The Pricker Boy

by Reade Scott Whinnem

  “Well, before I left for the summer, my mother said to me that if they had one more fight, she was going to leave him for good. Then a few weeks after I got here, I called them, and I heard it start, right over the phone. My mom started laughing, and she said to me, ‘Well, honey, this is it.’”

  Robin pauses for a moment, and I notice that Nana and the Cricket aren’t paying attention. She has started teasing him with a noodle, trying to stick it in his ear.

  “When I got off the phone, I went down to the water, and then Pete found me. He didn’t say much, just that things weren’t great with his own parents. But he was really sweet and patient and spent the whole afternoon with me, listening.”

  Nana gets the noodle in the Cricket’s ear. He laughs, then sits up straight. He growls like Frankenstein. He reaches up with a supposedly undead hand and pulls the bit of noodle brain from his ear. He looks at it, growls at it, then eats it.

  Robin continues. “I know about his bad side, but when he was good, no one was better. I miss him.”

  “Oh please. You spend two months out of the year here, if that. He’s my best friend year-round. Don’t go getting all dramatic on me.”

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” she snaps. “I’m not good enough for you and your pond and your woods because I’m only here in the summer.”

  “You only come when it’s warm,” I say dismissively. “Try coming when the wind whips over the ice and cuts through your coat even when you’re all the way out at Whale’s Jaw.”

  “So I’m not as strong as big bad Stucks? Maybe I shouldn’t even go tomorrow then.”

  “I don’t want you to go anyway.”

  Robin shakes her head. “You’re such a jerk.”

  My mother and father exchange a look. Another awkward silence settles on the table, and this time I’m the one to break it. “Are Mr. and Mrs. Morgan going to get divorced?” I ask.

  My father clears his throat. “We don’t talk with the Morgans about their personal problems. We’re not their therapists.”

  “I know, but I was just wondering—”

  My mother interrupts me. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “I think we’ve tried that a few times,” I say. “Without much luck.”

  Now it’s my mother’s voice that gets sharp, which is a rare thing that always throws me off guard. “Well, then you start us off. You’re planning a trip out into the woods tomorrow. Looking to get a good case of poison ivy?”

  “Yeah, sure, Mom,” I say, turning my eyes to my plate and ignoring the satisfied smile on Robin’s face.

  “Just be careful. You know what poison ivy looks like. Remember when you were little and you got into some? You had it on your arms and your legs and your stomach, even your—”

  “Yeah, Mom, we get the point.”

  My father chimes in. “You’re a bit too old to have your mother putting calamine on your bottom.”

  Robin laughs so hard that she coughs out a bit of chop suey.

  “How you got it there I’ll never know,” my mother says.

  “Could we please stop talking about poison ivy and calamine and my bare ass?”

  “Calamine is crap,” Nana tells the Cricket. “I can make him a mint balm that would do the trick. And, he’d smell all minty and fresh, which would be nice for the rest of us.” The Cricket can barely hold in his laughter.

  Luckily, my dad comes to my rescue. “I remember my first case of poison ivy. Remember, Ma? I didn’t know what the plant looked like. Bill told me that the leaves would give me magical powers, so I let him rub a little on my back. Little did I know that he was spelling out the word ‘nitwit’ in broad letters across my shoulder blades. Ma, why didn’t Bill get in trouble for that?”

  “Because it was funny,” Nana replies.

  “I guess it was.”

  “And it taught you good lessons. Watch out for poison ivy. And watch out for Bill, I suppose.”

  “How old were you?” I ask.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Let’s see.… Bill was probably nine, so that would make me seven.”

  “My father did that to a seven-year-old?” Robin asks. “That’s so cruel!”

  “You don’t understand boys,” my father tells her. “They’re rough-and-tumble. They just do things like that. You’ll understand someday when you have boys of your own. Boys like running around and playing games and exploring the woods.” My father smiles as if the wondrous days of his youth are flooding back to him. But I see my mother and Robin bristle. He doesn’t realize that he just stepped smack-dab into a tar pit that will gum him up for the remainder of the evening.

  “Uncle Stan!” Robin barks. “Girls like to do those things too!”

  “Sometimes I just cannot believe that I married this man,” my mother says, her hand slapping her forehead.

  “I was just saying …,” Dad starts, desperately searching for an explanation to retreat to. “I was just saying that boys, generally speaking now, not all boys mind you, I mean, not all girls don’t, but more boys like the woods than girls do. Just generally.”

  “Right,” my mother says. “Girls, you see, like to play with dolls and have tea parties.”

  “Well, more so than boys, yes,” my father says sheepishly.

  “Uncle Stan!” Robin says.

  I smile. I love my family’s hunger for debate. This argument could carry us safely through the end of the meal and across dessert, and surely my father will still be trying to defend himself as the dishes are drying in the rack.

  Nana blinks her eyes and looks up and down the table. “Where’s the Morgan boy?” she asks again.

  We all stand together for a moment next to the Widow’s Stone, the sentinel that marks the boundary between our land and the land that belongs to our spiked bogeyman. Before us, nets of intertwining thorns stretch off into the distance, broken only by the occasional stone wall or lonely tree. Our first destination, the Hawthorns, looms ahead. Their dying branches reach up toward the sky with open, brittle fingers. Their roots tangle in the dirt with those of the pricker bushes. Between us and the Hawthorns, a ragged path cuts through the brush.

  Emily takes the lead. As she goes, she plucks at the long thorn branches that loop across the path, passing them back to the next person, who in turn passes them to the next. I look around at the thorns. They really do seem endless.

  The Hawthorns are like three old women, frail and barely breathing. Ancient and silent, the trees have never borne many leaves, but they sprout just enough to stay alive each spring. Parts of them are rotted, just waiting for the next hurricane to come along and shake the dead pieces to the ground. Other parts are clearly alive, flowing sap, but slowly, as if asleep. Each tree is covered with three-inch spikes. The Hawthorns sit about twenty feet from each other, and if you were to draw lines between them they would form a perfect triangle. In the middle of the triangle sits a granite boulder, about waist high with a flat top.

  Vivek touches a spike on one of the trees, then immediately jerks his hand away. “Sharp as they look,” he says, shaking his hand in the air.

  “Hawthorns are sometimes called witch trees,” Ronnie states. “In folklore, it was believed that hawthorns were witches that had turned themselves into trees. And … uh …”

  “Yes?” I prod him, already knowing the rest.

  “Well, according to what I’ve heard …”

  Emily breaks in. “According to legend, if you find several of them growing together, it’s best to stay far, far away. It’s said that only carnivorous insects will fertilize the flowers, and because of that, the flowers smell of death and murder.” She reaches out and plucks a clump of small red berries from the branches. “The fruit are called thorn apples and are believed to be poisonous. In one story, a mother applied the juice of the apples to her nipples to kill an unwanted baby.”

  “That’s ghastly,” Robin says. “Are you making this up? Because if you are, you can stop now.”

  “She’s not making it up,” I say. �
�And if you knew a flower from a fungus, you might know about hawthorns too.”

  Vivek bursts out laughing. “‘A flower from a fungus?’ You sound like you were raised in Munchkinland.”

  Emily clears her throat. “The fruit and the sap of the tree were supposedly used in witches’ potions. The tree is also very unlucky. You should never, ever bring a sprig or flower of the hawthorn into your home. To do so will bring death to a family member. And the trees are said to attract fairies. Those fairies get very upset if the tree is harmed in any way and will bring sickness to the house of the offender.” She studies the hawthorn berries in her hand for a minute, then absently tosses the pieces to the ground. Ronnie stares down at them fearfully.

  Vivek is walking around the boulder inside the triangle. He gasps. “Oh boy! Something scary! I mean, something scarier than Emily!” He jumps back from the stone.

  I move around to where he is standing, and what I see makes me feel icy cold inside. Two words have been scratched into the back side of the stone: I’M SORRY.

  “I don’t like talking stones,” Vivek whimpers.

  Ronnie crouches down next to the boulder. He reaches his hand toward the letters but quickly pulls it back before his fingers reach the stone. His other hand closes around his wrist, covering his scar. “Looks like it was carved by a rock or a piece of metal. Who would have done this? And why?”

  “That’s what I want to find out,” I say.

  “Is this some joke?” Robin asks, directing her words right at me. “If so, then you’re sicker than I thought.”

  I shake my head. “Oh for crying out loud.”

  “Well, look, Stucks, who did that? Who wrote that? This might be your idea of fun, but I don’t like being scared. I—”

  “The universe doesn’t revolve around you, Robin!” Her face goes a little pale, and I resist the urge to add, “I told you that you couldn’t hack it out here.”

  “All I’m saying—”

  “Is that you’re a baby! So go back to the house! I don’t care.”

  “Nobody’s going back,” Emily says calmly. She steps between us, facing me. “We agreed to do this together, remember?”

  “Stucks, you make me want to puke,” Robin says.

  “I’ll hold your hair back for you!” Vivek shouts. We all laugh. Even me, even Robin. The color comes back into her face. “Onward,” Emily says. She steps toward the path on the other side of the Hawthorns. She picks through the thorny branches carefully, handing them back to Vivek, who hands them to my cousin, who then hands them to me. I hand them off to Ronnie.

  I hear Ronnie curse. I look behind. One of the thorn branches has caught Ronnie’s left arm, dragging a ragged cut. Tiny bits of blood form, and one drop falls and hits the ground. He looks up at me.

  “Not me,” he says. “Why did I have to be the first one cut?” He covers his cut with his free hand, then scuffs with his shoe at the spot on the ground where he had seen the blood fall. “I don’t want it to be me, not my blood.” His foot works furiously, trying to dilute the spot of blood with leaves and dirt.

  “Don’t you start,” I say. “We’re all together. Nothing’s going to happen to you. And look.” I show him a scratch on my own arm. “I got cut too. We’ll all get cut a dozen times before we’re out of here. Don’t sweat it.”

  “But that’s my blood on the ground,” he pleads.

  “So he’ll get you first,” I say. I’m joking. Kind of. Part of me wants to see the expression on his face, and he doesn’t disappoint.

  “Me first? But I don’t wanna be first.”

  He’s so pathetic I have to fight the urge to laugh. But I’ve tortured him enough. “Okay, we do it like we did as kids. If you think he’s after you, then you leave, I dunno, your favorite comb in the Hawthorns. And then he goes away. Widow’s walk. Simple, right?”

  Ronnie nods. “Okay. But I don’t like this, Stucks. I don’t like the way my story is turning out.”

  The farther we get from the Hawthorns, the thicker the thorns get. As they get thicker, they have more opportunity to do their work. Emily and I are wearing jeans, so we’re more protected than the others. Ronnie is wearing long pants, but he can’t keep them clean, and he’ll catch hell from his grandfather when he gets home. Robin and Vivek are wearing shorts. They both get cut quite a bit.

  We’re all having a tough time, but Robin thinks that she’s having the worst of it, I can tell. I see her sweating. I’m sweating too, but she’s sweating more. I think it’s stinging her eyes. She’s the only one who winces when her skin gets hit by a thorn. And she keeps looking around as if she expects something to dive out of the woods at her. I look around too, but not because she’s looking around. I just want to see what there is to see. I’m not scared.

  We’ve been walking for about a half hour when the path begins to slope downward. When it levels off, the ground becomes muddy. Pools of still water dot our path. As we approach the puddles, slippery things—things that will one day be frogs when their legs form—flip and skitter to hide in the moist leaves.

  The path begins to rise again, but not before it is blocked by a large, still puddle. It is only eight feet across, but it stretches into the thorns on either side of the path like a long, dark worm. I look down into it to see how deep it is, but the water is as black as oil, and all I see is the reflection of the tops of the trees and the sky above.

  “I’m not stepping into that,” Ronnie says. “No way.”

  “Yes, you will,” I say.

  “It’s disgusting. You don’t even know what might be in there—leeches or snails or worms. No way.”

  My hand snaps forward and grabs him by the wrist. I yank him toward the puddle. The action is so quick that I even startle myself.

  “Hey!” Vivek shouts.

  But it’s already too late. Ronnie’s foot has sunk shin-deep into the muck. Emily grabs me and pulls me away from him. My heart is thumping quickly.

  “What are you doing?” she whispers to me, then steps forward into the puddle alongside Ronnie. She takes his wrist. He pulls away. It occurs to me that I grabbed the scarred one.

  “Why did you do that?” Ronnie asks me. Sniffling, he makes his way across the puddle. Emily stays with him until he reaches the other side. Ronnie’s pants are covered with black mud halfway to his knees.

  Emily slogs back through the puddle. She helps Vivek and Robin through, then comes out again on my side. Her jeans, like Ronnie’s pants, are thick with slime. I move forward toward the water, but she places her hand on my chest. “That’s not going to happen again,” she says quietly.

  “It got him across, didn’t it?” I say. I try to push past her, but her hold on me is surprisingly strong.

  “That’s not going to happen again,” she repeats, looking me directly in the eye.

  “You’re in charge now?”

  “If I have to be,” she says, then releases me.

  As I turn away from her and step into the puddle, I swear that I smell cigarette smoke from somewhere nearby.

  * * *

  “I think we’ve been going through poison ivy,” Robin says.

  “Cousin, you wouldn’t know poison ivy if your own name was written on the leaves,” I tell her.

  “Okay, Mr. Woodsman, how about I pick some and use it to write the word ‘ignoramus’ on your back? Then we’ll see if it’s poison ivy or not, huh?” She begins searching the ground for vines and mumbling something about following in her father’s footsteps.

  “Can you even spell ‘ignoramus’?” I ask her.

  “She could probably miss a letter or two and still get her point across,” Vivek offers.

  “Has anybody thought that maybe it’s time we went home?” Ronnie says timidly, avoiding eye contact with me. “I missed lunch, and I didn’t tell my grandpa that I would miss lunch, and when he sees me like this I’ll be lucky if he lets me out of the house again all summer.”

  “We haven’t seen any ‘boulders larger than Whale’s Jaw,�
��” Emily states.

  “See?” Ronnie says to the rest of us.

  “I’m not agreeing with you, Ronnie. I’m saying that, geologically speaking—”

  Vivek stops her. “Emily? Dumb-guy language, please.”

  “You’re not as dumb as you pretend to be,” Emily responds. “But I’ll play along. Whale’s Jaw was dropped in these woods over ten thousand years ago by a receding glacier. It’s called a glacial erratic. And we’ve been looking for more glacial erratics—boulders larger than Whale’s Jaw—since we left.”

  “Whether you believe it or not, I’m too dumb to look for glacial erratics,” Vivek says. “I’ve just been looking for ‘big rocks.’”

  “The point is that it’s strange, very strange, that we haven’t seen any. Whale’s Jaw wouldn’t be out here all on its own. And according to Ronnie, the Pricker Boy’s stone pit is marked by other erratics. But so far there are none.”

  “Still, it’s getting late,” Ronnie says.

  “I’ll go back with you, Ronnie,” Robin offers, trying to be oh-so-pleasant, though I think it’s just an excuse.

  “We’re not going to split up now,” Emily says. “We’ll take a vote.”

  Robin sighs. “I’ll admit it. I want to go back.” She wipes sweat from her brow and swats at a mosquito that’s buzzing by her ear.

  “I was hoping we’d see something by now,” Vivek says. “Clouds of bloodsucking bats. The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Godzilla. Ronnie’s grandfather in a black cape. Something scary. I’d hate to turn back now without something to show for it.”

  “We could just come back tomorrow,” Robin offers.

  “If we come back tomorrow, we’ll have to fight through all that again,” I say. “We need to keep going.”

  All eyes turn to Emily. She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a handful of red pistachios. She begins cracking them and tossing them into her mouth. Very quickly her fingertips begin to turn red. “Well,” she starts, and then pauses, looking up at the trees and tossing pistachio shells into the bushes. “I’m still interested. If for nothing else than to find an explanation for what we haven’t found.”