WONDER # 57
THY MUST SUMMON COURAGE UPON ENCOUNTERING
THE EVERLASTING FLAME
WONDER # 26
SINNERS MUST MAKE RESTITUTION FIRST IF THEY
SEEKETH REDEMPTION
Like everybody else who comes to Miss Lydia for spiritual advice, I’ve spent hours upon hours pondering her words of wisdom. I bend down to straighten:
WONDER # 15
THE HIGHWAY OF LIFE HARDLY EVER TAKES YOU TO
WHERE YOU’RE HEADING
"Ain’t that the God’s honest truth,” Cooter says, reading over my shoulder. He’s tied the horse and donkey up to a sycamore branch, leaving enough rein so they can graze.
“Gib?” Miss Lydia calls out from her porch in that raspy voice she’s got. “Cooter?”
“Yes’m,” he calls back. “It’s the two of us.”
Miss Lydia looks like a left-behind rag doll in the wide-back chair. She’ll never talk about it, but I heard she used to be quite a bit taller. The explosion she was in melted her some, I guess. Like always, she’s got on a gauzy scarf of purple, the forgiveness color, that wraps around her head and hides the side of her scarred face. She NEVER takes that scarf off. Says it gives her an air of mystery.
“Where’s Keeper at?” she asks as we come up the steps to her veranda.
I look both ways, shrug. “Thought he was right behind us,” I say, not really bothered since I know that dog can take care of himself. So does Miss Lydia. (Just so ya know, even though she will not admit to it, I believe she was the one left Keeper back out next to the Dumpster at Top O’ the Mornin’ for me to find right after I got home from the hospital. After teaching him his few good tricks.)
The lavender shawl I crocheted her is set on her shoulders ’cause even though it is sopping warm, Miss Lydia is almost always on the chilly side. Shuckin’ beans into a white bowl she’s got on her lap, she tells me, “Your mama’s been missin’ you.” And then to Cooter, “What happened to your leg?”
“The sheriff.”
Miss Lydia puts her bean bowl off to the side and goes through the door of her house, leaving behind the smell of the camphor oil she massages into her puckered skin, wind chimes tinkling in her wake. There’s gotta be a thousand of ’em hanging off of every tree. (Besides their favorite—soul music—Miss Lydia tells me the dead truly appreciate hearing the wind stroking the willows.)
Cooter says to me, “Don’t get comfortable. The posse’s gotta be on our tail.”
Coming back out the screen door, Miss Lydia’s holding one of her special poultices that she makes out of clay and peppermint oil. “This’ll draw out the pain,” she tells Cooter. “Bring me your knee.” Removing the bandage, she smooths on the mixture in gentle strokes, and asks me, “Billy do it?”
“WHAT?”
“The knee, Gib,” she asks. “Did Billy doctor the knee?” Miss Lydia’s just been making mannerly conversation since we got here, ’cause a course, she already knows the sheriff was the one that messed up Cooter AND that Billy was the one who doctored his knee. That’s because she is Omniscient: All knowing. E.G., she can hear things only an animal can. Knows when a storm is coming days before the wind changes direction. And if you are still doubting her mystical powers, this should convince ya. Miss Lydia knows things about the crash and she wasn’t even there.
“What’s troublin’ ya?” she asks me, still applying the poultice.
I hardly know where to begin. “Well . . . Grampa is in Texas and Clever is havin’ her baby and the Brandish Boys are comin’ for us ’cause the sheriff lied and told them that Cooter is guilty of murderin’ . . .” She might not know about the deceasing of her brother, Mr. Buster Malloy. Then again, she’s got extra-strong communication with the spirits, and they’ve probably already informed her that Buster has joined up with them. NOT the ones residing in heaven. Not after what he did to her. “We gotta call up to the hospital to check on Billy and Clever. May we use your phone?”
“Ya could if the storm hadn’ta knocked it out,” she says, wiping the leftover clay onto the grass and replacing the bandage. “Ya better put the animals in the shed.”
"Pardon me?” I say.
“They’re comin’.” She pats Cooter’s leg, and he doesn’t wince at all. “Git now.”
Ya think she’s right in her head or wrong in her head, Miss Lydia is not the kind of person you question, so Cooter scurries even faster than me toward Dancer and Peaches. Of course, this is the moment Peaches has chosen to show off her stubborn. She’s dug in.
Miss Lydia calls from the porch, “Leave her, Gib. Go quick.”
The shed’s just a piece from the house, closer than the barn. Cooter’s already halfway there, dragging Dancer behind him, and swearing a streak.
I hear the posse now, too, on the other side of the trees. They’re arguing about what direction to go off in. They could head toward Cray Ridge, Browntown, or make the turn our way. Above the rustling, the grunting, the sneeze of a horse, the sheriff hollers out, “Looks to me like the tracks lead off to Lydia’s. We got ’em now, boys.”
I can imagine him fingering the rope on the side of his saddle. Bet Cooter can, too, ’cause I barely get the door closed behind us and he’s off in the corner, attempting to shrink invisible. This shed is where Miss Lydia keeps her gardening tools and old tack and worn-out bushel baskets and plows but nothing large enough to hide either under or behind.
The sound of hooves and leather comes roaring into the yard.
One of the Brandish Boys—it has to be one of them because neither the sheriff nor Deputy Boyd has got a voice that sounds like a bone getting ground up in a disposal—shouts, “Well, ain’t this convenient.” Peeking through a wormhole in the shed door, I can see the one with the seeping skin condition pointing up at the Hundred Wonders Cemetery sign. “We can string him up and bury him all in the same place,” he shouts again, following up with a laugh that is tremendously Bloodthirsty: Encouraging violence.
“Mornin’, Lydia,” the sheriff says, pulling his horse up to the porch steps.
"LeRoy,” she says politely, but doesn’t look up from her shuckin’. “What can I do for you and your friends this fine after-a-storm mornin’? A calmin’ elixir, perhaps?”
The Boys’ heads are swiveling like a pair of lazy Susans.
“The McGraw girl or Cooter Smith been by this morning?” the sheriff asks as he steps down out of his stirrup.
Cooter wails softly from the corner of the shed. “Can ya see ’em? Are they comin’?”
“Shhhhh . . . they’re gonna hear ya.”
“What ya do to your skull, LeRoy?” Miss Lydia asks, her eyes still not meetin’ his. “Might have a little something for that.”
The sheriff reaches up to where Cooter knocked him on the head with the limestone rock. The white bandage is dotted with blood. “Ya sure ya ain’t seen those two?”
Miss Lydia strokes her calico cat with her long-fingered good hand. “Nobody’s been by yet today.”
The sheriff bends his leg onto the lowest porch step and with a bowing of his head says, “Ya know Buster is dead, don’tcha?”
Cool as one of her bush cucumbers, she doesn’t answer him with words, just points off to the Wonders sign that LeRoy’s standing next to, like she planned it, which she probably did:
WONDER # 12
ANGER IS AT ITS BEST WHEN BURIED
The Brandish Boys aren’t paying any attention to this exchange of words between the sheriff and Miss Lydia. The other one’s got off his horse now, too, and they’re making their way over to Peaches, not so much walking like normal people, more like a kind of half slither. The long-eared one seems to be the boss, ’cause when he points down at Peaches’s hoof, the other one obediently bends down and scrapes out what she’s got collected in there, which is an old tracker’s trick. Ya can tell where somebody’s been by what your animal has collected in their feet. “This your donkey?” the Brandish Boy yells out to Miss Lydia.
His voice is . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . I can’t really describe it, that’s how genuinely horrible it is. Maybe swampish? Yes. That’s what comes to my mind anyways. A swamp at midnight on Friday the thirteenth.
Miss Lydia lifts her eyes up to the sheriff and says from behind her purple scarf, “Any harm come to that girl, ya best be makin’ sure your will is signed and dated. Same goes for Florida’s grandbaby.”
Ascared as a pumpkin on Halloween, but not being able to stand not knowin’, Cooter joins me at the shed peephole. “They’s worse close-up,” he whispers. “Real worse.”
Like they heard him, the Boys turn away from Peaches and start coming our way.
Miss Lydia calls to their backs, “Wouldn’t go into that shed I was you.”
The Boys flick her warning off like ya do a gnat.
“We got us a warrant.” Sheriff Johnson passes it to Miss Lydia. “The Smith boy killed your brother and we’re gonna see that justice is done.”
"You and me both know that ain’t true, don’t we, LeRoy?” she says, letting the paper flutter to the ground. “On both counts.”
The Boys can’t be twenty yards from us now. Mouths hanging slack, they’re eyeing the shed like it’s fresh meat. I can feel their hunger, and I believe Cooter can as well. He can barely swallow.
Without one word, Miss Lydia reaches behind her chair so fast and brings out a double barrel that she lifts up to her shoulder, aiming at the backs of the Brandishes as she shouts, “Got a dog with rabies locked in that shed.”
Either they don’t believe Miss Lydia or the Boys’d purely relish a roll-around with a dyin’ dog, ’cause they keep on comin’.
“Put the gun down, Lydia,” the sheriff orders. “No matter how much you hated Buster he was still your kin. Don’tcha wanna see right done by him?”
“Call off the Boys now, LeRoy, ’fore I ventilate the both of ’em.”
The sheriff comes up one more step, and it looks like he’s fixin’ to stroke her calico cat, but with a move so daring, he grabs out for the barrel of her gun and snatches it away.
I step back right quick, ’cause on the other side of the shed door, the pock-faced brother is reaching out his gloved hand for the handle. The metal latch swings up, but catches. Over and over. Hand to his heart, Cooter chokes out, “We gotta . . .”
I gesture to him to follow me as I move to the shed’s back door. I know it’s also locked, but from the outside. With a chunky wood latch held in a bracket. Hundred Wonders is our home away from home. I know its every nook and cranny. So does my dog. I realize now that’s where he disappeared to earlier. He had to get himself into his lookout position.
Placing my cheek against the splintering crack in the back door, I instruct Keeper, “Open the latch.”
The Brandishes got their eyes up to the grimy front window. They can’t see us from there, but the next window they look through, they’ll see us plenty fine.
“Use your snout, your snout,” I urge Keep.
“What?” confused Cooter asks.
I must confess, to save my Billy’s hide, I am tempted at this moment by my wickedness wave to let the Boys burst through that door and have at Cooter. Let ’em string him up for murdering Mr. Buster and be done with it, no one the wiser. But what about Clever and Rosie? Their hearts would be broke to bits, I allow anything to happen to him. Same for Miss Florida. If I let these bounty hunters string up her grandbaby, don’t think I’d ever be able to eat another piece of her pie without crying all over the crust.
Yanking Dancer off the hay he’s munching on, I boss, “Mount,” and cup my hands to give Cooter a leg up.
“Cain’t ya see the door’s locked from the outside?” he chides, squirming his way onto the horse’s back. Squaring himself, he reaches into his pants for the gun, ready to shoot his way out.
What’s left of their faces is pressed up to the shed’s side window. The Boys are beaming broad when the long-eared one smashes his rifle butt through the glass.
“Cooter, get a good hold.”
Too scared to question, with no time left, he wraps the reins around his fist. Dancer is pawing, snorting and ready.
“Please quit goofin’ around and finish up now,” I tell Keep through the crack.
Seconds later, with the loveliest of creaks, the back door swings wide and reveals the ripe green of the woods.
Cooter, sobbing, extends a hand to pull me up behind him.
But one travels faster than two.
“Give ’em my love,” I say, firing the .22 into the air. And just like he was trained to do, just like I knew he’d do, ex-racehorse Dancer, hearing that shot, jumps through the back door like it’s a startin’ gate.
The Soul of the Matter
I’m lying on my belly in the bushes back behind the shed as the posse, whooping and hat-waving, gallops past me. They’re streaking into the trees hot on Cooter’s trail. I’m not worried. He’s got a head start and the best dog in the world leading him to his heart’s desire. By the time Cooter gets to the hospital, Billy will already be there and his daddy will have called Judge Larson and told him about the pictures of dead Mr. Buster on the beach. Cooter will be Exonerated: To be cleared from an accusation.
I should be feeling real happy about all this, but the fact is, what I’m feeling is let down. I’ve reached The End of a whooper of a story I was hoping would have a much better ending. Especially for my Billy. Tomorrow he’ll walk hands held high down Main Street, declaring himself guilty of the murdering of Mr. Buster Malloy to anybody who’ll listen. That’s just the kind of man he is. (I’m sure he was just waiting ’til we were all outta harm’s way to do just that.) So instead of drinking coffee outta our shoes in the hills of Bolivia like I’d planned, looks like I might be spending the rest of my days bringing Billy pecan sandies in prison on visiting day. Well, like they say, that’s the way the cookie crumbles. And I really do have a fondness for Cooter, so it’s good that I didn’t let my wickedness wave pull me under. His black fender hair has even grown on me some.
Miss Lydia hollers from the porch, “Ya can come out now, chil’.”
WARNING: Do not be surprised by her saying this or anything else from this moment on. Mystics: Folks who have the ability of attaining insight into mysteries that transcend ordinary human knowledge as by direct communication with the divine. Miss Lydia knew I wasn’t escaping along with Cooter, but hiding under one of her highbush briar berries.
“Comin’,” I call back to her. With Billy and Clever and Cooter temporarily safe, my spiritual advisor and I, we got a little time to chat. I’ve been so busy dealin’ with all of these messes, I haven’t had a chance to stop by and I’ve been missing her. When we’re through with our catchin’ up, I believe I’ll ask Miss Lydia to conduct a quick VISITATION with Mama. Then I’ll cut some baby’s breath to take along to the hospital for Rosie.
As I lower myself onto her porch step, she’s shaking her head to and fro in a fed-up way. “I shouldn’ta turned my bad eye to him. I know better’n that. LeRoy Johnson’s always been a slippery one. Even as a boy. Why, I could tell you stories that . . .”
While she’s busy venting her spleen, I’m enjoying watching black-as-a-piano, slow-as-a-waltz Teddy Smith making his way down the path from Browntown. Too bad he didn’t show up a little earlier. He woulda been a big help. (I may have previously mentioned, besides working up at Tanner Farm, Teddy also does heavy lifting with his chest and arms that are rippling in the sun for Miss Lydia.)
Getting to the front yard, Teddy doesn’t wave like he usually does when he sees me. Instead he chirps, “Mornin’, Gibber. Lydia.”
“Hey,” I call back with a lot of enthusiasm, as it is rare as a good porterhouse that he’ll actually speak to you in that tweety voice of his.
Smelling the leftover smoke from the Browntown fire when it comes by on a breeze reminds me to ask Miss Lydia something that’s been confusing me for the last few days. “Billy told me that he thinks the coloreds set the dump fire on
purpose. The sheriff said so, too.”
Miss Lydia nods in greeting at Teddy, and then says, “Billy’s a smart man.” Shucking now in a fiercer way, she adds, “Do you understand why they set the fire?”
I think on that for a minute. “Is it ’cause they’d like to get a brand-new dump that’s farther away from their houses? The smell over there can get awfully pungent when the wind blows outta the north.”
“While that may be true, that’s not the main reason. They set the fire to call attention to the fact that they don’t want to be treated different. The coloreds want to be treated equal to white folks.”
Just about choking on a bean, I ask, “Like how?”
“With respect.”
Now, I don’t want to pooh-pooh Miss Lydia, her being all-knowing like she is, but that ain’t NEVER gonna happen. White folks are awfully set in their ways.
“Did the fire bein’ so close scare ya?” I ask, not able to stop myself from staring at the scars on her hands. “It did Billy and me.” But right after I say that, I come to the realization that even though we just about got the poop scared outta us, I myself learned something wondrous as a result of that Browntown fire. It’s only natural to stuff sad stuff away, like Billy’s war and my crash, but listen here—if you expose those sorrows to the light of day, you might be pleasantly surprised by the outcome. Look how it all worked out for Billy and me. Can’t be a rainbow without there first being a god-awful storm, right?
“The will of the Lord is strong and sure,” Miss Lydia answers in that versed way she talks sometimes. “His flock need not be fearful. All wrongs will be set right when He seeth them.”
“Is He seething now?”
“I believe He is.”
Wheeling an empty barrow outta the shed, Teddy shouts, “I’m strippin’ the stalls this mornin’,” not knowing how relieved he should be feeling about his nephew Cooter getting away from the Boys like he did just a bit ago with no time to spare. I’m not going to say anything to him just yet. He’ll find out soon enough, along with the rest of Cray Ridge, since I’ve already come up with my newest headline: