The black walnut trees that stood nearby smelled ancient; Cello could almost feel the human lifetimes they’d passed crammed close together. He steadied himself on one of them, laying his palm on the bark the same way he’d settle an animal. Cello shuddered under another wave of guilt—how could any living creature trust him now? He wondered how permanently this transgression would change him.
The oldest plants in the clearing grew to Cello’s eye height. The sturdy central stalks were crisscrossed with yarn-fine shoots, and their blue floral crowns seemed to nod as Cello drew close. They harvested from the base of the Vine, removing only its crawling, twisting ivy-like appendages. The plants did well in the shade, and did best in this particular grove. Letta said it was because her ancestor had found the very first Vine rippling up through the forest floor in this exact spot. The Vine still leaned on and swelled against the trees, but had matured over many decades to stand on its own. Cello looked closely at the nearest plant, not sure where to make the cut. Any abrasion in the stalk would ruin it—since that was where the sap pulsed most aggressively.
Cello wondered if Franklin Lees would even know what to do with it, how to plant it, how to tend it. He took an X-Acto knife out of his back pocket and sliced off three of the youngest shoots, still spiraling loose, not yet fully tethered to anything. He untangled them, and, as gently as he’d held Joanie’s baby that morning, he wrapped them in an old T-shirt on the ground. Joanie had said to smother it, but Cello couldn’t bear to think of the Vine slowly suffocating in the summer heat, rolled up in the bone-dry fabric. He settled a few handfuls of damp earth between each fold, and carried the bundle out of the grove. He hid the soft parcel behind the deflated tire of a decaying Oldsmobile, more fossil than machine now, that Sil had parked out back years ago.
Cello snuck back into the trailer and checked on the baby to make sure he was still asleep before easing himself down onto his own cot, turning his back to the rest of his dreaming family. He wasn’t sure how much time was left before Letta came in to wake them, but he forced his limbs to quiet and his breath to even so that Letta wouldn’t be able to see the way the disgrace gripped his body. His pulse slowed as he thought of Joanie, of her relief. Imagining Joanie at peace brought him the same comfort as a cool washcloth to the back of the neck.
2
“Morning, children!” Letta crashed open the kids’ trailer door. It didn’t lock, and never fully closed, so whenever the wind was up, a constant whistling through the gap between the metal door and the frame serenaded them. Cello had always wondered if the trailer came that way, or if it had been mutilated by Letta’s brusque entrances and exits.
“Breakfast time!” she trumpeted. Letta pulled covers—and kids—off bunks. Cello could still smell the dew on the air. It was earlier than they usually woke up. His throat burned with nerves; could Letta already know what he’d done?
“Come on, come on.” She adjusted her rose sateen robe over a jutting sternum. “Miracle—out!” She banged her ring-coated fingers against the wall beside the little girl’s head. Miracle scooted out from under the blanket so that just a tiny strip of her forehead showed. They all knew she’d be punished for wetting the bed. Instead of inspecting Miracle’s bedding, though, Letta sidled up next to Joanie’s cot. She lay on her side, the baby beside her in the sheets.
“Come here, handsome,” Letta cooed at the baby, slipping Joanie’s hand from the baby’s belly. “Come with Mama Letta.” She bent over, plucked the baby away and swaggered back to the flapping, open door. “Come on, the rest of you,” she called over her shoulder. Sometimes Cello believed Letta was completely rotted away inside, but her tenderness for the most helpless things—for Joanie’s baby, specifically—it was real.
The kids fell out of their beds and wandered after Letta into the humid morning. Cello didn’t say a word, even to Joanie. He just pulled Miracle from her bunk and peeled the damp, stinking sheets from her mattress.
“Get dressed, Miracle,” Joanie said, her voice as harsh as Letta’s.
Miracle pattered to the corner where they kept all of their clothes in two piles: one clean, the other dirty. No one had their own things—they all shared and somehow it worked out. Only Joanie had clothes that were her own, mostly because she was the oldest, and because she had already been married.
When Joanie’s husband died, it was sudden and complicated. She had lived away from the garden for a little while with her new husband, but came back with the baby in her belly once he was gone. Letta had set up the marriage, of course. Joanie never would have picked Josiah Joseph—sixteen-year-old Joanie wouldn’t have picked anyone.
Cello watched her put new sheets on Miracle’s bed, the way her body stretched and moved. He could see the old marks on her back from her time at the Josephs’ between the straps of her camisole. The evidence of that harm eased his guilt a little—his betrayal was a fair price to keep her away from Mother Joseph, to keep her safe.
Cello followed Miracle outside where the others were already eating in the grass, a row of faces spooning cereal into their mouths. The dense constellation of freckles across Emil’s nose and cheeks was indistinguishable from beneath a layer of the garden’s grime.
“Y’all are filthy,” Cello said, shaking his head.
“Cello, why don’t you take the kids for a swim while Joanie and I have some girl talk.” Letta bounced Joanie’s baby in the shade of an old beech tree. “You kids listen to Cello. Don’t want any running off.” Letta didn’t look at the others as she said it—only at him. “Lots to do today.”
“Yes, Letta,” Sabina and Miracle chorused.
Letta carried the baby back into her and Sil’s trailer. When Cello and the others left for the creek, Joanie still hadn’t come out of the kids’ trailer.
* * *
The water that morning was muddy, and Cello guessed it must have rained sometime overnight. Usually he wouldn’t miss a thing like that, the sound of rain pouring over the trailer, pouring over the ground. Cello liked to know everything that happened to the soil, and he was surprised that he hadn’t noticed something as significant as a rainfall. Maybe Joanie’s plans had dulled him. Maybe secretly slicing away the shoots of the Vine had changed something, melted away at his connection to the garden.
“Hey, Cello!” Miracle splashed at him from the shallows of the creek.
“Careful, don’t fall,” he called back. “Try to keep the mud off you.”
The kids were noisy, unfolding into regular children away from Letta’s gaze. Emil chased Sabina through the shallows with a handful of mud, and she squealed away, ducking behind Miracle.
“Are you in trouble, Cello?” Marcela flounced over to where he slouched on the bank. “You look like you’re in trouble.”