A Gift of Time

by Merritt, Jerry

  “So, you finally know.”

  “Holy shit, Arlie! Why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  But Arlie made no further reply. The drumbeat of rain all but washed out her sobbing.

  Chapter 30

  By early morning the weather had cleared. As we made our way along the trail to Aunt Cealie’s, I contemplated the parallels between Arlie and Ell. Both had seemed to be something they weren’t. And had done quite well at it. So well, I wondered whether I would ever be able to accept Arlie as a female. But, at least Arlie being a girl explained a lot. The delicate features. The pretty-boy look I had taken to be, perhaps, gay back in fifth grade. The refusal to go skinny dipping when the moon was out. The panic over going to jail where …. Then we came to the old bridge and I put my ruminations to rest for a time. Aunt Cealie waved from the porch as we crossed over to her island.

  “I see by that look you done figured it out, Micajah.”

  That stopped me in my tracks. She had said Arlie would astonish me one day. Apparently this was what she’d had in mind. But how could she have known?

  “Come on up and sit a spell. And don’t look so surprised. Arlie’s a girl. Been one all along.”

  “Well, why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  “Ain’t my place to go ‘round layin’ out everbody’s secrets like they was teacakes at a church sociable. I figured she had her reasons.”

  “Okay,” I said a little warily, remembering what Aunt Cealie knew about me, “but how did you know that first day?”

  “I sees what’s right in front of me. Always has. Girls and boys is different, in case you ain’t noticed yet.”

  “I know that, Aunt Cealie. But I never thought to check… you know. I never suspected a thing.”

  “They’s lots more differences than… you know,” she teased.

  I finally sat down next to her. She patted the empty chair on the other side and Arlie slipped into it.

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Almost everthing. But the first tell is they walk. Saw it the first moment I laid eyes on her. Boys throws they feets out forwards. Always in a hurry. Girls moves them more dainty-like. Almost like they hesitate to put they foots out too fast.”

  “That’s it?”

  “No. That ain’t it. They’s lots more if you know how to see. Like that day I sent Arlie out to fetch me some purple swamp lilies. Ain’t no such thing, a course, but a boy would of come back and said he couldn’t find none and be did wid it. But Arlie come back wid white lilies when she couldn’t find no purple ones. That’s how girls does things. An’ then there’s that elbow backward bend thing ….” She cocked her head and studied me for a moment. “But you ain’t here to tell me you just found out Arlie’s a girl is you?”

  “No. I’m not. But it’s a long story.”

  “Well, I only gots ‘til the Good Lord finally see he done left me down here overlong in dis swamp, so you best get to it.”

  It took the better part of a jar of mint tea to relate the whole story, including the parts Arlie had told me in the tent during the storm. The part about how Old Man Quintin had said before Arlie was even born that he had no more use for a damn girl than he had for a cat with a litter of kittens and he would drown both if he ever got stuck with them. Arlie’s mother had taken him at his word. Probably would have left if she hadn’t been pregnant. But she knew Old Quintin wasn’t going to help change any diapers or bathe any babies so she just told him he had a son.

  When Arlie was about four, she told her they had a secret that “Daddy” must never know about. To make sure Arlie remembered, her mother had warned her that “Daddy” might get rid of her if he found out she wasn’t a boy. Arlie had lived in dread her whole life. She knew instinctively what “get rid of” meant around the Quintin household. Mr. Quintin was always “getting rid of” things. Stray dogs and cats. And mothers.

  When I finished, Aunt Cealie leaned back and thought about all she had heard. Finally she turned to Arlie. “Then what’s your real name? Did your mamma ever tell you?”

  “Arlene. She named me that so she could use the first part for my boy name.”

  “Then how come you didn’t go to bein’ a girl after your pappy was put in jail for good?”

  “I was Arlen by then. Everybody knew me. My teachers. Everybody. What would they think if they found out I was a girl all this time pretending to be a boy? Even the girls wouldn’t want me hanging around them. I was already the class loser. I didn’t want it to get any worse than it already was. But I knew I couldn’t be a boy much longer. They were talking about putting showers in the school gym over the summer.” Arlene glanced briefly at me then back down.

  Strangely, it occurred to me I was now the official class loser. The last boy picked. Arlie had been a girl. Then I had an epiphany. I was about to bring it up when the two crows homesteading the porch railing began to flutter and ruffle their feathers and for a moment the world swung in a different direction.

  “If I ain’t wrong, that’s Julene coming up the trail. Your mamma tol’ me last month you all was moving off to Callyfornia. She wanted to know if I would come along.” Aunt Cealie shook her head. “I done a good job raising your mamma, Micajah. Ain’t no one else in this world would ask a ole swamp woman like me to go to Callyfornia with them. ‘Course I tol’ her no. I gots too many swamp friends counts on me to jus’ pick up and leave without no notice. Ain’t that right, Luther,” she said to the nearest crow. He bobbed his head several times and flew up to land on the back of her chair where he let rip an appreciative dollop of crow shit to spatter on the porch floor.

  About that time Mom turned off the swamp trail, stew pot in hand. When she saw all of us, she paused on the bridge in a brilliant shaft of morning light. “Well, aren’t you boys nice to come see Aunt Cealie. I hope they aren’t bothering you.”

  “No more ‘n scratchin’ a dog’s ears bother him. Good to see you here too, Julene. I ‘spect this might be close to the last time. I can’t tell you…, well, ain’t no need to go there. An’ bless your heart, I see you done packed in another pot of your heavenly stew. Come on up here. We was just talking out some problems and I ‘spect you can help. You always was a smart one.”

  Mom stepped into the cabin for a few seconds and returned without the pot. Aunt Cealie shooed me off my chair and motioned for her to sit down. “Problem?” Mom said. “Oh, you mean the thing with Arlie. Yeah, I haven’t had any luck with that yet.”

  Then I remembered the recent revelation I hadn’t gotten a chance to mention. When the chatter died down I said, “I have a solution to the whole thing.” All heads turned toward me. “That arrest warrant is for Arlen Quintin. There is no such person.”

  Aunt Cealie clapped her hands together once. “I knowed you was a smart boy. Jus’ like your mamma. Yes, that’s it.”

  “What on earth are you talking about, Cager? He’s sitting right here.”

  “That’s not Arlie. Or Arlen. That’s Arlene. She’s a girl.”

  Aunt Cealie began to cackle. “Julene, I wish you could see your face. You look like the day you found out Santy Clause and the Easter Bunny wudn’t real.”

  “Well, Arlie isn’t the Easter Bunny.”

  “He might’s well be. When we through, he gonna be just as hard to find.”

  “Okay, you all want to let me in on the secret.”

  Mom sniffled and wiped away loose tears as I finished Arlene’s story. “All we have to do is take her with us when we leave for California,” I said.

  “Well, not quite all. It won’t take the district attorney long to figure out Arlie disappeared the same time his best friend’s family moved out of town. He isn’t that stupid. And the whole bunch of us would be arrested for harboring a fugitive. No. I’m not putting my family at risk over this.”

  “Yeah. You’re probably right, Mom. The justice system is there to take care of stuff like this. The women’s penitentiary should make a nice home for Arlene as the years pass.”

&nbs
p; “It was a fully justified killing, Cager. Self-defense,” Mom countered.

  “Then the public defender will have no trouble against an experienced, self-aggrandizing state prosecutor with a political motive and unlimited state funding. The added twist of the defendant having masqueraded as the opposite sex her whole life as well as being the offspring of a child killer should convince the jury the prosecution is just grandstanding. Especially since they’re moving to try Arlie as an adult.”

  Aunt Cealie, brows raised, glanced up at me and shook her finger once before dropping her hand to her lap. The message was clear. I had stepped out of character. Spoken as an adult. But Mom was too upset to notice. It was a moment I feared would haunt me the rest of my life. I had just served my own mother with a moral summons. But I knew Aunt Cealie had raised her, and I knew Aunt Cealie would have instilled a strong sense of justice in her. It was the only time I ever heard her swear.

  She threw one arm up. “All right then. Arlie, you’re coming with us.”

  “Arlene,” I corrected.

  “Yes, yes. Arlene. Okay. We’ll all go to California. The whole damn bunch of us.”

  Aunt Cealie held her hands up for calm. “I knowed you’d figure that all out, Julene. Now you jus’ gots one more step then you home free.”

  “What’s that, Aunt Cealie? Change our names? That won’t work either. They’re expecting the Fentons out there in California.”

  “No. Ain’t nothing like that. Arlie jus’ need to kill hisself off. Then won’t nobody be looking for him in Callyfornia, or anywhere else for that matter. And even if they do, they ain’t gonna find Arlie. They gonna find Arlene and when they check… you know,” she winked at me, “they gonna climb back in they cars and go home thinking they been looking up a dead dog’s butt the whole time.”

  Mom’s impatience finally took over. “Aunt Cealie, Arlie killing himself, herself, doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Just like always, you ain’t listening to your Aunt Cealie. Been done before and you knows it.”

  Mom fell silent for a moment studying the spattered crow shit.

  “You mean ….”

  “The very same.”

  “That might actually work,” Mom looked up. “What ever happened to him anyway.”

  “Tarnation if I knows. Never heared from him again. He took to the plan, I ‘spose. Anyhow, he got clean away and weren’t nobody ever the wiser.”

  “So, what’s the story?” I asked. “What did you all do?”

  Aunt Cealie leaned back. “You tell it, Julene. It were your idea.”

  Mom faltered for a moment then cleared her throat with a nervous glance in my direction.

  “Old Elijah, Lige to us, was a cousin on Aunt Cealie’s mamma’s side. He had killed a white man over a hog. Well, over the cuts on the hog’s ear that marked it as belonging to Lige. The white man insisted the mark was his. He used a triple cut and Lige a two and a half cut and the argument was over whether the half cut was actually a whole cut. But when the white man stepped over to his horse, slid a rifle out of its case, and pointed it at Lige, Lige pulled a little, two-shot derringer he kept in his boot top for just such an occasion. His first shot hit the man in the forehead and killed him instantly.

  “There were three witnesses to the shooting. Two white men and Aunt Cealie. It was immediately clear the two men were going to say Lige had no reason to shoot since the other man hadn’t cocked the lever to load a round, but Lige had no way of knowing whether a round was already chambered. It didn’t take long for word to get around town, and by nightfall things were getting rowdy, and the sheriff was off somewhere leaving only his deputy who was useless on the best of days. Anyway, to get to the point, Lige was either going to be lynched or convicted by an all-white jury and hanged. So Aunt Cealie and I worked out a plan that night.

  “Lige’s wife had died just a few weeks earlier and was buried in the woods nearby. Aunt Cealie and I dug her up and laid her out in Lige’s house. We all said a prayer over her then I fired the second round of Lige’s little derringer into her head. I put the gun in her hand and set the house on fire. Lige lost everything he had but his life and the mule he rode off on.

  “The next morning the deputy came out and poked around in the ashes a few minutes before declaring Lige had set his house on fire and then killed himself. It was an easy mistake since there wasn’t much left of Lige’s wife. Just enough bones to show there was a human with a bullet hole in its head lying in the ashes next to a derringer. If the sheriff had been there, he would probably have noticed the skeleton was too small to be Lige, but that didn’t happen.” Mom paused with her hand to her cheek. “Lord, Aunt Cealie, I never told that story before to anyone. Not even Jim.”

  “You always did make a good restin’ spot for a secret, Julene.”

  “So where do we dig up a body everyone will think is Arlie?” I asked.

  “No. We ain’t doin’ that again,” Aunt Cealie said. “Fire done saved ol’ Lige. Water gonna save Arlie. An’ we needs to get busy on that right now. When we done, that prosecutor man gonna think his chance to show off his fancy lawyerin’ done gone straight to Blazes with that bad seed, Arlie Quintin.”

  A half hour later we had our plan.

  Chapter 31

  I returned to the rear of the garage where Arlie, well, Arlene had stashed her bike, pulled it out of the brush, and pedaled it down to the old High Pine Bridge. Making sure I was alone, I pushed the bike off the bridge onto the rocks and dropped one of the shoes she had worn that day down beside it. After checking again that no one saw me, I scrambled down the bank and pulled out a little aspirin bottle nearly filled with blood Aunt Cealie had collected from a cut she made in the side of Arlene’s palm. I dribbled the blood over a sharp rock several feet back under the bridge where the recent rain wouldn’t have washed it off. Finally, I pulled several pieces of her shirt out of my pocket. They’d been torn to look like they might have ripped off on a snag. I threw them into the current and watched as they swept swiftly downstream in the now rain-swollen river.

  Finished at the bridge, I turned back upriver to our campsite where I packed up all our gear, scattered the fire pit, and used a pine bough to wipe out any tracks left after the rain. Mom was waiting for me at the crossing, and we carried everything back to the house.

  Once the camping equipment was stored, Mom took a deep breath and put her head against the kitchen door. “Have we forgotten anything, Cager?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m ready to ride over to the Goodwillough’s now.”

  “Are you sure you can do this?”

  “Yeah, I can handle it. You just wait here like nothing’s happened. We’ll see if anyone buys our story.”

  She gave me a hug. “Good luck. And I’m sorry my initial reaction wasn’t better. Of course we’ll take Arlie, Arlene, with us. Aunt Cealie too, if I can talk her into it, but I don’t think I can. She’s lived in that swamp on and off ever since that business with Lige so many years ago.”

  As I pulled up into the Goodwillough’s front yard, he stood talking with a well-larded deputy clearly at risk of doughnut elbow. “Here comes Cager now,” Mr. Goodwillough said waving at me.

  “Hi,” I said as I lowered the kickstand. “Just came by to get Arlie.” I had almost said Arlene. I needed to pay close attention. “We’ve got some more radios in for repair.”

  “I thought Arlie was with you all this time,” Mr. Goodwillough said, concern evident in his voice. “He said you two were going camping.”

  “Camping? No, sir. Not in that storm.”

  “Well it wasn’t storming when he left yesterday.”

  Sweat trickled down the deputy’s sunburned jowls as he studied me. He was getting suspicious. His furrowed brow said so. “So you haven’t seen the boy today or yesterday?”

  “No, sir,” I said, savoring that, technically, it was God’s honest truth.

  “And you don’t know where he is now?”

  “No, sir. Have you t
ried his old home. He goes over there to feed Tripod.” I looked first at one then the other. “The cat,” I added.

  “The Quintin home?”

  “Yeah.”

  The deputy hitched his equipment belt up as he turned to Mr. Goodwillough. “If he comes back here, don’t let him leave again. I’m headed over to the Quintin place now.”

  I had to resist telling him to look under the old High Pine Bridge while he was at it.

  After the deputy left, I noticed Tripod sitting on the porch watching us. Mr. Goodwillough followed my gaze then turned back to me, hope in his eyes. I broke from the plan. “Don’t worry. Arlie’s okay.”

  Mr. Goodwillough nodded briefly. “Good luck.”

  ***

  Another two days passed before they discovered the bike under the bridge. It made front page news in the Pensacola Journal.

  “Boy accused of murder disappears. His abandoned bicycle found under bridge yesterday morning. Blood on rocks indicates he may have taken a fatal fall from the bridge. Search teams combing the riverbanks recovered a piece of shirt identified by foster parents as the boy’s. The sheriff said strong currents from recent rains probably washed the body down into Perdido Bay forty miles south. The search has been called off.”

  Called off? Apparently no one cared whether Arlie’s body was ever recovered. But the scrap of shirt found downriver was enough to let the sheriff get back to a tight runoff in the coming election. There was never any mention of matching the blood to Arlie’s blood type, but, of course, no one would have known what Arlie’s blood type was. Still, better to have been too careful than too careless.

  The moving company arrived the next day and packed us out. We slept on the floor that night and ate breakfast the next morning at the White Rabbit. After returning home for a final check around the old house, Mom and I climbed into the car. Dad was locking up when District Attorney Colcraine and two of his horse-holders pulled up.