They hadn’t gone far before she began to see familiar territory.
Not that she was interested. She hadn’t been back since the day she and Helen left twenty years ago, and she couldn’t think of a good reason to go back now.
Ten minutes later, when she asked the driver to stop, she was more surprised than he was as she climbed down out of the cab at Hawkins Corner and started walking down a rutted dirt road.
Odel Hawkins’ store, where she and Helen had sold pop bottles to buy candy, was boarded up now, the sign out front advertising Dr Pepper riddled with buckshot.
A quarter mile beyond the store, she came to the one-lane wooden bridge over Push Creek where Helen had threatened to jump one day when she was in the fifth grade.
I’d rather be dead, Vena, than be in that dumb play. Miss Lyons
could’ve picked any girl in class to be Pocahontas, but she picked me ’cause
I’m the only Indian. And she said I had to put my arm around that stupid Buddy Pitt ’cause he’s going to be John Smith. Well, I guess she’ll be
sorry when she hears I’m drowned.
Almost halfway to the section line, she passed the old Lanford place, but the three-room house where they’d lived was gone now, and in its place sat a double-wide house trailer, bashed in and rusted on one end.
When the road curved downhill at the Heisenberg farm where she used to steal watermelons, Vena stopped to shake a rock out of her boot.
You know what? I don’t think stealing watermelons is a sin, Vena. I
mean, it’s not like taking someone’s money or maybe some rich woman’s fur
coat. ’Cause watermelon, well, it comes out of the earth. And the earth belongs to everybody.
Ezra Settlemyers’ house was still standing and still leaning to one side, but now it had a six-foot chain-link fence around it.
When Vena stepped into a ditch where she saw a thicket of black-berries, two pit bulls raced from out of nowhere and, running full speed, hurled themselves against the fence as someone inside the house pulled aside a curtain to watch her back away and move on.
After she turned east at the section line, she passed the farm pond where she and Helen used to fish for perch until the day Helen hooked one in the eye when she was nine.
I’m never ever going to eat another creature that has a face, ’cause if they
have faces, then they have eyes and they can look at you when you kill them.
The road grew crooked just past the cattle guard, then straightened for a hundred yards before it snaked into the S-curve where Mary Cobb, at twelve, had wrecked her brother’s pickup.
But the twisting road was still as familiar to Vena as the jagged scar on her leg, the result of a dare by Jimmy Mendoza to play mata-dor in his daddy’s corral. She’d escaped the charging bull called Zore by diving through a barbed-wire fence which sliced open her calf and required twenty-two stitches to close.
She passed the old cemetery where she’d gone with Davey Baysinger, the first boy she ever kissed; hurried by the abandoned cabin rumored to be haunted by the ghost of Cassie Washington who poisoned herself; rested under the lightning-struck oak where Helen had pried from a knothole the blackened Prince Albert can they hid in their secret place.
She walked for almost an hour, a road where every house and hill and hollow held for her some voice, some face, some history . . . collecting moments of her past like a child stuffing fireflies into a jar.
But when she rounded the last bend and saw the place she’d once called home, she came to a dead stop.
The junked cars and pickups were gone, the lawn recently mowed, and the house, remarkably like the one she’d seen in her dreams, was white now with green shutters and windowboxes filled with flowers.
Her heart began to pound, and she felt light-headed as she started toward it.
“Can I help you?” A white-haired man leaning on a cane stood behind a closed screen door, watching her. “You got car trouble?”
“No, I—”
“Don’t get many visitors here since the wife died, not unless it’s some fool run out of gas or one of those kids driving hell-bent for leather hits that gully this side of the bridge.”
“I used to live here,” Vena said. “I grew up in this house.”
The man opened the door, studying her as he stepped onto the porch.
“Now ain’t that something. There was a woman here ’bout a year ago said the same thing. And by the looks of you, I’d say you might be her sister.”
“What?” Vena almost went to her knees. “Helen was here?”
“Well, she didn’t say her name.”
“But you talked to her?”
“Tried, but she wasn’t doing much talking, ’least not that made sense. To tell you the truth, I thought there was something wrong with her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like maybe she wasn’t quite right in the head. No offense, but she acted real strange, eyes all wild, and she had on a hat and a heavy coat buttoned up to her neck and it musta been ninety de-grees that day.”
Vena dizzied with the memory of her dream-vision.
“Me and my daughter’d just finished supper and she was fixing to go out and mess with her flowers when she looked through the window and seen this woman standing in the backyard.
“Well, I went out and asked her what she wanted, and she said she was looking for the graveyard. I told her the graveyard was a mile north, but she said no, it was right under her feet. Said that’s where someone named Peabody was buried.”
“Peabo. Her cat.”
“She was real upset, said it’d all changed, asked where was the barn and the chicken house. I told her they got blowed away in a cyclone a few years back, but she walked around out there looking for them like she didn’t believe me.
“Then she told me she had to leave something for her sister who’d be showing up here sometime. And I suppose that’s you.”
“What did she leave?” Vena asked, her voice hardly more than a whisper.
“Well, she didn’t leave nothing. I told her I’d be glad to keep it here, whatever it was, in case her sister showed up, but she wasn’t having any of that.
“She looked bad. Terrible, to tell you the truth, so I said I’d go get her something cold to drink and I went on in the house, but when I come back out, she was already halfway down to the creek.”
*
At the place where Vena went into the creek, the water was only ankle deep, but by the time she reached midstream, her boots were filled. She pulled them off, emptied them, then, cradling one in each arm, fought for balance on the sharp stones beneath her stockinged feet.
Much of the far bank had washed away, but she could see that the outcrop of rock which shielded the secret place was still intact.
From the day they’d discovered the narrow crevice beneath the rock ledge, just wide enough for the Prince Albert can, she and Helen had hidden small surprises for each other there—arrow-heads, fossils, eagle feathers, stones shaped like stars and apples and whales. Sometimes they’d leave buckeyes or a favorite poem, and once, Helen had been delighted to find that Vena had left her a tiny porcelain rabbit with ruby chips for eyes.
They’d even gone there together on the morning they left for good to hide their mother’s cheap gold locket which the woman their daddy married had claimed for her own.
When they left, they knew they’d never return to that secret place again, but now, as Vena waded from the water, she felt certain it had been visited one more time.
She tossed her soggy boots on the bank and climbed to the over-hang, then reached into the crevice, but her hands were larger now.
She forced her fingers between the rough stone, scraping skin from her knuckles and breaking off fingernails until she was finally able to pull the can free.
She scooted down, dropped onto the muddy bank, pried open the rusted lid and pulled out a folded piece of brown paper torn from a grocery sack.
Her hands were trembling as she unfolded it, but when she saw the writing, she could hardly believe it was Helen’s.
The words were jumbled, crooked letters written on top of others, like the scribblings of a child.
My Dearest Vena, I leave this letter because I know you will come for it. I have a baby named Tioga, so tiny he fits into the palm of my hand, a sweet baby who never cries but he is cold. I wrapped him in a piece of sheep wool and put him in the blue jewelry box you gave me but he is still cold. I burn fires to keep him warm but the wind blows out the flames and the sun is too far away. He talks to me sometimes and tells me to let him go but I know when you find us you will make him well. You could always make them well. I was so happy when I had him inside me but then I saw two crows in the same tree and you know what mama always says about that. You were always the strong one but I was too scared by the questions. I found a book with the answers but the pages were burned. Did you know I always wanted to be like you because you are good and have strength. I have always loved you.
Helen
Vena read the letter only once before she pressed the paper tightly between the palms of her hands as if she could force the words into her flesh and warm them.
Then she heard the voices of children playing upstream where she saw two thin brown-skinned girls, herself at six, standing chest deep in the water, keeping Helen afloat, one hand beneath her neck, the other at the small of her back.
Just relax, Helen.
I can’t. I’m scared.
Move your hands like I showed you.
But I’ll go under.
No, you won’t. I’ll be right beside you.
Promise?
Cross my heart and hope to die.
Vena watched as the girls began moving downstream, saw herself sidestepping in the water, still supporting Helen as they moved with the current.
Stay with me, Vena, till I’m ready.
I will.
As they slid past her, Vena heard Helen calling, her voice filled with wonder.
I’m doing it, Vena! I’m doing it! You can let me go now. . . .
I’m not scared anymore.
Then Vena slipped soundlessly into the creek, and as the water washed over her, she released the torn brown paper and watched it float away.
B
EFORE THE OFFICIAL beginning of summer, Sequoyah was already baking in the heat. Most days the temperature climbed into the mid-nineties with thunderheads rolling in by late afternoon.
A tornado raked the southern edge of town on the sixteenth of June, knocking out electricity for a few hours, uprooting some trees, blowing down what was left of the old drive-in screen and destroying Henry Brister’s trailer.
But the trailer had been unoccupied since Henry, by then fitted with prostheses, had settled out of court with the plastic factory for two million dollars, an event which attracted the attention of a number of women anxious to help him recover from the loss of his thumbs and his wife. And on the day of his marriage to a pretty, divorced mother of three, Henry had moved his new family into the finest house on the lake, an area untouched by the storm.
Wanda Sue was still rattling with tales about the woman Henry had married when Big Fib Fry disappeared, news that nearly felled her with gossip overload.
Certain that Big Fib had run away with his paramour, Frances Dunn, who dropped out of sight the same day, Wanda Sue pointed out that she, and she alone, had known from the beginning what was going on.
But a week later, when Frances and Luter returned from Aca-pulco where they’d celebrated their reunion with a second honey-moon, Wanda Sue turned uncharacteristically silent, at least for a couple of hours.
The disappearance of Big Fib, however, remained a mystery, heightened a few days later when Little Fib found his daddy’s straw hat in a soybean field where he swore he saw strange circles of scorched earth, leading some to believe that Big Fib had been ab-ducted by aliens again.
The summer brought other changes, most far less dramatic, but still worthy of comment by Wanda Sue on a slow day.
As a result of a radio trivia contest on a Fort Smith station, Soldier won a three-day trip to Las Vegas. His wife, a Southern Baptist who held that gambling was a sin, declared she was staying home. But Quinton, believing that only by faith would a man draw to an inside straight, accepted Soldier’s invitation to go along.
After they checked into the Golden Nugget, they pooled their money and sat down to a game of draw poker. When they checked out the next morning, two days earlier than planned and with less than five dollars between them, Quinton, repentant, confessed that he might have tested his faith a few too many times.
Wilma Driver’s three youngest grandchildren came for their annual summer visit of two weeks which caused Rex to come down with a severe case of scaly eczema and left Wilma nearly addicted to Valium.
Erin, just turned fifteen, made off with Wilma’s new Lincoln one night, then returned it at three the next morning with a half bottle of orange-flavored vodka in the front seat and a pair of briefs in the back. Robby, the budding pyromaniac, set fire to the doghouse, but fortunately, Wilma’s poodle, Nipper, was in her lap at the time. And Ashley, the youngest, sat in the yard every night, holding aloft a strangely shaped crystal to receive messages from her home planet, Klynot, where she claimed Big Fib had been taken.
Hooks Red Eagle had a stroke in early July. Though minor, he was left with enough impairment in his right arm and leg to make it impossible for him to get in and out of his johnboat. But declaring he’d rather be dead than give up fishing, he sold his bait shop and used the money to buy a pontoon boat he could manage, then rigged up a contraption which allowed him to haul in the big ones with the use of only one good hand.
A sudden outbreak of violence and vandalism, blamed on the op-pressive heat of midsummer, began when one of Wanda Sue’s nephews sent a jack handle flying through the window of the Mercantile because they didn’t have the shoes he wanted in his size.
Then a late night fight at the Hi-Ho where the Mosier brothers fought each other over a game of shuffleboard left one with a punc-tured lung and the other missing the tip of his tongue.