Franny Parker (13 page)

“Well, that's a mighty sad story, but I still haven't had my turn,” Izzy said and sighed.

“Just tell us then,” Grandma scoffed.

“It's a doozy, but it's not just mine.” Izzy elbowed Grandma Rae, who elbowed her right back.

“Tell us!” I begged.

Izzy hesitated, eyeing Grandma. “All right for you, Rae. I'm sharing it.”

Grandma rolled her eyes.

“What? What is it?” Sidda asked.

We were dying to know.

“The worst!” Izzy said, her eyes dancing mischievously.

“Oh, stop,” Grandma Rae scolded her.

“Not in front of the children!” Dotty said, her eyes darting from Izzy to us. Dotty knew, too? Now we were intrigued.

“Please tell!” Sidda begged.

Izzy set her hands on the table and leaned forward dramatically. “One year, about forty years ago, we shared a town garden. We were young girls then, newlyweds without any children yet. We set it up right by the river and took turns watering. I did the beans, Dotty did the tomatoes, and your grandma did the peppers.”

“Don't forget the eggplant!” Faye added.

“What's the big deal about a garden?” Sidda frowned.

“I'm getting there,” Izzy said with a smile. “Well, that summer was a scorcher, almost as bad as this one. So one day, after lugging the buckets back and forth, I said to myself, ‘This is crazy. I'm going in that river before I melt.' But of course I had no bathing suit.”

“So what'd you do?” I asked.

“I went in my birthday suit.”

“Your what?” Sidda asked.

“I skinny-dipped!” Izzy said.

Dotty looked away, her cheeks glowing red.

“By the town garden? In public?” Sidda gasped. Right then, Izzy took on a new light for both of us.

“You bet your bottom!” Izzy smiled. “Then your grandma came by.”

Grandma Rae sat up straighter. “I told her she was crazy. Plumb crazy.”

“And?” Izzy prodded.

“And then I joined her.” Grandma Rae said it matter-of-factly.

Sidda and I dropped our jaws. It was one of the greatest shocks I had ever experienced. Like pickles and ice cream, skinny-dipping and Grandma Rae did not go together.

“More tea?” Grandma asked, as if Izzy had merely told us about the weather. And then everybody laughed, except Sidda, who kept right on staring at them as if she'd had the wind knocked out of her. But I knew what she was feeling.

It's a strange thing, seeing family in that way. I'd only ever
seen Mama as a mother, and Rae as simply a grandma. It never occurred to me that they could have existed before me, could do something as crazy as skinny-dip in the town river. It was a small betrayal. And though we laughed about it then with girlish embarrassment, I understand now what I learned that day. That the world outside our barnyard fence was large and strange, a shock to the gauzy comfort I had wrapped myself in all those years.

W
hat book are you on?” This time I was doing the asking. Pearl was too busy driving me crazy.

All evening, Pearl had paced my room, trying to find an appropriate place to lay out her sleeping bag. We were supposed to be having a sleepover at her house, but Mable had caught a cold. We'd moved the location to my house, something we didn't normally do, since Pearl felt my room had inferior sleeping arrangements. So far the floor was too dangerous (“Heaven knows what's living under your bed!”) and the rug was too fluffy (“Allergens! I have a very sensitive nose, you know”).

“What about my bed?” I offered. “We can bunk together.”

Pearl frowned. “How clean are your sheets?”

That had done it, so I'd asked the meanest thing I could think of, feeling like the horrible person I was as soon as the words tumbled from my mouth. But Pearl was smiling.

“My fifteenth,” she practically sang.

“Your what?”

“Technically fifteen, but almost sixteen.”

I stared at her. “Wow, you and Nancy really hit it off!”

“Oh, I quit on Nancy. She took too long.” Pearl spread her sleeping bag on Sidda's side of the room and stood back, scanning the floor appreciatively.

“So what are you reading?”

Pearl fiddled with one of her red curls. “Just some books with Mable,” she answered hesitantly.

“With Mable?” I asked suspiciously.

“Actually, Mable is very advanced for a baby. She likes all kinds of genres.”

“A baby who says
woof
?”

Pearl frowned. “She says
meow
, too, you know.”

I laughed, picturing the look on Mrs. Jones's face. “So what
advanced
books are you and Mable reading?” I pressed.

Pearl bit her lip and whispered,
“Teddy Bear Goes to the Beach.”

“Pearl, that's cheating!”

“It is not!” she cried. “They're real books.”

“For
babies
!” I retorted.

She slumped on the bed. “You don't know what it's like!” Poor Pearl. Driven to baby books by her mother. Just then a car door slammed outside. I jumped.

“Who's here?” Pearl asked.

Mama and Daddy had taken Ben to an early movie. Sidda was at a friend's. But it was too early for any of them to be
home. I went to the window, half expecting to see the police again. Half hoping for word of Lucas. But it was the Busy Bees, pulling into our driveway in Grandma Rae's black town car. They passed the house and parked below, just behind the barn. What could they be doing?

My heart pounded. “I'll be right back,” I told Pearl.

Before the Bee had ended that day, I'd gone out to feed the animals. I'd run into Grandma on her way out, the quilt tucked protectively under her arm. It was the first time she'd taken the quilt home since the Bees had started it.

“Is it done? Can I see it?” I'd asked her.

“Not quite,” she'd said with a shake of her head. “There's a little something still to do.”

And with that she'd headed outside with the others, where the ladies had whispered among themselves in the driveway. There had been a lengthy discussion, with plenty of pointing to the sky, where a full moon was already visible. It was a pale moon, faded into the blue of the late day. I had wondered what it all meant.

Now they were back in my yard, dressed in brightly patterned skirts, staring up at the twilight. I followed their gaze from the window. There, hanging low above our barn, the full-bellied moon glowed strong.

I busied Pearl with making popcorn while I hurried outside. I stepped off the porch into the evening as the Busy Bees tiptoed past our barn. I followed as they made their way to the trail, holding their skirts up out of the grass as they climbed the hill. Quietly I crept behind: heel, toe, heel, toe. The way my
fourth-grade teacher described how Native Americans once moved through the woodlands.

Halfway up the hill the Bees paused in a clearing of pines, and I lowered myself behind a boulder. One by one, they kicked their shoes off, standing barefoot in a half circle.

“Join hands,” sang Grandma Rae. And then it began. Grandma led, dipping and swaying just a little, and the ladies followed, their skirts swooshing around their bare feet. I remembered what Mama said:
These girls can conjure up the rain
. I pressed myself against the rock, feeling a little like a spy. A gentle breeze stirred around us, and the sky darkened. They moved faster.

The Busy Bees murmured the sacred lines at first, then again, more loudly. The wind picked up, licking at my neck. The circle surged.

Dance in a field to the crickets' tune,
a full-moon sky in the afternoon
.

Louder and louder they chanted, hands swinging, heads raised to the heavens. The dust of the summer rose around them like a smoke cloud. Above us the sky shifted, and clouds tumbled. A hard wind began to blow, rustling the grass, bending the young trees.

I sucked in my breath at the strange scene before me. These were not the old ladies who gathered in my dining room with tired feet and soft voices. They became something else, moving like that on the hill: heads thrown back, holding tight to each other, feet pounding a dusty rhythm. Before me was a tribe.

The air grew sharp and cold, and I ducked my head when
something stung my eye. Rain! The ladies spun, a swirling blur of bodies, while the sky rumbled above. It was raining. I turned and ran down the hill, jumping over rocks as the sky opened up above me and the first pelts of rain hit my back.

Our truck was back in the driveway, and Dad, Ben, and Mama were scurrying around in the growing darkness.

“Get the sheets!” Mama hollered, yanking the clothes from the line.

Ben and I rolled the barn doors closed against the slicing rain.

“Run!” I shouted, as we scrambled across the muddy yard.

Inside, we slapped shut windows that had been open all summer and closed doors tightly behind us.

“Where were you?” Pearl demanded as I toweled myself off in the living room.

Ignoring her, I turned to my parents, who were wiping our muddy prints from the doorway. “Did you see them?” I asked Dad, breathless.

“Who?”

“The Bees!”

I pointed toward the barn, but by then the drive was empty, the tire tracks washed clean away.

O
utside the sky flashed, black clouds rolling over our house. When the lights went out, we huddled around the
stone fireplace, passing popcorn from lap to lap. Ben fell asleep in Dad's arms, and Mama stretched out on the blanket beside me.

“Tell me,” she said.

And so I did.

I told her about the bare feet pounding in the dust and the thumping chants, the swirling skirts and the rolling sky. Sidda's and Pearl's eyes widened suspiciously in the firelight, but it didn't matter. Mama nodded, and I knew she believed. When the fire died down, we went to listen to the rain in our beds.

Hours later, I awoke, thunder and lightning flashing outside my window. I peered outside. There, in the dark sky, our barn glowed. Orange and yellow lines, tracing the barn roof, licking the walls. But it wasn't lightning.

I don't remember screaming
fire
, though Daddy said I woke up the whole house. I also don't remember who called the police, or who ran outside first. I do remember the feeling in my stomach, the wash of heat and pain and fear that filled me up, and the smell of wet grass burning my nose as I ran into the storm.

“Stand back!” yelled Dad as he yanked at the barn door. Through the smoke I saw Snort's head rearing back, his eyes rolled white. Mama ran in with the fire extinguishers, aiming them at the loft, where the flames grew.

“Get the animals!” I cried.

There was a lot of yelling as we uncoiled the hose and
worked the pump, Jax dashing nervously around us. Daddy trotted Snort through the door to Sidda, who shut him safely in the small pen two paddocks away. Pearl appeared with buckets, passing them to Dad, who threw them at the ladder where the flames were climbing down.

When there was a steady stream of water soaking the walls, I went straight to the stalls, hauling cages out of the smoky darkness.

“Franny, get out,” Dad yelled. “You'll get hurt!”

Someone rushed in behind and grabbed me. It was Mama, and she looped one arm around me and scooped up the mice with the other.

“Hurry!” she cried.

We emptied the first stall, dropping the cages on the wet grass outside. Two boxes of mice, and a baby squirrel. Back in the second stall, Mama grabbed Speed Bump. Behind her, the opossums squeaked in the smoke.

“Stay with me!” Mama yelled, hurrying out. But instead, I raced to the opossums and yanked on their door. The latch was stuck. I yanked again, rattling the whole cage, but it wouldn't open. The opossums trembled inside.

“Everyone out,” Dad yelled from the doorway. “Now!”

I tried hoisting the cage up onto my shoulder, but it was too heavy. “I'll be back,” I told the opossums. I covered my mouth and ran for the door, right into Daddy, who'd come for me.

“Daddy,” I screamed. “It's the opossums; their door is stuck, we have to get them!”

He looked at the barn, at the flames racing up and down its sides, and pulled me outside. “No, Franny, it's too dangerous.” He coughed.

“We can't leave them,” I cried, turning to Mama.

The tears on her cheeks glowed eerily in the orange light. “I'm so sorry, honey. I'm so sorry.” Mama pulled me tight, leading me away from the barn, to where Sidda and Pearl sat beside the cages with Jax. “Stay here,” she ordered.

Pearl took my hand, and we huddled together, faces flickering as we watched the flames. Jax whined and wiggled nervously beside us.

“It's okay, boy,” I said. But I knew it wasn't. I stared carefully at the barn. The left side was only smoking, as the fire roared largely on the right. There was the side door. I still had time.