by Kim Powers
They hadn’t known a sister could make a sound like that, begging for help for a brother the rest of the town had shunned or, worse yet, forgotten.
Son’s eyes were wide and petrified, as were Sally’s, while Nelle’s daddy tried to calm him down and lead him back to his own house, his silver robot boxes dragging behind. Sally, a few years older, tried to cover his face with her Halloween witch’s cape, much as she might cover a bird’s cage with a dark cloth, to calm and soothe its squawking inhabitant. Her movements were practiced and careful, loving but sad, it was a gesture she had clearly performed many times before, and would perform many times again.
Nelle and Truman followed every step of the way.
Amasa Lee promised the Boular children he’d bring over refreshments from the party, but did not extend the same offer to the Klan. Instead, he asked if they were in the business of terrorizing poor innocent white children, or any other children, for that matter. They skulked away after that, their sheets dragging in the red dirt road in front of Truman’s house; they’d never get the red out of those sheets, Miss Jennie had proclaimed. You could tell who they were by what was hanging on their clothesline; serves ’em right!
In this case, all would not come out in the wash.
The party died down soon afterward—not even Truman could compete with an appearance by the Klan—and as the grown-ups began cleaning up, Nelle and Truman disappeared into their tree house. Looking down, they aimlessly pelted the ground with chinaberry bombs; they watched Old John stuff leftover apples, autographed with teeth marks, into his pockets; they watched Sook leave nibbles of fruitcake in the bushes for the neighborhood creatures.
Nelle and Truman should have known this was their time to say good-bye—he would be leaving by train the very next day—but they didn’t; maybe they couldn’t bring themselves to say good-bye to childhood so soon.
They talked, instead, of Sally and Son Boular, brother and sister, and of how they—Truman and Nelle—were more like that than mere next-door neighbors. They talked of how alive Son’s eyes had been, at what must have seemed like his near death at the hands of the Klan, of how much sweat had poured off his face. His heart must have been racing like a stoked-up furnace to provide that much heat; they had never seen so much sweat come off one person, and that included the field hands. Truman took a broader, more adult, more selfish view of things: he said they had just seen history being made: the night the Klan lost power in town. Not just witnessed it, caused it: it was all because of him and his party.
Truman had made history, in other words.
At eight years old.
Nelle could have answered by saying her father was the one who had made history by shaming the Klan. But she remained silent, letting Truman have his triumph as a parting gift. (Maybe that was her good-bye to him after all.) She was already thinking of a different kind of history: looking into the future, and knowing she would never forget the terrified face of Son Boular as long as she lived. That would be the last time she would ever see his face, terrified or otherwise; he would die of pneumonia when he was just thirty years old, never having come out of his house again, as far as she knew, until he was given a final ride—to the town cemetery.
The night the Klan was destroyed in Monroeville.
The night Boo Radley was born.
The night she and Truman said their first and hardest good-bye, without words.
They were all one and the same.
Without thinking, Truman unhooked the Chinaman’s pigtail from the back of his head and put it in Nelle’s hand.
Maybe that was his gift to her; she had it still.
Nelle picked up her pace, trying to outrace those memories and get to the place where they had started, all at once.
By now, she had convinced herself that her dream had been a prophecy: something from Truman would be waiting there, at the place where the tree had originally stood. That tree had been their Rosetta stone, and Truman her Merlin: he’d figure out a way to make the tree reappear if anyone could.
But no, nothing was there—not a tree, magically resprouted during the night, and certainly not a package with her name on it. Is that what old age would be? Waiting for packages that never came?
No, all that was there was a gravel-filled parking lot, some carved-up picnic tables etched with the names of boyfriends and girlfriends and who wanted to do what to whom, very little of which had to do with love, and the smelly dumpster behind Mel’s Dairy Dream, overflowing with empty ice cream buckets and buzzing with shiny green flies, drunk on sugar and cream.
That’s what her childhood, and the house in which she had grown up, had come to.
She had to get away before she gagged.
Maybe it was disappointment about to make her sick; she’d been so certain. (Certain of what? That she’d lost her mind? That Truman had addressed a bulky envelope to “the third chinaberry from the left” and that the local mailman had actually delivered it, tucking it away in a squirrel’s cubbyhole?)
But then again, she got everything else people sent, with barely an address, so why not get something in a tree? Sometimes she wished the postal service would just shut down; it wouldn’t leave her alone. The letters she got: it was their favorite book, they were her number one fan, wouldn’t she please write back, please accept this prize, please honor us with a few words, please do this, please do that—she knew how Santa Claus must have felt, the demand for toys blurring his eyesight and shredding his fingertips with paper cuts.
Mostly, she got copies of The Book that people wanted her to autograph, with return envelopes, postage included. She always signed and returned them; she could hardly ignore the readers who went to the trouble and expense of sending stamps—and often the choice of stamp was just as careful and revealing as the composition of the letter inside. It was always something noble and lyrical—not enough just to be a plain old American flag—the stamps had to picture a bird in midflight, or a black man holding his trembling young daughter’s hand. Lately, though, she’d been hearing that those very fans were selling their autographed copies of The Book; that was enough to make her never sign anything again, no matter how pretty or plentiful the stamps.
Some of the letters were more clever than others, and those she did give an extra five minutes of her time—because, truth to tell, what else did she have but time? Those were the packages that came with little soap-bar carvings of figures, jacks and cat’s-eye marbles, nubbed-down crayons in the colors of childhood.
Those were the geegaws Boo Radley had left in the tree for Scout and Jem, although, in reality, nobody had left anything for anybody there. She’d made it all up, even though, as a child, she’d never given up hope that something would magically appear there. It was the perfect secret hiding place; her childhood was made up of the yearning for such secret hiding places.
She used to stand on her tiptoes and peer inside the hole at least twice a day, on her way to and from school. When she confessed her secret yearning to Amasa, he told her she’d better be careful or a squirrel would jump out and bite her on the nose and she’d have to get rabies shots. When she reported this back to Truman, he added the detail that she’d likely start foaming at the mouth first, to give everybody fair warning; the only cure was to be tied down and get shots in the stomach, which was considered by some to be worse than the disease itself. Out of his love for her, he’d overcome his squeamishness to help hold her down—if it came to that.
Years later, living in a cold-water walk-up in New York and struggling to write out the story of her childhood, she’d told friends her fantasy about a squirrel’s hidey-hole becoming her own private Horn of Plenty. They’d smiled and said nothing more; Michael and Joy were a creative and artistic couple who had children of their own; they knew the imaginations of children, and knew better than to squelch them.
That same year, Nelle had visited their palatial apartment in New York, rather than stay in her hovel, for Christmas. Money was tight; she made a pittance as a reservations cle
rk for British Airlines, and her father was sick, no longer able to send her much to help out. She’d made stockings with felt and glitter for the children, and written a poem for their parents; she hadn’t expected anything in return, except the pleasure of their company. The wrapping paper that flew off presents and into the air inside the apartment would take the place of snow that had not come outside, as it had rarely come in Alabama.
But none of that wrapping paper had come from presents to Nelle.
She smiled anyway; Christmas was a time for children, not needy adults. But as soon as the little ones finished opening their gifts—their parents had had a good year, and spoiled them with too much—Nelle got up to begin laying out the Christmas lunch she had helped prepare. She was glad for an excuse to leave the room; she didn’t want them to see the expression on her face. They were so good to her, but she was homesick, and tired of working so hard: all day smiling for the public, all night digging into her soul and putting it down on paper, with little to show for either.
She heard a giggle and turned around on her way to the kitchen. Michael and Joy looked at her expectantly: do you think we forgot you, our best friend? O ye of little faith. Look inside the tree.
Even the children giggled, in on the secret.
Nelle went to the tree and looked past the colored ornaments and twinkling fairy lights into its branches: there, deep inside, propped up on a branch that was eye level, was an envelope with her name on it.
She turned around and gave the couple a puzzled look; the children gave another giggle, even a clap. Their surprise had come off after all.
She reached into the branches, needles and sap prickling her skin, and pulled out the envelope.
Tucked inside was a card the children had made, construction paper decorated with green and red crayon and tufts of cotton.
Inside that was a check, made out to Nelle, the amount large enough to live on for a year.
The year she needed to finish her book.
It had not yet become The Book.
The year she needed to prove, once and for all, or forever hold her peace, that she was a writer, like her friend Truman.
She didn’t understand, or rather, she did, she just couldn’t believe it—and she certainly couldn’t accept it.
Joy spoke first: they wanted her to leave her job at the airline and just write. They believed in her, even though they had barely read word one of anything she had ever committed to paper, not for lack of trying. They kept asking; Nelle kept begging off, too nervous and insecure. She wanted it perfect before she showed the world, and perfect was hard to come by.
Michael said he’d had a good year with his composing, and the stock market, and Nelle Harper was a new investment he wanted to make.
Together, they wanted to make her childhood fantasy come true: they wanted her to find something good in the branches of a tree.
She refused the money, of course, as they had known she would. They continued that little charade for about ten minutes—as they’d known she would as well—and then, finally, she consented to a slight alteration: she would accept the money, but only as a loan.
One day, she would pay them back.
How, she had no earthly idea.
That was the second night Boo Radley was born.
Alice was waiting for Nelle on the porch, holding a brown paper-wrapped package that had already been opened.
She looked scared, almost like she was waiting for an answer of some sort.
And Alice Lee was never without an answer.
Nelle was still thinking about trees: trees that weren’t there, and trees that were, bearing strange and wonderful fruit, so it took her a second to go on alert, to see what was behind Alice’s expression.
Alice didn’t say anything as Nelle came up the steps, just handed over the nest of torn paper and cardboard. Nelle didn’t mind that she’d already opened whatever it was; that practice had begun years ago, when Nelle received the only piece of hate mail she’d ever gotten. It was a dead mockingbird; Alice had been the first to open the box and see it, just seconds before she’d swept it off the front table with a scream and baptized herself with a spray of upchuck. Ever since then, she’d felt it was her duty to open large packages and save her sister from anything unpleasant. This—whatever this was—certainly belonged in the unpleasant category.
It hadn’t been mailed; there were no stamps on it, Alice had just found it waiting for them on the front porch. And it contained no dead mockingbird, but it was hard to tell what it was, or if it was better or worse than something dead. It was a small cardboard box, covered with pictures of—what? She could barely focus on what they were, there were so many shiny, competing images going on, and the glare from the midmorning sun turned them all the same blinding white. Nelle had to shade her eyes with one hand, then hold the package out a good arm’s length with the other to try and make sense of it all.
They were pictures of her, taken almost twenty-five years ago, just after The Book had come out. They had appeared in a two-page article in one of the leading pictorial magazines of the day, one of the last times Nelle had knowingly allowed herself to be committed to film.
In one of the pictures, she sat in the balcony of the courthouse where her father had tried his cases, smiling at the camera as it peeped over her shoulder to the judge’s bench below. In another, she walked through the playground of her youth, wearing jeans and sneakers that might have befitted a child, but certainly not a famous lady authoress, as the article stated she was primed to become. The photographer must have realized that as soon as she peeped in the boarded-up window of an old abandoned house wearing a dress.
She looked at that picture and remembered lying to the photographer, taking him to a deserted house that was not the Boulars’, when he said he wanted to go to “the haunted house in the book.” It was clear he hadn’t read “the book”; the house wasn’t haunted, by anything more than a child’s overheated imagination—and a gentle giant she had created, and christened Boo Radley. Better late than never; Nelle wanted to spare that family any more pain by turning their home into a souvenir-seekers’ landmark. She hurried over the thought that her book might have caused some of that pain in the first place. The lawsuit they had threatened was one thing, which she’d wiggled out of with an “Oh, it’s all fiction.” The looks she would get from Sally in the years to come, after Son’s death, were quite another. Wasn’t it enough that she had given life, and quiet, halting dignity, to someone the world would never have known without her? No, not even that was enough for Sally. Nelle had made her peace and moved on; Sally never had, long after the rest of her family had died off or moved away.
Looking at the strange box in her hand was better than remembering that. Nelle shook her head, almost trying to shake that memory away, and refocused on the pictures from the magazine: in her favorite of the bunch, she and her father sat on the porch of their old house in side-by-side rockers. Even sick and no longer able to work, Amasa had worn a dark suit and tie; it was the last picture ever taken of him.
But the photograph that haunted her most was the last one that had been shot, and the last one of the article. It was placed at the bottom of the second and final page, like a period that ended a sentence: Nelle was in her father’s law office, her shirtsleeves rolled up, pages and pages scattered around her. “Working on her next novel,” the caption read. She couldn’t see what was on any of those pages, and her memory didn’t help: were they mere props, or the real thing?
Looking at that picture again, pasted onto this strange box in her hand, knocked the breath out of her; she fell back into a chair on the porch.
It was her life, her past, staring her in the face.
“I’m calling the police,” Alice announced.
“And tellin’ ’em what? That some cardboard and cut-up pictures made me a little light-headed? I think not, Sister Bear.”
But maybe they should call the police: Nelle felt as if she had just been robbed, and
her life was what had been stolen away and glued onto a box that had snakes printed on it.
“Who sent it? Who put it here?” Alice asked.
There was no return address or name on the package, just an inevitable sense that it had been waiting, and had found its intended victim.
But there was more, besides that air of expectancy. Something else, something real and tangible, inside the box. Nelle felt its weight, heard something hitting the sides when she shook it.
She held up a finger to silence Alice, then opened the lid, afraid of what might pop out.
Alice gripped the offered finger.
Inside was a tiny coffin; there was no other way to describe it. It was made of balsa wood, the kind used to make model airplanes, and shaped like a flat sarcophagus, like something an Egyptian mummy would come in: about three-fourths of it flanged out, then the last quarter reversed that shape and started heading back in the other direction. It was plain and unpainted, not even varnished, but it had been solidly made, with the tiniest of hinges on one side, so you could open the lid.
Nelle opened the lid and was assaulted by a loamy smell: a thin layer of freshly turned earth. And crawling in it, poking its head up when the darkness was disturbed: a lone earthworm, now as terrified as Nelle.
She jerked; the whole contraption flew out of her hands and landed in the flower bed that bordered the porch.
“That does it. Now I am calling the police,” Alice said, then went inside the house.
This time, Nelle made no move to stop her, but stepped off the porch, holding onto the guardrail for balance as she reached down between the scuppernong grape plants Alice had climbing up thin wooden stakes. The escaping earthworm dove for cover as Nelle’s pinching fingers navigated down and retrieved what Alice hadn’t seen, what Nelle herself had barely had time to glimpse before the box took its header:
Two other photographs, rolled together, planted in the soil at the bottom of the coffin.
Nelle picked them up and brushed the dirt off as she returned to her rocker on the porch.
