Chasing Redbird (15 page)

While I was searching for wood, I remembered the zinnia seeds I had brought. Something else to do! Dragging a stick in each hand, I made a groove along each side of the trail I had cleared that day. As I walked back to my camp, I scattered seeds in the grooves, and then I retraced my steps, tamping the dirt. The seeds should have been watered, but I didn't want to waste my drinking water, so I hoped for rain soon.

These were trivial things my mind focussed on, and I knew it, but they kept me from thinking about the bigger things that were lurking behind this clutter. I felt that if I didn't keep busy, a million, million scenes were going to burst out of my head all at once. Part of me was curious to see what was in there, but I wanted to see them slowly, one at a time.

My watch said that it was only seven o'clock, and I shook it, thinking it must have stopped. On another wood search, I found an old maple tree, which would be a great climbing tree, with its sturdy, well-spaced branches. I thought,
hey, I can just climb right up there
. It might seem like a dumb thing to think, but at the time it was a thundering revelation—that I had seen something I wanted to do, and I could go ahead and do it, without worrying that I'd be late or had to finish something else first or that someone might tell me it was dangerous.

So I climbed the tree. Up and up I went, telling myself,
Go on, go higher, you can go as high as you want.
I settled on a branch, high, high above the ground. Birds were chattering, diving and swooping among the trees. Two gray squirrels chased each other up a nearby oak tree, their tails flicking like feathery whips.

Way off and far below was a thin ribbon of the river, and scattered here and there were rooftops and silos and pastures. From my perch, I spotted my trail and my campfire. As I turned to look farther up the hill, a dark shape fluttered at the corner of my vision. I turned back to my campsite and again thought I saw a shifting shadow, brief and wavering, like the whisk of a dark cape.

I listened and watched, and although I saw no more movement near my campsite, what I heard made me uneasy. There were creaks and groans that I'd not heard before, snaps and crackles, rattles and drones—a pulsing, thrumming of sound all around me. In a few hours it would be dark, and there I was, alone in a tree high up in the hills, and I was afraid.

I remained there a long time, in a sort of stupor, and might never have moved from that spot, but when the tree itself groaned as if it were tired of supporting my weight, I sat up with a start. My campfire was barely a glow below, and the sun had set, dropping an orange curtain over the sky.

I climbed down, trying to ignore the sounds of the woods and its creatures, and hurried back to my campsite, stoked the fire, and slipped into my sleeping bag. I lay flat on my back staring at the sky, watching the blinking fireflies, and the moths which darted on the fringes of the campfire. Bats swooped overhead. I was waiting for the moment when it would be dark. Then I would close my eyes and sleep.

But there was no moment of dark. Instead, what I saw was the most subtle shading in the sky, a gradual deepening of color, so gradual that you could not actually see the changes, but could only think,
Is that the color it was a moment ago? Isn't it deeper now? Is it dark yet? Is this dark?
Soon I noticed the white specks of stars, but still they weren't draped on a black sky, still it wasn't dark. And although I watched intently, I did not see the moment of dark, and I wondered if maybe it wasn't a moment at all.

O
nce in the night I heard a crackling of twigs, as if someone were near. I was burrowed in my sleeping bag, too sleepy and too afraid to look, but I listened. Hearing nothing more, I decided it had been the fire settling, and went back to sleep. I dreamed of baby Rose and the shopping bag.

I must have had lots of memories of Rose, because we were raised like twins, always together. Sometimes we even slept together because we'd put up such a fuss when we were separated. It bothered me that I couldn't resurrect these memories.

One of my teachers once said that we can't get at very early memories because our brains file memories by words, and when we're infants, we don't have enough words. I wasn't sure I believed this, because sometimes I saw baby Rose's face, an infant face, from before either of us knew any words at all.

Maybe it was like Gretchen's computer. Sometimes when she tried to open up a file, the screen flashed
Locked!
or
No access!
Gretchen then pleaded and coaxed, talking to her computer as if it were a naughty child, and if it continued to resist her, she scolded it and flicked it off.

Memories of Rose were locked somewhere, and I was denied access. That night, however, one snuck out of its locked drawer:

Aunt Jessie emptied a shopping bag and placed it on the floor. It was one of those fancy, sturdy ones, wide and tall, made of heavy-duty paper with two handles. Rose crawled into it, and Aunt Jessie picked it up, saying, “Oh, I guess I'll go shopping, la-de-da,” and swinging the bag back and forth. “Has anyone seen my Rose?” she said. “La-de-da.”

I peeked into the bag and there was Rose all curled up, grinning away, and I looked up at Aunt Jessie, and she, too, was smiling and laughing, and it was the most wonderful thing to see. Aunt Jessie asked me if I wanted a turn in the bag, but I didn't. I wanted to see Rose in it, grinning, and Aunt Jessie swinging that bag saying, “La-de-da.”

My dream was exactly how it had been, except that in the dream, the scene played over and over, and I stood to one side, praying that it would never, ever end.

In the morning a thin band of copper seeped above the horizon, and dew clung to cobweb bridges woven through the grass. In this peaceful scene, I wondered how I could have been so afraid the night before.

That day, I fell into a routine that I followed for the next eight days. I'd head out early, admiring my recently cleared stretch of trail, which I was clearing more rapidly—at least a half-mile a day, and sometimes twice that much.

Each day, I'd find something to add to my growing collection of things found along the trail: arrowheads, flints, strips of leather, bits of rope, a bowie knife, and a slingshot. I knew that the lady at the historical museum would blow a gasket if she could see these things. I also found fossils. In low-lying areas, there were plant fossils and brachiopods that looked like clams. Aunt Jessie would have had a grin a mile wide, and she would've said these were sure-fire proof that the area had been a huge sea millions and millions of years ago.

Depending on what I'd find, I'd be, for the rest of the day, a trapper cat-stepping through the forest, or an archeologist on a major dig, or an escaped convict fleeing his jailers. Often I returned to being
Zinny Taylor: detective
, searching for Jake's ring and the medallion. The more I thought about them, the more I believed they were connected to the trail, and if I kept going, I would find more clues.

I wondered about Uncle Nate's treks through the hills, and if he might have taken the medallion and the ring, but I couldn't imagine why he'd want them or what he would do with them.

Shortly after noon on that second day, the quiet was disturbed by the buzz of a small plane. A single-engine crop duster zipped over the trees, and I thought I was about to be sprayed with insecticide, though I couldn't imagine why anyone would be spraying up there. The plane circled overhead, and the two men seated up front waved. As I waved back, the plane dipped and turned, and I saw that the passenger was my father. “You don't have to check on me!” I shouted. He couldn't hear me, but he smiled and waved again. Every couple days after that, he'd buzz by, hitching a ride with the crop duster, and it got so I missed him on the days he didn't come.

In the evenings after dinner at the camp, I'd gather wood and plant zinnia seeds along the new stretch, and usually I'd climb a tree and wait for the six o'clock train whistle. The next few hours—between the whistle and dark—were the hardest, and for the first several days at this time, I had to force myself not to flee down the trail for home.

On the fourth day, I moved my camp ahead. During the early evening hours, I began to notice things in the woods, little things, normal things, like grasshoppers, crickets, butterflies, and moths zinging through the grass. Bordering the sentries of oaks, elms, beeches, and larches grew scores of wildflowers: buttercups and goldenrod; daisies and black-eyed Susans; goatsbeard and lady's slippers. In my head I could hear Aunt Jessie saying “Bingo!” and “What a wonder!” She and Uncle Nate had taught me to recognize all these things.

Sometimes, one grasshopper or one fossil or one maple would be mesmerizing. You could look at any one of these for days and weeks and months, and you'd see something different each time. Maybe it was the same with people: if you studied them, you'd see new and different things. But would you like what you saw? Did it depend on who was doing the looking?

I marked my progress on the trail maps. Already I'd passed through all of Maiden's Walk, which straddled the fenced meadow (though the meadow wasn't on the original map), and dipped through Crow Hollow, a shallow valley ringed with tall maples and inhabited by hundreds of jabbering crows.

I'd cleared straight across Baby Toe Ridge—weak-kneed and cringing, because on the back of the map was a handwritten legend which made me uneasy. A baby had been kidnapped by a wolf, and the only remains of the baby ever found were three toes, discovered on this ridge. As if that wasn't gruesome enough, this note was added:
Several sightings of baby's ghost on ridge.

Twice, after working on this stretch of trail, I dreamed about baby Rose. In one of these dreams, someone was peering at her in the dresser drawer and saying,
Where are her toes?

The old logging railroad was now rusted tracks ending abruptly in the middle of the woods. On either side of the railroad yawned clearings where trees had been felled. Old stumps still bearing the marks of cross-cut saws squatted here and there. There were also apple trees, which seemed out of place. I wondered if maybe loggers had brought apples up the hill with them, and tossed their cores aside, and after the men were long gone, after the railroad was shut down, apple saplings snuck out of their dark caves.

I was always in a muddle about time. It didn't seem like a series of days, but one stretch of time, with light and dark blending into each other. Time went on and on; it didn't start and stop, as I had thought. If time didn't start and stop, I thought, maybe life didn't either. Maybe it just went on and on and on.

And I'd dream about Rose going on and on and Aunt Jessie going on and on, and I'd dream about my family, and Jake, and everyone was going on and on, and I'd wake up and I'd look around and I'd be surprised that there wasn't a whole gang of people sitting there staring at me.

O
n a maple stick, I carved a notch each morning, fearing that if I didn't, I'd lose all sense of time, and might forget to go home on the tenth day as I had promised. Whenever I heard the train whistle, I still had terrible longings and would think about running down the trail and seeing the farm below and dashing into the kitchen and there everyone would be.

There was another source of unease, more difficult to explain. Several times I glimpsed a fluttering at the corner of my sight, or a moving shadow, or a spot of color—often red—as of someone's sleeve or cap, ducking behind a tree. I'd halt, wait, listen, suspecting that someone was near, watching me, spying on me. Sometimes I thought it was Aunt Jessie I was seeing, and that she was there in the woods, watching over me. Once, I confess, I chased after that flicker of red, hoping it was her red hair I'd seen, but when I found nothing, I worried that I was becoming like Uncle Nate, chasing air. Pretty soon I'd be carrying a stick and beating lifeless things to death with it.