I rolled the tarp up and stuffed it inside a pillowcase, then set about getting everything into some kind of order. It was dark out but not too cold. I pulled my sleeve back and looked at my watch. A long time ago it had belonged to Mama. It was near to seven-thirty.
I stuffed a bunch of things into my knapsack. There was a pile of paperback books I’d already put in the bottom of Dion’s. I started to take some out, then stopped and just put as much as I could on top of them. I wiped my hand across my forehead and was surprised to see that I was sweating.
Dion came back out carrying some more books and trying to pull on her boot at the same time.
“Girl, you trying to take the whole shelf?”
“I can fit a few in my pockets,” she said.
I took the books from her and stuffed some of them into my pack. The rest I took back inside. Then I took a quick check around the house, making sure we’d left things in a way that he wouldn’t come looking for us right away. In the bathroom, I pulled on my blue ski cap, then lifted my shirt and wrapped an Ace bandage tight around my chest. I didn’t have too much to make me look like a girl but the little bit I had, I wanted to hide. Dion didn’t have to worry.
When I came back outside, Dion was putting the last of her books into her knapsack.
“I got a book of maps in my pocket,” she said, eyeing me. “You figure we need them?”
“Kentucky in there?”
“Uh-huh. Is that where we going? What’s in Kentucky, Lena?”
“If Kentucky’s in there,” I said, ignoring her questions, “then pack it.”
“That’s where we going, Lena?” she asked again. “Kentucky?”
“You better get to tying your boot instead of asking so many questions or else the you part of this we ain’t going nowhere.” I knew I was lying but it made her move faster.
“Where’s my hat? How come you get one and I don’t?”
I threw her an orange cap and lifted the knapsack on my shoulders. She put the cap on and looked at me. “Get that bag on your shoulders and let’s go.”
That night, after I called Marie from a pay phone, me and Dion walked right on out of Chauncey. A lady in a blue car with Ohio plates drove us as far as Athens. We found woods to sleep in there.
I didn’t look back that night. Didn’t want to see Chauncey disappearing behind me. Getting smaller and smaller until it became another place and another time.
Five
It got real cold the night after we arrived in Owensboro. Me and Dion slept bundled up in our sweaters behind the Winn-Dixie. Some nights I prayed someone would come pick us up, take us someplace warm. But I knew in my heart I didn’t want to go to some police station or shelter to sleep in a room full of strangers, wake up to some social worker lady prying into our business.
The next morning, me and Dion went to the Salvation Army to get coats. Dion found herself this big old peacoat. It looked real cute on her with her scraggly hair. I told her she looked just like one of the Beatles—that band from the old days. Dion started dancing around the store, singing some crazy song about Strawberry Fields. A lot of kids wouldn’t know who the Beatles were, but Dion even knew one of their songs.
I got me a red bomber jacket with a hood that had fake fur around the edge. It kept my ears good and warm. The pockets had holes so I couldn’t even think about putting something in them, but if I jammed my hands in and balled them up into fists, they stayed warm. I pulled Dion’s collar up over her ears. The calendar next to the cash register said Saturday, December 29.
“Is that the right date?” I asked the lady who rang up our coats.
She looked at me kind of funny and nodded.
“Thank you.” I took the change she handed me and we headed out.
“Be two weeks tomorrow,” Dion said softly.
“I know. Don’t seem that long, does it?”
Dion shook her head. “Seems longer. We missed Christmas.”
“We knew it was coming.” Every town we ended up in had Christmas decorations up in store windows and on the lampposts. It was hard to not see it. Even the air smelled like Christmas—all piney and cold.
“Yeah,” Dion said. “But we didn’t know it came.”
I tried to think where we had been on Christmas Day—maybe Marietta or somewhere. A lot of stores had been closed one day and maybe that was Christmas.
We crossed the street and sat down on a bench at a bus stop.
“When we was little, Mama used to always make us a ham on Christmas and sweet potatoes and corn bread—a whole lot of food. But the only thing you’d eat was the corn bread. Mama used to say she’d never seen a baby eat as much corn bread as you.”
Dion smiled and I kept talking.
“She used to always wear her hair in this French braid that hung down her back and on Christmas, she’d do me and your hair up the same way and we’d just sit in front of the mirror looking at ourselves and eating candy canes. Even if we didn’t have a tree, we always had candy canes. And Mama always looked so happy on Christmas morning. She was tall and pretty and, before she got sick, she used to always laugh. Me and you could always make her laugh. And then she’d hug us and ask, ‘Who’s your favorite mama?’ ”
“And what would we answer?” Dion asked, even though I’d told her this story a hundred times.
I smiled and grabbed her. Dion laughed. “The one who can hug us the tightest!” I gave Dion a tight hug and smiled.
“And that’s what she’d do,” I said.
“I got a frog once,” Dion said. “A stuffed frog, right?”
“You loved that frog from the minute Mama gave it to you. You slept with it all the time.”
“What happened to it?”
I took my hands out of my pockets and blew on them. Dion shivered and moved closer to me.
“Huh, Lee? Where’d that frog go?”
I frowned. Every time we moved, something got lost. It was like there were these parts of us scattered all over the place. “I guess you got tired of it after a while.”
“Oh,” Dion said, but I knew she didn’t believe me.
“When we grow up, Dion, let’s always have a big Christmas with lots of food and presents and music.”
“And a grand piano we can stand around and sing songs. And it’ll always snow on Christmas morning, right?”
I nodded. “Always—big white flakes just slowly coming down like they got all the time in the world.”
Across the street, a group of little kids were walking in a line. Dion’s eyes flicked over to them, then away again real fast. She got quiet.
“You okay, girlie?” I reached over and rubbed my hand across her head.
“And hot chocolate with whip cream,” she said softly.
“Yeah. In big white mugs that we have to hold with both hands.”
Dion didn’t say anything, just kind of narrowed her eyes at the kids. I knew the dreaming was over for now. We got up and started walking again, Dion with her head hanging down.
“You missing school, right? I know how much you like it.”
She looked at me and shrugged. The wind was whipping around us like it had lost its mind. Dion’s teeth were chattering so I pulled her close to me. Soon as we got settled somewhere, I’d figure out a way to sign her up.
“I figure we could go get us some hot chocolate and something to eat, being the coats didn’t cost that much.”
“We ever gonna see Daddy again, Lena?”
My heart jumped. I squeezed Dion’s shoulder.
“Sure. One day.”
Dion looked up at me. “You lying. You said back before we left we wasn’t gonna see him no more.”
I stopped walking. And since my hand was so tight around Dion’s shoulder, she had to stop too.
“You listen to me good, Dion. Our daddy—well, he needs somebody to help him learn to—to treat us right. But he don’t know it yet. And when he finds out and gets some help, then maybe we’ll see him again.”
“What k
ind of help?” Dion’s voice was all tiny.
I started fussing with her collar, trying to figure out what to say next.
“The way he was touching on us, Dion. That don’t happen to everybody, you know. Other dads don’t do it.”
“What touching?” Dion glared at me.
“You know what touching.”
She jerked her head so I couldn’t fuss with her collar. “He never touched me.”
I swallowed and took a deep breath. When I first told Marie about my daddy touching me, she said that I was lying, that no father did something like that to their daughter. It took a while for her to believe me. People see what they want to see. I wanted to shake Dion hard now and make her remember. I didn’t want her mind shutting off. Not now.
“He did touch you, Dion,” I said softly. “If you don’t remember then maybe it’s best I put you on a bus back home to him.”
Dion’s bottom lip started quivering. I pulled her close to me and let her cry into my coat. “How come, Lena?” she cried. “How come it has to be us and nobody else? What’d we do bad?”
“We ain’t done nothing bad. Not me and you. And it probably ain’t only us stuff is happening to. Probably all over the place. It ain’t our fault either, you hear me?”
“We probably did something bad.”
I bit my bottom lip, trying to keep from yelling. “You listen to me good, girlie. Long time ago, I used to think the same thing but I had to sit and think hard about it. Our daddy’s a grown-up. Nothing a kid could do to make a grown-up start doing the things he did.”
Dion nodded.
“You spend some time thinking hard about it too, Dion. Think about somebody coming to you and you don’t want them being there—that’s not you doing something bad, okay?”
She nodded again, her lip still quivering.
“If Mama was alive things would be different. But we have to figure out stuff by ourselves and right now I’m figuring it’s too cold to be standing out here crying and hungry.”
Dion sniffed, then pulled away from me and wiped her eyes. She looked like a tiny little kid in her big peacoat with her eyes all red.
“Was Mama good, Lena?”
I bit my bottom lip again, remembering. “Sometimes I’d come home from school and you and Mama would be in the kitchen making bread. And the sun would be coming through the kitchen window making everything all gold and warm. You’d have flour all up and down your arms and Mama would kind of look at me over your head and smile all proud.”
“What would I do?”
“You’d hold up your arms for me to hug you and then I’d hug you and get flour all over me. You thought that was the funniest thing.”
I pulled Dion closer to me. “And then later on, we’d sit by the potbelly stove eating bread and jelly and drinking hot chocolate. Maybe that’s why you love hot chocolate so much, ’cause of that time.”
“Maybe,” Dion said. “Where was Daddy?”
I shrugged. “Out. Maybe he was working. Or drinking. I don’t remember.”
We walked awhile without saying anything. When I was real little, I remember my mama and daddy standing at the bedroom door smiling in at me. He used to have a nice smile. And I remember him asking me whose little girl was I and me saying, “I’m Daddy’s little girl.” And then he’d tickle me.
“Can I still miss him, Lena?” Dion asked. “Even though?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You can miss him.”
And we walked on, Dion’s missing him outright and my missing him tucked away deep inside, in a long-ago place where I had to think real hard to feel it.
Six
Mama was born in Kentucky. Somewhere near Pine Mountain. I wanted to get us to that mountain, see Mama’s home. I didn’t know what would happen after that, but maybe those mountains, Mama’s mountains, could tell me.
My family wasn’t always broke. There was a time when things were all right, when we always had something good to eat and Mama making us those pretty dresses. Before the coal was all gone and before Mama’s cancer, we wasn’t rich or anything but we got by.
People see somebody poor and they think it’s ’cause the person don’t want to work or don’t have good sense or something, but that’s not always true. People all the time looking for a way to blame a person’s troubles on the person. In Chauncey, people would look at me and Dion like we was dirt sometimes. Besides the dresses Mama used to make, I don’t remember having something new. After she took sick and our daddy wasn’t working regular, shirts and pants just sort of showed up at our house, buried deep in the back of a box or wrinkled at the bottom of a bag of clothes. When I started going to Chauncey Middle School where most everybody dressed so nice, I tried to make my clothes look a little better. Got a secondhand iron for two dollars and I’d run it over my stuff and Dion’s every morning—figured if the clothes were clean and ironed, they didn’t have to be new. People looked anyway. Called us whitetrash. White cockroach. Cracker. There’s not a name I haven’t heard somebody call me. After a while, the names kind of settle inside you. They start to . . . it’s like the names own you. I see Dion walking with her head down and I want to yank it up, say, You can read and you can write and you can walk, girlie, so don’t let the names own you. But she probably wouldn’t even know what I was talking about.
“Mama’s people were farmers,” I said one afternoon. Maybe a week had passed since we’d gotten dropped off in Owensboro. We’d gotten a couple more rides since then and I tried to remember the name of the town we were in. We were sitting out in front of an old shed we’d found the night before. All around us white pine trees shot up tall enough to keep the shed halfway hidden. I leaned back against it. It was pretty out, warm, with the sun shining in splinters through the trees. We were closer to something. I could feel it.
Dion scratched her head and stuck a few pine needles between the pages of her book. She was sitting across from me with her legs folded Indian style. It’d been some time since we’d had a good shower. Dion’s hair looked oily. I kept a bottle of water in my bag alongside the toothpaste and brushes and made her brush her teeth every night but her neck looked like it could use a good scrubbing and our nails were chewed and dirty.
She shrugged and looked up at the trees.
“You should know about Mama,” I said softly.
“I’d rather just think it was you all along, Lena,” she said. “Just you taking care of me.” She looked down at her fingernails. “I miss Daddy. I don’t want nobody else to miss.”
“Knowing about her don’t mean you have to miss her, Dion. I just figure it’s a way of having a mama.”
“You’re like my mama, though. You always took care of me. I don’t remember her—just shadows and stuff. I miss things I remember—like school, my bed in Chauncey, that pair of red sneakers I left at home.” She smiled. It was one of those sad grown-up smiles.
I leaned back against the shed. “Maybe I tell you Mama stories ’cause I want to hear them. I don’t want to forget her.”
“What kind of stuff did her people farm?”
“She never really said . . . or I don’t remember. What can you farm up in the mountains?”
Dion squinted and thought for a moment. “Mountain land is sloping and whatnot. Dirt would slide right down it. One good rain and—”
“Well, maybe her people lived in the valley,” I said. Sometimes Dion’s smartness got on my nerves.
“Well, maybe you know what they grew then!” She snapped her book open and started reading again.
I watched her for a few minutes. She was wearing her sweater turned inside out and her blue jeans and hiking boots. Her hair was starting to grow out some and every now and then she wiped it back away from her forehead.
I lifted up my own boots and checked the bottoms for holes. There was a tiny one in the right boot but other than that, they were holding up fine. I leaned back against the shed again and sighed. Some nights, standing out on the road with my thumb out, I got scared. Sc
ared the next ride was going to be our last one—that someone would hurt us real bad or turn us in to the police. But every time we got out of somebody’s truck or car, I felt good— a little bit more free. And times like this, when we could sit and get our minds together a bit, I started getting real sad. I didn’t know what was harder—moving or sitting still.
“You know what I miss most about Chauncey, Dion?”
“What?” Dion mumbled, not taking her eyes off her book.
“Remember how on Saturdays we’d go over to Marie’s house and take baths?”
Dion nodded. I didn’t care that she was only half listening, it felt good to be talking about Marie. Even if I was mostly talking to myself.
“Sometimes Marie would come in and sit on the toilet and read—”
“I wish we had a toilet here,” Dion mumbled.
“We do. Right in the woods. Go when you gotta go.”
She sucked her teeth.
“Anyway, Marie would read this poet named—”
Dion looked up. “What poet?”
“This lady named Audre Lorde. She was mostly a poet and sometimes she wrote other things.”
Dion went back to her book. “Her poems rhyme? I don’t like the rhyming kind.”
“Maybe some rhymed and some didn’t. I don’t know. That’s not even the point.”
“Well, what’s the point then?”
“It’s how the words made me feel,” I said. Then I started reciting softly—the same way Marie used to read to me. “It went something like ‘Living means teaching and surviving and fighting with the most important resource I have, myself . . .’ ”
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