The Steep and Thorny Way (12 page)

“There's no reason—”

“You're staying inside this house from now on. No more journeying outside on your own. No more wandering in the woods. I'll lock you in your room if I have to.”

“Mama—”

“I won't keep worrying about you. This will keep you safe.”

“I'm not going to get—”

“Go!”

RELUCTANTLY, I FOLLOWED MAMA'S ORDERS AND
plunked myself down in a scalding-hot bath in our little indoor bathroom, which was tiled in blue and white diamonds. My hair needed a washing, anyway. I leaned my head back in the water, my face sweating in the steam, and I soaked each curl from the roots to the spiraling tips. Then I scrubbed my scalp clean with Canthrox shampoo and dunked my head again.

Beneath the ripples in the water, my body seemed to waver back and forth like a reflection in a curved mirror I once saw at a church carnival. My breasts, my stomach, my navel, the dark triangle of hair between my thighs—all of me—shimmied back and forth, growing and shrinking; all the parts of me that no boy in my community would ever be allowed to see, unless his skin miraculously
transformed into a shade of brown or black, or mine turned white. Unless we sinned and enjoyed each other outside the bonds of holy matrimony.

To think Mama believed that I would touch Joe Adder.

Or that Joe Adder would touch me . . .

To chase such thoughts away, I closed my eyes and nudged my mind back to the days when Daddy would take me out to the very pond in which I'd caught Joe bathing. The line between our property and that of the Paulissens blurred around the water, but our families never quarreled, and what was theirs was ours, and vice versa. Daddy would roll up the legs of his pants after hard work in the fields on a hot summer day, and we'd wade in far enough to cool our shins in water that reflected the greens and browns of the trees. My toes sank into the sludge below my feet, and I'd sometimes see crawdads resting on the banks, or the shadows of minnows darting around my legs. Daddy would tell me a story he once learned from a Creole fellow about a man who convinced a wizard to turn a prince into a fish as a punishment for loving his daughter. We'd sing “Wade in the Water,” and Daddy's voice would rise up, deep and rich, into the boughs hanging over our heads. Sometimes he even sang so low, he sounded like the frogs croaking on springtime nights, and I'd laugh at the sound of it but would also feel filled up and get teary-eyed.

I rested the back of my head on the curved ridge of the bathtub and let myself stay in the pond for a while. Mama clanked her spoon against a bowl in the nearby kitchen, and the washroom walls darkened with shadows. But, for a moment, I stood within
that swimming hole, next to my daddy, with the water lapping at my knees and my voice joining his on the wind.

MAMA HAD LAID OUT MY WASHED AND PRESSED BLUE
cotton dress—the same dress I'd first worn into the woods to hunt down Joe—with wide pockets and a low waistline. After donning the clean clothing, I sat on the edge of my bed and brushed out the tangles in my hair, which soaked a damp spot across my back, but the curls were too wet to pin into my fake bob just yet. I didn't know how other brown-skinned girls with tight curls like mine combed and dried their hair, but I always begged my mother to allow me to buy one of the straightening combs I'd seen in the pharmacy. “Don't try to hide your pretty curls, Hanalee,” she'd say every time I asked, even though she didn't know what to do with my hair, either. Daddy had never paid enough attention to his mother's and sister's grooming habits to pass along any beauty tips from them. He just said their curls were even tighter.

Down below me, between the mattress and the box spring, hid the sketch pad I'd grabbed back from Mama before my bath. And in the drawer of my bedside table, no more than two feet to my right, hid the sheet of newsprint from the night before, alongside the bottle of Necromancer's Nectar.

I could feel my words—
my father's words
—captured in black ink, beyond the table's wood. I squeaked open the drawer and stared at the phrase I'd scrawled across the paper.

I put full blame on the doc.

The longer I looked at the words, the more the ink seemed to bleed across the pores in the newsprint, growing thicker, blacker, stronger. The letters curled into vines that could strangle a neck—or serpents that could sting a body with a flick of a poisonous tongue and a bite of needle-sharp teeth. I saw my father staggering toward me on the highway in the dark with his busted leg, his eyes illuminated by moonlight.

“I'm sorry I wasn't a stronger man,” he'd said, “and that hate won out that night.”

I grabbed the bottle and the note and buried them in a box of old toys beneath my bed. A dented cardboard container of bullets also hid in the hiding spot, beneath a canister of Tinkertoys and my Raggedy Ann doll.

A knock came at my bedroom door. I started and shoved the box beneath the center of my bed with a clatter of blocks and bullets.

“Hanalee?” called Mama from behind the door.

“Yes?” I jumped back onto the mattress.

“Fleur came over to see you. Are you dressed?”

“Yes.”

The door opened, and Fleur—lovely Fleur in pink cotton and a satin hair ribbon—slipped into the room with the look of a person encountering a wounded cat with blood matted in its fur. Her sky-blue eyes turned wide and dewy. She carried a small sprig of purple flowers.

“Keep the door open, Hanalee,” said Mama from behind her.

“Why?” I asked.

“You know why. I'm worried about you.” She set her hand on Fleur's left shoulder. “Stay with her as long as you'd like, Fleur. I think she could use your company right now.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“I'll be down in the kitchen.”

“Yes, Mama,” I said.

I sat as still as a member of our church choir, my hands folded in my lap, my posture impeccable, so that Mama would wander away.

Fleur sat down beside me on the bed with the little floral bouquet nestled against the folds of her skirt. The staircase creaked during my mother's descent.

Once Mama reached the bottom floor, Fleur rested her chin against her right shoulder and looked at me. “How are you?” she asked.

I pushed my hands against the tops of my thighs and bent forward at the waist.

“Are you all right?” She laid her hand on my back, above my left shoulder blade, just as Joe had done in the woods.

I shook my head. “Not really.”

“Are you still troubled by what Joe said about your father? Or what I said about”—she hesitated—“your father . . . on the road?”

“Well . . . to be most honest . . . I . . .” I took hold of Fleur's hand and squeezed it.

“What? What's happened?”

I swallowed and sat up straight. “I spoke to my father last night.”

Fleur's hand grew still beneath mine.

Mama ran the sink down in the kitchen; I knew there'd be no
chance of her hearing the words I longed to say, so I continued in a whisper. “Don't ask me how I communicated with him, but he told me he blames Uncle Clyde for his death. He said his body couldn't take what it was given that Christmas Eve and that hate won out that night.”

Fleur's fingers tightened around mine, and her eyes watered. “Are you positive you spoke with him? Or did—did you merely dream that you saw him?”

“I swear to God, Fleur, he talked to me. The more I think about the encounter, the more I remember how real it all felt—and what he looked like, standing just a few feet away from me in the moonlight. He said he doesn't blame Joe. He blames the doctor.”

“Oh,” she said—a small whimper of sound. She knitted her eyebrows and rocked a little. “I don't . . . Are you certain? Are you sure Joe isn't just planting wicked ideas in your head and tricking you into believing he's innocent?”

I slid my hand out of hers. “I don't think so.”

“Joe seems in an awful hurry to accuse others of faults and crimes, when he was the one driving around blotto.”

“‘Blotto'?”

“That's what Laurence calls people when they're drunk.” She gripped the edge of the mattress. “Joe's brought so much tension into this town over the past few days. It feels like an explosion's about to blast through the entire community because of him.”

I cast a sidelong glance at her. “How do you mean?”

“Laurence keeps yelling at Mama and me, telling us to watch our behavior and spend more time with church groups, to mind how we look to the community. Deputy Fortaine and Mama had
a spat, and now he's keeping an eye on Laurence, making sure he's not bootlegging. And those Wittens and some other boys are over all the time now, whispering about Joe, making accusations.”

I stiffened. “What are the boys saying?”

“They call him”—her ears turned pink, and she hunched her shoulders—“a word I'm not going to say, but I know what it implies because of the shocking things they talk about him doing. They're planning what they'll do to him if they find him, and I have to wonder if Laurence is hiding him just to brag that he captured him for everyone. Just to impress them.”

“Oh, Jesus.” I dug my fingernails into the folds of my quilt.

Fleur transferred the sprig of purple flowers into my lap. “Please stay away from Joe. It's not safe to be around him. He's got . . . He's not . . .” She licked her lips. “The other boys say he—”

“I know Joe's secret, Fleur. I know the types of things those other boys are probably saying about him.” I picked up the flowers by the stems and brushed the ball of my right thumb over the petals, which looked like wide-open mouths about to chomp down on my finger. “What is this for?” I asked.

“It's alfalfa . . . for luck.” She cupped her hand around my hand and held the flowers along with me. “Please, promise me you'll keep safe. Don't go looking for your father's ghost anymore or hunting around for Joe.”

I sucked in my breath. “Are
you
safe around those boys, Fleur?”

“Mama's always there. And Laurence wouldn't ever let any of them lay a finger on me.”

“You see why I worry about the two of us getting stuck here in
Elston? That pack of hungry wolves you're talking about contains all your eligible picks for a husband.”

Fleur nodded. “I know. Maybe I should just join a convent.”

“No, the Klan is anti-Catholic, remember? They'll pass out pamphlets and host a baseball game to fund the demolition of your convent.”

Our eyes met, and we both broke into nervous snickers with our heads bent close together.

“It's not really funny, is it?” she asked, still tittering. She leaned her head against my shoulder, and we both sighed at the same time, breathing the same air. “It's awfully unsettling.”

I rested my head against hers and closed my eyes, absorbing the warmth of her body through the dampness of my hair. “It is unsettling. And it makes me want to get the two of us out of this place as soon as I can.”

CHAPTER 10

THE MOUSETRAP

FOR THE REST OF THE DAY, THROUGHOUT
all my dusting and mending and other household chores, I contemplated the loss of Laurence in my life. I wondered if Uncle Clyde was to blame for that particular heartache as well.

Looking back over the past two years, I could see all the influences that might have turned Fleur's brother against me. The arrival of Robbie and Gil Witten in Elston. Daddy's death. Dr. Koning's appearance on our doorstep to check on my grieving mother, day after day after day. Somehow, all those incidents could have interconnected. Little strings that, once pulled, unraveled the world around them.

1921.

The year the KKK arrived in Oregon.