In the final days of camp he went with Lenny up and down Highest trail, last in the staggered line of girls, Cap between them and the rest to be sure there was room, like a guard. But they never talked about it, except Lenny told him once he was a brave boy, he would always be brave, and she walked with her hand on his shoulder like another boy might. Buddy put the ring back that first morning after and Lenny had waited for him just outside the door; no one ever noticed or asked. Then they all left and camp closed before August was half over; for a while it felt like they were all still there, off in the cabins and sites Buddy couldn't see from Turtle Hole. Then they were just gone and the heat was thick as soup, and he would stay near the rock in the morning while Mam worked in her garden, and he began to build over the hole of the cave. First he thought he was making a fort, then he saw it was more like a garden too, not for vegetables but for things to grow up over the opening, to look old, like it had all grown without help. He knew which logs to drag up, broken ones rotted into the heartwood in holes and crevices, ones with no bark left, the inner skin of the wood smooth and gray, etched already by worms and bugs in a near language of little forms, circles, maps, and pictograms. He used a trowel from home to dig the rich loam from underneath the shack and he brought the loam up in the bucket that's got no handle. He filled some dirt between the logs and planted in some fern and kudzu, and he watered them with the bucket, every morning all through the heat, four trips from the water, holding the bucket to his chest with both arms. He thought in a while you wouldn't be able to see the hole even if you were looking straight at it, in a year or two year; the kudzu would vine up on the pine already there and climb the rock. Kudzu could eat a town, Mam said, why, further south they had to hack it down every spring, and it never even bloomed like wisteria and redeemed itself.
Every day after school he would stand in the third-grade bus line and look in the windows of the buses pulling up. The younger girls would be at the junior high and he thought he saw Delia once. Lenny and Cap would be in high school, and a few buses loaded there and picked up at elementary when some of the older kids got off to change buses for home. But he never saw them at all, and then he got a picture postcard from Lenny, from the state of New York. It was a picture of a school building with a steeple like a church and Mam read him the words on the back a few times until Buddy knew them, and when he looked at the writing he saw it as a block of letters and knew it in one piece. My mother and my sister live here now. We rented a house so I live at home, not at school. My mom has a job in admissions. Cap goes here too and she is going to get a car after she passes her test. How was it anyone lived at school, Buddy wouldn't do it, it was enough Mam made him trace on his letters every night, and cut out pictures from catalogues that started with the sound. But he would want him a car, like that, as soon as he could drive. The car Dad made him drive in the woods is still there, like no one's ever seen it; maybe no one has, it's so far out in the trees, downriver of Turtle Hole past the boundary of the camp. Buddy goes there but he doesn't go in the car. The driver's side door still hangs open and Buddy can see inside, see it's empty, but he doesn't get in. The empty car sags down on one side like the ground has given way a little beneath it, and the car and the space around the car simply wait, wait to break down. The big trees Dad carried him across have rolled over and drifted farther downriver to where the water broadens out and deepens. Only the tips of the silken branches show now, the smallest, reaching ends of the branches. The riverbank there and the branches nodding in their rush of water are the farthest away of his places, each one a star on a map he walks and knows. The closed buildings of Camp Shelter are marked with the stones of their columned porches, leaves blown against their massive doors, and when Buddy climbs Highest trail he can look down and see more of the quad through the pines. The trees highest up lose their leaves first and stand near naked when the forest trees are still full flung as bouquets, yellow and fiery. Buddy sits on the platform of Lenny's tent and looks down, wishes he could stack up these platforms to make a tower for armies, and he climbs on the tarps that hold the canvas tents. There's a cache of walking sticks the girls left and he takes them home one by one, long ones sized right to be rifles, and he plays at shooting up all the trees across the road from their porch and Mam shakes her head and says to him those are the only rifles he'll have in this house, he won't go for a soldier, no sir, she didn't raise him to be sending him off to no cage, draft or no draft. We have already done enough of that from around here, she says, and Buddy shoots louder till she goes in the house and then he stops.
It's not shooting he does when he's up on top of the rock. There's no one comes near him then. He can see everywhere at once; Turtle Hole shimmers below and Mud River is an interrupted stripe through the trees, and the mashed place where Frank's tent stood is gone, nothing left but the cleared place and the low bank of rocks where he built fires, and halfway down the diving rock there's the spit of ledge people dive off, the ledge where Frank fished with his casting rod he never let Buddy touch. Buddy didn't want to fish, he doesn't like to catch fish, the way they suffocate. The way their gills work, the way they can't blink their eyes. Sometimes he sees Lenny's eyes move, very near him, like he's watching her with his eyes next to hers but she doesn't see him, and he sees the whites of her eyes and the blue rims of her irises, thin curve of color like a glass secret, and then the starred mix of blues and grays between the rim and the black point in the center. Her long hair catches in her lashes, stray white filaments like the lines of web that blow about when Mam takes a broom to the spiders under the porch.
Lenny sent him another card and Buddy keeps it with the first one; it looks like a picture from an airplane of a little town, little buildings with sidewalks between them and woods around. Mam said that's the school she goes to. Alma is going to Delia's at Thanksgiving and I'm going with Cap to her grandparents. We're going to send you a present at Xmas so write me if there's something you want. Now you should write back to her, Mam says, I could write down what you want to say and you could copy it out, you could do that, but he doesn't want to, he doesn't need to. He keeps the cards in a certain place and he doesn't even look at them. He knows about the writing like he has a picture of it, like he could fall into the white space between the letters, and in that white space him and Mam are at Turtle Hole like they were in August after camp closed, in the evenings after the hot days, and they would swim and then Mam would soap him off and rinse him down with the bucket, she'd make him stand out of the water in the open and she'd throw the water right over him so the suds ran off away from Turtle Hole, and she'd be using the same bucket from the shack and he'd get her to laughing, throwing the water as fast as she could, and she'd make him walk home before her so she could take her own bath in private. There is always a white space Buddy can make when he is on top of the rock, and he can put any good thing in that space. Like Mam and him collecting flowers to dry: she has herself a big jug of money tree now, the husks all taken off and the oval circles catching light like clear, skinned coins, and she keeps that jug in the middle of the table and at night a candle glow can catch a reflection and light up the undersides of each pale shape. Like parchment paper, Mam says, like glitter shell, and she slices the little tomatoes they picked, canned up with mustard seed and pickled onion, and lays them out all round on the white plates, with peeled white potatoes and white hominy, and she says to him he's got his white supper before the snow even falls, him a rich man with his money on a tree all clean and white. And she has a laugh about him liking white things, and tells him there's such a thing as white chocolate, and maybe she'll find some come Christmas.
He has the white T-shirt of Lenny's that he took last summer, the one he found in her footlocker wadded up like she wanted to throw it away. He kept it under his mattress for a while and then when school started he sat on top of the big rectangular freezer Mrs. T. gave Mam from camp, and he got Mam's kitchen scissors and cut the bottom off the T-shirt. He folded that up and p
ut it away, and he wears the shirt now, every day; it fits him under his school clothes, under his sweatshirt on the weekend. Mam says how she got him a whole package of those undershirts and what does he do but wear just that one, worn out soft as silk and going to rip right down the middle; where did he ever get that old thing? But she washes it out for him by hand every two or three days, and dries it on a hanger over the woodstove. I don't know where your dad has gone to, she would say sometimes, back in the summer, but I reckon it's just as well. Now she says, I'm only hoping I don't hear some bad thing about him, some crazy thing he's done. You won't hear nothing, Buddy wants to tell her, but he doesn't say, he keeps his lips pressed flat against his teeth in a signal to himself to stay still. She's scared sometimes, uneasy. These weekends, the long Saturday afternoons when they're home and she's teaching Buddy to knit on the porch, she'll stand up and look out over the railing, down at the road, with the sky brilliant all round and flared near topaz over the reds and golds of the trees. Cars do pass on weekends, people from town driving out to look at the leaves now fall has peaked and the colors are rarefied, fired luminous, nodding against the evergreens. Buddy sees Mam look after cars that pass and pass again on the way back, kicking up dust on the road; she looks into the clouds of dust that stay too low to reach them, and Buddy wants to tell her. But he says to himself she'll feel safe after more time goes by, after Thanksgiving, after Christmas, and he knits at the scarf he is making, the yarn so pale a blue he's got to keep his hands washed, and Mam complains how he should be using a dark color for a scarf to wear to school, she's got some navy yarn would do just fine. He says how he likes this color and she nods and sighs, well, go right on, then, but I'm the one that'll be washing it by hand, right along with that undershirt you won't stop wearing. He will finish the scarf and he will get her to show him how to tie tassels on the ends, and he already has a box to put it in, and he can wrap the box in aluminum foil, prettier thickened with creases than any store-bought Christmas paper, and he can give it to her when they get back from church on that morning, the house all fragrant with the smell of roasting turkey. Like butter in his mouth, Buddy thinks, and clinches his jaws like he wants to hold on to something.
At night he can wake up in a sweat, gasping, thinking Dad's hand is jammed between his teeth, and he sits up straight in bed and sees where he is, and he's glad about all of it again, glad Dad can't come back, and he feels lucky for the way it went. Lucky Devil: the words float into his mind in pictures from the tattoo on Dad's arm. Buddy is a devil too, he knows, for what he did, and he peers through the dark and sees the God's eye Mam made him, hanging from the ceiling over his bed. Mam made it from white yarn and peeled sticks after camp closed and hung it up to watch over him because God's eye never closes. What does the eye think, he asked her, and she told him it doesn't think, it only sees and knows, and the white shape moves at night at the end of its tacked thread, turning. The blanket hangs from the ceiling too, the blanket Mam put up when Dad came. They left the blanket up to make Buddy a separate room, and the blanket stirs a little, like Dad might be behind it, but he knows Dad's not, and he listens for Mam's breathing and the sound of her comes to him, quiet and steady, the sound he listens to so he can sleep again. In the dark at night he can see the half-size bookcase against the wall beside his bed, the space so close he can reach out and touch the objects on each shelf, objects Buddy brought from the shack when the camp closed. The bones are laid out separate, and the fibrous snakeskin, and the flashlight and the piece of knife. He thought he could watch over them because winter will come and he won't go to the shack anymore then, or to Highest camp. The trails will fill with snow and the rock by Turtle Hole will be hung with ice, sheets of ice like veils, and icicles thick as a man's legs, and Buddy will walk round the snow oval of Turtle Hole and slide its frozen face on his sled, just near the edge like Mam tells him. Or maybe this year in a hard freeze he'll run right across the middle, whooping and screaming, see it all laid out hard and shining around him, gleaming. But now the water is blue, azure as the sky, and the evergreens beyond toss and stir like giant flower points in the drenched colors of the leaves, and Buddy stands up and begins to dance, slower at first and then faster, jumping like a banshee, turning and whirling, yelling out loud, and beneath his stomping feet plummets the world within the rock and the world beneath that world, the black world, escaped, vast and deep and no bigger than his mind, what he sees when he closes his eyes and watches it all from far, far above. He watches from so high, the road and the camp and the lip of the rock and the long green sward of the mountains flatten out like a picture, a picture he could send to Lenny with writing on the back.
It's when he comes down the rock, past the entrance to the cave no one can see now, and he sits down to tie his shoe, shoes like the ones he saw Lenny put on in the shack, that he sees the rabbit, a small one, a young one looks like, sitting still beside the path. He's downwind, that's what, or the rabbit is hurt maybe and can't move, but no, he sees it hop once, twice, and sniff the air. Even from here, he can see how its body moves when it breathes, its furred sides palpitating. It holds its head still and looks, no whites in the eyes but a shine like tears. Buddy sees the rabbit from one side; the surface of its visible, bright eye rounded and reflective as a little mirror. Slowly, so slowly, he stands up, begins edging away, around behind it. Still, completely still, moving on the balls of his feet, choosing steps, his body poised; in his mind he picks up the rabbit, holds it in his hands, and he moves toward that image, yearning in silence. A crow's hoarse caw rents the air, ricochets off the broad wall of the diving rock, and Buddy freezes, but the rabbit only lowers its tight round head and smells the ground. The erect ears go flat. It should be running for cover at the call of a circling crow; Buddy has seen crows drop in sprung glides to rip rabbits and chipmunks apart, fast, like tearing open a wet package. Throwing the parts around, digging for the heart. Even young squirrels, anything small enough to carry away. And rabbits, they got nothing but speed, and hearing fine-tuned as a bat's. Squirrels can bite pretty nasty, fight off birds sometimes. But rabbits got nothing but knowing, Buddy thinks. He stands behind it now, where it can't smell him, and the rabbit's bunched brown body blends into the colors of the path, the autumn reds and browns of pieweed and devil's lantern, and he knows it by the nearly imperceptible trembling of animal breath, a slow flutter in the weeds and plants of the highgrown edge of the trail. Buddy begins to creep closer, even-paced. Slowly he closes the distance and the rabbit jerks alert, ears turned, and Buddy doesn't pause, he bends down and has it in his hands, the soft body enclosed in his two palms. He picks it up smoothly, with such dexterous care, holds it chin level and looks down, afraid to bow his head and startle it; he looks down the plane of his own nose and mouth and sees the rabbit's head, the sweep of its whiskers. The animal has gone dead still, frozen, and Buddy peers farther, like looking over a cliff, he thinks. He tilts his head and sees the tender, inner curve of the ear, mauve brown like a bruise. The whiskers move, twitch involuntarily, and Buddy sees that its left eye is limned with a milky glaze. One-eyed. Big enough to be on its own but won't make first snow, all the foxes and stoats gluttonous with instinct, storing up in themselves for the long cold. Buddy can't tell if the rabbit's just blind or something maybe took that eye, but there's no wound he can see. The eye holds still, smooth orb with a skin like an egg. The rabbit blinks. Buddy holds it to his mouth, to his nose, and begins the walk home. He'll take it to Mam. She'll think it's pretty, she'll have a bottle to feed it.
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