Before I could answer, the sheriff climbed out of his car. He settled his hat on his head and shifted his holster. “Where are the others?” he said.
“There aren’t any others,” I said.
“Who brought you up here?”
“I brought myself.”
“Whose car is this?”
“My grandfather’s.”
“And where is he?” The sheriff glanced to left and right, as if Gramps might be hiding in the bushes.
“He’s in Coeur d’Alene.”
The sheriff said, “Pardon?”
So I told him about Gram and about how Gramps had to stay with her and about how I had driven from Coeur d’Alene very carefully.
The sheriff said, “Now let me get this straight,” and he repeated everything I said, ending with, “and you’re telling me that you drove from Coeur d’Alene to this spot on this hill all by yourself?”
“Very carefully,” I said. “My gramps taught me how to drive, and he taught me to drive very carefully.”
The sheriff said to the deputy, “I am afraid to ask this young lady exactly how old she is. Why don’t you ask her?”
The deputy said, “How old are you?” I told him. The sheriff gave me a stern look and said, “I don’t suppose you would mind telling me exactly what was so all-fired important that you couldn’t wait for someone with a legitimate driver’s license to bring you to the fair city of Lewiston?”
And so I told him all the rest. When I had finished, he returned to his car and talked into his radio some more. Then he told me to get in his car and he told the deputy to follow in Gramps’s car. I thought the sheriff was probably going to put me in jail, and it wasn’t the thought of jail that bothered me so much. It was knowing that I was this close and might not be able to do what I had come to do, and it was knowing that I needed to get back to Gram.
He did not take me to jail, however. He drove across the bridge into Lewiston and on through the city and up a hill. He drove into Longwood, stopped at the caretaker’s house, and went inside. Behind us was the deputy in Gramps’s car. The caretaker came out and pointed off to the right, and the sheriff got back in the car and drove off in that direction.
It was a pleasant place. The Snake River curved behind this section, and tall, full-leaved trees grew here and there across the lawn. The sheriff parked the car and led me up a path toward the river, and there, on a little hill overlooking the river and the valley, was my mother’s grave.
On the tombstone, beneath her name and the dates of her birth and death, was an engraving of a maple tree, and it was only then, when I saw the stone and her name—Chanhassen “Sugar” Pickford Hiddle—and the engraving of the tree, that I knew, by myself and for myself, that she was not coming back. I asked if I could sit there for a little while, because I wanted to memorize the place. I wanted to memorize the grass and the trees, the smells and the sounds.
In the midst of the still morning, with only the sound of the river gurgling by, I heard a bird. It was singing a birdsong, a true, sweet birdsong. I looked all around and then up into the willow that leaned toward the river. The birdsong came from the top of the willow and I did not want to look too closely, because I wanted it to be the tree that was singing.
I kissed the willow. “Happy birthday,” I said.
In the sheriff’s car, I said, “She isn’t actually gone at all. She’s singing in the trees.”
“Whatever you say, Miss Salamanca Hiddle.”
“You can take me to jail now.”
43
OUR GOOSEBERRY
Instead of taking me to jail, the sheriff drove me to Coeur d’Alene, with the deputy following us in Gramps’s car. The sheriff gave me a lengthy and severe lecture about driving without a license, and he made me promise that I would not drive again until I was sixteen.
“Not even on Gramps’s farm?” I said.
He looked straight ahead at the road. “I suppose people are going to do whatever they want to on their own farms,” he said, “as long as they have a lot of room to maneuver and as long as they are not endangering the lives of any other persons or animals. But I’m not saying you ought to. I’m not giving you permission or anything.”
I asked him to tell me about the bus accident. When I asked him if he had been there that night and if he had seen anyone brought out of the bus, he said, “You don’t want to know all that. A person shouldn’t have to think about those things.”
“Did you see my mother?”
“I saw a lot of people, Salamanca, and maybe I saw your mother and maybe I didn’t, but I’m sorry to say that if I did see her, I didn’t know it. I remember your father coming in to the station. I do remember that, but I wasn’t with him when—I wasn’t there when—”
“Did you see Mrs. Cadaver?” I said.
“How do you know about Mrs. Cadaver?” he said. “Of course I saw Mrs. Cadaver. Everyone saw Mrs. Cadaver. Nine hours after that bus rolled over, as all those stretchers were being carried up the hill, and everyone despairing—there was her hand coming up out of the window and everyone was shouting because there it was, a moving hand.” He glanced at me. “I wish it had been your mother’s hand.”
“Mrs. Cadaver was sitting next to my mother,” I said.
“Oh.”
“They were strangers to each other when they got on that bus, but by the time they got off, six days later, they were friends. My mother told Mrs. Cadaver all about me and my father and our farm in Bybanks. She told Mrs. Cadaver about the fields and the blackberries and Moody Blue and the chickens and the singing tree. I think that if she told Mrs. Cadaver all that, then my mother must have been missing us, don’t you think?”
“I’m sure of it,” the sheriff said. “And how do you know all this?”
So I explained to him how Mrs. Cadaver had told me all this on the day Phoebe’s mother returned. Mrs. Cadaver told me about how my father visited her in the hospital in Lewiston after he had buried my mother. He came to see the only survivor from the bus crash, and when he learned that Mrs. Cadaver had been sitting next to my mother, they started talking about her. They talked for six hours.
Mrs. Cadaver told me about her and my father writing to each other, and about how my father needed to get away from Bybanks for a while. I asked Mrs. Cadaver why my father hadn’t told me how he had met her, and she said he had tried, but I didn’t want to hear it, and he didn’t want to upset me. He thought I might dislike Margaret because she had survived and my mother had not.
“Do you love him?” I had asked Mrs. Cadaver. “Are you going to marry him?”
“Goodness!” she said. “It’s a little early for that. He’s holding on to me because I was with your mother and held her hand in her last moments. Your father isn’t ready to love anyone else yet. Your mother was one of a kind.”
That’s true. She was.
And even though Mrs. Cadaver had told me all this and had told me how she had been with my mother in her last minutes, I still did not believe that my mother was actually dead. I still thought that there might have been a mistake. I don’t know what I had hoped to find in Lewiston. Maybe I expected that I would see her walking through a field and I would call to her and she would say, “Oh Salamanca, my left arm,” and “Oh Salamanca, take me home.”
I slept for the last fifty miles into Coeur d’Alene and when I awoke, I was sitting in the sheriff’s car outside the hospital entrance. The sheriff was coming out of the hospital. He handed me an envelope and slid in beside me on the seat.
In the envelope was a note from Gramps giving the name of the motel he was staying at. Beneath that he had written, “I am sorry to say that our gooseberry died at three o’clock this morning.”
Gramps was sitting on the side of the bed in the motel, talking on the telephone. When he saw me and the sheriff at the door, he put the phone down and hugged me to him. The sheriff told Gramps how sorry he was and that he didn’t think it was the time or place to give anybody a lecture abou
t underage granddaughters driving down a mountainside in the middle of the night. He handed Gramps his car key and asked Gramps if he needed help making any arrangements.
Gramps said he had taken care of most things. Gram’s body was being flown back to Bybanks, where my father would meet the plane. Gramps and I were going to finish what had to be done in Coeur d’Alene and leave the next morning.
After the sheriff and his deputy left, I noticed Gram’s and Gramps’s open suitcase. Inside were Gram’s things, all mixed in with Gramps’s clothes. I picked up her baby powder and smelled it. On the desk was a crumpled letter. When Gramps saw me look at it, he said, “I wrote her a letter last night. It’s a love letter.”
Gramps lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. “Chickabiddy,” he said, “I miss my gooseberry.” He put one arm over his eyes. His other hand patted the empty space beside him. “This ain’t—” he said. “This ain’t—”
“It’s okay,” I said. I sat down on the other side of the bed and held his hand. “This ain’t your marriage bed.”
About five minutes later, Gramps cleared his throat and said, “But it will have to do.”
44
BYBANKS
We’re back in Bybanks now. My father and I are living on our farm again, and Gramps is living with us. Gram is buried in the aspen grove where she and Gramps were married. We miss our gooseberry every single day.
Lately, I’ve been wondering if there might be something hidden behind the fireplace, because just as the fireplace was behind the plaster wall and my mother’s story was behind Phoebe’s, I think there was a third story behind Phoebe’s and my mother’s, and that was about Gram and Gramps.
On the day after Gram was buried, her friend Gloria—the one Gram thought was so much like Phoebe, and the one who had a hankering for Gramps—came to visit Gramps. They sat on our porch while Gramps talked about Gram for four hours straight. Gloria asked if we had any aspirin. She had a grand headache. We haven’t seen her since.
I wrote to Tom Fleet, the boy who helped Gram when the snake took a snack out of her leg. I told him that Gram made it back to Bybanks, but unfortunately she came in a coffin. I described the aspen grove where she was buried and told him about the river nearby. He wrote back, saying that he was sorry about Gram and maybe he would come and visit that aspen grove someday. Then he asked, “Is your riverbank private property?”
Gramps is giving me more driving lessons in the pickup truck. We practice over on Gramps’s old farm, where the new owner lets us clonk around on the dirt roads. With us rides Gramps’s new beagle puppy, which he named Huzza Huzza. Gramps pets the puppy and smokes his pipe as I drive, and we both play the moccasin game. It’s a game we made up on our way back from Idaho. We take turns pretending we are walking in someone else’s moccasins.
“If I were walking in Peeby’s moccasins, I would be jealous of a new brother dropping out of the sky.”
“If I were in Gram’s moccasins right this minute, I would want to cool my feet in that river over there.”
“If I were walking in Ben’s moccasins, I would miss Salamanca Hiddle.”
On and on we go. We walk in everybody’s moccasins, and we have discovered some interesting things that way. One day I realized that our whole trip out to Lewiston had been a gift from Gram and Gramps to me. They were giving me a chance to walk in my mother’s moccasins—to see what she had seen and feel what she might have felt on her last trip.
I also realized that there were lots of reasons why my father didn’t take me to Idaho when he got the news of her death. He was too grief-stricken, and he was trying to spare me. Only later did he understand that I had to go and see for myself. He was right about one thing, though: we didn’t need to bring her body back because she is in the trees, the barn, the fields. Gramps is different. He needs Gram right here. He needs to walk out to that aspen grove to see his gooseberry.
One afternoon, after we had been talking about Prometheus stealing fire from the sun to give to man, and about Pandora opening up the forbidden box with all the evils of the world in it, Gramps said that those myths evolved because people needed a way to explain where fire came from and why there was evil in the world. That made me think of Phoebe and the lunatic, and I said, “If I were walking in Phoebe’s moccasins, I would have to believe in a lunatic and an axe-wielding Mrs. Cadaver to explain my mother’s disappearance.”
Phoebe and her family helped me, I think. They helped me to think about and understand my own mother. Phoebe’s tales were like my fishing in the air: for a while I needed to believe that my mother was not dead and that she would come back.
I still fish in the air sometimes.
It seems to me that we can’t explain all the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so we look at the frightening things that are closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open. Inside is something that we can manage, something that isn’t as awful as it had at first seemed. It is a relief to discover that although there might be axe murderers and kidnappers in the world, most people seem a lot like us: sometimes afraid and sometimes brave, sometimes cruel and sometimes kind.
I decided that bravery is looking Pandora’s box full in the eye as best you can, and then turning to the other box, the one with the smoothbeautiful folds inside: Momma kissing trees, my Gram saying, “Huzza, huzza,” Gramps and his marriage bed.
My mother’s postcards and her hair are still beneath the floorboards in my room. I reread all the postcards when I came home. Gram and Gramps and I had been to every place my mother had. There are the Black Hills, Mt. Rushmore, the Badlands—the only card that is still hard for me to read is the one from Coeur d’Alene, the one that I received two days after she died.
When I drive Gramps around in his truck, I also tell him all the stories my mother told me. His favorite is a Navaho one about Estsanatlehi. She’s a woman who never dies. She grows from baby to mother to old woman and then turns into a baby again, and on and on she goes, living a thousand, thousand lives. Gramps likes this, and so do I.
I still climb the sugar maple tree, and I have heard the singing tree sing. The sugar maple tree is my thinking place. Yesterday in the sugar maple, I realized that I was jealous of three things.
The first jealousy is a foolish one. I am jealous of whoever Ben wrote about in his journal, because it was not me.
The second jealousy is this: I am jealous that my mother had wanted more children. Wasn’t I enough? When I walk in her moccasins, though, I say, “If I were my mother, I might want more children—not because I don’t love my Salamanca, but because I love her so much. I want more of these.” Maybe that is a fish in the air and maybe it isn’t, but it is what I want to believe.
The last jealousy is not foolish, nor is it one that will go away just yet. I am still jealous that Phoebe’s mother came back and mine did not.
I miss my mother.
Ben and Phoebe write to me all the time. Ben sent me a valentine in the middle of October that said,
Roses are red,
Dirt is brown,
Please be my valentine,
Or else I’ll frown.
There was a P.S. added: I’ve never written poetry before.
I sent a valentine back that said:
Dry is the desert,
Wet is the rain,
Your love for me
Is not in vain.
I added a P.S. that said, I’ve never written any poetry either.
Ben and Phoebe and Mrs. Cadaver and Mrs. Partridge are all coming to visit next month. There is a chance that Mr. Birkway might come as well, but Phoebe hopes not, as she does not think she could stand to be in a car for that long with a teacher. My father and I have been scrubbing the house for their visit. I can’t wait to show Phoebe and Ben the swimming hole and the fields, the hayloft and the trees, and the cows and the chickens. Blackberry, the chicken that Ben gave me, is queen of the coop, and I’ll show B
en her too. I am hoping, also, for some blackberry kisses.
But for now, Gramps has his beagle, and I have a chicken and a singing tree, and that’s the way it is.
Huzza, huzza.
About the Author
SHARON CREECH is the author of the Newbery Honor Book THE WANDERER. Her other novels include GRANNY TORRELLI MAKES SOUP, RUBY HOLLER, the New York Times best-selling LOVE THAT DOG, BLOOMABILITY, ABSOLUTELY NORMAL CHAOS, CHASING REDBIRD, and PLEASING THE GHOST. She is also the author of two picture books, the New York Times best-selling A FINE, FINE SCHOOL and FISHING IN THE AIR. After spending eighteen years teaching and writing in Europe, Sharon Creech and her husband have returned to the United States to live.
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ALSO BY
SHARON CREECH
Absolutely Normal Chaos
Pleasing the Ghost
Chasing Redbird
Bloomability
The Wanderer
Love That Dog
Ruby Holler
Granny Torrelli Makes Soup
Fishing in the Air
A Fine, Fine School
Credits
Cover art © 2004 by Cathleen Toelke
Cover design by Andrea Vandergrift
Cover © 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Copyright
WALK TWO MOONS. Copyright © 1994 by Sharon Creech. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.