Tending to Grace (9 page)

79

“I've been watching this tree for a long while,” Agatha says on our way home. She pulls Bertha over to the side of the road and we wait until the truck sputters off. “Come on, come see.” Agatha leads me to a withered tree that juts out over a stone wall. Its trunk is cracked and crossed like old veins and its bony branches reach out to half a dozen young pines that grow up around it in a dizzy circle.

Ugly tree, I think. “So?”

Agatha pokes me and laughs. “You got to look up, Cornelia. Look up!”

When I do, I see that at the very top the tree has freed itself from its bent body and burst into soft blossom. Dozens of bees buzz through its pink halo, making the slim pines crowding all around look empty-headed.

“Now there's a tree not afraid to be who it is,” says Agatha.

80

“This isn't going to work,” I say, pushing
Butterfly Handbook
toward her. Agatha takes a sip of her tea and looks at the book.

“H-h-h-how am I going to teach you the short
a
sound when all I have are w-words like
mottled dusky wing
?”

She picks up the book and flips through it for a few moments. “This, Cornelia, is a spicebush swallowtail. We'll start there.”

I look down at the page. A large black butterfly with orange and yellow spots at the edge of its wings sits above the words
spicebush
swallowtail.

“How did you read that?” I ask, unbelieving.

“I know what they
look
like, Cornelia. I've seen them since I was a little girl on this farm. Now if I know what they look like, with your help, I should be able to figure out the word. I've just been needin' someone to help me put all the sounds together, that's all.

“Now, let's get started,” she says, popping a sugar cube into her mouth. “I don't have all day.”

81

Several weeks later, we bake blueberry pies and Agatha slowly reads the ingredients while I measure. “When are you goin' to keep up your end of the bargain?” she asks me between the words
sugar
and
cinnamon
.

She doesn't know that I can't. Since the last postcard, I'm sure my mother will come for me.

82

On Saturday, I wake to the clanging of pots and pans. Agatha ignores me when I walk into the kitchen. Dirty dishes and mixing spoons and a pile of cake pans cover my clean counter.

“What are you doing?”

“Making lemon cake.”

She never cooks. “What for?” I wonder how long it will take to scrape the hardening flour paste that clumps along the edge of the kitchen sink.

“To celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?”

“The woods.”

“The woods?” She is nuts. “N-n-no thanks.”

I leave the mess and walk outside to wait for my mother.

83

As the moon rises, Agatha approaches the front step. I knot myself deeper inside myself. She walks up to me with a blanket under her arm, a cake in her hands, and a jug of something to drink over her shoulder. She wears her hat.

“Are you coming?”

“No. I don't want to celebrate the woods. That's ridiculous.”

“I'm celebratin' what smart women have always known. A night in the woods is medicine for the heart.”

She's been eating too many turnips, I'm sure. “I'm not coming.”

“Your choice.” She turns away and walks toward the fields behind the house. I watch her disappear into the darkness.

When I find her half an hour later, she's eaten half the cake.

“Come closer,” she whispers. “I want to show you something over this slope.”

Immediately, I see why she has come. Hundreds of tiny lights zip and blink through the night. Fireflies by the hundreds soar and flit and light up the sky on this starless night.

“Lightning bugs,” she says. “City folks call them fireflies, but up here we call them lightning bugs.”

“They're amazing!” I say, sitting on the blanket beside her.

“They're the perfect insect, you know.” She cuts a slice of lemon cake and hands it to me.

“How so?”

“Well, they don't bite, they don't attack, they don't carry disease, and they're not poisonous. All they do is fly around and put on a show. They're looking for mates.”

“How do you kn-kn-know all that?”

“I've been reading about them.” I think she might be grinning in the darkness.

I smile. “Wh-what else do you know about them?”

“It's not electricity that lights them up. It's a chemical inside them. It helps them find each other.”

We watch them for a while. I wonder when my mother will find me.

I take a sip of the drink. It tastes sweet and thick. “She's coming back.”

Agatha sighs. “Maybe she knows something you don't—that she can't take care of you right now.”

The air feels thin and flat. “She's coming back,” I whisper again.

“Maybe she's not ready.” She pours something from the jug into my cup. “Here, have some.”

“What is it, anyway?”

“It's cider, lemon, strawberries, and whipped cream. We always called it syllabub. It'll sweeten you up, Cornelia.” She laughs a low, sweet melody.

I give her my most sour look, but I don't think she can see it in the darkness.

“Maybe she's not ready,” she says again. “Your ma's like a butterfly that comes out of its chrysalis too soon. Know what happens then?”

I shake my head, certain I don't want to hear.

“Butterflies get strong in the struggle. If you help it out of its chrysalis, it doesn't get to struggle and it's too weak to fly on its own. Your ma, she keeps looking for the easy way out.”

84

Bo walks in the kitchen one day while I am sautéing tofu and garlic. “Are you supposed to be here?”

“He's back at work.”

“Well, you still shouldn't come. Did your m-m-m-mother have the baby?”

Bo smiles. “A girl. I've been reading to her.” She reaches down beside her. “Here, I brought these back. Do you have any more?”

I look at
The Cat in the Hat
. “You could just go to the library. You have your own card now.”

“Yes, but you know which ones to pick, Corney.”

I turn off the heat under the frying pan. “You're going to n-n-n-need harder ones now.” I walk into my room and pull
Harriet the Spy
out of my top drawer. “It's hard, but you'll really love it, Bo.”

She puts it into her backpack.

“Where's Agatha?”

“Out in the woods. Doing whatever it is she does with those trees.”

“Haven't you asked her yet?”

Frankly, I didn't give it much thought anymore. I've been too busy counting the days to my birthday.

“You should go see, Corney, you really should.”

85

When Bo leaves, I follow the path that Agatha's moccasins have worn into the grass this summer. The path begins at old Esther, who has lost a window again. From there, the trail passes the barn and winds into the woods and stops at a tepee.

The saplings that she has stripped of branches and bark through the summer now stand in the shade of a towering oak. The tepee is twice my height; pine boughs cover and blanket the outside in deep mossy green.

“It's beautiful,” I say as Agatha walks out of the woods with her arms filled with pine needles. She stops when she sees me, smiles, and then walks up and pours her armload of needles inside. When she crawls back out, she grins.

“It's for you,” she says. “Sometimes a person needs a cocoon for a while.”

I bend down and peek in through the opening: pine needles mound into a thick mattress. My eyes fill with tears as I crawl inside.

86

I spend so much time in my tepee, the month of October passes with me inside. I cover the pine needles with blankets and lie down and look up at the long thin poles and the way Agatha has stripped them of their bark. That gets me to thinking about stripping my own bark.

One morning after I wash the breakfast dishes, I take one of the notebooks I bought for Bo. I lie back and look up at the way Agatha has interlocked the poles at the top of the tepee, and I think about my life. Then I write
My Life, Chapter One
on the cover.

I open to the first page and my words fly. I forget everything I know about poetic meter and active voice and the right word and the not-so-right word because my words come too fast and too furious to slow down.

I write the story of my mother's leaving. It wasn't like one day she was here and the next day she left. It's like one day she left a little. And then the next day she left a little more. And then she started falling asleep on the couch instead of hugging me. I would crawl up with her and put her arms around me and snuggle against her. But that's when I was little. Later, her arms got thin and then it didn't feel so safe anymore.

I prayed a lot then.
Please make my mother not leave me
. But God didn't listen. Why?

And then I write the story of me leaving myself. I remember when I started stuttering. It wasn't like one day I didn't stutter and then one day I did. It was one day I stuttered just a little. And then I got scared and the next day I stuttered a little more. Before I knew it I was stuttering all the time. I started noticing that when I stuttered, people looked away. That hurt worse than the stuttering, so I started looking away from myself. I'd look at my feet, the ground, the floor because I was too scared to look them in the eyes. I stopped talking. I got too scared to try.

When I was eight, I began to pray,
Please, God, help me not stutter.
But God didn't listen. Why?

Now I live with Agatha. She's built me this tepee that I spend hours inside each day. I pray my mother will come, but my birthday comes and goes with no sign of her. God still isn't listening. Why?

And then I cry. The wound in my throat finally lets go.

87

A pile of rubble sits outside my tepee door. The branches Agatha cut off the poles, the bark, the leaves she raked before she began construction, the dirt she cleared to level the ground, all this she left in a wide pile about six feet from the door.

Usually I march right past, ignoring another of her messes, but today as I climb out into the light, my face still wet, I notice something new.

A tiny woodland flower grows up out of the ruins, so delicate and wispy it could be a white fairy reaching for the sun. The stem is slim as a strand of spaghetti, and it wobbles a bit, but it dances a rhythm all its own as the pines sway above.

It waves to me as I kneel down and touch its little face.

88

Warm Milk looks up at me as I put
To Kill a
Mockingbird
on the counter.

“Do you have a library card?”

I shake my head.

“You've been in here before, haven't you?” She smiles at me and I nod.

“Well, then. It will only take a minute.” She turns to her computer. “Your name, please?”

Think about anything,
anything
else, I tell myself. They used to kill saints in all sorts of horrible ways; think about that. My mother told me this during one of her “why are you wasting a perfectly good afternoon sitting in an empty church” speeches. They stoned them and burned them and dunked them in hot oil and pressed them. Pressing is when they made someone lie on the ground and they put a board on top of them and then they put stones on, one at a time, until the person died.

Tell my heart it is not being pressed right now, I think.

Warm Milk looks up at me again. “I need your name.”

“Ah-ah-ah-ah.” I press my foot into the floor. “C-c-c ...” I stop, start over. “C-c-cornelia Th-th-th-thornhill.” I look down, then force my eyes up. Warm Milk is not looking away.

89

I walk up the church steps, open the door, and step into a quiet that covers and draws me to a middle pew. A candle burns inside a glass globe. We are alone, the candle and I. Sun pours through the windows and sends shards of greens and blues and yellows across my skin. The windows each depict a scene from the Bible. I don't really know what they mean. It doesn't matter. I come for the quiet. A snowflake striking pavement would make more noise than I hear in this church.

I do this a lot now, stop in on my way home from the library, now that I have a library card. I think it's awfully nice that they leave the door unlocked. One of these days, if someone asks what I'm doing, I could say I'm trying to figure out if my mother was right when she said only fools and hypocrites come to church. Maybe people who go to a place like this are just trying to make sense of things. Maybe they come here because when they do, they start to feel better.

I feel kind of soft in the center, kind of peaceful, kind of free. Who knows, maybe my head's all foggy from the incense that hangs over everything. That's what my mother would say. But I get the feeling she'd be wrong.

Most of my life I have been a bird tethered to the ground, my speech the leather strap that binds me to earth. But as I sit here in the silence, I feel the tethers loosen, and I can almost fly.

90

We sit in the truck across the street from the high school as a bus pulls up and the door squeaks open.

“I'll go with you.” Agatha buttons her coat and straightens her hat. The hat seems bigger, more purple this morning.

“No,” I say quickly. “I'll be all right.” But I don't move. Students begin walking up the steps to the school, past a man wearing a blue suit and tie, probably the principal, and through a set of glass doors and into the school.

Everyone carries a backpack. I look down at Agatha's canvas sack that sits on my lap and I sigh.

“I put a sandwich in there,” Agatha says, turning to me.

I have forgotten lunch. I pull out a sandwich wrapped in a blue bandanna. I unwrap it and lift a corner of the whole wheat bread, sniffing for mushrooms or fiddleheads.

“Don't worry.” She laughs. “It's just cheese.”