Alabama Moon (30 page)

I wrote and burned my pages of memories well into the night. It was late when Mr. Wellington came to check on me.

“I just wanted to make sure you weren't planning on settling into your old ways again.”

I shook my head.

“Do you have enough paper to keep that fire going?”

“It's not to keep the fire goin'. I can keep a fire goin' without paper.”

“Of course,” Mr. Wellington said and held out a blanket. “I'm going to leave this in case you need it.”

I shrugged.

“I've got just about everything worked out with your uncle. He'll be here the day after tomorrow.”

I nodded.

“I'll be in the house if you need me.”

I lay on my side in the leaves and watched the last of the smoke curl away over the juniper fire. I listened to the wind in the trees and the needling of the insects and the settling of birds in the brush. I trained my ears to filter all of these for some sign that Kit had gotten my message. I searched the dark shapes and patterns of the forest, hoping that they would turn into Kit's ghost. I was so tired that my eyes stung, and the last thing I remember of that night was trying to keep them open.

I saw Mr. Wellington leave in his truck the next morning. He returned in an hour and he had Hal with him. The two of them walked over to me and stood looking down at my head.

“He's just been burning paper in this fire,” Mr. Wellington said.

“He thinks he can talk to dead people that way,” Hal said. “Moon, we're gettin' worried about you. You gotta get straight again.”

“Nobody else liked him,” I said.

“I liked him,” Hal said. “Sometimes I gave him a hard time, and I shouldn't have. I liked him, though.”

“I don't think it works, Hal.”

“What?”

“This smoke stuff.”

“I told you that.”

I felt my throat swelling and tears sliding down my cheeks. “He's by himself, Hal.”

“Moon, he had the best time of his life out in the forest with you. He knew he was sick. He wasn't alone because of you.”

I looked up at Hal. “Did he tell you that?”

“That mornin' I left y'all in the forest, I tried to get him to come with me. I told him you might be crazy. I said you might get us all killed. You know what he told me?”

I shook my head and wiped my face.

“He said he'd never been happier in his life. He said he wanted to stay out there in the forest with you no matter what happened. He knew he was takin' a big chance.”

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand again. “But I miss him, Hal.”

“I know you do. Nothin' wrong with that.”

Around noon Mr. Wellington took Hal home again. When he returned to the lodge, I got up and went back inside. He made a sandwich for me, and I forced it down. I still didn't feel like talking and Mr. Wellington said he understood. I lay on the sofa and watched the television and everything it showed me of a world I knew so little about.

Gradually I began to think of my new uncle. I began to picture him climbing trees and trimming their branches. I thought of my new aunt and pictured her like Mrs. Crutcher, the teacher back at Pinson. I tried to imagine what my cousins would look like, but images of Kit kept appearing, and I had to draw up my knees and roll over and blank my thoughts.

 

The morning my uncle was to come get me, I rose from the guest bed before daylight and left Mr. Wellington's lodge with Pap's rifle and the deerskin hats. I walked into the forest and made my way down a trail that was familiar only to my feet. It had long since grown over with honeysuckle vines and cane stems, holly branches, and gallberry. I could tell where I was by looking up into the trees. The outlines that the branches made against the sky were burned into my memory like thousands of lightning strikes. The forest was alive with the sounds of crickets and katydids. The creeks I crossed gurgled in their dark cuts through the bottom.

I stopped just beyond the shelter clearing. I closed my eyes and listened to the forest, waiting for something. There was nothing. I opened my eyes and continued. Daylight was starting to leak into the sky, and what was left of the shelter was a dark mound before me. I looked around and listened, but still there was nothing. I approached the shelter and stepped down into its hollows, which were not so dark anymore with parts of the roof missing. I shoved Pap's rifle into its old hiding place and hung the two deerskin hats on the wall. Finding a couple of the scattered animal hides, I stacked them in their old spot and lay down on them. I listened and stared at the roots over my head. Still there was nothing. The forest told me nothing. It gave me nothing.

After the sun rose and the ugliness of the old shelter appeared
around me, I stood and left the dead thing. I put my back to it and set out again.

The Noxubee River seemed unchanged when I looked down at it from the cedar grove. I thought of Pap telling me that catfish the size of beavers swam the bottom of it. I wanted to dive into its muddy water once and spear one until he told me that dead animals also floated along the bottom.

Pap's and Momma's graves were undisturbed. Pap's was already rain-smoothed, with pokeweed and a pine sapling beginning to take hold. I didn't have anything to say to either one of them. I just stood there and felt like all my insides had been scraped out. I knew that I would never come there again.

I didn't go inside once I reached the lodge. I sat beneath a magnolia tree where I watched the driveway. Eventually Mr. Wellington came out and stood over me.

“It might be a little while,” he said.

“I wanna stay right here by this tree.”

He sat down beside me. “Are you worried?”

I shook my head. “No, I'm just ready to get on to wherever I'm goin'.”

“Well, I've got the paperwork done. Your uncle is now your legal guardian.”

“He's my new pap?”

“That's right.”

I nodded and stared at the ground. I began plucking blades of grass and folding them between my fingers.

“Moon?”

I didn't look up. “Yessir?”

“I think you'll be happy where you're going.”

“Yessir.”

“Are you sure you don't want to come inside?”

I shook my head. “I'll just stay out here.”

His truck looked dusty and used. It came slowly up the drive, and I saw only one person in it. Before long, the face in the picture rolled to a stop beside me where I sat against the magnolia tree. He stared at me out of the rolled-down window for a moment, then stepped out and stared at me some more like I should say something.

“How come I've never seen you?” I said.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I didn't know where you were.”

I stood up. “You're not mad about all this, are you?”

He smiled at me. “Shoot, no! I'm not mad about it. Moon, you've got all kinds of people down in Mobile ready to see you.”

I walked over to him and looked up at him. “How many?”

“You've got two cousins, or maybe I should say a brother and a sister. You've got my wife and your grandparents and some more aunts and uncles and cousins. There's a bunch of people that you're hooked into in Mobile.”

I smiled and felt myself beginning to choke up. I started to cough but ended up crying. I hadn't meant to do it, but I didn't seem to have any control over myself. I could tell he was a nice man.

“I just wanna leave here,” I said.

He pulled me to his stomach and pressed my head into him and rubbed my hair. I tried to talk, but I couldn't. We
stood there for what seemed like a long time, and I cried on his shirt, which smelled of pine sap.

 

After loading my things and saying goodbye to Mr. Wellington, we followed the rivers south on a two-lane highway, leaving behind the limestone hills and cedar groves of Sumter County. We moved through a land of hard, dusty clay and broomsedge and pines that I had never seen. Uncle Mike's truck was worn and comfortable, and he sat back and drove with his wrist flopped over the top of the steering wheel like nothing worried him. The cool spring air swept across our faces, and I sensed I was being drawn to a place I had been stolen from long ago.

“I guess you're my pap now?”

He smiled. “I'd like for you to think of me that way.”

“Then I'd like to ask you some things.”

“Go ahead,” he said.

“What about Mr. Wellington and Hal? Will I get to see them again?”

“Sure. I'll drive you up sometime if you want. It only takes about four hours. And you can always write letters.”

“I'm good at writin' letters.”

“Mr. Wellington said he was gonna come check on you in a couple of weeks. He said he'd try to bring your rifle when he came.”

It made me feel better to think that I'd see Mr. Wellington again in so short a time. I watched out the window and saw a school and students standing out front waiting to be picked up. Station wagons and parents and buses clustered and moved about. A boy was taking a flag down from the flagpole.

I turned to Uncle Mike. “Do you remember me?”

“We all remember you when you were little. Your daddy and momma didn't disappear until about a year after you were born.”

“Why didn't you come lookin' for us?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. At first we were worried that somethin' had happened to you all. It didn't take long to find out that Oliver had shut down his bank accounts in Birmingham and sold his house and car. He didn't leave a note or anything. I drove up several times after that and asked around about you. You never had grandparents on your mother's side, so there wasn't anyone to talk to there.”

“Why didn't he want you to find us?”

Uncle Mike was quiet for a few seconds. Finally, he looked over at me. “No one really knows why he did what he did. I can tell you that I remember him as a boy no different from any other boy. He was my best friend growin' up. Some people change when they get older. Sometimes things happen that make them change a lot. In your father's case, he saw somethin' in Vietnam that caused him to lose trust in everybody around him.”

“But you were his best friend.”

“He saw a lot of his friends die over there. Maybe he didn't want any more friends.”

“My friend died, too,” I said.

“Mr. Wellington told me about Kit. I'm sorry that happened.”

I looked out the window again.

“Moon?”

“Yessir?”

“The important thing is that you don't have to feel the way your father did. Most people don't.”

I leaned my head against the door and slept with the wind licking through my bangs. I woke when Uncle Mike pulled the truck over at a Spur station for gas. He smiled at me in the rearview mirror as the pump numbers clicked over. Afterwards he strolled inside, and I watched him pay through the store glass. He came out with two bags of potato chips and threw one into my window as he passed.

Back on the road, Uncle Mike dialed the radio to a country station and played it low. I sat with my back against the door frame and ate my potato chips and watched his face while he chewed. He looked at me once and smiled and then stared ahead at the blacktop. “You like 'em?”

“Yessir.”

After a second, I turned and sank in the seat and watched the countryside. We were passing fields of rich, black dirt, plowed up nearly to the road. The pine trees were taller and greener and stood in the yards of white farmhouses. The land was mostly flat and the air was thick and humid like nothing I'd ever felt.

“Uncle Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks again for comin' to get me. I'm glad I've got a
place to go. I don't wanna be locked up anymore. I'm done bein' alone.”

He put his hand on my head and brushed my hair back and a warm feeling passed through me.

 

“How much farther?” I asked.

“About a mile.”

I sat up in my seat and stared ahead. The sun was setting outside my window, and the smell of soybeans and corn was strong in the cool dusk. We had skirted the outside of the city and were moving into the countryside again. To the east I could see the tall buildings of downtown Mobile standing against the horizon.

“How much farther now?”

Uncle Mike pointed ahead of us. “That house up there.”

The first thing I noticed about Uncle Mike's house was that it was a one-story brick home backed up to a pecan orchard.

“I like pecan trees.”

“Well, we've got a bunch.”

They had put up a small banner on the fence that read
WELCOME HOME, MOON
, and my new family came out of the house and stood in the yard as we drove up. I felt my hands growing fidgety, and I looked at Uncle Mike. “What do I do?”

He laughed. “You'll be okay. Just get out of the truck and meet everybody.”

I felt my face burning red as Aunt Sara knelt down and hugged me. My new brother, David, was only a year older than me, and my new sister, Alice, a year younger. They said hello and I nodded at them while my face was pressed into Aunt Sara's bosom. She finally pushed me back by the shoulders and stared at me. “He looks just like his mother.”

“They say he doesn't eat like her,” Uncle Mike said.

Aunt Sara stood and sniffled and wiped her eyes. “We'll just have to see about that,” she said. “Are you hungry, Moon?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I can't imagine all you've been through. I'm gonna have to feed you four times a day to get some meat on your bones.”

“I feel pretty good now, but I'd like four times a day.”

She laughed and turned around. “My Lord,” she said. “Let's all go inside.”

David and Alice crowded beside me while we walked. David kept glancing over at me. “I heard you beat up grown men,” he finally said.