Before the Strandline- the Story of Stone

by Linda L Zern

  Sun worried that Mommy and Daddy wouldn’t know where to find them if they stayed with Gabby and Gabby’s grandfather too long, but there was always some chore to do, some assignment to finish, something new to learn, some exciting story to listen to about how they would live “off the land” and be like the Timucaun Indians that lived there a goodly amount of time ago. It got harder and harder to think of going back to nothing.

  But Sun wouldn’t let the idea of finding Mom and Dad go. She just wouldn’t.

  “Sun, we could go back and write something on the chalkboard, to tell them where to find us.”

  “But it was all burned up. Don’t you remember?”

  Her snappy way of asking him that made him grumpy. “If we can’t write on the chalkboard then we’ll write on something else with charcoal.”

  “Maybe . . . we should.”

  “Sun, you can stay here, and I’ll go make a note for Uncle Jordan and Mom and Dad. You should stay here with Rex and . . . Grandpa . . . and Gabby and . . . I can go.”

  Sun frowned over the idea, biting her lip as she thought about staying or going. They sat on one of the bunkbeds in the bunkhouse. The scratchy sheet stretched over the bed smelled like sunshine and grass. They hung the narrow, white sheets on a fence to dry in the sunshine. Stone thought it better than the old dryer way, but it was heavy work lugging the wet sheets out to the fence. Everything was heavy work these days. Stone sighed.

  He didn’t want her to go. She was a slow walker and things distracted her: butterflies, lizards, toads. She loved the little animals that made their homes among the palmetto fronds.

  “What if Grandpa Wayne says that we can’t go?”

  Stone felt the prick of stubbornness crawl up his neck. “He’s not our grandpa. He’s not.” Stone jumped up from the edge of the bed, spun around to face his sister. “I’m going. You should stay here, help watch over the babies.”

  Sun shrugged and stuck out her bottom lip and then shrugged again. “Maybe,” she said, “and maybe not. You’re not my boss either.”

  He rolled his eyes and ignored her comment. Sun hated getting up in the morning. If he left early enough, Stone was pretty sure he’d be walking back to Uncle Jordan’s by himself.

  He didn’t ask for permission. He didn’t wake up Sun. He left before the dew had dried on the grapevines near the garden gate. In his backpack was water in a green drinking bottle, a handful of buffalo and berries rolled into greasy balls, and socks, a big man’s socks that pulled up to his knees, but he needed them when he walked. Dry socks were important. That was a lesson that Dad had taught him.

  Lizards raced over and under dried leaves and through twisting vines. It sounded like a baby’s play toy when they ran. A flutter of moth wings whirled around in Stone’s stomach. Would there be anything left? The barn? Uncle Jordan’s house?

  He turned off the overgrown ranch road into the cool, early morning shadows that led to the old riding trail through the hardwood hammock. Sun waited for him on a stump, in front of a stand of pine trees. She looked pretty smug.

  Shocked, Stone tripped to a stop. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”

  She nodded, and then jumped to her feet. They started walking into the shade of the big trees.

  “How did you do it?” he asked, and then took Sun’s hand.

  Sun started to swing their hands back and forth. “I slept on top of a bunch of pokey pinecones.”

  “You didn’t sleep.”

  She laughed. “Nope.”

  When the riding trail ran out and the tree line ended, Stone dropped his sister’s hand. From across the field, they could see the burned edges of the barn, the flying pig weather vane charred black. The big church where they’d hidden was a skeleton of broken beams and fire-blasted ruins. Someone had burned the church too. Up and down Geneva Highway, buildings smoldered. The wind blew the smell away from them, toward the big river. They couldn’t see anyone walking along the road anymore.

  “Stone, what happened?” She started to take a step forward.

  Stone held her back, with a hand on her chest. “Don’t, Sun. Don’t. We should wait.” He dragged at her vest until she squatted next to him.

  The roar of engines started out faint and then grew louder. “Get down.” The engines got closer. Motorcycles, a lot of them, zoomed along the old highway. They faded away as they headed away from Van Arsdale. Stone pulled Sun to her feet. “Let’s sneak around back behind the pond.”

  “It’s all gone. Stone, the house—” But he followed when she headed toward what was left.

  Uncle Jordan’s house looked like the church, a collection of sticks and broken beams. Uncle Jordan’s house was gone, but the barn’s solid block walls still made a cinderblock box under the buckled metal of the roof. The barn roof tipped into the building, but it was still there—mostly—like before. Their little table was there, their stool, dusty and dirty.

  It was the way they remembered it: the fire had eaten the stalls, the hay, the loft, the chalkboard. It was all gone, but the roof balanced against the back wall and the sand under their feet was still dry. It looked ruined on the outside, so people ignored it.

  No Daddy or Mommy or Uncle Jordan . . .

  In the wreck, something snuffled. The melted lump of a feed bin tipped. It was a racoon who peeked out at them from the shadowed corner, and then another set of eyes and another.

  “Oh, look, Stone, there are babies living in here, and they have their mother with them.” Her voice cracked when she said the word mother. “They must be happy inside here, they must like it to stay this way.”

  More engines roared by. Sun’s eyes got as big as plums. Stone and Sun froze. The racoons skittered backward, into whatever nest they’d made. But the sound of motorcycles didn’t pause or slow down. The barn was just another ruined building in a long row of worthless wrecks.

  Sun whispered, “Where are they going?”

  Stone was afraid to guess. “To find more places . . .” But he couldn’t finish the sentence. To find more places to burn, maybe, to find more people to hurt.

  They would need to be careful being this close to the big road, until they left their note and went back to Grandpa and Gabby.

  They stayed like the racoons, tucked away under the fallen stuff inside the burned-out barn. When the motorcycles came back, roaring and raging up and down the big road, Sun and Stone tucked in tighter to the ruins. At night, Stone snuck out to the pond to get water. They ate pemmican boiled into soup, careful to keep their fires small and smokeless. Grandpa Wayne had shown them how to dig a hole to build their fire in.

  Using a chunk of charcoal, they wrote on the un-blackened bit of concrete wall that had once made up the feed room:

  Dear Mommy and Daddy,

  We are not here. We are with Grandpa Wayne and the others at the big ranch in the middle of the woods. Find us. We love you. We will wait for you there.

  Your children, Stone and Sun

  The motorcycles patrolled back and forth, up and down, but Stone and Sun acted like the racoons, still and quiet in the day, busy and careful at night. Sun didn’t want to leave, just in case. In case they came back—Mom and Dad. It was hard to think about making Sun give up on her dream, his dream too. Besides, it would be hard to get back. That’s what Stone told himself—too many motorcycles during the day and at night campfires all along the road, in the woods.

  So, they kept up rearranging the bits of leftover garbage inside the barn, setting a half-burned slab of wood on the top of the rims of two big tractor tires.

  “We should sneak away. Tonight. We’ll be like the sneaking night time animals. We can do it.”

  Sun added a rainbow of hearts to the note on the wall. She had a smear of black charcoal on her cheek. It looked like war paint. Stone picked up another hunk of charcoal and drew another slash on her other cheek. Stone worried they’d be spotted by the motorcycle men, who seemed to be all around them. If only he knew what they wanted, what they would
do if they caught him and his sister.

  “The moon is all gone again.” She added a moon to the rainbow. “Tonight is good.”

  She was right. They were running out of Grandpa’s power bars and it was getting pretty boring eating the same thing over and over.

  Stone nodded, agreeing, and said, “Tonight. We’ll sneak away tonight.”

  And they tried.

  When they reached the edge of the property line to Grandpa’s the sky lit up in a blaze where the ranch should be. They could hear the faraway sounds of gunshots. Sun and Stone huddled next to a fallen tree trunk, ready to hide inside the hollow space if they had to. They jumped when an explosion made the ground under their hiding place tremble. The smell of burning stung their noses, coated the back of their throats. It was hard not to cough.

  “What is happening?” Sun scooted so close to Stone that he felt like she was trying to crawl inside his shirt.

  “War. I think it’s war.”

  Sun didn’t say anything.

  The wind shifted. Was that screaming? Was that the sound of screaming? He understood why Sun was so frightened. Where were they supposed to go now? What was happening to their friends?

  When the shooting stopped, and the fire burned toward their hiding place, they crawled on their hands and knees back the way they’d come.

  Like the little animals that snuck around unseen all night long, they crawled back to their barn. Sun fell asleep without asking him anything, saying anything. It bothered him a little bit. He was used to her chattering away at him.

  Stone kept an eye on the glow in the north, from the one grownup they knew. In the early morning it died out when a spring rain smashed down. The wind came first, flattening the long grasses and bending the tops of the trees over, and then the rain: big, fat, hard drops that stung their skin if it hit them. The surface of their pond rippled and pocked with the violence of the storm.

  Stone studied the gray blanket of raindrops from inside the barn. Through the shiver of the pouring water he saw them, figures quivering and shifting in the early morning light.

  They limped out of the rain, one at a time, Grandpa Wayne’s children. Stone yelled over the sound of thumping rain, “Sun, hurry. Something’s happened. Come here.” The bigger ones carried smaller ones. They stumbled through the mud hole, tripping over downed branches they couldn’t see. If they cried it was too hard to tell with the rain. Sun ran out to help the small ones into the dry spaces inside the barn.

  “Come on. Sit here. Come on.”

  There were only seven of them. When Stone asked about Gabby and Grandpa Wayne, they answered him with big staring eyes.

  One little boy said, “They can’t come. They won’t come. Only us.”

  “Who did this?” Stone asked. The boy jerked his shoulder at the question and then plopped a thumb in his mouth.

  Sun started trying to wipe the mud from their faces, but there wasn’t enough clean water, not for so many. The mud just smeared.

  “The bad men, they took . . . things.” The girl trembled when she talked about the bad men.

  Stone knelt in the black soot of the barn in front of the girl. “Tell me your name again.”

  “Molly. It’s Molly. But you can’t tell anyone. Please. If they know your name they know how to find you. They knew Grandpa’s name. They knew where he lived. And they yelled it, out loud and then, and then . . .” She fell back onto her bottom. Her tears made streaky lines through the black dirt.

  “Don’t make her sad, Stone.” Sun wrapped her arms around Molly. “Not anymore.”

  “Where’s Gabby?”

  None of the children would look Stone in the eyes. Their silence became worse than a curtain of rain. It was a black wall. No one answered him.

  “No, Stone. No,” Sun insisted.

  He nodded and thought about how much food nine children would need to eat that day.

  Stone promised Sun he wouldn’t go looking for Gabby or Rex or Grandpa, but he lied. What he found was bones scattered over the burned-out junkyard of the bunkhouse: dog bones, a dog’s skull, bigger bones, picked clean and bleached white under the mean, hot sun. But nothing he recognized as somebody. No sun-whitened skulls with a happy Halloween smile.

  That made it a little easier to breathe, but harder to be happy in a crazy, sad kind of way.

  On the way back to the Van Arsdale camp, Stone heard chickens. The twittering come-and-get-it cluck of a rooster to his hens: Here’ a lovely little worm for you to enjoy. Come and get it.

  Sometimes it was even true that the rooster had found something to eat. Stone started to push back the lower palmetto fronds. He’d find their nest. He knew where to look.

  Tens eggs and nine kids: today was going to be a good day. He pulled his undershirt out, stretching it with both hands, so he could nest the eggs in the soft T-shirt material. He carried them like precious treasure against his empty belly back to the children at the barn camp.

  She was waiting for him next to the edge of the field where the tufts of wild broom sage formed a maze. She sat on a bent bucket with a rusted hole in the bottom. They carried whatever they could find to eat in it. Sun sat with her hands folded in her lap, as if he was coming home from school or a playdate. Sometimes it freaked him out she acted so much older than she was.

  “Stone, I need to talk to you,” she said, not asking him why he’d been gone so long or why he hadn’t taken a battle buddy. “I want to change my name.”

  “Hey. Look here. I found eggs and there are chickens, so maybe we can keep them closer and always have eggs like we did at the bunkhouse.” He peeled back the edge of his shirt, but she didn’t seem to care. “Get up. I need that bucket.”

  Automatically, she stood up and let him put the eggs in the part of the bucket without the hole.

  “Stone, I need to change my name.”

  “But, Sun, your name is fine.”

  She shook her head. “No. The other kids were talking about what Grandpa said, that all this burning and crashing and not knowing is because the sun made a storm. That’s my name. Sun. The sun did this to us and now we’re waiting here in this messy, hungry place for . . . and they aren’t coming back. They aren’t.”

  They both knew who she meant, but they were careful not to say their names anymore, not out loud. It was too sad and felt like a jinx.

  “I want a new name. Not Sun. I hate what the sun did to us.”

  The wind blew back her shaggy black hair. It was dirty. She was dirty.

  Stone was careful to carry the bucket tipped to one side, so the eggs didn’t roll out of the hole.

  Sun put her fists on her hips and got that stubborn grouchiness in her face that meant trouble. Okay. Change your name. What difference would it make?

  He shrugged. He was hungry, and she looked pretty determined. “Okay, Sun, I mean whoever you are now? What should I call you? Miss Princess?”

  “No. That’s silly.”

  “Then what?”

  “Moss!”

  “Moss. What? Why? Moss! What kind of a name is that?”

  “Soft. It’s a soft kind of thing, and I like it. You have to call me Moss, and I’ll call you—”

  “Stone. I like my name fine. You be soft. And I’ll be Stone like always.”

  “Okay, Stone.”

  She helped him keep the bucket tipped just right to protect the eggs as they hurried back to their home.