“I killed off the cutworms in the rose bed this morning.” After another pause, he said, “Supposed to be a meteor shower tonight,” he told me, as if the worst thing that happened all day was battling cutworms and waiting for the sky to fall. “I got my telescope stationed right behind my reading chair.”
I knew that was true. He had been reading poetry for two weeks straight. I knew he would station himself right in that reading chair saying out loud every line of poetry, one eye on the sky.
I felt more tender than usual. I had felt a good cry coming on and now it seemed to be welling up and spilling over. Each day, after being invited back into the Miller’s lives, I grew more relaxed, but also more prone to feel like a great lake was about to break loose its banks inside of me. After Billy and I had pulled up to the ice cream diner and saw those awful Billings brothers grabbing Ratonda, I had no more reserves left for constraint. “I don’t know what to say,” I said, my lip quivering in a way that embarrassed me to pieces.
“Maybe you need a woman’s ear,” said Theo. He must have read me as well as he did poetry for he patted my head gingerly and then went inside. “Dorothea, Little Sister needs your company,” he called out.
Dorothea appeared right away, sitting in a chair next to me, finally able to enjoy her dip cone. She sat placid yet expectant.
I dabbed my mouth with a Twistee Treat napkin. Then I said, “I noticed people tend to spill their guts to the both of you, so that’s why I never like to say much. You carry too many peoples’ problems on your shoulders.”
“Everybody needs someone to listen to them,” said Dorothea, her usual sympathetic self.
I agreed, but tonight was not the night. “Later, Miss Dorothea, after Ratonda’s had a chance to get herself together.”
“If not us, then you need to find someone you trust,” said Dorothea.
“I trust you,” I said, not intending that she would believe otherwise. “What I meant was that so many people burden you, no regard for what you’re going through.”
“We roll it off so it doesn’t set up housekeeping in us,” said Dorothea, not aware of the hard chocolate sliver stuck at the corner of her mouth.
I re-crossed my legs and settled back against the chair. “Why do I always feel like I’m about to cry when I sit here?” I listened to the quiet of crickets and the little girls laughing inside while waiting for Dorothea’s answer.
She sometimes gave one, but other times just waited for me to figure things out on my own. Finally Dorothea laughed. “It’s not really the chair.”
“I beg to differ,” said Reverend Theo coming through the door again. He was never one to sit back and let Dorothea take the floor for long.
“No more than those aunts laying hands on everyone heals them,” she said so defiantly Theo backed off.
I teared up and started talking but it felt as if I was off to the side listening, my words spilling out of me without any forethought. “I have no idea where my mother is or if she’s even alive. We’re awfully messed up, our family. I put it out of my thoughts, you know, until things turn bad.” I looked at Dorothea. “And things do seem to turn bad quite often. That’s when you need your mother around, you know?”
Dorothea did not look at me but down at the porch floor as if that would ease the pain spilling out of me.
“Vesta, she wanted to be my mother. I do believe that.”
Dorothea sat quietly.
“I’m not the daughter to Vesta that Siobhan was.”
“You are the daughter she needs,” she said. “You are enough.”
After I said my good-nights to the Millers, I stood at the front of the sunflower forest looking down a row before heading home. A thin shower of meteors streaked overhead just like Reverend Theo said would happen. One trailed a long streaking comet tail, like a missile aimed straight into Lake Sequoia where the Johnsons moored their boat. I walked through the row allowing the leaves to wipe my face just as surely as Dorothea tried to wipe the tears from my past.
When I got home, there on my nightstand was the dance trophy, the top glued back in place. A pink note card lay next to it, so I picked it up and read it. Vesta was apologizing for accusing me of breaking it.
I tucked the note into Siobhan’s special box that lay under her bed. I had been hiding the box from Vesta so she would not keep finding things that made her cry. I decided to place it back on the closet shelf where Siobhan had left it. I pulled the chair next to the closet, putting the special box back onto the shelf. When I stepped down, Vesta waited in the doorway.“I’m getting help,” she said. “For my issues.”
I could tell by Vesta’s expression she was not kidding, but serious, her mouth a straight line.
“Issues?” I acted like I hadn’t noticed any.
Vesta said, “I should have done it sooner.”
Daddy came home late. He handed Vesta a bouquet of flowers he had bought off an uptown street vendor. Then he turned, addressing both of us. “My boss at the bank says my hours and benefits could be restored early as September.”
Vesta threw her arms around Daddy. I could hardly breathe for the joy in Daddy’s eyes. Vesta said, “I’m making late-night fudge.” Not planned or thought out, but the levity following Daddy into the house brought the long-awaited lightness of being into our souls.
I recalled the times I had crossed the sunflower garden only to find hope sucked into a crater when I crossed back into our yard. Tonight matters had changed, like old walls falling away and new ones dropping into place around us. Maybe I had to pass through the sunflowers a certain way or a special number of times for its faithfulness to sprinkle onto me. Maybe it was the meteor shower or even what I had confessed in the Story Chair.
Whatever had happened, I did not want to break the spell. Daddy had come back to me, to both of us. Happiness rose in his face, touching me in a manner so tangible I realized we had turned a corner.
I pulled the now-dehydrated cobalt vase from the window adorned by one of Theo’s sunflowers, holding it under the sink faucet and filling it with water again. I said so no one could hear, “We’re coming back to life.” Then, and not so anyone might comment and break the goodness that had finally rubbed off on me as I passed through the Miller’s garden and stepped into Periwinkle House, I whispered, “This is our first day out of hell.”
Chapter 8
I believed a nightmare so fully swallowed me up that I could not get away from a ghost moaning outside my window in the pre-dawn hour, a trembling wail that chased me back to a waking state. The moaning noise joined with a nightmare I was having about men in white robes hovering in the air over Theo’s sunflower garden. They had awful wings and buzzed like hornets. Then I woke up. I crawled out of bed, pulling back my curtains. The sun tinted the sky pink above a white-bread colored horizon.
The early light brightened only the tips of the sunflower petals, but cast enough light around the shape of a man for me to discern the dark figure slumped next to the garden. Coming fully awake, I yelled in horror at the sight. Stretching out in a perfect square, Reverend Theo’s sunflower garden was in flames. I could hear the snapping and the roar of the fire through my closed window. I slid into my cut-offs, and threw on a top. I was still pulling on my flip-flops as I hopped across the rear porch and down the steps to the lawn.
“Fire, Daddy, Vesta, get up! Fire!”
By the time I reached the blazing garden, Reverend Theo had fallen onto his knees, his brown weathered arms reaching to the sky. He moaned one moment and then threw back his head the next, wailing like a prisoner locked down in a dungeon.
He scared wits out of me when he would not answer me. “Where’s Dorothea?” I asked frantically, shaking his shoulders, and then fearing something bad had happened to her. I asked in a shaky voice, “Should I call an ambulance?” For I was imagining the Billings boys had set fire to the garden and broken into their home. They had sworn vengeance. I could attest to that.
That was when I spotted the empty fu
el can tossed on its side not ten feet from the garden.
The back screen door opened up and out stepped Dorothea, her face grim. She had eyes on her husband and a pained expression I had not ever seen on spritely Dorothea.
I tried helplessly to get Reverend Theo up on his feet when Dorothea reached us. “Did you see who set the fire?” I asked. “Have you called the fire department?
Dorothea dropped next to him taking up her own deep mournful moan. I backed away for fear was seizing me so badly I felt like something had knocked the wind out of me. The Millers seemed to be in some kind of trance.
Vesta and Daddy stepped off the back porch. Standing around the perimeters of the Miller’s yard, neighbors had come out due to the fire lighting up our neighborhood. They looked on as helplessly as I felt—HuiLin from next door, the neighbor boy rebuilding the muscle car, each neighbor, one after another, staring in a silent vigil distantly observing the preacher’s deep distress.
That was when a line of fire shot straight across our lawn and up the corner of our shed. Vesta screamed.
Daddy shouted for a bucket brigade. The men scurried into sheds and garages and ran toward the garden’s borders with water hoses and pails. Vesta showered the roof of the shed and then turned the hose on our house.
Dorothea, seeing the spectacle they were making, peeled a letter out of her husband’s clutched hands, the same hands that, only last night, comforted me. “Come on back to the house, darling,” she said, her voice quivering like the plucked strings of a harp.
The sirens roared onto Cotton Street. The fire truck pulled down our easement.
“Let’s get him out of here,” I said. I came up under Theo’s left arm and joined Dorothea walking the sobbing and distraught Theo Miller back inside to get us all away from the smoke and the spectators.
Once inside, Dorothea slid onto the floor. She slumped against a doorframe, finally letting go. She cried in a way that I had heard only once. I had heard that cry last summer coming night after night behind Vesta’s locked door. It was like the cry of grieving women you see on TV sitting around the cold ashes of an African fire pit.
I said, “I’ll tell the police everything about the Billings boys.” I was mad as a hornet imagining them sneaking into the Miller’s garden after dark and dousing it with kerosene. “I should have called the law on them in the first place. This never would have happened.”
“You can’t say any such thing,” said Dorothea. “It’s not about the Billings.” It took her another minute or two before she said, “It’s Anton. We got a letter this morning from the government. So did Ratonda. Anton was killed sometime last night, a roadside bombing in Laos. That’s all we know.” Dorothea sobbed and I put my arms around her, while she let go completely.
Reverend Theo disappeared, the last sound made being his reading room door closing.
“Theo was out of his mind with grief. That was Anton’s garden. He couldn’t bear sight of it. I tried to stop him.” She sobbed uncontrollably.
I got up and made coffee that no one drank, eggs that no one ate. But doing felt better than doing nothing. I watched out the window while the firefighters doused our shed and contained the fire. I still could not imagine Theo doing the deed. I half expected to wake up and find none of it had happened. I knew one thing for certain. Reverend Theo could not contain his grief. So he set fire to it.
* * * * *
They buried Lieutenant Anton Theodore Miller Friday in a military cemetery right outside Fort Bragg on a hill as pretty as the Miller’s gardens. Ratonda’s girls had tied bright dress-blue military ribbons around sunflower bouquets they tearfully dropped into their daddy’s grave.
Reverend Hildebrand, Dorothea’s aging daddy, officiated since Theo was too numb.
Dorothea insisted she would not have me stationed off distantly from them, saying, “You’re family.”
I stood behind the Millers in a respectful spot at the end of the row of cousins and pallbearers. I watched hoping Daddy and Vesta might gather among the handful of neighbors on the next hill. There stood HuiLin. My family never showed up. When I had brought it up over breakfast, Daddy hid behind his newspaper. Vesta took her coffee into the living room.
I had never met Anton Miller, but when the military gun salute went off, I cried so hard with Ratonda I ran out of tissues. I wept for Reverend Theo’s breaking heart and for Dorothea’s empty ache that left her staring out her kitchen window, no thought for cooking or making plans for family gatherings. Grief was like a cold dark spirit traveling down the street, each living soul glad it has passed on by his door. I was ready for the joker to get out of our neighborhood.
Standing behind Ratonda and the girls were cousins Whit and Calvin. I looked twice, thinking I was seeing things for behind Calvin stood two white men in dark suits. I assumed they were there to haul Calvin off again. But when the funeral ended, they followed Theo back to the family limousine. I tried to follow them, but the big white man calling himself a deputy told me, “Go on now, no fraternizing.”
Finally, the two of them left, but their eyes never left Theo.
I asked Ratonda, “What’s going on?”
Ratonda just held up a white-gloved hand to her own lips and mouthed, “I just can’t talk right now.”
I rode back home driven by Billy. He had stayed around to chauffer me back home again. He was the same old Billy again, avoiding talking about the awful things falling down around us. He got me laughing a bit. But when he pulled onto Cotton, a squad car was pulling out of our drive. It passed us on the way in.
I thanked Billy, but ran into the house.
I found Vesta working at her dressmaking, pinning the soft tissue paper pattern to a bolt of yellow fabric. “Oh, you’re back,” she said to me without taking her eyes off the sewing project. “Help me pin on this pattern.”
“Vesta, why were the cops here? What’s going on?”
Daddy held his newspaper up high, like he was holding up the Ten Commandments.
“We got a call from Winston Grooms. Funny, all of a sudden, he’s ready to talk to us,” said Veta, looking pleased. “After all this time.”
“About what?”
“Arson’s a crime.” Vesta looked up from her sewing.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Think what would have happened if you hadn’t have gotten us up. What if he had set Periwinkle House on fire? We all could have died, Flannery.”
My mind nearly evaporated right then and there. “It’s an old shed, Vesta. You called it an eyesore, admit it. We’ve been needing a new shed.”
“I lost three rose bushes. The whole back lawn is black as pitch. Stop defending him, Flannery. I’ve said all along the man was a menace. I was right, just like I knew I was.”
“What does Winston Grooms have to do with any of this?”
“He told me I could press charges. He said it was up to me.”
I recalled the deputy at the funeral. “And what? Have him arrested at his own son’s funeral?”
Daddy put down his paper. “I talked them out of that.”
“He sure did, Flannery. Your daddy said the family should be allowed to properly mourn. It was him who got the police to hold off.”
“I thought you’d come today,” I said, put out with her. “I looked for you. Now I know why you didn’t come.”
“I’m not ready for funerals yet, not ones where a child’s been taken. You should know that.”
I tore through the house and out the back door. I ran around the black charred landscape looking like the moon. I came up onto Theo’s porch. When I found the screen door latched, I ran around front. I stopped instantly, seeing Theo led out of his house. A cop had his hand on top of Theo’s head, guiding him into the back of the squad car.
Calvin led Ratonda and Dorothea out to the car. He glanced at me and then looked away as if I was the one who had Theo arrested.
When Vesta called me down for the evening meal, I said nothing but took supper up
in my room. First, the picture of Theo crumpled next to his garden flashed through my mind. Then just as quick, the memory of the cops leading him into the squad car like a dog haunted me.
When Vesta settled onto the sofa with Daddy to watch Andy and Barney, I reappeared making a loud show of washing up the dishes. Then I slipped out back, traipsing to the edge of the burned lawn. The Miller’s family and church friends had cleaned out the charred remains of the burned out sunflowers. Nothing remained but a big black square.
Ratonda opened the back door. I waved and she flagged me over. I followed her into the kitchen. “I sent Dorothea over to a friend’s house for coffee,” she told me. “Her pacing wasn’t doing any of us any good.” The bags under her eyes spoke of the sleepless nights she had endured the past twenty-four hours.
Since all of our incidents with the Billings brother, Ratonda and I had grown close. But tonight she acted like all that had passed between us was wiped away. She poured me a coffee, politely offering me some cookies.
“They can’t put Reverend Theo in jail, I said. It’s not right.”
“Winston Grooms has wanted his hands on the Miller’s property for years. Now he has his wild card.”
It was true, except I mistakenly thought he had given up circling their land like a vulture.
“I’m so ashamed. I didn’t know, you know, until after the funeral. I would have warned him.”
“We know it’s not your fault,” she said, still more polite than I would have liked.
“Is he in jail, actually in jail?” I asked, hoarse from yelling at Vesta.
“He’s locked himself in his bedroom,” said Ratonda, whispering. “Our church families all showed up and posted his bail. Same ones who bailed Calvin out. Dorothea says he’ll not be coming out today.” She thanked me for dropping in, but said, “I guess we’re sleeping over here again tonight. I’m going to bed early.”
“Sure, sure,” I said. I let myself out the back way.
I sat out on our back porch at sundown. Truth be told, I was feeling a bit sorry for myself, as if I had been relegated out of the Miller’s lives entirely and this time, for good.
Tiny Dancer Page 14
