She walked along the stream and studied the trail of trees and stumps that had large chunks gouged from their sides. Ozzie wouldn’t be hard to find, Tammy realized, as she examined one tree injury closely. It was fresh and bright and smelled of fallen pine needles. She followed the trail through the woods and down the stream hoping to find Ozzie. Hoping that he would be happy to see her.
A couple of hundred yards before the fig tree in the garden, Tammy stopped to listen. In the distance, she could hear him, sharpening his tusks as if he were grinding an ax blade. Every day he had been sharpening his tusks on anything the forest offered. Mostly stumps, she observed, as he was now doing downstream forty yards from her, unaware of her presence. For a moment, Ozzie stopped and scraped his hooves on the rocks. They, too, were honed and well sharpened. Tammy stared at Ozzie, marveling at how much he had grown in such a short period of time. His arched razorback and physical size was impressive. Indeed, his long sharp tusks and bulging shoulder muscles intimidated even her. But he had grown so much more mature. When she had seen him escape from his paddock, she recalled, she had seen something akin to a scared teenager. A child that had just suffered the horror of seeing his father murdered before his eyes. That day now seemed so long ago, as if it was the final remnant of a vague and distant dream.
Staying well back from Ozzie, Tammy stepped off the trail and hid behind a mountain laurel. She watched and marveled at him. And she worried about him. This was no child. He had become his father, the protector, the defender. And yet, there was something else. He wasn’t just preparing himself to protect. There was a restlessness in him as if he was searching for something, and Tammy was afraid of what it was. Ozzie turned and focused on a pine stump. He stared at it with the concentration a martial arts master applies to a cinder block he intends to slice with his bare hand. Pawing the ground, he began oscillating his head back and forth, opening his mouth and moving his upper and lower jaws in opposite directions to reveal his menacing tusks to the stump. Abruptly, he charged and rammed his head into the stump as if he in fact were a ram. Shredding the stump with his rippers and tearing it apart, freeing his rage over his mother’s imprisonment as the shards of pine flew from the stump, leaving a soft bed of shavings on the ground where the stump had been.
Panting breathlessly, Ozzie stood with bleeding gums. He tasted the blood and got a crazed look in his eye as he looked around, searching the woods for anything, anyone that was a challenge, a threat. A man. His breathing slowed and he thought for a moment. He turned and continued walking downstream breathing in the faint smell of man.
Chapter 28
A harsh morning sun magnified its light through the living room window and landed squarely on Blake’s right eye. He twitched his head and woke, instantly feeling the crick in his neck from sleeping with his head on the armrest of the sofa. He grimaced and threw his feet to the floor to right himself. The CNN newsroom still haunted Blake from the television and displayed the time as 9:34 a.m. EST in the lower corner. A team of weather forecasters stood in front of satellite images, discussing the devastation and path of Hurricane Isabel. The motion graphic read “Hurricane Isabel Upgraded to Category 4. Sustained Winds 123 MPH. Expected landfall Savannah Thursday late afternoon.”
Blake rubbed his eyes as he tried to wake up. He couldn’t believe he had slept so long, but the scrolling text at the bottom of the CNN screen brought the memories of the prior night into focus for him.
“Meat samples tainted with anthrax removed from restaurants.”
Blake jumped up, fully awake as he looked for Angelica. Both bedrooms downstairs and the kitchen were empty so Blake ran up the spiral staircase and looked first in the nursery and then in the rec room. No sign. Evidently Angelica had quietly taken the girls out without awakening him. He felt the back of his neck and rubbed his hand over the dressing she had placed on his wound, realizing what it meant.
She knows! Did she leave me?
Adrenaline shot through Blake’s veins as he considered the thought that terrified him. He moved quickly and walked out the door to see if she was outside. His truck was there so she hadn’t driven herself anywhere. He walked around the house and circled back to the small lawn in the front. The only sound was the trickling of the brook in front of the lawn that flowed from the mountain above. There was no sign of Angelica or the girls as he looked and listened.
His eyes focused on the opening between two Cryptomeria trees that Angelica had planted a couple of years prior. They stood as pillars framing the path she had cleared, the path that Blake had chosen to avoid until today. He walked to the entrance, and as he looked down the winding path, a flood of painful memories washed over him. Blake remembered how inadequate he felt, how much of a failure he felt he was when Angelica called and told him about the miscarriage. She had sobbed on the phone and told him what the doctor had said while he was in Savannah picking up pigs that would later demonize him. While she sobbed out the details of their loss, of her loss, all Blake could think of was how he felt. As if somehow it was his fault. That somehow his semen was weak or had penetrated poorly because of his sorry Cherokee genetics. As a boy, Blake’s father always blamed the Cherokee blood in their veins for their wretched life in the housing projects. “Me and you, son, have more Cherokee in our blood than anyone in this county,” his father would cry in drunken despair. “And look at what it’s brung us? This here’s our own reservation of poverty, all because our English ancestors mixed with Indians!”
As long as he could remember, Blake had been bitterly ashamed of having Cherokee blood. The thing that Blake hated more than anything about himself was the thing that Angelica loved the most about him.
When Angelica told Blake about the miscarriage, he couldn’t cry himself because Angelica was so distraught. She was the woman so she got to be emotional, he recalled. She was the one who got to feel inadequate, so Blake just shoved his feelings down as far as he could. And when she told him what she planned to do with Nancy’s remains he lost his lid, unleashed his feelings of inadequacy on her, which he suspected she might have misinterpreted as something else. Like perhaps he didn’t care. Now, Blake shook his head visibly as he tried to knock the memories from the forefront of his mind and bury them again. He had more pressing problems now to focus on.
For the first time he began down the path that meandered by the stream to the secret garden. The growth on each side of the path was dense and lush, but Angelica had kept the path itself neat and tidy. The winding path was peaceful and inviting as roots from trees on each side crisscrossed the path at the surface and formed something of a staircase for Blake to ascend in the sweet and humid air. After five minutes, Blake came to an opening so lush and full of life that the only word that came to mind was Eden. It was a sanctuary of life, a celebration of life, full of fruits, flowers and health. In the far left corner, near a bend in the stream, stood a lone and beautiful fig tree. “Nancy’s Tree,” Blake whispered to himself, his head nodding. Angelica hadn’t spoken about it in a long time and Blake knew that was his fault. Close to the tree was a raised bed that Angelica had obviously built herself. He saw a flash of movement from the right and turned his head to see what he could have sworn was an angel and her two cherubs walking among her flowers, fingering their leaves and petals. Angelica looked and caught his humble gaze, and kissed a smile to him.