When I get to the curve near William Blott’s place, there’s nobody around at all, and the night so dark, it looks like the whole world’s just an echo of something bigger. I pull over to the shoulder, get out, and jump the ditch.
I wait around for Leonard, but not for long. Then I begin walking the stretch of road, looking for shoe prints and bent-over grass. If a camera crew has been in those woods, and all those church ladies, and a reporter, I know I ought to be able to find the path they made.
And I do. It takes me a while, but I do.
I follow the trampled way for a while and even still, there are briers sharp as blades and long, like nails, that catch in my hair and my clothes. They scratch worse than cats as I pass through. There is kudzu wrapped around every tree, like a logic, swallowing up what shrinks inside. It’s a jungle of a world, in July, wild and looming, and it’s not long before I lose sight of the slight path I’d found. It’d be easier in daylight.
Briers claw at my socks and vines catch beneath my chin. I feel like I’m trying to walk through a hammock, and I have to swim with my arms and twist to get through bushes. I cuss Leonard with every breath. My light is good, but the woods are dense, and one little shining isn’t enough. I wish for a miner’s hat with a spotlight attached.
Finally, I reach a place where the vines seem woven together like a wall. I push against them with my hands, and though they are flexible, they do not give. I realize I’ll have to climb over, and so I shine my light upward to see how high. At the top of the viny fence, briers stretch two rows thick, like barbed wire.
At first, I’m stunned, and then I’m tickled when I realize William Blott had built a fortress for himself, taming nature just enough to afford him protection.
I drop to my belly and wiggle beneath, just like the children who come onto the cemetery grounds without permission.
And then I’m in. I dust myself and circle the place with the flashlight. It looks as if those campers had to be dropped from the sky, with the living fence forming boundaries all around. They must have been there for years for the woods to grow up around them that way. I work the perimeter with my light, shining on the overgrowth and shining on the campsite. At the opposite side of my entry, I see that somebody has broken through the fence with a hatchet or scythe. They’ve made a rough door for the camera crews and ladies, but they didn’t bust through the top levels of briers.
But the inside is miraculous—like being inside somebody’s head. It feels like a privilege to see it all.
There’s a camper shell designed to fit onto a pickup standing upright and supported from behind by two pine trees. William Blott has made a clothes rack in that camper shell, using a young sapling stripped to its trunk as the bar. He’s slipped the narrow tree through holes on either side, and his clothes hang on regular hangers, here in the woods.
There are other clothes on a line—costumes and boas and sequined gowns swinging from the rope, just above the dirt, like ghosts. His bras appear to be different sizes, and it startles me to see them hooked around sawed-off stumps. In the night, with just the light shining in one place at a time, it’s like headless nymphs wear those bras. I discover them individually, behind me, ahead, to my side. Each one makes me jump.
There’s a small pull camper, no bigger than a horse trailer, and when I see that it has no door, I lean inside and shine the light around. It’s his bedroom—complete with a bed, though dirty and unmade. I shine my light on a nest at the far corner of the crumpled bed, and then a bird comes flying at me, black and squawking. I lunge and fall against the camper’s moldy side, jostling it hard. And inside, an alarm clock falls and begins to ring.
Before I know it, I’m on the other side of the campground, my back against a tree, swallowing to keep my heart from jumping out my throat, the ring piercing my ears.
And in the dark, I hear a rustling, then “Yo,” a voice calls from deep in the woods. “Finch? You in there? What the hell’s going on?”
It’s Leonard, and I catch my breath and shine my light in the direction of the sounds of feet crunching through moss and mulch. He comes in through the door in the fence, dressed in coveralls and a cap, though the evening is hot. It’s clear he’s been here before.
“It’s just a clock,” I tell him. “I knocked it over.”
“You wanna turn it off?” he growls.
“No,” I say, and he nods and chases down the sound.
The bird comes flying at him, too, and he runs out saying, “God Almighty damn. Why didn’t you tell me there was a bird? Are you laughing?”
“I thought you weren’t coming,” I answer, ignoring his questions.
Then he points to a camper I haven’t been in. “You seen this yet?”
I shake my head.
“Come on.” He leads me to a pop-up with a beaded entranceway, and when I push through, it’s like something you’d see in a movie. It’s got red poofy pillows with tassles and a daybed covered with silky sheets. There’s the dressing table with makeup still sitting out, little sponges in the shapes of triangles darkened with the liquid. My flashlight hits the mirror and bounces off, and in the reflection, I can see the shelf along the top lined with wigs and foamy ninnies.
I do not wear makeup myself. There was never any chance I could cover up my faults, and so it seemed pointless to bother with painting my lips. But being in William Blott’s dressing room makes me feel little and silly, and there’s a part of me that wants to do my face.
“Creepiest thing I’ve ever seen,” Leonard says. “Let’s go.” He trips over a pair of heels, massive and gold.
I take a tube of lipstick, stick it in my pocket, and follow Leonard through the streaming beads.
“What’re you doing here anyway?” he asks, leading me to the hole in the living fence.
“Collecting William’s valuables,” I say. “And don’t you try to stop me, neither. If Reba’s got plans to burn this place—and you know that she just might—then I’m gonna take some of his things back to his grave.”
“You are not,” Leonard tells me. “If I have to put you in handcuffs, you’re not taking things away from here. We’re leaving. We’re leaving now.”
And he walks on out into the woods, but I dip behind another camper and then inside. This one’s full of books, and most of them stink like mold. I pick up a book of photographs—photographs of misfits—and the pages are warped from rain or other liquid.
“Finch?” Leonard calls, looking for me. “Damn it, you’ve seen it now. Come on.”
“I ain’t done looking,” I tell him. “And I ain’t leaving. I found my way in without you and I reckon I can find my way out.”
He shines his light in the doorway and says, “Well damn. You wouldn’ta thought the fellow’d been a reader, would you?”
And there are books on the ocean and marine biology, books of poetry and books of art. There’s a whole set of encyclopedias and a bunch of books he’d written in with a pen, but they’ve all suffered water damage. I have to peel the pages apart, and even then the writing has run together, words layered over each other like skins.
There are books on photography, but they’re in another trailer, this one divided into two parts. In one half, there are cameras and tripods and lots of pictures, some in frames and some loose. There’s a bathroom in this camper, but it looks like William used it as a darkroom. Pans of chemicals line the bottom of the bathtub, and when Leonard tries to turn on the water, nothing happens.
“Beats all I ever seen,” Leonard says. “He’s got a bathroom right here and don’t hook it up to the water.”
“There’s no water pump out here,” I tell him.
“How do you know?”
“He said so. Said there’s a creek running somewhere nearby, and he brought in water in five-gallon buckets and boiled it.”
“When’d he tell you that?” Leonard asks suspiciously.
And I recognize my mistake. Too late. “A couple of days ago,” I admit.
“Awww, Finch, damn it. We were having such a fine time,” and Leonard grumbles up his face and heads out.
“Wait a minute,” I call to him, because I’ve just seen something else. In the other half of the camper, my light shines on William’s music: sheet music and a stand, a violin and a horn of one kind or another. I pick up the horn and blow it flat.
“Get that thing outta your mouth,” Leonard scolds. But I just keep on blowing. I play him a medley.
“Can you believe Reba Baker wouldn’t sell this stuff?” he asks. “That’s ridiculous, if you ask me. It could be cleaned. Some of those children from the high school could use these instruments.”
I hand him the horn, put the violin in its case, drape a camera around my neck, and grab a handful of his pictures. I can’t even see them good in the dark, since they’re black and white, but I take them anyway—as mementos.
“Now can we go?”
“Soon,” I tell him. “Go ahead and set that down.”
I wander around behind this trailer and find an old RV, a small and ancient one. The hood is missing, and when I shine the light inside, I see that William Blott has built a fire pit for cooking right where the engine used to be. It’s tightly lined with stone, and in the bottom, pieces of charred wood cross ash. There’s a metal dowel stretched from side to side and a small cast-iron pot with something hardened in the bottom.
“Hungry?” I ask Leonard.
Inside the RV, Blott has a dining room, with a small Formica table and two chairs.
“Who do you reckon sat in that other chair?” Leonard wonders, but I don’t take a guess. I’m searching through the cabinet, looking at cans of beans. William must not have eaten anything else. No wonder he liked Reba.
There’s water stored in plastic jugs around the edges of the room, and dust covers everything, even the cobwebs—or maybe it just looks that way in the artificial light.
“Hard to believe,” Leonard says.
“It really is,” I agree. “He said a friend helped him drag in these campers years back, but it must have been a lot of years. I hate for his stuff to burn.”
“The man’s dead,” Leonard reminds me. “He won’t know the difference.”
“You got half of that right,” I say.
We stand in the middle, looking around, just staring out at the place.
“It’s amazing,” I tell him. “You’d half-expect to find a circus nearby.”
“Reminds me of gypsies.”
“I’m taking this stuff,” I tell him, pointing to the pile I’ve made.
“I don’t like it,” he says.
“She’s really gonna burn it, ain’t she?”
“Plans to,” Leonard tells me. “She’s gonna burn it off and clear it and then build a Christian park. His land goes all the way back to the road. He only used a part of it.”
We walk over to the costumes one last time, draped on the line, and I pull down a boa and throw it around my neck. The feathers have been wet and dried, and now they’re more itchy than fluffy, and matted, like a cat too fat to clean its back.
There’s a small tree behind the clothesline where William hung his hats. Fancy Sunday hats for ladies and railroad-worker hats. Even a ten-gallon hat. There are hats on every branch. I pull down a cowboy hat and stick it on Leonard’s head. He takes it right off, but he’s laughing.
I grab a lady hat with flowers and a veil, and I chase him down and crown him. It’s too small, but I push him to the mirror, which is nailed up to a tree, and I show him what he looks like. I shine the light on the mirror, and he looks nice.
Leonard finds a New York cloak and drapes it around my shoulders, holding his hands there for a minute. We stand in front of the mirror that way, with me cloaked and boaed and Leonard hatted and holding my shoulders, his fingers grazing my neck, one side burned and one side smooth.
I tell him, “William Blott’s gonna be so sad.”
I tell him, “William Blott thought Reba loved him back.”
I tell him, “William Blott can make baby—the babies stop screaming,” remembering just in time that Marcus is Leonard’s brother.
But he says, “The babies scream?” Then adds, “Don’t tell me that stuff, Finch. I don’t wanna hear.”
We leave sad, me and Leonard both. He carries the horn and the camera. I carry the pictures, the violin, the sequined dress.
TAKE THE BABY and go,” the Mediator tells me and Lucy. “Marcus doesn’t need to see William this way.”
Marcus is already crying, a throaty whimper. Lucy has to carry him. But I’m the one who’s been instructed to soothe him. Papa volunteered me. He reminded the Mediator that after the scrapings, he always took me out for a treat, and it always made me feel better, even if the burns still hurt.
But I beg to differ. The treats were distractions. Loving gestures, yes—but not comfort. I still felt the same way at the Tastee-Freez licking a vanilla cone. I still felt the same way with a fishing pole in my hand. And I know that Marcus will not be comforted, either. Not by anything I can do. I beg to be released from this assignment, claiming that I’m no good with babies. I never wanted my own and still resent my body for putting me through the monthly pains, year after year. I remind the Mediator of how unmotherly I am, but she pays me no attention.
Just my luck, I think. When my body begins to relax, relieved that it’s almost too old for the task, I get a baby shoved at me, a baby I can’t even carry or hold. Like I know how to talk to a baby.
“Finch, go play with him,” Papa coaxes.
“But I can’t pick him up,” I remind them.
“How tedious,” the Mediator answers, and pulls down her eyebrows to let me know her disdain. “Lucy, go with her. Take the baby and go.”
Marcus cries and screams and reaches his pudgy arms toward William Blott, who is balled up on the hillside, his head buried in the root of a tree, crying as if his lungs host flames. The Mediator has her hand on his back, and Papa’s there, too, saying, “Boy, you got to get yourself together.”
We head out, hurrying, and Lucy asks, “What happened?”
And I say, “I’ll have to tell you later,” and roll my eyes toward the baby.
“Somebody didn’t like somebody else’s lifestyle?” she tries vaguely.
“To say the least,” I answer. “You see that smoke?” and I point.
She shakes her sad head and adjusts Marcus to her other hip. We walk together, down the hill to my house, and the farther we get from the graves, the harder he screams.
“I’ll get him some spoons and let him dig in the dirt,” I holler above him. “That’s what Ma used to give me to play with.”
So Lucy puts him down at the edge of the garden and tries to show him how to push up dirt with his hands, calling, “Marcus, Mar-cus” in the sweetest voice she can muster. But he just gets madder by the second.
I run up the doorsteps and into the kitchen, grab a couple of spoons, and hurry back out.
“I think he’s got dirt in his eyes,” Lucy tells me, and sure enough, there are streaks of mud forming on his face, between the dirt and the tears, and he’s rubbing the balls of his fists against his eyes, his whole face red as a maple. I feel so sorry for him that I reach to wipe his face with my shirttail and run my hand right through his little head.
“Shit,” I say.
“I’ll do it,” Lucy offers, but Marcus bites her.
So Lucy nurses her hand and Marcus screams and I stand there jingling spoons, making a rhythm, making them dance like tap shoes, calling, “Mar-cus. Look, Marcus.” I play carnival. I try to put on a show. I kick my legs and click my spoons, but the only one I entertain is Lucy, who laughs in spite of Marcus’s wailing.
“You dance pretty good for somebody who never had lessons,” she teases.
I collapse on the ground, breathless. Lucy takes a spoon, and I take one, and we dig trenches all around him, plowing up dirt.
“Let’s play grave digger,” Lucy says, and we begin to scoop out a hole
, and I try to involve Marcus, asking him to get us a dead cucumber to bury, but he just keeps screaming, his little chin quivering between bellows.
“Marcus? You can be the preacher if you want,” I tempt. “You can be the song leader, or you can say the prayer.” But he isn’t interested.
Lucy gets up and carries him to the cucumber row and helps him pick one.
Then we bury it with full honors, Lucy trumpeting out taps, her hands forming a horn over her lips.
“Dearly beloved,” I say. “We have gathered here today to bury this cucumber named Harold.”
Marcus lets out a hard-rollicking scream, and Lucy says, “This isn’t working. Let’s take him for a drive. That’s what Mama did with me when I had colic.”
“We don’t have a car seat for a baby.”
“Finch, he’s dead,” she reminds me. “It’s okay.”
So we get in the truck, Lucy and Marcus and me, and I circle the cemetery. He quiets down considerably after that, but as soon as I drive out in the community, he begins to cry again.
“Stick his head out the window,” I tell Lucy. “Let him get some air.”
So she holds Marcus by the hips, and I step on the gas, and we cruise for a while. I wave to every car I pass, because they’re all staring at me, thinking I’m talking to myself, I reckon.
All the dogs bark at us, and we laugh when the pit bull that guards the corner of Crabtree and Stanley whelps and cowers as we pass. Even baby Marcus gets a kick out of that.
We drive down Glass Street, and Lucy catches a glimpse of her place and asks me to drive down the alley, too, in case her mama or daddy is out back.
“I can’t,” I tell her. “I wish I could, but if I get caught in your yard again, I’m going to jail.”
“You ever been down that alley?” she asks me.
“Well, sure,” I say.
“We used to have a baby pool back there—right at the back of the yard. Me and Charles Belcher played in it for a hundred summers, it seems like. I guess you don’t remember it?”
“No,” I say, but I smile at her memory. It’s nice to see Lucy having a good one.
“I loved summers. I didn’t take a bath all summer long. I played in the water every day.”