Finding Esme

by Suzanne Crowley

  “What the heck?” I gasped. Old Jack backed away, whining, then barking, till I called him to come over and look. “It’s all right, old boy,” I said. “It’s all right.” He sniffed at the tooth. I set down my tools and covered what I had dug up best I could with Bee’s crazy quilt. As we ran home through the orchard, a fine mist illuminated the peaches like sugared candies. Once we got close to the house, I could see June Rain’s silhouette up in her window, face pressed against the screen.

  Bee was waiting for me in the kitchen doorway, smoking a cigar, its lit tip like a firefly hovering in the dark. It was one of Paps’s, and it smelled like mowed hay after rain. I felt my stomach drop watching that ember, thinking about what I’d found earlier, those cigarette butts, and what it might mean, and how Bee knew things, but didn’t really know, not really. Thinking about the matches out in the henhouse, the fireflies leading us up the hill. All of it.

  We locked eyes a moment and a small shiver went up my back. I waited for her to say something. But she turned away and I brushed past her, shivering, and ran up to my room.

  Sometime in the night, Bo crawled into bed with me, snuggling up under my arm. He hummed sweetly off-key, harmonizing with the rhythm of the rainfall. I dreamed that night of a big-toothed monster, of Finch’s blue-green freckles, and June Rain’s peach-tree eyes. “Shhhhh,” she whispered to me. “Don’t tell.”

  The next morning I woke up thinking about what I’d found on Solace Hill and if I should leave well enough alone. I’d once asked Bee what she’d ever do if she found something really bad, and she said she couldn’t choose what God led her to and I wouldn’t either when my time came. When my time came. All my life Bee had told me I’d get her gift, but I wasn’t sure I wanted it now.

  When I went down to breakfast, I paused at the top of the stairs. June Rain’s door was open. I knew her soft footsteps, her slow movements, her silence, her stillness; wherever she was in the house, I was aware of her. But I couldn’t hear her, so I tiptoed into her room. Everything was always trim and tidy—her bed made, clothes neatly folded, almost as though she didn’t live here. When I was little I always looked under the bed, checking for her suitcase, worried she was gonna leave and follow Harlan. I walked to the window where I’d seen her last night and peered out. She was in the yard hanging clothes on the line. Bo was laughing and running through the sheets.

  She’d taken Harlan’s portrait of her from my room and leaned it on top of her dresser, her sad face staring back at me amidst all the swirls and blobs. I picked it up and something fell on the floor.

  It was a postcard. On one side was a big cactus in the desert with “Arizona” drawn fat and cartoon-like across the top. I slowly turned it over. It was addressed to June Rain McCauley, Peach Hollow Farm, and was dated two weeks ago. There was no writing, just a crooked heart painted in blue. I held it to my nose, smelling his Rise Aftershave Balm and the faint, stale odor of smoke. Harlan. I started to put the portrait back and saw there were more postcards propped up against the wall. They were from all over the country. None of them had a note, just smiley faces, hearts, and other scribbles, tiny versions of his ain’t-no-picture paintings. Harlan never really did know his letters. Bee said he couldn’t spell his way out of a watering can. But all this time I’d thought we’d hadn’t heard from him and he’d been sending these messages to June Rain. And she didn’t tell me. Didn’t tell any of us.

  I quickly looked under her bed, my heart exploding with worry, and pulled out her suitcase. I slowly, slowly opened it as though it were a coffin, like I’d done so many times before. But it was empty.

  The kitchen door slapped, startling me, and as I hurriedly put the cards back behind the portrait, the edge of a black-and-white photo caught my eye. The picture was of Harlan, leaning against an old-timey gas pump at a filling station. There was a prairie beyond the gas station, with a majestic blue mountain looming in the background. His heavy-lidded eyes were smiling back at the camera. I wondered who’d taken the photo. Was he traveling with someone? He was happy, wherever he was. But different than I remembered him. I quickly stuck the photo in the bottom drawer of my bureau, where I kept the photo of Bee, the other Bee, the one we didn’t know, the beautiful one, who’d walked on her wedding day with a swarm of bees over her head.

  After picking peaches for Bee all morning, I rode my bike down our rutted road over to Finch’s house. Finch’s house looked like someone had punched it. The front porch sagged, a couple of windows had cardboard taped across, and a sad row of blue Christmas lights, missing every third light or so, rimmed the roof. There was a rusted-out pickup truck in the front yard and clothes out on the line that had been there so long, they were polka-dotted with mud and grime.

  Finch’s mama answered the door in her housecoat, her hair rolled up in orange juice cans and a dark shadow under one eye. I could hear the Aberdeens’ mangy dogs barking from somewhere in the hollows of the house.

  “Finch here?” I asked, after she eyeballed me up and down. Visitors weren’t welcome at the Aberdeen house. I was practically the only one who had the courage to venture up their front porch. Spoon Aberdeen’s temper was legendary. He spent more time in the county jail over in Paradise than out of it.

  “Got anything from your grandma?” Pearl Mae asked, looking down at the small basket I was carrying.

  “I got peaches,” I said, handing it to her.

  She snatched it from me and said, “Hold on, honey.” The door slammed shut and then a few minutes later Finch appeared with a set of purple Clackers. He was counting as the balls flew up like little gymnasts, then came back down. They’d been the rage at school in the spring, but neither of us had money to buy them.

  One of the Aberdeen dogs shot past Finch like a rocket and then straight down the road. Finch didn’t even blink, just kept on clacking and counting.

  “What do you want?” he asked. “Fifty-five, fifty-six.” Clack. Clack.

  The secret about what I’d found up on Solace Hill rose to my lips like a sweet bubble. But I couldn’t share it. I knew I couldn’t. Not yet.

  “I wanted to know if you’d come with me over to Miss Lilah’s,” I said. “I want to ask her more about what she said.”

  “Sixty-two, sixty-three.” Clack. Clack. He frowned. “About what?”

  “You know, about what she said. About a light going up and down the hill.”

  “Sixty-eight, sixty-nine.” He hit the Clackers so hard I thought my ears would bust.

  “Will you put those stupid things down?” I hollered.

  He begrudgingly stopped. He leaned in toward me and sniffed. “You smell funny.”

  I blinked. “I’m trying out some new perfume Bee gave me. Blushing Rose.”

  “Well, it stinks to high heaven.”

  I left my bike at Finch’s house and we walked over to Miss Lilah’s. The afternoon sun, like an orange Creamsicle, sat low in the sky, and there was a soft breeze carrying the smell of freshly cut grass. Miss Opal was out in the garden picking beans when we walked up. She looked over at us as we approached, wiping her forehead with a rag she pulled from a pocket in her cotton dress.

  “Is Miss Lilah here?” I asked.

  “She is,” she said. “We weren’t expecting you. I don’t have iced tea, or—”

  “That’s all right, Miss Opal,” Finch said quickly. “It never tastes quite right anyway.” I elbowed him hard, even though it was true. I think Miss Opal, getting on in her years like Miss Lilah, forgot to wash off the mint leaves, and I’d more than once seen one of the Aberdeen dogs peeing in their garden.

  Miss Opal frowned. “Miss Lilah have her good days and bad days. Today’s not one of the good ones.” There was something there in her voice, a soft worry. “Something has stirred her up mighty fine the other day and she’s been chewing on it since. My mama used to say we look back on our lives when we’re afraid of what’s in front of us.”

  “I promise just a few minutes,” I said.

  She nodded towa
rd the house where Miss Lilah was rocking in a rocking chair on the front porch, and I could almost swear she hadn’t been there when we’d walked up the drive.

  “I thought you’d come back,” she said when we walked up the steps.

  Miss Lilah smelled like lavender and Johnson’s Baby Powder and unaired, dusty attics. Her hair was freshly done in a neat helmet hairdo that was Sweetmaw’s specialty. Miss Opal took her to the Just Teasin’ every Monday, and June Rain used to do her hair sometimes, back when she worked a regular shift.

  “You want to know more about what I seen,” Miss Lilah said, her rocker creaking to a stop.

  A shiver ran up my legs. “Go on,” I urged.

  Finch was leaning over the porch railing picking a flower and examining it; he knew every species of anything around here.

  “Sometimes I can’t sleep,” she said. “That’s all. Sometimes I wander at night. Can’t help it. Not as though I was watching for him.”

  “Watching for who?” I asked.

  “Homer,” she answered. “Although I swear, I wasn’t watching for him. After Harlan was born, anyway, I knew no hope anymore. But somehow I’d end up in the night on that tree limb watching Solace Hill. And every night I’d see a ghost go up that hill, then go down that hill. The fireflies following both ways.”

  “A ghost?” I said. “Probably it was just the fireflies, Miss Lilah.”

  She turned and watched Miss Opal out in the garden. “I told her it was too hot. ‘Too hot today, Opal,’ I said, but she says the beans not gonna wait.”

  Miss Opal peered at us, shielding her eyes from the sun, the worry shining in them like soft beacons.

  The porch began to tilt a little and I shut my eyes. Ever since Paps had died, Bee had been telling me to stay off that hill. Been watching me ever so carefully. Sometimes you find what you don’t want to find. Maybe it had nothing to do with Paps. Maybe it was something that had happened before. But a ghost?

  “We’ll come back soon Miss Lilah, if you’d like that,” I vaguely heard Finch saying. I didn’t know when he’d popped up from the railing. I took a big breath and Finch grabbed my arm. He was looking at me strangely like I’d just sprouted two heads.

  Miss Lilah peered at me. “Maybe best you stay off that hill, honey.”

  “Why was she talking nonsense about ghosts, Esme?” Finch asked me on the way back.

  “Like you said, Finch, it’s just nonsense,” I answered.

  Something tenderly rolled across my heart. It all had something to do with why Paps was riding his tractor that day up on Solace Hill, the last place a tractor should be. He was up there looking for something. Been up there the week before when I’d seen him, and Lilah, too.

  Chapter 6

  I was riding my bike back home from Finch’s when Bee pulled up next to me in the Wagon and came to a creaky stop, the dust blowing in a powdery puff in my face. I put my bike in the back and got in. “Where you been?” she snapped. My stomach fell. I’d been hoping I’d find a way to sneak back up Solace Hill without her seeing me. June Rain and Bo were in the backseat, quiet as doves.

  “Over to see Miss Lilah,” I said. I glanced at June Rain, but her eyes were far away. I was very mad at her for not telling us about the postcards. But being mad at June Rain was like being mad at the wind, or the sky. Bo leaned over the seat and I gasped. The old crazy quilt, the one I’d used to cover the bone on Solace Hill, was wrapped around his shoulders. He peeked out of it like a pig in a blanket.

  Bee hit the gas and we lurched forward. “She wasn’t expecting you, was she?” She glanced over at me, narrowing her eyes behind her spectacles. She was wearing her finding clothes and had a freshly picked witching stick sitting on the seat between us. It had one lone, unripe peach on it. I knew exactly what tree she’d gotten it from because I knew every peach tree by heart. Bee varied her witching sticks depending on the weather and her mood. A peach witching stick meant she wasn’t sure what we were gonna get.

  “Humph,” she muttered when I didn’t answer right away.

  Bee knew I was hiding something. She always said when I lied my nostrils flared, which let the devil in, so I turned my head and looked out the window so she couldn’t see my nose.

  “Where we going?” I asked, glancing back at Bo, wondering why he had the quilt and what he’d seen.

  “Treva Stump called and said she has something for me. Wouldn’t say on the line ’cause everyone was listening up and down the road.” We have a party line on our road, which means everyone knows one another’s business. “I could hear that Granger Aberdeen breathing heavy and Pearl Mae telling him to get off the phone, she had chores for him to do.”

  “Why they coming?” I asked, tilting my head toward the backseat.

  “June Rain says she feels up to working at Sweetmaw’s and we need the money bad,” she said.

  I nodded.

  Bee continued. “Sweetmaw says lots of the ladies are getting their hair done for some tea tomorrow. Everyone want perms and no one does them better than June Rain. Right, June Rain?”

  I knew June Rain wouldn’t answer. Bee always talked to June Rain that way, like she’s a baby or a dog that might miraculously answer back.

  But she did, to my surprise. “I’m hoping to use a new technique. Sweetmaw says she has the Permalaster kits all the way from Chicago.”

  Those were practically the most words I’d heard out of her in years. Something sad passed through me, though, hearing her soft voice. I’d overheard Bee on the phone once talking to Doc Delaney when June Rain was having one of her real bad spells, when she wouldn’t get out of bed for days, about some hospital up in Abilene. I heard Bee say no, the McCauleys take care of their own. We didn’t have the money anyway. After she hung up she gave June Rain a dose of her Black Draught, made of fermented peaches and castor oil (and a secret ingredient), which she used on all of us in any situation. But it didn’t work on June Rain. Nothing worked on her.

  I stuck my head out the window, trying to get some fresh air as Bo exclaimed, “I get a kazoo from the Ben Franklin!”

  “That’s only if you’re a good boy at Treva’s, tooter,” Bee said as she swerved the Wagon around a roadrunner. Bo slid into June Rain, laughing, and I thought perhaps I saw a tiny smile on her face.

  I thought of the photo of Harlan hidden in my drawer. All those scribbly postcards and you didn’t tell us, June Rain. Maybe she had perked up because she’d gotten one recently. And those Salem butts in the peach orchard . . . And he was nearby in Louisiana, not but a month ago. In jail, but still. I didn’t want to hope, knowing how hope was usually dashed into a thousand pieces.

  “Hey, Bee, do you think we can go to the library after Miss Treva’s?” I figured I could find some books about bones with pointy shark-like teeth.

  “What do you want at the library?” Bee asked, looking at me, eyes narrowed.

  “I thought I’d get some summer reading.”

  She pursed her lips in that I-know-and-you-know-you-are-not-telling-the-truth way but didn’t say anything. I’d never been a huge reader, “below grade-level reading comprehension,” my report cards said. Bee tore them up every year.

  Bee drove the Wagon up Main Street to the town square. We didn’t have much in Hollis, not like Paradise. When their chamber of commerce erected a welcome sign that read, “Escape to Paradise,” Hollis erected a sign that said “Come Home to Hollis.” We didn’t even have a Whataburger or a Tasty Freeze. Just the Ben Franklin, and the Dinner Bell Café, and the hardware store, and the Sonic Burger. And, of course, Just Teasin’ on the corner across from the Get-n-Go grocery store, which is half the size of the Get-n-Go grocery in Paradise.

  June Rain got out and went inside, the Charisma perfume Harlan gave her for Christmas one year wafting behind her. I had to pinch my nose; it was so strangely exotic. She was wearing her best dress, the embroidered one with roses that Harlan had gotten for her in Mexico. She’d even had mascara on, and her eyelids flashed sparkly blue like s
he was going to a dance club, or planning on running into Robert Redford on Main Street.

  Several men whistled at her and Bee leaned her head out the window of the Wagon and cursed up a storm at them. Although she’s washed my mouth out with soap more than once, Bee knows more bad words than Spoon Aberdeen and got kicked out of the Circle of the Women’s Missionary Quilting Club for using all of them in one sentence.

  Bee backed the Wagon up, and Bo scooted to the middle of the seat, now wearing the quilt on his head. I kept my eyes straight ahead, not daring to look back again as we headed out to Miss Treva’s on the south side of Hollis.

  Miss Treva was waiting for us on her front porch, her hands on her hips. Whatever she needed Bee for, it was urgent, more urgent, I suspected, than the time Miss Treva’s daddy lost his false teeth and Bee found them stuck in the trunk of a pecan tree. Seems he’d reached over and taken a bite of the bark and left his teeth there, but couldn’t remember why.

  Bee pulled the Wagon up in front of the house and told Bo to go play on a tire swing hanging from an old oak. He left the quilt in the car and ran off. He torpedoed himself through the middle of the tire and swung around on his tummy, laughing.

  “Well, Miss Treva,” Bee said, witching stick at her side, “what can I help you with? I hope it’s something more exciting than your daddy’s teeth.”

  Miss Treva’s eyes were flitting around and she was hugging herself, hands clasped across her front, holding her elbows, although it wasn’t cold out.

  “What’s Esme doing here?” she asked nervously.

  “She’s learning my witching.” That was the first I’d ever heard of that. That I was here to learn something. “Whatever it is, it stays with us,” Bee continued. “I know a little bit about everyone here, Miss Treva, and I won’t ever tell any of it.” It was everyone else who did the talking.