by Karen Hesse
Celia smiles.
We go outside then and eat the tomatoes greedily, noisily. They taste like candy. We chew the delicate meat, our eyes half closed with pleasure.
My parents have always grown tomatoes. I remember being so little and carrying them in from the garden; how proud I was to help. I remember the sun’s warmth lingering inside the firm red globes.
Nothing ever tasted as good as those tomatoes warm from my parents’ garden.
These come a close second though.
“I’m thinking I might catch some fish,” I tell Celia, examining the pole and hooks left this morning by Our Lady of the Barn. “Want to come?”
“Nope.”
I stand there, unwilling to drop the matter. “Won’t you please come?”
“Nope,” Celia says again.
“I need you to come, Celia. I don’t know how to do it.”
Celia gives me a scathing look. “You put a worm on the hook, you put the hook in the water. It’s pretty easy.”
“But I don’t know what to do with the fish once it’s caught. I don’t know how to clean it or anything.”
Celia says, “If you catch a fish, bring it to me. I’ll take care of it.”
So I become a fisherman.
I sit for hours between bites. I like that. I went fishing with my grandfather when I was little. He didn’t keep anything he caught. He told me he just liked being outside.
When a fish took his bait, he’d reel it in, gently unhook it, talking calmly to it the whole time, and then, as carefully as possible, he’d place it back in the water. I hated that he died before I really got to know him. But I’m glad he didn’t live to see the country turn on itself like it has.
I don’t release my catch the way my grandfather did, but I do talk to it.
When I get the fish back to the schoolhouse, Celia guts it and cooks it over our small fire.
I thought boiled eggs tasted pretty great but fresh fish is even better.
Celia licks her fingers, one at a time.
I give myself permission to build a slightly larger fire the next time and we char the fish I’ve caught.
Blowing gently on the twigs, I watch their tips light up like cigarette ends.
“Do you know the story of your birth?” Celia asks.
I am surprised by the question. It’s more a middle-of-the-night question than a dinner question, but I nod.
“Tell me,” Celia says.
“There was a snowstorm,” I say. “The midwife’s car went off the road on her way to our house. A stranger picked her up, gave her a lift, and watched my mother give birth to me.” Celia shakes her head in wonder.
“The most amazing part of the story is that after the midwife left, my mother, with me in her arms, rose from her bed and looked out the window over the fresh snow. The way she tells it, the storm had passed and the sky was the color of sapphires. As my mother watched, a hawk dropped from that immense blueness and caught an unsuspecting jay in midair. The windows, closed against the cold, couldn’t possibly have let the sound in and yet my mother heard the death scream of the blue jay. On the day I was born.”
Celia shudders.
“And you?” I ask. “Do you know the story of your birth?”
“My mother, when her labor started, told my father that she needed to go to the hospital. He didn’t believe her so she drove herself. She gave birth to me outside the emergency room. The nurses on duty that day still tease me about it.”
Celia is silent for a moment. “It’s the best story I’ve got, Radley, and yours is still better.”
“This isn’t a competition, Celia.”
“I know,” Celia says.
A piece of fish drops onto the stone in our fire pit. “It’s yours,” I say.
Celia deftly plucks up the delicate flesh with her fingers and eats it without letting it cool.
“Ow.”
“Burn your tongue?” I ask.
Celia nods. “Why are you smiling?”
“Remember when you didn’t think we could make a fire hot enough to boil an egg?”
Daylight enters at a new angle on the schoolhouse floor. A few leaves change color. It grows cooler at night.
Though winter is still many months away, I worry how we can possibly last here in this unheated, ramshackle schoolhouse.
In the afternoon I wander into an overgrown orchard. Apples, small and hard, adorn the boughs.
I lie down under the trees on a mattress of grass, remembering picking apples last fall with my parents, and drift into a blissful sleep.
When I wake the sun is low in the sky.
Celia sits on the schoolhouse step, waiting. It is fully dark by the time I catch sight of her. The sky winks with stars.
“I was worried,” she says.
“I’m sorry,” I answer.
“Where were you?”
“I fell asleep in an apple orchard.”
Celia rises, rubbing her back, stiff from sitting so long. She huffs inside the schoolhouse.
She’s angry.
But I’m not certain if she’s angrier at me or at herself.
We receive a box of matches and a single candle from our benefactress. My matches were running low. I’m relieved to see these.
We don’t dare light the candle at night. If we light it at all it’s only for a few moments, before daylight is entirely gone, before the candlelight would be visible from our windows.
We light the candle because it brings us peace, even as it uses up a precious match. We lean into the light, cup its warmth in our palms, then blow it out before the sky grows any darker.
When hunting season begins we won’t dare light it at all.
At night we pick a room in our old homes and describe it. My house is large, larger than any place Celia has ever lived. I have more rooms to describe. But Celia has lived in more places, and she remembers more in each room. This, too, she teaches me.
I tell her about the spinning wheel and my plan to start using it when I get back home.
“You really think it’ll still be there?” she asks.
“Why shouldn’t it be? I locked the house when I left.”
“Yeah, it’s all probably fine,” Celia says.
“You think someone’s going to break in and steal a spinning wheel? Really? Who would do that?”
“No one, I guess. But who knows. Maybe you won’t even want that stuff when you get home.”
I start to argue with her, but then, when I think about it, when I think of how little we actually need here at the schoolhouse, when I think about how the children at Paradis des Enfants manage with so little, I realize Celia’s probably right.
“Celia, you’re so smart,” I say.
It’s too dark to see her but I hear her. I hear the sound of her smile.
We’re eating our way through a bucket of wild blueberries and I’m thinking about the children’s librarian in Brattleboro and the summer I volunteered up on the second floor, shelving books, helping with story time, filing.
I tell Celia about the librarian … how she was in charge of the entire floor.
“I remember she loved books about dogs. And wombats. And pigs. But what I most remember about her is that she baked chocolate brownies for the staff every now and then. They were the kind of brownies where the chocolate sticks to your teeth. You know that kind?”
Celia nods.
“They were so good, Celia. Better than any brownies I ever tasted. I mean it. Those brownies made me so happy. I’d give my life if I could have a plate of those brownies right now.”
Celia’s tongue is stained purple. She scrapes blueberry goo out from under her fingernails. “Your life? Really? You wouldn’t give your life, Radley.”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes. I would.”
Celia looks long at me. “And never see your parents again?”
“My mother would understand. It’s a chocolate thing.”
Celia snorts.
But I’m still thinkin
g about that librarian. I wonder how she’s doing through all of this.
“How did you ever manage to talk your parents into letting you go to Haiti?”
The days have grown hot again and tonight the insects sing outside the schoolhouse. Celia and I sweat on top of our blankets.
“Well, when I first proposed spending time in an impoverished, earthquake-devastated country, I expected my parents to shoot the idea down. I never thought they’d say yes.
“But Mom said, ‘Of course you should go.’
“My dad wasn’t crazy about the idea. He was more concerned that I finish the school year.
“But my mom said, ‘She’ll learn more in Haiti than she’ll learn here.’
“Dad argued that there were already too many half-educated people in the world. That our family didn’t need to contribute to the problem.”
I tell Celia Dad thinks that’s the way the APPs got so far in such a short time.
“He says a poorly educated populace makes bad choices in the voting booth. Dad says the earthquake in Haiti wouldn’t have been nearly so bad if all the houses had been built right. But the houses weren’t built right because there was no standard. And there was no standard because the people were undereducated. Dad says that’s where we’re heading in the U.S., too.”
Celia says, “Is that what it’s like in your house all the time? Do you guys, like, always go on and on like that?”
“Pretty much,” I say.
“No wonder you wanted to get out of town,” Celia says.
“Yeah, I guess.”
“So, what happened? About going to Haiti, I mean.”
I turn to Celia. “Do you really want to hear all this?”
Celia nods. I can see her wild-haired silhouette in the starlight.
“Okay. Well, in the end my mom convinced my dad and I didn’t have to do a thing. They found the orphanage, bought my ticket, made things right at school. They shipped everything I needed ahead so I wouldn’t have to carry too much. I just threw a few things in my backpack…”
“The same backpack you’re using now?” Celia asks.
“Yup. Same one. Anyway, the last night I spent with my parents, we were in the kitchen making dinner together. My father said, ‘It’s good you’re getting out while you can, Rad. Maybe you should stay in Haiti.’”
“It was always like that. If Mom was for something, Dad was against it. Then Dad would be persuaded that Mom was right. But the next thing you knew, Mom had changed her mind.”
Celia laughs.
“There were times they drove me crazy…”
“I can see why.”
“Mom made butter beans that last night. You like butter beans, Ceil?”
“I’m not sure I’ve ever eaten them,” she answers, but her response comes out slowly, as if she’s getting sleepy.
“They’re good. Big, fat white beans. I’ll make butter bean salad someday for you when you come to visit. Anyway, that night at the table I told my parents I thought the APPs were a bunch of idiots.
“‘No,’ my father said. ‘Don’t underestimate them, Radley.’ Dad said maybe the APPs didn’t know history, maybe they didn’t know the Constitution. But they knew how to twist the truth. He just hoped whatever they did during their administration wasn’t irreversible.”
Celia sighs beside me. “Some things aren’t reversible.” Her voice has that slurry sound to it and I know she’s drifting off.
“Good night, Ceil,” I say.
“Night,” she answers softly.
Celia sleeps, but my mind won’t shut down. It startled me that night to hear my dad admit the government could do something that couldn’t be undone, that couldn’t be fixed.
Nothing surprises me anymore.
I listen to Celia, safe for the moment, rocking in the dark hammock of sleep. I’m glad for her, but the steady puff of her breath makes me feel even lonelier.
I bathe in the brook, using my ribbed undershirt as a washcloth, scrubbing my shirt and myself at the same time.
I get Celia to come down and bathe, too. But she’s gotten surprisingly modest in the last few weeks. Maybe because I’m always ragging her about how thin she is. With her back to me, I can see each knobby bone of her spine. But I bite my tongue and say nothing.
After our baths we look better, smell better, feel better.
“You sure you don’t have a boyfriend?” Celia asks as we warm up, sitting on the schoolhouse step in the sun.
I shake my head no. I’ve already told her I don’t.
“Who’s the boy in the photograph, then?”
I fetch my mother’s pictures and sort through them. It’s mostly food and scenery and chickens. Not too many people.
“This guy?”
Celia nods.
I have to think a moment to remember who he is. “It’s a portrait of a boy from Burundi. He lived across the street from us. That whole house was filled with international students. I wonder what all of this has done to them.”
I study along with Celia my mother’s portrait of the boy. I remember his name. Julian. Julian in his neatly pressed blue shirt, his head cocked slightly at the camera.
I remember the afternoon last summer when he and I sat on my porch steps and talked.
“He’s very beautiful,” I tell Celia. “And very brave. I think he witnessed horrible things in Burundi. But he never talked about it. I can’t imagine what the last few months have been like for him.”
Celia holds the picture in her hand.
“You like him?” I ask.
She shrugs. “He’s not bad.”
“Um-hmm,” I say.
Celia rolls her eyes, hands back the photograph, and heads inside the schoolhouse. But not before I see the smile play across her lips.
I must be going out of my mind, because they are dirty and stupid and they smell nasty, but I can sit and watch Ashley and Wynonna for hours.
Celia won’t admit it, but she likes watching them, too.
I’ll come home from my forays to find Jerry Lee, his paws crossed, his chin resting on his elegant legs, his eyes shifting alertly from one chicken to the other. When I point him out to Celia, she grins and nods.
The feathery shuffling of the chickens lulls us to sleep at night and wakes us in the morning.
Of all the gifts from Our Lady of the Barn it is the chickens for which I am most grateful.
We wake in the morning to rain slamming against the roof. We’ve had rain before but never this hard.
“Let’s shift things around to keep what we’ve got dry,” I tell Celia.
After we’ve rearranged the schoolhouse, we climb into our bed of fresh grass and cattails and pull up our blanket. Celia lays her head beside my shoulder. We nap like that most of the day with the drumming rain singing a lullaby to us in its watery voice. I dream of my mother. She is sitting on the side of the bed. She smells of wildflowers and sunlight.
In the late afternoon the storm clears. We sit on the schoolhouse step. The woods around us shimmer with green and mist and raindrops.
“How long were you in Haiti?” Celia asks.
“I left Brattleboro shortly before the inauguration. And came back to the States right after the assassination. It was so strange being in Haiti through all of that. We didn’t have a radio. There was a television but we never had power for more than an hour a day. Mostly, news came off the street. It wasn’t reliable.”
“It wasn’t reliable in the U.S., either,” Celia says.
“What did you think of her?” I ask
“Who?”
“The president,” I say.
Celia shrugs. “The president? I didn’t really care.”
“My parents hated her, and her party. Remember how I said my parents weren’t judgmental? Well, they were when it came to the APPs.”
Celia says, “I didn’t pay attention to any of it. I’m not even signed up to vote.”
“I wish I’d been old enough to vote.”
“W
ould it have made a difference?” Celia asks.
I sigh. “Probably not. But I still wish I had the choice. You should register for the next election, Celia. If there ever is a next election.”
Celia throws off the blanket. “Maybe I will. But right now I’m hungry. Do we have anything to eat in this house?”
“No,” I say.
Celia sighs. “I knew that.”
Celia and I play a game. One of us picks a date—month, day, year—and the other must tell the story of that day.
“January 7, 2009,” I say.
Celia invents the clothes she wore that day, the food she ate, the things she did, the people she saw, the conversations she had.
It’s like writing a story. We gather the crumbs of memories, then stretch the truth until it’s no longer recognizable.
Celia is far better at this game than I am.
I hear geese honking overhead. Surely it’s too early for geese to be migrating south.
Stepping down into the chicken room, I rest my filthy face in my filthy hands. I feel the bone of my spine against the dirt floor.
The sound of the geese overhead, reaching me through the shoddy roof, fills me with despair. In autumn that honking always meant Thanksgiving, the house filling with aromas that dragged me to the kitchen; the sound of geese meant family, the sound of geese meant home.
Home.
Celia finds me sitting on the dirt floor with the chickens. Ashley has flapped into my lap and I stroke her as if she were a cat.
“Radley,” Celia says, “you think too much. Soon this will be over. It’ll be just a weird memory for you. Nothing more. Your life’ll go back to normal in no time. Quit feeling sorry for yourself. If you want to feel sorry for someone, you should feel sorry for the APPs.”
I stare at her, dumbfounded. “Why should I feel sorry for them?”
“Because, Radley, they have to live with what they did for the rest of their lives,” Celia says.
