Through the kitchen window, the dust coming from the hayloft looks thick, like smoke. Like the barn is on fire. Mama’s taking a broom to it, and I smell horses. I smell Boneyard, who was my horse, and Pasture, who was Missy’s. Missy is my sister and she’s younger than me and too fat to wear my hand-me-downs. It’s June, and the air is clear except where the sun hits the dust, making beams that cut through the yard, beams that could cut up the oak tree and the jack-pine branches until all that’s left is a brush pile. Plenty of dust is coming into the house, and I don’t care. Old hay and dirt and ladybug shells parachute down from the hayloft, sail through the yard’s sky, and in through the kitchen window. A spider husk lands on Missy’s biscuit.
“What girl, are you blind?” This is what I say to Missy because she’s cutting last night’s biscuit with her sandwich teeth, right up close to the spider husk, and it’s a big one. Maybe an Outhouse Spider, which we find plump as tomatoes sometimes.
Here, we name things for where we find them, or for where they came from in the first place. Our dog Swampy, for example. We found him cowering in the cornfield, looking like a stump sticking up out of the rainwater. That was when Hurricane Hugo hit the coast last year and we got six inches of rain in one day, even way up here in the mountains. The corn was ruined, knocked down like pick-up sticks. My dad was mad because he would have run that crop through his contraption and sold it for money, and he made Missy and me put on our raincoats and walk to the cornfield, down our quarter-mile driveway above the ravine, gravel already washing into Sugar Creek Road.
I dragged my milk-jug-and-scrap-wood raft along with us, and when we hit the standing water, we got on and pushed ourselves out to the corn using long sticks, pushing hard against the mud. The water was the color of chocolate milk and deep, dragging us toward the creek, toward where the creek used to be before the flood. I said “Heave,” and Missy said “Ho.” Mama says we make a good team, and I reckon sometimes we do. Roots spoked out like stars at the ends of the cornstalks and we packed mud around them, trying to get them to stand up, but it didn’t work. That was morning, and by night, the Silver King corn was floating, getting all mixed up in Sugar Creek, which flows into Ivy Creek before you reach the big road.
When we first saw Swampy hunkered in the mud with the ruined corn, he bared his teeth, but he was real quiet, like he was thinking on something. Missy said he was smiling, but I’m older and I’ve seen enough teeth in the world to know it was something different. We got to keep him, and he’s still here with us, one of the only ones. We could have named him Hugo, but we named him Swampy. He’s small and he’s beautiful, black with a white star on his chest. Like Boneyard. He looks a lot like Boneyard, but Boneyard was brown.
I am proud of that raft. I drank a lot of milk for it and Missy did, too. Sometimes, instead of sticks, we use paddles from The Sea Squall, an inflatable boat we used to have, its name in cursive on the side, blue on silver. I’ve got this picture in my head from when The Sea Squall was new: All of us in the yard—Mama, Daddy, Missy, and me—stomping on the foot pump, making the boat swell up like a tick.
A while back, Missy and me found the paddles along the creek in the woods, down past the outhouse, down where we hunt crawdads near Daddy’s contraption. Two blue-handled paddles with silver blades leaning on a heap of brush. Even though it hadn’t been running in a while, if you were like Missy and me, and knew to press your nose to the hole in the barrel, the contraption still smelled like fresh-baked bread. We found the paddles, but the boat was gone, same as our dad and Boneyard and Pasture and the cornfield and the TV signal and the telephone and a lot of the good looks of this place. Our mama used to sit outside on her scrap-wood swing with a Miller High Life sweating in her hand and say, “It looks like a park,” because the grass around the garden was green and our dad kept it cut short and even. Sometimes, she’d pat the bench, and Missy and me were allowed to climb up and swing with her, as long as we kept our feet still. Now, we’ve got dirt, and where we do have grass, it’s tall and yellow and full of dragonflies thick as okra.
My sister isn’t blind, but her glasses are thick. When I hold her corrective lenses up to my eyes, it’s like looking through Jell-O or a helium balloon. I went to Nora Tate’s house for a sleepover one time, and we did that—stood at the big window in the living room and held balloons up to our eyes. We looked out at the Tate’s backyard, a stripe of grass and a stripe of street. The sky was here and there, except green not blue, because the balloon I’d picked was yellow. We stood against the back of the couch, me between Nora and Leeann, April at the end, like all of us went to the same school and were going to be friends forever. One thing I like to do is drink hot chocolate right after Sprite-on-ice at my grandma’s house in Virginia, which is far away but still in this time zone. That’s what it felt like, taking the balloon away from my eyes—like hot chocolate right after Sprite. You can feel it go all the way down and hit your stomach, like a surprise, even though it’s something regular. Grandma, I wish I could say, gimme some of that Sprite-on-ice. I wish I could call her right now on the telephone.
Missy holds her biscuit way out at arm’s length and squints through her glasses at the spider. “Kitty,” she says, and she’s crying because I’ve let her get too close.
“You bit its foot off,” I say, but she didn’t. The spider is hardly a spider at all. No guts, just a shell, and really only the outline of that, so that it looks like a diamond ring without the diamond. Thin wires the shape of a spider, but not much spider at all.
“Stupid blind baby,” is what I say to Missy, who has left her biscuit on the table in the dining room, which is no different from the kitchen because there’s no wall. Missy pushes open the screen door and spits a mouthful of wet biscuit into the weeds against the house.
“You’re gonna draw ants,” I say, but I wish she could see this spider, this diamond ring. I mean really see it. I lift it off the biscuit and hold it up to the window. It’s made out of the same stuff as locust shells, it looks like, and the light comes through it like brown stained glass. The legs are brittle and snap off at the knees, and the cups where the eyes used to be are smooth and hollow.
Our dad was resting in The Sea Squall, I tell Missy sometimes. Using the boat like one of those blow-up mattresses, the kind Nora Tate has in her room, spoking out around her own bed like petals on a flower, one for each girl sleeping over. Daddy was resting so deep that he fell asleep and didn’t feel the rain start to fall. Didn’t feel the boat wobble on the rocks when the creek water rose. Didn’t hear the thunder or see the lightning battering his eyelids. Dreaming so deep that the current was a carnival ride, the Fun Slide or the Teacups, which I used to ride at the fair, waving to Missy down on the ground, crying because she was scared. Our dad left on The Sea Squall, I tell Missy sometimes, and I think he did. But I have a lot of pictures in my head. It’s easy to mix them up, like that game where you twist a crocodile’s body and get a bunny rabbit’s head. In one picture, Daddy’s at the top of the driveway, wearing his good shirt, pockets pointy like fancy-folded napkins, rows of pearl snaps on the sleeves. This picture is from the very last time I saw my dad—or from the time I lay down flat in the back of the pickup, packed between crates of tinkling bells. We wound through the mountains, just me and my dad, following the Etch A Sketch of power lines. Mainly, I stayed wedged in my body like a cork. But sometimes, when my dad braked hard to unload a crate, or swung around a big curve, part of me lifted off, it felt like, like a kite or a bird.
When I finish telling about The Sea Squall taking off down the creek with our daddy in it, fast asleep, Missy climbs my back, wraps both arms around my neck, and hangs on like a bear cub. “Then what,” she’ll say, and if I don’t feel like saying, I’ll lock my lips and toss the key in the woods.
Missy and me are homeschooled. We weed the garden and load the truck with Yukon potatoes and Cherokee tomatoes, bush beans and crookneck squash. After Daddy got gone, Mama sold the plot at the bottom of the driveway with the corn on it, and she sold our horses. One afternoon a man came. He put his hand on Boneyard’s neck. “Git on up,” he told the horses, and they did. They climbed right up into his trailer and he drove away. And one morning the three of us, Missy, Mama, and me, put everything from inside our house out in the yard and a man came up the driveway in a truck with double tires. He walked around inside our house, knocking on things with his knuckles. Knocking on the kitchen counter, knocking on the bathroom door, peeling back the carpet where Mama and Daddy’s bed used to sit and knocking on the floor. It took him a long time to unwind a big chain from the bed of his truck and attach it to the back of our house, and when he did, the chain swung and made black stripes on his overalls. The man bucked his truck across our yard, jerking our house along with it. I could hear his engine a long time: rattling down our driveway, slowing for the right onto Sugar Creek Road, curving left to take the big road. Rumbling in the rafters when we tried to sleep in the barn that night, Missy curled in Mama’s arms, Swampy in the crook of my knees. I showed Missy the nest of roly-polies in the dirt where our house had been, and we let them roll around in our hands.
I wish it had been like Nora Tate’s house, lodged in the ground with a basement, tall and big, with wood in it too heavy to haul away, but it was a trailer, a single wide, and now we live in a bubble with Airstream stamped on the side. Pluto, Mama calls it, because that’s where it looks like it came from. We’ve got the same steps. While the man dragged the single wide out from behind her, Mama sat on the steps and held them down. Charlotte—that was the name of our first house, the house where I was born.
Missy lets the screen door slam, and I hear Swampy smacking his lips, going for her biscuit. When she turns, she stumbles on a box we’ve all stumbled on a million times, one of the only boxes we brought back in from the lawn: filled with nightgowns and shorts, sneakers and dresses, all outgrown. T-shirts that fit us like crop tops. Raincoats that cling like Saran Wrap to our arms. When I asked Mama why we have to keep this stuff, why we have to move this box to the barn, why we don’t tip it into the ravine like we’d done the toaster and the box spring and the bumper off the pickup truck, Mama didn’t answer. Just rubbed her belly a long time.
“Missy.” I dangle the spider by one wire leg and she turns away, plops into her chair at the kitchen table, and folds her arms.
Outside, Mama’s walking the path from the barn, the broom on her shoulder like a hobo’s stick. Martins swoop through the beams of sunlight, diving for dust like it’s food. I count four, but it’s hard not to count the same ones twice—flashing in and out of the light, on and off like lightning bugs, flashing purple and shadow. Usually, I go ahead and tell Missy the rest of the story. It can go a lot of ways, like the Choose Your Own Adventure books at the library out on the big road. But mainly, our dad floats a long way. All the way down Sugar Creek into Ivy Creek, which runs into the French Broad River, the water getting wider and stronger and faster every time it changes names.
Compared to Pluto, the barn is a mansion, big as the Tate’s house, practically, and I add pictures to the stash in my mind: The barn without rats, the roof without holes, walls without the gaps where the bats slip through. Us living in there like a regular home, a whole family, me and Missy, Mama and Daddy, the barn so big I’ve got my own room.
At the well, Mama fills a bucket and rinses off the dirt and the horse smell. Swampy licks her legs and dances in the mud. Behind the ears, Boneyard smelled like a new box of Cheerios. Under his halter, like old cheese. Like the creek clogged with leaves when you lifted his mane. If I smelled like Boneyard, I would never wash, just to keep him with me. I’d go on smelling like the brown horse with the white star.
“When Daddy gets back,” I tell Missy, “he might bare his teeth like Swampy did, back when we first found him in the corn. But he won’t do it for very long.” Sometimes, Daddy’s at the top of the driveway, wearing his good shirt, pockets pointy like fancy-folded napkins, silver bands across his wrists hiding the snaps on his sleeves. A man with a star—not a real star like Boneyard’s or Swampy’s, just a fake one, pinned on his chest—puts his hand on our dad’s neck, holds open the back door of a car, and our dad climbs in. Like the man told him Git on up, and he did.
“The French Broad River flows into the Dragonfly River,” I tell Missy, starting up the story. I want her to look at me, to climb up my back like a cub.
“And The Sea Squall floats all the way to the end and Daddy sleeps in the sea,” Missy says to her biscuit, choosing an ending I made up one time, an ending that isn’t true.
“Nope,” I say. “The Dragonfly flows into the Miller and the Miller flows into the Silver King. And you know how strong the current gets when Sugar Creek floods?” Missy doesn’t move. “Well, that’s nothing compared to the Silver King River. Stronger than He-Man, white water frothing thick as whipped cream. There’s no way our dad’s sleeping through that.”
Out the window, the dust has settled, the beams of light disappeared.
“He’s on his way home right now, I bet.”
Missy lifts her glasses, wipes her eyes and her nose in one big rub, and climbs off her chair. “I miss Pasture,” she says.
“I know,” I say, and Missy looks at me through her corrective lenses.
Together, we crouch, shoving our hands under the box. The cardboard is old, so fragile it drops crumbs.
“Heave,” I say, and we stand up, our legs unfolding like a single greased hinge.
