Amber thought I was smart? I wasn’t sure anyone had ever called me that before. I remembered the way Papa had praised me to Zeke when I first came up into the yard and saw them all standing there, watching me. The memory made my stomach twist up. But Amber saying I was smart felt different. She thought I could do this. She believed that I could strike out into the woods on my own, walk for four or five days, and find my mama. For some reason, thinking about that made my eyes tear up. I must have sniffled a little, because Amber’s head snapped up and her rambling talk stopped in the middle of a thought.
“Well, shit,” she said.
“Amber!” I had heard the men cuss a little here and there, when they broke something or just thought no one was around to hear. But never my grandma or my aunts! But Amber just ignored my shock.
“Here I am rushin’ around and runnin’ my mouth, not giving a thought in the world to how you are taking all this. Shit, shit, shit.” My eyes must have been huge by then because she took one look at my face and busted out laughing.
“You should see yourself! What, ain’t you never heard a woman cuss before? Lord, child, they have kept you in a little glass box all your life, haven’t they? Well, all the better, then. It’s time for you to get out there in the world a little bit. See some things! Lord knows one of us should. I wish I knew half the things you know how to do. I’da been long gone from here before you was old enough to remember you met me. My mama didn’t know too much herself, and my daddy…” She made a soft grunting sound, almost like the wind had been knocked out of her. But then she waved her hand, like she was brushing something aside. “Well, my daddy wasn’t shit. And when David married Rachel, it was just me and him left. He took care of me the best he knew how. He brought me here, and I guess I can’t complain too much. Things sure could have been a whole lot worse for me. But not you. Ami girl, you’re about to have you a little adventure!”
Five
Before I knew it, I had my bedroll and Amber’s pack strapped to my back. Strangest of all, I was wearing pants! Amber gave them to me and told me to put them on, and she wouldn’t listen to any arguments. They were made of some kind of thin material that she said would keep me cool without leaving too much skin out for the bugs and would dry real quick if it got wet. She said she’d packed me an extra pair plus some shorts, but I couldn’t wear those after sundown if I didn’t want the mosquitoes to eat me alive. Same went for sleeves on the shirts she’d packed. It felt strange wearing those pants after a lifetime of nothing but loose dresses, and I wasn’t sure I liked the feeling of having my legs all closed up in material. And the shoes! It seemed crazy to be walking around in the heat of June with those springy, spongy shoes tied onto my feet.
After a rushed goodbye, Amber all but shoved me out the door and told me to be careful. She said the others had wanted to be there to see me off, Rachel and Billie and David and Jacob, but they couldn’t risk rousing Papa’s suspicion. That made sense, but I still wished they could’ve been there to tell me goodbye. That first moment after Amber shut the door behind me, I think that was the loneliest I’ve ever felt in my life. And for a motherless girl, that is saying something.
I felt sure that everyone was asleep, but I avoided the hi-way just the same. All it would take was for Papa or Ruth or that man, as I still thought of him, to look out the window and see me in the bright moonlight, and my little adventure would be over before it ever got started. I sprinted across the wide, shining road and down the slope into the woods. From there I followed alongside it without too much trouble. When the sun came up, I’d have to move deeper into the woods.
It wasn’t that long ago, my grandma Ruth used to tell me, that cars came down that hi-way all day and most of the night, heading down to the Gulf from places like Mississippi and Tennessee. We had an old truck that could go a little ways on a sun charge, and I had seen Tennessee and Mississippi as shapes on a map and been made to learn the spellings of their names, but those places seemed so far away to me, not just in place but in time, that I could never really imagine them. I would look at the old junk heaps of cars and trucks that rusted on the handful of abandoned farms around us and try to picture it in my mind, a whole river of them moving down that hi-way, full of people going somewhere. Their destination, the Gulf, was even harder to imagine than Tennessee or Mississippi, since both Ruth and Papa told me those places weren’t really too much different from Alabama, where we were. I knew they had cities, just like Alabama once did, but they also had the country, which was where the compound was and always had been, according to them. But the Gulf was told to me as a place of wide, sparkling blue-and-green water as far as the eye could see, bordered by sand that was white like sugar, which I had both seen and tasted, thanks to Great-Great-Grandpa Jedidiah. Having no real way to imagine it, I would confuse things in my mind, thinking of that soft white sand as a taste of sweetness on my tongue, bordered by endless salty water.
I had seen a picture of the ocean, which the Gulf was a special part of, in those old 1992 encyclopedias Ruth used to teach me out of when I was little, but she said pictures didn’t do it justice. I had also seen pictures of children in those same books, some even with light brown or almost black skin, wearing every kind of thing you can imagine, alone and in groups and with their parents. There were little babies in those pictures, held so sweetly by their mamas or tied to their backs in bright strips of colored cloth. But they were still the hardest thing for me to picture when I tried to imagine that stream of cars passing in front of Heavenly Shepherd Trailer Sales, which is the name on the sign that still stands, somehow, in front of the compound. I mean the children. Families with little boys and girls, yellow-haired or dark-headed or reddish like me, smiling out from back seats on their way to swim in all that big water. I had never seen a real, actual, flesh-and-blood child, and like the Gulf or China, I found them hard to imagine. Until I ran, I was always the smallest person in my world, and what I knew about the outside of myself was no more than could fit in the palm of my hand.
It was late when I set out, and I should have been tired, but I was too wound up. I thought back to that afternoon, when I’d walked into the yard after my foraging trip. Could that have really been that same day? It felt so long ago, like years had passed since I’d been that silly girl swinging a bucket of berries and singing while I walked. I hadn’t been worried about a thing in the world. The last thing I ever expected was to find a stranger waiting to give me worries aplenty. For the first time, I thought to wonder where he’d come from. How had Papa and Ruth planned the whole thing? I had definitely never seen the man on the compound before that day, and no one really left for more than a day or two of hunting, fishing, or hauling. I guess it could have been then. I never really gave much thought to the comings and goings of Papa or my uncles. The women mostly stayed on the place, cooking and cleaning, sewing and growing the garden, tending to the chickens, churning butter. The men handled the cattle and the big peanut field, hunted deer and rabbits. A couple of times a year, they’d make a longer trip to the river, about a day’s walk from the road, to fish and go duck hunting.
Maybe it had been on one of those trips that Papa had met Ezekiel Johnson. It made sense, I guessed. A man with no home, or not much of one, might drift along the riverbanks living off the land. I felt a little surprised as I realized how good that sounded to me. I started to imagine myself in a little cabin some fisherman had left behind, close enough to hear the sound of the water through my windows when I lay down to sleep at night. I could fry up a fish fresh-caught from the river for my breakfast. I could set snares and traps in the woods, forage for wild carrots and poke and strawberries. It was easy enough to find peach trees and even plums in summer. It could be my own Banks of Plum Creek.