Beyond Summer (22 page)

“Whoa,” Cass whispers, her eyes bright with interest. “I must’a missed story time that day. How come they burned the cane fields?”

Beside her, the little girl, Opal, holds the bird very carefully and echoes Cass’s words. “Come bun a cay-feel?”

I smile at her and answer, “Always the sugarcane fields are burned in the winter to clear the brush and the snakes before harvest, and the rabbits run from the fire.” But then I wish I’d said nothing. I can hear the rabbits screaming in my mind. I can feel the black muck oozing over my feet. I can smell the blood.

Cass’s mouth hangs open a moment, and then she says, “I saw a football dude on TV who said he learned to run so fast by chasing rabbits in the sugarcane. He makes, like, a bazillion dollars now. Are there sugarcane fields where you come from?” Like all children, Cass is filled with questions, like a jar filled with water. She pours them out in streams.

“I have lived in the cane fields.”

“Where?” MJ asks.

“Far from here,” I say, and I feel them chasing me into a corner. “I don’t have a name of that place.”

From outside, the children are peeking in the door. They are waiting for a storyteller.

“I guess we better go out. C’mon, Opal.” Cass walks ahead of us to the door, talking yet. “Mrs. Kaye says if I keep getting all my summer-school work done, I can help in the child-care room when the literacy class starts. I’m gonna do storytelling. Opal and me have been makin’ puppets at Holly’s house.”

“I think that’s a great idea,” MJ says, and we go out the door with Opal twirling her little bird on its string. On the porch, the children are waiting for us.

In the back of the crowd, I see Root and Berry.

Tyler wouldn’t stop pointing to what looked like a homeless woman on the Summer Kitchen porch and saying, “Dere da lady, Mommy. Dere da lady. Is a wed-dwess lady.” For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why the boys were so into talking about people’s clothes anymore. Next, I’d be having to tell them not to talk about the green-pants lady
or
the red-dress lady.

“Ssshhh,” I whispered, pushing his hand down to get him to stop pointing at the woman in the red muumuu. Beside her, the other woman had just put on a chef’s hat and coat to do story time. “Let’s listen to the story, okay? The lady in the cook’s hat is gonna read a book for us. Cool, huh?”

“But it da wed-dwess lady,” Ty insisted again, his voice loud enough that the woman in the chef suit stopped dragging her chair across the porch and looked at us. Then everybody, including the lady in the muumuu, looked at us. Shaking her head, she slowly pressed a finger to her mouth, her long, gray dreadlocks falling over her eyes. She was kinda creepy-looking, actually.

Pastor Al stepped onto the porch with a platter full of cookies, and Ty hollered, “I wanna cookie!” And then every kid in the crowd was asking for cookies.

“All right, all right!” Pastor Al called out, holding the platter up high. “Now, Mrs. Kaye and Mrs. Holly did make us some cookies, but . . .” Whatever else he said was drowned out by squeals, bodies scooting forward, and cookie requests in both English and Spanish. The loudest ones in the bunch were my kids. Leave it to the Williams boys to show up and crash story hour.

I checked over my shoulder and Tam’s Escalade was pulling up in the parking lot, and not a minute too soon. It was totally time to give up on story hour and make a break for it.

I grabbed the back of Ty’s shirt just before he could dive into the cookie-crazed mosh pit; then I swung him onto my hip so hard he let out a big, “Ooof!”

“Cut it out!” I said, and then tried to weave my way forward to get ahold of Benji. I ended up grabbing the wrong arm, and a little African-American boy looked up at me like he was scared to death. The girl beside him grabbed his other arm and said, “Leggo my little brother!” Any minute now, some mad mommy would probably smack me upside the head. Tomorrow, I’d wind up in the paper:
Mom of Two Arrested in Story Hour Brawl.

All of a sudden, a loud, warbling, shrieking sound shot over the crowd. The noise was so high and sharp, it sliced through the racket like a hog call at the county fair. Heads jerked, Tyler did a pretzel twist in my arms, and everyone froze, including me.

On the edge of the porch, the woman in the muumuu was crouched down like a warrior getting ready to heave a spear. She waved her palms over the frozen crowd the way a witch would if she was casting a spell. “A-i-i-i-i-i!” she shrieked again, and kids popped their hands over their ears. “Krik, Krik!”

“Krak!” the kids hollered back, bouncing up and down and bumping into one another.

“Krik, Krik!” the woman said again.

Ty hollered right along with the rest of them. “Krak!”

“Do ya hear de tale of Story Mouse?” the woman asked, her chin jutting out as she stared down the crowd with her dark, cloudy eyes, her accent making the story sound like it was from someplace far off. “Did’ja know about Story Mouse and her many little childs?”

“No!” the kids squealed.

The woman pointed for them to sit down, and, like magic, every little rear end found a space. Ty squirmed out of my arms and sat crisscross like everybody else. Benji’d worked his way to the front row, near the cookie platter and the story lady. No way I was gonna get him out of here now without a fight. I was ready to get to Walmart, but sometimes you’ve gotta pick your battles. I learned that from my mother. With Mama, everything was her way or no way. There wasn’t any discussion and nobody got a vote. By the time Jace and me were teenagers, we sneaked around and did what we wanted. It wasn’t worth trying to talk to Mama, because she wouldn’t listen, anyway. I didn’t want my kids to feel like that about me. Everything didn’t have to go right on plan. Sometimes it was okay to stop in the middle of the day just to hear a story.

I turned toward the Escalade and waved for Tam to come on up. She poked her head out the window, like she wasn’t one bit sure about that, but then she got the kids and walked up the sidewalk with them.

“It’s story time,” I whispered. “Let the boys scoot on in where they can hear. Benji’s over there.”

She moved a little farther, but it was pretty obvious this wasn’t her scene. She was eyeballing a group of Mexican guys in work clothes over by the edge of the porch like she was afraid we were gonna get jumped any minute. They noticed her, too. She had on a cute little tank top and shorts, and she stuck out here like a really well-dressed sore thumb. I, on the other hand, blended right in.

Tam’s little brother pointed at the storyteller and mumbled something, but Tam was too busy scoping out the crowd to pay attention.

“Ssshhh,” I whispered, and the little brother hushed up before the creepy-looking muumuu lady started talking again.

“De grandmothers, they say all de stories come from de smallest creature. In de very old day, there been a time with no car, and no television box, and no radio to make music.” While she talked, the woman acted out the words, her hands driving cars and turning on televisions in thin air, then cupping around her ear, like she was listening for radio music. The kids squiggled closer. I forgot about trying to sort out her accent, and I just listened to the story.

“The whole world been quiet then, and the people go around doing their work, but when their work been finished, the young, they sit at the feet of the old ones and listen to the stories. The stories make the young ones very happy in the long-ago time.” She paused to look at the children. “How do you t’ink the young ones, they sit at the feet of the old people?” she asked, and the children straightened their little bodies, crisscrossing their legs and tucking their hands in their laps. The woman nodded. “But one day, there come a time when the children, they grow tired of the stories, and they do not sit and listen, and the old people tell their stories to the air.”

The words came with a long, sad face, and the kids moaned and groaned. The storyteller waited a minute for the noise to die out. “Then nobody catch the stories, so they just float about in the air. And then one day come along a tiny mouse, and she go silently among all the people—into the rich homes, and into the poor homes. She capture the stories, and she make them her children, and they are so many. For each story child, she weave a beautiful dress of a good color—white, blue, red, green, and black. The story children, they live in her house and do all the work for her, then, and soon she is very jealous and she do not let them go out into the world. ‘Why I give the stories back to the people?’ she say in her own ear. ‘The people have let them go float about. Why I give them back?’ And she live in her house and she grow lazy and selfish and fat, like dis.” Holding her muumuu puffed out in front, the woman waddled back and forth across the porch, and the kids giggled and squealed. By the corner of the building, the Mexican dudes elbowed and punched each other, pointing to their beer bellies and joking. They inched closer as the tale started up again.

“The story children, they are very much sad then. They remember the long-ago, when they travel like the wind and gather the young ones to the old ones, but now the world of the people go very quiet, so quiet, and the young boys and the girls only work, and the old grandmothers and grandfathers sit and look into the air with empty eyes.” The woman made another long face. Her dreadlocks fell over her cheeks, so that she seemed like something out of a scary movie. “Oh, this be a sad, sad time. A very sad time. And long time. The story children know they must find a way back to the people, and so they decide that when the she-mouse is not looking, they gonna chew the door with their teeth, but the door is very thick, and heavy.” Spreading out her feet, she pretended to push on the door; then she shook her head like there was no chance.

On the lawn, the kids whispered, “What happened? What did the people do? How’d the stories get away?”

Finally, the girl who’d yelled at me for grabbing her little brother half stood above the crowd and snapped, “If y’all shut up, she’s gonna tell. Be quiet. Boo and me wanna know what comes next.”

I wanted to hear, too. I’d heard parts of this story somewhere before, but I couldn’t remember where. It seemed like I’d read it in a book . . . with Benji, maybe. But we didn’t read the whole thing. I knew the part about the colored clothes, but not the part about the door. . . .

I wanted to remember it this time, so I could tell it to the kiddos in our family the next time we went back to Oklahoma for a visit. Mama’d have a heart attack if I told her I learned it from a homeless lady at a free-lunch kitchen.

The storyteller lifted her chin, her eyes clear and sharp in skin the color of black dirt farmland. She looked like she could be a hundred years old, but she didn’t move like an old person. She reminded me of my Nana Jo. Nana Jo gathered us up and told old stories about Choctaw history. I usually didn’t listen like I should of. I wasn’t that interested, and I couldn’t see the point in all that old stuff. It seemed to me like we needed to get modern instead of hanging on to the way things’d always been.

Now I wished I’d paid more attention to Nana Jo, so I’d be able to tell those stories to Benji and Ty and this new baby. I’d let the stories float off into the air, just like the people in the Story Mouse tale.

I tuned in again when the lady moved down the steps and leaned toward the kids, until she was eye-to-eye with them. “You must listen, if you will know how the stories came back to the world. You must never again let the stories escape into the air.” She shook her head slowly, like she was really sad, and the kids did the same. A breeze ruffled the grass and pulled her dress tight, outlining legs like toothpicks and a skinny body that couldn’t’ve weighed more than ninety pounds.

I wondered if sometimes she didn’t have enough to eat, and where she went when she left the Summer Kitchen.

“One day, the young men bring a herd of sheep through the village where Story Mouse, she live in her big house,” she went on. “A ram break free, and he run against the door. The door, it so weak that it break down, and all the story children run into the sunlight, and the old ones reach into the air and find the stories again. They fill their eyes, and the young ones sit at their feet again. Now the story children run over the whole earth, and all the people can see the colors of their beautiful dresses. But the young ones, they must always hear the stories with their ears, and never allow them to go float about again, or Story Mouse, she gonna take back her children, and stories gonna be no more, forever.”

She stretched out a hand and moved it slowly over the bunch of us. “Can you catch the story with your ears?” She snatched an invisible tale from the air and brought the fist to her ear, and listened to it like a tourist hearing the sea in a shell. “Can you catch it?” She walked back and forth, catching stories and listening, and pretty soon, story time looked more like playtime, with the kids grabbing stories and putting them in their ears.

When the kids settled in again, the lady in the chef suit read
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
. Then she finished, and pointed across the street to the old gas station building with the glass bottles hanging in the tree and the Book Basket sign out front. She reminded the kids that they could come by for a book, and everyone’s first book was free.

“We should do that,” I whispered to Tam. “Cody’s cousin’s got the studio in the back of that building. If he’s there, we can drop in and say hi, and the kids can pick out a book.” Terence Clay wasn’t the friendliest guy in the world, but he was the only family we had around here. Maybe I was trying to impress Tam a little, too. Terence was a real live artist, after all.

Tam nodded, but didn’t look real enthusiastic. Holding the baby tighter against her, she checked out the junky building across the street. Her lip curled, as in,
Any book that comes out of there, I don’t want to take home with me.