Listen! (9780062213358) (10 page)

Later, when Charley is reading on the terrace, a fishing boat comes by, its electric trolling motor making a barely perceptible hum. Coyote goes down to the bushes at the edge of the lake and barks at it. “That's some new watchdog you've got there,” Mr. Sutcliff shouts over the barking.

Coyote barks until the boat has gone on down the lake and even the ripples have faded. Then he comes back to lie down under the camellia. Charley imagines him congratulating himself for having chased off a dangerous enemy. This barking is another step forward, she thinks. Their yard has become Coyote's territory.

That day a new pattern begins. The daily hikes are over. After dinner Charley takes Coyote his liver pieces, and little by little he begins to come up to her and take them from her hand, even when she's looking at him. At dusk he disappears. But when she goes outside in the morning, he is there, lying up by the road or sitting at the end of the driveway, waiting for her. If her father leaves before Charley goes out, he never sees the dog, but Charley is sure Coyote isn't going back around the lake anymore. He has found a place in the woods across the road to spend the night.

Sadie comes over later, sometimes swimming, sometimes on the road. Charley always has a book with her, but she doesn't get much reading done. After a while she figures out what the dogs are telling each other with their ears and their tails and the expressions on their faces. If she kept a notebook like Jane Goodall did with the chimpanzees, she thinks, it would have more interesting information about dogs than the training books do.

The only change in the new pattern happens on the Fourth of July. Fireworks aren't legal in North Carolina, but they are in South Carolina, and Eagle Lake is only a few miles from the South Carolina border, so there are plenty of firecrackers and bottle rockets around the lake on the Fourth. The minute the firecrackers start going off in the early afternoon, Coyote disappears. Charley and her father and Sarita have been invited to the Sutcliffs' for a picnic supper, along with most of the rest of the people from the north side of the lake. Coyote hasn't shown up again when it's time for them to leave, so he doesn't get his evening liver. She leaves a few pieces on the retaining wall.

When they get home after the picnic, there is no sign of Coyote. The liver is still on the wall. Deep booms fill the night from the official fireworks in downtown Charlotte. Charley worries all night about where Coyote is and whether he'll come back. She's heard of dogs so frightened by fireworks that they run off and get lost and are never seen again. But when she goes out the next morning, the liver is gone and he is there, lying out by the road.

Just taking care of myself, he seems to say. You can't be too careful.

“‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.'—John Muir.”

C
harley is sitting on her bed, looking at her mother's book. The photo that goes with this quotation is a perfect circle of white mushrooms, some big, some small, against a background of brilliant green moss. A fairy ring. The mushrooms, she knows, are attached to one another—are really only a single fungus, its connections underground. It is called a fairy ring because it seems to appear by magic, overnight. One day it isn't there; the next it is. In a few days it will be gone, as if the fairies came to dance there in the moonlight and then moved on, leaving their magic to fade.

Charley remembers believing that. She remembers being in this place when a fairy ring was there, begging to be allowed to stay out at night to watch. “If humans are there, the fairies won't come,” her mother told her.

Later, of course, she gave up the idea of fairies dancing in the moonlight. But this place where the photo was taken remained a special place, different from the rest of the Eagle Lake woods of beech and hickory, oak and sweet gum, dogwood and sourwood. Her mother called it the Pine Grove—a small hillock covered entirely with evergreens—pines and cedars and holly. Charley doesn't remember exactly where it is, but she knows it isn't on the lake trail. In all the days of walking around the lake, she hasn't passed it.

Sitting with the book open on her lap, staring at the fairy ring, Charley has a strange sensation. It's as if she is looking through her mother's eyes. She can almost feel the camera in her hands, the pine needles and small stones under her as she kneels to get exactly this angle, this contrast of green and white, shadows of pine boughs on the moss.

Goose bumps rise along her arms. She reaches to close the book and finds her mother's face looking at her from a photo on the back jacket flap. Colleen Morgan, dark hair, blue eyes, splotches of pink on her cheeks against skin as pale as skim milk. Her mother called those splotches her “continents”—the shape of South America on one cheek, Africa on the other—proof of the Irish heritage that Charley shares. Charley touches her own cheek now, feeling the surge of heat, knowing that if she had a mirror she would see the pink that for her appears only when feelings rise like a tidal wave and threaten to wash her away. It doesn't matter what the feelings are—anger, embarrassment, this rush of loss—her cheeks broadcast it to the world.

She did not know there was a picture of her mother in this book. It has been hiding like a scorpion, waiting to sting. She pushes the book back under her pillow, pulls the sheet up over it, piles the other pillow on top. Her throat has closed so that she almost cannot swallow at all.

The woods, Charley thinks. What she wants at this moment is to get out into the woods, away from the book, the house, the human world.

She hasn't walked the trail since Coyote began spending the night on this side of the lake. She realizes now how much she has missed the woods. How much she has missed the sounds of the birds, the pattern of sunlight through the leaves, the rustle of wind in the trees. She even misses spider sticks, and the way the silvery threads they catch glint in the sun.

Two whole years. How could she have stayed away from the woods she grew up in, the woods that had been the background, the setting, for her whole life? Two years ago she made herself a new life, with a new setting, just the way her father did. His life became work, hers became school, Amy and her brother, and their friends. Two summers at Amy's house, swimming in their pool—a pool surrounded by concrete and grass and a tall wooden fence—two summers of malls and movies.

Coyote must be missing the woods, too, she thinks. For the dogs the walk through the woods is never just a way to get from one place to another. It is always an adventure.

She changes into her hiking clothes, calls to Sarita to tell her she's going out. Coyote is under the dogwood. “Walk!” Charley says to him. “Let's go for a walk.” He gets up and stretches, first his front legs, his rear in the air, then—one at a time—his back legs. Then he shakes himself and starts up the driveway after her, prancing and smiling. After a moment he passes her. Tail waving, he trots ahead down the road toward the woods trail, pausing now and again to look back over his shoulder to be sure she is coming.

The next day, before she gives him his breakfast, Charley takes him for a walk. And there is a new pattern.

They go every day, no matter what the weather is like. Because there is no particular destination on these walks, Charley lets Coyote choose where they will go. It is quickly clear that he knows the woods better than she does. He takes her on old logging roads, ATV trails, side branches of the sewer line access. Though he doesn't need to follow trails, he seems to understand that she does. Or maybe he, too, likes the way cleared of brambles and honeysuckle. After they've walked for a while, he goes off cross-country on his own, but no matter how far she walks, whether she turns back on the same trail or off on another one, he always manages to find her again.

If she doesn't see him for such a long time that she starts worrying about roads again, and cars, she whistles for him. Sometimes he actually comes. Once in a while Sadie comes to the whistle instead, and finishes the walk with her. With or without Sadie, by the time Charley gets home again, Coyote is always with her. Once, when she thinks he is behind her, she waits and waits by the chain across the end of the road for him to catch up. When she finally gives up and goes home, she finds Coyote sitting at the head of the driveway, waiting for her. “What took you so long?” his expression says. “Where's my breakfast?”

With no place special to go, Charley isn't in a hurry. She walks slowly and finds herself noticing things she hasn't noticed before. Once she spends fifteen minutes trying to follow a line of ants carrying things, looking like bearers on safari. Moving their colony, she thinks. It's easy enough to discover where they are coming from, a hole beneath a tree, but try as she might she never finds where they are going. The line just seems to peter out in the leaf litter. She sees a woodpecker disappear into a hole in a dead tree and wonders if it is feeding young ones. Hearing a hawk scream overhead one day, she looks up and sees an enormous chunk of broken tree hanging above her, one end caught among the branches of another tree, the other moving slightly in the light wind. She scuttles out from under it and then realizes it is very old, is rotting slowly away in the air. It has probably been hanging there that way since Hurricane Hugo.

There's so much death in these woods, she thinks, noticing how many blowdowns she can see standing where she is.
And so much life
, a voice sounds in her head. Yes, she answers, listening to a woodpecker's laughing call.

Coyote likes going up the sewer line access toward where Dixie Trace, the new housing development, is going in. Even though ATVs have beaten a path, blackberry brambles grow thickly on both sides, up the hill from where the lake trail angles off. They are half-choked with honeysuckle vines, but there are plenty of berries. And plenty of thorns. The thorns are so wicked that Charley can't pick berries without getting scratched and bloody, but the berries are worth it, shiny and fat and sweet.

Along this trail, wide enough to be sunny most of the day, there are huge, circular spiderwebs with gigantic green and yellow and black spiders sitting in the middle, their legs spread out to feel vibrations in the strands. On a foggy morning Charley finds a web lined with drops of water like pearls and wishes she had a camera, wishes she knew how to do what her mother did. She stands for a long time, trying to burn the image into her brain so it will stay with her, even though she can't bring it back, capture it on paper, and frame it.

On Day Thirty-eight of The Taming, with Coyote as her guide, she finds the way from the sewer line access, across the creek behind the new housing development, and up the power lines all the way around the lake to the Dumpster on the road that leads in through the gates—where she saw him as a wild thing that very first time before the accident. The power company keeps the trees cut beneath the lines, so the way is mostly tall grass and wildflowers, blackberry brambles and pine saplings—like an overgrown Christmas tree farm, Charley thinks. The ATVs have been here, too, leaving deep red clay ruts through the weeds. That day Charley doesn't get home till nearly noon, and Sarita meets her at the door, furious. “You let me know before you leave if you're planning to walk to China and back!”

Charley, hungry, soaked with sweat, and limping more than usual, holds out a plastic grocery bag, heavy with blackberries. The berries cool Sarita's temper, but Charley can't decide what made her so mad—whether she was worried about Charley or only about what Paul Morgan would say if something happened to his daughter when she was being paid to watch her.

Later, when they are eating the blackberry muffins Sarita has made, she tells Charley she was so worried that she gave up working on her puzzle. “I was picturing you at the bottom of a cliff someplace, smashed to pieces. Or drowned.”

“Don't worry about me drowning,” Charley says. “I don't go in the lake.”

Sarita slathers butter on a muffin. “I've been meaning to mention what a waste that is, girl. Here you are living on a lake with three swim docks and the cleanest water in the county. Swimming's good exercise.”

“I don't see you swimming Eagle Lake every day,” Charley says.

“You won't, either—all those snakes and snapping turtles.”

Charley nods. After two years of Amy's pool, the clear blue water with nothing in it you can't see, it gives her the creeps, too, to think what would be swimming with her in the lake. But that wasn't always true.

Charley learned to swim in Eagle Lake. She knows perfectly well that the turtles and the shy brown water snakes that sometimes zigzag across the surface want no more to do with a swimmer than the swimmer wants to do with them. She and her mother and her father used to swim—all three of them together—every evening when her father got home from work. He didn't used to go back to the office after dinner, which in good weather they mostly ate outside on the terrace. The dock box is still full of swim noodles and fins and goggles and inflatable toys. She and her father don't use them anymore. Maybe, Charley thinks. Maybe someday.

S
arita comes in from her drive up to the mailboxes and hands Charley a letter from Amy. Charley can feel Sarita's eyes on her back as she starts for the kitchen to throw it away. She can imagine the look on Sarita's face—the same look she gets when Charley refuses an invitation to hang out with the kids from school. Sarita probably thinks, like Charley's father does, that she shouldn't be alone so much, that she should be going out with friends, having them over to the house.