by Leisha Kelly
I kept walking, past where our Blackberry Creek joined into Curtis Creek and kept going. I remembered the time Edward had come looking for me; he was none too impressed with our little camp. He seemed angry as usual, kicking our ring of rocks in all directions and calling me stupid for not going home when it started to get dark. That was when he’d shared the pickle loaf. It was too bad there was so much strain between Edward and me now. Just that memory, of him caring just that much, might have been enough to help us move on together.
“Harry!” I yelled. “Berty!”
I wondered how George was faring, and where he was right now. Why all this struggle, Lord? One Hammond boy’s laid up with a broken leg, and now this!
I thought I heard something in the distance. A motor vehicle, and then it was gone. “Harry!” I yelled again.
After two more twists in the creek, I found a cloth ball soaking in the water. Berty’s ball. I knew it. Julia had made it for him for Christmas. I picked it up, squeezed the water out over my head, and crammed it down into my shirt pocket. The sudden coolness felt good.
And I’d needed that sign. I was headed upstream, so they had to be somewhere ahead of me. Had to be.
I hurried, calling their names some more. Finally, I heard a muffled little sound ahead of me that sounded like crying. I called, but nobody answered. I rushed forward, pushing my way through a bramble bush. And there I found Berty, sitting at the base of a tree in tears. First he jumped, as though I’d scared him, but then he leaped to his little feet and ran at me. I scooped him up, thrilled to find him safe and sound. “Where’s Harry?” I asked the little boy, real worry churning inside me. But Berty only sniffed and pointed up. Harry sat above us, high on a limb, looking all around like he himself was one of the searchers.
“Come down,” I told him. “And tell me what it is you’re doing out here.”
“We’s turtle huntin’,” he said immediately, scooting down expertly toward me. “Lizbeth said we could.”
“Not this far.” I shook my head. Berty, at least, knew there was a problem. He’d been scared. But apparently he was the only one.
“She jus’ said I had to take somebody. She never said not to go far.”
One day I figured this would be laughably ridiculous, him thinking she meant for him to take his four-year-old brother on such an excursion. But I was pretty upset with him at the moment.
“You worried your pa and Lizbeth something awful,” I told him. “If you want to go someplace, you’ve got to tell them first. And take somebody as tall as Lizbeth or taller. Is that clear?”
“Yes.” He took his reprimand with a smile. “We done real good gettin’ so far. Bet that was the bestest explore anybody ever saw.”
“All it means to me is it’ll take us longer to get home,” I said wearily. “Can you walk, Berty?”
“Nope,” he said, even though he’d managed to get up and come to me. “I tink my foot’s all broked like Franky.”
I hadn’t looked at his feet. I was surprised now to notice that one of them had been bleeding, but not badly. Probably scratched on a branch. “That’s not broken,” I assured him. “No big problem. Does it hurt?”
He nodded. “I’m hungry too.”
“You’ll have to be patient about that,” I told him. “But I’ll carry you. Harry, you’ll have to walk. Stay close.”
I tried to hurry as we started back, yelling every once in a while in hopes I would be in earshot of another searcher. But I got no answer, and pretty soon Harry was complaining about his foot, and falling behind.
“Come on,” I told him. “You’re the one who got yourself out this far.”
“But it really hurts,” he insisted. “Really bad.”
I stopped to look. Harry’s tough little bare foot had a splinter, right in the soft arch. I tried to pull it out, but it was hard to get ahold of and hard to see in the shady light.
“Carry me too,” Harry said.
There’d been times when I could have. Neither boy was all that big. But I knew better now. “I can’t,” I told him. “Both of you are too much at once.”
“Then carry me!” Harry whined. “Please. It hurts.”
“No!” Berty wailed. “My footy hurts too!”
Neither boy was hurt badly, and I was about to make them both walk when I heard a sound way off somewhere to my right.
“Here!” I yelled, just as loud as I could. “Over here! I found them!”
At first there was no response, but I was sure I could hear someone coming steadily closer. I yelled again, wondering why they didn’t answer.
Then silence for a moment. Maybe I’d been mistaken. But there was another rustling in the bushes before long, and I knew there was somebody coming our way.
When finally I saw who it was, I scarcely knew what to think. Edward, pushing his way through the pigweed and wild rose. He spoke before I had the chance.
“What a stroke a’ luck! All I did was pull over and park where there was plenty of room along the road. Thought I’d be obliging to your wife and walk a ways so I could say I’d joined the search. She’s something, that’s sure. I never expected to hear you yelling. Trying to be some kind of hero, aren’t you, Sammy?”
“How far’s the car?”
“You askin’ for a ride?”
I would have walked away from him had I been alone. “We need it. Yes.”
“Well, your wife won’t be able to say I don’t care no more. Will it make me a hero too, if I bring you home?”
“If you want to be a hero, we’ll call you a hero. Fine. We just need the ride. Please.”
He laughed. “You look awful, you know that?”
“You’re not much to look at yourself.” I turned away from him and coaxed Harry to his feet. “We need to start home. There’s people searching for these boys.”
Edward was quiet for a moment; I didn’t know if he’d help us or not. And I almost didn’t care.
“Are these some of the Hammonds?” he asked me.
“Yes. They are.”
“Well, I know the way to that farm,” he said with irony in his voice. “I was just there this morning. A neighbor of theirs got a little out of hand.”
He had to taunt me, even now. I turned, expecting to find the same angry mockery in his eyes. But something else was there, I wasn’t sure what.
“They’re tired,” I told him. “One has a scratch and the other has a splinter. They don’t want to walk.” I handed Berty into his arms, because he was the lighter of the two. No matter how sore I felt, I wouldn’t ask him to take the heavier load.
I lifted Harry onto my shoulders. Seemed like he weighed a ton.
“Okay,” Edward said with a little laugh. “Follow me. If I can find my way back to the car, we’ll go be heroes.”
He wasn’t too sure of his way, but I knew by now which direction the road was. We moved quickly, but it still took us a while to break through the trees.
“Thanks,” I told him as we went along. “You saved me a lot of walking.”
He barely glanced my way. “What are brothers for?”
Those words hung in the silence between us for a long time, until Harry started bouncing on my shoulders.
“I’m ridin’ a giraffe!” he hollered. “Looky!”
“Me too!” Berty squealed. “Go jaffey!”
“Haven’t you boys learned your lesson?” I asked them. “You went too far. You didn’t know your way home. You both got hurt. It could’ve been a lot worse. You are not to go off by yourselves. Do you hear?”
“But we wasn’t by ourselves,” Harry argued. “We had each other.”
“You know exactly what I mean. You need somebody older. You’ve been told that many times.”
Up on Edward’s shoulders, Berty was nodding. “I wanna go home. We was too far.”
“You sure were. We’re almost four miles from home.”
“Boy!” Harry proclaimed. “That’s a adventure!”
Edward laughed. “You’
ll have to watch out for that one when he’s a teenager.”
Walking along beside him, I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Juli and the girls had looked after he’d been there. I wanted to address it, but I knew I couldn’t. Not before we got the little boys home. We didn’t need another fight.
But the silence was awful. And finally I knew what I had to say, despite the anger I felt toward him. “I’m sorry, Edward, for this morning. I should have stopped you . . . some other way. I shouldn’t have hit you. It wasn’t right.”
“You’re hardheaded,” he answered back. “Still thinking you had a right to stop me at all. I was just apologizing. He never told me he had trouble with the bottle.”
“You didn’t know it’s illegal?”
“I think it’s a foolish law.”
I had to shake my head. “You and me, we know about the bottle, Edward. I can’t see why you’d want—”
“I know. It’s stupid, ain’t it?”
I would never have been that bold. But he’d said it himself. “Yeah,” I agreed.
“I’m hungry,” Berty complained.
“We’ll be home before long,” I assured him again.
“Do you know where I went?” Edward suddenly asked me. “After you had the nerve to attack me the way you did?”
“Yes,” I said immediately, feeling the heat rise to the back of my neck. He’d brought it up. I couldn’t help it. “You went and tormented my family. You grabbed a little girl and shook her, and you shoved my wife. I don’t care if you want to fight me. Maybe that’s normal, I don’t know. But I can’t have it, not with the women and children, Edward. I can’t.”
“I went into that little town called Dearing,” he said, ignoring the warning in my words. “I found a telephone in the back room of that little service station they got there. Man charged me a whole nickel to make a phone call.”
He paused. He let the silence hang there again for a minute.
“Pa talked on a telyphone once,” Harry told us. “He was callin’ Aunt Chloe, an’ it was really cold.”
“I want Lizbeth,” Berty whispered.
“I called Mother,” Edward said, and the words sunk to the pit of my stomach like they were encased in stone.
He stopped and looked at me for a moment. “I had to ask her.”
For a fleeting moment I considered telling him not to tell me whatever it was she’d said. But I knew he would. That’s why he’d come. And maybe the Lord was in it.
“She tried to tell me the same thing she said before. But I told her somebody seen a picture, six or seven years old, with a tattoo like that. She cried, Samuel. She got all upset and cried, right on the phone.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. We were just coming out of the trees. The car was down the road, no more than a quarter mile at most. It was a relief to see it.
“Ain’t you gonna ask?”
“No,” I told him. “Honk your horn when we go. Anybody out searching will head back and see what it’s about.”
“You’re something, you know that?”
I lifted Harry down from my shoulders, not sure I could make it much farther under his weight.
“Don’t you want to know?”
“If he’s dead, you’ll accuse me again,” I said. “If he’s alive, I’ve got that to think about, and I’m not sure I want to.”
He was quiet. Very quiet as we walked the rest of the way to the car.
“Go real fast,” Harry said. “I like fast.”
“I want Lizbeth,” Berty said again.
I got in the backseat with the boys on either side of me. Edward jumped in front, started the engine, and honked the horn once. Then he stopped and looked at me. “She’s not seen him in five years, Sammy. Can you believe that? It’s been twenty years since she said he was dead!”
He gunned the motor. He raced down that road like a lunatic, honking the horn the whole way. I hung on to both boys and prayed he wouldn’t spill us in the ditch. I didn’t know my brother. One day, one moment to the next. I didn’t know him. But at least he was feeling something over this news. At least he was touched, I could tell that much. But whether it was shock or anger or what, I didn’t know.
We got the searchers’ attention. We got George and Lizbeth’s attention way before we came up their weedy drive, and they were running to meet us. Lizbeth took to hugging both boys and scolding them at the same time. George hung back, obviously surprised to see Edward and me together. But he thanked us both, and Joe fired off a shot into the air, in case anybody out there might be left wondering what the car horns could mean.
We were on our way soon enough, just Edward and myself, back home. I don’t know why he took me. I don’t know why I went with him.
He stopped before we got to our lane. He just sat in his seat a minute, not speaking.
“You want me to walk the rest of the way?” I asked.
“You’re such an idiot. Just shut up.”
I did. I sat there quiet. Finally, he started talking, staring out over George Hammond’s cornfield. “You really think she’s our sister?”
“I got no proof. But I don’t know what else to think.”
“I never figured when Trudy said Samuel Wortham that she could be talking about somebody that old.”
“You wouldn’t. I understand that. But he’s only about sixteen years older than you are.”
“You’re right. He looked like a kid when we were kids.”
“He never had much. I guess you know that.” He turned on me, a sudden sharpness in his eyes. “You excusing what he did to us?”
“No. Come on. Let’s go home.”
He shook his head. “Your wife said I wasn’t welcome.”
I nodded at that. Maybe I was wrong, even thinking about asking him on the place again. But there was something different between us right now, a chance, maybe, at acting like brothers. “If you can apologize, we’ll feed you some supper.”
He stared at me. “That kid said that. I oughta apologize. Only he said God thinks so.”
“Should listen to Franky. He knows what he’s talking about.”
“You’re all pretty crazy, if you ask me. Talking about God, like anybody really knows.”
“You can. If you want to.”
“There you go again.” He looked out over the field. “Why’d you turn preacher, Sammy? You been preaching to Mom in letters a long time now. She showed me some of ’em. She keeps ’em all in a box under her bed.”
That came as a shock. I’d never had any indication that Mother thought my letters fit for anything but the trash can.
He started the vehicle going again. We pulled up to the house together. Julia and the children were glad to know about the boys but far less than thrilled to see Edward. But it didn’t take him long to tell them he was sorry, which told me a lot. I’d never heard him apologize before. Ever.
We served him supper. I even asked him to stay the night. He told us about dancing with Trudy Vale and getting a slicked-back haircut to look nice for her. He said he was sorry all over again to Robert and to Katie when he thought he saw them looking at him strange.
I wasn’t sure how I really felt, having him there. But he was so much calmer, and careful with his words. He was actually decent company, once he’d decided I might not be a liar after all. He saw the old radio the Posts had given us and was interested in a program. But I had to tell him it had quit in June and I hadn’t been able to get it going again. He wanted to fiddle with it. He tried for a while, then I tried with him, with Robert looking on, and finally we got it playing again in time to sit and listen to a program before bed.
With him in the house, I lay awake a long time, thinking too much about his past and mine. Finally I got up, unable to sleep, and found him sitting at the kitchen table.
“Just wishing for a cup of coffee,” he told me.
Morning was a long way off, but I started a fire in the stove and got out the canister of “coffee blend”—
the rest of our store-bought coffee, plus roasted and ground chicory and dandelion root that Julia had dried and stirred in.
“What are you going to do, Edward, from here on?”
“I don’t know. I heard there might be a carnival going through some towns south of here. Thought I might see about getting hired on, travel with ’em a while, you know.”
“There’s likely to be a lot of folks vying for that job, or any job.”
“I know it. What about you? You gonna stick it out here?”
“I think we can. Got a few animals. A lot of land to try to make good with.”
“You’re lucky, Sammy. Chips don’t fall for most folks like that.”
“We’ve been blessed. I know that better than anyone.” I put a generous scoop of the coffee blend into the pot of water and put it all on to heat.
“You really gonna raise up that girl?” he asked.
“Don’t have much choice, do I? Where else is she going to go? We can’t find her mother, and her grandmother wants us to keep her here.”
“But what if she ain’t family? What if it was some other fool with a tattoo?”
“Named Samuel? Wortham? Looking like me? I’d like to meet him, wouldn’t you?”
“No. Can’t say what I’d do. Probably land me back in prison. You know Mother was still afraid? That I’d go looking for Father, maybe kill him after all these years. She was glad she didn’t know where he was. Maybe he really is dead this time, who knows?”
“It doesn’t matter.” I sat down at the table with him. “He’s not searching us out.”
Edward leaned his chair back, looking at the ceiling. “I can’t go back to Albany. Mother told me how mad Jimmy is.”
“Why? Why’s he mad?” I thought that Jimmy, my mother’s husband, and Edward had always understood each other pretty well.
“That’s where I got the money. To come out here. Right out of his till.”
“You stole it?”
“Well, I didn’t ask him. Mom knew. She didn’t say it was all right. But she didn’t try to stop me, neither. She thinks I’m headed straight back to the pen. That’s what she thought when I called. That I was gonna tell her I’d been picked up someplace.”