He pulled up about fifty yards from Mrs. Flint’s store. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to see Mrs. Flint right now, so I’ll wait for you here, okay?”
I waited a minute, expecting another kiss or some passionate announcement, but he kept scanning the road and wouldn’t look at me. I got out and slammed the door. So much for passion.
He was right about one thing, though—that car was a beaut.
“Golly,” Mrs. Flint said, when I’d stacked my provisions on the counter. “You’re the one clearing some trail or something, aren’t you? You’re—”
“Zinny.”
“That’s right. Zinny.” The phone rang. Mrs. Flint sounded agitated. “I sure don’t know,” she complained to the caller, “and I’m about to give up on that boy. Late again and refusing to work nights and straggling in like a zombie. I told his mother a thing or two when she came in here yesterday. She doesn’t know what to do with him either. He doesn’t come home most nights, and won’t tell her where he’s been, and she thinks he’s up to no good—” Mrs. Flint stopped herself. “I’ll call you back. I’ve got a customer.”
So. Jake really had been up on the trail watching over me most nights. He wouldn’t go to all that trouble if it was May he cared about.
The sheriff walked in. “Hey there,” he said to Mrs. Flint. “Hey there—which one are—”
“Zinny.”
“Zinny? You the one doing that trail thing? Heard your dad talking about it. Better be careful up there.”
“I will.”
“I’ll take one of those candy bars,” he said to Mrs. Flint. “And a red pop.”
“Where you headed?” Mrs Flint asked him.
“On up to the Fosters’. They’re all in a flutter.”
“Not that cow again?”
“Naw—something about a stolen car. I couldn’t make much sense of it. Betty was half hysterical. You know how she gets.”
I struggled out the door with my sacks of groceries, and wasn’t real surprised to see that Jake and his beaut of a car were gone. Automatically, I scanned the sky, as if I were looking for traces of a big old hand, disappearing back into the clouds.
CHAPTER 33
THE OLD LADY
Straggling home, loaded down with groceries and worries, a glimpse of my shadow frightened me. Was that me—that bent figure creeping along? Zip! Out of the no-access portion of my brain slipped another memory of Rose.
After Mom’s great-aunt had visited us once, Rose started doing a peculiar thing. She would hunch over and hobble along, her face all scrunched up into a little prune.
“Rose is being an old lady,” Aunt Jessie said.
I started doing it with Rose. People would say, “Rose and Zinny—do the old lady,” and we’d instantly transform ourselves into miniature old women, creeping through the house grimacing. Aunt Jessie would clap her hands and toss her head back, tickled to pieces.
Not long after baby Rose died, I leaped off a chair one morning and started doing the old lady. I was hoping to cheer up Aunt Jessie, sitting so forlornly on her sofa. She didn’t laugh, though. Instead, she said, “Rose will never be an old lady.”
I never did the old lady again.
As I walked on up the road with the sacks of groceries, I thought about what Aunt Jessie had said. Rose never would be an old lady. She would always be four years old and cute and completely innocent, and I envied her.
CHAPTER 34
EVEN A MONKEY…
Twice I dropped the groceries on my way home, and when one sack split, I had to cram its contents into the two remaining bags. As I turned into our drive, Jake sped past in the red car. Twenty feet beyond me, he honked, braked suddenly, but shot forward again. A minute later, the sheriff’s car whizzed past in the same direction, red lights flashing.
Jake had really done it this time. I hoped he wouldn’t be arrested. If he were, maybe he would blame me. He might tell the sheriff he’d been trying to impress me, and I’d been such a pill.
Jake’s stealing was worrying me. I was all mixed up about it. If anyone else had stolen anything, I would’ve instantly known it was wrong, wrong, wrong. But with Jake, I’d find myself making excuses for him. Maybe he thought Bingo was mistreated at the Butlers’; maybe he was trying to save Bingo. Maybe he’d borrowed his mother’s ring. Maybe he’d borrowed the car.
These excuses didn’t convince me. Maybe he couldn’t help himself. Maybe he was just a generous, free-hearted sort of person who wanted to make people happy. Maybe he loved me so much that he had lost his senses.
And then I was really mixed up. I was impressed that someone would go to all these lengths just for me. And then I felt guilty that I might be the cause of Jake doing terrible things. And then I worried that something terrible was going to happen to Jake, and then I’d really feel guilty. Then I wondered why I was thinking about Jake so much, and did I really like him, and if so, why did I like him? And then I got angry that he was making me so confused.
At home, Mom said, “Are you packing up again already?”
“Yup.”
“We’ve missed you, Zinny—”
From overhead came a loud crash, followed by Sam’s wail, “Mom—” She dashed upstairs.
“You’re not spending the night, are you?” Bonnie asked.
“Nope.”
“I want you to stay, Zinny—it’s just that Junie’s staying, and I was hoping she could have your bed—”
“Fine.”
When Mom returned, she said, “You’ve got to stay until your father gets home, and I was hoping you’d stay and help with Uncle Nate tonight—”
“Tonight?”
“Your father and I have been taking turns sitting up with him all night, and we’re so tired we can hardly stand up. Maybe you could sit with him tonight?”
“What about May or Gretchen or—?”
“They’d be no good at it. They’d fall asleep and wouldn’t hear an elephant crash through the window.”
“What about Bonnie?”
“Bonnie’s got Junie staying over.”
“The boys?”
“They’re too little. Will you do it?”
I didn’t want to watch Uncle Nate. I didn’t want to see him like that. But I agreed. “Okay, but I’m leaving first thing in the morning,” I said.
In Uncle Nate’s room, I curled up in the chair. He was asleep, still clutching that stick. On the wall next to the bed was a framed wall hanging that Aunt Jessie had cross-stitched. At the top, in blue letters, were these words: Even a monkey falls from a tree. In the picture below this saying, a monkey tumbled out of a palm tree. I’d always wondered about that monkey, who looked surprised, suspended in the air, forever falling. I wished he could be back in his tree, safe. I didn’t want him to crunch to the ground.
Tucked into the mirror frame above the dresser was the “proof” picture. On top of the dresser was Uncle Nate’s camera. Where were Aunt Jessie’s lotions and perfume? Her hand mirror?
Her things were vanishing, just like baby Rose’s had. There were no reminders of baby Rose anywhere. This had always seemed so sad to me, this erasure of baby Rose from their lives.
Swish! Out flew an image of a pair of dolls that Aunt Jessie had made for me and baby Rose when we were three years old. They were life-sized dolls (three-year-old-sized), soft and floppy, dressed in our own clothes. Baby Rose’s doll had soft yellow hair, and mine had dark hair. What had happened to those dolls? I longed to see them.
I was gripped by the need to look in that bottom dresser drawer, and tiptoed across the room to open it.
Their marriage quilt was folded neatly, taking up most of the drawer. I patted it tentatively, as if reassuring myself that there was no dead body wrapped in it. To one side, and partially covered by the quilt was a square black box. Startled by a snore from Uncle Nate, I closed the drawer.
In the pink bathroom, I looked everywhere for the key to the locked cabinet drawer. I ran my hands along the top of the w
indow frame, searched the remaining cabinet drawers, and opened every bottle and jar on the counter. No key.
I returned to Uncle Nate’s room and stared out the window. Maybe Uncle Nate and Aunt Jessie had replaced Rose with me. Was it possible that Uncle Nate would ever replace Aunt Jessie with someone else?
Then I heard the cricket. Automatically, I counted his chirps, watching the second hand on Uncle Nate’s clock. Seventy-seven degrees outside.
Uncle Nate awoke with a start and said, “Rose?”
“No, it’s Zinny.”
He looked at me for a long, long time. “I knew it,” he said.
“Uncle Nate, you don’t happen to know anything about a medallion, do you?”
“A what?”
As I described it for him, he fidgeted with the sheets. “Don’t talk to me about it,” he said. “Stop talking.”
“Why? Do you know where it is?”
“Don’t talk to me about it.”
I studied him. He looked guilty and afraid. “Did you take it?”
“I never. Stop it. My heart’s jumping.”
I was in my Zinnia Taylor: detective mode, and there was no stopping me. I was heartless.
“Where were you really going on those mountain walks? Were you meeting someone?”
He grabbed his stick and raised it in the air. “Stop it! Stop it!”
I was so angry it scared me. I left the room and paced the hall. Up and down, up and down. I didn’t want to hate Uncle Nate. I loved him as much as I loved my own father. More. I loved him more.
What a thought! It went through me like a hundred little lightning bolts. I knew Uncle Nate better than I knew my own father, and I’d known Aunt Jessie better than my own mother.
When I looked back in the room, Uncle Nate appeared to be asleep. I opened the bottom dresser drawer again, and removed the black box. Inside was—aha!—the medallion—and a key.
The key fit the bathroom drawer. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I was surprised by what I found. There was a box, nearly full, of syringes, and an insulin pamphlet. In all the time I’d known Aunt Jessie and heard her talk about her sugar, I’d never known she’d taken insulin shots.
But there was more in the drawer, beneath these things. In a pink heart-shaped box was a locket containing a wisp of hair. Folded beneath the box was a child’s drawing of a stick-figure woman and M-O-M in crooked letters.
I touched the hair, and ran my fingers over the drawing. It was Rose’s hair and Rose’s drawing. What bothered me was that these two things seemed to be all that Aunt Jessie had saved to remind her of Rose, and that she had locked them away in a bathroom drawer.
Uncle Nate was mumbling in his sleep. Once he said, “Bury it,” and another time he said, “Redbird!” and, worst of all, he kept saying, “Let me out of here! Let me out!”
I couldn’t bear it. His legs jerked under the sheet and sweat rolled down his forehead. With a cool cloth I mopped his face, and when I tried to straighten his pillow, I found a silken cloth tucked beneath it: Aunt Jessie’s embroidery about the hyacinths, the one I had placed in her coffin with her. There were the hyacinths, the bread, and that hand coming down from the sky.
This really spooked me. How did this get out of the coffin and under Uncle Nate’s pillow?
“Redbird! Redbird!” he called.
I held his pillow and looked down on his contorted face, and I don’t know what came over me. I was somebody else. I was God. I placed the pillow over his face, blotting it out. I pressed hard.
CHAPTER 35
LEAVING
As I hurried up the trail early the next morning, I couldn’t bear to look back at the house and the farm. If I stole one look, it might suck me up and imprison me.
I kept returning to that moment when I pressed the pillow down on Uncle Nate’s face. I was full of love and full of hate. I hated his being sick, trapped like that. I hated myself for thinking that he might replace Aunt Jessie with someone else. And mixed in with this hate was huge, overpowering love for Uncle Nate, my Uncle Nate who wouldn’t hurt a flea, who so desperately missed Aunt Jessie, who so desperately wanted to be with her.
When I pressed on the pillow, I was thinking, Catch her, then, catch her!
His hand flapped in the air, caught my wrist, and squeezed it. I saw my hands. They were my hands, not God’s hands. I snatched the pillow away from Uncle Nate’s face.
He stared up at me, and that stare was like the beady eyes of the salamander and the knowing eyes of the fox. I fluffed the pillow and placed it beneath his head. Then I folded Aunt Jessie’s hyacinth embroidery and slid it under the pillow. All the while he watched me. I sat in the chair beside his bed and squeezed his hand all night long. Neither of us said a word.
When I heard Mom groping in the kitchen, I snatched Uncle Nate’s camera, stuffed it in my backpack, and gathered my food.
“You’re up early,” Mom said. “Leaving already?”
“Yup.”
“How did Uncle Nate sleep?”
“Fine,” I lied.
“Zinny, I want to ask you something.”
I winced, afraid that she knew what I’d done.
“Can you come home next Saturday—instead of in ten days?”
“Why?”
“We’re all going to the circus in Chocton.”
“I don’t want to go,” I said.
“Are you sure? We’re all going.”
“Uncle Nate?” I asked.
“Oh. Right. Well. If you don’t want to go to the circus, maybe you’d come home and stay with him? Would you, Zinny? How about it? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you upset about Uncle Nate?” she asked.
I couldn’t answer. I yearned to tell her everything—but everything was jumbled up in one big spaghetti pot. Uncle Nate and Jake and Rose and Jessie and the ring and the medallion and the trail were all twisted around in a huge tangle of guilt, and I longed to empty that whole pot into someone else’s lap. I wanted to stop feeling guilty about baby Rose and Aunt Jessie and Uncle Nate. I wanted to understand what Jake was doing and why, and I wanted to stop feeling guilty for his stealing.
Instead, I felt like the monkey in Aunt Jessie’s wall hanging: frozen, forever falling, falling, falling.
I ached to be like Sam, stirring his soup saying, “Don’t blame me,” and to be like baby Rose, perpetually doing the old lady without actually being one, and eternally riding around in a shopping bag pleasing Aunt Jessie.
All of that I wanted to tell my mother, but instead, a faint voice came out of my mouth, and I agreed to come back and watch Uncle Nate the next Saturday.
“Bless you, Zinny.” She helped me strap on my backpack and added, “Have you said good-bye to him?”
No! I nearly screamed. I can’t! I won’t! But my legs moved toward his room and my hand opened his door and when I leaned down to say good-bye, he whispered, “Take me up on the trail, Zinny. Take me.”
“I can’t—you can’t—”
“Please, pumpkin,” he begged.
“I can’t. Look at you—”
He pressed my fingers to his lips. “Tootle-ee-ah-dah—”
I couldn’t answer. I fled.
It was drizzling as I climbed the trail, and a silvery sheen covered the stones. The mist felt cool against my face, and as I walked along, I scattered zinnia seeds recklessly, bent over like that little old lady, and obsessed with finishing my trail.
Without realizing it, I’d veered off the trail to the spot where the medallion had been buried, and was filled with unaccountable dread. There was a flicker, like a dream re-forming, of me hurrying, running through the woods, running away, kneeling at this spot.
I turned back to the trail and stomped along. As I entered dark Maiden’s Walk, I thought, Here I go, being dragged toward a dark pit, helpless and chained. But I wasn’t going to scream or resist. Take me, I begged. Do away with me.
The clear light of the meadow was
my temporary reprieve. When I came to the barbed-wire fence with its new NO TRESPASSING sign, the meadow was occupied. A sleek chestnut mare paced at the far edge of the fenced enclosure. Willow! Sal’s horse, Willow! I passed my food sack and backpack through the fence and climbed through. Willow pawed the ground and flicked her mane. She recognized me. I approached her slowly, fishing an apple out of my sack and holding it toward her. She backed off a few steps, tossed her head, and whisked her dark tail. She stepped toward me and rubbed the side of her head against my arm.
“You miss Sal, don’t you?” I said, stroking her. “You miss her to pieces, don’t you?” Willow was beautiful. I could run up to camp, fetch my wire cutters, return, and take her with me. Then I’d have my horse and I could ride my trail.
Selfish Zinny. Thief!
When I climbed through the other side of the fence, Willow paced back and forth in the enclosure, agitated, restless. She stared after me as I ran up the trail.
On through the remaining portion of Maiden’s Walk I went, surprised to exit it alive. Loaded with guilt, full to bursting with it. If you loved someone and he was sick, how could you help him? Down through Crow Hollow where the crows were eerily silent. If you loved someone and he wanted to die, what could you do?
Across Baby Toe Ridge, staring at the sky so I wouldn’t see any dead baby toes. If you’ve done something wrong, how do you fix it?
Over the railroad, past the stumps, onto Sleepy Bear Ridge.
By the time I made my way to my camp, now about fourteen miles up the trail, it was pouring, a real frog-strangler. I crawled under the tarp and lay there listening to the rain smattering against the leaves overhead and dripping onto the tarp. Wind whooshed across the hillside, threatening to rip the tarp from its moorings.
CHAPTER 36
DISCOVERED
The low wail of the train whistle awoke me eight hours later. It was still raining and too late to work on the trail. Instead, I decided to move my camp forward, to the grove of larch trees where I’d last worked, near the edge of Spook Hollow, which I’d soon be entering to clear the next section of trail.