Into the Free (5 page)

CHAPTER 5

More than a week has passed since Jack pinned Mama to the ground with a knife to her neck, and he’s due back in town today. At least that’s what it says on his rodeo schedule, tacked to the kitchen pantry. Mama has spent most of the time in bed, but now she’s in the kitchen humming along to “Rhapsody in Blue.” She stirs red beans and rice for Jack’s supper. It’s the first time she’s cooked since he left, and I can’t figure out if she really wants him to come back, or if she’s just afraid not to have supper ready if he does.

I stay in my room, staring at the family portrait that hangs framed above my bed. In it, Jack is sitting with his arm around Mama. They are tucked close together like petals on the same bloom. In Mama’s arms, I’m wrapped snug in a little blanket she knitted just for me. Mama’s looking straight at the camera, smiling big in her flowered dress and polished pearls. Jack wears his cowboy hat. He’s looking down at me, and I’m looking at him, and it’s easy to see it there. Love. Plain as plain can be.

“Millie?” Mama calls me from the kitchen. I don’t answer. As happy as I am to find Mama out of bed cooking, I walk right past her and go outside to prop myself against my sweet gum tree. From there, I keep a close eye on Mama. Sometimes she gets so deep into the music, she forgets all about the cooking. I worry she will melt her skin to blisters.

I scoot up Sweetie’s limbs and watch the sky. I figure Sloth can see me better from up here, but still—no hole. Just as I reach my favorite spot, a gang of skinny boys in overalls runs by yelling, “The gypsies are coming! The gypsies are coming!”

The boys, barefoot with dirtbeads ringing their necks, don’t slow down. While they are yelling to the chickens and the farmhands, I tuck my dress between my legs, drop my hands, and hang upside down from my branch.

The gypsies’ laughter reaches me right away. It rises up above Iti Taloa’s everyday sounds: train sirens, mill whistles, and streetcar squeals. It floats across the ticking clock tower and the tall white steeples with their hollow hourly bells. Out past the two-story red brick library where sweet Miss Harper sits reading
God’s Little Acre
from the banned book box. Their laughter rolls beyond the matching red brick corner bank, where men in ties count crisp green bills and starched rich ladies pull tight gloves over small, soft hands.

Their laughter rises all the way up to the clouds of my Mississippi town and reaches out to my family’s little rental cabin perched on the back side of Mr. Sutton’s plantation. It finds me, two days after my tenth birthday, in the limbs of my sweet gum tree. It rolls across her branches and whispers in my ear. “Come find us, Millie. This is where you belong.”

I climb down from Sweetie’s branches and follow the gypsy laughter. With bare feet and black braids, I follow it all the way across the hard dirt patches of our yard and down the gravel lane that leads me off the Sutton plantation, away from Jack’s fire and Mama’s valley and Sloth’s empty house.

I follow it all the way to the paved streets, the swept sidewalks, and hot-pink azaleas. Past the rodeo arena, the courthouse, and the carousel. Past the turn that would take me to my grandparents’ house, a house where their mixed-blood granddaughter would never be welcome.

I follow that laughter all the way to the stiff iron fence that surrounds Hope Hill, where the gypsies gather each spring.

I squeeze through the green gate, past statues of angels. I follow the sound of laughter to the graves of the gypsy queen and king.

Then, I slide behind a poplar trunk to watch a woman, barely taller than me, pour purple juice over the grave of her queen. A younger girl, wearing red, lights a tall white candle and places it at the foot of a gray cross. Two tweed-capped boys sprinkle coins over a second stone, covering the king’s tomb in silver and gold. More than twenty gypsies have circled the graves to pluck strings and sing in an unknown tongue, and as much as I want to sing along with them, I can only listen as they tell stories I barely understand.

Behind the poplar, I am invisible, a good spy, until an old gypsy woman smiles at me. She reaches her arm out to draw me in, but I step back, behind the safety of the tree.

The wrinkled woman winks and pulls a blue silk scarf to cover her silver hair. She turns back to the group, motioning for them to sit and rest. They fall at her feet like bees at a hive, as if they, too, can sense this woman’s sweetness.

“Be here today with us, you be blessed,” she begins, and the crowd grows silent. Her accent is strange and deep, but it reminds me of a thick-waisted grandmother. “You be blessed here. With tribe. Your people. This, this what you know, here in heart, how it feel to belong.”

The circle of dark-skinned travelers clasp their hands together and smile. All I can do is stay tucked behind the poplar and wish that I am a gypsy and that I have a tribe.

I hurry back through a shortcut in the woods and hope Mama doesn’t find out I’ve been watching the gypsies. Jack doesn’t like them. Claims they cheated Mr. Cauy Tucker out of a fine stallion, traded him a sickly bunch of colts in exchange.

I don’t get far before I have the feeling I’m being followed, and twice I catch sight of a scrawny boy, one of the two I’d seen throwing coins on the graves. He is wearing a brown tweed hat, a loose-fitting shirt, and dirty trousers that are too short for his toothpick legs. He dashes for cover when I turn my head. I shout at him, “Come out,” but only silence answers.

I scramble up a steep hill, pulling my weight by clutching weaves of ivy. Just as I reach the top, I see a woman more than a hundred yards away. She is kneeling in the brush. Her back is turned to me, so I stop and watch from a distance. She is holding something in her hands. She is crying.

I spy from the shadows and wonder if the skinny, brown-capped gypsy boy is spying on the spy. The woman is talking quickly. Jarring back and forth between whispers and shouts. “Time to bury the past,” she says, loud enough for me to hear. Who is she talking to? Why does her voice sound familiar? I lean closer and strain to focus. With bare hands, she digs a hole into the soft ground and places a box into the shallow opening. She covers the box with dirt, and over it she spreads a layer of dead leaves. It disappears under the tree.

The woman stands as she throws something into the river, something small and shiny. All I see is the glint of it before she yells, “Happy now?”

She dusts her hands on her skirt, turns, and for just a second, I see her face. She sweeps blonde hair from her eyes and I am certain. She is my mama.

CHAPTER 6

I hide behind the face of the hill and hope Mama doesn’t see me on my belly, peeking through newborn cedars and sweet gum scrubs. I spy as she talks to the air, and buries a box, and throws away a key. It is all I can do not to jump out and call to her, but fear speaks first. What if I’m not supposed to know about this? I cower lower, behind the grassy bank. I wait for a long time after she leaves, until I’m sure it’s safe to move. Then I go to the spot where she has hidden her secrets. I know I shouldn’t do it, but I brush away the leaves and I scoop out handfuls of dirt and I find her wooden box, like a coffin, buried under the sycamore tree.

It is locked, so I feel for my pocketknife. Careful not to make a mark, I pry the lock, but it won’t shift. The sun is sinking, and I am running out of time.

A branch breaks in the distance and I’m hit again with sizzling. Someone is watching me. I hope it is just the gypsy boy. I hope it isn’t Jack.

A hawk screams, scared from its perch. The wind howls, the leaves wave warnings. Another twig snaps into the forest floor. Closer this time. I turn to look. Listen. I see only the day giving into night. But I know I am not alone.

I hurry to cover the box, exactly the way Mama had buried it. I scatter dry leaves over the spot and stand, looking around with wide white eyes, like Mr. Sutton’s horses when stray dogs circle the pasture. “Hello?” I say to the woods. No one answers. Another twig breaks, close behind me now. “Who’s there?”

Again, nothing.

I am too afraid to run. I stand, turning, watching, holding my pocketknife. “Come out!” I shout, louder this time.

Down a bit, close to the water, branches are bending and leaves are crunching. Then I hear the sounds of someone, or something, running away.

Just as quickly as the noise began, the woods quiet down. The hawk returns to his perch, the moon shines a new yellow light on the fading canopy, and all becomes still again. I don’t move. I stand and listen and breathe. A coon shows itself in the clearing, and I finally get the courage to head home to Mama.

I find her in the kitchen. Ella Fitzgerald sings from the speaker. Red beans are simmering, and the house smells like sausage.

Mama leans over the counter. Her feet are crossed at the ankles, and she rubs an old string of pearls around her neck. She never looks up from the book she is studying. “Where’ve you been?”

“At the library,” I lie to Mama. I feel it like a punch in my gut. I stir the pot so I don’t have to see her reaction if she knows. “What’ve you been doing?”

She keeps right on reading. “Cooking,” she says. “Just cooking.”

Mama cooked all night, but it didn’t seem to matter. Jack didn’t come home after all. I’m on my way home from school now, hoping he’s still gone, but when I turn the corner I see his truck parked in front of our house. Pins shoot through my bones like I’m one of those voodoo dolls Mr. Sutton brought back for me from New Orleans. I don’t see Mama or Jack, so I climb Sweetie and wait for a sign.

I count Sweetie’s new spring leaves like stars. Numbers too big, too great for anyone but God to really know. Jack doesn’t like Sweetie. Or much of anything else, now that I think about it.

I’m sitting in the tree when Jack comes around the house, ax in his hand. “Tired of this nothing tree,” he mutters. His voice puts a taste in my throat like dirt. “Don’t want to pick up no more of these dead gum balls.” He throws one of Sweetie’s old prickly spheres across our yard. The pod is hard and brown and empty of seed. The new ones hang from the limbs. They are soft, green, and smell like Christmas.

Jack must not notice I’m in the tree. I climb down from her branches and wrap my arms around the trunk. “Chop her, you got to chop me, too,” I threaten.

He forgets that I turned ten while he was gone, my lucky number. I look at the wilted four-leaf clover on his hat. I am counting on having good luck.

Jack doesn’t look twice at me before he adjusts his cowboy hat straight on his head and swings the ax. It hits only inches from my hands, taking a bitter bite out of my tree. I jump. Yell. Mama watches from the porch. Just stands there and watches, her arms crossed in front of her like a collapsed
X
.

Jack raises the ax out past his right shoulder, both hands tight against its splintered handle, his dark leather skin tight against his square jaw. My arms tight against Sweetie’s rugged trunk.

Jack swings again. Misses my hands by three inches at most. His breath makes me gag. It smells like nibbled pears the deer leave behind to rot in the pasture.

“I’ll pick them up,” I yell, looking out into the yard where hundreds of brown sweet gum seedpods shoot their spikes out into the world like tiny daggers. Jack doesn’t listen. Instead, he pulls the ax back again and takes aim. His flannel shirt is soaked dark under his arms. His jeans are worn through at the hems, and his stubbled cheeks look like a fresh field at harvest. Beads of sweat line up between his brows. Heat from the sky, the soil, the sips of whiskey. All there, burning up his insides as he holds that ax, heavy above Sweetie and me.

“I promise!” I yell again, refusing to move, even if that means he’s taking me down with her. “I’ll pick them up!”

Jack stares hard. I stare right back. “Every last one of them,” he orders. Then he swings the ax into her trunk one last time and leaves it there. He turns his back and limps up the porch steps, right past Mama, like she’s not even there. Like she’s an invisible, unworthy, nothing mama.

I spend a good ten minutes pulling and tugging on Jack’s ax, trying to work it back out of my tree. But once it finally gives free, I realize the scars are there for good.

By the time I work the ax out of Sweetie’s trunk, Jack’s gone again. His truck is nothing more than a blurry ball of dust in the distance. I don’t say much to Mama. I’m mad at her for not taking up for me. When I think about it, I was mad at her even before Jack sliced into Sweetie. Mad because she didn’t hold my hand during Sloth’s funeral and because she let me spend two nights sleeping outside alone. Mad because she lets Jack treat her like a punching bag, leaving marks we call bangers and stamps. Mad because she never told Sloth thank you for taking care of me. Mad because she won’t take care of herself.

Right now, Mama is ironing a basket of clothes for one of the rich ladies in town. She’s singing “Stormy Weather,” and I don’t want to be here. I want to be with Sloth, catching fish or hunting deer or cooking stew.

“I’m going fishing,” I tell Mama. She nods and keeps right on singing, and by the time I hit the porch, Sloth is there to greet me with two cane poles and a can of worms.

I can see him, plain as day. “You ready?” he asks.

But Sloth is dead. He died right next to me. Under the dogwood. I watched four men drop his casket into the ground, heard Mr. Sutton call him a “good man,” spent the long, lonely night crying at his grave. Yet here he is, standing on my porch, saying, “Ready?”

It’s Sloth. It has to be. With his round chin, his deep wrinkles, his happy smile, his rough voice. He takes a step toward me, “twisted like a tornado” from the old gunshot injury to his foot. I drop the sandwich I’d packed as a snack and fumble for the doorknob behind my back. I keep both my eyes on Sloth. Mama opens the door and I rush in. “Sloth!” I say, shaking from the inside to the out. “Sloth. On the porch!”

Mama steps outside and looks around calling “Hello?” but she finds only an empty evening.