Smack Dab in the Middle of Maybe

by Jo Watson Hackl

  Daddy’s book was already out there. It could help.

  And everything important was right here on me. After Little Quinn blew my sketchbook to smithereens, I’d started toting around the things that mattered. Now I patted them one by one. I had the doogaloo in my jeans pocket. I was wearing Daddy’s jacket, and his big pockets carried the rest—Daddy’s pocketknife, the letter from the headstone company, my hat and gloves, and a little notebook full of Mama’s paper. Plus, I had my money.

  If I hurried, maybe I could beat the dark.

  Then I started thinking about the cold waiting just outside the grocery-store glass.

  I’d never been out in those woods without Mama or Daddy.

  Aunt Belinda would be home in another twenty minutes. I could call her to come pick me up.

  Charlene chirped three quick times, her notes high and fine and clear.

  There she was, cupped in my hand in the middle of Thelma’s, and she was still putting out music.

  “Leave.” I said it so loud, it bounced back at me off the concrete walls like somebody else was doing the talking.

  Me and Charlene, we could do this together.

  The sign over the meat counter slung washed-out shadows over the shelves. My steps echoed on the sticky floors. As creepy as the whole place was, though, part of me liked it. It was the first time since Daddy died that I didn’t have to put on my “I’m okay/don’t ask” face. It was the first time since Mama left that whispers weren’t buzzing around me, the entire sixth grade wanting to know why Mama ran off. It was the first time in a month of Sundays without Aunt Belinda rushing me or my cousins pestering me.

  I fluffed out two bags from behind the cash register.

  The Little Debbie snack cakes called to me, but I was good. I only took two boxes. For the rest, I went with what Daddy would have picked—jerky, apples, peanut butter, an emergency candy bar, plastic cups, duct tape, matches, clothesline, a hand shovel, tissues, underwear, and socks. We didn’t have a sleeping bag out there, so I grabbed two sweatshirts to keep warm. My big splurge was a pack of number two pencils and a sharpener. I’d go crazy in those woods if I couldn’t draw.

  The pencils almost made up for the Who Farted? sweatshirts, which, I’m sad to say, were the only kind Thelma had.

  I made Charlene a nest out of two duct-taped cups and a tissue, and punched in some breathing holes. Putting my cash by the checkout, I did the math. When I came up short by half, I started a column in the notebook: Money I Owe: $36.47 to Thelma’s Cash ’n’ Carry.

  I leaned my weight into the back-door exit bar and stepped out into the clouded-over afternoon.

  “Charlene,” I said, “let’s go get Mama back.”

  If you’re going to take to the woods with nothing but a bug for company, do it on the day of the fry. I didn’t draw one speck of attention on the way out of town. Pickups loaded with fish fryers, minivans loaded with families, they all blew right past me.

  Besides that fry, I had three things going for me.

  One, it was still hunting season. Folks were used to seeing people trotting on the side of the highway, looking between those straight rows of trees for something to shoot at. I hugged Daddy’s jacket tight, tucked my hair in the collar, and picked up a broke-off branch. Every time I heard a car coming, I pulled my hunter’s orange hat down a smidgen more, held that branch under my arm the way you’d hold a rifle, and turned my head toward the pines. People see what they want to see. I looked like a hunter, maybe just a smallish one.

  Two, Daddy’s camouflage jacket worked for me. The pockets handled most of the supplies and the cricket cups, too. The bags thumping against my leg handled the rest just fine.

  Three, I never was one to stand out in a crowd. I used to be jealous of Keisha, the way every head turned toward her bright brown eyes. Now I was glad for the way I looked—eyes more gray than blue, freckles scattered like the pattern on Daddy’s jacket, my hair always a summer away from being blond. It was like I was born ready to blend into the woods.

  And I knew where I was going.

  Or I thought I did.

  I’d spent enough time there with Daddy. There were two ways to go. If I stuck to the main roads, it would be over fifteen miles. But if I turned off on the dirt road and cut through the woods, it would only be nine miles. Me and Daddy, we’d done a 10K walk the last time Mama was in the hospital. This wasn’t that much farther.

  Either way, I was heading south. It seemed to me somehow like it should be easy, like walking down the globe in science class.

  Wrong.

  It was mostly anthills and briars.

  Those briars made me worry about search dogs. Was I a runaway now? True, Aunt Belinda had left me, but would that matter? Every couple of miles, I backtracked and went around in crooked figure eights. I saw on a science show once that a bloodhound can track your smell across just about anything. Your only hope is to make the handler think the dog lost your trail. That or let your trail go stale.

  Aunt Belinda wouldn’t want to admit I’d run off. It’d make her look bad in front of that fireman she liked. That’d buy me some time. But they’d sure enough notice me missing from school come Monday morning.

  With every weed I brushed by, all I could think about was how long my scent would cling to those sticky stems.

  I made some extra figure eights, just in case.

  The whole walk, I tried to keep Mama in my head, to see this weedy patch the way she would.

  Meandering with Mama while Daddy was offshore was like wearing a special pair of glasses, part binocular, part microscope. Mama never walked anywhere. She ambled. She skipped. She strolled.

  “Walking is for other people,” she always told me.

  “What people?” I would ask.

  “Those people. People who don’t see things the way we do. We’re meanderers, Cricket. We pay attention.”

  Mama would have noticed the way the clouds were starting to look like curled-up cats and the way the crows were flying from tree to tree in front of me. She would have noticed the sweet smell of tea olive trees and walked forever to pick a sprig for my room. She would have braved the thorny branches above my head to bring me back the last wild orange.

  Now I shivered as the wind pecked at my cheeks, the turnoff to the old dirt road just ahead.

  The rows stopped by the barbed wire fence. Behind us, row after row of same-size timber-company pine trees stretched as far as I could see. In front, the woods turned wild. Hardwoods, pines, briars, and bushes, they all crowded out the light.

  Brushing up against a sumac bush, I broke off a handful of seeds, breathed in the smell of Mama’s paper, and wedged my way through the barbed wire.

  Overhead, birds started squawking. They didn’t like me and Charlene invading their woods.

  The only thing left of our path was the small gap in the briars. I followed it, tossing the seeds ahead of me, one by one.

  I tried to keep what I could see of the sun on my right side. “The sun sets in the west,” I whispered to Charlene. “This way, we know we’re heading south.” With each step, though, it seemed like that sun was slanting at us lower.

  I hiked faster.

  The path ended at the rickety, narrow footbridge.

  The water was running high. Already it had rotted out two boards, and the rest were so loose, they might not be there tomorrow.

  Still, it was the only way.

  Tucking Charlene close, I crawled across the sagging wood.

  My foot hit the bank, and Charlene let out a chirp. She knew it, too.

  We were on the other side now.

  The woods smelled like a hundred and fifty years of dark. A goose-bumpy ghost-town kind of dark.

  It didn’t feel right to be here without Mama and Daddy.

  The trees all looked the same—rough barked and
winter bare. No sign of where our path used to be.

  Nothing felt familiar, not even me.

  Scanning the treetops, I tromped through the thick leaves, searching for the clear spot that marked the old logging road.

  When I finally found the break in the trees, I was worn out and sweaty, with panic starting to buzz in my brain, loud as those bird squawks.

  Then I saw the sign.

  Back before the logging road got grown over, the state had put up a plaque. Now the sign was faded and off kilter, but I could still read the words.

  ELECTRIC CITY, MISSISSIPPI

  Site of one of our nation’s premier electric lumber mills. In 1920, the Electric Lumber Company purchased cutting rights to hundreds of thousands of acres of timber from nearby landowners. The company built the mill and a modern town with a central park, a theater, a library, a general store, a teaching hospital, and attractive homes. The town even minted its own currency, the doogaloo. When the timber was harvested decades later, the company removed the buildings.

  Mama and Daddy always called it a ghost town, and Daddy’s family still squabbled over whether they’d done the right thing all those years back, teaming up with the neighbors to grant those cutting rights.

  Everywhere I looked, something reminded me of the way things used to be—the thick-poured sidewalks stretching out in neat squares for miles, the old homesites taken over by scraggly pines, the honeysuckle vines hugging the concrete pillars that used to prop up the houses.

  I tried to picture the way it was when Daddy lived here, the sidewalks bustling with people headed to work, to shop, to see a show, going home to street after street of crisp white houses and clean-kept yards.

  How could they just take everything away?

  A cracked cement front walk led to a set of columns just ahead—all that was left of Daddy’s old home. Three wide steps ended in empty air. THE OVERLANDS was still etched on the top step. The steps Daddy, Uncle Quinn, Mawmaw, and Granddaddy posed on in all those photos from when Daddy was little.

  I put a pebble on the top step, just like Daddy always did.

  The whirling leaves made whisper sounds, pointing out things to notice.

  That straight line of pillars from the movie theater, the sidewalk there edged in quartz rocks. Daddy’d told me how these rocks used to catch the moonlight. Past that, I saw the pillars that used to hold up the old library and the general store.

  Me and Charlene followed the third sidewalk to the left for three-quarters of a mile. There, in the only ginkgo tree in the woods, I saw the one thing me and Daddy ever finished together.

  “Look, Charlene,” I said. “Our new home.”

  Our tree house stood seven feet off the ground, tucked so tight between the branches that you’d walk right past it if you didn’t know what you were looking for.

  I recollected the day last spring when Mama and Daddy put me to work hunting for just the right tree. “Make sure you stay on our family’s land. And look for sturdy,” Daddy said.

  “But pretty.” Mama slid her cool fingers across my cheek. “Always seek the beauty.”

  “And made of tough stuff like you?” I fake-punched Daddy.

  “It doesn’t have to be quite as handsome.” He pointed to a towering tree. “Bodock. Listen to the wood.” He rapped the trunk with my knuckles. “What do you think it’s saying?”

  “That it’s too bumpy. Let’s pick something else.”

  We walked half the morning until I spotted that ginkgo tree. Its limbs spread out, inviting me to climb up on in. In the speckled sunlight, its fan-shaped leaves quivered in sixteen shades of green. “This is it,” I said.

  “Don’t forget to build me a porch.” Mama tucked a leaf behind my ear, put one behind hers, and headed off bird-watching.

  “Not too many tree houses you can get to by sidewalk.” Daddy picked up his hammer.

  He used the right nails, four on each rung, for the ladder. Over the next few weekends, we measured off the walls, seven feet each, exactly. We waterproofed the roof. We added shutters to the window cutouts so we could take pictures out the windows whenever we wanted and could close the shutters at night to keep out the bugs. We shored up the beams with steel plates. “Can’t be too careful,” Daddy always said.

  Fat lot of good it did him.

  After Grandma died last summer, Mama went to pieces. Come winter, Mama up and ran off. It wasn’t even twenty-two full days before the principal called me out of study hall. Later, after Aunt Belinda ran all those red lights on the way to the hospital, after they wouldn’t even let me see my own daddy, after all of it, that doctor stood in scuffed-up Docksides dangling Daddy’s chart, staring at the wall behind me and Aunt Belinda. “There wasn’t anything we could do,” he said. “It was like his own body turned against him. No way he could’ve seen it coming.”

  I let Aunt Belinda lead me out to the car, but I knew better. Thirty-eight years of clean living got undone in ten minutes by a blood clot that started out no bigger than a gnat too small to swat at.

  With only me left, it was like there just wasn’t enough weight to hold Daddy to this earth.

  I shook that thought loose. Keeping Charlene close, I climbed the ladder.

  The tree house smelled of cedar, clean and wild. Daddy’d put down old shag carpet to muffle our sound so we wouldn’t scare off the wildlife before he had a chance to take their picture. Pressing my back into the floor, I breathed in deep. Mama had painted us a red, white, orange, and black calico heart on the wood above the door when she came for her third and last visit. I showed it to Charlene.

  Now the color was fading.

  My breath started to speed up.

  So I pulled out the letter.

  It was addressed to Mama and Daddy, and I knew it by heart. When that letter got written, nobody could have known there’d be another tombstone so soon—the ugly, cheap one Aunt Belinda bought for Daddy’s grave over in his family’s plot next to the Big Ridge Baptist Church.

  December 1

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Overland:

  We have scheduled the headstone for Mrs. Overland’s mother to be delivered to the Pickens County Baptist Cemetery in Electric City at 9:00 a.m. sharp on the first of March. We will meet Mrs. Overland at that time to verify proper alignment.

  We have never had the privilege of carving a headstone with movable interlocking pieces before. As you know, the intricate carvings Mrs. Overland designed have required considerably more time than originally anticipated. We apologize for the delay and hope that your family will continue to look to us for all your monument needs.

  Sincerely,

  Edward Josiah Honeycut

  December first. That was the date on the letter. Mama left three weeks later. After Daddy died, I found that letter in his things before Aunt Belinda swept me up in a hug and told me I was family even if we weren’t blood kin. She said to come live with her. But the next day she squeezed Mama’s lucky aventurine ring on her finger, handed me Daddy’s jacket, and threw the rest of his stuff in the dumpster behind the Burger Barn.

  Now I ran my hands over the note Mama had written on the letter, the one and only message she’d left:

  I’m oƒƒ looking ƒor my birds.

  That’s what she always said when she disappeared. But she’d circled the first of March and Pickens County Baptist Cemetery—the cemetery next to this ghost town. Next to that, she’d scrawled in big, black, mashed-down Sharpie letters—

  Don’t let them start without me. I’ll be there. No matter what.

  No matter what. After Grandma died, Mama used to say a lot of things she might not remember later. She sprinkled them around like salt and pepper on a ripe tomato—things she wanted to do, things she meant to do. But she never, ever broke a “no matter what” promise.

  Tho
se last few days before she left, Mama must have told me a thousand times how she wanted just two things. One, she wanted to find the Bird Room she was always looking for. She wanted to prove it was real. Two, she wanted to be there when the gravestone got put up so she could align the carvings and make sure they were what she wanted—a message for our family.

  Mama was coming to these woods on March 1. I had eleven days to prove the Bird Room was real, to prove to Mama I believed her. And if I could do that, then maybe, just maybe, I could get her to stay for good.

  On the night of my seventh birthday, Mama fixed me a great big ice cream sundae for dinner with pecan pie for dessert. The sundae had my three favorite flavors, all homemade by Mama—peanut butter, banana marshmallow, and chocolate crunch. With Daddy offshore, it was just the two of us, and Mama didn’t even eat. She just watched me, a grin playing on her face. Soon as I took the last bite, she looped her arm through mine and pulled me to our back porch. “This is your night, baby,” Mama said. “The sky knows it, too.” A full moon was just starting to show itself against the summer cotton-candy clouds, and the air hummed with the sound of crickets, katydids, and tree frogs. It sounded to me like a parade.

  “I want to tell you a story.” Mama patted a spot next to her on the porch swing. “When I was little, I was smart, like you. My daddy used to bring me on his electrician jobs when I wasn’t in school. I fetched him tools and kept him company on those long drives.” She smoothed back the hair on my forehead. “My daddy was licensed in two states, and we traveled all over. We’d start out before daylight and cover one, two hundred miles in a day.” Her mouth drew into a tight smile. “It was my seventh birthday, and by afternoon, we’d been all over. We came to a job far off. Daddy had a string of work in a fancy neighborhood. Our last job was at the biggest house of all. Daddy took a while, and I got to looking around.” Mama took a long breath. “I looked through a keyhole and found a room where everything was alive.”