Joe
THE HIGHWAY CUTS THROUGH THE TREES, SLICING THE province in half, north and south, connecting but separating. This time of year, the asphalt is littered with potholes so big they might swallow the car whole if you hit one hard enough. And I feel every one of them. It’s reached my marrow, the doctors tell me. And I believe them. When we hit one of those potholes, I can feel it in every single one of my disease-ridden bones. The only point of this trip is the all-day breakfast we go to after the appointment. Bacon and eggs, home fries, and toast with sweet strawberry jam, and an extra side of ham. I wouldn’t be going if Mom didn’t make me. I’m fifty-six years old and I stay alive because my eighty-seven-year-old mother tells me she can’t watch another child die. If it were up to me, I’d be home in my bed, waiting for the dark.
“Mom will survive my passing. She’s survived Charlie’s and Dad’s,” I say, wincing as we hit a hole.
“And Ruthie,” Mae says from the driver’s seat. “Ruthie ain’t dead, Mae.”
“God love ya, Joe. You and Mom holdin’ out hope after all these years.” I never count Ruthie among the dead. We returned to those fields along
Route 9 every year, but we never found a trace of her. If she was dead, someone would have found something. And besides, when a person dies, there’s a finality to it, a heaviness that comes with all endings. Ruthie’s story has no ending. But there was living to be done and, slowly and quietly, we did begin to live again. It didn’t come right away, and when Dad asked the Johnsons to host the apple pickers that fall, all it did was keep us in the lingering part of grief a little bit longer.
Each year before Ruthie went missing, the apple pickers came to the field that sat between our house and the train tracks, their brown skin made browner by the summer sun and their minds made calmer by the cool autumn air. They arrived in cars, in trucks and by train, and walked from the station in town carrying everything they needed to live for another month of picking fruit. They pitched tents and built fires, fought a little and loved a lot. And just like in the berry fields, Dad piled them in the back of the truck and dropped them off at the orchards at sun-up and picked them up at the end of each day. The elderly women came together in cars with the windows rolled down, their white hair still big and messy from the wind. They came and sat around the fire, gossiping, mending socks and weaving baskets, which they’d give us to sell for them in town.
“Now, you make sure to rub a little dirt on your face before you get to town,” one of them said.
“And a limp helps, too. They pay more if you got a limp,” another said, laughing.
The folks in town liked to buy our baskets. It made them feel charitable, I guess. They never seemed to notice that the Indian child with dirt on his face and a lame leg that sold them baskets on Wednesday was the same clean and healthy Indian child that sat behind them at church on Sunday. But that October, there were no fires, no old ladies and no apple pickers in the field.
Ruthie wasn’t there either, but we felt her in the walls, in the extra chair at the dinner table and in the things that belonged to her. Mom found Ruthie’s winter boots in the storage closet where we kept our summer clothes in winter and winter clothes in summer. She held them for the longest time before she put them on the shelf at the top of the closet in the girls’ room. She gently placed the sock doll with button eyes inside one of the boots.
“She’ll need them when she comes home,” Mom reasoned.
“Mom—” Mae started, but Mom put her hand up, stopping her.
“Don’t, Mae. You don’t know what it’s like to lose a child. And I pray you don’t ever find out. Her boots are staying there until I say they aren’t.”
Over the decades, the walls of this house have been torn down and built again in different places and painted in different colours, but a closet still holds a very old pair of girl’s boots with the head of a doll sticking out of
one of them on the top shelf, between old woven baskets and Christmas decorations.
When winter began to show itself in grey skies and dark afternoons, Mom went quiet—a real deep quiet. A quiet like the sky just before the snow starts. She spent all her time sitting in her chair beside the window, watching the crows and yelling at the squirrels that got into her bird feeder, rosary in her hand. I was tiptoeing through the living room on a dark afternoon, near the beginning of November, when I stopped to watch her.
“I’m sorry I lost her, Mom.”
She jumped when I spoke and turned away from the window. I watched her face go from empty to sad.
“You didn’t lose nobody, Joe. And don’t you go carrying that on your shoulders.” She looked at me, straight in the eyes. “This isn’t your fault. Seems like my children are just ripe for leaving, one way or another. Ben and Mae came back from that school. Ruthie will come back, too, don’t you worry.” She didn’t look away like she usually did. This time her eyes stayed on mine, those dark eyes that, I swear to this day, still know every thought in my head. I was grateful when Mae came into the living room.
“Mom, teach me how to knit.”
Mom looked at Mae and a new shadow crossed her face, one not so dark and sad. This one looked like it held surprise and maybe just a little bit of humour.
“Mae, I love you to bits, you know that. But you got two left hands and the attention span of a new puppy snapping at the snow for the first time.”
But Mae pleaded, and eventually Mom relented. And I remember that Mae tried—she really did. But after a few days, Mom got frustrated and quit on Mae, leaving a sock half finished. Something about Mae with her fingers all knotted up with yarn and her teeth biting her lip in concentration reminded Mom that we were still there, that we still needed to be taken care of. I still think Mae knew what she was doing, knew that this was how she was going to help Mom, help us all. When no one is looking, Mae can be a sweetheart.
Now it’s Mae who takes care of us. She cooks and cleans, washes my bedding when I can’t get up fast enough in the middle of the night, and helps Mom out of her chair in the living room, then sets her at the kitchen table, and helps her to bed each night. Mae’s kids are grown now, so she sold her house and moved back in when I came home to die. In all my years
here, and even in all my years away, I never would have imagined Mae as the caring type. Yet here she is, behind the wheel, driving me into the city to sit in a waiting room that reeks of disinfectant and disease, to stare at a wall with a blue glass sculpture, ugly as sin but somehow compelling.
“My land, Joe, I don’t know why they put something so ugly on these walls for the sick and dying to look at. Why don’t they put nice stuff like cheesecake or that white castle from India?” She flips through a magazine left on the table between the rows of chairs. “Or maybe even a nice picture of the pearly gates.”
A young woman, her head wrapped in a scarf, smiles at me. “I think it’s art,” I say.
“I think it’s garbage that they glued to the wall.” She doesn’t look up from her magazine, and I shrug at the woman with the scarf. There is a code among the dying: let the living speak. They have longer to atone for it.
When they call my name, Mae waits while they poke at me and tell me I’m doing well, even though we all know I probably won’t see the changing of another season.
If Mae’s willingness to knit brought Mom around, something far crueller brought Dad around. But for years, the cruelty was lost on me. On a grey afternoon just after Mae’s failed attempt at knitting, Dad dropped the stick he was using to flip deer meat on the outside grill. He called out to Mom, telling her to turn off the inside stove and gather us. It was the first snow and Ben and Charlie, who’d been throwing snowballs at each other, dropped the clumps of snow they’d fashioned into weapons and moved toward the front door. I raced toward the dropped snowballs, seeing a chance to steal their hard work and use it against them. I didn’t notice anything strange until Dad came out of the house with his shotgun in his hands and called my name. I followed his gaze to the road where a long, shiny black car was pulling into the driveway.
“Joe, leave those snowballs.” I could feel the cold as it soaked through my knitted mittens, and I remember the disappointment at being made to abandon them, so perfectly formed. “I need you to follow your sister and brothers into the woods.” He never took his eyes off the approaching vehicle. “It’s a game, like hide and seek. You go hide and I’m going to come and find you. When you hear me holler your name, you can come out. If you hear anyone else call your name, you stay hidden. Do you understand?”
I nodded my head and bent down to pick up one of the snowballs I’d just dropped, its roundness hard and solid, before I turned and ran as fast as I could into the woods. Behind me I could hear Mae call out, “Don’t go too far but stay hidden.”
A big maple tree, just on the edge of the woods, stood at a spitting distance from the house. It was rotting from the inside out, with a hole about my size and low enough for me to climb into. The tree was damp inside, but I could peek out to see the car as it stopped just in front of Dad, his back straight and his shotgun held across his chest. My mother, in her apron with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, stepped down from the front stoop to stand beside him.
“Mr. Hughes? Can I help you?”
I had to strain to hear my dad’s voice. My mother wrung her hands as she turned her head toward the woods.
“Good afternoon, Lewis. Missus.” He nodded to my mother. “Word reached us that you lost one of your younger children this summer.” His breath hung white and weak on the air. Dad didn’t move or make a sound. “I’ve come to talk about the others. About what’s best for them, in light of what happened.” He looked down at the ground and paused. When he started again, his voice was higher, meaner than it was just seconds before and carried easier on the wind, so I could hear him better. “How do you lose a child, Lewis? You give me a good explanation for losing a child and I will consider leaving one, maybe two, in your care. Maybe I only take . . .” He looked down at his notepad. “Ben and Mae, the oldest. The ones you snatched away. Maybe I leave the younger ones, for now.”
Dad didn’t move. “You try to take any of my children, and I will use this gun on you.”
Mr. Hughes shifted from side to side, his bald head red from the cold, his hat in his hands. “Now, be reasonable.”
“Get off my land now.” Dad didn’t raise his voice.
“Well, you see, I have an order to take them all, Lewis. I’m trying to be compassionate here, trying to compromise.”
My dad stepped back, lifted the shotgun, cocked it and pointed it at Mr. Hughes. “Get off my land now. Or you won’t be going home to your own family tonight.”
Mr. Hughes slowly lifted his hands into the air and backed away until he was against the car. “I hope you don’t regret this,” he said as he opened his
car door and slipped in, his hands still high in the air, my father’s shotgun still pointed at him.
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Dad said, as Mr. Hughes pressed on the gas, tossing snow and mud into the air. Dad lowered the shotgun and passed it to Mom, who, shaking from fright and the cold, went inside. Dad turned toward the woods and started hollering our names.
A few weeks later, when Dad was hunting deer with Ben in the woods, a letter came. Mom read it, kissed it and placed it inside the front cover of her Bible. We never saw Mr. Hughes again, and for years I chose to remember that day as a great game of hide-and-seek where I was the winner. The others had crouched down behind pines or run behind the outhouse. I’d gotten inside a dead maple—inside it! And I’d stayed there until Dad called my name. Even Mae admitted how clever I was. For years I considered that one of my greatest victories of childhood. Then the memory faded for a bit until I opened Mom’s Bible just after I moved back. The letter was brown and soiled by that time, but it told the events of that day in a way I didn’t remember. But none of that mattered. They agreed that they would leave us alone since we didn’t live on reserve and Dad owned his land outright. It seemed like the wrong kind of reason to me. In return, they would no longer be sending us the two dollars per child for school supplies. I slid the letter back in between two pages in Leviticus, careful to leave it just where Mom had placed it.
Since we skipped the apple picking, Dad had to take on extra work. In any other year, after the apples were picked and before the new year, he spent his time fixing things around the house that needed fixing before the snow came and before he started his winter work, cutting trees and peeling bark for the sawmill. But that fall, just after I’d won my game of hide-and- seek, Dad decided to cut down my maple tree.
“It’s dangerous, Joe,” he said when I whined. “You could hurt yourself.” And that was the end of it. The stump is still there, the circle of rings fractured by time and the weather. When the pain doesn’t let me sleep, Mae makes me a strong cup of tea and sets me in a lawn chair beside that stump and wraps me in blankets, so I can watch the sun rise. But back then, when I was still a child, I was mad. And I got even madder when a letter came for Dad.
These letters requesting Dad’s services weren’t new, but he’d started sending the requests to younger men, those who lived down near his sister,
my aunt Lindy. The letter requested the services of a “real Indian guide” for a group of wealthy American hunters. They liked to come up in the late fall, outfitted with the newest hunting gear and money to spend. According to Dad, they wanted an “experience,” and this meant Dad taking them through the woods looking for a buck. Dad folded the letter and looked across the dinner table at Mom.
“I think I’ll go. Since we missed the apple picking this year.” The table went quiet. Forks stopped scraping the bottom of plates and chewing slowed into silence. No one moved, and Dad took a swallow and continued. “Be good to get a little extra money in before I go back to the mill.”
“Yes, I suppose so.” Mom reached for the salt.
“Can I go with you?” I asked, the excitement vibrating through me so hard that I dropped my fork, and a piece of carrot flew across the table and landed in Mae’s glass of water. She fished it out and threw it back at me.
“Mae, stop that. And Joe, you’re too young . . . Your mother needs you here. I’ll take Charlie with me this year.”
“Yes!” Charlie pumped his fist in the air, and I scowled at him. Ben had always gone and now Charlie. I was getting worried that Dad would be too old before I got the chance to go. It’s funny how old you think your parents are when you’re a child. Ben was only fourteen and Mae twelve. Charlie was eleven that fall, and I had just turned seven. Ruthie would have been five in December. Yet I was convinced that my parents were old when, really, they were decades younger than I am now.
“Don’t you worry, Joe. Your time will come.” Mom smiled across the table. “Now stop trying to grow up so fast.”
Every year I was told that my time would come, I grew more resentful. I let that bitterness grow for eight straight years until the fall I turned fifteen. We’d just gotten back from another summer living and working along Route 9. Mr. Ellis was still the landowner. He was fatter now and had no hair to speak of, but he was still as unpleasant as a dead skunk. Something called gout kept him more at home and less in the fields. Even when he did show up, he stayed seated in the cab of his truck. In our downtime we still asked questions and still looked into the face of every girl we saw at the supply store or the carnival that stopped by in the summer. We looked for those brown eyes and turned-down mouth, that tattered dress and that faraway stare. We looked for the face of our mother, her likeness still the stuff of stories around the campfire. But Ruthie was getting more gone each
time we went down to Maine. The apple pickers returned to our fields each October, and the sadness that seemed to settle over Mom when we were in Maine lifted, just a little, once they arrived.
A few days after the apple pickers left, when all that remained was the black earth from their fires—a reminder of the good times and shared meals, of hard work and even a baby born—Dad and I were out back of the house. We were cutting pine boughs to place around the base of the house to keep the cold winter winds out, when he pulled a letter from his back pocket and handed it to me.
“You want to go this year?”
I opened it to see the request written in perfect cursive, and my heart nearly jumped right out of my chest. Charlie had a full-time job now painting houses, and Ben, who’d left the berry fields three years ago, hitched to Boston and stayed, always told me that his best times were spent with Dad in the woods.
“It’s easy work and they pay well.” He went quiet and reached up to bend a thin branch back and break it off. “Back when I was your age, it was harder to get work for people like us, so these trips were important. Kept food on the plate.”
We left two days later, Mom standing at the foot of the stoop, waving with one hand, her other hand over her eyes to protect them from the sun.
Late October brings a chill. In the mornings, even in the house, before the fire started, you could see your breath on the air. But it wasn’t the depressing grey chill of November. I think the trees, all afire with orange and red leaves, made the chill bearable. My favourites were the ones that looked like they glowed gold when the sun hit them just right. As we passed them, I rolled down the window and tilted my head and squinted just to see if I could make them glow even more. We travelled the whole way down the old road. The highway was new but dull. Fields forever and barely a twist or a turn. The old road offered trees, orchards, roadside stands we could stop at for cider or a glass of water, old bridges that shook and rattled when we passed over them, the water slipping away underneath.
We got to Aunt Lindy’s just before supper. Aunt Lindy was Dad’s older sister by eleven months, and she was a fat woman—no other way to say it than that. She hugged with such strength that I thought I might be sucked into her roundness, but I survived, breathless but alive. She made the best deer stew, and her house, while small, was always warm and comfortable.
She had a husband once, a “no-good white man” she’d call him when she was having “just a thimbleful of whiskey,” but one day he just got up and left. He washed his face, put on his boots and left her with three children to raise on her own. I don’t know if he became “no good” before or after he left. She never told any stories about before, only the ones where he left and didn’t return. A year after he left, Aunt Lindy took all the photos she had of him and lined the floor of the outhouse with them.
Dad and I shared the big bed in the one extra bedroom. Two of her kids lived away, and the third had been killed in a logging accident a couple years before I was born. I got into bed and listened to them talking through the pine plank walls. The hum of adult conversation lulled me to sleep. The next morning, they both complained of headaches and drank their coffee black and so strong I swear that the smell of it watered my eyes. When we finally got on our way, our packs loaded with rubbery leftover bread, smoked meat, and apples, I saw Dad pass her a few dollars, and despite my slowly backing away from the door to avoid her, I could still feel Aunt Lindy’s kiss on my forehead hours later.
Aunt Lindy’s place wasn’t far from the path that led to the camp, down an old dirt road just like any other. Dad turned down and stopped about five minutes in, pulled over to the side of the road, and parked. I looked around and saw nothing.
“Where are we?”
“At the start of the path.” He grabbed his sack from the bed of the truck and strapped his fiddle to it. I grabbed my own pack and looked up at the trees, still and quiet in the calm morning. Dad stepped across a small ditch and parted the grass. I followed, the wet of early morning frost cold on my hands.
“There’s a path?” I asked.
“If you know where to find it. We gotta stamp it down a bit before they arrive.”
We walked ahead for another twenty minutes, parting the grass and stomping it down before we came to a narrow dirt path just before a wall of trees.
“See, a path.” Dad winked at me, and we turned around and headed back to the road to wait for the Americans. “I’ve walked this path more times than I can count. The camp belonged to your grandfather. I can always find it.”
When I came home for the last time, after the new Mr. Ellis did what he did, Ben and I tried to find that path, to make our way to Dad’s cabin. It had been too long, and the narrow dirt path had faded away under new grass. We must have stopped beside the road a dozen times, convinced we were in the right place. But we never found the path and left disheartened. On our way home, we drove past Aunt Lindy’s house, long abandoned and given up to nature. The roof had caved in and the windows were broken. Shards of glass reached up out of rotting windowpanes. Grass and weeds had taken over her garden, but a beautiful vine wrapped itself around the ruin and I was glad for that.
When the Americans finally arrived, there were three of them, dropped off by an ugly man named Harris who claimed to be the trip coordinator. With an exchange of American dollar bills, he drove off in a cloud of dust, promising he’d be back the next day at nightfall to retrieve them. They shook hands with Dad and eyed me sideways. Dad spoke to them in Mi’kmaw, pretending that his English was poor, using only words, never a full sentence, to get his point across. Path, deer, mud, nighttime, food and whiskey. I was told to stay quiet, seeing as how the only Mi’kmaw words I knew I could count on two hands and had mostly learned from Mae. Saying them, even under my breath, usually meant a swat to the head if Mom heard. They weren’t Christian words, that’s for sure.
“They tip you better if you speak the language out here in the woods. It doesn’t need to make sense; you just need to throw some of the words together,” he whispered when they were out of earshot.
It’s something I had a hard time reconciling, my father making himself small for them.
“People will be someone other than themselves if they have people who rely on them,” Mae said on one of those mornings I sat by my stump to watch the sun rise. She stayed out with me this time, and we were talking about the days before we knew anything about the world. “You got fed, didn’t you? You went to school, didn’t you? Not that you did anything with your schooling, but you got to go. You had a warm house to come home to in winter.”
I sat quiet, the steam rolling off my tea and the old blanket wrapped around my thinning legs. “I suppose you’re right.”
“Don’t suppose I’m right. Know I’m right.” She took a sip from her mug and used her other arm to wrap tight around her chest to conserve
warmth.
“And you’d be a good one to talk, Joe. You abandoned your family, if you remember. Dad only fooled a few morons so we could eat.”
Dad and I led those Americans down that path and through those woods for the better part of a day and saw nothing but rabbits, a few common snakes and one porcupine, but we stayed clear of him. The sun was starting to sneak toward the west when Dad stopped to point out a deer. The white men lifted their guns but never got off a shot. Deer are skittish, and the men talked a lot. Dad had to always remind them to be quiet, turning his head and placing his finger on his lips. And they were picky. We saw a nice big doe, but they wanted antlers.
We came to the cabin, one room with an old wood stove and bunks, just as the first stars started to shine. There were four beds closest to the fire and one against the other wall, with a sheet that we could pull across for privacy. My great-grandfather had built it and passed it down. He was long dead now and I never knew him, but he’d carved pictures into the walls during long winters when he’d stayed for weeks at a time, hunting and catching rabbits. That first night in the cabin, I lay on the narrow bed I shared with my father and traced the rough lines of a beaver, trees, the cabin itself and flames shooting up out of nothing. A crudely etched star made me think of the last time Ruthie and I lay on a blanket and watched the stars move slowly across the Maine sky.
I could hear the men well enough—the sheet didn’t keep their voices from me—but I paid little attention. Dad sat in the corner, whittling a piece of wood, and kept the fire going. He also poured, and charged per pour, some of his homemade whiskey. He made them pay before the pour, and the more they drank, the more he poured. He sipped the same cup all night, adding a bit of water every few sips. Just when they were thinking of going to sleep, Dad brought out his fiddle and played them a tune. Good for another three or four pours.
“New boots for you kids,” he said after they passed out and he counted the American bills.
The next morning, really only two or three hours after they’d gone to sleep, Dad woke them, made coffee and fried bacon on the old stove. Dad had me get water from the lake so that they could wash their faces. The morning was crisp, and dipping my hands in the tin-coloured water of the lake felt good, like being new again. I washed my face and under my arms
the way Mom had taught me, before taking the two kettles back to the cabin. I passed them water and Aspirin for the headaches. The air in that cabin was filled with bacon grease and the smell of too many men confined in one place. When the Aspirin started to do its job and they had breakfast in their bellies, we headed out again.
By midafternoon, they bagged a buck. That was my first experience with waste. The men wanted to cut the head off and throw the rest away. Dad salvaged the body and took it back to Aunt Lindy, who cut it up for food. I learned how to hold a camera that day. We didn’t have one, but one of Mom’s sisters owned one. That is how we have pictures of ourselves. Mom has one of all of us together, Ruthie standing beside me, squinting in the sun. It’s the only picture of all seven of us in one place and hangs in the middle of a wall on its own. The camera was heavier than I thought, and I was shaking out of fear of dropping it. The men posed, crouched down by the dead animal, each gripping the antlers. They wanted Dad in the picture, so he stood in the back, his lips straight and thin, his face serious, his arms folded over his chest, oldie-type Indian style. I pressed the button, and it made a clicking sound that scared me. I thought I’d broken it. I dropped it and it landed on the ground with a thump. One of the men started toward me.
“You little brown shit, you’d better not have broken it.” Dad was between us before he had the time to grab me, picking up the camera and handing it back to him.
“It’s good,” he said in his false broken English. “It’s good.” And it was. The camera was fine. They took a few more pictures but none with Dad in the background or me holding the offending piece of equipment.
“You did everything—why are they so happy? They didn’t do hardly anything,” I whispered as I pulled a tall piece of grass from its root and stuck it between my teeth, enjoying the sweet flavour.
“There are things more important in this world than taking credit, Joe.”
The trip home the next day was quiet. The leaves seemed dimmer somehow, the road longer and less interesting. When we pulled up the drive, I don’t think the truck was even at a full stop before I was out and running through the front door of the house, slamming it behind me. I wrapped my arms around my mother. Mae had to get me off her.
“Jesus, Joe. You’ve been gone three days. Don’t be such a baby.” Mae had hold of my arm and dragged me over to the sink for a good wash.
You’d never think I was fifteen years of age, the way they babied me. I’d be lying if I said it bothered me. Mae was heating water when Dad came in with deer meat in packages for the freezer downstairs in the basement. We were the only Indian family that I knew of with a basement, and the only ones with a deep-freeze. Mr. Ellis had given us an old one, said it didn’t work, but Dad brought it home and fiddled with it until it did. He put it in the basement, on wood tracks since it flooded down there every time it rained.
“Hello, my love.” Dad kissed Mom on the cheek. “And before you ask, Joe did really good.” He stopped to put a one-dollar bill in my hand and then climbed down the ladder into the dark, mouldy basement.
“Well, look at you,” Mae said, teasing, and Mom gave me a kiss on top of my head. I still have that dollar in my wallet, sitting on my nightstand beside warm glasses of water and medication. On days when no one comes around to visit, I watch the small bubbles that form when water turns from cold to warm. I watch them free themselves from the bottom, betting on which one will make it to the top first, the glare of brown medication bottles in the background.
That winter, after my first trip to the woods with Dad, passed slow and quiet. Letters came from family members and Mom read them out loud before pressing the paper to her chest. Sometimes she cried, and sometimes she didn’t. Some received the honour of being squeezed in between the pages of the Bible. If a particularly good letter came, we’d get baked apples with butter and cinnamon. When spring came, we spent our time planting, but only those fruits and vegetables that would be ready before we headed to Maine. Cabbage, string beans and strawberries mainly, which were boiled and preserved and set in the basement, ready for winter. Mom was disappointed when the school sent a letter telling her I wasn’t ready for the next grade. I was never a good student, preferring to stare out the window instead of pay attention to what was being said at the front of the room. I drifted off so much into my own imagination that the principal strapped me once for “preoccupation,” whatever that meant. I didn’t tell Mom or Dad. I had to hide my blistered palms for a week and then tell a lie about pulling a rope too strongly. Turned out that would be my last full year in school. Halfway through the next year, I left it behind. I could read enough to get through a Louis L’Amour book, add and subtract numbers on paper and
sign my name. I didn’t see much sense in learning anything more than that, and I never regretted leaving.
But Mom worried about it the rest of that spring and made me pack extra lessons in math and reading to take with me to Maine. Before we left, I was looking for a good place to hide them when I came across Ruthie’s old boots. The leather was still soft but coated in dust. The laces sat untied. I lifted them off the shelf and held them close. The button eyes of her doll looked at me mournfully in the dim light. We left two days later, the house secured, the early summer fruits and vegetables squirrelled away in the basement, boys on the back of the truck and Mae and Mom squeezed into the cab. Charlie came with us that year, and he said it was going to be his last. He had plans to maybe open his own business painting houses, and maybe I could work with him. I never imagined it would be our last summer in Maine.
