“Go ahead,” she said. “Tell us something you like about Mother Nature.” Ms. Long folded her hands in front of her chest, waiting.
Jordan’s blond hair fell into his eyes and he blew it. His mouth seemed to start working before any words came out. “I like hunting with my dad.”
Ms. Long frowned. “What do you like about hunting? The deep smell of the forest floor? The sun rising over the mountains?”
Jordan blew his hair again. Justy didn’t think he looked much like his uncle Lefty. “I like the guns,” he said. “Daddy’s got a twenty-two he lets me carry, and when I turn eight, it’ll be mine.”
Ms. Long frowned more and asked Jennifer Sloan, who twirled her hair around a finger and said, “I like the flowers.”
“Exactly. Me, too,” Ms. Long said, and beamed. The circle continued, with Ms. Long being frustrated by most of her students. Justy wondered where Ms. Long had come from. When it was Justy’s turn, she just looked at her socks, saw where Dale had darned a hole on the left heel. Ms. Long prompted Justy three times before she glanced at the clock. Justy looked at her and noticed that the flowers in her frizzy hair had wilted.
“Justy.” Ms. Long used her firm voice. “Please answer the question.”
Justy shook her head no, once.
“Well then, we’ll just have to put your good little head to work. Write me a poem about it, due tomorrow.” Ms. Long nodded, affirming her decision. The other students stared, then looked to Justy’s left for Buddy Stewart’s response. The children were used to her being different, mostly because she couldn’t participate in the holiday activities and because she got to do different assignments, ones that let her go to the library by herself and leave for other classrooms every once in a while. When Ochre refused to speak as well, Justy sat straighter and sneaked a look at him. He was smiling at her. Ms. Long stood up with exasperation and told him he had to write a poem also.
“Back to your seats,” she said, and handed out handwriting worksheets. Justy flew through them as Jake approached Shelby Gaines’s house, rang the doorbell and waited, his cowboy hat in his hand. Dale looked through recipe books Mamie had given her, letting the pictures take her from the four things she had to cook with: peanut butter, celery, food coloring and deer meat. Justy laid her pencil down and waited for the school day to end so she could ride along the Eel and return to Dale.
***
Eight days later, Jake picked up the kids after school and then stopped at the post office, leaving them in the truck while he went into the one-room building for the mail. The five-foot-wide bulletin board that stood between the store and the post office held a few handwritten signs, two of them offering cordwood for sale. One advertised herbs, and Sunshine’s name and post-office box were listed. Justy guessed they didn’t have a phone in the tipi. Jake tried not to smile when he saw the envelope from Kyle marked “Jacob Colby, General Delivery.” Inside was a check for two hundred dollars written in Kyle’s blocky handwriting, and Jake took a deep breath, feeling suddenly lighter.
He returned to the truck and smiled through the window. Justy gently shoved Lacee, who looked up from her book and smiled back at Jake’s rare show of teeth. He opened the door with a flourish. On the way home, he sang cowboy songs the children all knew by heart. Lacee mouthed the words and Micah sat next to Jake, smiling. When they reached their dirt road, Jake traded places with Micah. “Let’s see you drive, boy.”
Micah’s legs barely stretched to the pedals, but Jake told him how to work them. Lacee pretended not to notice, but Justy could see her watching from the corners of her eyes. Jake felt a surge of pride at his son, at all his children with their good grades and all. When they pulled up to the house, he told Micah he’d make a good Tonto any day of the week. Lacee and Justy went inside, and Jake showed Micah the carburetor, the battery and the spark plugs. Justy wanted to learn these things, too, but Jake didn’t think girls needed to know such stuff. Lacee went into the bedroom and began reading again, taking herself away from Jake. Justy walked to Dale, who sat at the kitchen table with a needle and thread, fitting a dress for her. A candle fought back the approaching afternoon dark while Dale sewed. The dress and other clothes had come in a black plastic bag from people in the congregation last Sunday, and Dale had spent her days changing the clothes to fit her family. She was almost finished, and Justy watched her strong hands making quick work of the thread and fabric, sewing a hemline.
“Hello,” Dale said through the pins in her mouth. Justy wondered if it mattered to Dale that she’d grown speechless. Dale hadn’t once said anything about it. Justy was surprised at how easy it was to leave the world of speech. If only Ms. Long would leave her alone and stop asking her to participate in the circle talks. Ochre hadn’t remained true to his circle silence, staying quiet only on the first day. Jake and Micah entered the house, and Dale set aside the sewing, pulling the pins from her mouth as Jake walked close.
“Look what he sent.” Jake held out the check and Dale’s eyes widened. “I know. It’s a chunk. I can get the rifle from the pawnshop.” Jake walked away from her, taking big goose steps. He poked Micah in the ribs, and Micah laughed. Dale watched them play. Justy wondered if Jake would like her and Lacee more if they were boys.
“Jacob?” Dale said.
He looked at her and went back to tickling Micah for a few more seconds before walking back. “Yeah?”
“Can we go to town and get some things?” Dale leaped inside at the thought of being able to make a real meal.
“Yup. You can have fifty. Why don’t we go to Safeway?” He smiled and tousled Justy’s hair. She looked to the can of pennies still sitting on the kitchen counter and wondered what she could do with them.
***
They rode though the darkening day. The fifty miles passed quickly, with Jake singing to himself and Dale holding tight to Justy, considering the different food she’d buy. Micah and Lacee were quiet, each reading a book. The dirty snow melted along the road, no longer looking like something good to eat. When they had to stop at a sign, they entered the north end of the town of Willits.
The lights of Safeway stung Justy’s eyes as she followed Dale and Lacee inside. Jake drove away with Micah to the pawnshop, on a back street in the front room of a man’s house. Dale took a cart and pulled out a pencil and a piece of paper from her purse. Lacee began reading a fashion magazine, scowling at the pictures of women wearing too much makeup and not enough clothes or flesh. Justy drove the cart and Dale considered each item. If she put it in the basket, she added it to her tally, making sure she didn’t go over her allotted fifty dollars.
When she had placed milk, eggs, flour, sugar, bacon, potatoes, rice, bread and a few nonfood items in the basket, they entered the cereal aisle. Dale picked out oatmeal and Cheerios, but Justy’s eyes were drawn to the colors of what Dale called the sugar cereals—Froot Loops, Cocoa Puffs, Sugar Smacks. Justy knew these weren’t good for her, just like the holidays, but she still liked to look at the packaging. Ochre never ate meat or candy, but he seemed to like the lunches Sunshine prepared for him. He kept sitting next to Justy at lunch but never said anything.
Dale paused in the baking aisle and studied the numbers on her paper. Then she grabbed a package of baking yeast; she’d seen a recipe for sourdough bread, and if she could figure it out, she could keep the starter in the fridge and make bread instead of having to buy it. Justy closed her eyes and felt the ways Dale spread herself thin; she didn’t know when money would come in next, so she tried to figure out how to buy the right things to last. Justy thought it was almost like a spell, Dale’s ache and ability to feed five mouths. Dale put the package in the cart, smiled and said, “It’s not even a dollar.”
Justy nodded. Dale’s love for her children felt like the ocean to Justy, wide and without end. Lacee approached them with a magazine. “Look, Mama.” She held out a picture of a woman dressed as a girl.
“We can’t afford that,” Dale said, and looked away.
“I just wanted to show you this article.” Lacee gritted her teeth and started to walk away. Justy tapped Lacee on the elbow. She looked at Justy as if she weren’t there. Justy felt Dale waver; she didn’t mean to come across so harsh, but she wanted to stop hope before it had time to fi11 the sails.
***
Jake walked into the pawnshop while Micah waited, playing with the steering wheel and singing, just like Jake. The man who answered the door nodded at Jake without smiling and said. “I’ve had to fight off some good offers.”
Jake panicked, and his eyes ran the room full of guns, giant televisions, radios, guitars. Behind the counter, his Krag .30-10 waited, and he relaxed a little.
“I reckon you have.” He pulled out the cash, tried not to think about Kyle’s need to send the check and laid out a hundred dollars in tens.
“One more day and I’d have sold you short, friend.” The man rubbed his large belly.
“Good thing I got here, then,” Jake said. The man counted the money again and handed the rifle to Jake. The gun’s weight was pure in Jake’s hands, and he grinned. Despite his dislike for someone who thrived at the expense of other people’s failures, Jake dipped his head and left the pawnshop, feeling better than he had in months.
Justy sat in the barn, looking at the pictures tacked on the wall. She stood in Jake’s territory like he stood in hers every day, he and Dale filling her up and making her confused all the time. In the growing afternoon dark, the people in front of her were hard to see, but she liked the clean, white edges of the pictures—the way the borders made the photos seem complete, whole stories she could tell herself. Today she was trying to gather from them something of Kyle.
Justy leaned on a saddle, a stirrup hitting her behind the knees. Around her, cobwebs lined the things in the barn—the wooden kitchen table Jake had cracked one night when he was mad, a grandfather clock that had never worked, boxes full of what, Justy didn’t know. The air remained chilly and she chewed on the inside of her turtleneck. Most of the photographs tried to curl into themselves. Off to the right, four blue and two red rodeo ribbons hung. In one rodeo picture, Jake’s arm blurred as he quick-wrapped a calf’s hind legs; a horse pulled another rope taut, keeping the calf’s neck strained.
In an old tomato box, Jake kept his high school yearbooks. Justy had pored over them and learned it had been Jake’s ambition to be either a rodeo star or a professional fiddler. And she found out he’d played all the sports in high school, even football when the town had been big enough to have a team. His nickname had been Fiddle, and in the yearbook pictures, he didn’t wear glasses.
A raven cawed from one of the drooping live oaks that surrounded the barn, and Justy looked away from the yearbooks and concentrated on the photo of Jake’s mother when she was young. Lila—the grandmother Justy hadn’t known—and her three sisters stood outside a shack, their hair in black braids that disappeared down their backs. Each had her arms folded in front of her chest, the gingham of the dresses faded. They didn’t look like the Indians Justy had seen on television or in comic books. Their faces were lined with stories she would never know—lines that were echoed in Jake. Justy scrunched up her cheeks to see if she, too, carried stories in the canyons of her face, but her skin felt smooth. Her fingers left her face and she thought about the Indian who sat on every billboard advertising the big trees. He was a silhouette on his horse, spear at his side. The way he sat made him look completely defeated, and it took her the longest time to realize the spear wasn’t lodged through his body. She didn’t understand why a sad Indian was the symbol of the giant trees. Maybe it had something to do with the red of the bark and the supposed red of an Indian’s skin. But that didn’t make much sense to her, either.
She touched the picture of Lila and her sisters. Jake didn’t know what had happened to his aunts, and Justy wondered if they’d grown up, married men with blond hair and blue eyes, whether they had had children. She didn’t like it—that there might be family somewhere in this world who didn’t know about hers. Justy imagined the girls’ parents standing with the photographer, too shy to be in the picture but still proud. She thought maybe they had been people who knew how to sing and play stringed instruments, and that Jake had inherited an appetite for music from both sides.
The sound of a truck broke her gaze. She knew it wasn’t Jake. With a sigh of relief she stepped back. If he caught her here, she’d get it. She remembered back to the night, years before, when Helen had called and they’d had to leave, Dale shaking them awake and all of them running down the road. It had been strange, to run away from the power in Jake’s drunken hands. Now someone drove the quarter mile to the house, but when she checked the filaments of her shadowy senses, she knew Jake was still at Gaines’s place, digging ditch until the grave job began. Dale punched down a loaf of sourdough for the second time, pleased she’d taught herself this new skill. The sound of the truck grew, and Justy looked at the picture of Kyle, a dashing young man in military dress, a world of white behind him. She considered hiding in the trough—like she did when Jake drove home and she was here—and decided against it. She took the picture down, knowing how vivid Jake’s anger would be if he knew. Something lurked beneath Kyle’s absence, and Justy had been given only a hint of it that night Dale had visited the pictures in the dark.
Justy held Kyle in her hands and was not surprised when she heard the truck turn toward the barn. She walked to the barn door. Kyle’s eyebrows arched, wonder riding his features, but he smiled. She glanced down at the photo and saw that most of his good looks had run into the wrinkles by his eyes. He looked at the row of barn supports that caught the edge of the roof, creating a protected overhang for cattle or horses to feed. Three of the five supports simply hung in the air, like rootless trees, the cement blocks that used to meet them gone.
Kyle shook his head and walked toward her. “Hello,” he said, then squatted on his cowboy boots before her. She nodded and felt lost in his hazel eyes. Their color reminded her of the Eel in late summer. He pushed back his white straw cowboy hat, and she could see sunspots dotting his pale forehead. His long legs were clothed in faded jeans, and over his lanky torso he wore a white western-cut shirt. They studied each other and then his eyes darted to her hands. He smiled and walked to the back of his old Chevy pickup. He pulled out a saddle and brought it into the barn, the straps and stirrups dangling around him. A few feet into the building, he stopped, letting his eyes adjust. He slung the saddle over the edge of the family baby crib and slapped his hands together.
“Crazy, ain’t it? This saddle with no horse.” Kyle sighed. “I see Jake’s are all gone.”
Justy tried to see through Kyle’s eyes, someone who’d been here before, now returned to the skeletons. Jake had sold his three saddles over the last three winters.
“Where are we gonna go, anyway?” Kyle asked. She just looked at him, wondering if she should be afraid of this man. He walked the length of the barn, past the cobwebbed tack hanging from the large nails in the wall. His footsteps rang hollow until he reached the other end and the dusty remnants of hay, now more silhouette than person. Small slivers of vertical light seeped through the spaces in the boards. This was her grandfather, a man she knew only from pictures, pieces of stories and whatever feelings Jake and Dale allowed concerning him.
He pivoted a slow circle on his boots and held out his hands. “What a man don’t own…”
Justy wasn’t sure his muffled words were intended for her. He stood quiet another while and then walked back to her. “You must be Justine.”
She nodded, wishing she could open her mouth and tell him she preferred Justy.
“Nice to meet you.” He stuck out his hand and smiled. “I remember when you was just a growing thing inside your mama’s tummy.”
She studied his palm, saw the callused softness of it and stuck out her
own. They shook hands, his warmth easing her shoulders. Her hand seemed so tiny in his large grip, and she grimaced, feeling like she could tumble into him.
“A pleasure,” he said. “What you got there?”
She looked down to his young black-and-white face and then held it out to him.
“Time sure does get you.” Kyle took the photo. He studied it and then grinned. “United States Army,” he said. He cocked his head, and his words seemed to fall out of the lowest portion of his mouth. “Wanted to be a horseman.” He gestured to the saddle.
“Figures that the year I join so I can be in the cavalry is the year the army decides to phase it out.” He handed her the picture and looked to the rest of the photos. She moved closer. She wanted to keep her stories of her family intact. At the same time, she wanted to know the people Jake and Dale were before she was born and whether their stories could help her bridge the gap between them now.
Kyle squatted and rested his palms on his jeans while his eyes traveled the pictures. He considered each one, blinking only when he moved to the next. The nine pictures on the wall were almost all the Colbys had to show themselves they had a history. Kyle looked at himself as a young man sitting in an army jeep, snow covering the landscape, military sheds in the background and behind the sheds, radio towers. He took the picture down. Justy took a deep breath. This was Jake’s place first, and then hers, and here was this stranger boldly touching the photos. Kyle turned the jeep picture over and held it out to her. In pencil, it said, “Daddy wishes he could take his Jake boy for a ride. Daddy burns up the road with this buggy.”
Justy blinked, realizing that was Kyle’s handwriting from years ago, the same as on the check he’d sent two weeks before. She didn’t know words lingered on the backs of any of the photos.
“So, they sent me to the Aleutian Islands instead of giving me a horse. Had to keep a watch against the Japanese, the Russians, anybody that might try an attack through the Bering Strait.” He shook his head, and Justy tried to remember where these places might be. “Ridiculous, when all I wanted was to be a cowboy, not an army hero.”
By Way of Water Page 6