Читать книгу An Unrehearsed Desire - Lauren B. Davis - Страница 4

It happened last summer, a season I call The Time of the Naked Guys. Of course, I was ten then and didn’t know as much as I do now. It was a real hot summer, and the air around town smelled of baking asphalt during the day and barbeques at night, since none of the mothers wanted to cook much. This one afternoon I was sitting on the porch eating a blue Popsicle, which is my favourite colour Popsicle although it doesn’t really taste like anything blue, but then what does? Blueberries, I guess, but Popsicles don’t taste like that. Anyway, a white van pulled up in front of our driveway and the man driving asked me to come over.

“Hey, kid” he called, as he leaned over and rolled down the passenger side window. “I’m looking for the public swimming pool.” He was alone.

“You’re on the wrong road,” I said, going over to the van. “You got to go back and down Biscayne to Castle road. This is a dead end.”

“You think they’ll mind if I don’t wear a bathing suit?” He moved his hand in his lap.

That was when I realized he had his pants unzipped and his thing was all big and purple-y in his hand. It was as if I’d just dived into cold water.

“You’ll have to ask them,” I said, which at the time I thought was a cool, un-freaked out thing to say. It was the first thing I’d ever seen, since I don’t have any brothers or cousins or anything and I wouldn’t of minded taking a longer look, but it scared me. I hightailed it back in the house to tell my mom.

I came into the kitchen opening and closing my mouth like a fish. When I finally sputtered out what had happened, I figured she’d phone the police or something. Like the week before when the same thing happened to Janet Drury and her father and brother chased the car all the way down the street, her father waving a rake around like a sword.

“What are you talking about?” my Mom said. Her hands were sticky with marshmallows from the Rice Crispy squares she was making, and her permed hair had gone frizzy in the heat.

“Some guy! You know, with his thing out,” I said.

“Sweet Jesus! You shouldn’t be going near strange men,” she said.

I ground a lost kernel of puffed rice under my foot until it was nothing but dust on the black and white linoleum. The way Mom looked at me, I felt like I was the one who’d been out there with my God-givens bouncing around for the whole world to see.

“Why can’t you stay in the playground and play with the other kids? I blame your Aunt for this. The way you run wild in the woods all the time.” I watched the skin under my mother’s arm flap back and forth as she stirred the thickening goo.

“You’re ten years old, Kathy, very nearly a young lady. You’re far too old to be running wild the way you do. You’re just asking for trouble. He didn’t touch you, did he?”

“Course not,” I said.

“Well, good then. And take your hair out of your mouth; you look like a little idiot.”

I have long straight mouse-brown hair and chewing on it is a bad habit I’ve had since I was a little kid. I pulled it out of my mouth.

“I don’t know what the world’s coming to,” Mom said. “It’s not like we live in the city, with all those Eye-talians and J-e-w-s.” Mom always spelled out anything she didn’t think was fit to say outright. I waited for her to say or do something more, but that seemed to be her final word on the subject. She wasn’t a ‘making-a-fuss’ kind of Mom, not one to get into a tizzy, as she called it, about trouble. Although my experience was it was only my trouble she didn’t get bothered about. She sure was prone to pitching hissy-fits when it came to stuff she personally didn’t like.

I went out onto the porch and sat down on the step. The boards were so hot they near burnt up the back of my thighs.

“You stay outta those woods, Kathy, you hear me? I want you to promise me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, although I couldn’t see the sense in it. I hadn’t been in the woods. The naked man had practically driven right up to our own house, after all. Sometimes the way grown-ups think is a bafflement to me. I was suspicious that Mom wasn’t mad about the man at all but was, as usual, mad about Aunt Shirley and getting things all tangled up in her mind.

It was Aunt Shirley, my Dad’s sister, who taught me the magic of the woods, although if my Mom and Dad knew, they’d skin me alive and boil Aunt Shirley in oil. They already figured she was half-crazy, but she’s not. She knows stuff. And she’s a wood-walker, just like me.

I’ve always been drawn out into the woods like under some enchantment. In the field past the stone wall, the first stand of birch trees and the big oak is my special place: an abandoned apple orchard with a stream running through it that isn’t much more than a trickle in August, but runs like a chorus of glory in the springtime. The trees are all ramble-down and scrabble, pretty much forgotten by everybody.

Except me and Aunt Shirley, that is.

Aunt Shirley came down and spent three weeks with us every summer. Mom didn’t like it much and didn’t put flowers in her room like she did when her own sister came to visit. For me, though, it was the best time of the year.

We went walking out in the woods early every morning she was there. Sometimes she’d come and get me before the house was even awake. She put her fingers against my lips to rouse me quietly and we snuck down the narrow stairs in the dusty shimmers of first light, being careful of the creaky third step. It was our private ritual, she said. We went out across the back field and over the stone fence, which was slick with moss and dew. Our feet got wet and we shivered against the chill, but stood it, knowing we’d be warm as soon as the sun was full up in the sky. She showed me plants that made medicine.

“The forests and meadows are God’s drugstore, Kat,” she said. “A living, breathing pharmacy.”

We picked stuff like five-finger grass, which is good for loose bowels; yarrow, which cleans the blood and treats the piles; blue cohosh for women’s cramps, and black snakeroot for bad skin and nervousness. Aunt Shirley gathered the plants in her sweetgrass basket that had been woven by a special friend. Then we’d go to the stand of cedars near the stream and she’d put her basket down and raise her hands up to the light.

“You must always breathe in beauty, walk in beauty, dance in beauty,” she’d say. She twirled around in slow circles with her robin’s-egg blue shawl that came all the way from Spain and her black hair swirling around her. I thought Aunt Shirley was the most beautiful woman in the world.

“There is magic all around,” she said, holding my face in her cool hands, my nostrils filling up with her smell of vanilla and something deep and woody. “Close your eyes and repeat after me: God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is alive. Magic is afoot.”

We repeated the words over and over until they became a chant and then a song and then nothing but sound rising in the air. She caught my hands in hers and we spun around and around and fell back on the soft mossy earth, the sky reeling, and our eyes wet from laughing.

She taught me it was places like this, under the protection of the trees and sky, which were most sacred to God.

“Church is all right as far as it goes,” she said, “and I suppose that’s pretty far for some, but for me, this is where the Spirit lives.” Her eyes were bright as black stones on a sun-dazzled river bottom. “Can’t you just feel it?”

I was sure I could.

Mornings were for Aunt Shirley and me, and magic.

“You’re just like your Aunt Shirley,” Mom would say and mean it not in a good way. “You be careful you don’t end up like her, too.” By which she meant living in a railway caboose sixty miles north of Scout’s Landing on Blue Bird Lake, near the Red Dog Indian Reservation.

“She lets Indians sit at her table,” she’d whisper and shake her head.

I remember one day Mom and her friend Sylvia were sitting around smoking cigarettes and picking at a cinnamon coffee cake.

“A woman alone like that, well,” Mom said, “you can imagine.” She made her eyes as wide as possible and raised her eyebrows. She pulled her chin to her chest and three rolls of fat puffed out her neck. “I’d be very interested to know how she makes ends meet, if you catch my meaning.”

I was moused-up in a corner stool in the kitchen, under the African violets that crowded the windowsill. I ate spoonfuls of chocolate milk powder from the tin and tried to stay quiet enough so they’d forget I was listening.

“A touch of the tar brush there, I suspect,” she said. “You know, she’s only Bob’s half-sister. Some say their mother was—how shall I put this nicely?—friendly with...,” and she leaned over to Sylvia’s waiting ear and whispered something.

“No!” said Sylvia, her eyes wide as an owl.

“It’s what they say,” said Mom, nodding wisely, her finger against the side of her beaky nose.

I’d never heard that ‘tar brush’ expression before. I got my behind smacked smart later for asking Dad what it meant.

“It just means that whereas all the rest of the family’s fair, your Aunt Shirley’s got olive skin and black hair and brown eyes. That’s all it means, you understand?” said Dad. “Do you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, rubbing my stinging backside and feeling the injustice of the world. “I just asked.”

“Well, don’t,” he said, and huffed off to find Mom.

Then came the day of the third naked man, the one down in the orchard. It was one of those days when even though the sky’s clear as the chlorine-shocked public pool, there’s a crackle of something in the air. You wake up just knowing everybody’s going to be snappish and if something nasty has been waiting to happen, it’s going to happen today. And, sure enough, it wasn’t but lunch when all hell broke loose.

My mom and dad and Aunt Shirley had a whopper of a fight. The kind where I was thrown out of the house for the duration. Aunt Shirley’d been kinda sick on and off her whole visit, so sick a couple of days that we’d missed our wood walks. I thought it was mean as hell, my mother picking on her the way she did, and Mom chose a day when she was particularly under the weather to start the fight.

“You’d best go out and play for a time, Kathy. I need to have a few words with her,” Mom’d said jerking her neck in the direction of the bathroom where sounds of Aunt Shirley being sick could be heard.

“I want to stay and make sure she’s all right.”

“No. Out. Now.” She pointed to the door.

“D-a-a-d,” I pleaded.

“Go pick some berries or something,” he said, his stubby hands pushed way deep into the pockets of his jeans, his fingers rattling all his coins, which was never a good sign.

“Fine,” I said, as unhappily as I could, and grabbed the aluminium berry-pail from beside the sink.

I stood next to the side door of our house, pressed up against the prickly green stucco, trying to hear what was going on. After a few minutes, Aunt Shirley came out of the bathroom. My mom was waiting for her. At first, I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but their voices started to rise as they moved into the kitchen.

“You are a woman completely without shame!” my mother yelled.

“I have nothing to be ashamed of, Libby,” said Aunt Shirley.

“How can you say that? It’s indecent! It’s obscene!”

“Don’t get yourself all worked up now, Lib,” said my dad.

“Worked up? I’ll give you worked up! You haven’t seen worked up!”

“This really doesn’t concern you, now does it?” said Aunt Shirley. Her voice was as calm as always, the sound of a cool river breeze on a sweltering day.

“It certainly does concern me, as long as you insist on presenting yourself at my door, expecting to be taken in whenever you darn well feel like it. It concerns me as long as you keep trying to insinuate yourself into the affections of my only daughter!”

My ears were burning for sure now. I held my breath.

“Indians!” my mother yelled, as though a bunch of wild red men were coming in through the back window. “Indians! My God.”

“Not ‘Indians,’ Libby. Indian. His name is Daniel Migwins.”

“More likely the whole tribe on a bargain rate!”

“Libby, keep quiet a minute!” said my Dad. “I suppose you’re going to want to marry this guy?” Even though I couldn’t see him, I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was glowering something awful and was probably pulling at his ear the way he did when he was real mad.

“No, I don’t know whether I do or not. We haven’t decided.”

“That is it!” Mom’s voice rose way up to a squeak. “The last straw. You are not welcome here any longer, Shirley MacDonald. I will not have you around Kathy. You will leave my house.”

“Is that what you want too, Doug?” Aunt Shirley’s voice was so low I could barely hear it.

“It might be for the best. At least for a while.”

“I see.”

“I hope to heaven that you do!” said Mom.

“A fine mess you’ve made Shirley. Jesus! I need some air,” said Dad. His footsteps sounded on the linoleum floor and I dashed around the corner of the house and along the path to the berry patch. My heart pounded like a jackhammer.

I knew I better stay away for a while. So, I filled the pail halfway with berries. But all the time my mind was whirling with the information I’d heard.

When I went back to the house Dad told me I’d better head off for the afternoon. Let things cool down a little.

“Is Aunt Shirley going away?” I said.

“I don’t know, Kitten, I don’t know.” He ran his fingers through his thin hair. “Don’t you worry about it though, all right? Just go play some place for a few hours. Things’ll be better by dinner time. We’ll be all right.”

“What’d she do?”

He turned me round and gave me a gentle push.

“You ask too many questions. Git!”

So I and Ginny, who’s my best friend, went climbing trees near the stream in my orchard. We were sitting up high, peeling the bark off the dead branches and looking for the secret writing left on the smooth wood by worms, the trails and snaky lines we knew meant something mysterious. Secret Indian writing, maybe. Ginny was a branch lower than me. She had trouble climbing because she was chubby and her shorts were always too tight. She said she was afraid they’d split if she had to reach her legs too far. Ginny had long wheaty hair in a thick braid down her back. She said it weighed a ton and she wanted to cut it off but her mother wouldn’t let her because she said it was her best feature. I envied that hair.

Ginny dropped her head back and shrugged her shoulders to get the weight of the braid off her neck. Then she grabbed me by the arm, pinching me.

“Ow!” I yelled. Her eyes were wide behind her thick pink-framed glasses.

“Kathy, look!” she pointed to the other side of the stream. I looked but didn’t see anything.

“Look,” she said again, “there, next to the rocks.”

“What’re you looking at?” I strained to see. “What is that?”

“I think it’s a man.”

I could make out a shape in the long dry grass.

“It’s a dog or a coyote or something.”

“That’s no dog!”

“Yeah, you’re right. Wait a minute! I don’t think he’s got any clothes on.”

“Not a stitch,” she whispered. “We should get out of here.”

“He should get out of here,” I said. It made me mad, seeing him there. How did he even find his way here? This wasn’t a place most people even knew about. My blood was boiling to think of this man, this naked man in my special place. “He’s got no business here.”

“It’s not your orchard.”

“I claimed it. I’m the only one who comes here. You only come here because I bring you.”

“I’m going.” She started to climb down the tree.

“Go then, if you want.” I broke a piece of dead branch off and chucked it across the stream. It landed with a soft flop on the far bank.

“Kathy! Don’t!”

“Hey, you! Get out of here! You’re trespassing!” I yelled.

The man sat up and looked in our direction. My heart started to beat fast, but I held on tight to the wood even though my palms were slippery. He looked hard at the tree. He had a big head, full of black hair and his eyes were small.

“Now you’ve done it,” said Ginny, “he’s seen us sure.”

“So?” I said, trying to sound brave.

For a second I could have sworn he was looking straight in my eyes. He held his hand up to keep the sun out. He wore a thick silver chain bracelet around his wrist. He was smiling and his teeth were very white. I scrambled down as fast as I could put hand over hand. I scratched my ankle on a patch of rough bark and skinned my shin. The blood soaked through my cotton socks in a bright round spot.

Ginny and I huddled at the base of the tree.

“You think he’ll just leave?” I said.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe we should go, too.”

“Look and see what he’s doing,” said Ginny.

“You look,” I said.

“No, you’re the one that threw stuff at him – you look.”

“Chicken!” I said and slowly stood up. I couldn’t see him anywhere. I ducked down again.

“I think he’s gone,” I said.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Kathy. Thrown that stick at him.”

“Scared him off, didn’t I?”

Ginny stood, and tugged the legs of her blue shorts down over her round bottom.

“I’m going home.”

“Hi, there,” a voice said. We near jumped out of our skins.

Sure enough, there was the naked man. Except he wasn’t naked any more. His black shoes were all muddy, so I figured he must have jumped the stream and slid a bit. He had on beige pants with dirt spackles around the cuffs and a black belt, a red and brown plaid shirt with a tear at the pocket. He’d missed a belt loop on his pants and the waist sat funny, drooping a bit. He carried a ring of keys in his hand.

“My names’ Cliff,” he said. “Didn’t know anybody came out here. Thought I was alone. What’re your names?”

“Kat,” I said, and crossed my arms in front of me. Ginny slapped my arm.

“Like kitty-cat. That’s a cute name.” When he smiled his teeth looked too big for his mouth, like big horse teeth.

“It’s Kathy.”

“I like Cat better, don’t you?” He looked at Ginny. “And what about you, don’t you have a name?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t want to tell me, huh?”

“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

“You think I’m strange?”

“I don’t know,” she shuffled her feet at the tree roots.

“Well, I’m not. Just somebody who enjoys being out in nature, like you.” He spread his arms wide and breathed deep. “Sure is a pretty day. You kids come out here often?”

“This is my place,” I said.

“Is it? Well, I don’t mean to trespass. Didn’t know it was anyone’s place in particular. Hope you’ll accept my apologies.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Thing is, I’d move along, except I’ve got a problem.”

“What kinda problem?” asked Ginny. She held onto the end of her braid and tugged on it as though trying to pull herself free.

“See, I’ve been out walking around in these woods for a while now. Just enjoying the day, the woods, you understand. And it seems that I’ve dropped my wallet – some place between here and the main road. I looked all around down where you saw me sitting. But I can’t find it anywhere. I’m sure I dropped it climbing over some of the stone fences out there.” He pointed in a general sort of way, towards the woods to the west.

“I’d be ever so grateful if you girls could help me find it. I’ve got some photos in there of my own little girl, about your age. I’d hate to lose that. And of course, I got some money in there, too. In fact, I’d be pleased to reward you both if you found it for me. I’d pay you a dollar a piece.”

“I don’t think so,” said Ginny.

“Silver dollars. I got a couple of ‘em in my wallet.”

“Did you come on the old track by the silo?” I asked, looking in the wrong direction.

“Through that way. Yes,” he said.

Now, I knew those woods better than anybody alive, I bet. Knew every place to duck, run, or hide. This man thought he was so smart. I could show him.

“Kathy...” Ginny warned, “I want to go home.”

“Then go ahead,” I said, knowing she would not go home alone, not with this man around. “Come on, Mister. Follow me.” I started off at a trot, giving him a wide berth and headed across the field to the rocks that crossed the stream.

“Kathy!”

“Come on, Ginny.” And because the only choice she had was to stay with the man or come with me, she ran with me. I felt a little mean about it, knowing Ginny was scared.

“Don’t be afraid,” I said when she caught up. “We’re gonna really show this guy the woods, Okay?”

“You’re going to get us in trouble!”

“Naw.”

“Hey, wait up,” called the man, hurrying after us.

We headed into the forest and scrambled over the first stone wall, then scrabbled down the ravine. We ran so quick the sun through the trees went dark-light-dark-light and made us feel like we were blinking our eyes real fast.

“I don’t think I came this way,” he called.

“It’s a short cut,” I called back. Ginny giggled.

At the bottom of the ravine, we crossed the fallen log to the other side and started up the steep bank. I heard the man start across the log and then slip, cussing as he got a soaker full of muck on the soft bottom. At the top of the ravine bank, we made a quick dash across the meadow and into the edge of the cedars.

“Hey!” the man called again.

“Hurry up,” I called.

“You’re going too fast to look for my wallet.”

“No, I’m looking real good. Aren’t you Ginny?”

“Yeah, real good!”

“Wait for me,” he said.

We went on deeper into the forest, kept turning, and shouting for him to follow. We dodged and dipped around for about fifteen minutes. We kept a good ways ahead of him, which was easy, slow and klutzy as he was. He stumbled and rooted around like a hog.

“This way,” said Ginny, and she looped around the patch of stinging nettle we’d fallen prey to ourselves a couple of weeks before. She stood in the middle of the path on the other side, waving back at our companion. He headed right for the nettle.

“Goddamn it! Goddamn it!”

We took off fast, ducked down through the old barbed wire fence, and kept going, farther into the cool dark, where all the fallen fir needles were soft sponge on the forest floor. The clean scent of pine and cedar made our noses tingle but when our feet landed hard the smell of mushrooms and rot rose from the ground. Behind us, we heard him say words we weren’t allowed to say.

He slipped and almost fell to his knees.

“That’s it. I’m heading back,” he called and turned.

“Not that way, Mister. That’s the wrong way. You’ll get lost for sure,” I said. “You want to go back, we’ll take you.”

He turned around in circles, trying to get his bearings, but it was no good.

“Damn it! All right then. Just get me out of here.”

“What about your wallet?” I said.

“To hell with my wallet!”

“Okay, then.”

“You’re crazy,” said Ginny. Her face was all shiny and her hair damp on her forehead, but she was laughing.

We crossed a stand of birches, climbed over another stone fence and hopped across a small stream. Then we stood waiting for him. He was breathing hard and his face was red as a beet.

“Don’t need to cross that, Mister. You’re back.”

He looked around and put his hands up to his head. He groaned.

“This is where we started. You took me around in a circle.”

He was panting. Big dark wet patches stained the underarms of his shirt. He bent over, hands on his knees. A bead of sweat fell from the end of his nose.

“Sorry, Mister. Guess you lost you wallet for good,” I said.

“We gotta go,” said Ginny.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” the man puffed. “Look at this.”

“What?” I said, not getting any closer.

“My wallet, right here. Must have dropped it when I was sitting here.”

“Must have.”

“You sure are lucky,” said Ginny. “I thought it was a goner.”

He bent down and picked it up. Brushed it off and went to put it in his back pocket.

“Hey,” I said, “You said you’d give us a dollar if we found it.”

“But I found it.”

“We helped. You wouldn’t have come back here if it wasn’t for us.”

The man looked at me a minute, his eyes clouding over with something filmy and mean. Then all at once, he threw back his head and laughed a big rough craggle of sound. Ginny jumped.

“I’ll be pissed,” he said, “I’ll be pissed.”

He wiped his eyes and put his wallet in his back pocket.

“I seem to be out of silver dollars.”

“That’s okay, we’ll take paper.”

“You’re a tough little kid, you know that?”

“I guess.”

“I don’t think I like tough little girls.” He reached in his pocket and dug out a handful of change. “This do?”

“It will if it’s two dollars.”

He held out his hand. “Take it.”

“I’d prefer if you put it on that rock, Mister.”

He grinned his muley grin and put the change on the rock.

Then he turned, quick as a cat, his arms wide flung and yelled: “RAAAAAGH!”

I thought my heart was going to jump out of my throat and Ginny grabbed my arm. Even with the stream between us, we turned tail and ran a few paces. Then I glanced back.

The man was laughing, and walking away. Waving his hand like he knew we’d look.

Ginny was crying. “I want to go home, Kathy, I want to go home.”

“Okay. But first I’m going to get that money.”

I waited till he’d moved off a good long way, then I ran fast as I could, grabbed the coins and headed off at a run, Ginny beside me, snuffling away. When we got back to the stone wall that separated the fields from our backyards, we stopped to count it.

“There’s almost three dollars here!” I said. It was a sweaty little pile of treasure in my palm.

“Wow.” Ginny touched it with the tip of her finger and then quickly pulled her hand away and put it behind her back. “What are we going to do with it?”

“You keep it.”

“Really? Me?”

“Yeah. Don’t spend it.” I held out the money and dropped it into her hand, one coin at a time. “We’ll make a pact.” We twisted our pinkie fingers together. “We’ll do something real great with it. We’ll buy stuff and build a tree house in the orchard, maybe. Or what else? What do you want to do with it?”

“I was thinking about a hamster,” she said.

“Well, sure. We’ll have enough for that too.”

We walked along, planning out our purchases, until, longing for the cool sweet taste of cherry Kool-Aid, I headed back to my house. Since my mom wasn’t a whole lot of help with the pervert in the car, I didn’t figure I’d tell her about this guy, especially since I knew the way she felt about me hanging around in the woods.

“Where’s Aunt Shirley?” I said.

“In her room.”

“She sick?”

“Sick, eh?” Mom looked at me with a funny expression. Then she went back to the dishes she was washing. “Yeah, sure, she’s sick.”

“Can I go up and see her?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I said so. Now get out of my hair! There must be something in the air,” she muttered. “Everybody’s gone crazy. Skedaddle!” She waved a soapy brush at me.

I was lying in bed that night, trying not to think too much about Aunt Shirley. It was obvious something was really wrong and wasn’t going to get any better any time soon. All through dinner the adults had been quiet as coffins, not talking to each other and not talking to me much either. It made it hard to swallow, even the soft stuff like mashed potatoes and creamed corn. Aunt Shirley smiled at me a time or two, but I could tell she was real upset. She gave me a hug and went up to bed right after dinner.

I watched the North Star through the branches of the oak in the backyard and tried to keep my mind off things by figuring out what I was going to do with my new-found wealth. After a while my parents came up to bed. They talked softly, their voices just a hum through the wall. A few minutes later, my mother’s voice rose up and I could make out the words.

“So that’s how she’s been supporting herself all these years.” My mother’s voice clanged. “I thought as much. Filthy money from those men! Dirty money!”

“You’re letting your imagination run away with you.” Dad sounded tired and sad.

“Good riddance, I say!”

“Keep your voice down, Libby.”

It took me a long time to get to sleep.

Aunt Shirley came to my room real early next morning. Mother-of-pearl combs held her hair in a messy pile on the top of her head. She had bluish-gray smudges under her eyes. She told me she was leaving.

“But why?”

“That’s the way it has to be for a while.”

“But why?”

She took my hand and put it on her stomach. “Things change, Kat, that’s part of the magic. It comes from the most unlikely places.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will,” she smiled.

“I don’t want you to go,” I said.

“I wish I didn’t have to go.”

“I could come with you.”

“No, Sweetie, your place is here. When you’re older, you can come visit me. In the meantime, you remember everything I taught you, won’t you?”

“I’ll remember,” I said, but it was hard to talk.

She put her arms around me and hugged me tight.

In the morning, she was gone. And nobody would tell me what was going on. It was as if she’d never been there and I wasn’t allowed to talk about it.

“But what happened?” I wailed.

“Nothing happened,” said my mother. “And that’s all there is to it.” She clamped her mouth down in that firm line I knew permitted no discussion. “Absolutely nothing happened here.”

I took a little paprika bottle from the drawer, emptied out the paprika in the back garden, where I figured it would kill slugs, and then went to St. Anne’s Church. I slipped in the big wood doors, and made for the stone bowl in the chapel. I scooped a bit of church water into the empty bottle and headed over to Ginny’s.

When she showed up at the door I told her to get the money.

“We have to bury it,” I said. “We can’t spend it.”

“Why not?” said Ginny. “I want to go down to Dougall’s and buy a goldfish.”

“We can’t,” I said. “That’s what they call dirty money.”

I explained about what my mother had said. About money and men.

“I don’t get it,” Ginny said.

I wasn’t sure I completely did either, but I knew somehow that this money, all bright and shiny, was tied up with things I didn’t want to think about.

“It’s evil money. If we keep it, bad things will happen. All right? It’s dirty money,” I repeated. “We have to make a ceremony. We have to cleanse it. From that man.”

“You think so?” I could see by the way Ginny’s skin went red that she had weird feelings about the man, too.

“I do. A ritual is required.”

She nodded, solemn.

So I dug a hole and put the money in, tied with a white handkerchief and a sprig of cedar. I sprinkled church water over it just in case. Then I filled up the hole and spat three times. And we left that money in her back yard, near the doghouse so Toby, her big mangy German shepherd, could guard it just like the wolf spirit my Aunt Shirley says stands guardian over me.

I think about that money, in the ground a whole year now, but Ginny never mentions it and somehow I don’t feel much like digging it up. I don’t feel like doing much of anything this summer, except sitting up in the old apple tree out in the orchard. Sometimes, if I close my eyes and concentrate real hard, I can smell Aunt Shirley’s clean sweet scent on the breeze. The smell of vanilla and wood-moss and rainfall.