The Girl from Felony Bay

by J. E. Thompson

  “You all right, child?” Mrs. Middleton asked.

  I nodded, even though I really wasn’t sure.

  “That boy like to have choked the life outta you.”

  “Y’all tried to kill me,” Jimmy whined. “I’m gonna tell my dad, and he’s gonna arrest y’all. Then you’ll be sorry.”

  “Tell him whatever you want,” Mrs. Middleton said. “I tell him the truth.”

  “You hurt my head. You need to drive me home.”

  Mrs. Middleton coughed out a bitter laugh. “Y’all got off the bus at the wrong stop. You get your own self home.”

  I looked at Jimmy. His head wasn’t bleeding, but he probably had a big goose egg. It served him right. “We’re not done,” I managed to say, even though my throat felt like I’d been gargling with sandpaper.

  Mrs. Middleton let out another laugh, this one warm and full from deep in her belly. “Girl, you a spitfire.”

  Jimmy turned his eyes to me, and I could see the storm clouds gathered there. “Next time I’ll finish this,” he said.

  “Next time you won’t even get to lay a hand on me,” I said.

  Two

  Dinner that night with Uncle Charlie and Ruth started out like most nights. Ruth was in the kitchen either thawing dinner or opening a can of dinner and getting ready to heat it up in the microwave. Along with the premade stuff, there was a bag of chopped lettuce and a bottle of dressing. That was basically how we ate every night, unless we had leftovers.

  Uncle Charlie was sitting on the porch drinking a big glass of bourbon. He drank two of them out there every night unless it was too hot, too cold, or too rainy, in which case he would drink his bourbon in front of the TV in the living room. Sometimes the bourbon made him goofy; those were his good nights. Other nights it just made him mean. It made him double mean on the days when he’d been playing cards in town and had lost money.

  Uncle Charlie was Daddy’s brother, but he wasn’t anything like Daddy. Daddy was smart and funny and kind and hardworking, and Uncle Charlie was, well . . . the opposite. Daddy always said you didn’t get to choose your family, and Uncle Charlie sure proved it. Choosing him for a brother would be like asking for a broken arm for Christmas, maybe worse. Ruth was Uncle Charlie’s wife. She was technically my aunt, but she didn’t seem like an aunt. So I just called her Ruth.

  As a rule I tried to avoid Uncle Charlie when he was drinking or getting ready to start drinking. That meant I pretty much avoided him all the time. I stayed in my room reading or doing homework until it was time to do chores, and then I snuck downstairs to the kitchen, did them as fast as I could, and snuck back upstairs. Most nights Uncle Charlie just sucked on his bourbon and didn’t think about me, but that wasn’t the case on this night.

  “Hey, Squib,” he shouted from the porch. Squib was a nickname he had given me. I had looked it up in the dictionary and knew that a squib was either a sarcastic saying or a little firecracker that burned with a hissing noise and then made a small pop. I was pretty sure Uncle Charlie had no idea what the word actually meant, but from the way he said it, his own meaning wasn’t anything very nice. He knew I didn’t like the name, and that made him use it even more.

  “Squib,” he shouted a second later. “I’m talking to you. Get out here.”

  I tried to read his tone to figure out how bad his mood was. I just knew if he was in a good mood, there was no way he’d be calling me outside, and if he was in a really bad mood there was no way I wanted him to come up to my room and corner me where there was no escape. I closed my book and hurried downstairs and out onto the porch, where I was careful to keep some distance. Sometimes when he’d been drinking Uncle Charlie liked to hit.

  “What?” I asked.

  He sipped on his drink and squinted at me with the same face he’d use if he’d just discovered the meat in his lunch sandwich had gone bad. Uncle Charlie is about six feet two, nearly as tall as Daddy, but no longer thin. He’s not exactly fat, either, at least not yet. He reminds me of a candle that’s been sitting in the sun too long and is starting to bulge in the wrong places. Also, he has the beginning of three chins, red broken veins on his cheeks, and wispy hair that can’t seem to make a decision whether to lie down or stand up. Kind of like Uncle Charlie, now that I think about it.

  “Deputy Simmons called. Told me you sucker punched his son. Told me you and some other kids ganged up on the boy.”

  I laughed. “That’s a lie.”

  Uncle Charlie brought his hand down hard on the arm of the chair. “Bubba Simmons don’t lie. Not to his friends.”

  “His son, Jimmy, lies like a rug.”

  “You sayin’ you didn’t punch his kid?”

  “I punched him, but I didn’t sucker punch him. We were face-to-face. He went for me first.”

  “Young ladies aren’t supposed to hit boys.”

  “Boys aren’t supposed to try and choke young ladies.”

  I knew I should let it go, but I couldn’t. Uncle Charlie’s cheeks had already gotten redder. He hated what he called “guff,” which is what other people call “logic.” He got angriest of all when he was dead wrong and I called him on it, or when he didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Like now.

  He took a slug of bourbon, then pointed a finger at me. “Stop sassin’ me, girl. Y’all keep away from Bubba’s son, and if you see him y’all apologize. You’re just lucky Bubba’s not pressing charges.”

  “Pressing charges? Against who? Me, a girl? Skoogie Middleton, a skinny little fifth grader? Skoogie’s grandmother, who can barely walk?” I shook my head. “Jimmy Simmons was trying to choke me to death, and Mrs. Middleton stopped him. I hope Bubba does press charges.”

  “That’s Deputy Simmons to you, Squib.”

  “Yeah, well, the judge’ll have a good laugh before he throws Deputy Simmons and his stupid son in jail.”

  I knew even as I said the last part that I’d pushed it too far. Uncle Charlie’s face was now the color of a swollen zit. He came out of his chair, but I was ready. I jumped off the porch steps and raced out into the yard. Uncle Charlie came to the edge of the steps, stopped, and looked down. We both knew he was way too slow to catch me. His face was muddled with evening heat and confusion, and his second bourbon was kicking in right on schedule, making him forget about what it was that had made him angry in the first place but not making him a bit uncertain about the fact that he was angry.

  He pointed his finger at me. “One’a these days, Squib, y’all’re gonna be too slow.”

  The problem was, I knew he was probably right, but it wasn’t going to stop me from putting him in his place. Daddy and Uncle Charlie’s father had left them both what Daddy said was “a fair pile of money.” In Daddy’s language, a fair pile meant we weren’t rich, but we were a long way from being poor. That money had been passed down generation to generation from when my family mined phosphate in the late 1800s. Daddy had needed to spend a big part of his pile on doctor bills when my mother got cancer. I don’t really remember it, because it happened when I was three, but I know that Daddy did everything he could to save her. In the end, Mom died, and a lot of the money was gone.

  Where Uncle Charlie was concerned, it was no secret around Charleston, South Carolina, that he had a powerful love of gambling and an equally powerful dislike of work. Over the years, Uncle Charlie had dribbled his inheritance into the hands of luckier gamblers.

  When he hadn’t been gambling, Uncle Charlie had fancied himself a treasure hunter and bought some old pirate maps that Daddy said were probably fakes. Uncle Charlie had funded some “expeditions” to try and find his buried gold in the Bahamas and South America. He had always believed that his luck would eventually turn and he would either start winning at cards or dice or find some long-lost gold hoard. Like Daddy always said, luck is fickle. But there’s unlucky and there’s just plain dumb, and Uncle Charlie was more often in the second category.

  In the end, my grandfather had needed to make a choice about whether to
split Reward between his two sons or keep it whole. Figuring Uncle Charlie couldn’t even afford the taxes and that he would just lose his half in a poker game anyway, he’d given it all to Daddy. Right away Daddy had fixed up a tenant house real nice and offered it to Uncle Charlie and Ruth to live in rent-free. Uncle Charlie was a lousy real-estate salesman when he actually worked, which wasn’t very often, so there was no way they could have kept a roof over their heads any other way. But it didn’t matter. Uncle Charlie and Ruth had never forgiven Daddy for inheriting Reward.

  This past year, when Reward had been put up for sale to settle Daddy’s debts, Uncle Charlie had been the listing real estate agent and had insisted that he had a twenty-five-year rent-free agreement with my father that would remain in effect no matter who bought the property. The new owner apparently hadn’t cared, because Uncle Charlie and Ruth were still living in the tenant house.

  In order to keep my distance from Uncle Charlie, I walked around the outside of the house and went into the kitchen through the back door. I set the table for dinner and fed Rufus, our black Lab. For the past nine months, I’d been taking Rufus for all his walks and making sure he got fed, and as a result he’d come to like me about twice as well as Uncle Charlie and Ruth.

  By the time I finished, Ruth had spooned the canned stuff she had heated up into some bowls and put them on the table. The food was brown and smelled like it could have been stew. Uncle Charlie came in off the porch, shaking the ice in his empty bourbon glass and still giving me a mean squint.

  Dinner with Uncle Charlie and Ruth never involved a whole lot of talking. It involved mostly silence and chewing, with maybe one or both of them occasionally looking up from the business of eating to ask me whether I’d done this chore or that chore or to criticize something I had or hadn’t done. Unlike the dinners Daddy and I used to have, the ones with Uncle Charlie and Ruth didn’t include talk about how their days had gone or what they had done or interesting questions. They just ate, and when they were finished, dinner was over.

  So imagine my surprise when, on this particular night, Ruth went to the cupboard and brought out two wineglasses, took a jug of white wine out of the refrigerator, and poured some for herself and Uncle Charlie. When she did, the cloud over Uncle Charlie’s head seemed to go away. They both looked at each other and smiled and raised their glasses. Ruth said, “Here’s to better times ahead.”

  Uncle Charlie gave her a sly grin and a wink. “’Bout darn time,” he said. Then he swallowed half his wine in one big gulp.

  I looked back and forth between them and tried to pick up a clue. What did Ruth mean about better times ahead? Had Uncle Charlie gotten a real job? I sure didn’t think that was likely. I knew I should keep my mouth shut because neither one of them would tell me anything if I asked, but I couldn’t help it. “What’s going on?” I blurted.

  Uncle Charlie gave me a sideways glance. I could see something flash in his eyes almost like slyness. He gave me a smug little grin. “Never you mind, Squib. Y’all’ll find out when it’s time.”

  I felt Ruth’s eyes on me, and when I turned to look at her, she sat up suddenly.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, lifting off the chair a little and reaching into the back pocket of her blue jeans. “Almost forgot.” She handed me an envelope that was badly wrinkled from being sat on.

  I looked at the envelope and saw that it was from Miss Walker’s School for Girls, where I had gone before Daddy’s accident. After everything that had happened, there hadn’t been any money for tuition, so this past school year I’d had to attend the public school.

  Truth be told, I didn’t really mind going to a new school where I didn’t know anyone, because I thought it was what I deserved. Just before Daddy’s accident, I’d had one of my dreams. One that told me something really bad was about to happen. It was the second time in my life that I’d had one. The first had come before my mother died, but I had been very young, and there was nothing I could have done even if I had understood what the dream meant. However, it was different with Daddy’s dream. I should have warned him, and it was my fault that I hadn’t.

  Actually I did try once, but he just smiled and patted my head and said he was touched that I worried about him. It was obvious that I hadn’t tried hard enough. I should have yelled and screamed, convinced him that something bad was going to happen. Maybe that way I could have kept him off that ladder.

  Both of those dreams stuck hard in my memory because they were scary and horrible and seemed to last all night long. Both times when I finally woke up, my sheets were drenched with sweat, and I was totally exhausted. Also, while I usually never remember the colors in my dreams, both of these had been in Technicolor. The dream about my mother had been deep burgundy, the color of a funeral. The dream had come just days before the doctors told her that she had cancer. The dream about my father had been deep purple, but the sense of the dream had been exactly the same as my mother’s, full of impending doom and sadness.

  The envelope from Miss Walker’s sent a nervous buzz through my stomach. Why were they writing to me? I had gone to Miss Walker’s ever since we moved to Charleston, from my last year of preschool through fifth grade, and I had loved it as much as a kid can love school. Miss Walker’s was a wonderful place, and I missed my old friends and teachers and coaches and pretty much everything else.

  I sensed Uncle Charlie and Ruth watching me. Part of me wanted to take my envelope up to my room and open it in private, but the other part didn’t want to wait.

  “You gonna open it?” Uncle Charlie asked. “Maybe they changed your grades from your last year there to Fs,” he added with a smirk.

  “Funny.” I looked up at him. “Why would they do that? So my report card could match yours?”

  He snapped his fingers and nodded toward the envelope. “Open it, Squib.”

  I turned the envelope over. Right away I saw that the glue on the flap was barely holding, coming open the moment I started to put my finger under it. I felt a rush of anger at the realization that Ruth had steamed the letter open, read it, and tried to reseal it. Anger turned my cheeks bright red and made my hands tremble. Uncle Charlie and Ruth already knew what the letter said, but of course they would deny it if I accused them.

  I removed a sheet of Miss Walker’s stationery and unfolded it. In one corner I could see a dried smudge that looked like some of the canned stew we had eaten for dinner. I ignored it and read the letter and felt a bright shot of excitement that made me forget everything else.

  “Miss Walker’s is offering me a scholarship,” I said, unable to keep the excitement from my voice as I looked up at Uncle Charlie and Ruth. “A hundred percent. You don’t have to pay for anything.”

  Uncle Charlie and Ruth were both gazing back at me with flat expressions. There was no surprise, no joy, not even a sense of relief that I would be farther away from them for most of the day. Just deadpan. I felt the bright star that had just seemed to explode inside my heart shrink back to a cold, dry husk.

  “It says it’s a merit scholarship,” I said, trying again, my voice soft. I had a desperate hope that they simply had not understood the first time, but a voice inside told me I was wrong. Ruth had opened the letter. They already knew.

  Uncle Charlie raised his eyebrows. “It’s charity.”

  “Huh?”

  “You heard me. It’s charity.”

  “No,” I said, hearing my volume rise. I couldn’t believe I had heard him correctly. “It’s a scholarship.”

  “Like Shakespeare says, ‘A pig by any other name is still a pig.’ It’s charity. Our family doesn’t take charity.”

  “Look in the dictionary,” I said. I wasn’t even going to point out that the Shakespeare quote was about a rose. “A scholarship is not charity.”

  “It is if I say it is.”

  “And our family doesn’t take charity,” I said. I could hear the mockery in my tone, but I couldn’t stop. I knew the real reason they didn’t want me to go to Miss Walke
r’s was that the school didn’t have a bus, and getting me there would mean one of them would have to drive me into Charleston every day. “I suppose your idea of charity doesn’t apply to the free rent you got from Daddy all those years.”

  “You watch your mouth, girl.” Uncle Charlie was leaning across the table toward me, his eyes flat and dangerous. “There’s no such thing as charity in a family. Families do for family. It’s just how things are.”

  “Like you do for Daddy,” I said, knowing that neither one of them had visited him even once in the hospital.

  “Your daddy is a thief,” Ruth spoke up. “He’s shamed us.”

  “Besides that, he’s a vegetable,” Uncle Charlie added. “It’s no more good talking to him than it is talking to a corn plant.”

  I felt the tears begin to burn in my eyes. Not wanting to give them the satisfaction of seeing me cry, I shoved my chair away from the table and ran up to my room.

  Three

  The next morning I woke early, got dressed, took my book off the nightstand, then snuck downstairs as quietly as possible. I fixed a quick bowl of cereal, and when Rufus saw me eat, he rapped his hard tail on the kitchen floor, so I hurried to get his breakfast before his racket woke anyone else. We both ate fast, even though I ate slower because nobody can eat as fast as a hungry Lab. I grabbed a couple carrots from the fridge, and we both slipped out of the house before we could bump into Uncle Charlie or Ruth.

  It was a typical South Carolina summer morning on Leadenwah Island. A crystal-clear blue sky overhead, the air as heavy and damp as the inside of a shower stall, full of early warmth and the scent of flowers and damp earth and the promise of more heat to come. Overhead two herons were flying toward the river to begin stalking the shallows for fish. Couldn’t have been a more perfect day for my first day of work.

  Rufus and I walked across the yard and then down the dirt track that led between the corn and soybean fields to the main plantation drive. Several large horse pastures ran along the other side of the road, and on the far end of the nearest pasture I could see my old gray Welsh pony grazing alongside the two old carriage horses.