our kids are gone.”
“How many kids did you have?” Dallas asked.
“Four,” Tiller said, lightly tapping his chest as he said each name: “Buddy, Lucy, Charlie, and Rose.”
“You miss them?” Florida asked.
“Used to be we missed them every day, every minute,” Sairy said. “We couldn’t figure out how to fill up our time. Sometimes even now it feels kind of … kind of empty here in the holler.”
Tiller stared at his wife. She feels that way, too? He cleared his throat. “But we got used to it, I guess.”
“How’d you get used to it?” Dallas asked.
Tiller swirled his spaghetti. “Well, first off, we made ourselves some getting-over-kids stew, special recipe.”
“Yeah, right,” Florida said. “There isn’t really stew that makes you get over missing your kids.”
“We’ve got some amazing secret recipes,” Sairy said. “Beat-the-blues broccoli and anti-cranky crumpets and—”
“Hey, with us here now,” Dallas said, “maybe you ought to make yourselves some getting-used-to-kids-again stew.”
Tiller reached for a meatball. “What do you think we had last night?” he said.
CHAPTER 14
WOOD
A row of tiny wooden birds perched on the fireplace mantel, and a fleet of miniature boats rested on top of the bookcase. Florida leaned close to one of the boats. “People can’t touch these, right?” she said to Dallas. “I bet if people touched these wee little boats they’d get their hands smacked.”
Dallas was nose-to-beak with one of the birds. “People maybe could touch them a little bit,” he said.
“They’d probably get shot if they touched these things,” Florida said.
The screen door slapped against the frame as Sairy entered from the porch. Both Florida and Dallas jumped back, stuffing their hands in their pockets.
“Were you talking to me?” Sairy said.
“No, I wasn’t talking to anybody but the air,” Florida said.
“Me neither,” Dallas said. “Words were coming out of my mouth, but they weren’t aimed at anybody in particular.”
“I thought I heard you talking about our birds and our boats,” Sairy said.
“Naw,” Florida said. “What birds? What boats?”
Sairy slipped over to the bookcase. “These boats.” She glided past the mantel. “These birds.”
“Well, I’ll be! Look at all those little birds and boats, Dallas. You ever notice those before?” Florida said.
“No, I can’t say I did,” Dallas said.
“Even if I had noticed them, I wouldn’t have touched them,” Florida said. “People ought to know better than to touch wee little fragile things like these.”
“Heck,” Sairy said, lifting up one of t
he birds, “they’re not so fragile. They’re made of wood. Here …” She handed one of the birds to Dallas and one to Florida.
“Golly, will you look at that?” Dallas said. “It’s so smooth. And it’s got little feathers carved in and little eyes.”
“And mine’s got wee feet and a wee pointy beak,” Florida said.
Sairy returned to the bookcase. “And these boats, they’re pretty sturdy, too,” she said, passing one to each of them.
“This one’s even got seats and oars,” Dallas said. “A little tiny elf person could row this boat on down the river.” He tried to maneuver the oars. “Oops. Oars came off. Oops. Seat got a little smooshed.”
As Sairy stared at the broken boat, Dallas took a step backward and raised his arm, as if to shield himself. Sairy moved toward him and gently moved his arm away from his face. “It’s okay,” she said.
Florida inched closer to Dallas. She was balancing a boat on her head and squeezing a bird in her hand. Snap. The bird’s beak drifted to the floor. “I didn’t mean it!” she shouted. “I told you people shouldn’t touch them.” Florida shoved the bird and the beak and the boat at Sairy. “Go ahead. Punish us. We don’t care.”
“Punish?” Sairy said. “I’m not a very good punisher.” She shrugged and placed the broken bird back on the mantel. “I break things sometimes, and when I do, I try and fix them. We’ll fix these later.” She stood back, regarding the mantel. “We made these,” she said. “Tiller made the boats and I made the birds.”
“All by yourself? With what?” Dallas asked. “You get a little kit or something in the mail?”
“No, we make the whole thing.”
“From what?” Dallas said.
“From wood.”
“Where do you get the wood?”
“Look out there,” Sairy said, gesturing toward the window and the holler beyond. “There are about a million trees out there in Ruby Holler. That’s where we get the wood.”
“From regular old trees?” Florida said.
“From regular old trees,” Sairy said.
Florida rushed outside and slapped her hand against the maple tree which stood beside the porch. “Like this one?” she hollered.
Sairy stepped onto the porch, with Dallas behind her. “That’s right,” she said.
“What do you have to do?” Florida said. “Chop down a tree like this and then hack it up into a zillion itty bits and—”
“No, we don’t chop down any trees,” Sairy said. “Look in that basket there.”
Dallas lifted a cloth off a wide wicker basket. Inside were short pieces of tree limbs.
“We find those just about everywhere. We pick the ones that speak to us,” Sairy said.
Florida eyed her. “You think they talk to you? Like a crazy person thinks things talk to them?”
“Not exactly,” Sairy said. “You just see a piece and you know it wants you to pick it up and you know there’s a bird inside, or maybe a boat.”
Dallas examined one of the chunks of wood. “What? Inside this stick thing? There’s already a bird or a boat in here?” He knocked one against the porch railing. “How do you get it out?” As he knocked it against the railing a second time, the railing split. “Oops.”
Tiller ambled around the side of the house. “What’s going on?” he said.
Florida and Dallas stepped back against the house.
Sairy studied their faces. “It’s okay,” she said. She turned to Tiller. “Tiller, I think Dallas might want to help you fix this porch. And maybe we ought to do some whittling tonight. Got any extra knives?”
“What are you talking about, knives?” Florida asked. “What are you going to do with knives? You going to stab somebody?”
CHAPTER 15
CONVERSATIONS IN THE NIGHT
“Florida?” Dallas whispered. “You awake?”
“Awake as an old barn owl,” she said. “You remember when I had to get my picture taken for that passport thing?” Dallas asked.
“Uh-huh. Not the best picture. Your eyes were droopy.”
“You know what Sairy said? She said she had to get my birth certificate, too, and I told her I didn’t have any birth certificate.”
“We weren’t born, I guess,” Florida said.
“Of course we were born. We’re here, aren’t we? We just don’t happen to have any of those birth certificate things in our pockets.”
“But you have to have one to get that passport, right?” Florida said. “Where are you going to get one? Is there a birth certificate shop or something?”
“Sairy said not to worry, that she talked with Mr. Trepid and he said he’d fix everything just fine.”
“Mr. Trepid? That pitiful pincher?”
“Hey, listen,” Dallas said. “Hear that? It’s the train.”
Florida heard the faint wail of the freight train as it wound its way through the distant hills, and she pulled the quilt up close to her face. The train sounded so lonely.
In the dark alley behind the Boxton Creek Home, two men met. It was too dark to see either of them clearly, but when one struck a match, the light flashed off his gold tooth.
“Here,” he said, passing a wad of money to the other man. “Just keep your lips zipped.”
The other man slid two fingers across his mouth. “Zipped,” he said. He pocketed the money, turned, and crossed the railroad tracks.
In the downstairs bedroom in the cabin in the holler, Tiller climbed into bed beside Sairy and stared at the ceiling above him. “It’s weird having those kids up there. Were our kids that blasted clumsy? And did they eat that much?”
“Sure,” Sairy said.
“I guess my brain pretty much forgot all that,” Tiller said. “Do you think we were good parents?”
Sairy turned to look at him. “Of course we were, once we made our mistakes and got over worrying so much. Sometimes I think we were just getting really good at it when all of a sudden those kids were grown up and gone. Maybe that’s why it seems easier to me now, with Florida and Dallas. I figure we know what to expect and we know how to love kids.”
Tiller sat up. “But I about died when we were trying to teach Dallas and Florida how to whittle! I thought fingers were going to zing off into the air. Did you see that robin Dallas made—that hacked-up piece of maple he threw down the well? He sure was mad at that hacked-up robin.”
“And how about Florida’s rowboat?” Sairy said. “Did you see that little thing she carved?”
“Before she buried it? Yes, I saw it. Looked more like a bucket than a rowboat.”
“Remember our Charlie?” Sairy said. “When he got so mad at a piece of wood that he set fire to it, and then the porch caught on fire?”
“Oh, yeah, I remember you trying to beat out that fire with my good jacket, and I remember me yelling at Charlie and then feeling so bad afterwards that I made two accept-my-apology pies just for him.”
“And out of all our kids,” Sairy said, “Charlie turned out to be the one who is a natural carver.”
Outside, amid the chirps of crickets, a snowy white owl flew to the maple tree, calling “Hooo—hooo.”
Sairy said, “Tiller? You know what Grace told me when Dallas and I were down in Boxton the other day? While Dallas was loading up the truck?”
“What?”
“She said that the Trepids call Dallas and Florida ‘trouble twins.’ Grace said maybe we ought to be careful.”
“Maybe we’ve done a stupid, cockamamie thing, taking these kids in,” Tiller said. “Maybe we oughta take ’em back.”
“Tiller! You can’t send them back as if they’re a pair of boots that don’t fit right. Here’s what I think: that Dallas and Florida are no more trouble than most kids, and besides, you might not have noticed it, but I think you’re actually beginning to enjoy messing around in the holler with them. Don’t you make that face at me. You don’t have to admit it, but I still know it.”
Tiller reached over to remove a piece of lint from Sai
ry’s hair. “Well, if we do take these kids on these trips—and I’m not saying it’s what we ought to do—but if we do, at least they won’t be together,” he said. “How much trouble could one kid be? We each ought to be able to manage one kid.”
“But they feel safe together,” Sairy said. “Like I feel safe with you.”
“Is that a compliment you’re giving me?”
“It’s just a thing I’m saying, that’s all.”
“Hear that?” Dallas said. “Sounds like an owl out there.” He crept over to the window and peered out.
“How come they call this place Ruby Holler?” Florid a asked. “You seen any rubies yet?”
Dallas pressed his nose against the screen. “Sairy told me that in the fall all those maple trees turn scarlet red, and all those red leaves look like a million bazillion rubies dangling on the trees. And she said that now, in the summer, right after a rain, all those leaves look like a bazillion shimmery emeralds, and in the winter, after an ice storm, it looks like a bazillion gazillion sparkly diamonds in the trees.”
“Well, why don’t they call this Emerald Holler then? Or Diamond Holler? Or Jewel Holler?” Florida asked.
“Heck, I don’t know,” Dallas said, staring into the blackness. “I feel a mite bad. You know, that Sairy bought me all that stuff and I’m not even going to use it, and she’s going to have to go all alone all the way to Kangadoon.”
“I know,” Florida said. “That ole man lunatic, he’s so proud of our boat, and he’ll have to go all by himself all the way down a bunch of winding rivers.”
“But we’ve got our plans, right? We’re going to get that night train, right?”
“We didn’t ask them to pay us,” Florida said. “They wanted to pay us. It’s not like we’re stealing the money, right?”
Later, Florida tossed and turned, slipping in and out of dreams. First she was fleeing rats and lizards, and then she was in a canoe on a narrow river, paddling hard, and then golden light filled up the whole sky and the river, and a golden bird swooped down and sat on her knee and spoke to her. It said, “Have you seen my baby? I’m missing my baby.”