The Secrets of Tree Taylor

The morning the gun went off, I was thinking about Tolstoy and the Beatles, and maybe, if I’m being honest here, a little about Ray Miller and how his eyes were perfect little pieces of sky.

The Beatles I thought about all the time, especially Paul. My friend Sarah could have Ringo. Just give me Paul McCartney.

I wouldn’t have been thinking about Tolstoy if he hadn’t popped up in my writing notebook as my first quote of the summer. All year I had collected quotations from famous writers and had copied one quote onto each page of my otherwise empty social studies notebook. Our school library had biographies of writers, but the public library had whole books of quotations. My primary goal for the summer was to become a great writer—at least, great enough to earn me a spot on the school newspaper my freshman year.

My first quote happened to be from Tolstoy:

How on earth was I supposed to reveal the inner workings of my very soul?

To be fair, I had tried to write something dear and necessary—well, worthy—the day before the shooting. I figured I’d need a worthy article to convince Mrs. Woolsey to give me the only freshman reporting spot at Hamilton High next year. Two seniors would run the paper, but each class got one reporter. I wanted ours to be me.

As for “necessary,” well, that’s what this position was to me. Being on the
Blue and Gold
staff would be my first step toward becoming a real writer. An investigative journalist. Or maybe a female version of Walter Cronkite, interrupting regularly scheduled television programming with breaking news for the nation.

Randy Ridings had been editor of the
Blue and Gold
, and now he ran the town’s only newspaper, the
Hamiltonian
. And Becky Smith, also an ex-staffer, got a job in the mailroom of the
Kansas City Star
last year.

I sure needed that
Blue and Gold
job a heap more than Wanda Hopkins did. Wanda hadn’t written anything important last year when she was our junior high reporter. Since the junior high occupied the same building as the high school, seventh and eighth graders got one reporter for the
Blue and Gold
. But Wanda didn’t report. She’d been too caught up reigning as queen over her many friends.
And too busy entertaining Ben, then Dennis, then Eric … then Ray.

Ray, with the eyes like two pieces of sky.

I tried writing about the Cold War and the Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev banging his boot on a podium and declaring, “We will bury you!” I tried writing about President Kennedy’s promise in front of God and everybody to put a man on the moon by 1970 … and how embarrassing it would be if we didn’t get there before the Russians.

But I ended up ripping the pages from my notebook and pitching them into the wastebasket.

What did world events have to do with me, Tree Taylor, age thirteen, living in Hamilton, Missouri, population 1,701? (And that census had been taken before the shoe factory closing that forced dozens of families, including our census taker, to leave town.) We hadn’t even been all that worried about the Cuban missiles aimed at the U.S. What would the Communists want with us farmers anyway?

Nope. Everything dear and necessary happened far away. And certainly not in my soul, thank you, Count Tolstoy.

My second day of writing went much better, even before Mr. Kinney got shot right up the road from my house. Ben Franklin had a lot to do with it. (Not with shooting Mr. Kinney. With getting me off to a better writing day.) The quote for the day was:

So even before the whole Kinney shooting business gave me something worth writing about, I’d penned two worthy goals for the summer of ’63:

Jack, my lifelong buddy, and Sarah, my best-friend-who-was-a-girl, already knew how much I wanted to write for the school paper. But I wouldn’t talk to anybody about my kissing goal. I would keep
that
a secret.

Barefoot and still in my fuzzy pj’s, I tiptoed out of the house at dawn. I eased the screen door shut behind me and skipped over the dewy wet front step, where I usually sat. Instead, armed with nothing but a Bic pen and my writing notebook, I plopped cross-legged, Navajo-style, right onto the warm sidewalk.

I’d barely finished writing the day’s date on my journal page when I heard gravel crunch in the distance. A car going way too fast bounced up over the hill in a cloud of dust. From the backyard, Midge barked.

“It’s just Jack!” I hollered to our family mutt, a terrier mix that looked kind of like a hairless lamb.

Jack Adams came flying up our road in Fred, his ’53 Chevy. Brakes screeched, and the car came to a stop. “Hey, Tree!” he called out the driver’s window.

Jack claimed credit for getting everybody to call me Tree instead of Teresa. Tree is all I ever remember answering to, so I couldn’t say about that.

“Hey, Jack!” I called back.

His parents and mine had been friends longer than Jack and I had been alive. He was four years older than me, but it had never mattered. We’d always been close. We talked to each other about everything in a way I never could with my sister, even though Eileen was only three years older than me.

Music blared from Jack’s radio—“The Loco-Motion” by Little Eva. Jack’s non-steering-wheel hand hung out the window and drummed against the car door in perfect rhythm. Made me want to jump up and dance, but I resisted.

“You working this afternoon?” he shouted above Little Eva’s invitation to “Come on, come on, do the loco-motion with me.”

I sighed. “All afternoon. Tonight too. What a drag.” It had seemed pretty neat when I’d gotten the job of basketgirl at the town’s swimming pool. It only paid a quarter an hour, but there weren’t any other jobs for a thirteen-year-old girl. Plus, I’d have the edge on the lifeguard job when I turned sixteen. “You working today, Jack?”

He smiled, flashing the biggest, whitest teeth in all of Caldwell County. People said I had big brown eyes, but Jack’s eyes made mine look like pennies. He had a classic face, with bones, instead of flesh, shaping his chin and jawline. “Me? Nah, man. I’m up and grooving early for no reason. You know me.”

I did know Jack. If he was up this early, it had to be work. Jack’s summer job was the pits. Donna, his mother, had pulled strings to get him on at the IGA, Hamilton’s only grocery
store. He worked in the meat department, cutting and wrapping gross, raw meat in slick white paper. Jack hated the job. But what he hated even more was his mother’s prying. Donna, who had never met a piece of gossip she didn’t like, called him a couple of times a day at work, always with the same question: “What’s new at work today, Jack, honey?”

“So, writing anything great?” Jack asked.

“I wish.”

“Wishing is great.” He revved his engine as the Beatles launched into “Please Please Me.” “Guess I’ll see you later. I might stop by the pool if I get off in time and haven’t slit my throat from boredom.”

“Thanks for the warning.” I waved my pen at him.

He honked goodbye. Then he and Fred the Car disappeared into another cloud of dust as they rounded the curve at the end of our road.

I couldn’t stand the thought of Jack not being around next year. He’d be off to Northwest Missouri State, where, no doubt, he’d have a dozen dates on weekends and never come home. In the yearbook, his class had voted him “Most Likely to … Everything.” To succeed. To get rich. To find fame. To marry a movie star.

Every time I thought about school without Jack, I got a pain in my stomach, as if my guts were being twisted like a wet towel.