Finding Esme

by Suzanne Crowley

  A moment later the front door slammed. I crawled out from under the house, wiping off my rear end as Mr. Galloway drove his big Cadillac away.

  Later I went out to the orchard and crushed peach leaves, letting the pieces fall to the ground. Old Jack lay by my side, swatting away horseflies with his tail. Bee says horseflies are the most persistent; they don’t give up no matter what, not like the fireflies who leave and never come back.

  “It’s all right, boy,” I said, patting his head. “It’s all right. Come on, let’s go.” Old Jack lifted his head then, as though he understood my thoughts, his wet, gray eyes boring into mine.

  I retrieved the pickax and shovel, then Old Jack and I climbed Solace Hill. I very carefully picked away more earth from around the skull, the dried mud clots coming off easily, the layer beneath thicker and stubborn. I could see more of her head now, four teeth, even longer than the first, and the hollow sockets where her eyes had been. It was almost as though she was smiling. What were you doing up on this hill, Louella Goodbones? So many millions of years ago? Did you fall down in the mud, get stuck and die? Were you a mama? Or just barely grown up, like me? Or were you old and just couldn’t go any farther? Why’d you stop on our Solace Hill?

  And then all these millions of years later, my paps drove his tractor up here looking for something, perhaps a carved box with a bee on it. I lay back on the cool earth, closed my eyes, and started to drift off. I didn’t notice Bump when he ran across Louella Goodbones’s head. Neither did Old Jack, who was snoring now under the tractor on Bee’s crazy quilt.

  “Well, what in the blue wonder is that?”

  Finch! I cussed under my breath, sure I was saying some words worse than what got Bee kicked out of Women’s Missionary Quilting Club.

  “What in the heck are you doing up here, Finch?” I shrieked.

  He ignored me and walked closer to Louella Goodbones, his mouth open in a big giant O. His mouth was apparently full of Pop Rocks because they all shot out on top of Louella Goodbones. The smell of sugary grape wafted through the air. I wanted to slap him good. How dare he spy on me and follow me up here. How dare he!

  “I’ve been worried about you, Esme. You’ve been acting so strange,” he said, still staring at the skull.

  “Get out of here,” I said, tears springing to my eyes. “Get of here!” It was all ruined. The only secret I had in the world and now it was ruined. By Finch Aberdeen, of all people, my only friend.

  “Why didn’t . . . why didn’t you tell me? Why did you keep something like this from me?” he asked, his voice catching.

  “’Cause,” I said. “’Cause . . .” I couldn’t finish. I felt terrible.

  “This is big, Esme. Really big, do you know that?” He was leaning down now, practically touching her. “Is it some sort of dinosaur skull?” he said, looking over at me incredulously. He sat back on his haunches, stunned.

  “It’s mine, Finch Aberdeen. And mine alone.” I stood with my hands on my hips.

  He frowned. “You don’t think I know that? Who do you think I am, Esme McCauley?”

  I looked down, ashamed, remembering all we’d done for each other our whole lives. The times I’d hidden Finch under our house when his daddy came home drunk, the times he’d cheer me up after Harlan left, the time he pulled the paper off my back, how really we had no other friends at school but each other.

  “Do you remember that big rain we had a few days ago?” I asked, and he nodded. “It brought part of her up. Then I started digging.” I didn’t want to tell him it was really Paps who’d started it all, and then a ghost, or maybe not a ghost, in the henhouse, and then the fireflies leading Bo and me up the hill. I could keep all of that to myself. He’d think I was crazy for feeling like it was all threaded together somehow like one of Bee’s crazy quilts.

  “What are you going to do with it, Esme?” he asked.

  “I don’t know yet,” I told him. “I’m just trying to see what she looks like.”

  “You think there’s more down there?” He brushed a little more dirt from her jaw.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, there’s more. Lots more.” My toes started to tingle. There was lots more of her down there waiting to be found. Those bones were vibrating up through my toes, my legs, all the way up. Even my ears were tingling now, and I wondered if Finch could see them move.

  Then I noticed something. “Where are your new boots?”

  “They looked stupid in the summer.”

  He was right. It felt good to laugh. I held out my hand. “Pop Rocks, please.”

  He reached in his back pocket and handed me the packet. I dumped them all in my mouth, the whole packet.

  “You’re not going to tell, are you, Finch?” The candy was exploding around in my mouth like tiny firecrackers.

  “No, Esme. I’m not going to tell. Not ever.”

  And I knew then he wouldn’t. Finch Aberdeen would never tell.

  Finch returned after dinner and helped me dig for hours, neither of us saying one word. Then he disappeared back home in the moonlight. I stopped briefly to put the tools away in the storm cellar. Bee was sitting there in the living room, silent, smoking on a cigar again, when I went inside.

  “What you been doing up there on that hill?” she asked. There it was. She’d finally asked.

  “Planting a little garden for Paps,” I knew she couldn’t see my nostrils, but they were flaring all right.

  “Nothing good has ever come from that hill,” she whispered.

  I thought about the carved box, the bee. Something told me she would not tell me a thing if I asked about it.

  “Maybe,” I said finally. “But maybe all those bad things are gonna add up to something good. Something good has to come eventually, Bee. That’s what I think.”

  “I don’t know, Esme.” She took a puff on the cigar. I knew she was thinking of those honeycomb sorrows, one after another, one after another. But I wasn’t going to think of all the sad things that had happened to us. Not now. I couldn’t.

  “’Bout time we sell that damn tractor,” she said. “We need the money.”

  “No one is going to want it,” I said quietly. “It’s practically rusted out.” My heart lurched. It’d be like taking Paps away all over again if she sold it.

  “Go on upstairs, then, go to bed,” Bee said. “Been staying out awfully late, haven’t you?”

  I ran upstairs and shut my door. When I got into bed, I opened Dinosaurs of America. A small folded-up news clipping fell out. It was an article about a professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas who had dug all around Texas looking for dinosaurs.

  His name was T. Rex Abramanov, and there was a grainy photo of him standing on a rocky ledge, one booted foot out, a tool belt with sharp, shiny tools around his waist, his angular face shadowed under a weathered safari hat. Abramanov. I’d never heard of a name like that around Hollis. “Abramanov.” I said it aloud, letting it roll off my tongue, like something new yet delicious. He looked like he’d just stepped out of a movie. I’d studied all the library books, but couldn’t find anything that looked exactly like my Louella Goodbones. I wondered if someone like T. Rex Abramanov would know who she was. I fell asleep dreaming of faraway lands and ghosts walking up and down Solace Hill.

  Chapter 9

  The next morning Finch showed up at the door with a garden shovel as big as Texas and I had to push him back down the kitchen steps and march him into the orchard. I looked back at the house. Bee was watching from the kitchen window. “We can’t dig now, Finch, not now. Bee knows something’s up.”

  “Of course she does,” said Finch. “She’s Bee McCauley. And maybe it’s good she knows. Maybe everyone should know. I’ve been doing some thinking. Those bones up there might be worth a lot of money.”

  “Seriously?” I hadn’t thought of it that way. I hadn’t really imagined what could happen.

  “Maybe. We should have someone come and look at it, Esme,” he said. “I think it’s gonna make you
famous.”

  “But I don’t want to be famous, Finch,” I said. “And I’m not ready to share her with anyone.” But it did make my mind start spinning around and around, that maybe Bee was wrong and I was right. Maybe all the sorrows on Solace Hill could add up to something really good.

  A moment later Bee hollered for me to come in and help with the honey.

  “Can I come, too?” Finch asked.

  I looked at him funny. Something was up. “You want to help bottle the honey?”

  “Don’t want to go home is all.”

  I didn’t ask more. He’d tell me later if he wanted to.

  We spent the whole morning helping Bee pour honey through funnels into jars. Even June Rain and Bo helped, although I think Bo got more on his fingers than into the jars. Old Jack sat next to him, drooling, waiting for each sweet drip that oozed off the side of the table. Every now and then Bo put his hand down and Old Jack licked away.

  Harlan used to paint the labels, a cute little bumble bee at the bottom below the name, Bee’s Honey. But since he’d been gone, Bee’d had them printed over in Paradise. I saw June Rain linger over one of the labels, knowing just what she was thinking, and I think everyone else did, too.

  “Didn’t Harlan used to paint the labels?” Finch asked, and I kicked him. June Rain pushed her chair back from the table and walked off. Grief shades people in different ways. Harlan was painted all over us, and there was no way to wash it off.

  Later I begged Bee to let Bo and me go into Hollis with June Rain while she went to deliver some of the honey orders in Paradise. She agreed and dropped us at Just Teasin’. June Rain and Bo headed into the beauty parlor, but I told them I’d catch up later. I waited for the Bee Wagon to round the corner off Main, and when I saw the last of the little white curtains, I ran as fast as I could to the library.

  Miss Ferriday got a big grin on her face when she saw me. “I heard from Mrs. Greenly. She sent over five more books on dinosaurs! And one on Texas dinosaurs,” Miss Ferriday said, opening the book up. “It seems most of them were found all the way down in Big Bend.” She pointed to a map of Texas, way down in the tippy corner where several different dinosaurs were drawn as though they were walking across the desert. “But a row of dinosaur footprints was once found in Glen Rose about an hour from here.” She pointed to the top of the map where we were in North Texas.

  “Footprints. But no dinosaur, no big dinosaur skeleton, ever found round here?”

  She shook her head. “But footprints, Esme. That means they were here. And maybe they’re just waiting to be found.”

  She stacked the books in a bag for me and a few minutes later I left, proudly swinging the bag.

  I rushed into the Just Teasin’, the smell of permanents, fruity shampoos, and hair spray stinging my eyes. Sweetmaw had decorated the Just Teasin’ in fifty shades of pink. It looked like one big powder puff of cotton candy, with shiny black salon chairs topped by hot pink dryers.

  “Well, what’s up your craw, young lady?” Sweetmaw said, glancing up from rolling Lottie Broadway’s hair that was thin and pale as a spiderweb, two strands on each roller.

  “Huh?” asked Lottie, her hand up to her ear. Sweetmaw whispered something to her that made her giggle and turn red. Sweetmaw, as sweet as she is, tells off-color jokes. It’s the only thing I can think of in the whole world that links them, those two sisters; otherwise they are like night and day—Bee gloomy as a pocket, and Sweetmaw light as the sun.

  Vera Godly was asleep under one of the hair dryers and June Rain was papering Violet Galloway’s hair, preparing it for a perm. June Rain hadn’t noticed me yet, but Mrs. Galloway had. She looked over her glasses at me, with a small strained smile, the kind of smile people usually gave me, but then it widened. “Thank you,” she mouthed. “For Popsicle.”

  I blinked. I didn’t know what to say. I wondered if she knew about her husband’s trip to our farm.

  Bo was playing on the floor with his soldiers, who were launching an attack. I plopped down in one of the empty chairs and pawed through the Glamour magazines, trying to get my mind off what Finch had said about showing Louella Goodbones to someone.

  Sweetmaw was telling a story about a friend whose husband night fishes when he’s been on a bender. Vera Godly’s eyes popped open. Violet Galloway snapped her magazine up in front of her like she wasn’t listening. “Well, he caught a ‘throw-back,’ meaning the fish wasn’t worth keeping, but it was so cute he brought it up to his lips to kiss it—and then he suddenly heard some wailing and thought perhaps it was the drowning woman. And the next thing he knew that fish jumped right down his throat and got stuck. True-itt had to take him to the hospital in Paradise to get it taken out. Ten stitches later and he still swears he heard something in the river.”

  Then suddenly Finch’s mama Pearl Mae was there, holding the door open with her foot, like she wasn’t staying long. I don’t think Pearl Mae had ever stepped into the Just Teasin’. She’d tried to do something with her hair, though, teasing it up in the back like Sweetmaw’s, but it looked like humps on a camel. She had on her church dress—an old quilted cotton that frayed at the hem.

  Sweetmaw looked over at her, and everyone else did, too. “Can I help you, Pearl Mae?” she asked, her eyebrows rising.

  I could see Pearl Mae’s chest heaving, her eyes were big like she was about to cry. She looked at me a moment and opened her mouth. But then whatever she was gonna say left her. She pushed the door with her foot and slipped away.

  “Well, I’ll be,” said Sweetmaw.

  Everyone knew that gossip spreads faster at her beauty parlor than bad news at a funeral, especially if Vera Godly was there.

  Suddenly Vera Godly pointed at me. “My, she’d have to stand on her toes to look a rattler in the eye, June Rain. When she gonna start to grow up?” My heart sank. June Rain froze, the bottle of waving lotion she was holding poised in midair. “And maybe you could do something with her hair to hide those ears.”

  June Rain walked over to Vera Godly and started squirting the waving lotion all over her hair, the odor of ammonia filling the salon. I couldn’t believe it, my quiet ghost of a mama, the mama who never did anything but exist, had poured the entire bottle out onto Vera’s head!

  I grabbed Bo’s hand and told them I was taking him for ice cream. Sweetmaw gave me some money from the cash register and patted my back as we went out the door.

  Much later, I stood in the doorway of Paps’s room. The moonlight streamed through his window. Bee had left everything just the way it was the day he’d died, just like she’d left that tractor up on Solace Hill. But I was glad because it meant he was still here with us, in some small way. His room was on the first floor, across from the front parlor, far away from everyone else because he snored louder than a freight train, complete with the whistle, and it had vibrated through the whole house. Until Paps died, I hadn’t realized how much his snoring soothed me, soothed all of us. About a week after Paps died, Bo had come in my room in the middle of the night screaming “Where is he, where is he? I can’t feel the freight train.” He wasn’t able to sleep till June Rain put a cassette player next to his bed that played a tape of the sound of ocean waves over and over.

  I lingered in Paps’s doorway a long time, wanting to go in, but not able to move. I thought about the bee box and the gold coin and the mystery of it. My heart ached, but I sensed that by stepping over the threshold I might find something I wasn’t ready for. Finally, I dashed in, grabbed his spectacles off the nightstand, and dashed out as quickly as I could.

  And then just after I’d fallen asleep that night, I was sure Paps’s snoring had jarred me awake. But I realized it was that vibrating feeling again. It was rising from my toes, up through my legs, circling around my knees, then spreading through my insides, twirling around like a fairy casting spells with her wand, till finally it worked its way back down to my fingertips. I lay there a long time with the wonder of it, scared but excited at the same time.

 
I stepped out into the yard, out into the peach trees, feeling as though I was walking in a dream. The moon shone brightly, so brightly the peaches gleamed like orangey jewels. Cicadas and crickets called to one another. I snapped a small branch off, like I’d done many times for Bee. But this time it was for me. I bent the branch down the middle, turned, and let it lead me. I went past the house, through the orchard, and into the woods, feeling as though the moon lit my way and protected me. At first I thought I was going to the hives, but the witching stick suddenly veered to the left and off I went deeper into the woods.

  And then I was at a clearing at the edge of Bitter Creek. The witching stick tilted down, and I felt the power in it fade away. So I found water! I laughed. Water that I already knew was there. But suddenly the hair stood up on my arms and I saw something in the water to my left. I narrowed my eyes, trying to decipher what it was. Then the moon, high in the sky, danced across the creek, lighting up a figure. A bare-backed man, swimming across the creek.

  I stepped back, quietly, ever so quietly, and stumbled on something. I looked down and saw it was a boot. I caught a glimpse of spatters of colorful paint, before I turned and ran. Harlan’s rainbow boots. Only one person had boots like that. But why was I running from my father? Something inside me had told me to. Run! Run as fast as you can!

  I woke up before dawn. I lay in bed a moment listening to the birds, thinking about what I’d seen the night before. Had I dreamed it? I got out of bed and went to the window. In the distance I could see a tiny pinprick of light shining, and a shiver went through me as I thought of Lilah’s story about the ghost who floated up and down the hill.

  I threw on my clothes and snuck out into the dawn. As I walked closer and closer so Solace Hill, I could see it was a lantern light and I got mad, mad, mad that someone was trespassing on my hill. But it was just Finch. He’d been picking away at Louella Goodbones. Bump, the traitor, was sitting on top of the lantern watching him.