What I Came to Tell You

by Tommy Hays

  “All I need is the phone number,” the man said, walking around to the other side of the sign, but Sudie kept moving around with him. Biscuit barked and growled.

  “Get out of his way,” Grover said.

  “Come on, kid.” The man took hold of Sudie’s arm.

  “No.” Sudie hugged the sign.

  The man’s face reddened as he pried Sudie from the sign.

  Clay ran at the man but he just swatted Clay out of the way.

  “Hey, mister! Your car!” Matthew, who was wearing his old Army coat and must’ve been on his way to work, was out in the road, pointing toward the BMW, which was slowly rolling down Edgemont, the driver’s side door wide open.

  “Oh Lord.” The bald man ran after it and, finally catching up with it, jumped in the driver’s seat, bringing it to a stop.

  In a burst of anger, Grover jerked the For Sale sign out of the ground, ran to where the car had come to a halt and swatted the trunk.

  “Hey! What the—” The bald man jumped out of the car and came toward Grover.

  “You want to see the sign!” Grover shouted. He swung the sign at the bald man, who jumped back in the car. “Well, here you go! Here’s the sign!” Grover swatted the car again. The bald man started the car, the tires squealing as he sped out of sight.

  Grover stood in the middle of the road, catching his breath. Sudie and Clay came up beside him.

  Emma Lee came running up the street, a book in her hand. “What in the world?”

  Clay nodded at the sign that Grover was only half aware he still held.

  “Oh, no,” Emma Lee said.

  “I don’t reckon that old boy will be buying it,” Clay said, nodding in the direction the car had disappeared.

  “They’ll be plenty more where he came from,” Grover said grimly.

  “Where’d that Matthew fellow go?” Clay said.

  “There he is,” Sudie said, pointing up the street where they saw him walking through the cemetery gates.

  Grover started back in the direction of the Bamboo Forest, and as he did, he hurled the sign into the thickest part of the bamboo. He charged up the path. Back in his workshop, he stood in front of the tapestry. He kept seeing the For Sale sign. For Sale. For Sale. For Sale. He looked at his tapestry. Tapestry, my eye, he thought. It was just a bunch of bamboo and sticks crammed together. It wasn’t anything really. He thought of all the hours he’d wasted out here, messing with leaves and sticks and limbs, trying to make them into more than they could ever be.

  He sat down on the ground, feeling light-headed. Like the time he’d gotten hit in the head. Like he was floating above everything, looking down on his life. As he sat there with his elbows propped on his thighs and his chin resting in his palms, the yellow carpet of bamboo leaves beneath him began to spin—slowly at first, then faster, until it blurred into a Saturday in early spring just before everything changed.

  Most of the drive up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, past Cold Mountain and past Mount Pisgah, Grover sat in the back, stewing about being dragged along on another hike. He barely noticed the deep green rhododendron and laurel moving in the breeze, the spring water dripping down the moss-covered rocks or the purple waves of mountains that went on forever. When he was smaller he loved going on these hikes, but somewhere along the way his parents had turned into slowpokes, always stopping to look at wildflowers or birds, trying to identify them in one of their many guidebooks. And Sudie, who’d always been a slow hiker anyway, was slower than ever, bending down to look at every butterfly, bee or spider. Grover barreled ahead, but his parents never let him get too far ahead. They never let him leave behind the lumbering embarrassment that was his family.

  They pulled into the parking lot of Graveyard Fields, a kind of flat-bottomed bowl with waterfalls at both ends. The trail followed a big creek, where they could wade, skip smoothed river rocks and look for salamanders. Some people said Graveyard Fields got its name after a farmer’s herd of cows had died in a sudden deep freeze. Another story was that it was named after a big fire that left tree stumps singed and gray, resembling tombstones. Grover liked theorizing how it got its name. But this afternoon he couldn’t shake being irritated. He stayed ahead for a good part of the way. His mother kept calling, “Grover, wait up!” and he’d wait till he saw them appear around a bend in the trail.

  These hikes had become a trial for him. His father had often offered for Grover to stay home and work in the Bamboo Forest, but his mother insisted he go. She said it was important that they do things as a family. Grover didn’t see what was so important about doing things as a family. He’d spent the last twelve years doing things as a family.

  His family spent half an hour on a shoal in the creek, turning over river rocks and catching salamanders. The cool air, the wet sweet smell of the creek mud on his hands and the water gurgling over the rocks worked on him. He remembered looking up from hunting for salamanders and seeing his mother squatting on the little beach and, with his father’s help, turning over a big flat rock. His sister stooped beside them, hands cupped just above the water, ready to scoop up any salamander that might be hiding underneath.

  But once they were back on the trail, he kept trying to go ahead, even with his mother calling out to wait up. A few days later his mother would be hit by a car. If only he had known that this hike through Graveyard Fields was the last his family would ever take, he would’ve waited up.

  Shadows flickered past, and he heard crows settling down in the bamboo. He looked around at the fading light in the Bamboo Forest. How long had he been sitting here? He stood, thinking he should probably get home, but he couldn’t resist picking up the pine limb he’d been working with and weaving it into the big bamboo grid. He picked up another limb and wove that in. Then another and another. The more he worked, the better he felt. He’d been working for a while when he stepped back to see how his tapestry was shaping up.

  “You do good work.”

  Startled, Grover put his hand to his chest.

  Emma Lee was sitting on the sycamore stump.

  “How long have you been sitting there?” he asked, his heart racing.

  “A while,” she said.

  “I never heard you,” he said.

  “We’re one quarter Cherokee. We know how to sneak up on people.” She smiled. “Man, you really jumped.”

  He sat down beside her on the stump, looking at the tapestry.

  “You’re a real good artist,” she said.

  Grover shrugged, never knowing what to say when people complimented his work.

  “You say ‘Thank you,’ ” she said. The more he was around Emma Lee, the more he was afraid to think much of anything, for fear that she would read his mind.

  He looked at the tapestry. “Maybe I’ll finish it before the bulldozers come.”

  “That’s no way to think,” she said.

  “Well, you gotta admit, it’s pretty hopeless.”

  “I don’t have to admit a thing,” Emma Lee said.

  Grover looked at her.

  “If you go around thinking things are hopeless,” she said, “then you have no reason to try, do you?”

  Try. Hadn’t his mother used that word all the time? As long as you try, she used to say, that’s all anybody can ask. Grover looked around. He lowered his voice. “Did my mother send your family to be our neighbors?” Grover felt embarrassed as soon as he’d said it.

  “Not that I know of,” Emma Lee said, “but God works in mysterious ways.”

  “I don’t believe in God,” Grover said, crossing his arms.

  “Because of what happened to your mama?”

  “That didn’t help,” Grover said.

  “Losing Daddy made me believe even more,” Emma Lee said. “It’s my only hope of seeing him again.”

  “You want to see him again?” he asked. “Even after he hurt your mother like he did?” Ever since Emma Lee had told him what happened with her father, he’d figured she was glad to be rid of him.

&nb
sp; “In Heaven he’d be back to his old self.” She said this like there wasn’t a doubt in her mind. “I think you believe in God. If there wasn’t a God, then there’d be no Heaven. There’d be no place for your mother to be.”

  “How do you know what I believe?” He jumped off the stump and walked over to the tapestry, adjusting a limb that was a little out of place. “Besides, believing is for kids. Believing is something people outgrow.” He looked back at her. “Or at least they ought to.”

  “You can never outgrow God,” she said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I see God in your art.”

  “Where?” Grover looked at the tapestry.

  “It’s not like that,” she said. “It’s not something you can point to. It’s just a feeling I get whenever I look at your weavings.” She got up, came over and gently laid her hand flat on the woven limbs. “Like I’m looking through a window onto a world I never knew was there.”

  “Really?” Grover said, scratching his head and looking at the tapestry. “All I do is put things together.” He shrugged. “It’s more like things put themselves together. Like I’m helping nature get a little more organized. Like I’m part of something … I don’t know … something way bigger.” He felt silly for saying it.

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” Emma Lee said. “Something way bigger. That’s God.”

  “It is?”

  “What else could it be?” she asked.

  He picked up a new limb from the stack that Clay had neatly arranged and began working it in between the others. “I don’t believe in God.”

  “Maybe your head doesn’t,” Emma Lee said, watching him work, “but your hands sure do.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  TRY NOT TO THINK ABOUT IT

  It was a Friday afternoon, one week before Thanksgiving, when Grover, Sudie, Clay and Emma Lee walked down the front steps of Claxton after school and headed up Montford Avenue in the direction of downtown. Last night Leila Roundtree had called their father, asking if they could tour the Wolfe house this afternoon. Grover and Sudie were to take Clay and Emma Lee downtown and meet Leila and their father at the house.

  Montford was a long, wide street and the cold wind blew uninterrupted all the way from downtown. After a few blocks, they ducked into Reader’s Corner to warm up. The first thing Grover always noticed when he walked into Reader’s Corner was the musty smell of used books. An old, comfortable smell. And even though he wasn’t a big reader, being around books other people had read made Grover feel at home.

  Byron, the owner, was a short, round woman with long white hair and spectacles perched on the tip of her nose—a female Benjamin Franklin. She sat at a desk surrounded by boxes of books, going through them and writing prices in pencil on the inside cover.

  Grover took Clay over to the window to show him Tom, who pushed his head against Grover’s hand and purred loud enough to hear across the store.

  “Emma Lee’s died and gone to heaven,” Clay said. His sister stood in the middle of the store, taking in the shelves sagging with books.

  “This is Clay,” Sudie said to Byron, “and that’s his sister, Emma Lee.”

  “Hey,” Clay said. He turned back to Emma Lee. “Sis, we can’t stay long.”

  Emma Lee, having already picked up a book, didn’t say anything.

  Clay leaned toward Byron and said in a low confidential tone, “She’s a bookaholic.”

  Byron looked over her spectacles at Clay. “We get a lot of those.”

  Emma Lee disappeared around the corner of a bookshelf, still reading the book. “Uh-oh,” Clay said, going after her. “Now Emma Lee …”

  Watching Clay go after his sister, Grover remembered that one day he’d been behind her at Claxton and watched her walk down the hall, her long black hair swaying. It had taken his breath away. Up until that moment he hadn’t really seen her, at least not like that. Now he’d be in the middle of doing homework or washing the dishes with Sudie or working in the Bamboo Forest, and suddenly there’d she’d be, walking down the hall at Claxton, her long hair swaying.

  “How’s the weaving going?” Byron asked. She was one of the few people he could talk to about his tapestries.

  “I’d rather be in the Bamboo Forest,” he said. Ever since the woman had stuck the For Sale sign in the Bamboo Forest, Grover had felt his time there running out.

  “We’re taking Emma Lee and Clay to tour the Wolfe house.”

  “It’s kind of you to take time out for your friends. You always were a generous boy.” She looked at him over her spectacles. “You come by it honestly.” Grover wasn’t sure if she meant his mother or his father. But Grover could never look into Byron’s clear eyes anymore without seeing what she’d seen that warm evening last April just as she was closing her store:

  She had locked the front door and had been closing out the cash register when there was a knock at the window. Grover’s mother had been outside, walking past with Biscuit on the leash. She often stopped by to talk to Byron and buy a book or two but this time she’d waved and walked on. Byron heard sirens a little later though she hadn’t thought anything of it.

  Grover never minded stopping by the Reader’s Corner with Sudie. He wasn’t interested in the books so much. He mostly liked petting Tom, talking to Byron and looking through the very window where their mother was last seen alive.

  After they left, they’d walked two blocks and the wind blew harder.

  “I’m freezing,” Sudie said, shivering and looking longingly at Videolife as they passed by the store.

  “Why don’t we stop in there?” Clay said.

  Grover stared at the store. “We’ve only got a few more blocks.”

  “Your sister looks cold,” Emma Lee whispered into his ear.

  Sudie’s cheeks had turned holly berry red. “For just a minute,” he said.

  With his heart pounding, Grover followed them inside. He hadn’t stepped in here since the day their mother hadn’t come home. Videolife was small, about a tenth the size of Blockbuster across town but had a lot more movies, especially old movies. The shelves, almost as close together as the ones in Reader’s Corner, were packed with DVDs and old VHS tapes. Big handwritten signs dangled from fishing line above the sections: Keep You Up at Night Scary, Too Deep for Us, Great Old Ones, Strictly for Grown-ups, Okay for Everybody, Basically for Kids and Stupid in the Stupidest Sense.

  On late Friday afternoons Grover and Sudie would walk down here, meet their parents and decide on a movie together, which wasn’t always easy. They’d get take-out from a little restaurant called The Weeping Duck, then go home and watch the movie and eat wonton soup, egg rolls, and Grover’s favorite, shrimp fried rice.

  Sudie and Clay had gone straight to the Pretty New section and found Fantastic Mr. Fox. They were reading what it said about it on the back of the DVD.

  “Let me know if you need any help,” said the guy behind the counter. He had a goatee and wore a turtleneck. He was watching a TV mounted high up on the wall in one corner where a Woody Allen movie was playing. Their father loved Woody Allen. He would laugh and laugh at his movies. Most of the time, Grover didn’t see what was so funny.

  Sudie looked up at Grover hopefully, clutching Fantastic Mr. Fox to her chest. Grover shook his head. Sudie sighed and set it back on the shelf.

  “It’s just one little movie,” she said.

  Grover wasn’t about to tell Sudie why just the sight of his sister holding that DVD made him feel almost sick. He’d never tell her that his mother had asked him, when Videolife had first called, if he would pick up the Fantastic Mr. Fox DVD that the store was holding for them after school. He’d never tell her that he’d forgotten about it till the day he’d seen their mother through the car’s rear window, headed toward Videolife with Biscuit.

  “Sure there isn’t anything I can help you with?” The guy behind the counter glanced away from the movie.

  “We just came in to warm up,” Grover said.


  “Stay as long as you like,” the guy said, looking back at the TV. But the way he said it made Grover wonder if he knew who they were.

  Grover wandered over to the Funny as All Get-Out, picking up a DVD of Fawlty Towers, a British TV comedy that used to make their mother laugh so hard she’d be wiping away tears. Someone sneezed. He looked up to see Matthew, in his UNC Asheville sweatshirt this time, looking at a movie, reading the back of the case. Grover quietly set the DVD back in its place, and then quickly stepped around the corner and headed back to find his sister and the others.

  They crossed the overpass that led into downtown, passing city workers who fought the wind to hang garlands, wreaths, giant yellow candles and Christmas lights. The workers were decorating for the Christmas parade tomorrow, which was on the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

  Grover, Sudie, Clay and Emma Lee ducked into the Grove Arcade. In the entryway, a red-cheeked man dressed in a Salvation Army uniform rang a bell for donations. Clay dug into his pocket, pulled out a crumpled dollar bill and dropped it into the big hanging pot.

  “Merry Christmas to y’all,” the man said as the four of them walked on inside.

  The first thing to hit them was the warmth, the feeling coming back into their hands and faces, as they looked at the long glistening hallway. Shafts of afternoon sunlight filtered down through the high windows, looking touchable.

  “Monet,” Emma Lee said to herself, staring down the hall.

  “I gave the fellow a dollar,” Clay said to his sister.

  “Not money,” she said impatiently. “The painter. It’s like that painting by him.” She looked down the hall. “Of the cathedral.”

  “Exactly!” Grover said, looking at her. One year Grover’d given his mother a calendar of Monet’s paintings.

  Sudie showed Emma Lee and Clay the model in the middle of the building of how the architect had originally designed the building with a twelve-story tower above the shops, a small skyscraper. Grover had heard this a million times, but it was only now that he thought what it must’ve been like for the architect. How disappointed he must’ve been to have worked so hard on something and created such a beautiful building on paper but never seen the whole thing built.