The House You Pass On The Way

by Woodson, Jacqueline

  Staggerlee smiled. She loved that part too.

  “You ever been there—to Vermont?”

  Trout shook her head. “I dreamed it, though—when I was real little, I used to have all these ideas about—about what it was like. The way Grandma sings it—that part about the falling leaves and the sycamores.”

  “And the snowlight,” Staggerlee said softly. “Sometimes I sit in my window and imagine what that’s like—snowlight and ski trails.” All her life, she had felt like she was the only one who dreamed about places. The only one who watched those film clips and imagined herself in the places they sang about. And now, here was a girl—sitting close enough to touch, talking about the same things.

  “And I know why you call yourself Staggerlee too.”

  Staggerlee started picking at a cuticle. It was almost too much—like Trout could look right through her and see everything. “Why do you think?”

  “’Cause of Grandpa’s song,” she said, matter-of-fact.

  “Yeah,” she said. But it was more than that. Nothing she could explain to a near stranger. “How come you call yourself Trout?”

  They passed a farm where about a dozen cows were out grazing. Trout watched them, her eyes on the farm until it was long out of sight. “You ever been fishing?” she said, finally.

  “No. I watch people do it. We have a river near us.”

  “When I was little, Jonathan used to take me fishing all the time. We don’t do it much anymore, though. Ida says he should take my boy cousins fishing and leave me to do girl stuff. Thing is—we used to fish for trout. You ever see a trout getting pulled out of water?”

  Staggerlee shook her head. Once she had seen a man hit a fish against the ground so hard, it brought tears to her eyes. It was a bluefish about as long as her arm. Since then, she always looked away when a person had a fish on their line.

  “A trout will fight you real hard,” Trout said. “Trying to get itself free. I’d get one on the line and it’d be leaping all high out of the water.” She sighed. “Sometimes I’d keep it. Sometimes I’d let it go. But even when I let it go, I’d think about its mouth, the way it had this big cut in there—the way I’d hurt it even if I did throw it back.”

  “How come you liked fishing if you didn’t like hurting them?”

  Trout looked at her, her eyes dark and intense. “Something about the way they fought. I guess, without even knowing it, I wanted to learn how to fight like that. I wanted to see this little fish that thought he had so much to live for. That’s why I changed my name. Be a fighter like a trout. You give yourself a name, you have to live up to it, though.”

  “You feel like you have to fight all the time?”

  Trout looked away. “Yeah,” she said. “All the time.”

  She was quiet, her eyes steady on the land they passed. Staggerlee sat holding her ponytail, trying to keep the wind from whipping it into her face. She watched Trout. Her jaw was narrow and strong. It looked like someone had chiseled it out of a piece of dark brown stone. But her chin kept quivering as though she was trying hard not to cry. They drove for a long time before the first tear fell. Trout wiped it away quickly.

  “Don’t stare at me, please,” she said hoarsely.

  They rode the rest of the way in silence.

  Chapter Eight

  AT THE HOUSE TROUT SLOWLY CLIMBED DOWN FROM the truck and moved toward the porch where Mama was standing with Battle. She walked like someone older, someone sure of herself. Staggerlee watched them embrace awkwardly, then pull away from each other and smile. Her mother’s smile was small and uncertain.

  “I hope you have a good time here,” Mama said. But her words sounded as though she had practiced saying them.

  “I’ll show her a good time,” Staggerlee said quickly.

  Trout turned and looked at her, a half smile beginning. Staggerlee frowned. She didn’t have words for this—the way Trout . . . the way Trout . . . unsteadied her.

  She took Trout’s duffel from her father. “I—I’ll show you where you’re sleeping,” she stammered.

  TROUT’S ROOM WAS next to Staggerlee’s, and even though it was called a guest room, there had never been a guest in it. Staggerlee looked around. Her mother had slept here. When she had returned from the hospital after having Battle, she had moved into this room and closed the door. And for the next few weeks, they tiptoed around the house, only disturbing her when it was time for Battle to nurse or on the few occasions when she herself was hungry. The room was painted blue, with a high ceiling and windows facing the river. There was a queen-sized iron bed in one corner, a desk with a lamp on it in the other, and a small blue-and-yellow rug on the floor.

  “This is it,” Staggerlee said, setting Trout’s duffel on the bed.

  Trout whistled under her breath and walked over to the window. She stood there, staring out, her hands in the back pockets of her shorts.

  “Something sad about this room.”

  “Sad,” Staggerlee repeated softly. She remembered how she would tiptoe down the hall and peek in on her mother, who lay sleeping. How bright the room was in the mornings, the yellow-gold light making her mother seem almost holy.

  “I don’t think it’s sad.” She sat down on the edge of the bed and fingered the patchwork quilt. “Our grandmother made this.”

  Trout turned away from the window. She looked at the quilt a moment and nodded. “I know how to do that kind of piecework. Ida Mae taught me.”

  “I’d like to learn one day,” Staggerlee said. “Mama knits but she doesn’t know anything about quilting.”

  Trout smiled. She had the prettiest smile. Laugh for me, Staggerlee wanted to say.

  “I thought I was going to hate quilting at first, but it’s like . . . it’s like you take all these pieces from all these parts of your life and you sew them together and then you have your life all over again, only it’s . . . in a different form.” Trout turned back to the window. “I don’t know if that makes any sense.”

  “Yeah. It does.”

  “What’s that water?” Trout asked.

  “Breakabone River. Daddy says it got its name because so many slaves broke their bones trying to swim it to freedom.”

  Staggerlee started chewing on a cuticle. Mama hated when she did this. She stopped as though Mama had just fussed at her for it. She wanted words—the way Trout had them—for every feeling, it seemed, every thought.

  “Ida Mae didn’t send me here because I wanted to come,” Trout said softly. “She sent me here because she doesn’t like the person I’m growing up to be.”

  Staggerlee stared out the window past Trout. The sun was setting now, beautiful and clear across the water.

  “Who?” She felt her knees trembling and put her hands on them to steady them. “Who are you growing up to be?”

  Trout looked at her a long time. She came over to the bed and sat down beside Staggerlee. It felt strange having her so close. She smelled of lotion. Staggerlee wanted to put her nose in Trout’s hair and sniff hard.

  “Look at this,” Trout said. She spread her hand out next to Staggerlee’s and stared at them. Trout’s skin was dark reddish brown. Staggerlee’s hand looked pale beside it. “Look at how different we are.”

  “It’s just skin,” Staggerlee said. They were sitting shoulder to shoulder. They were whispering now.

  Trout looked at her and smiled. “Can we walk down to the river later?”

  Staggerlee nodded and stood up quickly before Trout could tell her what terrible thing she’d done to get sent here by Ida Mae.

  “I should let you . . . get settled,” she said, moving toward the door. Her legs seemed to be disconnected from the rest of her.

  “Will you come get me later?” Trout asked.

  Staggerlee nodded and pulled Trout’s door closed behind her.

  Chapter Nine

  SHE HAD ALWAYS COME TO THE BARN. WHEN SHE WAS little, her parents would find her here, curled up on a bale of hay, her harmonica lying at her side. A long
time ago, when Dotti still came here to groom her horse, Buck, Staggerlee would tag along behind her and beg until Dotti lifted her up onto Buck’s back and taught her to ride. But Dotti outgrew Buck, and Staggerlee didn’t care enough about riding to take him over. The morning her father sold him, Staggerlee had come to the barn to pack up his brushes and saddle and say good-bye. And Buck had looked at her with milky eyes. Each time Staggerlee slid the heavy door open and stepped into the empty barn, she remembered him.

  When she was ten, she found a litter of motherless kittens in the barn. For weeks the family nursed them, with tiny bottles and kitten formula her father had gotten in town. Staggerlee sat in the dim barn remembering them all sitting in a semicircle, each with a kitten in their lap. They had kept one—Mamie, a calico. Staggerlee pressed her harmonica to her lips and remembered people calling to adopt the others, until one by one, they were gone.

  She sat cross-legged in the center of the barn now, Buck’s scratchy blue blanket pulled across her shoulders, and played softly. When she was eleven, she would come here late at night and stare through the barn’s cutout window up at the moon. She dreamed of flying Daddy’s planes and making enough money to buy more harmonicas. Enough to last her forever. Staggerlee smiled, remembering. She used to imagine traveling around the world and finding all the people in it who loved to be alone, who loved the sound of music. And she would start a small band and build lots of barns far apart from each other. And she and the other musicians would sit in the darkness of their individual barns and play, listening to each other, and the music would travel up through the windows and meet the moon.

  Staggerlee blew softly into the harmonica. She licked her lips and started playing, her eyes half closed, her head moving slowly from side to side. She remembered the feel of Trout’s shoulder pressed against hers and the way Trout’s lips moved when she spoke. But out here playing, Staggerlee wasn’t afraid of Trout. She felt far away and safe. She felt free.

  Chapter Ten

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, MAMA AND TROUT MOVED carefully around each other. Sometimes, sitting at dinner, Trout would say something that made Mama smile. In those moments, Staggerlee felt like her heart would break open. Her mother didn’t smile much, and the scarce times when her face lit up were amazing. Maybe Trout felt it too. She started talking more and more after a while, telling funny stories about Baltimore and her family. One night, Staggerlee caught Trout staring at Mama, watching the way she lifted a slice of corn bread to her mouth, and she knew in that moment that Trout had begun to look past all the mean things Ida Mae must have said about them.

  “Did our grandparents love you?” Trout asked one evening at dinner.

  “What kind of question is that?” Dotti asked, nearly choking on her rice.

  Trout glared at her, then turned back to Mama. Staggerlee smiled.

  “We never met,” Mama said. “Ida Mae never told you?”

  Trout shook her head, not taking her eyes off Mama.

  “Elijah and I had planned to come at the end of the summer of sixty-nine. He had written them about us and they had written back saying they were looking forward to meeting me.”

  “They died that summer,” Trout said.

  Mama nodded and pushed some peas around on her plate.

  “They would have loved you,” Staggerlee said.

  Mama smiled. “I like to think so.”

  Her father had been sitting quietly, his hand pressed against his mouth, his thick brows furrowed.

  “That’s what they lived for,” he said. “They would’ve gotten to know you.” He smiled. “I’m sure my mother wouldn’t have thought anyone was good enough for her baby boy, but she would’ve given anyone who tried to be a chance—black or white.”

  Trout was staring down at her plate. “I try to think about how they were regular people,” she said. “That’s what everybody seems to want to forget.”

  Staggerlee swallowed, wanting to reach under the table, take her hand, and squeeze it hard. She knew what Trout was talking about. Everyone had gone and made their grandparents heroes. There was a statue of them up in town. Her grandfather held a Bible in his hand and her grandmother held a poster that said WE WHO BELIEVE IN FREEDOM SHALL NOT REST. They were heroes. But they were also human. And because nobody wanted to believe that, it was hard for people to see any of the Canans as human. Including her and Trout.

  “I mean—what if they wouldn’t have liked you?” Trout said.

  “That’s just dumb.” Dotti glared at Trout. “You don’t know anything about them.”

  Trout’s eyes didn’t flicker from Mama.

  Staggerlee watched Dotti, who was looking at Trout out of the corner of her eye, as though she was waiting for Trout to pull something. Trout ignored her, and this burned Dotti up more than anything.

  Mama nodded. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s easy to imagine them only as heroes. Sometimes people need the easy way.”

  Daddy pushed his plate away and leaned back. “I don’t think my parents had that kind of hate in them,” he said. “I think I would have inherited at least some of it.”

  “But look at Ida Mae,” Trout said. “She’s—”

  “Can I be excused?” Dotti interrupted.

  “Whose night for dishes?” Daddy asked.

  “Go,” Staggerlee said. “It’s my night. Good-bye.”

  “I’ll help you,” Trout offered.

  “Dotti, help Battle to bed,” Mama said. “Make sure he brushes his teeth.” Dotti scowled, mumbling as she lifted Battle from his high chair. The dining room seemed to get lighter after she left.

  “Ida Mae’s from the same people,” Trout continued as though she hadn’t been interrupted. “And she’d never go out and marry a white guy.”

  “Why does it matter?” Mama said, annoyed.

  Trout slunk down a bit in her chair. “I was just wondering,” she said. “Just trying to figure it all out.”

  Mama reached across the table and put her hand on Trout’s shoulder. “No one person ever figures it all out, honey.”

  Trout shrugged. “Maybe I’ll be the first.”

  Chapter Eleven

  “YOU READY FOR OUR WALK BY THE RIVER?” STAGGERLEE asked the next morning. Downstairs, she could hear Dotti clearing away the breakfast dishes.

  Trout was sitting on her bed lacing her sneaker. She was dressed in black again, and Staggerlee wondered if everything she owned was black.

  “I dreamed about the river last night.” Trout smiled. She had combed her hair back from her face and tied it with a ribbon. “I dreamed about bones floating in it. People’s bones.”

  “The slaves’ probably,” Staggerlee said. She leaned against the doorway and watched Trout. “Sorry Dotti’s kind of rude.”

  Trout rolled her eyes. “She’s got her own thing going on. That’s fine with me.” She started making her bed.

  “You don’t have to do that now,” Staggerlee said.

  “Yes I do. Ida Mae said it’s good home training—to make your bed before you go off on your day. I’m not going to leave it unmade so you all can talk about me when I’m gone.”

  She looked over her shoulder at Staggerlee and smiled.

  “We wouldn’t talk about you.”

  “You won’t have anything to talk about.” When she finished, she turned. She was serious again, and Staggerlee felt her stomach flutter. “In that dream, those bones seemed to be calling my name.”

  “Your name?”

  “Yeah.” Trout paused. “I need to tell you something, Stag. I need to tell you why Ida Mae sent me here. If we’re going to be friends, I don’t want it starting out on a lie.”

  “I don’t know if it’s something I want to hear.”

  Trout stared at her a long time. “If you don’t want me to tell you . . . I won’t.”

  But Staggerlee knew why Ida Mae had sent Trout here; she could see it in Trout’s eyes and she could feel it when Trout sat down next to her. There was a feeling growing inside Trou
t, and Staggerlee knew it because it was growing inside her too. Maybe it had always been there. Maybe it had started before she was born and would keep growing—into the earth—long after she had died. She knew it was secret and shameful. When Mama had given her a taste of wine for becoming a woman, she knew that was different somehow—that the woman thing happened to every girl and because of this, they could celebrate it. But what was happening to her and Trout—that was different. They were alone together. There was no one standing behind a closed door smiling and holding out a glass of wine.

  “I know why, Trout,” Staggerlee whispered.

  Trout ran her hand slowly back and forth over the quilt. “How come you know?”

  Staggerlee shrugged. She had never spoken about it and couldn’t now. She didn’t have the words for any of it, but her feelings were like words inside her—painful and sharp.

  “I just do,” she said finally.

  She could see Trout swallow. “Ida Mae thinks I could learn to be a lady here.”

  Staggerlee smiled, and the air grew lighter. “Lady. Sounds like something out of the eighteen-hundreds.”

  “I think that’s when Ida Mae should have been born.” Trout looked down at her hands. “Hallique understood me. I could tell her anything and she didn’t judge it. When she was dying, she called Ida Mae into the room and told her to be patient with me, to give me some growing room. I was standing outside the bedroom door listening.” She blinked and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Then she told Ida Mae why she needed to be patient with me and Ida Mae lost it. She just lost it.”

  Staggerlee had run home from that afternoon in the cornflowers with Hazel bursting to tell someone. But as she got closer to the house, she slowed down. Somehow she knew there was no one—no one who would say, “That’s wonderful that someone made you so happy.”

  “She said when I come home from here,” Trout was saying, “all these feelings I have better be gone. Feels like everyone in my life has betrayed me.” She looked over at Staggerlee. “I guess I’m kind of scared you will too.”