I’ve got to get closer.
“E. J., quit piddlin’ around,” I call to him in the ivy patch.
“Come get her. She’s sensing something.”
“That’s what I was tryin’ to tell ya, Shen,” he says, getting up and dusting off. “Be nice if you listened to me every third time or so.”
“Yeah, well next time, speak up. I couldn’t hear your puny voice.” Once I’m sure he’s got a good hold of Woody, I take a few steps into the woods. She whimpers, but I pull back on a hickory branch anyway.
Bringing up my binoculars, I scan the surroundings for whatever it is that’s made my sister start twitching like a cornered rabbit. There’s Mr. Cole hoeing the vegetable garden with his straw hat on. Louise is having a hissy fit at his side. The two of them are bickering about something until Lou stomps off into the house. Maybe Mr. Cole found out about Lou’s chasing around the meadow with Uncle Blackie. I might’ve gone ahead and left an anonymous note in the shed for Mr. Cole that clued him in on their midnight meetings. I’m not saying that I for sure did, but there’s times that I get so worked up. It’s like… like I drank down a bottle of hundred-proof pissiness. I can blab out this thing and do that thing while I’m in that state. Look how I just treated Sam. Next time we go over to the Triple S the first words out of my mouth will be Jackie Robinson.
My eyes are searching the front of the house now.
I really must remember to speak to Mr. Cole about painting the second story shutters, and the doorbell, it’s hanging by a wire. But none of these odds and ends are what’s got Woody worked up. This is just business as usual. I still don’t see… wait. That shadowy figure in the corner of the porch. I’d know his outline anywhere. Papa was who Woody’s nostrils were picking up. I’m surprised she didn’t start howling. His Honor is lounging in one of the tall-back woven chairs. His mouth is moving, so he must be talking to somebody. I swivel my binoculars to the swing that hangs off the porch ceiling. There’s Sheriff Andy Nash gliding back and forth with icicle-shaped perspiration stains under his arms. He looks like he’s melting. Not like Papa, who’s looking cool as an igloo. Dressed in a snowy white shirt, his hair slicked back. I can almost smell his English Leather cologne from here. He took my tidying-up advice to heart and changed himself from the sloppy, grieving man I left up in his room into his sparkling, magisterial self.
He’s doing what I call his regal routine.
I’ve seen him do this too many times not to recognize it. After Sunday Mass, he’ll stand on Saint Pat’s steps and slap the men jovially on their backs and spread the compliments so thick. “Why, don’t your wives look younger than springtime and aren’t your children cute as June bugs,” he says, like a medieval ruler passing out morsels of food to starving villagers on the way back to his castle. It’s perplexing and hurtful. How can he be so giving to them and so miserly to his own flesh and blood? I know he doesn’t mean to, but sometimes Papa makes Woody and me feel like we’re a couple of peasants who’ve got the plague.
Andy Nash has to be here for a reason. Papa must’ve come looking and rung him up when he couldn’t find us or maybe Lou opened her fat trap and ratted us out or… maybe the sheriff has come with news of Mama and I can call off my search, which quite frankly hasn’t been going too well so far.
If the sheriff is here to deliver a surprising report about our mother, then Woody and I will blow up balloons and I’ll bake a yellow cake and get out the butter brickle! But if he’s gabbing out on the porch with Papa to pass the time until his deputy arrives, I’ve got to come up with an escape route. Because after they find us, Papa’ll laugh and say, “Kids will be kids,” but once the sheriff leaves, he’ll march us to the root cellar. I can take that kind of discipline because my hide is tough, but Woody? She’s made more out of feathers than leather. I don’t think she can endure one more night on her knees, no matter how many stories I tell her.
After the first two times Papa dragged us down there, I got the idea of putting some important things inside a sack and took it to our home-away-from-home.
I pawed against the cool walls last night until I got to the bushel basket that the sack’s hid under. Opening it, I felt around for what I was looking for. Woody gets so scared of the dark that she can’t even cry so I right away lit one of the matches and set the flickering candle down close to her and said in my most loving voice, “Do you think you could draw a little?” I placed a spiral pad and a couple of pencils in the sack, too. “Something that would make you feel like you’re somewheres else.” The candlelight bounced off the cracked root cellar walls. Off my sister’s face. Even in all that decaying ugliness she looked beautiful.
She didn’t reach for her drawing stuff right away, so I nudged her and said, “Ohhh, I get it. You want to eat a little something first. Why don’t we crack open a jar?” That’s a joke. Woody and I cannot stand to even look at those jars of strawberry preserves that sit on that rickety shelf along the back wall, that’s how much we’ve eaten them. We got so hungry we ate the pickled beets, too. “Come on, pea. Drawing will make the time pass faster, you know that,” and then I started singing “Some Enchanted Evening.” Woody goes crazy for that song. When my voice wore out, I whispered her the story about two girls who go to a faraway beach with their mother, she likes that one most of all. “Once upon a time, it’s a perfect day. Not a single cloud in a baby blue sky. The girls’ mama is relaxing under a striped umbrella reading and watching her twins build sand castles.” My story was so believable Woody started drifting off. “Wake up,” I told her when she began listing. I found a mouse nibbling on her hair one night and after that, we don’t fall asleep no matter how whipped we are.
I mean, I understand why Papa puts us down there. All the liquor he’s been drinking has made him stricter, but he has never spared the rod. How else are sinful children to learn? The Good Book is clear on this subject. And Woody and I deserve to be punished. We’re not telling him the whole truth about the night Mama disappeared and somehow, some way, his under-the-influence brains knows that. Whenever he interrogates us, I leave out the part about Sam and our mother’s friendship and how I ran through the woods that night to his place looking for her. And then there’s Woody, who will not speak to him at all, which makes him worse mad to be disregarded like that. His Honor expects you to follow the rules. If you don’t, then you got to take the punishment. It’s his job.
Of course, E. J.’s noticed. He pointed at our scabbed knees and asked, “Why ya always got those?” I told him, “From kneelin’ on the root cellar floor, a course.” He grinned and asked, “And which root cellar floor would that be?” like he was waiting for me to deliver the punch line of another Bazooka joke. I didn’t want to embarrass him over his poor upbringing, so I told him, “It’s something rich people do, you wouldn’t understand.”