Justy stared at Kyle, whose face remained calm.
Jake walked into the house, greeted Dale and asked after the children.
“What’s your pick?” Kyle placed the guitar back on his lap and held his hands ready. Justy closed her eyes and tried to push back Jake and Dale. She wanted a soothing song, one that would bring them all together. Lacee bumped Justy’s head forward with an elbow.
“Answer him.”
Justy wished for a song to swim toward her. Whenever Jake sang, Dale hummed before she realized it was a pagan tune, and then she’d whisper a prayer to herself.
Kyle said, “How about this one?” He began to sing “On the Wings of a Dove,” stretching his deep voice and singing about pure sweet love. All of it a sign from above.
Again, Lacee and Micah joined in on the chorus. Jake walked up the plank to the cabin and Justy wondered if the feeling that flooded her would be similar when Armageddon happened. Jake opened the door, and Lacee and Micah stopped singing. A cold draft filled the room while Jake stood there, his jeans and flannel shirt mud-splattered. Kyle nodded but kept singing.
Jake pushed his glasses back when Lacee joined Kyle again on the chorus. Her sweet voice hit him sideways, distracting him from his old anger. Lacee saw his look and closed her eyes, her voice growing stronger. Kyle kept his voice down, giving Lacee room. When the song ended, she tossed her hair, her neck and face painted with a deep blush. Micah reached across Justy to pat Lacee on the knee. Kyle beamed. Jake shook his head, wondering where she’d learned to sing like that.
“Listen, Kyle.” Jake pointed his index finger. “We’re gonna have some rules.”
Kyle nodded and said, “I reckoned.”
The tide of Jake’s anger faded, leaving him with a pointing finger and his father and children waiting. He realized how much he’d missed Kyle, even though he’d sworn to keep him at a distance. The creek rolled under the plank, and time seemed to crawl. Jake dropped his finger.
“How about rosining up the bow, son?” Kyle tapped the body of the guitar. Jake gently closed the door behind himself. “Whew,” Lacee said.
“What do you say? Is he coming back?” Kyle’s eyebrows raised.
“I bet you a motorcycle ride he is.” Lacee walked to Kyle with her hand extended.
“Lacee,” Micah hissed. “We ain’t supposed to bet. You know it’s worldly.”
She shrugged and said, “It’s not gonna hurt anybody, so you keep quiet.”
“All right,” Kyle said to Lacee, and they shook. “We got us a bet.” While they waited, Kyle tinkered on the guitar, making up a song about a grandfather being too long gone, his grandchildren growing up like trees in the forest. He even sang about his tomboy granddaughters, wearing pants. Justy smiled and looked down at her and Lacee’s jeans, thinking about that prissy Sky Harris who wore dresses every day; she and Lacee wore them only to meeting.
Jake came in with his fiddle case. He stood next to the children and pulled out the instrument. Kyle watched him draw the bow across the amber rosin, and Justy thought she saw tears in Kyle’s eyes. Jake began playing “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow.” Jake slid the bow through the somber melody. The song was one of his favorites—it had seemed sad in a beautiful sort of way, just like the Eel seemed lonely in the early mornings with its curtain of fog. Now Jake seemed to be making a statement to Kyle, and the room filled with the power of it, how it carried Jake away from the confines of his body and soothed his hands. As he swayed with the melody, his glasses caught the candlelight and hid his eyes.
The song ended and Kyle strummed a few chords, and said, “’Sing Me Back Home.’” Jake started the song, and the two of them were off, playing and singing about a prisoner’s final request before dying. Kyle sang the story part of the song, and Jake joined on the chorus. Justy knew she wasn’t supposed to think such things, but it felt like magic, their voices combining in that way. It was hard to imagine that these two men hadn’t spoken in years, but maybe that’s what the music did for them—let them glide next to each other. Justy watched Jake’s fingers on the fiddle and wondered what other Colby hands had played it.
Kyle started a Cajun waltz, opening with a dance of fingers. Jake smiled and the children watched them trading licks and playing across the years. Dale caught the strands of music coming from the cabin while she plopped the last of the dumpling dough on top of the stew, then washed her hands. Through the kitchen window she saw the smoke curl from the cabin roof and the candlelight glowing through the windows. She went to the back door and drew aside the curtain, smiling.
The night air raised her bare arms in gooseflesh. She glanced at the moonless sky and saw hundreds of stars. The work of Jehovah constantly amazed her, and she thanked Him again for the chance to live in such country, even though surviving felt like a daily miracle.
***
Sweat dotted both the men’s foreheads, yet they kept playing, talking through the songs. They paused for a moment and Kyle winked at Jake.
“Let’s go down to the river, boy.”
Jake nodded and Justy sat straighter. Kyle said to the children, “You can help us on this one.”
Lacee leaned forward and Micah smiled. Kyle taught them the refrain and said, “That’s the basic song. Ready?”
Kyle began, “As I went down in the river to pray, studying about that good old way.” Jake eased in the fiddle. If the sound of all their voices joined together was anything near to love, Justy wanted in. The harmony pushed up against her promise—it felt like two kinds of hunger wrestling inside her, pulling her stomach apart. She jiggled the penny in her shoe, trying to remind herself that someone had to tend Jake and Dale’s words and their silences, and Justy knew she was the one. She let the song wash over her and felt Dale outside, also aching to join. Dale swayed with the harmony, closing her eyes and remembering back when her voice had been the pillar for this song, when she hadn’t made her own kind of sacrifices to Jehovah. It made her think of her baptism, not in a river but in a tank of warm water at a Witness convention. Her heart surged at the memory, how she’d made the strange promise never to sing the pagan songs again, not with Kyle hitting Jake and then leaving. Her hand went to her chest to keep from reaching out toward the cabin.
Justy sat outside the classroom on a wooden bench, listening to the sounds of Jennifer Sloan’s birthday party. The afternoon sun sat an inch above the western mountains, and she could tell there was an hour of school left. She kicked her legs and the bench rocked. The snow had completely melted, but cold air stung her eyes. Three small chickadees pecked in the dirt of the baseball field, and a crow flew overhead. Kyle had been with them about two weeks now, but Gaines had found some excuse for the grave job not to start. Kyle had dropped the children off at the bus stop that morning, heading south to the sawmill in Madrone to maybe pick up a couple days of work. Jake still dug ditch for Gaines, helping create a waterline on the property where a hot tub and sauna would go. Dale was out in service with Joella Mills, knocking on doors in the Madrone area, spreading Jesus’ word. Justy didn’t understand how Dale could find the courage to speak to strangers about her faith, but it was part of the commitment to witness to Jehovah’s Truth, and Dale tried to make good on it at least once a month.
Ms. Long had told the students to move their desks for the board games and jacks. When the students began, she walked to Justy, squatted and smiled gently. The flowers in her hair had wilted like they did every day by this time.
“Justy. Go ahead and wait outside.” Ms. Long laid a warm hand on Justy’s.
Justy walked to the door, trying not to notice how the room seemed to pause and inspect her. Ochre watched, his blue eyes intense. Justy frowned, knowing that even though she wanted to stay, she was doing the right thing by leaving the room. When the four riders came, she’d be on the right side of things, even if there were no sign of Jehovah in her heart. The copy of the birthday
calendar Ms. Long had sent home at the beginning of the year didn’t have Justy’s name on it. Dale had transferred the dates to the Tucker’s Logging Supply calendar. Under pictures of horses and beaches and redwood trees, Dale drew small X’s in the right-hand corner of the days her children should be sent out of their classrooms. Halloween, Christmas-decoration days, any birthday.
The children inside sang “Happy Birthday” to Jennifer and then clapped. Justy waited outside and thought about Ochre and his strange name. The other kids didn’t talk to him, except to call him okra or ogre. He still sat by her at lunch without comment, and he’d begun to smell good to her, like fallen leaves in the autumn.
The empty playground was quiet. Uptown, a quarter mile away, an occasional pickup drove by, leaving the store or the post office, maybe stopping at the gas station for cigarettes or a fill-up. It seemed only tourists ate at the two diners, their long cars or RVs seeming out of place. Justy walked to the pole in the center of the playground, where the flags danced in the slight breeze. The red, white and blue flag folded in on itself, and the state bear on the other one walked up into the sky. She loved the California flag, though she knew she shouldn’t love anything to do with man’s government. She liked how the brown of the bear contrasted with the white background. She wished she could see one someday.
Justy walked to the swings, the penny’s slide a comfort, and sat facing the baseball field and the old mill farther on. Almost all the kids she’d watched from the bench looked toward the school while they flew higher and higher from the ground. Her legs found a rhythm, and she felt the glorious pull of gravity and motion. It reminded her of her dreams, how she felt swimming, free and without a body.
Her view of the sawmill came and went, and she remembered the pictures in Jake’s yearbooks. So many more children played in the schoolyard then, and stacks and stacks of logs waited in the background. In some of the photos, smoke poured from the domed mill, its white plume seeming to drift from the tops of the children’s heads. Justy saw the gutted mill yard, the orange-red rust of the dome, and thought about the soil that the mining company wanted. The trees and the soil and the mill were different shades of red, and she wondered about the Indian blood running her body. Her hands seemed as pale as any of her classmates’.
A piece of glass glimmered, and she knew it was a broken beer bottle. A few of the remaining high school students and their dropout friends would gather at the mill yard on the weekends, drinking and throwing bottles at the dome, a circle of smashed glass ringing the rusted structure.
The chill forced tears from her eyes. She heard a door open and she stopped pumping, turning gently to see Ochre walking toward her. She twisted the swing so she could face him. He wore black corduroy overalls and the denim jacket with all the bright colors. His face widened into a deep smile. Justy liked how his eyes crinkled at the corners. She tried to look fierce, telling this boy to go away. He sat on the swing next to her, facing away from the school. She slowly turned back around and sat as still as any stone she’d ever watched.
“The cupcakes were burnt on the bottom,” he said. She wanted to laugh, since this was the first thing he’d ever said to her, but she kept her eyes on the mill dome. The chains of his swing creaked. “My mom, she doesn’t want me to eat any refined sugar.” His boots were covered in mud. “We eat things made with honey and carob.”
Justy knew he was scrunching up his face. She wondered what it was like to live in a tipi, the way some real Indians used to. Helen from Hilltop had said these people were from Berkeley, and Justy had looked on a map to see where it was. It seemed so far, but then she’d looked to see where Arkansas was and realized it was worlds away, and that was where Kyle and Lila had both come from. The only thing Justy knew about Berkeley was that it had a university, a place Colbys didn’t go. She wanted to know if Ochre had lived in a tipi in Berkeley, but she pulled her gaze away and he began to swing. Justy watched his shadow kiss his feet and then release him back to the sky. After a few minutes, he stopped swinging and stared at her.
“And my mom,” Ochre said, “she believes in a true separation of church and state, like it’s written in the Constitution, so that’s why I don’t participate in all that holiday stuff.”
Justy didn’t understand what he was saying, but she knew he was giving her some clues. She realized he’d be ready whenever she decided to talk to him. She felt it all well up inside her, the nights without food and praying the hunger would end, hoping to find a way to fill the silences between Jake and Dale. Ochre would listen with that wide-eyed look and that would be enough.
She pushed off and they were swinging, their rhythms out of sync, and then they were evenly matched. Justy leaned back, letting her head and hair hang so that the world was upside down, the sky a generous patch of cloudless blue. Ochre leaned back, too, and they both gradually came to a stop, her loose hair and the tip of his braid brushing the dirt beneath them.
He stood and Justy sat up, looking at his calm face.
“I got to go walking.” He smiled and started to move away, then turned. “Come swim sometime,” he said.
She didn’t know what he meant but she liked that he asked her, that her circle of people could maybe grow to include someone like him, a boy with color who seemed to understand her lack of speech. The peace sign flashed as he walked on beyond the baseball field and disappeared in the tall grass by the creek.
She swung gently and wanted to walk with him the farther distance to the Drive-Thru Tree a half mile past the mill yard. She’d show him the color of the Tree, see if he understood that the innards of a sequoia might be red. Men told stories in the bars—pretending she wasn’t there—about how they liked to take their dates to the Tree because the women couldn’t open the doors. Justy imagined her and Ochre standing free in the cutout, running their hands over the names and dates carved into the Tree. They’d stand the wintry shade of the tunnel, and Justy would be in the place Jake and Dale had first come together.
She wondered if Dale had sung for Jake that night, sixteen and hopeful at his interest. Dale’s voice must have been beautiful, filling the truck and the night and the Tree. Justy guessed Dale probably sang for all she was worth, using the one thing she had in this world to call her own, after her adoptive mother put her back in the foster-care system.
Ochre’s blond hair bobbed up and he waved. He started walking back at the same time the bell rang for the last recess. Children flooded out of the classrooms, and as they did, he walked to her and opened his fist. The five other swings filled with eager bodies and Justy took the tiny, smooth green rock he held out to her.
***
Lacee sat in the last seat of the bus, reading away while Micah sat again near the Harris twins, keeping his spirit safe from worldly influence. Justy remembered the scripture that the Witnesses quoted often, “Bad association spoils useful habits,” and she wondered what would become of her since she spent so much time in bars with Jake. She sat by herself and looked out the window as the rest of the children took seats. The boxy blue car sat near the bus and Sunshine waited, twirling the beads hanging from the rearview mirror. Ochre walked over and she got out of the car and they hugged a long time. When they pulled apart, he touched her green scarf as he told her something that made her laugh. Justy turned the stone over and watched them drive away, and she saw the car’s name, Volvo.
The ride was long, the yellow metal bending through the curves of the old highway. The Colby children got off the bus, and Emmet headed south to drop off the Harris twins and one other kid, a hippie type named Forest. A hundred feet from their bus stop, a silver sedan waited in the shade of the freeway overpass. Micah ran to the car, becoming a silhouette as he entered the dark shadows of the concrete structure. Lacee and Justy walked up and stood behind Micah.
Lucas Mills sat in the car, his brown hair slicked back, a smile lurking on his pale face. His slim body seemed hidden in the folds
of his blue suit. A Bible lay open in front of him, and on the seat sat a pad with neatly printed notes.
“Come on, kids. I’ll take you home.” His smooth words filled the afternoon.
Micah ran around and climbed in while Lacee and Justy slid into the backseat. Lucas handed Micah his Bible and started the car. Micah traced his fingers over the gilded letters. Lucas glanced every few seconds at Micah and he smiled back, his brown eyes full of shine.
It had been Lucas’s wife, Joella, who had first knocked on the door before Justy was born. Joella was the one with the quiet voice who spoke some kind of sense to Dale and helped open up a river of faith between Dale and Jehovah. Joella had the kindest eyes of anyone Justy had ever seen.
Lucas drove to the house for Jake’s monthly Bible study, the same way Joella had studied with Dale. Sometimes Jake didn’t show up, and Justy couldn’t remember when she’d last seen Brother Mills at their house.
He didn’t talk, his hands loose on the steering wheel. When they reached the house, Lucas turned to Lacee and Justy. “You girls been good?”
His right arm lined the seat behind Micah, almost pulling him closer to his presence. Lacee and Justy nodded, and Justy wanted to know why he never asked Micah. She tried to see her brother as Lucas did, and she felt a stab of jealousy fi11 her. She didn’t understand how it was Micah who got to be the boy and the one to feel Jehovah so solidly in his heart.
“Glad to hear that,” Lucas said, and then Lacee and Justy went in the house. Justy looked back and saw Lucas and Micah talking. She knew Micah’s name was in the Bible—maybe that was why he was connected to Jehovah. Dale had picked his name even before she’d heard of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Justy knew that Jake had picked her name while Dale was at a congregation meeting, cementing her alliance with Jehovah after Kyle had left, Justy still growing inside her. Jake was so sure Justy would be another boy, he took her name from his favorite pair of cowboy boots. When she’d shown herself to the world as a girl, he changed the name to Justine.
By Way of Water Page 8