Someplace to Be Flying (26 page)

“Is that a true story?” she asks after awhile.

“True as I remember it.”

She sits up, smiles shyly at me. “I never knew corn had a story.”

“Everything’s got a story. Take that milkweed you’re about to knock down with your knee.”

She moves back and gives it a wary look. “What about it?”

So I tell her its story, tell her the june bug’s, whirring in the high grass just out of sight, the lacewing’s, and the one that belongs to the cedar—not the ones growing up the side of the hollow here, but an older stand that were thick in the middle of one of Cody’s mischiefs.

“Do you know any more?” she asks when I’m done with that last one.

But the sun’s lowering, and the shadows of the trees are creeping across the meadow. The first bats are sailing down out of the woods. In the distance, we can still hear the crows’ hooley. It’s louder now, the sound earning farther on the gray shoulders of the dusk.

“I know hundreds,” I tell her, “but let’s save them for another time.”

“I want to know them all.”

I have to smile. “Even I don’t know them all, but I’ll tell you the ones I know and you could learn some yourself, too, and then tell them to me. Be cause that’s what we storytellers do.” Her little chest swells a bit when I include her with that “we.”

“What do
we
do?” she asks, savoring the word when she uses it.

“Share our stories with each other.”

She’s eager, but doubtful, too. I can tell.

“I don’t even know where to start learning stories,” she says.

“You’ve just got to pay attention. You have to practice listening and learning to hold them all in your head. It’s hard to do and it takes time, but you could start with writing some down. Can you get yourself a pencil and some paper?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Well, you take them out with you, the next time you go rambling, and sit down, maybe draw some old weed or wildflower, listen close while you’re doing it, maybe you’ll hear some no-account gossip about what the rabbits have been up to this week, or those bees that never stop humming. Or maybe you’ll get a piece of its story and you can add that to the page.”

She looks a little disappointed. “That’s not the same.”

“That’s how all the stories start,” I tell her. “With some little thing.”

“But why do I got to learn how to draw?”

“You don’t. But it’s a good way to learn how to pay attention. To really
see
what you’re looking at, instead of what you expect to see.” The doubt is still there, but the eagerness is stronger. “So are you gonna be here tomorrow?” she asks. I nod. Turns out I’m there for most of the summer.

The crow girls think it’s too funny when they come by to collect me a few days later and I’m not ready to go.

“Are you going back to sleep?” Maida asks, which is what we call it when we lose ourselves, when we forget we’re people and spend all of our time in our animal skins.

“Naw,” Zia says before I can answer. “He’s found himself a puppy and he’s going to teach her how to fly.”

“I didn’t know puppies could fly.”

“They can’t. But don’t tell Jack. He’d be ever so disappointed.”

They both erupt into giggles and I can’t help laughing with them. But they wait with me, black-winged, perched on the stone, for when Nettie comes tramping through the field that morning and I can tell right away that they like her, too. The crow girls wear their hearts on their sleeves. You know when they’re happy, you know when they’re sad.

“Be careful,” Zia whispers in my ear. “That one’s going to break your heart.”

“It’s not that kind of thing,” I tell her.

“Not now. But she’s not always going to be some skinny little fox child, too young for an old jackdaw.”

I give Maida a look to see what she thinks, but she doesn’t have anything to add right away. She sits there, filled with quiet, dark gaze fixed on that wild fox girl making her way through the tall grass.

“She could fly,” she says finally and then the two of them rise on black wings that shine blue in the sunlight.

Nettie comes running up, shades her eyes as she watches them go.

“I never saw anything so pretty,” she says. “Jenny-May’s pappy plumb hates crows—like most folks do around here—but I don’t.”

“Me, neither,” I tell her.

She’s earning the sketchbook we made the second day we got together. Brown wrapping paper, torn up neatly, folded together into a book, the spine held together with twine stitching. She keeps her stubby pencil behind her ear, sharpened to a fine point with the little penknife I gave her.

I remember the look on her face when I pulled that penknife out of my Pocket and told her it was hers to keep.

“Nobody’s ever give me something this good before,” she said, turning it over and over in her hands.

She’s got a knack for drawing. I saw that in her, same as I saw the empty places waiting to be filled with stories. Next summer, I’ll bring her a proper paint box, but for now she’s using berry juice, red dirt, coffee grounds, and the like to add some color to her sketches.

“Lookit this,” she says, scrambling up to sit beside me.

I take the sketchbook on my lap and look at the page she wants to show me, every corner of it crammed with pencil drawings and faded colors that look almost misty against the brown paper background. A sparrow. Queen Anne’s lace. Joe-pye weed. A hickory leaf. Ground beetle. Pinecone. Her own hand, the outline traced, but she’s filled in the detail—creases, scab on a knuckle, dirt under the nails and all. At the bottom of the page she’s written in a child’s scrawl: “What I seen teday.”

“You get much schooling?” I ask her.

She grins. “Only what I can’t avoid.”

I’ve brought her a book today—bought it for her in a pawnshop over in Tyson. It’s bigger than Hazard by a couple of thousand people, lying south, about halfway to the city. The book’s a field guide to wildflowers, full of pictures, but lots of words, too. Latin names, common names, stories about how they got those names and such. She’s so delighted with such a simple thing it makes me want to give her something every time I see her, but I won’t.

“I can’t read that good,” she tells me.

“Lots of stories in books,” I say. “They’re like the woods. You can learn a lot from them.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s the truth. And the beauty is, you can go into that little library in the basement of the town hall in Hazard and they’ll let you borrow any one you want. All you got to do is go in and ask.”

She gives me a suspicious look. “What’re you really trying to tell me?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be avoiding your schooling.”

She weighs the field guide in her hand, then gives me one of those sudden grins of hers.

“Maybe I won’t,” she says.

Summer, 1941

The next summer she’s a year older and I’m looking about sixteen, trying to even the gap so that her mammy won’t be so worried when she sees her daughter spending so much time with me. The crow girls laugh when they see me, no more handsome than the Jack they’ve always known. Only younger.

“Jack’s going courting,” Zia says. “All he needs is a bow tie and some flowers.”

Maida pokes her in the shoulder with a stiff finger. “Don’t tease him,” she says. “Jack’s our friend.” But she’s giggling, too.

“Not like he wants to be friends with her. Jack’s in love.”

“Is that true?” Maida asks.

I shake my head. “No. Not like you’re thinking.”

That sets them off again. Why? I don’t know. The crow girls have a whole other way of deciding what’s funny and what’s not.

“But she’s in love with you,” Maida says when she catches her breath.

She’s not joking now.

“Maybe she thinks she is,” I say, “but she’ll grow out of it.”

Zia shakes her head. “That girl’s too stubborn to grow out of anything she sets her mind to.”

“Then she’s just going to have to live with the disappointment,” I say.

There’s a long moment of silence, the two of them looking at me, serious.

“No,” Maida says. “You are.”

As I’m walking down the dirt road that leads out of Hazard to the Bean farm, I find myself wondering if Nettie’ll recognize me, but I needn’t have worried. She comes running down the windy path from the farmhouse and gives me a hug, then grabs my hand and tugs me back up to the house to meet her mammy.

Edna Bean is a well-favored woman and it’s easy to see why some fox came tapping on her window late one night. She has the look of corbæ blood, our dark hair and eyes, but her skin’s brown from the weather and the only place I guess she ever flew was in her dreams. Her build is slight, but there’s nothing weak about her. These hill women get born strong and only grow stronger. She watches our approach, not exactly suspicious, but not exactly welcoming eidier; wondering about me, the way they do in the hills when a stranger comes to their door.

Back in the woods, I can hear the crow girls giggling.

“I’m guessing from the way the girl’s earning on that you’d be Jack,” Nettie’s mammy says to me after giving me a slow once-over.

“Yes, ma’am. Pleased to meet you.”

“Summering in Hazard, are you?”

“Yes, ma’am, if I can find some work.”

A crooked smile touches her lips and I know then where Nettie gets that grin of hers.

“Looking for work,” she says and lets her voice trail off.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, you’re sure enough polite—I’ll give you that much.”

Nettie’s shifting her weight from foot to foot, impatient to be done with the talk and go rambling through the woods. But her mammy’s not done yet. She’s still eyeing me, trying to get my measure. I do my best
to
look harmless.

“So you’re the one who got her to work at her schooling,” she says.

“I couldn’t say, ma’am. All we did was talk one afternoon about how learning’s a good thing.”

She cocks her head, corbælike. “You think learning can feed you?”

“Depends on what you’re hungry for, ma’am.”

The crooked smile widens into that familiar grin of Nettie’s.

“You’ll do,” Edna says. “Tell you what, Jack. You’ll eat with us and you can sleep in the barn. All I ask is that you help out around with the chores some.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And maybe keep my Nettie here company. I figure you’re a good influence, seeing’s how she came home with straight A’s last year.”

“That must’ve made you proud,” I say.

“She doesn’t need to do good at school to make me proud,” Edna tells me. “But I figure schooling’s the only thing that’s going to get her out of? these hills on her own terms.”

What makes you think she wants to leave? I think, but I keep it to myself?. Edna’s laboring under the same misconception that’s snared too many parents before her. She wants to make sure her child doesn’t repeat the mistakes she made herself?, but I doubt she’s got to worry on that account. Any mistakes Nettie makes, they’ll be her own, and whatever else they’ll be, they’ll be interesting.

“And one more thing, Jack,” Edna says.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Call me Edna. I hear you call me ‘ma’am’ and I keep looking around to see where my mammy is and her dead seven years now, God rest her soul. It’s disconcerting. Save your respect for those who’ve earned it.”

“I figure you’ve earned it,” I say.

“Nobody likes an apple-polisher,” she tells me, but she smiles.

Saturday nights they have the barn dances and pretty much everybody shows up at one of those old granges, high on a hill like the cows need a view, the farmhouse tucked down in some little hollow out of the wind. Inside, there’s music and singing and dancing, a long table along one wall with pies and cakes and cookies, coffee and tea, pop, juice. There’s no never mind on the old wooden dance floor, old folks, young folks, all taking a turn together. Outside, there’s drinking and a few fights, nothing too serious, and a lot of? spooning in the hayfields, or maybe the back of someone’s wagon.

The night Nettie insists we all go to the grange there’s a full moon, the stars are hanging high and bright, and the air’s brisk, more like an autumn night than one in late June. Look hard and you can see Venus, Mars. Sometimes a little streak of? light as a meteorite comes zipping from space to hit the air and burn up. Falling stars to wish upon. I don’t make a wish, but maybe I should have.

The music’s already playing when we arrive—a pickup band, Edna tells me. Two fiddles, five-string banjo, washtub bass, and steel-bodied resonator guitar.

people dancing, congregating around the laden food tables, laughing, gossiping, sneaking out for a drink or a kiss. I’m surprised to see Ray there, flirting with a sweet young thing on the far side of the barn, but I guess I shouldn’t be. He does get around. Then I see the way Edna’s looking at him and I know for sure who it was sired that wild fox child of hers.

Ray doesn’t even look in our direction and I think, that’s hard. But Edna makes a quick recovery. She smiles brightly, cheeks flushing pretty, and it’s like he’s not there for her any more than she is for him.

“Let’s you and me dance,” Nettie says, tugging at my hand as the band finishes one tune and starts right into another.

I shake my head. “I can’t dance.”

“Sure you can,” she says, still pulling at my hand.

“I’m saying I can’t.”

I reclaim my hand, then wish I’d left well enough be. Wish I’d gone out on the boards with her and made a fool of myself?, because the hurt in her eyes is something I don’t ever want to see again. It jumps into my chest, cuts too quick and deep. She puts away her own hurt like her mammy did hers, got the same flush on her cheeks, the same too-bright smile, but I can’t forget it. And then it’s too late because some handsome young man is stepping up, dark hair slicked back, his smile offering her everything I can’t. The next thing I know the two of them are out there dancing and I’m standing there beside her mammy, watching them go.

“His name’s Randall Miller,” she tells me. “Cuts a fine figure, don’t you think?”

Not so fine as Ray does, I’m thinking, but I’ve learned my lesson and keep my mouth shut.

“The Beans and Millers, we go back a long way,” Edna’s saying. “My husband was a Miller, third or fourth cousin of Randall’s father, I suppose.”