Tending to Grace Read online

  I am a stone, sinking. “C-c-c-c-c ...”

  He looks down, away. He turns to Agatha. “You change your mind on that woodlot, you give me a call now, you hear?” He hurries to his truck and climbs in, starts it, and drives off.

  Agatha looks at me a long time. She puts her arm on my shoulders and then we walk to the truck and ride home in silence. I want to slip into the quiet and never talk again.

  34

  “You c-c-c-could have helped me,” I say later, after we push the chairs off the truck and shove them against the barn, where they sit in the shade of the maple tree. Agatha flips a cucumber basket upside down and sprawls in one of the chairs and puts her feet up. She raises an eyebrow. “How?”

  “You c-could have said my name. S-s-something.”

  “Seems like no one should be doin’ that but you.”

  I turn away and storm into the house.

  35

  Agatha sleeps under a heap of sheets and blankets, with her feet sticking out the bottom of her bed. The whole thing drives me crazy and one day I tackle her room. I strip the bed and wash the sheets and blankets and hang them on the line. I wash her overalls and T-shirts that are strewn over chairs and across the bedposts and are stuffed behind the door. The dust chokes me as I yank things out from under her bed. It’s an archaeological dig: I pull out a stuffed owl with one eye missing, yellowed newspapers from 1961, a purple hat with a long sweeping feather, and a small wooden box with a hinged cover.

  I brush off her bed with my hand and sit down and open the cover of the box and find the tiniest sweater I’ve ever seen, a pair of booties, mittens the size of strawberries, and a hat that could fit an orange. A thin thread of lace edges the sweater and when I rub it against my cheek, the yarn feels as soft as the dandelion fluff in the yard.

  “What are you doing?” Agatha’s voice claws at me; her eyes are nickels on fire. In one leap she hovers over me, pulling the sweater out of my hand. “I ain’t never told you to clean in here. Now get out.”

  I run out to a tree in the backyard where the branches start low enough to climb. From up high, I can look across the backyard to the fields. A bird struggles to put branches into a tiny hole in the bird-house by the garden. The branches stretch longer than the bird, but she keeps trying to push the sticks through the hole, first one way, then the other, trying to make a home in a place that doesn’t fit.

  36

  Not one car passes by Agatha’s house in half a morning. My mother must have known what she was doing, leaving me at a house three miles from the center of town, a place with no train tracks, no buses, no taxis, and no easy way out. I look up at the mountain in the distance.

  A picture of fried eggs and sausages covers the front of my mother’s next postcard. A bright neon light spells out the words Lou’s Diner.

  Her handwriting is quick and sloping. I can tell she has other things to do.

  37

  “Can I help you with something?”

  The voice behind the desk at the library fills me like warm milk. I shake my head, smile, and walk to a back wall. I want fiction, a book to get lost in, a book where the mother comes back for the daughter.

  “There’s a shelf over there you might like to look at for school.” Warm Milk smiles.

  I walk over and find several dozen books on the summer reading list at the high school. There’s a separate stack of honors books. To Kill a Mockingbird sits on the tenth-grade shelf and I pull it down and walk over to a sofa upholstered in a material covered with books.

  “Excuse me?” Warm Milk taps at my shoulder. “We’re closing now. Would you like to take that with you?”

  I jump a little, surprised that a dusky sky now hangs outside the window.

  “It’s after eight. You can take that home, you know,” she says, smiling again.

  I don’t have a library card. To get one, I’d have to tell her my name.

  I shake my head and swallow my voice and leave the book on the table. I am a flower folding into myself, my petals wrapped up tight.

  38

  A truck sputters up behind me.

  “Get in,” says my aunt.

  We’re still not talking to each other, but I am glad she came looking for me before it got too dark, so I grab on to the strap that hangs from the ceiling and climb inside as we begin bouncing along the road that the boyfriend drove me in on. We bounce over pot-holes and a tree limb that has fallen across the road. We bounce past the stone soldiers on the town common and past the general store, now empty. We do it all without talking.

  Agatha slows at the driveway, then turns up, scraping the sides of the truck on some bushes before bouncing to a stop. She pulls a sugar cube from her pocket and tosses it into her mouth.

  “I seen a moth this mornin’, Cornelia, brown and ragged as a dead leaf on the ground,” she says, crunching on the sugar cube.

  La-dee-da-dee-da, I think as I look straight ahead and she turns the key. The truck backfires, not wanting to turn off.

  “Most of the time it kept its wings closed tight as a young head of cabbage. But now and again, it’d fan them wings open and it’d show me what it kept hidden inside. It was a stained-glass window in there, all reds and oranges and yellows. What a sight, beautiful as the sun coming up. But most of the time it kept them wings shut up tight. Looked like a walkin’ paper bag.”

  I wonder what’s coming next.

  Agatha looks up at the stars that are poking through the sky. “You’re all mad and crusty on the outside, Cornelia.”

  I climb out of the truck, slamming the door, then storm along the walk and into the house. “Y-y-you don’t know anything about anything,” I yell at the moccasins I hear padding behind me.

  I hurry into my bedroom and stuff my head under my pillow and think about how much I really want that library book.

  39

  Whamwhamwhamwham.

  I wake pretty fast when someone kicks at the front door. Even without coffee, I’m unfolding myself from the crescent shape I’ve crunched into all night on the little bed. Where’s Agatha?

  Out the window I see a young girl standing on the front step, looking up at me through bangs that hang in long sticky strings. She’s wearing thick work boots several sizes too big, the long laces wrapped round and round at the top near her shins. She holds a box covered with a faded towel.

  “The Crow Lady, is she here?” the girl asks when I open the door. She looks behind her, then back at me.

  I don’t know who she means. “Who?”

  “The lady that lives here. Is she here?”

  You mean Agatha? I’ve been left with a woman people call the Crow Lady?

  “My mother made this for her.” The girl hands the box to me. She looks behind her again. I take the box and look under the towel, where two loaves of homemade bread lie nested close.

  “My ma is thankin’ the Crow Lady for the potatoes.” The girl hands me a letter. “You’re not scared of her or nothing?”

  I’m not sure what to say to that, so I just stare at the bread. The Crow Lady?

  “Lots of kids hold their breath when they walk past here. They say she’s loony.” The girl pushes her bangs away from her face. “But I don’t think so. She brings us stuff.”

  The girl looks out at the road. “I been here too long. My pa will whip me real bad if he knows I’m here. My ma has to sneak sometimes.” She turns to go. “Don’t tell nobody it was me that brought it. You won’t, will you?”

  “I d-d-d-d-don’t even kn-kn-kn-know who you are.”

  She looks at me for several seconds. “Don’t say nothing. My pa’s gonna beat my tail if you tell.”

  She turns and runs down the steps and off toward the road.

  40

  I leave the bread on the table for Agatha.

  “Where’d this come from?” she asks a few hours later as she lugs a bag of groceries into the room and sets it on the table. She’s wearing the hat.

  “A l-l-l-little girl.”

&n
bsp; I look through the grocery bag. There’s flour and sugar cubes and milk and oatmeal, no coffee.

  I hand her the letter. She brushes it away.

  “Read it for me,” she says, walking over to the counter for a knife. “I need glasses.”

  I shake my head.

  “You read all the damn time,” Agatha says, her voice sharp. “You read too much, if you ask me. Now I need a hand.”

  The hell I will. Reading to myself isn’t the same as reading out loud. She knows that much by now.

  She slices a two-inch chunk off the loaf, slathers it with molasses, and takes a bite. “I think it’s time I get something out of you readin’ so damn much. I can’t pay for no glasses right now.”

  The knot in my throat tightens. I never know which feels worse, the anticipation of reading aloud or the shame when I do. I glare at Agatha.

  She cuts another slice and pops it into her mouth. I look up at the mountain. If I leave now, how will my mother find me? I grab the note, pick it up. “ ‘Th-th-th-th ...’ ” I stop, gulp some air. “ ‘Thank you for the p-p-p-potatoes. I don’t kn-kn-know how we would have gotten through the w-w-w-winter. L-l-l-lydia.’ ” I throw the note on the table.

  “Lydia always did make the best bread.” Agatha leaves the loaves on the counter and walks across the kitchen and out the back door.

  41

  “Where’s my fiddleheads?” Agatha yells at me one morning. “All my jars down in the cellar. They ain’t there!”

  I roll over in bed, tuck my head under the pillow to block her out. “Who told you to clean down there? Cornelia, get up!”

  I sit up. “Those d-d-d-disgusting old jars? I threw them in the barrel in the barn.”

  Her eyes spark. “You threw them away? Do you know how much work it is to get enough fiddleheads? You can only get them for a couple of weeks in the spring and you have to go down the bank by the brook and it takes hours and hours and hours to get a few jars. Who told you to throw them away?”

  She storms out of my room. With my window open, I hear her swearing at me as she storms out to the barn.

  That afternoon, a dozen jars of fiddleheads fill the cupboard over the stove.

  “You didn’t break ’em all” is about the only thing she says to me for the next few days.

  42

  I’ve had enough. I stuff my books and my socks and my mother’s postcards into my suitcase and pack as many clothes as I can fit.

  Agatha is checking on her woodlot across the road, making sure Moss isn’t cutting down there. I open the screen door and a screw near the top pops loose and the door slumps lopsided from its bottom hinge. I shove it back into place and use the front door.

  I look back at the mountain, considering it, but I’m not sure if I could make it all the way up and over, and I’m not sure that it would get me to Vegas, anyway, so I push that dream out of my head and walk to the road.

  43

  Cornfields stretch out as far as I can see. Red-winged blackbirds scold me as I pass a grassy brook, and a bobolink flies to the telephone wire that strings from pole to pole to my right. Agatha has taught me a lot about birds, I think as I watch the bobolink watch me in his tuxedo of black and white.

  I get about five miles out of town when I can’t carry the suitcase anymore and a blister splits the skin on my third toe. I step into a little ditch, climb on a stone wall, pull off my sneaker, and wonder what I’m going to do.

  After a while, I snap open my suitcase and take out my mother’s postcard, the one with Lou’s Diner on the front. I don’t know much about Vegas except that it is someplace in Nevada and it’s hot and it’s dry and it’s about as far away from New England as you can get. I wonder if there are any bluebirds or barn swallows or barred owls that call “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?” in the middle of the night the way they do at Agatha’s. There probably aren’t any stone walls there, I think, settling down on the one I’m sitting on.

  But I want my mother. She made a mistake bringing me here; that’s as plain as Wonder Bread. I had planned on walking until I got to a bus station. Where I come from, there’s a bus at every corner, but I have gone miles now and there’s nothing but this road.

  I am chomping on an apple when I hear the low-pitched grinding of Bertha’s engine. Agatha has turned her headlights on, even though it’s early, and the light on the right tilts toward the sun. She sees me just as I am finishing my apple. Bertha backfires, refusing to turn off. Agatha climbs out of the truck, slamming the door behind her, then walks over to where I’m sitting, pulling a sugar cube from her pocket and popping it into her mouth. She is so blasted irritating, I think, watching her.

  “What you doing down there, Cornelia? That ditch is filled with all kinds of stuff you don’t like, I bet.”

  I rub my toe.

  She walks over to the edge of my suitcase. “See this little hummock here?” She bends down and inspects a clump of weedy grass. “Now, if this was more of a brook, not just standing water full of mosquitoes, we might have some fiddleheads growing here. They do like gravel like this, yes, they do.”

  I roll my eyes.

  Agatha sits down on a large rock. Bertha smells as if Agatha ran over a load of manure a while back. I swat a mosquito off my arm.

  “Cornelia, you ain’t never goin’ to find your mother this way.”

  I shrug, look bored.

  “Does she tell people who you are when you don’t do it yourself?”

  I look the other way.

  “She does or she doesn’t, it don’t matter. I’m not goin’ to do it.”

  I ignore her, put my sneaker back on. My toe hurts something awful. She takes the last of the apple out of my hand and chomps on it. “You don’t do your own talkin’, you’re going to be sorry someday.”

  “D-d-d-don’t worry about me,” I say.

  She stands and throws the core into the corn. “You hide who you are, you live half a life. You speak up, then you can be who you was meant to be.”

  My eyes become two fat blazing suns. I jump up and face her, hobbling a bit. Tall as she is, I reach her chin. “And j-j-just who the hell is that?”

  She looks straight back at me. “That’s why you got two feet, Cornelia: to put one in front of the other to find out.”

  “That’s wh-what I’m doing, see?” I pick up my suitcase and limp away from her.

  “But you’re going the wrong way.”

  I turn around. “How do you know the right way?” I yell at her. “You d-d-don’t know jack shit about anything, far as I can tell.”

  She looks away for an instant, then straight back at me. “I know it’s easy to get all mixed up when you try and do it alone.”

  44

  Later that night I come out to the kitchen, looking for a new Band-Aid for my toe. Agatha is sitting at the table, holding the tiny sweater.

  “You think I don’t know what it feels like to be alone, Cornelia?” She doesn’t look up. Her voice is low, hard. “Felt every winter blow right through this old house for forty years, all alone ever since my baby died.

  “I know plenty about standin’ alone, Cornelia. I know about havin’ a husband and I know about havin’ that husband run off before our baby cut her teeth because he couldn’t take havin’ a baby that wasn’t right in the head. I know about doctors who told me a woman all by herself couldn’t take care of a baby as sick as that and I know about letting them put her in one of those hospitals. She died there.”

  She pushes the sweater in front of me. I look at the soft woolen stitches that hook together in tiny, orderly twists and I think that I may not know much about losing a husband or about having a baby die, but I know a lot about being dumped off by your mother.

  “In a hospital? You mean for good? You left her there?”

  She looks at me, furious, then picks up the sweater and storms into her bedroom and slams the door.

  45

  A few days later, I hear the whacks of Agatha’s ax in the woods not far from my b
edroom window. Then I watch her drag a young tree to a spot near the barn and chop off the branches and peel off the bark. This takes until nearly lunchtime. She leans the trunk of the tree against the barn. Without its leaves and branches, it is a long thin pole.

  The next afternoon, Agatha pulls two more trees from the woods and chops off their branches and strips their bark. The outhouse shakes a bit when I close the door lately and I wonder if Agatha plans on using them to prop up old Esther, but when she finishes, she drags the poles to the barn, right past our own Leaning Tower of Pisa.

  I sigh and put the outhouse on my list of things to tend to and sink my hands into the dishwater and finish the breakfast dishes.

  I don’t ask her what she has been up to when she comes in for supper, but I notice that she has pulled another tree from the woods and left it stripped of its bark in front of the barn. Like a fly intent on a piece of watermelon, I can’t stop thinking about it.

  46

  A jeep drives up with lights flashing and stops at the mailbox as I walk across the yard. A man reaches out and pushes a couple of letters into the folds of Agatha’s smashed metal mailbox. When he sees me, he motions for me to come over.

  “How come the old lady never fixes this mailbox?” He chomps down on his cigar and hunts through the box on the seat beside him.

  He points to the house. “I’ve seen you around here a few times. You a relative of hers?”

  I nod.

  “Well,” he continues, “there’s rules about how to keep your mailbox, you know. Tell her.”

  He hands me an armload of mail. “Everything’s gonna get all wet if she doesn’t do something about this.” He shakes his head, puts the jeep into gear, and drives off.

  When I walk into the kitchen, Agatha is sorting through dried lentils, pulling out bits of stone.