“Before morning, Sil,” Letta called, her voice flat and bored.
“I’m just working up to it, alright? Well, turn around, girl!” Sil hollered. “Have a little shame.”
Joanie turned her back to Sil, and closed her eyes, waiting. Sil paced the yard in front of the trailer, his body lit and then hidden each time he walked past the open door. Cello didn’t look at Letta, or even at Joanie. He only watched Sil.
Sil rubbed at his chin, and then ran his hands over his sun-wrecked face.
“Alright,” he muttered, clapping his hands in a single smack of palms. He strode toward the nearest tree—a maple—and chose an impressively gnarled branch.
Cello hated his powerlessness. He hated that all he could do to help Joanie was endure the beating beside her. He wished that he was different and bolder—that he could be useful—instead of slouched in the grass beneath Joanie’s struggle to stay silent.
* * *
“Oh, Sil,” Letta said, shaking her head. “You’re going to have to do better than that.”
“Come on, Letta, I’m wore out,” Sil pleaded.
“What, you want me to do it?” Letta’s tone shifted to its familiar scattershot, flinty rage.
“Of course not. Give me a minute.” Sil lowered the branch and tilted his neck from side to side.
“Hurry up,” Letta said, lighting a new cigarette off the burning one between her lips.
Sil cleared his throat and began again, this time harder. Cello cast a glance at Letta, who was finally smiling a real smile. It would be over soon at least.
Letta’s last satisfied look pried out an unexpected realization. Cello understood that they’d done him a favor. If he and Joanie hadn’t been caught, if they’d been successful and escaped out into the world beyond the garden, Cello knew that Joanie would eventually peel off and away from him. That’s how Joanie was. He wouldn’t see it coming, either. Joanie loved secrecy, silence. If it weren’t for Sil and Letta’s intervention, and even the punishment, Cello would have been alone, and away from everything he understood. He had nothing outside of the predictable world of the garden and its inhabitants. Certainly, he had nothing to give to Joanie.
Cello felt sick as that combination of gratitude, disgust and anger mingled in his body.
“Now,” Letta called from the trailer’s low, steel steps. “I think you’ve done enough. Off to bed with you two. I better not hear any more about this. And keep it to yourselves. I don’t want a soul to know the nonsense you tried tonight.”
Sil, out of breath, dropped the branch and brushed his hands down the sides of his shirt. “Jesus, Letta,” he said, hollering. He held his palms out to her like a surrendering man. “I got blisters now. Hope you’re happy you got your way.”
Sil disappeared into the dark and Letta turned, slamming the door to their trailer shut.
Joanie and Cello were left in the heavy night air, not looking at one another. They walked back toward the trailer where the kids were asleep, their eyes on the grass.
“What would happen if she told Mother Joseph?” Cello asked.
“She won’t,” Joanie said. “She can’t.”
Back in the kids’ trailer, Cello and Joanie had to lie in bed on their stomachs. The stuffy air inside was filled with the night sounds and smells of the others. The kids had slept through everything; they gurgled and snored, and the tang of urine hung thick in the air—Miracle had wet the bed again.
Cello saw Joanie’s open eyes stare out at nothing, definitely not at him, and tried to sleep. The baby cried out, and Joanie went to him. “I’m sorry,” Joanie said, smoothing his little back. “I’m so sorry.” Cello fell asleep to the sound of her low humming; the scent of the Vine and the earth he’d packed around it still clung, like a reproach, to his skin.
4
The next day, Letta behaved as if nothing had happened, though the other kids were unusually quiet. Sil and Cello walked in silence down the hill, and around the perimeter of the plot he and Marcela had started. Sil pulled a robust sip from the can of Crown Light held low by his side. Cello understood that Sil was prone to the same tides of emotion as anyone. He didn’t always blame Sil for his spates of violence. They didn’t seem personal, the way Letta’s did. Sil just aimed to hurt—it was like the violence was still a part of him, just a fist, attached to an arm, attached to a man, attached to a heart. Letta aimed to hurt surgically, specifically—without emotion of her own.
“This looks good, son,” he said, slapping Cello on the back. Cello winced as the force of Sil’s friendly pat collided into what remained raw from the blows from the night before. Not that Sil noticed.
“Couldn’t’ve done better myself. Mow this here, maybe three-quarters of the way up that slope, see?” Sil gestured ahead. “We don’t need this much space on both sides. Shouldn’t need it, if we do things right.”
“Okay.”
“And if you got time tonight, run the rototiller over it. I’m gonna see how the east plot’s getting on. Make sure Marcela and Sabina pick up the scraps. I want those for compost.”
“I’ll be fine on my own,” Cello said, brushing a fly from where it had landed, lapping up the sweat on the side of his throat.
“I know you will, but Letta wants the girls out here today. I’m sure they’ll stay out of your hair. Just bring them back in with you before dark.”
Sil paused, rolling the can of Crown between his hands. “I know it wasn’t your idea, son, but what you and Joanie did put us all in danger. Mother Joseph’d kill every one of us if she knew. Think of the little kids. What’d happen to them? We depend on Amberly Joseph for everything—I’m not saying I like it, but that’s just the truth. If it weren’t for her, we wouldn’t have a damn thing. No farm, no roof over our head—nothing. You know that, don’t you?”
Cello nodded quietly.
Sil slapped a hand against the side of his leg. “Let’s get to work, then. Make sure the girls help you, like I said. It’s what Letta wants.”
* * *
Cello worked evenly—not too slow, not too fast—and thought about what Sil had said and how the conversation had been a kind of apology. Cello knew he’d get nothing like that from Letta. He understood that Letta’s punishment hadn’t been meted out yet, and the wait made him itch.
As the afternoon slipped into evening, the air cooled. Cello hitched the tiller to the little tractor and noticed Marcela and Sabina under a low stand of pines. Their figures were dark shadows half-swallowed by the trees’ deep green cover, straightening the piles of brush they’d moved out of the way. “Marcela, Sabina! Come help!” he called, surveying the rest of the broken branches and clumps of debris across the plot that needed to be cleared before tilling.