“I think it’s our daddy’s,” he said. I covered my eyes and peeked through the cracks. I couldn’t stop staring at that bone. I had never thought much about our daddy. His face was dark in my mind. Once I was sleeping in the little room Johnny and me shared and a shadow shaped like a man was sitting in the straight chair in the corner. I laid there all night beside of Johnny not moving a muscle, wishing it would go away. To me that was our daddy. But now I imagined him a flesh and blood man without a finger.
“She killed him,” Johnny said.
“Don’t say that!” I yelled. Johnny got quiet, but I knowed he still believed it. I was mad at him for thinking she could do such a thing. But later that night I laid there looking at the wall wondering if he was right. I started thinking maybe there’s times when you have to kill somebody. But if she didn’t do it, that meant he was alive someplace. Then the man from the co-op parking lot came into my mind. I got to feeling like our daddy had something to do with whatever Mama was hiding us from. I started worrying he might be coming back, as a ghost or a real-life person. Either way, I figured he meant to do us harm. I don’t know if it was something I picked up from Mama or something I made up in my mind, but I didn’t like thinking about mine and Johnny’s daddy, whether he was dead or alive. I tried not to whenever I could help it.
But right then, standing in Mama’s bedroom, I didn’t know what to think. We heard a clang under the window and Johnny clapped the box shut. He stuffed it back through the slit in the mattress and tried to smooth the mouth hole and its raggedy thread teeth to look like it hadn’t been bothered. We went to the window and watched Mama drag out the tin tub. She had caught a catfish and was fixing to scald it. Johnny wiped off my runny nose with his shirttail and leaned over to press his forehead against mine.
JOHNNY
Sometimes in the heat of the day Laura and I slept naked in the musty shadows of the house, wherever we found a cool spot. We liked the rug in the front room best, one of those woven by our mama’s granny, its bright colors faded by years of dirt and sun. Before she fell silent our mama had rocked us, one on each knee, and told stories about our great-granny and other ancestors from Chickweed Holler, who called birds down from the sky and healed wounds and made love potions and sent their spirits soaring out of their bodies. When I asked if it was all true, she said, “It’s not for me to tell you what’s true. It’s your choice to believe it or not.” I know now it was more than just stories she was talking about. It was a whole world of things I could choose to believe or not.
Our mama used to show us family pictures and I always wished as she turned the pages of the photo album to have known my great-granny, to have met her at least once. There were pictures of other relatives, too, posed portraits that must have been made in town. Like the one of my grandmother Clio, who died when my mama was still a baby. She had a solemn face with haunted eyes that I didn’t like. It was almost like seeing a ghost. Nobody smiled in the old pictures, except for my mama when she was a little girl. She seemed to have been much happier then. When I was around five, I noticed for the first time the blank squares in the photo album, empty corner pieces where they had once been tucked. I knew there were pictures of my father somewhere, maybe even of my parents together. That’s when I began to imagine him, to think of him almost all the time.
I didn’t like those blank spaces, or the haunted eyes of my long-dead grandmother, but I took the album down to look at my great-granny again and again. In my favorite picture she was standing on the back steps, squinting against the sun with her hands on her hips, her mouth a sunken line. I liked to imagine that same old woman weaving her rags as she watched my mama playing in the yard, never knowing that one day Laura and I would sleep on her rug and wake up with its pattern printed on our skin.
We were curled on that rug like cats when the church ladies came. It was during our last summer together, in early August, when we were still eight. I thought I was dreaming the sound of their car and the murmur of voices approaching the house, but then there was a loud knocking. I sat up fast, sweaty and dazed in the hot sun streaming through the windows. Laura rose beside me, a silvery thread of drool on her chin. I felt her fear in my own stomach. Our mama once said that I was born first, so I was the oldest. I knew it was my duty to protect Laura, no matter how small I was myself.
“Hello,” a woman’s voice called out. “Is there anybody home?”
Laura got to her feet but I jumped up and held her back. I looked to the room where our mama was sleeping and thought of waking her up. But after finding that finger bone in her box, part of me was more afraid of her than I was of these strangers.
“Don’t,” I said to Laura, and the church ladies must have heard.
“Hello?” one of them repeated, rapping sharply.
My mama stirred, the bedsprings groaning. I turned toward the gloomy opening of her room, wanting so badly for her to come out that for an instant I saw her there, arms held open like wings for us to hide under. But it was only a shadow on the wall. When I looked back there was a face in the front room window, with little stone eyes under a mound of stiff gray hair. My stomach dropped. The woman caught sight of Laura and me, holding hands in the middle of a dusty room strung with cobwebs and littered with humps of sad-looking furniture, wearing nothing but underpants. Her stone eyes widened and she pecked on the window glass. “Is your mama and daddy home?” she hollered. I shook my head, alarm bells going off inside me. She stared for a minute more and then was joined by another face, younger and leaner with bright orange lipstick. The second one took us in, painted-on eyebrows raised, and shouted through the glass, “Where’s your mommy at, honey?” I shook my head again and the two women turned to each other, maybe considering what to do, before finally disappearing from the window.
Laura wanted to look outside but I stopped her. I could still hear them out there in the yard, talking about us. There was a scuffling sound on the stoop and Laura’s grip tightened on my fingers. Then we heard their ugly voices going away and the slam of doors and the hum of a car starting up. We went to the window and watched it lurching down the hill. When the car was out of sight, I found Laura’s dress pooled on the floor and tossed it into her arms, then pulled on the blue jeans Mrs. Barnett had sent in a trash bag full of her grandson’s outgrown clothes. Laura and I opened the door carefully and went outside. There was a stack of pamphlets on the top step, weighted down with a rock. We stood for a long time looking at them, thin manila papers with crosses on the front, but didn’t touch or move them. Then we stepped around the rock and went into the yard.
The sky was bright blue with fat clouds sailing over. A squirrel darted across the clothesline into the weeds. It all looked the same but everything had changed. I imagined I could see brown foot shapes where our grass had died under the trespassers’ shoes.
Laura and I walked halfway down the drive to where their tire tracks stopped in the muck. They had only made it part of the way, the dirt path still nearly impassable from the last rain. I couldn’t understand why they would go to such trouble to bother us, or how they even knew we were there. Looking up the hill toward the house it seemed abandoned, one shutter hanging crooked and a vine growing up the soot-blackened chimney. The grass was almost knee high, overrun with dandelions and purple clover. There was an old wringer washer beside the back steps and a rusty tub filled with rainwater under the apple tree. It chilled me to think of those coiffed and powdered ladies creeping like monsters up to our window. I stood for a long time examining their tracks. When Whitey came sniffing into the yard she startled me so that I whirled and chucked a rock at her without even thinking. She yelped and ran off and I was sorry.