Chapter Three
Iwas born in 1988 but since I never spent much time anywhere but Horseshoe Cliff, where for many years there was no television, my childhood never felt connected to the times in which I was living. It was only when I entered kindergarten at Little Earth School in Osha that I became somewhat aware of pop culture and the larger world. From the beginning, I loved school. I was not the sort of child who was afraid of new experiences. My father told me that I was like my mother in this way, always up for an adventure. There were other young students who clung to their mothers and sobbed on the steps of the school in the morning; I hopped out of my father’s truck and ran right past them. My schoolmates did not know what to make of me at first, but after some effort on my part, they came around.
Little Earth occupied an old Victorian house. The upper school was upstairs, and the lower school was downstairs, with only twenty or so children enrolled in each. I had no idea, of course, that it was a little hippie school in a little hippie town.Little Earth might as well have been the whole earth—that’s how big and exciting it seemed to me. The raucous clatter of dozens of children talking and laughing at once was as wonderful a sound as I had ever heard. Until then, my only playmates had been covered with fur or feathers.
It did not take long for me to understand that I was not like the other students at Little Earth. My classmates wore different outfits every day of the week. They had clean hair that smelled of flowers. They left school with blackened fingernails and streaks of dirt on their knees from playing in the schoolyard and returned the next morning wiped clean, all signs of the previous day’s activity erased. They had more food than they could eat in their lunchboxes, packed neatly by their mothers.
They were kind to me, often offering me half a sandwich or a cookie when they saw how little I’d brought.
“Here you go,” a talkative girl named Daphne said to me on our second day, handing me a plastic bag full of celery sticks covered in peanut butter. “My mom told me to beextranice to you because you don’t have a mom and you’re poor.” Daphne spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. A few of the other children at our table glanced at me and smiled in a way that revealed that they, too, had been told to be nice to me.
I’d known the mom part, of course, but the poor part surprised me. Was I poor? No one had mentioned it before. It made sense, though, upon reflection. I was often hungry, and the shelves in our kitchen were closer to bare than full. I wore clothes that my brother had worn years earlier, or things that we found in the free box in front of the Osha co-op. We didnot have a television. We occasionally endured a week or more without the lights working. The only new things I had ever owned were presents from our friend Rei, and though my father sometimes protested her gifts, in the end he always accepted them.
With the wordpoorechoing through my mind, I felt a sudden impulse to impress my new friends. When Teacher Julie had gone slowly through the letters of the alphabet the day before, I had not spoken up to let her know that I could already read, but now, I did. I had learned to read when I was four. We did not have many toys at Horseshoe Cliff, but stuffed bookshelves lined my father’s bedroom. He and Rei frequently traded books, discussing their most recent reads at length on the back porch while watching the sun set. When Rei noticed that I had taught myself to read, she started bringing me stacks of books that she had borrowed from a library some distance away, though she was less inclined to do so as of late because I had lost the last few books she had given me. The books were beside my bed when I went to sleep, and when I woke up, they were gone. Rei was soft-spoken but serious; she had never before scolded me the way she did when I lost those books.
After only a few days at Little Earth, it became clear to me that I read far above the average level for my age. I offered to tutor my new friends, but they declined my help.
My stories, on the other hand, delighted my classmates. I told them about the mermaid sisters who swam alongside the whales just off the coast of Horseshoe Cliff and the civilization of fairies that had been living in the eucalyptus grove for a thousand years. These were complicated tales with devious villains and plucky heroines. Not every character made it to the end alive. In the yard, my classmates would gather around me to listen to the latest installment of life under the sea, or in the trees. My audience swung from gasps to laughter. Sometimes, they clapped.
When Teacher Julie would come outside to collect us from our recess, she would wait until I’d reached a suitable resting point in my story. One day, after sending the other kids inside, she handed me a clothbound journal.
“You’re nearly bursting with these stories, Merrow,” she told me. “Why don’t you try writing them down?”
I ran my hand over the journal sadly. I adored Teacher Julie, but how could I explain to her that the only way for me to keep my stories was to save them inside of me? If I wrote them down, I would only lose them. I was so forgetful I could hardly remember half the things I’d forgotten. Just a week earlier, one of the older girls at school had presented me with a doll that she’d sewn from old cloth and bits of ribbon. Within a day of bringing it home, the doll disappeared. I was sure I had left it at the kitchen table when I’d gone out to feed the chickens, but when I returned to the cottage, the table was empty.
“I’ll lose it,” I told my teacher. “I lose everything.”
Teacher Julie studied me, thoughtful for a moment. “Why don’t you keep it here at school?” she said at last. “You can write during quiet time and store the journal in your cubby whenyou’re not using it. I’ll help you remember to put it in the same spot every day, okay? Nothing is lost for very long at Little Earth.”
Her words filled me with hope. I gave her a tight hug before hurrying to place my new journal in my cubby.
AS MUCH ASI loved school, Bear hated it. In the morning, after Dad drove away from Little Earth in his truck, Bear would lumber off toward town. On those days, he smelled like beer in the afternoon when our father picked us up. Dad would tell him that if he skipped school again, he would have to drop out permanently and stay home to work in the orchard. But he kept giving Bear another chance and another chance until the Friday came when Bear learned he was all out of chances.
I sat between Bear and my father in the cab of the truck. Since I refused to sleep during naptime at school, not wanting to miss anything, I was always tired on the way back to Horseshoe Cliff and usually nodded off. That afternoon, I awoke to hear my father telling Bear that from then on, he’d remain at home to help in the orchard. As Dad spoke, Bear’s elbow pressed sharply into my side. I looked up to see my brother glowering at me. I felt a chill around him that would not thaw; I’d seen the knives in his eyes every day since that first time in the grove. His elbow pressed into my side so hard that I gasped. He had never hurt me in front of our father, and I think I was surprised as much as I was hurt.
“Bear!” Dad said.
“She’s taking up all the space.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and pretended to sleep.
“Ugh, she smells terrible,” Bear said. “She has fleas.”
“Your sister doesn’t have fleas.”
On cue, the red bumps along my arms began to itch. Once I started scratching, I could not stop. I had fleabites. It was true. Fleas loved Pal as much as I did, but I’d endure the bites of all the fleas in the world if it meant I could keep my dog with me at night.
“Oh, Mer,” I heard my father say. “Are you letting Pal in your bed again?”
I pretended to snore. I couldn’t stop scratching though. The scratching, at least, gave me something to do other than cry, which I knew would have made Bear only angrier. The kids at school never pointed at my fleabites or yanked my hair or told me manure smelled better than I did. Only Bear. My father told me that Bear loved me, but what I felt from him seemed the opposite of love. It seemed to me that before my fifth birthday, when Bear had sat on me in the grove, I had walked around in a kind of fog. I had not been able to see all the ways he mistreated me. But now I felt a kind of clarity. I knew Bear hated me and wished me only harm. I knew I should stay as far away from him as I could.
As the truck tires rumbled from the paved road onto Horseshoe Cliff’s dirt drive, I hugged my backpack and kept my eyes tightly shut. I imagined that I was still sitting on the rug in Little Earth, surrounded by other kids, listening to Teacher Julie tell us how the Earth turned. I wished the Earth would speed up just this once, delivering me back to school faster. I shuddered at the thought of a weekend at home with Bear,especially now that he had been sentenced to full days of the farmwork he hated.
OVER THE NEXTcouple of years, I became more adept at staying out of Bear’s way. Still, the anger that I sensed simmering within him would boil over unpredictably, and there were times when I could not avoid his rage. These assaults felt random, but some calculation must have gone into them; Bear never shoved me to the ground or twisted my arms behind my back within sight of our father. And he never went so far as to hurt me so badly that my father could not dismiss my complaints as within the realm of normal sibling squabbling. I loved my father more than I loved anyone, but it always seemed that he was only half listening, only half watching. He did his farmwork and he put plates of food on the table and at night he sat on the porch, exhausted, coughing, whittling those tiny houses and staring off at the horizon and drinking beer until his words softened. He was a vague presence much of the time, benevolent but preoccupied. And what preoccupied him? The farm, of course, which needed near constant attention, but I also came to believe that my father’s thoughts never strayed far from his memories of my mother.
When I thought of my missing treasures, I thought of a list as long and old as an ancient scroll, and at the top of that scroll was my mother. Of all that had gone missing, she was, of course, the most important. Of all the mysteries that hounded me, the mystery ofhowshe had been lost was the most unrelenting.
When I finally worked up the nerve to ask my father outright what had happened to my mother, the look on his face was so pained that I ran away from him and never asked again.
