Free Verse (3 page)

Phyllis comes to see me at the hospital in the northern part of the county. Her empty hands hang like wilted flowers.

They make me stay at the hospital for hours because I walked without shoes for so long that I hurt my feet and because I didn't drink anything for the two days I went walking. They poke me with a needle to give me water. They smile with toothpaste mouths and they undo my braids and wash my hair.

“I wish you'd told me you was going, Sasha,” Phyllis says. “I would have packed you some sandwiches, at least.”

I can't turn over without tugging the needle out of my arm. I lie perfectly still.

“Egg salad,” Phyllis says. “You like egg salad?”

•   •   •

A couple days later, me and Phyllis sit on her porch in folding chairs, eating egg salad sandwiches. We're both bundled up against the cold of early March. It's four a.m. This is when I finally got hungry.

The neighbor comes out on his porch, cursing, and a child's shoe skitters out with him. He nearly falls. After he kicks the shoe back in the house, he locks the door.

The neighbor is dressed in blue coveralls with reflective stripes down the sides. That means he's on his way to the coal mines. He might have worked with my dad, with Ben. I picture Ben raising one coal-darkened hand to this neighbor as they arrive on the job. I raise my hand, like I did the day Ben left.

The neighbor waves back with a grimy hand that I know will never come clean, like he has a tattoo of coal dirt. Phyllis and I watch him climb into the blue pickup truck and disappear down Route 10. She says, “That's Hubert Harless. Any relation?”

I shrug and sigh. There are a passel of Harlesses in Caboose. I'm probably not related to all of them, but nobody claimed me after Michael. I hope I'm not related to somebody named Hubert. That's one of those names you see on national TV when someone from West Virginia gets interviewed. I don't want people in other states to
think we're all named things like Hubert and Bucky and Junior. We have Williams. We have Gavins and Garretts and Sams. We have one less Michael than we did before, but still, we have Michaels. I can't deny, though, that there are people around here with names and nicknames like Hubert and Bucky and Junior. I may or may not be related to one.

Phyllis has a cat that won't leave me alone. She bumps her body against my lower legs. She stands up and puts her feet on my knees. She smells my sandwich.

“You tell Stella to get down,” Phyllis says. “She don't need your sandwich.”

I've already picked apart the last corner of my sandwich. I drop the rest on the porch. “She can have it.”

•   •   •

A couple days later, Phyllis and I sit on the front porch, eating egg salad sandwiches. It's four a.m. This is the next time I got hungry.

•   •   •

It's ten a.m. and I'm still on the porch. The porch is better than the house. More to see and less to think about. Hubert Harless waves his hand to me now without me having to raise mine first. His two little daughters follow him across the porch. It's a Saturday. It's unseasonably warm for March. He's got overalls on today instead of coveralls, so he must not be going to work. The two little girls wear diapers and long T-shirts.

Hubert Harless has a wife named Shirley who stays in the house. If I look out Phyllis's kitchen window, I can see Shirley at the sink, washing cake pans.

Hubert Harless's son is named Mikey. I'm surprised there's been another Michael Harless in the town of Caboose this whole time and I never knew it. But it's not as hard as you'd think to not know people in Caboose. People keep to themselves. You can end up knowing the lady at the Save-Great cash register better than you know your own family, if they don't live next door.

According to Phyllis, Mikey Harless doesn't belong to Shirley. He only belongs to Hubert. He's nine years old. He has glasses.

•   •   •

It eats at me all weekend. I have to know. So late Sunday morning, I knock on the door and ask Shirley if we're related.

“You're Benjermin's girl, ain't you?” she asks. She isn't mispronouncing my father's name. It was his mother who misspelled it.

I wait for her to answer my question.

“Benjermin's daddy and Hubert's daddy was brothers,” Shirley says.

“That makes Hubert my cousin.”

“Benjermin's daddy and Hubert's daddy didn't talk to each other for twenty years.”

I mull. “I think that still makes Hubert my cousin.”

She goes back to her cake pans. Because she doesn't lock the door, I follow her in.

Shirley's kitchen is decorated in apple everything: curtains, window trim, cutting board. There are plastic apples in a bowl—at least, I think they're plastic. The kitchen is nicer than the rest of the house, like Shirley spends a lot of time here. There is a newish computer whirring on a desk in the corner.

Shirley puts biscuits on the table, in reach of me. They're covered by a dish towel with apples on it. Mikey Harless sits in a corner of the kitchen, on the floor. He colors with a black crayon. He doesn't look up when I come in.

“Mikey, run and get your daddy and the girls,” Shirley says. “Lunch is up.” Her voice is high-pitched and cheerful.

Mikey doesn't move. I see his eyes flick toward her and away. He colors through the face of the little kid in his coloring book. The face disappears under black crayon so thick you could scratch designs in it with your fingernail.

Shirley looks like she's ready to speak again, maybe not so cheerful this time, when my cousin Hubert comes in, carrying one daughter and leading one by the hand. The baby in his arms has elbow dimples and knee dimples and cheek dimples, and her belly sticks out, round, over the top of her diaper. She keeps grabbing Hubert by the beard and tugging on his ears and poking him in the eyes. She says syllables that aren't quite words yet, but she clearly has some strong opinions. The little girl he's leading by the
hand is all angles, long lines of bone with knobs of elbow and knee. She keeps sniffling and hiking her diaper up with her free hand.

I wonder whether these little girls are my cousins, too. I guess Mikey is, and I suppose Shirley is my cousin by marriage. Is there such a thing as a cousin by marriage?

The Harlesses over on East Avenue might be my cousins, too; nobody's ever told me different. And maybe I'm related to the Harlesses on North Road. Or even the Harlesses that live a couple miles down the highway leading out. It's too small a town for there to be many unrelated people with the same last name.

But these Harlesses live on Route 10, next to Phyllis. I'm fascinated. I eat a biscuit.

•   •   •

Hubert Harless tells me he never met my father till they were working together in the Hardwater coal mine.

“I heard tell about Ben,” Hubert says, scratching his beard, which is as wiry as a scrub brush. “I heard stories. Didn't sound like a bad fella. I didn't have nothing against your daddy. It's just, our families didn't talk. Dad and Uncle Arlie had a fallen-out.” He means “falling-out,” but I like the soft sound of the way he says it.

“How come?” I talk with my mouth full of biscuit.

“Don't know,” Hubert says. He talks with his mouth full of biscuit, too.

“Well, what stories did you hear?”

Hubert smiles slow under his mustache. “Ben was a lot like your brother, Michael. Had all these big plans, never carried through on a one of 'em.”

“You knew Michael?” Somewhere inside, I shake. Hearing Michael's name still takes away all the oxygen from the room for a second.

“Lot of folks did. Good man, your brother.”

I put my biscuit back on my plate. I think I'm finished.

“'Course, Ben had that stubborn streak a lot of us old-timers have.” Hubert's smile grows wide enough to peek out from the corners of his mustache. “Hard to miss him trying to catch Judy's eye.”

I act casual, even though my heartbeat speeds up at the sound of my mother's name. “What do you mean?”

“Your old man chased that poor girl around Caboose for upwards of a year before she broke down and agreed to go out with him.”

There is a sensation deep in my chest that feels like the ache you get in your teeth when you drink something cold. A term I have never completely understood—
heartache
—suddenly feels literal. Something right where my heart lives is hurting. I get this picture in my head of my mother, who I only remember in pieces—hands, hair, earrings, lipstick, and a sad line or two from her favorite song—being chased by my father, who I remember so vividly I can still smell his aftershave. The biscuit I've already eaten starts turning
somersaults in my stomach. I don't remember my father as a man who should have had to chase after anybody, least of all somebody who didn't turn out to want him.

“You know how he proposed marriage, don't you?”

I don't. But I don't like admitting it, so I pick a crumb off the biscuit and eat it so I've got my mouth full and don't have to answer.

“Man climbed a telephone pole. Started hollering down, asking your mama to marry him. He sat at the top of that pole more'n two hours, till somebody was able to round her up. He was drunker'n a skunk, of course. Least he was when he went up. By the time she finally said yes—probably just to get him down off that dang utility pole—he'd more or less sobered up. Had the ring with him the whole time.”

Mikey snickers.

“That doesn't sound true,” I say.

Hubert's eyes twinkle. “Well, that's the story, anyway. They say the cops were waiting, gonna haul him off to jail, but they turned a blind eye because a man does what he's got to do to get a woman to marry him. Ain't that right, babe?” Hubert glances over his shoulder at Shirley, who hasn't joined us at the table. She's wiping down the cutting board, which already looks clean.

“What?” Shirley glances up, looking genuinely startled.

Hubert lets out the smallest of sighs, almost quick enough to miss. “Never mind. Got any more biscuits?”

•   •   •

Phyllis tucks me in, even though I'm too old to be tucked in. I tell her about my cousins next door, and her forehead gathers into deeper wrinkles. Wisps of her graying hair are forever escaping her messy ponytail, and she's always sucking one of her cheeks in like she's chewing on the inside of it and thinking.

“I don't know if I like you wandering around,” is all she says.

I want to ask whether Phyllis has any kids of her own. They'd have to be grown now; she's an older lady. I'm careful not to point that out when I ask, “Do you have kids?”

“Two sons,” she says. “Sam and Miles.”

“Where are they now?”

“Sam teaches welding at a trade school in Indiana. He married a sweet little girl he met when he was in trade school himself.”

“How'd he end up in Indiana?” With Michael's years of talking in my ear about getting out of Caboose, I can't help but be fascinated by the ways that people leave. I'll bet Sam at least managed to wear shoes when he took off.

“That's where Mary's people are from.”

“Did Miles move away, too?”

Phyllis smooths the quilt on both sides of me and turns
off the lamp, so that only the light from the hall bathroom spills into the little bedroom. In the dim light, Phyllis looks older, or sadder. Lines trace down from the corners of her eyes like tear tracks that stuck. She stands abruptly, makes it all the way to the door before she turns.

“Miles is with your brother. Good night, Sasha.” She goes before I can ask any more questions.

I figure out how to get the back door open. There is prying involved, which explains the hammer propped next to it. The back door leads to a tiny yard, where Chip, Phyllis's droopy dog, woofs a soft hello. He doesn't bother to pick his head up off the cold ground.

It's two forty-five a.m. I figure I've got an hour before Phyllis comes looking for me. Two forty-five a.m. in early March in Caboose is peaceful, but not quiet. I hear a dog barking a few yards over, but Chip pays no attention. A train's wheels rattle, not on the nearest tracks but on the branch that cuts off toward Vineland. From the highway, I can hear trucks. Most people hate the emergency brakes they call “Jake brakes” because of how loud they are, but I like how you can hear them from a distance. They sound like the road, and the road sounds like keeping a promise I made to Michael.

For the moment, I make do with exploring my new yard, and the one beside it. There aren't a lot of good fences in Caboose. There are tall ones keeping people out of the abandoned mine sites past city limits. There is a picket one between the grocery store and the trailer park behind it. A few of the nicer houses in town have privacy fencing around their yards, usually chain link with green or white plastic woven through for privacy, but sometimes something fancier, like stone.

Phyllis doesn't have a fence. Not even a hedge. It's easy to wander into my cousin's backyard.

The house has asbestos siding, which you aren't supposed to use, but it's fireproof. The window glass is wavy, the way it looks when it's older than your parents. I have to stand on my tiptoes to see in the nearest window, and on the other side of the glass, there is a quilt tacked up, pink and ratty. I can't see anything else, but I hear a faint snore.

There isn't a back door in the Harless house, but there's a storm door lying in the weeds. I wonder whether it came off the front door or if somebody put it here so they could build a back door later. There are tripping hazards in the tall grass of the yard as well: a hole with a shovel sticking out of it, somebody's old work boot, a pile of broken bricks. The next window I come to, the glass is newer, not wavy with age. It has a sticker on it with the silhouette of a fireman carrying a baby. I know from elementary school
and from Michael that these stickers are used to let a firefighter know there are children in this room who need saving. As firefighter deaths go, I think rescuing a baby would have been a better way for Michael. I've never seen a sticker of a fireman carrying a cupcake.

There is no quilt on the other side of this glass. It takes a minute of staring before I can work out what I'm looking at. Then my heart thumps with surprise. I am rattled.

Mikey Harless stares out of the window, his nose inches from my own. He doesn't budge, and I don't, either. He's wearing his glasses. He's still in his jeans, like he never went to bed.

We stand and stare at each other.

•   •   •

When Mikey retreats into the darkness of his room, all at once, as though remembering something he'd forgotten, I head back into Chip's yard and sneak through the darkened house. I don't want Phyllis to know I was in a staredown with Mikey Harless for almost half an hour. She has not exactly
forbidden
me to sneak out after dark, and I'd like to keep it that way.

We eat egg salad on the porch. I think Phyllis probably doesn't have egg salad for every breakfast when I'm not here. I think about the days before I came, wonder how much time she spent on this porch, watching the sunrise. How much time she'll spend here when I've gone wherever it is foster kids go when a foster mom gets tired of
them. We pet Stella and watch streaks of pink work their way up from the tips of the trees. We wave good-bye to Hubert Harless and watch his truck disappear down Main Street.

•   •   •

On Monday, Grace, the social worker from the county, comes. I met her right after Michael, but I don't remember a whole lot about those days. Today, I really look at her. She doesn't dress the way I would have thought, like in a business suit or something. She wears khaki pants that aren't very dressy, more like cargos with a ton of pockets. She wears a polo shirt with a logo on it that doesn't seem to be from her job. I like her kind eyes, but not the pressed-in corners of her lips.

She says I have to go to school. I missed a week after Michael, and then the school went on spring break and I was spared from it another week, but now it's time to get back into a routine.

I do
not
think about school.

I
do
think about what Phyllis will do while I'm gone. She doesn't have a guitar to keep her busy. I can't always stand to think about what happened to it, but I know she doesn't have one and I know it's my fault. She tells me she's going back to work, since I'm going back to school. She works above the Laundromat, where Mr. Cardman has his lawyer's office. She types things.

The elementary school bus comes in the darkness of
Thursday morning. Mikey climbs on it and it carries him away. His sister Marla screams from the porch. She wants to go on the school bus, too. I want to offer her my spot.

My bus, which goes to the middle and high schools out of town, comes twenty minutes later. I have to walk down the street and around the corner to the sagging red bus house to catch it. The driver wears a uniform and doesn't smile. The kids mostly wear jeans and sneakers, a few skirts here and there. The whole bus smells like sulfur water and cigarette smoke. I tried on almost everything I own last night to find the perfect back-to-school outfit, but I maybe don't own one of those. I tug my jeans up and my T-shirt down.

There are no empty seats. I'm paralyzed. The driver tells me twice to find a seat.

I choose a strange face to sit next to. I'm not friends with anybody on the bus, but I know most of the faces. This girl, I don't know. She's a small-looking girl and doesn't seem likely to hurt me. I sit beside her and she scoots toward the window. Her long brown hair swings forward so I can't see her face. I fix my eyes on my knees, but out of the corner of my eye, I can't help but see her farm-muddy jeans and worn cowboy boots. Her clothes make me relax a little. She doesn't appear stuck-up or scary.

School is a thirty-minute bus ride out of Caboose and over the mountain. I watch mailboxes flash past as we start our climb. Three of them say Harless. I see the entrance to
the Hardwater mine, long closed and abandoned. Heavy chains hold hands across the weed-strangled road leading in. This is the last place Ben ever drove his truck, five years ago now. I remember him driving away that evening. The fading sound of his ancient country music—Dwight Yoakam that morning—floated back to me and Michael, the two of us standing in the driveway in a sweet summer night full of lightning bugs and the smell of cut grass.

The news came late the next morning. The actual news, I mean: cameras and microphones, and reporters wanting to know not only what happened up at Hardwater—a cave-in, miners trapped and unaccounted for—but how it was affecting our small community. For days, bedsheets hung on porch rails and tree limbs, painted with messages like “God be with our miners” and “Prayers for Joe and the others” and “Keep the faith.” I remember reporters on CNN talking about how they were being well fed and housed by the families of the miners while they covered the stories. Michael, who was fresh out of high school and trying to get fit enough to pass the tests for the Navy, stopped training and drove out to the mine instead, helping with the search and rescue efforts like a lot of younger guys in Caboose. I rode out with him a few times, and sat in the cab of the truck, which one of the accounted-for miners had brought home to us. I scraped patterns into old cigarette grime on the dashboard. I watched Michael as he stood outside the cab,
finishing a cigarette of his own. Watched the lights on the fire trucks flash in his eyes.

It took the town of Caboose five days to find our people. By then, we already knew. When it was confirmed, the town held five funerals, including Ben's. They were televised, both locally and on CNN, and afterward, people drifted back into their homes and locked the doors. Still, nobody wanted to take down the bedsheets, and a lot of them hung until the paint washed off and the paisley print faded. By then, most of the sheets were nothing more than rags, impossibly knotted around tree limbs.

I shake off the memory as the bus pulls into Engine Creek, where the high school kids go. Next stop, on down to Bent Tree, is the middle school, which smells like waffles and glue guns. We are herded into the cafeteria, where we sit until the first bell rings at five of eight. I'm expecting to start in homeroom, but instead, Mr. Powell steps from his office into my path as I go by.

“Do you have a minute, Sasha?”

As if you can say no to the school guidance counselor. I've seen Mr. Powell ever since the day I ended up beside the Dumpster. At first, he just wanted to make sure I wasn't going to run out of the school again. Nobody expected the visits with Mr. Powell to go on as long as they have, but apparently I truly do have some type of “issue.” The trouble is, nobody's ever told me what. I know I get nervous and think of all the bad things that might happen,
and that sometimes it gets so overwhelming that I have to hide out in the girls' bathroom until my stomach stops hurting. I have a class period that I go to in the morning that's supposed to help me manage what my paperwork calls an “emotional disorder.” Michael always said it was a load of crap; that any kid whose mom had up and left town when she was five and whose dad got killed in the mines when she was eight was bound to have some “friggin' issues.” But he never asked the school to stop sending me to Mr. Powell, which, deep down, always worried me a little, like maybe Michael thought my “friggin' issues” were more serious than he let on.

He's kind of pointless, Mr. Powell, and so are his sessions, but I don't mind him much. Sometimes he can get me out of tests or help me with my homework. Seventh-grade algebra is no picnic, so I don't mind telling my teacher I need to go see the counselor that period.

•   •   •

Seeing Mr. Powell is not a good idea after all. The books on his shelf are always in the same order, so I know he doesn't read them. I can't blame him. They have titles like
Depression in Adolescents
and
Our Youth, Our Future
.

I have a hard time paying attention to the right things in Mr. Powell's room. I notice that his clock battery has died and we're stuck at ten after five. I notice that he's worked his way down through the yellow layer on his Post-it cube and now he's working on the pink layer.

I don't remember what he says.

I walk into my first class late, clutching a bright pink Post-it that says not to count me tardy. I don't want to get in trouble, so I don't say anything or look at anybody. After a while, it's like I'm not here.

In between classes, I sneak into the girls' bathroom. I carry my brown paper lunch sack, which Phyllis filled with egg salad sandwiches. I hide in one of the stalls, on the toilet. I feel scared for no reason. It's strange, being back. Everything here is so normal, like no time has passed. Everything's been different in the two weeks since Michael died, and now I'm back at school, with rows of eraser-pink lockers with bad words scratched in them, and speckled blue carpet that makes my eyes cross, and everything looks the same as it did when I left.

I came to school the day after Michael died, but I didn't stay. I tried. I really did. I wanted everything to be normal, and on a normal day, I'd be at school. But people already knew about my brother, and they kept giving me this look, like they were wondering when I might snap. When I caught the teacher looking, too, I got up and walked out in the middle of class, kept walking past the double doors and through the courtyard and into the street. It wasn't one of those things that happened. I was calm. I remember it perfectly. I walked all the way across the four-lane and lost myself in the woods for a while. It was the social worker, Grace, who found me, driving up and down
the highway in her rickety old Jeep Cherokee. When she picked me up, she ran her fingers through my hair to clean out the pine needles I'd gotten from lying on the ground. She wrapped her sweater around my shoulders. She made me drink some hot coffee from a thermos. That was the day she drove me to Phyllis.

•   •   •

Two class periods and lunch have gone by when I come out of hiding, somewhat more collected now, and aim toward class. I'm still clutching my egg salad sandwiches in their paper sack. In the hall, Anthony Tucker approaches me. It always makes me nervous seeing him approach. There are two versions of Anthony Tucker in my head, the before Chris McKenzie version and the after. Before Chris McKenzie, Anthony could be counted on to snap my bra strap or to jostle me so I dropped my books or to say something rude about my outfit. Ever since he followed me out to the Dumpster that day, he doesn't seem to know what he's supposed to do with me. His solution for a while was to be nice to me, but then his friends noticed, and they started making kissy noises at us, and Anthony went back to proving his dislike for me. Now it's like he's only pretending to be a bully, which is somehow more upsetting than when he was really being mean. Every time he misses the chance to poke me with a pencil or scrape his muddy shoe against my jeans, I think of his face by the Dumpster and I feel like I'm back there
for a minute. Anthony tugs at my braid, which is more mess than braid at this point. It's been up for three days. I don't like taking it down. Someone might make me wash my hair.

I can't handle Anthony today. I can't think about how he treats me differently now. I don't speak. I keep walking. Behind me, I hear his buddies making rude noises in time with my steps. I'm afraid they might be following me. I feel like my insides are trembling. I cut half-moons into my palms with my nails. Boys like Anthony Tucker don't understand. They don't know about egg salad on porches, about fists full of dirt that taste like blood. They don't know.