Page 114 of Mazywood

Grady was furious, but she was his boss, so he kept his profanities locked in his eyes.

“Ten minutes,” he said. “I said to come back in ten minutes. No way in the world you would stay away that long unless something was wrong in those woods. So I tried calling for you. Didn’t know what else to do.”

She had scared him. He looked ready to quit on the spot. Then what would she do?

“I’m sorry.” Mazelle stepped closer to him. Grady was in love with her and always had been, so she tried to soothe him with her eyes. “Please forgive me, Grady. I saw a rabbit caught in a snare… poor thing. And I brought him back with me. I didn’t think it through.”

Grady glanced down at her basket, but he was too angry to be curious.

“A rabbit,” he muttered. He turned to walk back to the driver’s-side door. “You gonna get me lynched out here over a goddamn rabbit…” He climbed in and slammed his door.

He had not forgiven her. But he also hadn’t quit. Not yet.

Mazelle had enough room in the front seat to set the picnic basket beside her rather than on the floor, where her legs would be cramped. She just had to keep the lid shut.

“That rabbit stinks,” Grady said as he started the car. “You sure it ain’t already dead?”

Ricky’s head popped up behind Mazelle. “Rabbit? You’ve got a rabbit, Mother?” He reached toward the picnic basket’s flap.

Mazelle’s hand lashed out on its own, before she could think. She heard the pop of her palm across Ricky’s pudgy hand. His mouth opened into a surprised O as he yanked his hand back. Then he started crying. His crying set off Sadie crying in her car bed. This racket!

“Sit back in your seat,” Mazelle said to Ricky, and her son scooted back with frightened eyes. He was holding the hand she’d hit against his chest as if she’d whacked him with a tire iron. Mazelle glanced at Grady and saw how tightly his jaw was locked, more disapproval. He’d told her many times that she was too hard on Ricky. Too quick to spank him.

“The rabbit’s sick, okay?” she said, pouring sweetness into her voice. “No looking or touching. Just eat your snack and be still like a good boy.”

Such a momentous day, and she had to deal with these children!

She’d told Richard she didn’t want children, but Richard had gotten his way—and she’d told the judge about his violence to make sure he couldn’t keep the son he craved. Her pregnancy with Ricky had cost her the role she had hoped would take her to the future. Did she blame Ricky for that? Or the way he was marked by his father’s face, not just his name? Or, as she’d confided once to Grady after too many drinks, maybe the mothering gene had skipped a generation in her.

Mazelle caressed the picnic basket beside her.

She had not truly felt like a mother until she lifted Scout into her arms.

Thirty-One

MAZYWOOD

EIGHT YEARS LATER

JANUARY 1958

AN OTHERWORLDLY CLOUD HOVERED OVER Mount Shasta’s peak like a disk-shaped spacecraft in Forbidden Planet, hugging the mountain in orange ringed with majestic purple. These spectacular cloud formations didn’t usually appear in winter, so today the sight felt as magical as Scout’s presence beside her. For every step Mazelle took, she heard him matching her pace beneath snow glowing in crystalline twilight hues.

Scout usually knew better than to bother her when she had guests, or her children were awake, but she’d heard an urgent ringing of the wind chimes she’d posted beneath her bedroom window. She’d only happened to hear it as she emerged from her bathroom while her chef, Marguerite, prepared dinner. Those chimes were placed out of most drafts, so the only time they rang was when Scout leaped against them.

As soon as she stepped down the rear porch steps, she saw his erratic tracks in the snow, as if he’d been racing in a frenzied circle. To the unschooled eye, it might look like someone had been operating a snowblower without rhyme or reason.

“What is it, boy?” She whispered so her special guest in the nearest cabin wouldn’t hear.

Scout, still hidden beneath the small drifts, led her away from the house and cabins. In seven years, Scout had grown from the size of a possum to a fox, but no single animal could explain Scout. Mazelle figured there had never been another like him.

Mazelle had told Scout that he must stay out of sight—but he had adopted a new extreme by the time she returned from Los Angeles for her Christmas stay, preferring to burrow beneath the snow, propelling himself like a snake. His motion was wild, almost playful, as he’d been in his dog form. But he had been robbed of his more functional doggy legs in his transformation, reduced to overly long front legs with bat-like, furred webbing and claws. He mostly used his mismatched stubby rear legs, also with claws, for steering. (But he moves too fast, so that isn’t all of it, not by a long shot.) Scout swam beneath snow as if he had been conjured in Alaska instead of Florida, easily adapting to his new life on the mountain.

He did not move like bone and skin. He moved like a creature of the mud.

Mazelle and Scout traveled together alongside the wooden railing above the ski trail, past the empty rose-colored metal car for the ski lift, which was chained shut because neither of her guests this week wanted to ski. She had spent a fortune to build a ski lift only for it to go untouched so often—probably too much, as Grady had tried to warn her—but she still loved the sight of the padded car and sturdy wires strung down the path like miniature flying streetcars. Mazywood looked like any boutique resort where Negroes were still not welcome. As far as she knew, she was the only Negro woman, or Negro period, who had ever built a ski lift at her own resort, even a small one, an enduring source of pride.

And she barely had the chance to enjoy any of it. If not for her radio gig in Los Angeles playing a quipping elevator operator in a fancy hotel, Mazelle would have let Ricky and Sadie live with Mother and Dottie for a long while and moved here to spend all her time with Scout. She hated to be away from him. Her sleep was restless in the trap of her Baldwin Hills house, where she yearned for inky-black night skies, fresh air, and the perfume of fir trees instead of a city smell that was so much more pronounced now that she remembered what clean air smelled like. And Scout was so much easier to care for than the children. All Scout needed her to do was toss him a few raw steaks from the back porch at night. Not even that.