Virginia Hamilton (19 page)

They can’t make me.

Levi raised his head, watching Thomas and the boys trudge away. He looked wretched, worse than Justice felt. His face contorted in fury. His chest heaved up and down.

“I hate him,” he said. “I hate him. I hate him.”

After that, he got hold of himself and started back toward the field, with Justice beside him.

“Why didn’t somebody tell me it wasn’t racing the snakes?” she asked.

“Who would’ve thought someone would think it was?” Levi said. He laughed bitterly. “You can’t blame him for taking advantage of your ignorance. Thomas’ll take advantage of anyone, but you in particular. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know where it’s all going to end!

“We’re freaks, you know,” he added, quite clearly, so there was no mistaking what he said. “Thomas and me are.”

“You are not, now stop it!” Justice said. She was shocked. “It’s that Thomas doesn’t like me very much at all.”

Levi turned to her. He studied her for a moment, stopping still, searching her face. “I always hoped, because of your name,” he began. “I don’t think your name was an accident—” He left off, shook his head and sighed. “We’re freaks. Maybe you are, too.”

They went on. Justice thought she heard him say under his breath: “I won’t live long, either. I’m glad.”

Somewhere within her, suddenly, was the Watcher, who calmed her without her knowing. Had her tell herself without her knowing: “Brother of mine, you’ll live. I’ll see to that.”

Undisturbed, Justice walked on with her favorite identical next to her, and carrying her snake larger than all the rest.

A
LL DAY, BOYS WENT
quietly within the hedgerow, checking on containers of wiggling, twining creatures. Times the creatures would be still, feeling cool, perhaps, and growing accustomed in the row’s shaded stillness. Then, suddenly, they would seem to heave up in unison, as if knowing through shared sensations that this ancient place was not their home.

Justice made trips to her snake throughout the day. She kept the knapsack damp by filling a cup with tap water and carrying it out to the row. She’d let the water sit until it was the same temperature as the surrounding air. Then she’d wet the outside of the knapsack, carefully, so as not to disturb her snake.

Hope that’s right, she thought. No one says what’s right anymore, not even Levi. She felt disappointment rise and fade and rise again as the day turned.

Never one to quit, she would have to ask questions. What do you think the word
race
means? she had asked at the day’s end.

“Why, the color of a people,” her mom had said.

“No, not that kind of a race. I mean a foot race.” Justice had made it easy for her mom to naturally say a race is a certain kind of contest.

“Well, then, it’s a contest …”

Yes!

“… to see which one will win,” her mom said.

“Sure it is!” Justice was quick to agree. “And if you were to race raccoons, say?”

“What? Who would know how to race raccoons?” her mom asked.

“Mom …”

“Oh, I see, it’s hypothetical.”

Whatever that means.

“Well, then,” her mom said, “it would be a contest to see which raccoon came in first.”

That’s what
I
thought, Justice had told her mom.

“But then,” her mom had said, “how are you going to tell raccoons apart? You’d have to tag them, and if I know anything about wild raccoons—Maybe it’s to see how many of them a person can—”

“No!” Justice cut in on her, so angry at her mom she couldn’t get another word out. And she sashayed from the room.

I’ll get Dad, she’d thought to herself. When she’d got him, he said just about what she had wanted him to say.

“Race?” he’d questioned. “You mean like ‘I’ll race you to the corner,’ like in a contest?”

“Yeah, like that,” Justice told him.

She loved the way her dad talked things, slow and easy. There were pauses between his words, as though each was a heavy stone and he had picked it up to see it, to know its shape and weight before he used it.

Being so close to her dad gave her a sudden fear she might lose him. She had to hold herself tightly inside and tell herself how foolish she was being to keep from crying.

Don’t know what’s gotten into me, she thought. But she knew; knew why she had to go around asking her friends the meaning of
race.
Her friends she could count on one hand. Her mom and dad and Mrs. Jefferson.

And went down there to see Mrs. Jefferson long before her mom and dad came home and she asked them about
race;
and after she had checked on her snake for the twentieth time to make sure it was safe and sound. It lay so still, but she could tell it was alive. She’d gone down to Mrs. Jefferson’s when there had been no boys in the hedgerow as she walked through. She saw all the peanut-butter buckets hung from tree limbs like lanterns along an old-fashioned avenue. She felt like taking the tops off and letting the snakes loose.

You don’t win a race by cheating.

I’m going to win. It wasn’t possible she could win, she knew that. Not unless she could get grown-ups to say a race had to be a contest of one against another, racing. She didn’t know how she could ever do that without telling on both her brothers, how they had these snakes in the hedgerow. If she did that, she’d be out of favor forever. But wasn’t it forever now?

And in that Jefferson place of magical green like no other, Justice found she could ask her question in a voice of soft willow: What must a race mean?

Dorian, having to look away from her and the wind that swooshed around her.

“Don’t let the child worry,” was Mrs. Jefferson saying from somewhere. Justice couldn’t see her; yet she recognized the voice as that of the Sensitive.

Who are you talking to? was what Justice thought.

“He who allows tricks to be played will be punished,” said the Sensitive.

Who? Justice wanted to know.

“But how was I to figure she didn’t understand what a snake race was?” said Dorian.

“Not you,” said the Sensitive. “Although you could have probed her thought.”

“I couldn’t,” he said. “Because I didn’t doubt she knew. And anyway Tom-Tom had a trace in on her. He would’ve found me out.”

“He will be punished for playing tricks,” said the Sensitive.

“I won’t have Thomas hurt,” Justice said. Even as she spoke, she was aware of Thomas hurting and Levi hurting. Somewhere, the future and the river. Water and hurting. Times to come and Thomas’ ending.

“I don’t want to see,” she said.

“You can’t help seeing,” said the Sensitive. “Your way is clear with far sight.”

“Is that what it is in me watchful and out there, wind green?” Justice asked.

“It’s not nothing terrible,” whispered the Sensitive. “It’s a great given. It’s a given greater than any I’ve seen.”

Justice turned her face to the Sensitive. All this time, her eyes had been rolled back in their sockets and only the whites showed.

“You’ve told me something,” Justice said, “something important.”

“Have I? I may have,” said the Sensitive.

“I will remember. No greater given.”

“This is true, as far as I’ve seen,” said the Sensitive. She got up from her chair and, quite heavily, knelt on the floor before Justice. Dorian stood at his mother’s side. He looked at her and then at Justice, with great tenderness. Gently, Justice stroked his mother’s cheek with her fingers.

They were silent a long time. At last, Justice, said, “I will care for Dorian,” and that was all.

“Thank you,” said the Sensitive. She rose, taking her place again at the table. “In this life, I am your servant to give you what help I can.”

Justice’s brown eyes came into focus on her hands lightly touching the hand of Mrs. Jefferson on one side of her and that of Dorian on the other. She slid her hands from theirs and stood up. The room was faintly green for her. She made up her mind to leave.

“Have I had your fruit salad yet?” Justice asked.

“I didn’t make it today,” Mrs. Jefferson said. “I can’t make it every day, child.”

Mrs. Jefferson didn’t smile. She had entered Justice’s mind already to put in place the veil of forgetfulness. She couldn’t help wondering when would come the day that Justice would leave this house knowing of her own power.

Justice left mumbling her good-byes. She did not yet know her power; but she knew something. Nearing the end of that day in her room. Without words or thoughts, she knew she was no longer herself. Somewhere within, she gathered and grew beyond who she had been. She understood that she was growing up. And then she gathered more, as a snail’s pace.

Finding out, not in words or thoughts, but through an awful sense within her of being abandoned, that she would never be the same after this day.

Rather than cry out, cut off from her family in her room, she slipped down the hall to find her mom. Not knowing where the boys were, she perceived they weren’t in the house. There wasn’t a live trace of them—no echo of breathing or heartbeats. There were signals of the boys having been in the house less than a half-hour ago. Red and yellow touches of the boys on walls and furniture; prints of their fingers trailing along windowsills. They were like scents, these color signals.

She found her mom rushing about the house, putting it in order.

“I have so little time for this,” she told Justice, sounding relieved.

Justice joined the rush, slipping her arm through her mom’s as they went from one room to straighten another. Being close to her mom was sadness. Was knowing through a thickness in her throat that this would be the last time they would be this sort of alone together.

What’s happening to me? thought Justice. It was Levi said he wouldn’t live long. But is it me, too, dying?

Not in words but in flashes of swelling intelligence came to her first impression of the Watcher.
No, you are not dying.

She and her mom sorted laundry in what was called the mudroom. It had been a pantry and was now converted into a service area with an exit door to the outside. All through the wet months of winter and spring, the family entered and left the house by this mudroom door. It was one of many sensible habits that made the house a home. Doing the same thing day after day caused a safe feeling to grow inside Justice.

“You mind doing this all the time?” abruptly she asked her mom. She eyed the piles of dirty laundry her mom sorted into whites and colors. Justice began helping.

“Yes, I guess I do mind some,” her mom said. “I mean, I get angry when I come home from a hard day and you all are sitting around, and all the laundry is here waiting for my common touch.”

“But you never once asked us to do it or showed us how,” Justice said.

“I know.” Her mom’s hands were busy flipping clothes into the washer. “I haven’t been an ‘away’ mom long enough to divide up the chores,” she said. “I guess I thought you guys would ask to do the work that had to be done. I was a dope.”

“I’m glad to help,” Justice told her. “Bet Levi would be, too.” She gazed at her mom. “I’d be just glad to help forever.”

Surprised and touched, her mom dropped what she was doing to clasp Justice’s curly head to her chest. And planted a smacking kiss on her forehead.

“You sound so grown-up sometimes,” her mom told her.

They stood there, folded peaceably against one another, until Justice had to ask her question about
race
and got the wrong answer. She sashayed away. And best she did, too, before her mom could wonder why she was such a clinging vine today.

Because boys are so cruel, that’s why I want to be with her, Justice thought. Thomas. Because I have not one girlfriend. And never will, either. Not now.

She knew this. Not from the sound of words, but from deep sorrow of losing—races. Time. Herself.

When her dad came home near the supper hour, she was distressed and bewildered at herself. She paced the house, biting her hands and sucking her fingers. The boys were back and in their room. One of them came through, going past her. She couldn’t tell which one of them it was. He, whichever he was, stared at her while passing, but never said anything to her. She knew she must look a sight, so upset, eating her hands. Her hair was a mess, looking as is she’d slept badly on it, when actually she hadn’t had a nap all day.

But then her dad came home. She went out to the battered Oldsmobile, not only to meet him, but to get to him first before anyone else could take his attention from her.

Heat poured out of her in odorous sweat. She pulled at the door handle on the driver’s side. Her dad, sitting there, was turning off things. He stared up at her.

“Ticey,” he said, as the motor died. Eyelids dried out, his eyes were red and strained.

Frantically, she pulled at the door handle.

“Take it easy!” her dad said. He pulled up the door lock. It was then she recalled the door would not stay closed unless locked. Now it gave a squeaking sigh and swung open. Her dad lifted one leg out of the car. She grabbed his arm and began pulling him. She left off when she couldn’t move faster than he wished to go.

The back seat of the car had space full of her dad’s tools. All sorts of heavy things for scraping, sizing, breaking. Mallets, rulers, levels and planes. A massive iron sledgehammer. They never went riding in the car these days. Silver-gray ladders were tied to the car’s roof.

Her dad out of the car and she was hanging on his arm.

“You will get the cement dust all over you,” he said firmly to her.

It was then she saw that her dad was covered from head to foot with a fine whitish powder.

“But you’re a stone man,” she thought to say.

“I know it,” he said, “and what’s to hold the stones together?”

“Oh. Cement, I guess,” she said.

She held tightly to her dad even when he turned toward the steps. She tried pulling him back, but he shook her off with some amount of force. She was hurt by what she thought was his wanting to be rid of her.

“Dad?” an anguished cry.

“Ticey,” he said, with a tremor there under the word, “I am beat to my socks and I need a shower before dinner.”

He turned from her to climb the steps. Stiffness in his legs. His back obviously hurting. She imagined she saw his hands tremble.