The books in my pile mostly showed plans for the sort of houses you saw out by the new mall in Johnson City. They were subdivision houses with big garages and windows that lay flat against the outside walls. Over the years I myself had developed a liking for houses with more character, although I understood why people might want to buy a house that was fresh and new and completely their own. I spent a lot of time wondering about the girls who lived in the dorm before me. It seemed strange to think how their stuff once cluttered up my desk and their clothes filled the closet I now shared with Murphy, Donita, Brittany, and Kandy. Sometimes I worried about those girls, what might have happened to them.
“My books give a lot of measurements,” I told Logan and Ricky Ray after I’d gone through the whole stack. “But that’s it.”
Murphy came back to the table at the same time that Donita was settling in at the far end of the table with a pile of books I guessed were on the subject of dolphins.
“Here’s a bunch of stuff on renovations and adding extra rooms,” Murphy said, letting an armful of books tumble down on the table. “But nothing that says how to build a house, A to Z.”
Donita looked up from her notebook. “Y’all really serious about building a house?” she asked. “I mean, you got some land around here?”
I hadn’t thought about where we would build the house. We’d gotten so caught up in the idea of building a house at all, we hadn’t really discussed the details. I looked at Logan. “How big is your yard, anyway?” I asked him. If he was going to be a part of this, he might as well come in handy.
Logan reddened again. “It’s pretty big,” he said, like it almost embarrassed him to admit it. “But, well, I don’t think my parents would let us build another house on it.”
“Why don’t y’all just build a fort?” Donita asked, sounding practical. “ ’Cause I used to live with this family where the man was a contractor, and he had to hire lots of people to build his houses. No offense, but I’m not sure y’all could build a whole house by yourselves. Now a fort, that’s a different story. I could even help you get the boards and the supplies for it.”
Murphy sighed. You could tell she really wanted to build a house. But Donita was right, and we all knew it.
“So Logan,” Murphy said after a moment, “we know that building a house on your property is out of the question, but how about a fort? A big fort?”
“Sure!” Logan said, sounding relieved that he could be of some use after all. “The back of our property is mostly woods. My parents would probably like it if I built a fort, as a matter of fact.”
“Why’s that?” Donita asked.
Logan shrugged. “It’s the sort of thing a normal guy would do. My parents would like for me to be as normal as possible. Like right now, my dad’s mad because I decided to be in band instead of trying out for football.”
“You don’t look unnormal to me,” Ricky Ray said nicely.
“Abnormal,” Murphy corrected him. She turned to me and mouthed the words “frog prince.”
Donita bounced her pencil on the table a couple of times. “You hanging out in the woods all afternoon with this bunch is going to make your folks happy?”
“They’ll be glad I have some new friends,” Logan said. “My mom is always getting on my case about making more friends.”
“How many friends do you got now?” Ricky Ray asked.
Logan looked down at the table. “I had one, but he moved last summer.”
“Well, if your parents will let us build a fort in their yard, they must be nice folks, which means you’re probably a nice person too, underneath it all,” Donita said, standing up. “I’m going to check out these books, and then we’ll go see my Uncle Wendell. He’ll help us out.”
We all followed her to the checkout desk. Without so much as a how-do-you-do, Donita was part of the plan.
Chapter 7
“I didn’t even know you had an uncle here,” I said to Donita as we tromped up the sidewalk toward the center of town. We were passing the Limestone Grocery, which was hardly a grocery store at all, just one room of wooden bins filled with produce from Sonny Baldwin’s farm. Today the outside bin featured mostly pumpkins and yellow squash.
“He’s not really my uncle,” Donita said. “But black folks in this town are few and far between, in case you haven’t noticed. I think he just wants me to feel like I’ve got some of my own kind around if need be.”
“Could we grow pumpkins at our fort?” Ricky Ray asked, catching up with us. He had hung back a few seconds at the Limestone Grocery and was clearly under its influence.
“I thought I told you, we’ll be building the fort in the woods,” Logan said, like he couldn’t believe how dumb Ricky Ray was. “Pumpkins need sunlight to grow. Lots of it.”
I grabbed Ricky Ray’s hand and pulled him along with me. “Logan Parrish, I believe you have impressed us with the fact that you know more about many things than a six-year-old boy does,” I told him. “You’re a regular encyclopedia. So why don’t you quit picking on Ricky Ray?”
“Holy cow!” Logan said, holding up his arms as if surrendering. “The kid asked a question.”
“Which you could have answered in a polite and respectful manner,” I pointed out.
Logan shrugged, but he looked more than a little humbled. I was hoping we could embarrass him all the way out of the building project. There had to be someplace other than Logan Parrish’s backyard to build a fort.
Donita made a sharp left onto Watauga Avenue. “Turn here,” she said, leading us past the Elizabethton Savings & Loan and across the railroad tracks. We passed Trivette Coal Company, the name of which would make you think it was a large business of some importance, but really it wasn’t much more than a shack where Mr. Lindberg Trivette kept his office and a small supply of the coal that he sold by the truckload or the sack. Mr. Trivette was about ninety years old, and he spent most of his day sitting at his desk reading novels. I ran into him a lot at the library, when we were both checking out our weekly supply of books. “You read any of them Thomas Wolfe books I been telling you about?” he always asked, and I always had to shake my head no. I picked up Look Homeward, Angel once, but the first few paragraphs didn’t really draw me in.
“Uncle Wendell, you there?” Donita called out. We were nearing Potter’s Used Auto Parts and Misc. Supplies, which looked to me to be a former gas station. It had that design to it, with a roof that came off the main building to shade a rectangle of concrete covered with oil spots, making it appear like a map of some far-off planet. All that was missing were the gas pumps themselves, but you could see where they might once have been bolted to the concrete.
“Hey, Uncle Wendell,” Donita called again. She turned around and said to the rest of us, “He’s getting on in years. I don’t think his hearing is all that good.”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with my hearing,” a man said, walking out from what I guessed was the main office. He must have been Mr. Potter. “I’d wager good money I hear a sight better than you do, little gal. Now come give your old deaf uncle a hug.”
Donita went over to the man, who was wearing a dapper hat from the 1950s, a brown cardigan sweater, and wing-tipped shoes, and squeezed on him. “How you doing, Uncle Wendell?”
“My day just got a whole lot brighter, that’s for sure,” Mr. Potter said, patting Donita on the head. “You bring some friends with you?”
“These are some people I live with, except for that tall one over there,” she said, pointing to Logan. “His name’s Logan Parrish, and he lives over on Snob Hill. I understand his daddy’s a judge.”
Mr. Potter nodded. “I voted for him in the last election, as a matter of fact.”
Logan half-smiled, half-smirked. You couldn’t tell if he was proud of his daddy or if he would have voted against him if he’d been of age.
“That’s Maddie,” Donita continued her introductions, pointing at me. “And that curly-headed girl is Murphy, only that ain’t her real name,
but don’t ask me why that is; and the little boy is Ricky Ray.”
“Goodness, you got quite a crowd with you today,” Mr. Potter said. “Y’all just stopping by for a visit, or do you have some business with me?”
“We’re going to build a fort at that one’s house,” Donita told him, pointing a finger again at Logan. “We’re going to need some supplies, maybe some tools too.”
“I’ve got tools,” Logan said. “I’ve got my own toolbox. And we can use my dad’s stuff, too. He never does.”
Mr. Potter nodded. “So you’ll be needing some lumber, some nails, that sort of thing.” He turned toward his office, motioning with his arm. “Well, follow me out to the back; we’ll see what I got on hand at the moment.”
We crowded in through the door to the office and then squeezed out through the door to the garage. Snaking through the maze of tires and hubcaps and rusting car batteries, we followed Mr. Potter out a back door and found ourselves in a kind of backyard, a fenced-in square of hardpan dirt with clumps of onion grass struggling to grow around its edges. Here we were greeted by an oddball collection of open-mouthed ranges and refrigerators that had clearly seen their heyday many years before, not to mention washers and dryers and a chorus line of vacuum cleaners. At the far end of the yard, cinder blocks two and three deep kept different lengths of sawed lumber off of the ground.
“Who’s the main architect here?” Mr. Potter asked us. “Any y’all know something about building a structure?”
Logan stepped forward. “I know a little bit,” he said, sounding sure of himself.
“Good, good,” Mr. Potter said. “Now, any of y’all any good at math?”
This time Murphy stepped forward. “I’m in the advanced math group at school,” she told him. I waited for her to say something about building an adobe hut in New Mexico, but she didn’t mention it.
“Good, that’s what I like to hear,” Mr. Potter replied, sounding even more enthusiastic. “You done any geometry yet?”
Murphy nodded. “A little. At my old school.”
“Well, then, you two come over this way and let’s discuss what you children will need.” He turned to Donita. “Baby, you take the rest of them and fill five or six coffee cans with nails. Be sure to get a variety of sizes.”
Ricky Ray nudged me. “Maddie, I ain’t got no money. How’re we going to pay?”
I shrugged, looking at Mr. Potter, who smiled. “Y’all don’t have to pay for it. I like to help out my little niece when I can.”
“We could barter for it,” Murphy said. “Not Donita, since she’s your niece, but the rest of us. I mean, we might need a lot of supplies. I don’t want to take advantage.”
Mr. Potter smiled again. You could tell he liked Murphy. “You might be on to something there, missy. I could use me a few hours of help around here. I appreciate that you want to be square on your debt. That’s a good habit to have.”
Logan Parrish opened his mouth, but before he could say a word, I cut him off. “Don’t even offer to pay for this, Logan. We’ve already worked out a real good deal.”
“I wasn’t going to offer to pay for it,” he stammered. “I was just going to say that I could come by on Wednesday afternoons after school, if he needed help then.”
I felt my face go red. “Oh,” was all I managed to say in reply.
“Go get those nails, children,” Mr. Potter said, saving me from further disgrace. “We’ll work out a schedule later.”
It took the good part of an hour for Mr. Potter, Murphy, and Logan to figure out what lengths of board we’d need for building. They also had a long discussion about techniques for making a fort stand up straight and last through a windy season.
After helping Donita fill two coffee cans with nails, I roamed around the appliances and dreamed of the kitchen I’d have in my own house one day. I wanted one of those kitchens that had a big wooden block in the middle, for your husband to chop up vegetables on while you were cooking dinner.
“So how are we going to get all this stuff to my backyard?” Logan asked, after he and Murphy and Mr. Potter had picked out what appeared to be enough lumber to build at least three forts and set it aside in a special pile. It was, I hated to admit, a sensible question.
“We can haul it in my truck,” Mr. Potter said. “You and your daddy can help me unload it, get it to wherever it needs to go.”
Logan nodded. “Sure, that’d be great. My dad’s probably not home, but I’m pretty strong. Do you want to do it now or wait until you’re ready to close up?”
Mr. Potter smiled. “There is one main reason I went into business for myself, children,” he said, ushering us back through the garage toward the front. “And that is because when you are your own boss, you can close up shop at a moment’s notice.”
We all helped to load up Mr. Potter’s truck, and then Donita hopped into the front seat, while the rest of us rode in the back with the neatly bundled wood and the other supplies. I peered through the truck’s narrow rear window at Donita and Mr. Potter, and a feeling came over me that was both sad and pretty. I couldn’t exactly name what it was.
Chapter 8
I wanted to be building that fort every spare minute of the day, every day, but I had obligations, and I knew better than to sneak out of them. Corinne and them were always keeping an eye on me to make sure I was behaving myself. I’d been known to get into a little trouble now and again, nothing much, mostly just cutting up in class. But add that to the fact that I was an abandoned child who didn’t even know who her daddy was, and it was enough to have people look at me cross-eyed every time I sneezed too loud.
Thursday afternoon I was at my Journey Through the Mind meeting, wishing like crazy I was out at the fort. Journey Through the Mind was a sort of zany-brainy organization where kids got together to put on skits and solve problems for competition. I always looked forward to JM practice, though I have to say the fact that Logan Parrish was in JM took some of the shine off it for me. He was the sort of person who always thought his ideas were best, even when everyone else was thinking in the opposite direction. It could tire you out after awhile, arguing with him.
I could tell from Logan’s antsiness that he wished he were at the fort too. He kept hopping from one foot to the other and couldn’t get focused on the project at hand: the construction of a time machine that would send our team into three different periods in history, where we’d have three different problems to solve.
It was strange to have something in common with Logan Parrish. Every once in awhile our eyes would meet, and we’d almost smile at each other. For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel the urge to snatch that Fraley’s Feeds blue cap from his head and shove it in the closest washing machine.
We’d been working on the fort for almost a week. That first day Saturday, though, I thought we were done before we even got started. To begin with, we’d had to sit through a lecture on safety from Logan’s father, Judge Martin Parrish, who’d stood in front of us in a pair of lime-green pants, a jaunty golf cap on his head, smiling a big cheesy smile that he must’ve learned running for elected office. He’d told us how he and Mrs. Parrish had always supported the Home through their church, and that he was happy to be able to help us with this project of ours, but, basically, if we busted our thumbs with a hammer, not to come crying to him.
“I hope building this fort will teach all of you responsibility,” he said, like he’d read a report somewhere that we were the biggest bunch of ne’er-do-wells in the county. “And I hope it will teach Logan some much-needed social skills.”
Murphy gave the Judge her own cheesy grin. “We appreciate you letting us use your yard, sir,” she said. I thought I saw her batting her eyelashes when she said it.
After Judge Parrish left, we stood there in the clearing in the woods behind Logan’s house, our shoes all wet from dew on the grass, the pile of boards in front of us waiting to get hammered and nailed; and our faces were big zeroes, just blank as could be. There didn�
��t seem to be any way to begin.
Then Donita took a few steps forward and turned around to face us. “All right, now, there ain’t no need to panic. Let’s start at the starting place. What do we need to get going with this?”
Ricky Ray squinched his eyes and twisted his cap in his hands, trying hard for the right answer. “Wood?”
Donita nodded toward the stack of lumber. “Okay, we got the wood. What’s next?”
Taking in a deep breath, then letting it out slowly, Ricky Ray said, “Nails?”
“Nails,” Donita agreed. “I see them cans of nails, but let’s put ’em in a specific spot.” She looked around quickly, then grabbed a long pine branch near her feet and walked it a couple of yards away from the pile of boards. Then she moved the cans of nails so they were lined up against the branch. “Okay, this is where we keep the nails. Nails don’t get moved away from here, everybody got that?”
We all nodded. “Okay, then, Ricky Ray, what’s that leave us with?” Donita put her hand on Ricky Ray’s shoulder, like she had all the faith in the world he was going to come up with the right answer.
“Tools!” he yelled at top volume, and you could tell he felt confident as could be, having gotten the first two things on the list right. “We got to have tools, don’t we, Donita?”
“That’s right, honey, and we got plenty,” Donita said. She turned to Logan. “You got a tarp of some sort back in your garage? Garbage bags will do, if that’s all you got. Can’t have no tools lying on the wet ground.”
Ten minutes later, we were organized. The air around us seemed lighter from pure relief, like we thought this fort might just get built after all. Before we went to work laying out the boards for the floor, we took a few minutes to study for the millionth time the plans Mr. Potter had helped Logan and Murphy draw up. Then, hammers in hand, we got down to the business of putting that fort together.
Do you know the smell of raw lumber? It’s the freshest thing you can imagine. Every time I pounded a nail farther into a board, it was like a little puff of perfume came out, and I breathed it in as hard as I could. “They ought to put this smell in a bottle,” I said to no one in particular. “I’d pay top dollar for it.”
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