It was a Friday afternoon in early May, 1972, and Dotsy’s best friend Dale had been missing for three months. In her treehouse, Dotsy arranged a shrine: the ice quartz Dale tumbled smooth for her twelfth birthday, a ceramic Buddha from the Boodleheimer shop, Dale’s wallet-sized fifth-grade picture, and a macramé plant holder—a lark’s head knot of jute he wove at Vacation Bible School. Prayers to God never brought Dotsy’s father back from Vietnam. Ghosts were her protectors: her father, Cpl. Perry Lazenby’s twenty-six-year-old ghost self, and the most recent residents of the spirit world—Razz, checker champion and street sweeper, and Superfly in purple velour, counter of cars on the Mozelle town square. Dotsy lit incense, and recited their names. She prayed for them to bring Dale home. Sandalwood smoke searched the air as if in pursuit of the lost boy.
Sitting cross-legged, Dotsy was overcome with momentary clarity; she contemplated the facts of Dale’s disappearance. He was last seen pedaling his Kool Lemon 5-speed Manta Ray to piano lessons at Uncle Moon’s. Mary-Bett Deas had opened her bay window to draw the honeysuckle breeze. She told police Dale conquered his C major scale, butchered the D minor, raced through “Für Elise” six times until the metronome’s tick tick tick lured him to tempo. Then, as always, Miss Deas said in disgust, he slammed the screen door and hollered goodbye. Against the Leyland cypress hedge, police found Dale’s ditched Schwinn and sheet music. Wherever he’d gone, he’d taken his army helmet and suede fringe knapsack.
Dotsy closed her eyes. Water drops plunked the tin roof. There’d been a soaking dew the night before. This was her sanctuary with its red and white gingham curtains and knotty pine walls and floor, and if she could figure out anything it would be here. Her father built the treehouse the summer before he went to Vietnam; she’d been a toddler, her mother pregnant with Audra. Occasionally, from her bedroom window, she watched her ghost father climb the treehouse ladder to inspect the weather-worn roofline. Catching her spying, he’d wink. Cpl. Perry had an infectious laugh, a lopsided smile. When he sat at the supper table, he made silly faces until she giggled. Her mother and Audra complained she was acting out, and rude. It was such a lonely secret.
The pop of a ladder rung interrupted Dotsy’s prayer. She sat still, eyes pinched. Common sense said it was wind shifting the live oak limbs. There it was again. Footsteps on the platform. The ghosts had done their work, she thought. Dale had returned. She imagined his extravagant explanation on the run, or an outlandish story of near death. She’d forgive him for the sleepless nights. “Thank you,” she whispered to her ghosts, and, beaming with gratitude, turned to face the ladder. The green eyes and a cleft chin made her smile, at first; it wasn’t Dale. The similar features belonged to his younger sister, Laurie.
“It’s only you,” Dotsy said.
Laurie stomped into Dotsy’s sacred circle, scrunched her face; her eyes were crazy. Dale’s picture stuck to the sole of Laurie’s shoe; she picked at it like gum. “What is all this? Voodoo?”
Dotsy looked out across the yard and up Claiborne Avenue to Uncle Moon’s house, as if she might signal him for help. Three months ago, he’d have been tending his zinnias, filling his bird feeders. Now, his favorite wrought-iron table and chairs were on their sides, the way her mother prepared the yard for a storm. “I—” Dotsy started. “I’m praying.”
Hands on her hips, Laurie demanded, “Praying for what?”
“For Dale. To bring him back.”
Laurie looked confused, and then, it was as if she understood there was something conspiratorial between Dotsy and Dale, something stronger than her own relationship with her older brother. As Dotsy reached for the school picture now perforated with sneaker treads, Laurie kicked the orange Buddha so that it sailed out the open door, cracking on a row of concrete blocks that guarded the strawberry patch below.
Dotsy’s bottom lip quivered. Laurie stood proud.
“Why are you so mean?” Dotsy stuttered, stepping toward her. “Why can’t you be like Dale?”
Laurie’s smile disappeared. She stepped forward and swung. Dotsy raised her hands, lost her balance, pitched to her knees, rocketing Laurie backwards and down the ladder. Her scream was piercing, the flailing of arms a blur. Dotsy crawled to the edge. The screen door whined open, power slapped against the door jamb. Laurie’s head was inches from the concrete blocks. There was Dotsy’s mother, out of breath, shouting, “Don’t move. Don’t move.”
On Tuesday after school, Dotsy and her mother left Audra with a neighbor and walked up Claiborne Avenue to the Holsenback house. Her mother’s full name was Lois Laramie Lazenby, but everyone called her by the childhood nickname, Cricket, for her nimble stride and petite stature, though she often joked she’d long outgrown that name. She still had an energetic gait, even on a day like this, Dotsy thought, as she trailed behind carrying the sour cream pound cake in a round Tupperware carrier. Dotsy’s own legs were leaden. She had no appetite for pound cake. In fact, while Cricket rapped at the front door, she felt sick to her stomach.
In the Holsenback living room, Laurie sprawled on the sofa, doodling on her plaster cast with pink Magic Marker. Everyone in homeroom but Dotsy had signed the white plaster shell. Dotsy handed the cake over to Cricket. From the saloon swinging kitchen doors, her mother mouthed, “Dotsy.” Dotsy nodded. Despite the air of loss and depression in the house, the aroma was sugary and celebratory. The pound cake promised creamy melt-in-your-mouth slices. Coffee brewed in the kitchen. The saloon doors swung open, and Cricket greeted Laurie’s mother. Dotsy took a deep breath, ready with a rehearsed speech.
Laurie threw up her arms. “We’re going to find Dale.”
Imagining Laurie’s plans involved hightailing it to the Greyhound station going god-knows-where, Dotsy would rather recite her apologies. “Are you crazy? It’s dangerous. Plus, the troopers looked all over. Even down in the gully.”
Laurie winked. “You mean, Big Gully.”
Dotsy’s face flushed at the mention of hers and Dale’s secret name for the submerged leafy world. Dale promised he’d never tell anyone, not even his sister about Big Gully. Laurie pulled a folded sheet of lined composition paper from her pocket. The colored pencil markings depicting lush green kudzu coves, tables of vine-covered stumps, were Dale’s. Getting down the steep slopes of a gully was difficult, this gully deeper than the Wallace County pool, but Dale rigged a zip line to a pine at the bottom, climbed to the peak, cable in tow, attached it to a second larger pine on the north side, just out of view from their houses. Soon as the lines were complete, he’d take her there. It would be a place Laurie couldn’t touch, a place where Dotsy knew she would feel safe, where she knew all her ghosts could roam freely.
“I know all about Big Gully.”
“That’s not yours,” Dotsy said, but Laurie tucked it into her pocket.
“I had to know what ya’ll were doing up in the treehouse,” Laurie said, wincing as she adjusted her leg. “So I went up there. Found your little maps.” She leaned back, arms crossed. “I was going to tell you about it the other day, but you were doing all that weird stuff. And then,” she motioned to her leg, “—you pushed me.”
Dotsy stared at her feet, gutted. What would happen now? As if reading her mind, Laurie leaned over. “It’s our secret.”
From the kitchen, Laurie’s mother’s voice erupted, high pitched and desperate. Cricket’s assuring alto interrupted the cries. “It’s all right, Jeannie,” she said.
Laurie put her hands over her ears. Feeling guilty of her possession for the gully and of Dale, desperate to make her happy, Dotsy whispered, “We’ll look for him. I promise.”
“Deal?” Laurie said. She handed Dotsy the Magic Marker. Angry cries rose from behind the saloon doors. A chair scraped the floor. Laurie closed her eyes. Dotsy scribbled her name on the slick plaster at Laurie’s shin. She added a heart, a smiley face.
Cricket said, “Just hear me out.”
“I thought you were my friend.”
“Uncle Moon’s a dear, old man—“ Cricket said.
Dotsy hesitated, and drew a long, curving pink vine along the length of Laurie’s leg. “Deal,” she said.
The saloon doors flung open. Cricket appeared, face flushed. The Magic Marker rolled under the sofa. Laurie pinched Dotsy’s arm until it stung. “Tomorrow,” Laurie whispered. “Don’t forget.”
From the tree house, Dotsy admired the fearless long-eared bats plucking horseflies from the streetlight haze. Across the yard, Audra’s jump rope slapped the carport floor, her song hypnotic: “Miss Mary Mack Mack Mack Mack Mack.” Cricket ambled to the treehouse occasionally stumbling over shallow rises pocking the lawn, the only remaining evidence of the fertile soil’s past life as a cotton field. Dotsy checked to see if her ghost father had followed, but Cricket was alone. She tapped a ladder rung. “Permission to climb aboard?”
Dotsy giggled. “Permission.” The bats kept at their mission. Audra sang, “All dressed in black black black black—”
Cricket collapsed in an aluminum lawn chair. Dotsy had turned the afternoon’s drama over and over in her mind. In the light of the Coleman lantern, Dotsy studied Cricket’s face. She was in her late thirties and never wore lipstick or frosted her hair. She looked tired, and worried, but she was beautiful.
“I’m so sorry you had to hear all that today.” Cricket waved her hand uphill toward Laurie’s house. She smoothed the chair’s frayed plaid webbing
“Why is Laurie’s mom so mad at you?”
Cricket picked at the threading. “She’s mad at the world, honey, and she hates it that I’m supporting Uncle Moon. I told her if they thought he had a thing to do with it, they’d have arrested him by now.” She shook her head. “But she’s got to blame somebody. And, since that’s the last place Dale was—” Cricket shook her head.
“Uncle Moon wouldn’t hurt a soul.”
“I know. I know.”
“Mama, I was thinking. Dale wouldn’t forget his bike,” Dotsy said. She smiled at the thought of those handlebars, the banana seat. “It was the best bike in town. Unless—”
Cricket shook her head. “No. No. Only kidnapping I ever heard of was down in Mobile.”
“But where is he Mama?”
Cricket hugged her. “I just don’t know, baby.”
Dotsy said a quick prayer to her ghosts. “Mama? What are they saying?”
“Oh, Dottie.” Cricket took off her left loafer and rubbed her bunion. She worked long hours at the courthouse as Judge Freddie Biggs’ secretary. Gossip was rampant in that office, one of the reasons she said she’d stayed as long as she did. “Nothing. They’ve said nothing.”
Dotsy leaned in and kissed her mother’s cheek. “Promise?”
“I’d tell you if I knew something. I can tell you this, though. I have known Uncle Moon since I was a little girl. He taught me piano, too.”
Uncle Moon was Dubose Cole Moon. He was no one’s uncle, the name being a nickname, like Cricket. She would never think of him as anything else.
Cricket shook her head and closed her eyes. “You hear that?”
There was the stinging call of cicadas, the occasional car, and the ever-present swoosh of Audra’s jump rope song. “I don’t hear anything.”
“There’s no music,” Cricket said, opening her eyes, big and blue. Dotsy had always wished she had her daddy’s hazel eyes, but when she saw her mother’s now, so earnest and beautiful, she took back that wish.
“I’d even pay to hear kids messing up their scales right now. Remember how Uncle Moon would play into the night? Chopin. Mendelssohn. Brahms.” She hugged her chest. “God, I miss that.”
Cricket patted her hand, “Now, let’s eat some supper.”
Dotsy followed Cricket down the ladder; they walked arm in arm to the house.
“Mama?” Dotsy paused on one of the hills. Here, she was taller than her mother. “Did you ever get mad like that when Daddy was missing? You know? Before they found him?”
Cricket looked out into the dark. Her eyes pricked with tears. “Those were bad times, honey. Bad, bad times. I reckon I was real mad, too. Then, I had to let it go.”
At the carport, her father joined them, like he did most times. Dotsy noticed that the older her mother got, her father, not a day older than twenty-six, looked strange next to her, almost like a younger brother, or a friend. Audra’s jump rope brushed the concrete with a comforting rhythm. She sang, “Johnny gave me apples, Johnny gave me pears. Johnny gave me fifty cents to kiss him on the stairs.”
Dotsy’s dad jumped imaginary rope alongside Audra, keeping perfect time, and humming. Cricket joined in with Audra, “I gave him back his apples, I gave him back his pears. I gave him back his fifty cents, and kicked him down the stairs.”
Cricket whispered to Dotsy, “That may not be the best lyrics?” She winked. “No more fighting. You promise?”
Dotsy nodded. “Cross my heart.” She took her mother’s arm again, and they walked to the house. What they were missing—a fun night with her father—was unbearable.
“Honey?” Cricket’s voice was suddenly serious. “For now, at least, you shouldn’t play with Laurie. Understand?”
But, there was tomorrow. She had promised Laurie. What if she could prove Uncle Moon wasn’t involved? What if she could bring the music back? Wouldn’t it be okay to see Laurie just this once? Her father climbed the ladder to the treehouse. He turned to wave.
“I understand,” she said, not meeting Cricket’s eyes. And, then, when Cricket wasn’t looking, she waved back at her father.
Under normal circumstances, Laurie would have led the search mission into Big Gully with the brave abandon of the long-eared bats. There were gray splotches under her eyes, her blond braid stringy. She was unsteady on crutches. Her face was a delicate, sadder version of Dale’s.
Laurie covered face with her palms. “Stop looking at me like that. Go on. Get up there.”
Dotsy hoisted herself onto the peg Dale hacked from a piece of plywood. Months ago, they’d seared BG into the side of it with a wood-burning kit. She traced the initials with her finger. Dotsy tightened the pulley’s rigging. The galvanized cable glimmered with sunlight. Pine tree limbs smothered in vines jutted like robot arms. Her stomach roiled. It was so dark in the gully. Her father’s ghost would follow her. Wouldn’t he?
“Ready?” Laurie said.
Dotsy jumped off the foothold. “I can’t.”
“You have to.”
“Dale would never make me do something I didn’t want to do.”
“If you don’t go, I’ll tell your mama you’re here. You’re not even supposed to be talking to me.”
“But—”
“If the whole town knew you were in your treehouse talking to dead people,” Laurie paused and grinned. “They’d call you a witch.”
“But I’m not—”
“You’re not even supposed to be here—”
Dotsy climbed back up onto the peg. “Neither are you.” There was no winning with Laurie, but Dotsy needed to find a sign that Dale had been in the gully. She didn’t know what it would mean, but she knew in her gut she had to at least try. The kudzu seethed, and Dotsy clung to the rigging.
“Scaredy cat,” Laurie said.
“Am not,” Dotsy said, and then, to prove it, she cast off, the cable dragging with her weight. Tree stumps, briars, and pointed roots grazed the soles of her shoes. The ride seemed to go on forever. Near the bottom, the line sunk, and she skidded over rocks and earth. From her treehouse, the gully bubbled up like a green spring, but to be inside it was as frightening as the landscape of Dale’s Planet of the Apes comic books.
Lower Alabama was riddled with these peculiar structures. They were countless in Wallace County. The one by the Red and White Grocer was impressive. It sprawled from the parking lot to the hardware store. Often, Dotsy wondered why the landscape here was so fraught and fragile. Cricket said that when she was a child, it was the hard rains—gully washers—that whittled the unstable ground into wretched pits. But the more Dotsy learned about life, the more she wondered if it had to do with the people that inhabited this landscape. Was it their fault?
Years ago, to stabilize the gullies, the city of Mozelle turned them into glorified dumpsters, encouraging residents to trash their old appliances and unwanted furniture into the pits, but they continued to collapse like sinkholes. Next, the city resorted to planting fast-growing loblolly pines used for timber farming. This showed gradual promise, but the trees didn’t grow fast enough. Some genius soul realized that the one thing Alabama had a lot of, but folks had taken for granted, was kudzu. It was called foot-a-night-vine for a reason. It adhered to the loamiest of clays, created a plaster as good as the cast on Laurie’s leg, covering all those old cars and refrigerators, and the lanky loblollies with its thick quilt. Not only did the kudzu quickly eat up the floor of the pit with vine upon vine, stopping further erosion in its tracks, but it crept up the sides and held the walls steady as steel scaffolding.
Above, on the high slope, Laurie hobbled, swinging her crutches, and shouting commands—go here, go there. Dotsy wasn’t prepared for rough terrain. Her sneakers were thin-soled, her bravery wobbly. Any path Dale may have forged would be covered already. Is this what the battlegrounds of Vietnam were like? Had her father waded through ropey thickets like this alone? She tromped far from Laurie’s commands; the silence was almost comforting. One Christmas when Audra was a newborn, their mother took them to see her father’s people in North Alabama near the Tennessee line, and it snowed. The entire town stopped, breathless. Kudzu was Mozelle’s equivalent to snow.
“Dale,” she said, breaking the quiet. “Are you here?”
The afternoon sun surrendered shadows along the gully wall. Pine trees, entombed in kudzu, became turreted castles with gothic balusters. A black racer stitched its way through the viney rungs, then vanished. She held out her arms. “Dale, if you are here, show me.” Dale wouldn’t run away. He loved Mozelle, and this gully and her treehouse. It was Laurie who, at the drop of a hat, would desert them for good.
The north side of the gully was crowded with overturned washing machines, their rusted bodies barely distinguishable. Everything looked the same. Beneath a canopy of sinister tall pines, Dotsy turned back, unsure how to find her way. She thought about faraway Vietnam. From up in the suffocated loblollies, a Bob White called. She mimicked the bird’s upward pitch, hoping it would answer and return. She needed company. “Bob white, Bob white,” she whistled. The empty hush, no longer comforting, answered.
It felt like an hour before she saw the ridge. Laurie was not there. Without someone to tow, it was a miserable climb. Using the rope, she picked her way to the top, blackberry brambles scratching her hands and arms and ankles. She stopped once and gazed back into the pit, the kudzu brackish as the Alabama River in flood season; it seemed to rise to envelop her. Her mouth was parched, her arms and briar-pinched hands stung, and Laurie had let her down, again.
Once, when Laurie made fun of her boyish haircut and second-hand BMX bike, Dotsy escaped to Uncle Moon’s. He’d allowed her to sit on the chintz sofa in the sunroom with a bowl of butterscotch while a future pianist stomped out “Frere Jacques.”
Suddenly, the loneliness that had built up was impossible to fight; Dotsy needed to know Uncle Moon was okay. The guarding camellia bushes in his front yard swayed in the breeze. She peered into the front room. He sat at the piano, the polished fallboard folded over the keys. Maybe he’d just finished practicing. She rapped at the glass, the door rattling against her knuckles, and he turned to her, his expression that of a man who had not played a note in a long time.
“Oh, Dorothy. Oh, dear,” he said, standing on the stoop. He seemed thinner, older, but as usual his white shirt was starched and he wore a bow tie, this one a spectacular yellow. “Honey, you ought not be here.”
“I’m worried. About you,” she said.
Looking down at her hands, Uncle Moon cried, “My Lord. What happened?”
“I was down in Big Gully looking for Dale,” she said. Her arms itched and she scratched at them. “Can I come inside?”
Uncle Moon looked out past the hedge. “You ought not to. The neighbors—” his voice trailed off.
“They’re awful people. Mama said—”
“It’s okay,” he said, nodding. “It’s okay.” He looked as if he might send her home, but instead said, “You wait here.”
Uncle Moon returned with a silver tray holding a damp towel, a bottle of Methylate, two glasses of cold lemonade, and a bowl of butterscotch. Soon as she tasted the candy, the sadness of Dale’s disappearance momentarily vanished.
“Now, let’s tend these hands.”
He patted her wrists with the Palmolive towel, then opened the tiny bottle. Dotsy scrunched her nose at the medicinal odor and watched as Uncle Moon dripped orange stains over the scratches.
Miss Mary Bett Dees walked by with her spoiled Pekinese; both human and dog’s expressions were always of profound annoyance. To spite her, Dotsy waved, and the old woman shook her head. “That was rude,” Dotsy said.
“Well, between me and you, she’s always been an old bitty,” he said.
They laughed and laughed at that, and Dotsy unwrapped another Butterscotch, savored it under her tongue. “Things will go back to normal soon,” she said. “I wish I could help.”
“You’re helping just plenty.”
They sat chatting about school and the injustice of mathematics, until the afternoon sun filled the disheveled patio, warming the hedges. Uncle Moon said it was time for her to go home.
“Can I come back? Tomorrow?”
“We’ll have to see about that,” he said, looking away, a new sadness falling over his face. She wanted to press him on his answer, get him to commit to something concrete, but then he smiled, and she smiled along with him. That answer would have to be good enough.
Dotsy walked through the hedge of variegated camellias. It would be months before they’d be burdened with blossoms, but today they were weighted with something bigger, some emotion she couldn’t distinguish. She willed herself to feel carefree on the walk home, completely forgetting about her stinging hands, thinking of Uncle Moon’s kindness. When she passed Laurie’s house, the girl was on the front steps; she waved a pair of binoculars—Dale’s army binoculars. “You were at Uncle Moon’s. You’re not supposed to be there.”
“You left me. I got all scraped up. I could have gotten hurt really bad.”
“You’re not supposed to go to Uncle Moon’s. I’ll tell on you.” Laurie was scrambling up from the steps, steeling herself against the crutches.
Her hands and arms throbbed. “You go on and tell. See if I care.”
“Mama,” Laurie was calling, unsteady and wobbling to the door. “Mama!”
Dotsy ran, and downhill Mary Bet Dee’s Pekinese yelped and yelped. Once home, Dotsy stood outside her back door, the telephone’s insistent ring drowning out all the day’s good.
The next morning, Uncle Moon’s car was gone. Dotsy investigated. The curtains were drawn. A new stillness invaded the lawn. By Saturday, when he’d not returned, she waited in the treehouse watching for a glimpse of the old Buick. She tried, but couldn’t muster a prayer to her ghosts. Cricket called from the ladder. “Honey? Granny’s invited us for dinner and a sleepover. Crowder peas and cornbread, buttermilk fried chicken, fried okra.”
“I’m not hungry,” Dotsy said, her voice too stern.
Cricket climbed the ladder, dragged a chair beside her. They sat like that for a while. There were no long-eared bats to clear the skies.
“Honey?” Cricket said.
Dotsy offered her hand to Cricket. Her mother squeezed it.
“I know I wasn’t supposed to go see him, or Laurie. I’m so sorry.”
Cricket squeezed her hand again. “You sure you’re not hungry for Granny’s world-famous blackberry cobbler?”
Dotsy shook her head.
“Fried chicken?”
Dotsy brushed tears away. “Mama? Is he coming back? Is he gone for good?”
The look on her mother’s face said the courthouse contacts had bad news. She stroked Dotsy’s hand. “He must’ve gotten tired of all the whispering. All the gossip. You know, he has a sister in Birmingham.”
When Dotsy didn’t answer, Cricket said, “It’s not your fault. He’d probably been planning to leave for a while. There was no sense in him staying, with people talking like that.” Cricket climbed back down the ladder.
Dotsy kept her eyes on Uncle Moon’s house. She thought of the drive to her grandmother’s, how after they turned off the bypass in Mexia, the first landmark was the old Phillips 76 station, so webbed with kudzu it was nothing but a leafy silhouette of a concrete block building. Those vines devoured the orange 76 ball just like her life had been swallowed whole.
As the sun went down over the gully, Dotsy was faint with hunger. She closed the little eyelet curtains and made her way down the ladder. At the screen door, she watched Cricket at the kitchen table, talking on the phone. Dotsy sat outside on the step. She wanted to keep watch a little longer for Uncle Moon, just in case. Cricket’s voice was soft and lilting, and soon Dotsy understood it was Granny she was speaking with. There was something different about her mother’s voice—a tone of resignation or disbelief—Dotsy couldn’t put her finger on it. Granny talked on and on, her full voice booming through the receiver. It made her long for the big backyard in Mexia. If they were there now, Audra would be watering the shoulder-high zinnias with the garden hose, the setting sun casting a water rainbow on the orange and fuchsia petals.
Cricket ran her hand through her hair and sighed. “I know. I know. The pain of losing a child—or a husband—or a brother or a friend—it eats at you forever. It takes everything.”
Her mother was quiet while Granny spoke. Dotsy’s stomach growled, and she thought of the warm blackberries and purple ice cream and was ashamed of her hunger. Cricket said, “And once your insides are gone, it just gnaws at the bone.”
Dotsy felt a catch in her throat. Her eyes welled. She imagined Laurie, just twelve-years-old, wasting down to a skeleton. Maybe Laurie had hurt Dotsy’s feelings because there were none of her own left to hurt. The cicadas began their racket, and an immense ache rose out of her heart for that girl.
At 4 a.m. a rapping at the window woke her. She crept to the end of the bed, pulled back the curtain. Laurie’s face, slim and dark through the screen, stared back at her. Dotsy hesitated and shoved open the window. The air was damp and chilly and reeked of the rotten-egg pulp mill in Cantonment. “Laurie?” she said, her voice kinder than it had been before, recalling her mother’s words.
“It’s Dale! He woke me up.”
“What?” Dotsy pulled her hair away from her face. From the big loblolly pine that shadowed the lawn, a barn owl purred.
Laurie was half laughing, half crying. She could hardly get the words out. “Dale woke me up. For my birthday. He came back for my birthday. I knew he would.”
“Like in a dream? He came to you in a dream?”
“No. No. For real. I was sound asleep and there he was. Right by my bed.”
“But where is he now? Where’d he go?” Dotsy said.
“He told me where he was. At the farthest part of Big Gully behind the trees.”
“But where is he now? He woke you up and then ran away again? That doesn’t make—”
“Shh,” Laurie said. “You’ll wake everybody up. We got to find him. He’s waiting.”
“No. You’re making it up. You’re trying to trick me.”
“It was him. I know it was.” She was hysterical, clawing at the screen. “He’ll leave if we don’t find him.”
Dotsy thought of the rain and the orange mud, and all the times Laurie intentionally hurt her. Even though she wanted to keep her grandmother’s words in her mind, she closed the window, locked it, pulled the curtain to, and leaned back against the headboard. Her hands shook as she listened to Laurie’s cries. Finally, the tapping stopped, and she assumed Laurie had gone home. But the house made settling sounds, a sigh here, another there, and the usual predictable, comforting shifts in the old house now made her nervous. She’d never be able to go back to sleep. She pulled a blanket over her head and thought, what if Laurie tried to go into the pit on her own? What if she got hurt? It would be Dotsy’s fault. She’d go, prove to Laurie that Dale wasn’t there. That she’d had a strange dream. That was all it was.
The clock on the kitchen stove shined 5:00am as she left the house. Humidity soaked the air, and she shivered in her T-shirt. At the edge of Big Gully, she secured the flashlight in her belt loop, climbed up on the peg, and soared down into the dark pit.
Darkness brewed from the thickets and rugged caves of vines and briars. She kept going further into the bramble, reminding herself it would be daylight soon, and she would find her way back to the tow rope easily. She prayed as she walked, “Corporal Perry, Daddy? Superfly, Razz.” The trees became dense. She assumed it was the area seeded with pine saplings when her mother was a child. She could feel her heart pounding, and she took deep breaths. The milky gray light of dawn filtered down, and bark shone like smooth leather. It was otherworldly down here, and she ran her palms along everything, even the old tires and a smooth refrigerator door handle. She made her way through as if in a dream, willing Dale to appear to her. Oh, no, she thought. Dale. He was a ghost. He had gone to Laurie as a ghost. Just like Dotsy’s father, like Superfly, like Razz. He is there at the gully. That’s what he meant. He’s dead. When a slip of a stream appeared, she hopped over it, but once on the other side, something caught hold of her right foot, and she fell backwards. She ran her hands over springy prongs. The rusty metal rings of a box spring had yoked her ankle. Blood dripped at her heel. After a while, she leaned back on the box spring and dozed. When she woke, the sun had risen, and there was a heavy breeze cooling her face. Storm clouds had gathered. From high on the ridge, she heard her mother’s frantic singsong calling her name, strangers’ frantic shouts. She tried to answer back, but the pain in her ankle rose up to her throat. Dizzy, she sank back into the box spring, and concentrated on the branches of the high, mottled trees above her. There was a strange beauty to it all, and it gave her strength. “Mama,” she called, but her voice was scratchy, so weak it sounded as if it were coming from someone else. “I’m here.”
The bob whites joined the chorus of voices that answered, and Dotsy followed their dance above, flitting from one haggard limb to the next. In the distance, on the high rim of the gully, there was movement and urgent commands. Soon, they would be here, and she’d never be allowed back in the gully again. She would memorize everything about it, the smell of the glossy, impenetrable leaves of this underground world, the smooth dance of a black racer as it wove its way vine-like. Maybe she was wrong about Dale. Maybe he was still out there somewhere, alive. She studied the bob white as it hovered overhead, and followed its nervous flight. Her eyes drifted with its black and white wings as it moved up the trees and then down down along a chaos of branches to a single cowboy boot, just like Dale’s, and then, next to it, the sole of a bare foot. The boot and the foot swayed gently with the growing wind.
Later, police found climbing pegs Dale nailed all the way up to the top of the loblolly wall. They were sturdy, made with good white oak he’d split himself. Dotsy recalled the ring of wood against axe one afternoon, the sound of hard work being done. The sheriff explained to Cricket, and then she explained best she could to Dotsy that once Dale had nailed the pegs, and then bit by bit made his way to the top of the tree, he’d rigged a cable around the tree trunk. The safety line on the limb above him, a strong sturdy nylon got caught in the strap at the back of his army helmet, tightened around his neck, cutting off his air supply, hanging him from the vines.
In the weeks and months that followed, despite his now obvious innocence, Uncle Moon never returned. Cricket said she suspected it was more than his varnished reputation; he’d simply lost faith in Mozelle. How could he teach piano to the children whose parents had turned on him? Dotsy thought she could bring him back with letters written on her mother’s embossed notes. She wrote of the nesting cardinals on his patio, how she missed hearing the piano, his stories, the butterscotch candy, how she was so sorry about what she’d done. Dotsy imagined the rooms where he read these letters. They would be stuffy and overheated with high ceilings overlooking a busy street, devoid of gullies and children. Uncle Moon never answered the letters, and his house sat empty for years, a reminder of silenced music. Laurie’s family moved to Greenville, and then, Cricket heard later, on to Montgomery. The ghosts who boosted Dotsy up all those years were quiet. Her father no longer teased in the backyard. Superfly’s corner spot in front of the post office was empty. Cars went uncounted. Razz was gone from the courthouse square, the checkerboard pieces untouched. Dotsy wondered if they had ever been there at all.
Years later, Dotsy moved to Florida where the landscape was riddled with sinkholes, another kind of pit born from unstable ground. Often, she would make the long drive to visit her mother, and on one of those weekends, a Saturday morning in May at sunrise, she walked to the gully’s edge. Pink light lit the deep cavern, casting it harmless. Many times she had tried to imagine what Dale had intended that afternoon long ago. He must have been so proud of himself, excited about the construction of the zip line. He must have left his piano lesson at Uncle Moon’s too excited to ride his bike down the hill to the gully, or perhaps he didn’t want anyone to know he was there. It was a surprise after all. What she liked to believe was that when his work was done in the gully, he would have come for her, and together they would have soared through the air.
