Me & Emma

  “Momma?”

  “Git,” she says, softer than a whisper, “out.” She takes in another breath but not too deep ’cause it looks like it hurts to breathe. “Now.”

  “I’m not leaving you, Momma,” I say, trying, trying so hard, really really trying not to cry. So I shake my head no to make my point better.

  “Hurry,” she whispers.

  The shouting hits me before my brain can figure out what the words all mean.

  “Trying to provide for my family, such as it is,” he hollers on his way into the front room. He must not have heard me come in. “Tha’s whut I’m tryin’ to do. Piece of shit.”

  He pauses to gulp some beer and then kicks whatever’s slowing him down. That’s when I make my move toward the back of the room so I can slide out the kitchen door without him seeing me.

  “You seen those prices in thar,” he calls over to Momma, like she’s able to carry on a conversation, “place’s beggin’ to be robbed, y’ask me! What the hell…”

  Good thing he’s drunk since it takes him a minute to figure out where the noise I made hopping over broken dishes came from. I bet he’s given up looking for its source by the time I hit the woods that separate our house from Mr. Wilson’s. My breaths pant in my own ears. Oh, Lord. Please let me get Momma help ’fore he kills her altogether. Please, Lord. I’ll do anything. I’ll never bicker with Emma again. I’ll keep a good house like Momma wishes I’d do. I’ll mind Richard, even. Just please, Lord, let me get to Mr. Wilson.

  Pow!

  The sound hits me and nearly knocks me off of my feet.

  The sound I know pretty well by now. Ain’t no other sound like it. A shot’s been fired. From inside our house.

  I’ve seen pictures of the guy in circuses who walks on a wire high up in the air—like he’s suspended. That’s how I’m standing right this very minute. I don’t know whether to follow the wire I’m walking on to Mr. Wilson’s or to go back home to see what happened.

  When I squeeze my eyes shut I see my momma lying out on the floor, the brightness of the lamp turning her whole face red with blood. There’s my answer.

  I’m comin’, Momma.

  I take the porch stairs two by two and this time I don’t care who hears me come in the house.

  “Momma?”

  I hop over the broken glass, china and other things littered across the floor to where she’s still lying.

  “Momma?”

  Her head turns toward me so it ain’t her’s been killed. I stand up and turn, looking slowly around the room. It’s hard to see across the couch so I pick up the lamp and hold it like a lantern Laura Ingalls Wilder might’ve carried. The cord’s not that long but at least I can throw some light over to the other side of the room.

  And there he is. Richard.

  Laid out and looking like he doesn’t mind the glass and china cutting into his back. His eyes are open like he’s studying the ceiling, so at first I’m afraid to go over that way…maybe it’s a trap and he’s playing dead so he can grab me when I get closer. I’m staying as far away as I can from his arms, spread out like he’s making a snow angel. And that’s when I see the red circle in his chest, getting wider and wider with blood.

  He’s not moving.

  I get closer still and see his chest is still, not moving up and down, letting air in and out. Richard’s the one’s been shot.

  And for a hair of a second, less than a hair of a second—more like a half a hair of a second—I see my daddy, laid out, bleeding onto the linoleum floor back at the old house. I don’t know how that can be since Emma was the one who really saw him…I must’ve pictured it so many times in my brain that I’ve taken over her memory.

  Emma.

  “Emma!” I call out, hurrying over to the stairs, flying up them to our bedroom. She’s not here. She’s not here?

  “Emma!” I shout for her but silence is the only answer I get back.

  “Mr. Wilson! Help!” Like he could even hear me call him for help. Stupid me.

  As fast as I ran in, I run out…down the dark path to the blacktop…down the blacktop to his pathway that seems steeper now that I’m trying my hardest to get to him. The rocks play tricks on my feet, being places I never knew they were. Just as I’m getting up from a fall I hear footsteps crunching on the gravel that’s closer to his front steps. Yep. It’s him, all right. I can tell by the hunched way he walks. I’m about to yell out for him when the moonlight catches hold of something shiny in his hand. A gun?

  Oh. My. Lord.

  * * *

  The fallen pine branches breaking under my feet and my breathing’re the only things making any sound in the woods; the moon, the only thing lighted up. The scrub bushes and saplings I didn’t remember being here in the daylight slow me down but not by much. I don’t care if I get jabbed by any of them anymore.

  The Bicketts’ house is absorbing all the blackness from the night, so it’s hard to see where the steps end and where the door begins but I find them both and soon I’m banging on the front door.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Caroline? Caroline, look at me.” Momma’s swollen mouth is moving but the words don’t appear to be coming from that direction. She’s holding a towel wet with melting ice inside, up to her forehead. The blood’s all cleaned away by now.

  “Caroline?”

  “She’s tired,” another voice, a man’s voice, floats overhead. “Let her rest.”

  “Caroline, can you hear me? What are you thinking about?”

  * * *

  The cottonwood tree was made for climbing, with fat, barky branches spaced out like a staircase, one on top of another, so you could climb almost to the top before it got scary.

  “Can you see it? Can you see the house from there?” Emma called out to me from below.

  “Not yet,” I answered back. “Let me get up a little higher.”

  “Hurry up, I’m only two down from you.” She sounded annoyed ’cause I was taking so long to pull myself up. I should have let her go first, she’s the faster tree climber. But I’m the oldest, so when I called it she knew I’d win.

  “I can see it!” And I could. The cottonwood tree stood taller than the other trees around Hamilton’s farm so there was nothing blocking our view. “Come on! Git up here.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said, still annoyed but breathless to catch up to me. “You should’ve let me climb up first. Whoa, you’re right. You can see it from here.”

  “What’d I tell you?”

  Hamilton’s farm was a good distance from our house, the house with the chipping shutters on Murray Mill Road. But when you’re as high as a bird flies it doesn’t matter so much, you can see anything from up here.

  Trouble is, you can also look down and see how far you have to get back down. I tried not to look down but it was impossible: I liked to scare myself sometimes and I reckon that’s what I was doing.

  “How’re we ever gonna get out of this tree without killing ourselves?”

  “Who cares? Look! There’s the Godseys’!”

  I didn’t think to check out what all lay on the other side of the trunk I was hugging like my life depended on it, which in that case it did. Sure enough, there was the Godsey house.

  “I want to stay up here forever.”

  * * *

  “Caroline, answer me.” Momma’s tired voice is getting louder even though she’s not an arm’s length away from me. “Y’hear? Answer me.”

  “What?”

  “Listen to her, ‘what?’ Like she hadn’t heard us talkin
g at her for hours,” Momma says to some invisible body that’s behind me.

  “Now, now, Mrs. Parker, let’s go easy here,” a voice says. I don’t have the strength to turn around to see who the voice belongs to—I’m so tired—but it’s a voice I’ve heard before. “It’s been a long day. For everyone.”

  “I know it,” Momma says. “I’m going ’bout as easy as I can. Caroline?” Her voice is fake soft, just for show. “Tell your momma what happened, all right? Just tell your momma.”

  I watch her cracked lips move along with the words coming out.

  “Mrs. Parker, now, let us talk to her fo’ a while, how ’bout,” the voice says. “You must be tired after all. Why don’t you go git yourself a cup of coffee and we’ll talk to Caroline.”

  “It’s my husband’s been killed, it’s my daughter I’ll be talking to,” she says, her lips facing up to the man. “Now, Caroline Parker, you’re gonna talk to me, y’hear? Talk to me. Tell me.”

  I want to reach for her. I want her to pull me onto her lap and tell me we’re going home, it’s all been a bad dream. I want…

  “Caroline, if there’s something you want to tell us, something you maybe need to git offa your chest, well, then,” a large man I recognize as being the one who tacked the sign up to our door—the sheriff!—has moved in front of Momma. His face looks sad, his eyes locked into mine, looking for an answer to this question they keep asking me over and over again. But looking back out at him is like looking through a lace curtain on a sunny day—I see the light there but I can’t quite make out the shapes. What happened, what happened, they keep saying—asking—those two words, and for the life of me I don’t know what they’re talking about.

  I look from the sheriff to Momma and back again for a hint to the answer.

  Momma doesn’t let on as she knows so it’s up to me to come up with the answer. I look back at the sheriff. I don’t know, sir, I tell him with my eyes, since my mouth isn’t following orders from my brain. Truth to tell, I don’t know. The harder I think on it the less I remember.

  Then, a flash of Mr. Wilson carrying something shiny. Mr. Wilson, who’s been so good to me. A man has to answer for the bad things he done.

  “How long you been firing guns off, anyhow?” Momma says, folding against the back of the chair—I guess leaning in toward me got too tiring. “A gun went and killed your own daddy…and you learning how to do the same from some crazy man out in the woods. No respect for her dead daddy, that’s what she’s got.”

  “Mrs. Parker, please,” the sheriff says. “Let us take it from here.”

  She taps the pack of cigarettes so one comes out and she lights it and draws on it hard, blowing smoke up to the ceiling when it’s time to breathe out.

  The sheriff’s voice is softer than Momma’s, calmer, like it’s floating across the air and petting me. “You want to tell me what happened ’fore we got there?”

  I close my eyes and see a flash of Richard, drinking beer at the kitchen table.

  “Carrie?”

  Then another flash, this one with my heartbeat loud in my ears as I run through the two rooms upstairs looking for something.

  “Caroline?”

  Looking for someone.

  “Let’s leave her be for a while,” he says.

  Looking for…

  “Oh, fine,” she says, from a place that might as well have been a million miles away.

  Looking for…

  “Emma” is all I can say.

  “What? What’d you say, honey?” Footsteps cross the room, coming closer to me. “Say again?”

  I look as surprised to hear my own voice as they do. “Emma.”

  He looks at Momma, who looks like all the life’s been sucked out of her suddenly, her head drops down—clunk—like a rag doll’s. Then it shakes slow-like from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.

  “You want to tell me about Emma?”

  “I was looking for Emma.” I must be whispering ’cause he’s leaning into me so close I can smell the tobacca on his breath.

  “You were looking for Emma…” He wants me to keep going but that’s all I know.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Momma says, her voice as tired as her head.

  “Wait!” The sheriff holds up a hand to quiet her. “Go on,” he says to me.

  Momma, please, I’m thinking. Please help me. Make it better like Daddy always used to do. Please, Momma.

  A flash again. Richard’s laugh cuts into my head. My head, pounding on either side of my eyes, trying to thump, thump, thump the picture out, then back in. A door swinging open. Richard’s smile turning upside down, his eyes wide. Thump, thump, thump. Heaviness in my arms, in my hands. Thump, thump, thump.

  “I couldn’t find Emma.”

  Another flash: Mr. Wilson climbing the stairs to his house. Something shiny.

  The man reaches across the corner of the tabletop to rest his hand quietly on top of mine, relaxing it for a spell, its lightness surprising ’cause it’s so wide and knotted.

  “He was carrying a gun back in the house.”

  With my eyes I trace the winding veins on the back of his hand. Bumpy rivers.

  “Who?” The sheriff is practically begging for the answer. “Who was carrying a gun into the house?”

  I look at him and realize I have to tell him what I saw. I have to tell on my friend.

  No. He couldn’t have done it. No.

  I can hear my own voice telling Emma, It’s one thing to kill a can, it’s another altogether to kill a man, no matter how much he needs killing.

  Mr. Wilson’d never hurt a fly. But then I can hear his voice in my head, clear as day: Back in my day a man had to answer for the things he done. He said it himself.

  Maybe he wanted Richard dead after all. And he was carrying that shiny gun, too.

  “Who was carrying a gun into the house, Caroline?” the sheriff asks me again. Then again, right now I’m not even sure my name’s Caroline—I’m so tired and my head keeps on a’pounding under my hair.

  “Mr. Wilson.”

  “What?” He leans forward even closer to my face. “I didn’t hear ya, honey. What did you say?”

  I slowly move my face up from looking down at my dirty hands with scratches on my palms from falling on the path. I look him square in the eye, ready to say the name again. I’m sorry, Mr. Wilson.

  “Mr. Wilson.”

  “Now, I don’t appreciate your playing games with me, Caroline,” the sheriff says, “but I know you’ve been through a lot these past twenty-four hours, so I’m gonna overlook that. Tell us who was carrying the gun into the house, honey.”

  “I told you. Mr. Wilson. I saw him…”

  The sheriff looks down at his own hands and shakes his head, thinking something to himself—what, I don’t rightly know.

  “I’m telling you what I saw—” I start to say but he cuts me off.

  “Honey, you need to start leveling with us. Your momma and I need to know what all happened back there at yer house.”

  “Mr. Wilson—”

  “Drum Wilson is a friend of mine,” he says, pointing his finger at my face, “and I happen to know for a fact that he wasn’t anywhere near your house at the time the gun went off….”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. He was with me and about half the town, down at Sonny Zebulon’s celebratin’ his birthday.” The sheriff turns to explain to Momma. “Sonny Zebulon’s the oldest living fella in town and yesterday was his ninety-fifth birthday. Man can still play like the calluses are fresh on his fingertips…. Anyhow, Drum Wilson was down there with the rest of us, playin’ out some tunes for Zeb’s ninety-fifth. Wilson even splurged and brought out the mother-o’-pearl mandolin his pappy used to play on….”

  While he’s carrying
on about the party down at Zebulon’s I squinch my eyes closed, trying to picture the form of Mr. Wilson, walking up his front steps, carrying…

  “Thing’s worth more’n all of us put together…” the sheriff’s saying.

  Carrying something…

  “It’s beautiful, shell inlay, shined up nice…”

  Something shiny! His mandolin! The moonlight only hit the thing for a second, but now I realize that’s exactly what it was. It wasn’t no gun after all. I knew he couldn’t hurt a flea on Brownie’s back! I knew it.

  “Anyhow—” the sheriff turns back to me “—that’s how come I know Drum Wilson ain’t the one who fired the gun. So who was it, little girl?”

  “Momma, where’s Emma?”

  Then I see something in my head. Something that almost feels like it could have been a dream.

  “Git…out…now.” I can still hear the way she whispered it to me while she was lying out in a bloody mess.

  I remember telling her, “I’m not leaving you, Momma.”

  And I remember the sound of Richard coming in from the kitchen, yelling. I can even hear him slurring the words the way he does after a few drinks.

  But then something comes to me that I didn’t remember until just now.

  He grabbed me by the back of my shirt on my way trying to slip out the back door to Mr. Wilson’s!

  “Piece of shit,” he said. But then he continued on hollering. I didn’t remember that from before.

  “Let me go!” I can remember squirming to get free from his grip.

  “You seen those prices in thar,” he says to me like I’d know what he was talking about. “Place’s beggin’ to be robbed, y’ask me!”

  I can see myself biting the hand that’s got hold of my shirt.

  “What the hell…?” he said.

  “Where’s Emma?” I remember swinging around to face him. I can even hear my voice that didn’t even sound like my voice at the time, all screechy it was.

  I can see the corners of Richard’s mouth curl up on either side of the round bottle he’s pulling beer from. He didn’t answer me.

  “Where is she?” I pushed past him into the kitchen.