The Memory Thief (12 page)

Then I noticed something else. The black ash didn’t end. It stretched far and wide. It replaced everything that should have
been green and growing. Nearly half of the farm was ruined. Every field behind the trailer, every barn and parked tractor,
had burned during the night.

Flat on my belly, peeking through the bacca, I listened.

“Lost more than half our yearly income. Plus Daddy’s barns. His best tractors. Ain’t no insurance, Daddy dropped the policy
years ago.”

“Son, let me ask you a few questions about the family you said was livin’ here. They good people?”

“Daddy never said one way or the other. They worked these fields for years. We told ’em to move on a few weeks ago, though.”

“When’s the last time you saw ’em?”

“The man left a couple weeks ago. Saw the woman leave earlier on a bike. Didn’t see the young one go, though. Oh, you don’t
think she was inside?”

“Doubt it. What I am wonderin’ about, though, is that burned-out hull of a gas can sittin’ there by the road. I want the fire
chief to come investigate this.”

“You think she—”

“You kicked her family out, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And her momma took off without her.”

“Yeah.”

“Ain’t much trailer trash won’t do. Especially the young ones.”

“When I catch her, I swear I’ll—”

“You won’t have to do anything. Law will do it for you. Nobody likes a firebug.”

I edged my way backward. Then turned slowly and walked away carefully. It was easy for me. I knew how to turn my shoulders
just so
between the leaves. I knew how to find the spaces between the plants. When to duck and crawl because I needed to be lower.
I grew up in the middle of that great bacca field. No one ever knew it, really knew it, the way I did.

I walked through acres and saw the corners of Swarm house rising up with pride. Then I saw flowers, Mrs. Swarm’s joy, brittle
and matted around the windows. Boxes were stacked on the porch. Moving vans lined the driveway, as daughters-in-law shouted
commands of which van to put which box into. Dividing the spoils. I turned my eyes back to the proud bacca, and felt shame
for that house. Once it had been something to salute. Something to pray and cuss over.

I didn’t reach the road until midmorning. Still more acres lay on the other side, but a large
For Sale
sign stood in front of those. They were chopping up the farm. It made sense. Swarm farm was the largest one in that half
of the state. Only kings needed that much land. Our king was dead.

I touched the leaves gently. Soon those plants would be cut and staked and dried and carried to auction outside Knoxville. It hurt to think I would miss those auctions. I had gone every year since we’d first come to Black Snake trailer.

I went to mourn and pay last respects. I’d look at all that dead bacca and wonder how I’d survive the empty fields waiting
back home. Nothing is as lonely as a cold barn on a winter’s night. Everyone else just sighed relief and counted money. The
warehouses were lined with golden-brown wilted leaves. Numbers were shouted, farm names swapped. Crates measured, graded,
and weighed. And the smell. With no wind inside the warehouses and all that ripe bacca, all the tar, hanging heavy around
us. The men, women, too, dipping and chewing and smoking and spitting. Sampling goods from other farms and then spitting it
out to make room for more. Daddy said when the auctions were over they’d go back through and sweep the floors. Gather all
the bits of bacca that lay dried and scattered like gold dust. Box it into little round cans and call it snuff.

No matter what it was to other people—a drug, a cash crop, an honest living—to me, that bacca was home. More home than Daddy’s
car. More home than Black Snake trailer. But somehow I’d finally outgrown it.

I stepped through the fence onto Old Route Two. A road used by tractors more than cars. Anybody
on their way
used the highway. And anybody on Route Two lived for bacca. They grew it. Chewed it and spat it out their truck windows.
Rolled it and smoked it. Bought and sold it. Carried green gold off in the back of their trucks. There were no cities built
around Route Two. There was only land, rippling like my green baby blanket, and filled with thousands of acres of bacca. In
the distance, mountains locked everything in. Like a giant fence.

I crossed over Route Two and into the fields on the other side. I walked the edge of the bacca and hid quickly when anyone
passed. Two cop cars drove by slowly during the day. So did the Swarm boys.

I spent the whole day walking, and once evening came I settled for the night in the fields and glared at the mountains, somewhere
in the darkness. They were still so far away. There were already blisters on my heels, but my journey to you was only beginning.

When the sun rose the next morning I didn’t start walking. I sat in the bacca and waited. Until I saw a truck coming that
I didn’t recognize. One that I knew didn’t belong to the Swarm boys. I walked out onto the road. Held my thumb up the way
I’d seen Janie do once when she wanted a ride into town and Daddy wouldn’t take her.

The truck slowed to a stop.

“Where you headed?” asked a man about Daddy’s age. He had a graying beard and a tractor-supply hat on.

“Towards them mountains.”

He nodded his head, and I opened the door and climbed in. I tried to not look scared. I remembered Momma storming out of the
trailer and throwing dishes at Daddy. I remembered the look in her eyes, meaner than the black snake had ever been.

“What you so grumpy ’bout?” He reached between his legs and brought an empty Pepsi can to his mouth. Spat a long stream of
golden bacca juice into it.

I shrugged my shoulders and looked out the window.

“You runnin’ away, ain’t you? Pretty girl like you walkin’ down the road alone. What’s wrong, Daddy won’t let you have a boyfriend?”

“Ain’t runnin’.”

“You from them mountains?”

“Gonna find out.”

He laughed and swore under his breath. “You a little crazy?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Maybe.”

The truth: I wanted to touch a mountain. After staring at them my whole life. Jealous that they were bigger than the bacca.
Jealous that they were louder. Yelling out their presence, while the bacca only whispered. I wanted to touch a mountain and
feel something great.

The rest of the truth is that I found a map. Inside Daddy’s glove box. A dollar sign was drawn over the Carolina mountains.
I looked at that sign, traced it with my finger, but didn’t see the word
Money
, like I was supposed to. I saw your name. Strange letters that I don’t know and couldn’t read.

“Which farm you from?” I asked, noticing the tar stains on his hands.

“Tucker. You?”

“Grigsby.”

“Well you must’ve walked a good ways, then. That’s a few hours west, ain’t it?”

I nodded.

“I guess that’s the big farm in these parts now. Since Swarm is closin’ down.” He shook his head slowly. “You heard of it?
Shame what’s happened there. That land’s been in the same family since it was took from the Cherokee. One batch of bad sons
and it’s chopped up and sold in pieces. Did you know somebody’s already lookin’ it over? Wanna make it a quiet country home.
Don’t wanna work the land. Drove up and asked my boss to lease it and work it. Otherwise it’ll lay untilled. First time ever,
Swarm farm won’t be a farm. It’ll just be a place somebody lives. Mr. Swarm would die twice if he knew. He always set such
a high standard for farmin’. He was a gentleman farmer. A dyin’ breed. You know?”

“I guess,” I said and nodded. But that trucker was more right than he’d ever know.
Mr. Swarm was a gentleman
. All the rest of us, all of the people stuck waiting beneath his sycamore tree, hated him for it. And waited for our moment
of revenge.

The day he died I returned to him. After giving his money to Momma, I hid in the bacca just a few feet from him. Daren, another
farmhand, came by. He didn’t realize Mr. Swarm was dead at first, and asked whether he should start digging new fence holes.
When he saw Mr. Swarm’s face, the purple lips, he swore under his breath and turned around and ran. He stopped, though. I
saw the bacca leaves grow still and knew that he wasn’t running anymore.

Daren came back and stood in front of Mr. Swarm. He looked around in every direction. Then reached down into Mr. Swarm’s pocket
and pulled out his wallet. I had left a five-dollar bill behind.

But Daren didn’t know Janie’s lesson, and he tucked the five-dollar bill in his pocket. “You won’t be needin’ this no more,”
he said. He walked to the tractor. Lifted the hinges on the seat. Pulled out a pistol.

I cussed inside my head. That pistol was worth more than the money I’d grabbed out of Mr. Swarm’s wallet.

“No more snakes for you to have to shoot, neither,” Daren said, as he tucked it in his pocket. He opened a toolbox that sat
on top of the tractor. Thumbed through it roughly. Put a few things in his pocket before he walked away.

I knew then, that Mr. Swarm was right about us all along. Every farmhand cussed about not being allowed to step on the Swarm
front porch. It seemed unfair. Arrogant. Hateful. We were the ones that made him a King. Our backs, our hands, our lives, given to raise his golden treasure. But in the end, Mr. Swarm was right.

There are only two kinds of people in the world. The first are Swarms. People that eat inside the farmhouse. People that drink
from silver goblets engraved with a royal name.

As for the rest of us, we are all stuck beneath the sycamore tree. Waiting for the king to come and bring us paychecks. Waiting
for the queen to come and bring us pie. We drink our tea from paper Dixie cups. We rob dead people without a second thought.
We are not to be trusted. We are not to be welcomed. We are thieves, every last one of us. Even the sweet little girls.

As the trucker drove Route Two we talked about farms, bacca crops, and the coming harvest. I was careful not to reveal the
truth. Of how much I really knew about bacca. Or that I was once a girl of Old Number Nine.

“My stop’s up the road,” the farmhand said. “I’d let you come but my woman wouldn’t like it. You’re dangerous pretty.” He
reached his hand out and ran his fingers across my thigh. He was shy at first, like he expected me to swat him away. But I
didn’t, and he let his hand rest just above my knee.

“Could you drive me a bit further? Maybe to them stores up the road. The one that sells candy in the barrels?”

“This ain’t my truck. An’ I’m due in the fields.”

“I could pay you.”

“A kiss?”

It would be my first. I had watched Janie with boys on the back of the bus and farmhands in the back of the barn many times.
She never drew the line that I did, connecting boys she kissed to Daddy. Once he had been a farmhand chasing Momma to the
back of the barn. Promising her a way out. But unlike Momma and Janie, I knew the truth about that line. It went sideways.
Never up. Never out.

Once my own breasts filled up black bras and my own hips became worthy of a dance, I was invited to those back corners. Even
chased a few times. But I had no use for sideways lines. So I sat at the front of the bus. And ran from the barn corners to
the bacca.

The farmhand parked in front of the stores.

“You can git your candy now”—he laughed, as he leaned toward me—“an’ I can git mine.”

The muscles in his mouth pulled forward, like he was drinking a coke on a hot day. I saw the stain of bacca on his chin. Felt
the scrub of his beard, the firm wetness against my lips. I closed my eyes and enjoyed the smell of bacca all over him. Sweet
and peppery, like at the auctions.

“I could change my mind and take you home with me,” the farmhand said.

I shook my head and stepped out of the truck. As he pulled away I raised the hem of my shirt and wiped my mouth. It was over.
And it had been easy.

The row of stores was built out of old barn wood, with sagging front porches and hand-painted signs. One was a general store.
The front was filled with barrels of hard candy and taffies and brown bags to stuff. The back had shelves of groceries, a
rack or two of clothes, some magazines and books. When I was little we’d go there after payday. Daddy would go through the
car magazines. Momma would try on clothes. I’d clutch a sweaty dime in my palm, one stolen off a farmhand and hid from Momma,
and pace in front of the candy barrels.

The next store was an antique and hardware shop filled with tractor parts and seed for the locals. A few antiques for any
tourist that might have taken a wrong turn off the highway. Mainly blue mason jars, and iron skillets labeled
Probably Civil War era.
Retired farm tools with magazine clippings of flower beds framed next to them, to show how a person of style could prop an
antique plow blade between rows of petunias.

I’d never been in the last store. The Biscuit ’n’ Gun Shop. An all-in-one stop for hunters. Where they could get ammo or a
new rifle, a hunting license, and a pork chop biscuit.

I went inside the general store first. Ran my hand over the full barrels of candy, then headed to the back where the magazines
and books were. I found a map of the entire southeast. Sat down on the floor and let my finger trace the short line between
me and the mountains.

“Can I help you?” the cashier asked. She was Momma’s age. Skinny and tired like her, too.

I folded the map and placed it back on the shelf. “I’m lookin’ for a day’s work. I can clean or watch the store. Been in here
plenty of times growin’ up. I know how the candy barrels work.” It was a good lesson Daddy taught me during our journey out
of Carolina. He earned our food and gas money by drifting from one odd job to another.

“Don’t hire out day jobs.”

“Know if the antique store does?”

“If you really needin’ work, go to the Biscuit ’n’ Gun.”

“They hirin’?”

“Always. Worked there a few times myself.” She winked at me. “Tell ’em Marcy sent you.”