The Language of Sycamores (13 page)

Uncle Bobby returned his attention to me. “You a Jehovah’s Witness or somethin’?”

I smiled with my best sales smile and said, “No. Did you want me to be?”

The joke actually won a bit of a laugh, and he relaxed his posture, bracing one boot on an overturned log by the fence. “You’re a funny lady.” Pulling a tobacco can from his jeans pocket, he took a pinch and crammed it in his lower lip. “You with the welfare?”

“You know those government people don’t work on Sunday.”

“Ain’t that the truth?” He liked me better already. We were, as we say in sales, building a rapport. “What was it you said you come for?”

I rested one hand on the fence, standing close enough to smell a mixture of tobacco, grease, sweat, and stale beer. “To get a permission form signed for Dell. There’s a kids’ day camp in town next week, and I was hoping she could come.”

“It cost anything?”

“No.” My hopes crept up. He was leaning forward, nodding—all the signs of a client about to take the bait. “It’s not a big deal or anything. Just kids from around the area and some volunteer teachers. They’ll learn some songs and dances for a couple weeks, then do a performance at the end.”

Scoffing, he wiped a stray drop of tobacco. “Sounds like one of them ignorant do-gooder things. What good is singin’ and dancin’ gonna do kids out here? Kids around here got plenty of work to do.” He pointed at Dell. “She needs to get her butt in there and clean up all them dirty dishes.”

Dell squirmed and took a step toward the house, and Uncle Bobby
straightened away from the fence. I could feel the rapport breaking down. So could Dell. She looked ready to give up and go wash dishes.

“I can help her do that,” I heard myself say. “Maybe by the time we’re done, her grandmother will wake up, and I can ask her about day camp.”

I took a step backward, starting toward the door with Dell, wondering what Uncle Bobby’s reaction would be. He didn’t seem to want me going into the house. He vacillated a moment, then stuck his hand across the fence so quickly that I drew back out of reflex. “Give me the thing and I’ll sign it.”

I didn’t ask whether he was legally able to sign Dell’s form; I just handed it to him and smiled. “Great, thanks. You’ve really helped me out a bunch.”

Snatching the paper, he flipped through the pages, then searched his pockets for a pen. I handed him one from my purse, and he found the signature line, talking to Dell as he signed. “What about you, girl? You really want to spend two weeks at kiddie camp, singin’ and dancin’ with a bunch of little butt-heads from town?”

Dell didn’t answer, just stared at her toes. For a mortifying instant, I thought that here in this dingy yard, under the scrutiny of Uncle Bobby, she was going to say no. Her cheeks went flush as he glanced up from the paper and pulled his pen away. “I asked you a question, little girl. You wanna go sing and dance with the white folks, or don’t ya?”

“Uh-huh.” Her voice was little more than a whisper, a choked sound she could barely force from her throat. She was afraid to say yes.

“Fine by me,” he muttered, then finished signing the paper and handed it to me. “There ya go. She’s all yours.” He slanted a narrow look at Dell. “Now, tell your friend good-bye and git your butt in there and wash them dishes. There ain’t any clean plates left.” The log on which his foot was braced tumbled over, and he kicked it irritably, ready for me to leave.

I followed Dell a few steps to the dirt path, which would take her to the front porch and me to the yard gate. Her into this world, and me back to mine. “Are you going to be O.K.?” I asked quietly, turning my back to Uncle Bobby, still very aware that he was watching.

“Mm-hmm.” She squinted past me, watching him. “So am I gonna go to Jumpkids tomorrow morning?”

“You betcha,” I answered, unable to contain my enthusiasm, even here in this place. “I’ll come by for you first thing in the morning. Seven forty-five. Camp check-in starts at eight thirty.”

Her brows drew together as she glanced around my shoulder. I wondered what she was looking at. “I’ll just come over to your place. ’K?”

“O.K. I’ll be . . .”

A crash and a string of curse words brought me up short. Dell jumped back, her eyes widening, and I spun around just in time to see Uncle Bobby drop his pants right there in the driveway. Wildly batting his skin and spitting out obscenities, he ran for the water hose, grabbed the squirter and sprayed his pale, thin, hairy legs, then rinsed territory I didn’t even want to think about underneath his faded purple underwear.

The dog bounded to the end of his chain, yipping gleefully, ready for a game of chase.

Dell turned her back, biting her lip, desperately trying not to laugh. “Guess there was red ants in that log.”

“Guess so.” A puff of laughter slipped past my lips as Uncle Bobby ran around the corner of the house, still dragging the hose and spraying water into his underwear. When he was gone, Dell and I burst into laughter, collapsing against each other as the dog dashed back and forth on the end of his chain, trying to see what had become of Uncle Bobby.

“Rowdy, h-hush,” Dell called. I was struck by how good it felt to see her really let loose and laugh. “Row-deee!”

The dog ignored her command, and just kept yapping. Somewhere in the distance, Uncle Bobby hollered another string of obscenities, and Dell sobered. “I better go get my dog.” She sighed, seeming sorry, but not surprised, that the moment was over. In her world, joy was fleeting.

“All right. I’ll see you in the morning, bright and early.” I couldn’t keep the excitement from my voice. She might have been hesitant about what tomorrow would bring, but I couldn’t wait. I had a sense of something wonderful just around the corner.

The dog quieted to a series of low yips and playful growls, and Dell walked with me to the yard gate, not ready to say good-bye. Pausing just outside the fence, I waited to see if she wanted to ask something.

“Is everything all right?” A dozen questions rushed into my mind, but I knew if I pushed, she would back away. “Here . . . I mean. Do you want me to stay? I could help you get the dishes done.”

Twisting her lips to one side, she glanced toward the house, then back at me, taking in my silk suit. “No. It’s all right. You’d get dirty.”

“Are you sure? I don’t mind.” Was it just the sadness of that place she didn’t want me to see, or did things happen in there that she didn’t want anyone to know about? What secrets was she hiding?

“Granny wouldn’t like it. She don’t like people coming around.”

“O.K.” It seemed anything but O.K. I felt like I was tossing something precious into a landfill and hoping it would still be there when I came back. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

She shifted from one foot to the other and crossed her arms over herself, but didn’t leave. “You’re gonna go with me in the morning, right? You aren’t gonna leave?”

“Yes. I’m going to be there with you. Wouldn’t miss it.” Remembering what Kate had said earlier, I leaned closer, stroking a hand over her hair. “But listen. In a couple of days, I’ll have to head back to Boston. Kate told me you said something about me staying the whole time, and as much as I’d like to do that, I can’t. We’re sort of . . . in a tough time at home right now. I have to get back.”

Her dark eyes searched my face, reflecting the afternoon sky like mirrors. She had a wise look, the tranquil expression of a very old soul. “Grandma Rose told me you’d stay awhile.” She presented it like a fact, as if she knew more about my life than I did.

I tucked her hair behind her ear, gazing into that shy, quiet face; not quite a child, not yet a woman, filled with so many secrets. “Honey, Grandma Rose is gone. Kate is worried about the fact that you think she can still talk to you.”

“She
does
talk to me,” she said, her gaze earnest, tender, a million miles deep, her voice little more than a hush of breeze.

“Dell, she’s gone,” I whispered, my heart aching for both of us. “She isn’t here anymore.”

Dell only smiled the slight, trusting smile of a child who still believed in things she could not see. “She’s with God,” she replied, turning away from me. “And God is everywhere.”

Chapter 13

I
took the long way home from Dell’s house, went around the mountain, as my grandmother liked to call it. When we drove home from town during our summer visits, she would sometimes say, “Well, my fine ladies, shall we go the direct way, or shall we go round the mountain?” It was an unusual bit of whimsy for a woman who usually didn’t believe in wasting time or gasoline.

Kate would always pipe up quickly and vote for the most direct route. Sometimes I would, as well. Even at a young age, I knew that the trip around the mountain would give Grandma thirty minutes of uninterrupted time during which she would tell the stories of her Depression-era girlhood. The stories were, of course, intended to point out how spoiled and overindulged we modern children were. It was a lecture Kate and I learned to hate, and one of the things that eventually drove us away from her. We did not feel spoiled and overindulged; we felt ignored and invisible. It hardly seemed like we deserved a lecture for that.

But sometimes, even though I knew Kate would groan and sneer at me, or maybe
because
I knew it would goad my little sister, I’d say, “Yes, let’s go around the mountain.” Grandma would nod, turn the Oldsmobile off the main road, take a deep breath, and we’d be off—on the journey and on the lecture.

Perhaps it was the artist in me, or just the fact that I could tune out Grandma’s lectures, but I loved those trips around the mountain. The gravel roads were narrow and ancient, curving slowly up mountainsides, plunging deep into shaded valleys, where crystal streams wandered over beds of multicolored river rock, worn smooth over time. Those places had the feel of being old and untouched, magical. Even now, the unlikely network of roads, the distinguishing features of each valley, were ingrained in my memory. I could recall the two places we always stopped. The first was in a valley where an old wooden bridge crossed the river. We climbed from the car, slipped through the rusted barbed wire fence, and picked wildflowers in a valley where a waterfall tumbled over smooth gray shale into a deep pool.

We stayed there long enough to play mermaid princess and hunt for shiny stones, or carve our initials into the chunks of brown sandstone beside the water, where long ago other young people had carved their own childhood marks. When we climbed out to dry, Grandma left us sunning on the rock shelf and wandered upstream to pick wildflowers. On the way home, we stopped at the family graveyard on the back side of our farm, where we placed the flowers on the grave of my grandfather, who was little more than a shadow in the farthest corners of our memories.

My mind swept back in time, clearing away the dust on those memories until the essence of my childhood was so strong that I could feel it all around me. I knew that I would find the old wooden bridge and the mermaid pool in the next valley.

They’re probably gone by now
.
That was a long time ago. . . .
But I found myself hoping, the way we all hope that our childhood places will be eternal, a sort of proof that time can be stopped, after all.

I held my breath as I topped the hill, and the car wound slowly downward, sliding silently beneath the thick canopy of overhanging branches, moving in a rhythm of sunlight and shadow. I stretched to see ahead, a little farther past the trees, around the next bend, until finally I caught a glimpse of something. Something metal and new, glistening in the patchy sunlight. My eyes took in the reality that my heart had refused to frame. The old wooden bridge was gone. Time had
moved on and everything had changed. On the far side of the river, someone had cleared the overgrowth of cedars, put in a culvert, a driveway, and a new metal gate. The rusted wire fence that once hung in loose and broken strands, allowing Kate, Grandma, and me to slip easily into our magical spot, had been replaced by a new woven wire fence, silver and clean, unwelcoming like the bridge. A new gate lay beside the fence, not yet placed on its hinges but ready to soon bar trespassers from the place. The wildflowers, at least around the gateway, had succumbed to the bulldozer, as well.

It’s gone,
I thought, tasting the salt of raw emotion in my throat. Even though it shouldn’t have mattered that much, I stopped the car on the bridge, gazed down the river toward the bend, and started to cry. I wondered if even the mermaid pool was gone, dozed away like the wildflowers and the old fence. Did I even want to look? If the pool was gone, as well, it would be proof that there was nothing left here but memory.

Things are changing.
I didn’t want things to change. I didn’t want my life to change. I didn’t want to lose my job, or face having cancer again, or go back and investigate the reasons why James and I never talked about the baby we lost. I didn’t want to relive the pain of the miscarriage or consider how I had gotten from there to here. I wanted to just go along, day in, day out, in my rut. Busy. Comfortable. Passing time. Mindless of life or its meanings.

Pulling the car to the roadside, I stepped out, moving slowly through the gate, my steps directed by memory and a need I couldn’t put into words. The old paths were no longer visible. The way was always hard to find, but Grandma Rose knew it intuitively. She went through the meadow, into the trees, as if she belonged there. Ahead, I could see her now, disappearing into the undergrowth, passing through a tangle of brambles that seemed impenetrable.

I followed the memory, slipping through the entwined branches. The thorns snagged my suit, but nothing seemed to matter. I followed the path, seeking the way to the water’s edge, drawn by the sound of the river. As I moved, it grew louder—not the soft, quiet whisper of water trickling smoothly among rocks, but the low roar of it tumbling
over the rock shelf into the pool below. My hopes leapt up, and I pushed through the last of the underbrush, emerging onto the riverbank, rushing downstream to that old place.

“It’s here. It’s still here,” I heard myself whisper as I stood above the falls, breathing in the scent of water and damp sandstone. Silk suit and pumps forgotten, I picked my way down the uneven tangle of boulders to the pool. Beneath me, the bare, brown legs of a ten-year-old girl traveled easily over the rocks, moving from memory, finding every foothold, every bit of space large enough to anchor a hand.

A sound slipped from my throat as I reached the bottom—something between a laugh and a sob. I stood gazing up at the waterfall, a mist of droplets touching my face. It felt good to be there. Oh, it felt good! A sense of joy lifted my heart, the same joy I felt when I sat at the piano and found music again. This was another part, I realized, another bit of my authentic self. Somewhere inside was the little girl who wasn’t afraid to dream impractical dreams, who believed she could be a mermaid, a princess, an actress, a classical pianist.

I sidestepped along the narrow shelf near the falls, sliding my hands carefully along the rough, damp sandstone, searching for the letters we had carved into the rocks so long ago. One more step and I could see our initials. KEV, Karen Elaine Vongortler. KAV, Kate Allison Vongortler. Above each name was a tiny etching that looked like a crown—a symbol we had learned from the older carvings on the rock. A symbol that Grandma told us was the mark of the mermaid queens.

Taking another step, I felt for the other initials, remembering the day that Kate and I had found them there. We were surprised that others had been to our secret spot before us.
Who?
we asked Grandma.
Who had been there?

She gazed at the rock and then at us, her eyes a mixture of melancholy and contemplation. “The mermaid queens,” she said finally. “But they were gone a long time ago.” Turning away, she walked up the bank to the Queen Anne’s lace. We knew better than to ask any more questions.

I looked at the initials now, running my hands along the tiny crowns we had tried so hard to imitate, then tracing the letters. All at once, I understood the identity of the mermaid queens, and the reason
Grandma wouldn’t tell us more about them. BEG, Bernice Ella Gray; SMG, Sadie Marie Gray; AHG, Augustine Hope Gray.

My grandmother and her sisters were the first to come to this place. For reasons we might never know, they left it and they left each other. In her letter to Augustine, Grandma said she had erased this place from her memory, but that wasn’t true. She brought us here because she had not forgotten this place or her sisters. She hadn’t ceased to need it, even though she was too stubborn to admit to that longing.

I thought of Kate and me. I had been drifting away from Kate for years, even these last few years, when she was trying so hard to pull me back. I had been telling myself I didn’t need this place, this family, my sister—that my life was complete as it was. It was a deception I practiced until I had it down perfectly. The truth was that part of me needed all of those things. It was the weakest part, I had always thought. My father had taught me that to need anyone, to not be self-contained and self-sufficient, was weakness. But now I understood that this need was not my weakness; it was my humanity.

I pushed away from the rock, stretching my arms outward as I did when I was a child, embracing sky and sunlight and water, letting myself fall backward—just fall and fall and fall and fall, until the water caught me. I sank into the pool and the cool water surrounded me, washing away . . . everything.

When I came to the surface, I felt new. I felt as if I’d been burning with a fever for thirty years, since that eleven-year-old winter when I let go of my childhood. The fever was finally gone, every thirst suddenly quenched. I lay in the water, gazing upward at the sycamores, listening.

I don’t know how long I lay there, my ears just below the current, enveloped in the silence beneath the surface. An object floated by, touched my cheek, and I brushed it away, then reached for it again, my hands closing over something round and wet. I held it up. A tiny peach, still hard and green. Not yet ripe, but somehow cut loose from the tree. What would it be doing here, out in the woods?

Who planted the peach tree in such an unlikely place, deep in a glen of sycamores where no one would find it? Perhaps the seeds floated down the river from some fine plantation far away. . . .

I remembered the words from Augustine’s letter to Rose. Their secret place had to be nearby. That was why their initials were carved in the rocks. This was where they came to hide from their mother, to hide from the world. Somewhere nearby were the sister trees.

Swimming to the edge of the pool, I stood up unsteadily, stumbling on the loose river stones, dimly aware of my wet clothes and shoes. Letting myself fall into the water in my dress clothes should have seemed foolish and ridiculous, but at that moment it seemed like a bold adventure. I wanted to find my grandmother’s secret place, to add one more piece to the puzzle of my family’s past.

The river led me through a tunnel of overhanging branches and into the clearing beyond, where the banks became less steep, the slopes rising gently into thick stands of primrose and wild huckleberry. A pair of deer startled as I rounded the bend. Raising their heads, they stood frozen in place, fanning their tails and snorting warily. I stopped, enjoying the exhilaration of being so near something wild and beautiful.

Finally, the deer turned slowly and disappeared down a trail through the underbrush. I followed, slipping quietly past the primrose and low-growing huckleberry, just beginning to fill with tiny wild blue-berries.

Beyond the stand of berries, the way began to clear and the trail became more visible, passing through the deep magenta of wild sweet pea and the puffy white of blooming clover. Ahead, the trail led through a grove of twisted trees, some only now surrendering the final blossoms of spring and forming tiny green fruit.

I followed the trail through the peach trees, imagining three little girls there picking sweet amber fruit, inviting one another to imaginary playhouses for tea. I could hear their voices somewhere just beyond view as I continued to the clearing’s edge, where the grove opened into a tiny meadow. The glen was carpeted with new spring grass, shady and serene beneath the thick, far-reaching branches of three ancient sycamores, their limbs rising like castles toward the sky. The sister trees. I stood beneath them, looking into the broad, waving leaves, connected to the past in a way I couldn’t explain.

A dove called somewhere off in the distance, its low, mournful
sound making me aware that it was already late afternoon. Kate and James would be wondering where I was. I had no idea how long it had been since I pulled the car off the road and stumbled out. An hour? Maybe longer?

A cool breeze stirred as I made my way back to the road. The air carried the scent of a storm coming, and somewhere far away thunder rumbled. I shivered as I climbed into the car, the seat pressing my wet clothes against my skin. A glance in the rearview mirror brought back reality. My makeup was gone and my hair clung to my face in damp, dark strands. How would I explain this to everyone at the farm?