Finding Esme

by Suzanne Crowley

  “Well, okay,” Miss Treva said.

  “So what are you missing?”

  “My husband,” Miss Treva answered.

  “Your husband? Luther?” Bee asked in surprise. “I saw him yesterday after church sitting outside the filling station with Johnny Wa—” Bee stopped herself, but I knew where she was going. She must have seen Miss Treva’s husband with Johnny Wallet. That’s not his real name, of course. He got his nickname from picking wallets.

  “He’s up to no good,” Miss Treva said. “A wife knows these things.” There were tears in her eyes now. “He disappears every day, says he going in to the mill, but I ran into his boss yesterday and he asked me—‘Where’s Luther been? He hasn’t been at the mill.’ But Luther still got money; I found a whole big roll of dollar bills in his back pocket. And sometimes he gets up in the middle of the night, but I don’t see the car lights goin’ down the drive.”

  “He’s not gone far,” Bee said, looking around the property, narrowing her eyes. “I can tell you that.”

  “You mean he’s right under my own nose?” Miss Treva sputtered, the tears running down her cheeks now.

  Bee started walking around the house, but she wasn’t holding her witching stick up yet. Miss Treva and I trailed behind her, watching her as she poked about—lifting up a trash can lid, a log on the log pile, and then opening the barn door. She fished down in some hay and pulled out a shiny silver dollar. She handed it to Miss Treva. Those are the best finds, she always says, those you’re not looking for. The image of the gold coin in Paps’s hand flitted through my mind. Then, without saying a word, Bee walked out of the barn, turned toward the woods that bordered the Stump property, and marched on like a soldier, her witching stick buoyed up by something unseen.

  Miss Treva and I watched her go, then exchanged glances and went after her, trying our best to catch up.

  “We’ll be right back!” I called to Bo, who was still happily spinning around on the tire swing, his fingers trailing in the dirt.

  We followed Bee through the trees. She seemed to know what the stick was telling her, suddenly turning to the left or the right, like a hog in the brush being chased by a hunter. At one point a jackrabbit jumped out at us, scaring Miss Treva and me, but it didn’t faze Bee. She was on to something for sure, but when my arms started prickling and toes vibrating, I began to feel that maybe we shouldn’t be here.

  “Bee!” I called after her, but on she went, because when she’s on to something she doesn’t stop till she finds it, no matter what. I could smell something now—like baking bread mixed with smoke and grit and something nauseatingly sour. Suddenly Bee stopped. We’d come to a deep clearing where the sun was trying its best to break through the trees in long slanting shafts. Bee was standing in one, illuminated brightly, her witching stick vibrating, and I could feel it, too, that vibrating, down deep in my bones. Slowly, ever so slowly, the tip of Bee’s witching stick started turning down to the earth.

  “What in tarnation!” Miss Treva gasped.

  In front of us was the strangest contraption I’d ever seen—a hodgepodge of barrels and tubes snaking around a large vat with smoke coughing up out of a rusty pipe. Underneath it all were the embers of a small fire. Three scruffy-looking figures were sitting on a log. One of them, Luther Stump, stood up, pointing a shotgun at Bee. The other two just sat there with their mouths hanging open. It was Granger Aberdeen and Johnny Wallet. They were both holding tin cups.

  “See, I told you Treva was up to something,” Granger growled.

  “Get outta here, Bee McCauley,” Luther said, spitting in the dirt. “’Fore I shoot your meddling behind.”

  “You ain’t gonna shoot anyone,” Bee said, but I could hear the tiniest catch in her voice, a slight quiver that told me she was scared, too. She’d never found anything like this, no, not this big. “You boys know very well what you’re doing is illegal. Sheriff Finney won’t be able to ignore something like this. And Granger, I’m ashamed of you. Your mama has enough on her plate.”

  Granger, his eyes red rimmed and half open, looked down shamefaced.

  I felt like I was going to throw up. I looked away, thinking how different Finch was from his family, from all of them. My heart was about to thump out of my chest. But I was also sad, sad for the Granger I used to know, the Granger who would give Finch and me noogies and sneak us M&M’s during church, even if he called me Stinky Weasie and Finch Monkey Kettles.

  Miss Treva stood behind Bee. “I thought it was that floozy from Paradise,” she said softly.

  “How’d you know about her?” Luther asked stupidly, brandishing his shotgun, and Miss Treva let out a sob.

  “And you got more, don’t you?” Bee asked Luther. “Where you hiding your other stills? In the water, I believe.”

  “You stay away from Bitter Creek,” Luther snarled, shaking his shotgun.

  It was quiet a moment and I thought of Bo back at the tire swing, happily drawing his circles in the dirt. I suddenly had an image of the swing empty, Bo standing at the edge of the woods. No! I tugged at Bee’s arm.

  “Maybe we can come to some agreement,” said Luther.

  “Nope, I don’t shake hands with the devil,” said Bee, turning to leave. Luther stepped forward, lifting his shotgun again.

  Bee grabbed Miss Treva’s arm and we all started to walk away. Suddenly there was a shotgun blast, and we froze. Bee walked on, pulling us along with her. I peeked back and saw Luther with his shotgun still pointing up in the air.

  Bee didn’t say a word the whole way back into town, but I could see her chest heaving. Bo was in the backseat asking one question after the other. Bee told him to hush, her voice shaking slightly, and I couldn’t believe it. My Grandma Bee was not all powerful. I turned and peered out the window. We picked up June Rain at the Just Teasin’, then roared out of town, the white eyelet curtains in the back of the Wagon swaying to and fro. None of us said a word. June Rain stared out the window, a small postcard-smile on her lips.

  “You gonna tell, Bee?” I whispered hoarsely a few minutes later. Thank God Bo hadn’t seen anything. Thank God we hadn’t been hurt.

  Bee didn’t answer me, just stepped on the gas, causing rocks to splay up behind us.

  We rode the rest of the way home in silence.

  That night for supper we had leftover sweet-pork beans with rice and jalapeño cornbread. Bee’s hand shook as she stirred the pot on the stove, round and round, round and round. In all her years of witching I don’t think a shotgun had ever been fired, least not that I knew of. She was usually rewarded with gratefulness, sometimes regret and disappointment. One time a century-old dead cat in a chimney. An old family recipe. A forgotten security box in Paradise. A rhinoceros horn brought back from a safari. Lots of things, but nothing like this. I washed up the dishes afterward, and Bee didn’t even ask why I volunteered. Usually I disappeared faster than a raindrop in the desert.

  She was sitting at her sewing machine in the front room, stitching a new crazy quilt, when I snuck out, the tap, tap of her foot going up and down on the pedal reverberating in my ears. I ran through the peach orchard, swinging the lantern, throwing warm arcs of light across the trees. I’d hidden the pick and shovel back in the storm cellar in the field behind the house. That’s where Paps used to come sometimes to hide from Bee and take a few puffs on the cigar he stashed up on a high shelf. The stub was still there, like the footprint of someone long gone. As I was swinging open one of the doors, I felt someone behind me in the semidarkness. Harlan? I swung around fast.

  It was Bo, standing there with the crazy quilt around his shoulders, Old Jack by his side. “Bo, you too old for that,” I yelled at him, snatching the quilt. Then I felt bad.

  “I want to go with you,” Bo said, staring at the June bugs as they buzzed around my lantern.

  “Where’d you get this?” I asked, clutching the quilt to my chest. It smelled of summer grass and cider, melted cherry Popsicles, and Johnson’s Baby Shampoo.

&nb
sp; “Up there on Paps’s tractor.” He pointed.

  My heart sank. “You see anything up there, Bo?” I asked carefully. Telling Bo a secret was the same as blasting it out to the whole world.

  “Just a horn toad. It scared me, so I ran back down the hill.”

  I took a deep breath. Bump had been guarding my bones, of course he had.

  “You go on home,” I told him, lifting his chin so he knew I was serious. “I got some Wax Lips and Gold Nugget Bubble Gum under my bed; you can have ’em.” I swallowed hard. It was a sacrifice, but I had no choice.

  Bo turned his head a little, looking like Old Jack does when he’s trying to figure something out, like if you are up to no good. But whatever Bo was thinking passed quick enough at the thought of candy. He turned and ran for home, a big smile on his face.

  Old Jack followed me as I went up the hill. When I got to the top, I sat down to take in the wonder of it all. A soft breeze tickled my nose. Were there really such things as spirits? I thought perhaps Paps was here, maybe.

  I held the lantern up close to that one ferocious, giant tooth. It was scary, but I knew it was gonna change the no-good, honeycombed bad luck we’d had all these years. I decided to name whatever this creature was for my great-grandmother Louella. Somehow they were connected, the long line of peculiar relatives in my family and that big bone. It was my Louella Goodbones, ’cause something good was going to happen. I just knew it. God couldn’t send so many sorrows in a row without sending something good eventually. I wrapped Bee’s crazy quilt tightly around me, then crawled under Paps’s tractor with Old Jack. I must have fallen asleep because I woke up in the middle of the night and had to sneak back into the house like a ghost.

  Chapter 7

  The next morning I brought a bucket of oats to Sugar Pie in the back pasture before breakfast. I was brushing her down when Bee appeared.

  “Yesterday, at Treva’s, you felt it, didn’t you?” she asked. “Your gift.”

  I kept brushing Sugar Pie. I wanted to tell her that I’d felt it even before that. I wanted to tell her about all I’d found up on Solace Hill, everything. But I also didn’t want to talk about it right now.

  “Some of Harlan’s cigarette butts were out under the peach trees,” I said. I did want her to know that. Know what might be coming our way and what it might mean.

  She was quiet a moment. “You think he’s here?” she asked. She was testing me, seeing how much I felt and knew. I turned away and ran the brush down Sugar Pie’s belly. I couldn’t give her an answer to something I didn’t know myself.

  “No,” she said finally, with a hint of relief that caught me off guard. “I don’t feel him here. He’s not here.”

  But you paid for his bail in Louisiana a month ago, didn’t you?

  Miss Lilah’s geese appeared at the fence, honking. Bee clapped her hands at them, and they waddled off.

  “You told me once you didn’t feel him no more, that he was too far away,” I said. I leaned my face into Sugar Pie’s neck.

  “I don’t know if I ever felt him,” Bee said gently. “He never really seemed a part of me, of any of us. Even as a child your daddy was always a wanderer. I could barely keep him corralled.”

  “But he’s my father,” I said quietly. “Bo’s and mine, even though he’s not a good one.”

  Bee snorted.

  “Did you pay his bail, Bee?” I asked.

  “I thought’d you’d been in my room,” she said. “I didn’t pay it. We simply don’t have the money. And if we did, well, I can’t tell you if I would have.”

  Something rushed through me then, sadness maybe that he could still be sitting in jail? No, disappointment that Bee’d have to make a decision like that. And shame, deep shame that Bee could leave her own son sitting there, even if she had no choice.

  “June Rain thinks he’s coming home,” I mumbled into Sugar Pie, my eyes starting to sting. “That’s why she’s perked up.”

  “June Rain thinks lots of things that aren’t true, Esme.”

  “Maybe someday I’ll find out what is true about her. She’s my mama, after all.”

  “I don’t think she fully understands that she’s your mama and Bo’s, too,” said Bee. “Harlan should’ve never brought her here. . . . She’s—”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” I told her angrily. I didn’t want to hear her grown-up talk. That’s how she always talked to me, even when I was Bo’s age. I wanted to ask when I’d fill out my bra, and I wanted to tell her how deep down I wished I could have a new pair of jeans from Dallas—things a twelve-year-old girl wants to talk about.

  I glanced over to her, and her eyes softened, but I knew she wouldn’t say she was sorry. Those were words that would never come from Bee McCauley. Never in a million years.

  “We having eggs this morning?” I asked.

  “How’d you know that?” She sounded surprised.

  I pulled a bit of eggshell out of her hair and held it up. She actually smiled a little before she turned to leave. “Anything I need to know about those hens, Esme? They been producing half what they usually do. Did Old Jack get in the henhouse?”

  “Maybe,” I answered. “But what do I need to know? What is it you want me to know?”

  I could see her running it all over in her mind, then she spoke. “It’s the seen and unseen, Esme. You got to know them both inside and out, and which is which, and more importantly, what’s in-between. It’s the art of finding a heartbeat in the darkness a mile away, a dragonfly wing at the bottom of a river. You’ll know it when you’re close, Esme. You’ll know.”

  I felt a sweet shiver go down my spine, a connection to my grandma even if it was a tiny, tender thread that made me feel all strange inside. “Who’ll tell me?” I whispered.

  But she’d already turned for the house, and I knew without a doubt that there was more, much more to that puzzle.

  Bee and Old Jack had gone to take June Rain to the Just Teasin.’ Sweetmaw said June Rain done real good with the perms and comb-outs and wanted her back today. Bee and Sweetmaw had even talked on the phone for a minute or two. I’d heard Bee praising June Rain for her hard work, hoping June Rain was back in a good spell. But I knew from experience not to trust good spells, ’cause the bad ones always came back, and came back stronger.

  I was picking peaches when I found something peculiar in one of the oldest trees in the orchard. It was a chain of little paper girls with clasped hands. It was wrapped around several limbs like a garland around a Christmas tree. A friendship chain. Dovie must have spent a long time making it. I watched Bo dash across the yard blowing Finch’s bubbles. Sugar Pie was in her enclosure lazily chomping on some daisies. I gently pulled the chain down and held it to my heart.

  An hour later, when Bee had taken June Rain to town, I’d picked all the ripe peaches I could and neatly lined the baskets up in the barn. I ran upstairs to wash up and change out of my dusty coveralls. June Rain’s Maybelline mascara, recently unearthed from somewhere, was on the counter. I looked up at my eyes in the mirror. I had Harlan’s green eyes, but they were like saucers with ghostly lashes—“bug’s wings,” Bee politely called them. I quickly slashed a little bit of the mascara on my invisible lashes and rubbed some lipstick on. I stood back and couldn’t believe what I saw—my eyes looked pretty, well, almost pretty.

  I hovered outside Bee’s room, then listened carefully at her door. I went in and retrieved the telegram from the bureau drawer—I glanced at it. The phone number for the jail was there. I snuck down the stairs as quietly as I could and loaded Bo on the back of my bicycle. “Why do you look like a raccoon?” Bo asked. I ignored him and we headed over to Finch’s house.

  Finch was sitting on his sagging porch whittling a stick. An open book lay next to him. He’d probably been reading like he always does. If he was whittling a stick that meant he was pondering, savoring what he’d just read.

  I wondered if Granger had said anything to Finch about us finding him and the moonshine.
I doubted it. Finch looked up and smiled. As I walked closer, I saw he was wearing a new pair of jeans, a popular kind that flare at the bottom. And a new pair of shoes, too, moon boots, and one of those necklaces with the shark’s tooth on a leather cord. A shiver ran down my back as I stared at that tooth, thinking about Louella Goodbones up on Solace Hill.

  “Where’d you get those?” I asked, my eyes shooting away from the tooth, down at his boots. Bo ran back and forth across the porch swan diving into the Aberdeens’ porch swing.

  “Granger bought them for me,” he said proudly. They looked hot for summer and stupid, and worse than my white Mary Jane’s. In the past I would’ve told him so, but something stopped me. Maybe it was thinking about how I’d last seen Granger, sitting on that log looking like he’d swallowed a bug.

  “Where’d he get ’em, Finch?” I asked, getting a sinking feeling, my mind connecting things.

  “He took me over to Paradise yesterday,” he answered. “Said Hollis didn’t deserve his hard-earned cash.”

  One of the Aberdeens’ dogs came running around from the back of the house with a bird in his mouth. Bo cheerfully chased him around the yard.

  I kicked at the dirt. “Did Granger say anything about me?” I asked casually.

  Finch got up. “Granger? Why would Granger say something about you, Esme McCauley?” His face turned a little pale. He spit on the ground.

  “No reason,” I said, staring at the splat of spit, thinking that wasn’t like Finch. It was more like his brother.

  “Do you think he likes you or something?” he asked. He snorted. A strange feeling passed through me. Finch Aberdeen, my closest and oldest friend in the world, was jealous. Even if he had the wrong idea, he was jealous, and to my surprise I felt a tickle in my heart like a doodlebug had crawled across it.

  He stood a little closer to me, looking straight into my eyes, and I noticed two little cuts on his chin.

  “What’s that smell?” he asked, crinkling his nose.

  Oh, God, how I wished I’d worn the deodorant Bee gave me. He pointed at my lips.