None of them moves. Outside, rain seems to wash the world away. A piece of Turtle Hole is visible through the broken windows. The sky is light gray and mist drifts through it like smoke behind the rain.
"He was wanting me to take all the stuff from that old lady's room. I had got me one ring—I got it for a reason, but Dad took it and kept it. I took it off his finger in the cave. I took it when you was all gone from me, looking for the edge." Buddy reaches into his pocket and shows them the ring, flat on his palm.
"You keep it tonight and you put it back tomorrow," Lenny tells him. "At breakfast you put it back, before she misses it. She won't be looking for it tonight, with all the confusion and the storm."
Buddy puts the ring back in his pocket, speaking slowly, as though to himself. "I'll tell Mam he's gone, he's left. She knows he was aiming to leave, and she won't be looking for him to come back."
Lenny swings the beam of light off the floor, up to the rafters in a bell that expands and fades, a circular tour, back to the pallet. They see the knife, small as a nail file, and farther on, just at the head of the bed, a pair of white shoes. Canvas sneakers.
Alma walks over and picks up the shoes. She walks back, three steps, holding them in her arms. She turns them one way and another in the yellow wash of the flashlight, as though to be sure. They sit on her flat palms like objects on a tray. The frayed strings hang down. Inside one, the fabric decal of Mickey Mouse, worn nearly smooth.
The rain still pours, a pounding, murmurous constant. They all sit down, knees almost touching, and Lenny sets the flashlight on its end in the center of the circle. The light shines up, a low lamp. She takes her shoes from Alma, and puts them on.
He climbs to the top of the rock nearly every day; even if he can't see the whole camp, he knows he stands over it, and he spreads his arms out and stands straight up and turns himself, slow, like he holds all below him in a bubble or a globe. School days, they get home before five and while Mam makes supper she lets him stay out; he has him a secondhand bike she got from someone at the church and he rides it down the road and straight through a stand of level pine till he can see the swinging bridge. Then he runs; he knows the light is going and it's not much longer she'll let him out like this near dusk, the wind blown around wild, a sudden rush in the trees while leaves fly up, like the wind blows him into the needle of the bridge and rocks him in its swing. He loves how the bridge looks to be a different color now because the sun has got a darker shade, like a fireball in a brown box, glowing through to turn the brown box red and tinge Mud River. The river is louder, faster, floated with leaves that rush away, like it knows the ice will crawl across it, choke it off narrow and more narrow till the water only runs hidden and slow, a deep channel no one sees. Buddy sees the little crosses he carved once on the bridge, a code at his feet as he runs across the moving planks; the crosses look like chicken scratches or a one-legged track that disappears, and he likes the unmarked part of the bridge, the part he'll never have to write on. He runs faster then and takes the flat part of the trail by the river at top speed. These shoes aren't like the leather ones Mam used to get him, or the boots she'll make him wear later in the cold; he can rim now fast as the painter cats never seen around here anymore, faster than anyone at school, even the oldest boys. The long dirt track on the riverbank where the crew lay pipe is covered over now. Men brought in a bulldozer on a flatbed truck, edged it down a ramp and roared it through the woods from the road; how the big machine crashed through brush and throbbed, the August heat rising up from its yellow sides in lines. And the hills of dirt the workmen had dug up and piled like a ridge along the ditch began to disappear. The lengths of pipe were deep and still and linked and the dirt began to cover them, little trees and green bushes pulled in and crushed, the limbs cracking and the dozer jerking back and forth, roaring. There's still a long mound where the trenches once lay open; Buddy has run up and down it, stomping and tramping, talking to the hard dumb pipe that is buried. He's said all his words and he doesn't have to look as he pours himself through the woods toward Turtle Hole, round the big trees, onto the dirt track edging the water. If he looks the water will stop him, make him stand and try to see across, make him look at the rocks still scattered round like thick flat plates in a certain spot, the only place he can't go to or look at, the only one not part of his kingdom. And when he runs past, faster, cutting through, sometimes he can feel the angel pass by in the opposite direction, not the way he really looked behind Dad or in the water, but the way he was, faceless, like a wind, bigger than his body, trailing pieces of himself like a fog. Then the diving rock comes up beside like the flank of a wall or a tower and Buddy rims round to where the cave was, hidden now, Buddy thinks, hidden a while, anyway.
In the final days of camp he went with Lenny up and down Highest trail, last in the staggered line of girls, Cap between them and the rest to be sure there was room, like a guard. But they never talked about it, except Lenny told him once he was a brave boy, he would always be brave, and she walked with her hand on his shoulder like another boy might. Buddy put the ring back that first morning after and Lenny had waited for him just outside the door; no one ever noticed or asked. Then they all left and camp closed before August was half over; for a while it felt like they were all still there, off in the cabins and sites Buddy couldn't see from Turtle Hole. Then they were just gone and the heat was thick as soup, and he would stay near the rock in the morning while Mam worked in her garden, and he began to build over the hole of the cave. First he thought he was making a fort, then he saw it was more like a garden too, not for vegetables but for things to grow up over the opening, to look old, like it had all grown without help. He knew which logs to drag up, broken ones rotted into the heartwood in holes and crevices, ones with no bark left, the inner skin of the wood smooth and gray, etched already by worms and bugs in a near language of little forms, circles, maps, and pictograms. He used a trowel from home to dig the rich loam from underneath the shack and he brought the loam up in the bucket that's got no handle. He filled some dirt between the logs and planted in some fern and kudzu, and he watered them with the bucket, every morning all through the heat, four trips from the water, holding the bucket to his chest with both arms. He thought in a while you wouldn't be able to see the hole even if you were looking straight at it, in a year or two year; the kudzu would vine up on the pine already there and climb the rock. Kudzu could eat a town, Mam said, why, further south they had to hack it down every spring, and it never even bloomed like wisteria and redeemed itself.
Every day after school he would stand in the third-grade bus line and look in the windows of the buses pulling up. The younger girls would be at the junior high and he thought he saw Delia once. Lenny and Cap would be in high school, and a few buses loaded there and picked up at elementary when some of the older kids got off to change buses for home. But he never saw them at all, and then he got a picture postcard from Lenny, from the state of New York. It was a picture of a school building with a steeple like a church and Mam read him the words on the back a few times until Buddy knew them, and when he looked at the writing he saw it as a block of letters and knew it in one piece.
My mother and my sister live here now. We rented a house so I live at home, not at school. My mom has a job in admissions. Cap goes here too and she is going to get a car after she passes her test.
How was it anyone lived at school, Buddy wouldn't do it, it was enough Mam made him trace on his letters every night, and cut out pictures from catalogues that started with the sound. But he would want him a car, like that, as soon as he could drive. The car Dad made him drive in the woods is still there, like no one's ever seen it; maybe no one has, it's so far out in the trees, downriver of Turtle Hole past the boundary of the camp. Buddy goes there but he doesn't go in the car. The driver's side door still hangs open and Buddy can see inside, see it's empty, but he doesn't get in. The empty car sags down on one side like the ground has given way a little beneath it, and the car and the space around the car simply wait, wait to break down. The big trees Dad carried him across have rolled over and drifted farther downriver to where the water broadens out and deepens. Only the tips of the silken branches show now, the smallest, reaching ends of the branches. The riverbank there and the branches nodding in their rush of water are the farthest away of his places, each one a star on a map he walks and knows. The closed buildings of Camp Shelter are marked with the stones of their columned porches, leaves blown against their massive doors, and when Buddy climbs Highest trail he can look down and see more of the quad through the pines. The trees highest up lose their leaves first and stand near naked when the forest trees are still full flung as bouquets, yellow and fiery. Buddy sits on the platform of Lenny's tent and looks down, wishes he could stack up these platforms to make a tower for armies, and he climbs on the tarps that hold the canvas tents. There's a cache of walking sticks the girls left and he takes them home one by one, long ones sized right to be rifles, and he plays at shooting up all the trees across the road from their porch and Mam shakes her head and says to him those are the only rifles he'll have in this house, he won't go for a soldier, no sir, she didn't raise him to be sending him off to no cage, draft or no draft. We have already done enough of that from around here, she says, and Buddy shoots louder till she goes in the house and then he stops.
It's not shooting he does when he's up on top of the rock. There's no one comes near him then. He can see everywhere at once; Turtle Hole shimmers below and Mud River is an interrupted stripe through the trees, and the mashed place where Frank's tent stood is gone, nothing left but the cleared place and the low bank of rocks where he built fires, and halfway down the diving rock there's the spit of ledge people dive off, the ledge where Frank fished with his casting rod he never let Buddy touch. Buddy didn't want to fish, he doesn't like to catch fish, the way they suffocate. The way their gills work, the way they can't blink their eyes. Sometimes he sees Lenny's eyes move, very near him, like he's watching her with his eyes next to hers but she doesn't see him, and he sees the whites of her eyes and the blue rims of her irises, thin curve of color like a glass secret, and then the starred mix of blues and grays between the rim and the black point in the center. Her long hair catches in her lashes, stray white filaments like the lines of web that blow about when Mam takes a broom to the spiders under the porch.
Lenny sent him another card and Buddy keeps it with the first one; it looks like a picture from an airplane of a little town, little buildings with sidewalks between them and woods around. Mam said that's the school she goes to.
Alma is going to Delia's at Thanksgiving and I'm going with Cap to her grandparents. We're going to send you a present at Xmas so write me if there's something you want.
Now you should write back to her, Mam says, I could write down what you want to say and you could copy it out, you could do that, but he doesn't want to, he doesn't need to. He keeps the cards in a certain place and he doesn't even look at them. He knows about the writing like he has a picture of it, like he could fall into the white space between the letters, and in that white space him and Mam are at Turtle Hole like they were in August after camp closed, in the evenings after the hot days, and they would swim and then Mam would soap him off and rinse him down with the bucket, she'd make him stand out of the water in the open and she'd throw the water right over him so the suds ran off away from Turtle Hole, and she'd be using the same bucket from the shack and he'd get her to laughing, throwing the water as fast as she could, and she'd make him walk home before her so she could take her own bath in private. There is always a white space Buddy can make when he is on top of the rock, and he can put any good thing in that space. Like Mam and him collecting flowers to dry: she has herself a big jug of money tree now, the husks all taken off and the oval circles catching light like clear, skinned coins, and she keeps that jug in the middle of the table and at night a candle glow can catch a reflection and light up the undersides of each pale shape. Like parchment paper, Mam says, like glitter shell, and she slices the little tomatoes they picked, canned up with mustard seed and pickled onion, and lays them out all round on the white plates, with peeled white potatoes and white hominy, and she says to him he's got his white supper before the snow even falls, him a rich man with his money on a tree all clean and white. And she has a laugh about him liking white things, and tells him there's such a thing as white chocolate, and maybe she'll find some come Christmas.
He has the white T-shirt of Lenny's that he took last summer, the one he found in her footlocker wadded up like she wanted to throw it away. He kept it under his mattress for a while and then when school started he sat on top of the big rectangular freezer Mrs. T. gave Mam from camp, and he got Mam's kitchen scissors and cut the bottom off the T-shirt. He folded that up and put it away, and he wears the shirt now, every day; it fits him under his school clothes, under his sweatshirt on the weekend. Mam says how she got him a whole package of those undershirts and what does he do but wear just that one, worn out soft as silk and going to rip right down the middle; where did he ever get that old thing? But she washes it out for him by hand every two or three days, and dries it on a hanger over the woodstove. I don't know where your dad has gone to, she would say sometimes, back in the summer, but I reckon it's just as well. Now she says, I'm only hoping I don't hear some bad thing about him, some crazy thing he's done. You won't hear nothing, Buddy wants to tell her, but he doesn't say, he keeps his lips pressed flat against his teeth in a signal to himself to stay still. She's scared sometimes, uneasy. These weekends, the long Saturday afternoons when they're home and she's teaching Buddy to knit on the porch, she'll stand up and look out over the railing, down at the road, with the sky brilliant all round and flared near topaz over the reds and golds of the trees. Cars do pass on weekends, people from town driving out to look at the leaves now fall has peaked and the colors are rarefied, fired luminous, nodding against the evergreens. Buddy sees Mam look after cars that pass and pass again on the way back, kicking up dust on the road; she looks into the clouds of dust that stay too low to reach them, and Buddy wants to tell her. But he says to himself she'll feel safe after more time goes by, after Thanksgiving, after Christmas, and he knits at the scarf he is making, the yarn so pale a blue he's got to keep his hands washed, and Mam complains how he should be using a dark color for a scarf to wear to school, she's got some navy yarn would do just fine. He says how he likes this color and she nods and sighs, well, go right on, then, but I'm the one that'll be washing it by hand, right along with that undershirt you won't stop wearing. He will finish the scarf and he will get her to show him how to tie tassels on the ends, and he already has a box to put it in, and he can wrap the box in aluminum foil, prettier thickened with creases than any store-bought Christmas paper, and he can give it to her when they get back from church on that morning, the house all fragrant with the smell of roasting turkey. Like butter in his mouth, Buddy thinks, and clinches his jaws like he wants to hold on to something.