by Bobbie Pyron
The world exploded. The blast lifted Tam off the ground and tumbled him backward. Pain unlike anything he had ever felt shot through his shoulder.
Footsteps stomped through the dead leaves and snow. Tam scrambled to his feet and tried to run. His front left leg refused to move. It hung limply and painfully at his side.
Another shot rang out above his head. “Come back here, you devil dog!”
Tam ran through the forest as fast as his three legs could take him. Blood streamed from the wound.
Footsteps quickened behind him, coming closer.
Tam lost his footing. He slid down a mud-frozen bank to the creek. The human tripped and slid, cursing.
A skin of ice covered the creek. Slick, black rocks jutted through the frozen surface like rotten teeth. Tam knew if he could get across, he could lose the human in the twisted laurel and rhododendron. Tam stepped carefully onto the ice. Water gurgled beneath.
The human stood on the bank at the edge of the ice. He raised his gun. “Say your prayers.”
Tam dodged to the side. The bullet whined past his ear. He scrambled blindly toward the far bank, away from the human and the gun and the sad, empty body of the coyote.
The ice cracked beneath Tam’s feet. Before he could save himself, he plunged into the freezing water and was carried away.
WINTER
CHAPTER 21
Abby
“You sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Mama asked.
From the safety of the school office, I watched all the kids at Jesse Rogers Middle School stream through the front doors. I had never in all my life seen so many kids, so many different kinds of kids, in one place.
It was January 4, my first day at a new school. My mouth felt dry as crackers.
Before I could work up enough spit to get an answer out, a tall lady with curly ginger hair walked in the office. She smiled at me and Mama.
“You must be our new student, Abigail Whistler,” she said.
“Abby,” Mama corrected. “She goes by Abby.”
The lady smiled right into my eyes. “Is that what you’d prefer to be called? Abby?”
I swallowed and nodded. Mama poked me with her mind-your-manners elbow.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I only get called Abigail when I’m in big trouble.”
Mama’s face turned red. The lady laughed. It was a nice laugh.
She held out her hand. “I’m Miss Bettis. I’ll be your homeroom teacher and your English teacher.”
I took her hand. It was cool and soft. “I’m Abby Whistler.”
After she and Mama made their hellos, Miss Bettis said, “Let’s get you down to homeroom so you can meet everybody. Does that sound like a good idea?”
“Yes ma’am,” I said. I figured if everybody at Jesse Rogers Middle School was as nice as she was, I might get along okay.
Miss Bettis steered me out into the mass of kids.
“I’ll pick you up after school, Abby,” Mama hollered over all the noise.
It seemed like it took forever and a day to get to the classroom. I figured you could have put three of my school at Harmony Gap into this one school, it was so big.
Finally, Miss Bettis stopped in front of room 309. “Here we go,” she said.
She pulled open the door and gave me a little nudge.
My mouth must’ve fell open all the way to the ground. I stared at the huge room with all its computers and bulletin boards and fish tanks and bookshelves and about a million and one eyes staring at me.
“Better close your mouth before a fly gets in,” someone called. Laughter rippled across the room.
Miss Bettis frowned. Everyone went quiet. “Class, we have a new student joining us. This is Abby Whistler.” Not a single person said hey.
“Abby, why don’t you tell us all where you’re from?”
I glanced at the kids in the front of the class. They looked like they could care less where I came from.
“Um…Harmony Gap, North Carolina,” I said, staring down at my feet like they were the most fascinating things on the planet.
“Well, that sounds like a lovely place,” Miss Bettis said. “But I’m sure you’ll be happy here in Nashville, right, class?”
Not a peep out of anybody, just lots of eye rolling and shrugging. At that particular moment, I wanted a big ol’ hole to open up in the floor and swallow me up.
Miss Bettis guided me over to a desk by the only window in the class. “I think we’ll put you here, Abby.”
I slid into my desk and tried to make myself very, very small.
She motioned to the girl sitting next to me who was busy smearing shiny stuff on her lips.
“Madison, would you serve as Abby’s escort this week?”
The girl glanced over at me. “Sure thing, Miss B.” She popped her gum. I waited for Miss Bettis to tell her to address her by her proper name and to get rid of that gum.
But she didn’t. Instead, she smiled and said, “Thank you, Madison. Make sure she finds her classes and the cafeteria.”
Without sparing me a glance, Madison said, “Sure, whatever.” If that had been Mrs. Radley at my old school, she would have jerked a knot in that girl’s tail for talking that way to an adult.
I took a deep breath and tried to smile just a little at Madison.
The bell rang. Madison stood up and slung a fancy-looking pack with all kinds of doodads hanging off it onto her shoulder. “Let’s go,” she said.
“See you back here for English, Abby,” Miss Bettis called.
Madison held out her hand. “Let’s see your schedule.”
I handed the crumpled piece of paper over to her.
She frowned as she smoothed it out. “You need to take good care of this,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s got everything on it—your class schedule, your locker number and combination—”
“I got a locker?” I asked. I’d never had a locker before. Only the kids at the Balsam County High School got lockers.
“Of course you have a locker,” she said.
“What do I do with a locker?” I asked.
She studied me like I was a bug under a windowpane. “I can see I have my work cut out for me.”
“Abby! Abby, over here!” Mama waved and hollered at me from the parking lot. The end of my first day at Jesse Rogers Middle School and my head was about to bust.
I slid into the seat beside Mama, slammed the car door closed. For the first time that day, everything was quiet.
Mama touched my cheek. “You okay?”
“Yes, Mama. I believe I am.”
She smiled and pulled out of the parking lot. “So how was your first day of school?”
Every single crack and crease of my brain was full to overflowing with everything about the day, so finding the right words was hard. “Okay, I reckon,” was all my brain had room for.
“Was it a lot different from your old school?”
I laughed. “It purely was,” I said. “The kids dress different, talk different, and act different. And Mama, we change classes lots more than we did at Harmony Gap.”
“Is that so?” she said.
“Uh-huh. And my history teacher is black and my math teacher is from somewhere in India. I can’t pronounce his name, but he’s real nice. I’m ahead of the other kids in the class.”
“You got your daddy’s math gene,” she said. “So your day must’ve gone by fast, then?”
“Yes, it did. I can’t even recall…”
And then it hit me like a ton of bricks: I’d gone a whole eight hours without thinking about Tam. Not once.
“What’s wrong, honey?”
I blinked back tears. “Nothing,” I said. “I reckon I’m just tired.”
We pulled up into the driveway of our rented house. My heart sagged just like the front screen door. Patches of paint curled away from the wood. The porch was barely big enough for one chair. When we first saw this house, Daddy said t
he yard was small enough for a feller to pee across. That had made me and Mama laugh.
Mama sat there beside me looking at the house too. Neither of us said anything for a long moment. Finally she sighed and squeezed my hand. “Let’s go in and unpack some more boxes.”
Later that night, after pizza and Daddy’s stories about all the people he was meeting down at the recording studio, I went to my tiny little room to unpack another box. I unpacked the last of my books and sketches. I put Tam’s picture on the table by my bed. I hung his collar from the bedpost.
Somewhere close by, another siren wailed. I’d never in my entire life heard so many sirens and cars and horns honking and people yelling. I missed hearing the wind in the old oak tree and the hoot owls late at night. I missed hearing Meemaw’s clear, strong voice drifting up through the heat vents from the kitchen below.
I crawled into my bed and pulled one of Meemaw’s quilts around my legs. From my bedside table, I took out Olivia’s letter. I unfolded it and read it for the fifty-second time.
Dear Abby,
You are the best friend I’ve ever had and I’ll miss you very much. But I want you to be with your parents. They need you. My papa used to always say the earth only spins one way: forward.
Try to be happy, okay?
Your friend always,
Olivia
“Just like Olivia,” I said to no one in particular. “Short and sweet.”
I threw off the quilt and ran to find Mama, which wasn’t hard in such a tiny house.
“Mama, have you got your computer set up yet?”
She looked up from the box of dishes. “Yes, it’s in the living room. Why?”
“Mama,” I said, “can you teach me how to do email?”
CHAPTER 22
Tam
Ivy Calhoun had lived outside of Galax, Virginia, near the banks of the New River, ever since most people could remember. Her daddy had built the cabin back in the twenties, when he’d bought the old Sawyer Mill and the forty acres around it. Folks had come from miles around to grind their corn and wheat, taking home sacks full of flour, cornmeal, and grits. Local legend had it that a fair amount of moonshine was bought from the Sawyer Mill too. That wouldn’t have surprised Ivy at all. Her daddy was fond of saying, “A man’s got to do what he has to do to feed his family.” And he had fed them well. There had been Ivy and her big brothers, Samuel and Ben; her older sister, Iris; and the middle child, Rose. Ivy was the baby.
Ivy shook her head as she pushed herself out of the worn leather chair by the fire. “I’ll be eighty-two come spring, and I still think of myself as ‘the baby,’” she said to no one in particular. She glanced at the faded black-and-white photographs on the fireplace mantel. The mill had been silent for forty years or more now. The great, groaning wheel was still. The cabin, like herself, showed its age. But the river and the mountains and the land were the same as ever.
Ivy pulled on her boots and grabbed the walking stick her grandson had carved for her at camp. She stuffed a bag of stale bread crumbs in her coat pocket.
It was her custom when the weather was good to walk the perimeter of the property, just like her daddy had done every day she could remember. It drove her children crazy.
“What if you were to fall and break a hip or something?” her daughter would say almost every Sunday during their weekly phone visit.
“You don’t know what all kind of weirdos might be out there by the river, Mama,” her son would say. He was a police officer in Roanoke. He thought everybody was a weirdo. Between those two and her nosy neighbors, Ivy Calhoun didn’t get a moment’s peace.
She stepped out onto the porch and squinted up into the winter sky. “Still,” she said, “I suppose they mean well.”
The sun touched the top of the ridge across the hollow. New snow sugared the trees. She watched the ridgeline grow brighter and brighter. When Ivy was a child, she’d stood on this same porch every morning with her daddy and watched this same sight. “It’s coming alive, baby girl,” he’d say. And it was true.
Beyond that ridge, thirty or forty miles to the east, wound the Blue Ridge Parkway. She and her husband used to drive up to the craggy balds where the best blueberries grew. Ivy smiled. “That man was a fool for blueberry pie,” she said to the brightening sky.
First she walked the fence line along the high pasture. The snow from two days before had melted in the open sun. A cardinal, bright red and black-masked head, watched Ivy from a fence post. Her husband used to say there was no prettier sight on God’s green earth than a cardinal in the snow. That was true too.
Ivy picked her way down into the forest, careful of her footing. She followed the winding line of dogwood and redbud trees. Ivy reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the plastic bag of stale bread crumbs. “Come get breakfast,” she called to the birds as she scattered the crumbs upon the snow.
The ground leveled as she approached the bank of the river. The water was narrow and shallow here. Her children had spent many a summer day on these banks looking for salamanders and crawdaddies. Farther down, where the river widened, the children had caught trout. Ivy knew where wild onions were plentiful in the spring and where the wild asparagus grew.
The old woman walked along the river, careful of slippery rocks buried beneath snow and dead leaves. Lids of ice capped the water pooled in the small, still places.
As she started up the gentle slope leading away from the river, something caught Ivy’s eye. It looked like a pile of old leaves or perhaps some garbage washed up from the river. She was about to walk on when a raven landed on the ground right in front of her. It cawed in agitation.
“What do you want, you noisy old thing?” Ivy knew this particular raven by his oddly notched tail feathers.
The bird hopped over to the pile on the riverbank, raised his wings up and down, and cawed louder. Ivy watched the raven’s strange behavior. Finally she said, “Oh all right, all right,” and made her way back down the bank.
“Oh my,” she breathed, bending down to get a better look. “What happened to you, you poor little fox?” Her daddy had hated foxes because they ate the chickens. But Ivy hadn’t had chickens on the place for years. She took great pleasure in watching the foxes slip quietly through her front yard and hunt the fields.
An ear twitched at the sound of her voice. An eye opened and locked on her face. Without thinking, Ivy lowered herself to the ground. “Why, you’re no fox,” she gasped. “You’re a dog!” She ran her hand carefully along the wet, matted coat. Bones rippled beneath her hand. Blood stained her glove. The dog whimpered. Tears stung Ivy’s eyes. “You poor, poor thing,” she whispered.
Snow drifted down around her as she stood. She looked up. The sky had turned from blue to lead gray. A gust of wind blew open her coat. “I’ve got to get you up to the cabin,” she said. She studied the size of the dog and the distance to the cabin. She heard her daughter’s voice, “Honestly, Mama! What are you thinking?” She heard the raven call from the tree above.
Ivy set her jaw, dropped her walking stick, and scooped up the dog. “Why, you’re nothing but skin and bones,” she said as she carried Tam up the slope to the cabin.
In no time, Tam lay on a wool blanket in the leather chair before the fire. The snow came down hard now, burying the front yard and piling against the house. A fretful wind howled across the chimney, but inside the cabin it was warm and dry.
Ivy watched the snow, one hand stroking Tam’s head. “If ever there was a dog in need of a vet it’s you. But I don’t dare drive in this storm. I’d get us both killed for sure, and then I’d never hear the end of it from my daughter.”
Ivy pulled up the footstool and sat down next to Tam. She put on her glasses for a better look. After her husband had died, she’d worked as a nurse’s assistant at the hospital in Galax. The old woman had helped put back together more folks than she cared to remember.
Ivy gently parted the bloody, matted hair on Tam’s shoulder. She inspected the wou
nd, then sighed. “Looks like the shot hit your shoulder bone and came out. That’s lucky. We got to get you sewn up, though, so you don’t lose any more blood than you already have.”
Ivy checked Tam from nose to tail, then, as carefully as she could, rolled him over. “Oh dear,” she said with a sigh. Ivy peered at the angry, infected abscess. She’d seen this often enough back when she’d had dogs of her own. “Just like I thought. You’ve had a run-in with a porcupine.
“Well,” she said, heading to the kitchen, “I got my work cut out for me.”
It was still snowing that night as Ivy sat, exhausted, in her rocking chair beside the fire. She had shaved the hair away from Tam’s shoulder, cleaned and disinfected the gunshot wound, and sewn it up.
Removing the festering quill was harder. First, she lanced and drained the abscess, then cut into the cheek to find the quill. Once she’d dug it out, she washed and stitched his face. It was clear, though, that the dog’s body was full of infection. In his near-starved state, she wondered if he had the strength to fight it.
Ivy stood and rubbed the ache in the small of her back. She pulled a fleece blanket across the dog. “I have my doubts whether or not you’ll make it through the night,” she said. “But if you’re still alive in the morning, I’ll call Doc Pritchett and see if he can come take a look at you.”
The wind pushed against the walls of the cabin. Snow scratched hungrily at the windowpanes.
CHAPTER 23
Abby
To: [email protected]
From: “Abby Whistler”
Date: Wed, January 6 7:32 pm
Subject: Hey again from Nashville
Hey Olivia,
Thanks for sending me that email right away the other night! I can’t believe how fast we can write each other. It’s almost like talking on the phone. I’m glad you and your granddaddy are going to see Meemaw this weekend. I miss her something terrible! You too! Mama says our family is a lot like a three-legged dog without Meemaw. We get along okay, but we don’t work nearly as well together without her.