Sharon Creech
Walk Two Moons
For my sister and brothers:
Sandy, Dennis, Doug, Tom
with love from The Favorite
Don’t judge a man
until you’ve walked two moons
in his moccasins.
Contents
Epigraph
1 A Face at the Window
2 The Chickabiddy Starts a Story
3 Bravery
4 That‘s What I‘m Telling You
5 A Damsel In Distress
6 Blackberries
7 Ill-Ah-No-Way
8 The Lunatic
9 The Message
10 Huzza, Huzza
11 Flinching
12 The Marriage Bed
13 Bouncing Birkway
14 The Rhododendron
15 A Snake has a Snack
16 The Singing Tree
17 In The Course of a Lifetime
18 The Good Man
19 Fish in the Air
20 The Blackberry Kiss
21 Souls
22 Evidence
23 The Badlands
24 Birds of Sadness
25 Cholesterol
26 Sacrifices
27 Pandora‘s Box
28 The Black Hills
29 The Tide Rises
30 Breaking In
31 The Photograph
32 Chicken and Blackberry Kisses
33 The Visitor
34 Old Faithful
35 The Plan
36 The Visit
37 A Kiss
38 Spit
39 Homecoming
40 The Gifts
41 The Overlook
42 The Bus and The Willow
43 Our Gooseberry
44 Bybanks
About the Author
Other Books by Sharon Creech
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
A FACE AT THE WINDOW
Gramps says that I am a country girl at heart, and that is true. I have lived most of my thirteen years in Bybanks, Kentucky, which is not much more than a caboodle of houses roosting in a green spot alongside the Ohio River. Just over a year ago, my father plucked me up like a weed and took me and all our belongings (no, that is not true—he did not bring the chestnut tree, the willow, the maple, the hayloft, or the swimming hole, which all belonged to me) and we drove three hundred miles straight north and stopped in front of a house in Euclid, Ohio.
“No trees?” I said. “This is where we’re going to live?”
“No,” my father said. “This is Margaret’s house.”
The front door of the house opened and a lady with wild red hair stood there. I looked up and down the street. The houses were all jammed together like a row of birdhouses. In front of each house was a tiny square of grass, and in front of that was a thin gray sidewalk running alongside a gray road.
“Where’s the barn?” I asked. “The river? The swimming hole?”
“Oh, Sal,” my father said. “Come on. There’s Margaret.” He waved to the lady at the door.
“We have to go back. I forgot something.”
The lady with the wild red hair opened the door and came out onto the porch.
“In the back of my closet,” I said, “under the floorboards. I put something there, and I’ve got to have it.”
“Don’t be a goose. Come and see Margaret.”
I did not want to see Margaret. I stood there, looking around, and that’s when I saw the face pressed up against an upstairs window next door. It was a round girl’s face, and it looked afraid. I didn’t know it then, but that face belonged to Phoebe Winterbottom, a girl who had a powerful imagination, who would become my friend, and who would have many peculiar things happen to her.
Not long ago, when I was locked in a car with my grandparents for six days, I told them the story of Phoebe, and when I finished telling them—or maybe even as I was telling them—I realized that the story of Phoebe was like the plaster wall in our old house in Bybanks, Kentucky.
My father started chipping away at a plaster wall in the living room of our house in Bybanks shortly after my mother left us one April morning. Our house was an old farmhouse that my parents had been restoring, room by room. Each night as he waited to hear from my mother, he chipped away at that wall.
On the night that we got the bad news—that she was not returning—he pounded and pounded on that wall with a chisel and a hammer. At two o’clock in the morning, he came up to my room. I was not asleep. He led me downstairs and showed me what he had found. Hidden behind the wall was a brick fireplace.
The reason that Phoebe’s story reminds me of that plaster wall and the hidden fireplace is that beneath Phoebe’s story was another one. Mine.
2
THE CHICKABIDDY STARTS A STORY
It was after all the adventures of Phoebe that my grandparents came up with a plan to drive from Kentucky to Ohio, where they would pick me up, and then the three of us would drive two thousand miles west to Lewiston, Idaho. This is how I came to be locked in a car with them for nearly a week. It was not a trip that I was eager to take, but it was one I had to take.
Gramps had said, “We’ll see the whole ding-dong country!”
Gram squeezed my cheeks and said, “This trip will give me a chance to be with my favorite chickabiddy again.” I am, by the way, their only chickabiddy.
My father said that Gram couldn’t read maps worth a hill of beans, and that he was grateful that I had agreed to go along and help them find their way. I was only thirteen, and although I did have a way with maps, it was not really because of that skill that I was going, nor was it to see the “whole ding-dong country” that Gram and Gramps were going. The real reasons were buried beneath piles and piles of unsaid things.
Some of the real reasons were:
Gram and Gramps wanted to see Momma, who was resting peacefully in Lewiston, Idaho.
Gram and Gramps knew that I wanted to see Momma, but that I was afraid to.
Dad wanted to be alone with the red-headed Margaret Cadaver. He had already seen Momma, and he had not taken me.
Also—although this wasn’t as important—Dad did not trust Gram and Gramps to behave themselves along the way unless they had me with them. Dad said that if they tried to go on their own, he would save everyone a lot of time and embarrassment by calling the police and having them arrested before they even left the driveway. It might sound a bit extreme for a man to call the police on his own tottery old parents, but when my grandparents got in a car, trouble just naturally followed them like a filly trailing behind a mare.
My grandparents Hiddle were my father’s parents, full up to the tops of their heads with goodness and sweetness, and mixed in with all that goodness and sweetness was a large dash of peculiarity. This combination made them interesting to know, but you could never predict what they would do or say.
Once it was settled that the three of us would go, the journey took on an alarming, expanding need to hurry that was like a walloping great thundercloud assembling around me. During the week before we left, the sound of the wind was hurry, hurry, hurry, and at night even the silent darkness whispered rush, rush, rush. I did not think we would ever leave, and yet I did not want to leave. I did not really expect to survive the trip.
But I had decided to go and I would go, and I had to be there by my mother’s birthday. This was extremely important. I believed that if there was any chance to bring my mother back home it would happen on her birthday. If I had said this aloud to my father or to my grandparents, they would have said that I might as well try to catch a fish in the air, so I did not say it aloud. But I believed it. Sometimes I am as ornery and stubborn as an
old donkey. My father says I lean on broken reeds and will get a face full of swamp mud one day.
When at last Gram and Gramps Hiddle and I set out that first day of the trip, I prayed for the first thirty minutes solid. I prayed that we would not be in an accident (I was terrified of cars and buses) and that we would get there by my mother’s birthday—seven days away—and that we would bring her home. Over and over, I prayed the same thing. I prayed to trees. This was easier than praying directly to God. There was nearly always a tree nearby.
As we pulled onto the Ohio Turnpike, which is the flattest, straightest piece of road in God’s whole creation, Gram interrupted my prayers. “Salamanca—”
I should explain right off that my real name is Salamanca Tree Hiddle. Salamanca, my parents thought, was the name of the Indian tribe to which my great-great-grandmother belonged. My parents were mistaken. The name of the tribe was Seneca, but since my parents did not discover their error until after I was born and they were, by then, used to my name, it remained Salamanca.
My middle name, Tree, comes from your basic tree, a thing of such beauty to my mother that she made it part of my name. She wanted to be more specific and use Sugar Maple Tree, her very favorite, but Salamanca Sugar Maple Tree Hiddle was a bit much even for her.
My mother used to call me Salamanca, but after she left, only my grandparents Hiddle called me Salamanca (when they were not calling me chickabiddy). To most other people, I was Sal, and to a few boys who thought they were especially amusing, I was Salamander.
In the car, as we started our long journey to Lewiston, Idaho, my grandmother Hiddle said, “Salamanca, why don’t you entertain us?”
“What sort of thing did you have in mind?”
Gramps said, “How about a story? Spin us a yarn.”
I certainly do know heaps of stories, but I learned most of them from Gramps. Gram suggested I tell one about my mother. That I could not do. I had just reached the point where I could stop thinking about her every minute of every day.
Gramps said, “Well then, what about your friends? You got any tales to tell about them?”
Instantly, Phoebe Winterbottom came to mind. There was certainly a hog’s belly full of things to tell about her. “I could tell you an extensively strange story,” I warned.
“Oh, good!” Gram said. “Delicious!”
And that is how I happened to suspend my tree prayers and tell them about Phoebe Winterbottom, her disappearing mother, and the lunatic.
3
BRAVERY
Because I first saw Phoebe on the day my father and I moved to Euclid, I began my story of Phoebe with the visit to the red-headed Margaret Cadaver’s, where I also met Mrs. Partridge, her elderly mother. Margaret nearly fell over herself being nice to me. “What lovely hair,” she said, and “Aren’t you sweet!” I was not sweet that day. I was being particularly ornery. I wouldn’t sit down and I wouldn’t look at Margaret.
As we were leaving, Margaret whispered to my father, “John, have you told her yet—how we met?”
My father looked uncomfortable. “No,” he said. “I tried—but she doesn’t want to know.”
Now that was the truth, absolutely. Who cares? I thought. Who cares how he met Margaret Cadaver?
When at last we left Mrs. Cadaver and Mrs. Partridge, we drove for approximately three minutes. Two blocks from Margaret Cadaver’s was the place where my father and I were now going to live.
Tiny, squirt trees. Little birdhouses in a row—and one of those birdhouses was ours. No swimming hole, no barn, no cows, no chickens, no pigs. Instead, a little white house with a miniature patch of green grass in front of it. It wasn’t enough grass to keep a cow alive for five minutes.
“Let’s take a tour,” my father said, rather too heartily.
We walked through the tiny living room into the miniature kitchen and upstairs into my father’s pint-sized bedroom and on into my pocket-sized bedroom and into the wee bathroom. I looked out the upstairs window down into the backyard. Half of the tiny yard was a cement patio and the other half was another patch of grass that our imaginary cow would devour in two bites. There was a tall wooden fence all around the yard, and to the left and right of our yard were other, identical fenced plots.
After the moving van arrived and two men crammed our Bybanks furniture into our bird-house, my father and I inched into the living room, crawling over sofas and chairs and tables and boxes, boxes, boxes. “Mm,” my father said. “It looks as if we tried to squeeze all the animals into the chicken coop.”
Three days later, I started school and saw Phoebe again. She was in my class. Most of the kids in my new school spoke in quick, sharp bursts and dressed in stiff, new clothes and wore braces on their teeth. Most girls wore their hair in exactly the same way: in a shoulder-length “bob” (that’s what they called it) with long bangs that they repeatedly shook out of their eyes. We once had a horse who did that.
Everybody kept touching my hair. “Don’t you ever cut it?” they said. “Can you sit on it? How do you wash it? Is it naturally black like that? Do you use conditioner?” I couldn’t tell if they liked my hair or if they thought I looked like a whang-doodle.
One girl, Mary Lou Finney, said the most peculiar things, like out of the blue she would say, “Omnipotent!” or “Beef brain!” I couldn’t make any sense of it. There were Megan and Christy, who jumped up and down like parched peas, moody Beth Ann, and pink-cheeked Alex. There was Ben, who drew cartoons all day long, and a peculiar English teacher named Mr. Birkway.
And then there was Phoebe Winterbottom. Ben called her “Free Bee Ice Bottom” and drew a picture of a bumblebee with an ice cube on its bottom. Phoebe tore it up.
Phoebe was a quiet girl who stayed mostly by herself. She had a pleasant round face and huge, enormous sky-blue eyes. Around this pleasant round face, her hair—as yellow as a crow’s foot—curled in short ringlets.
During that first week, when my father and I were at Margaret’s (we ate dinner there three times that week), I saw Phoebe’s face twice more at her window. Once I waved at her, but she didn’t seem to notice, and at school she never mentioned that she had seen me.
Then one day at lunch, she slid into the seat next to me and said, “Sal, you’re so courageous. You’re ever so brave.”
To tell you the truth, I was surprised. You could have knocked me over with a chicken feather. “Me? I’m not brave,” I said.
“You are. You are brave.”
I was not. I, Salamanca Tree Hiddle, was afraid of lots and lots of things. For example, I was terrified of car accidents, death, cancer, brain tumors, nuclear war, pregnant women, loud noises, strict teachers, elevators, and scads of other things. But I was not afraid of spiders, snakes, and wasps. Phoebe, and nearly everyone else in my new class, did not have much fondness for these creatures.
But on that day, when a dignified black spider was investigating my desk, I cupped my hands around it, carried it to the open window, and set it outside on the ledge. Mary Lou Finney said, “Alpha and Omega, will you look at that!” Beth Ann was as white as milk. All around the room, people were acting as if I had singlehandedly taken on a fire-breathing dragon.
What I have since realized is that if people expect you to be brave, sometimes you pretend that you are, even when you are frightened down to your very bones. But this was later, during the whole thing with Phoebe’s lunatic, that I realized this.
At this point in my story, Gram interrupted me to say, “Why, Salamanca, of course you’re brave. All the Hiddles are brave. It’s a family trait. Look at your daddy—your momma—”
“Momma’s not a real Hiddle,” I said.
“She practically is,” Gram said. “You can’t be married to a Hiddle that long and not become a Hiddle.”
That is not what my mother used to say. She would tell my father, “You Hiddles are a mystery to me. I’ll never be a true Hiddle.” She did not say this proudly. She said it as if she were sorry about it, as if it were some sort of
failing in her.
My mother’s parents—my other set of grandparents—are Pickfords, and they are as unlike my grandparents Hiddle as a donkey is unlike a pickle. Grandmother and Grandfather Pickford stand straight up, as if sturdy, steel poles ran down their backs. They wear starched, ironed clothing, and when they are shocked or surprised (which is often), they say, “Really? Is that so?” and their eyes open wide and their mouths turn down at the corners.
Once I asked my mother why Grandmother and Grandfather Pickford never laughed. My mother said, “They’re just so busy being respectable. It takes a lot of concentration to be that respectable.” And then my mother laughed and laughed, in a gentle way, and you could tell her own spine was not made of steel because she bent in half, laughing and laughing.
My mother said that Grandmother Pickford’s one act of defiance in her whole life as a Pickford was in naming her. Grandmother Pickford, whose own name is Gayfeather, named my mother Chanhassen. It’s an Indian name, meaning “tree sweet juice,” or—in other words—maple sugar. Only Grandmother Pickford ever called my mother by her Indian name, though. Everyone else called my mother Sugar.
Most of the time, my mother seemed nothing like her parents at all, and it was hard for me to imagine that she had come from them. But occasionally, in small, unexpected moments, the corners of my mother’s mouth would turn down and she’d say, “Really? Is that so?” and sound exactly like a Pickford.