What I Came to Tell You (3 page)

Sudie squeezed grapefruit juice into her spoon. Their mother had had to make her eat fruits and vegetables. Now Sudie ate a grapefruit every morning, packed her school lunch box with carrots, peppers and apples or grapes and made sure they all had at least two vegetables for dinner. Sudie had been like that with a lot of things. Their mother had always been after Sudie to make her bed and pick up her room. Now Sudie kept her room as neat as a pin.

After Grover ate his sandwich, he took his sister’s and his plates out to the kitchen, rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher. When he came back, he told Sudie he was going back to his workshop.

“I want to see how it’s coming,” Sudie said, turning off the TV. “Can you wait a second while I change out of my pjs?”

While he waited, Grover roamed the front yard, looking for the morning paper in the tall grass. Their mother had been the one to keep up the yard. Now the grass and the hedges had gotten out of hand. Grover cut it himself every now and then, but one day Sudie had been watching a program on the show
Nature
about letting your grass and hedges grow to make your yard a home for birds and small animals. “We’re a refuge,” she said, and sent off for a little plastic sign that said
Certified Backyard Wilderness
. She hung it from the abelia bush, which had grown
to the size of a VW Bug. Grover didn’t bother mowing after that.

A couple of crows cawed from the maple, flew away and settled in an overgrown nandina.

Sudie came out dressed and wearing a coat, and Biscuit followed behind her. As they walked over to the Bamboo Forest, she said, “How come you don’t show Daddy your weavings?”

“He never asks to see them,” Grover said.

“When he’s busy with work,” she said, “he forgets about everything else.”

The truth was that their father had never seemed to think much of the things Grover made. More than once he’d overheard his parents argue about him. His mother saying that Grover was talented and had
vision
. His father replying that might be true but that the boy could be a good student if he spent half the time studying that he spent in the Bamboo Forest.
He is a good student
, his mother would say. But he knew what his father’d meant. He wanted Grover to be like Sudie, born making As.

The longer his mother had been dead, the more his father had seemed to worry about Grover’s grades. When Grover received a couple of Cs on English papers a few weeks ago, his father started making Grover and Sudie walk over to the Wolfe house so he could check his homework. Now Grover was only able to work in the Bamboo Forest after supper, and only after he showed his father his completed homework. With daylight savings switching back to regular time in a couple of weeks, it’d be dark after supper, and then how would he work in the Bamboo Forest?

“What is that?” Sudie walked over to a stake on the edge
of the Bamboo Forest. It had a red ribbon tied to it. “There’s another … and another.”

A pit opened up in his stomach as Grover saw that stakes had been driven in along the edges of the Bamboo Forest. He hadn’t noticed these this morning. He’d been too busy working on the weaving. Or someone had put them in the ground while he was eating lunch.

“What do they mean?” Sudie asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. He sounded miles away from himself. He remembered the afternoon his father had been driving him and his sister home from soccer practice. They’d seen their mother walking along Charlotte Street, with Biscuit trotting ahead of her on the sidewalk. Their father pulled over, rolled down his window and asked if she needed a ride. She shook her head and said she was going to Videolife to pick up a movie and that she and Biscuit both needed the walk. “See you in a little bit,” she said as they pulled away. Something made Grover turn around and look back out the rear windshield at his mother. She waved. He didn’t wave back. He’d started to. Probably every time she’d ever waved at him before, he’d waved back. But this time he’d felt childish, embarrassed that someone might see him wave to his mother. Besides, why wave good-bye to someone he was going to see in forty-five minutes?

“Grover,” Sudie said, tugging on his coat sleeve. “What do the stakes mean?”

“I said, I don’t know!” He bent down and took hold of the stake. He tried to jiggle it but it didn’t move. It must’ve been
pretty deep in the ground. He tried to pull it up but it wouldn’t give. He tried again, this time with both hands, and remembered reading in
The Once and Future King
how the boy Arthur strained to pull the sword from the stone. With a couple more tugs, Grover slid the stake out of the ground and held it up.

Sudie tried to pull up the next one. Feeling bad about yelling at his sister, Grover went over and tugged on it. “Give it a try now,” he said, letting her pull it the rest of the way out of the ground. They went all around the edge of the Bamboo Forest, him loosening the stakes and Sudie pulling them out. In the end they each had an armful.

“What’ll we do with them?” Sudie asked.

Grover thought about piling them up in his workshop. He could make something out of them. That was a stupid idea. Whoever put them there in the first place might find them. So he and Sudie started home with them, keeping an eye out for anyone who might see them.

“What y’all got there?”

They hadn’t seen Clay juggling the soccer ball in front of his house. He’d stopped when he saw them and ran across the street.

“Oh, no,” Grover groaned. “Not that kid.”

“Clay?” Sudie said.

“You know him?”

“I’ve kicked around a soccer ball with him a couple of times. He’s all right.”

Clay trotted up to them. “What y’all toting?” Grover realized the boy’s accent was like the people up in the mountains where his family went to get their Christmas tree every year.

“Somebody put stakes in the Bamboo Forest,” Sudie said, holding up her armful.

“Sudie,” Grover hissed.

“Surveyors,” Clay said. “Saw them over there yesterday.”

“You did?” Grover asked.

“I want to be a surveyor when I grow up,” Clay said, bending down to pet Biscuit. “You get to be outdoors. Not cooped up in some old office all day. My daddy was a surveyor.” He glanced at the stakes. “Those boys are going to be none too happy about you pulling those up. If I was you, I’d do a mighty good job of hiding them. Maybe even destroy the evidence.”

Grover and Sudie went inside with the stakes, and Clay started to follow them. But Grover said, “See you later” and shut the door on him.

“That kid doesn’t take a hint,” Grover said, dropping his stakes on the floor.

“He’s just being friendly,” Sudie said, piling hers on top of Grover’s.

“There’s a fine line between being friendly and being a pest,” Grover said.

“There’s a fat line between being nice and being rude.” Sudie stood at the window, watching Clay walk back across the street.

“He might tell somebody we pulled up the stakes,” Grover said.

“He’s not like that,” Sudie said.

“You better hope you’re right,” Grover said. He had to admit
that, even if Sudie was his little sister and two years younger, she had a sixth sense about people. If she thought Clay would keep his mouth shut, he probably would.

“What’re we going to do with all these?” Sudie asked, toeing the pile of stakes.

“We can’t leave them here or Daddy’ll find out.”

Grover studied the woodstove that sat in the middle of the den. Their father heated with it as much as possible to cut the oil bill. Every summer Jessie brought a load of wood that his father loved to split and stack at the side of the house.

“Be back in a second.” Grover ran out into the yard, snapping some dead twigs off the abelia bush and the privet hedge. His father had taught him that the best kindling came from the bottom of bushes and trees where it was kept dry by the limbs above. Coming from under the abelia, Grover saw Matthew, Jessie’s assistant, in his Army coat and wearing a backpack, walking in the direction of the cemetery. Grover waved but Matthew didn’t wave back. He couldn’t tell if Matthew was ignoring him or just hadn’t seen him.

Back inside, Grover set the twigs by the woodstove and, as he balled up some newspaper, asked Sudie to bring the stakes over to him.

“What’re you doing?” She carried over an armful of stakes and dropped them beside him.

“Deeeee-stroying the evidence.”
He arranged the twigs in a miniature tepee over the ball of newspaper, then lighted a match to the newspaper. When the fire was going good, he stacked the
stakes on top. The new wood popped and snapped, sending sparks out into the room, which Sudie was quick to stomp on.

Sudie sat back down beside him. Both watched the stakes flame up inside the woodstove. “Did you hear what Clay said about his daddy?” she asked.

Grover paused. “That he was a surveyor?”

“That he
was
,” she said.

“Probably has some other job now,” Grover said. “He
was
a surveyor, now he’s a plumber or a lawyer or a doctor or something.”

“There’s no father over there now,” she said.

“Maybe he’s finishing his job somewhere,” Grover said. “They moved ahead of him to get settled.”

“Maybe,” she said.

Grover watched his sister watch the fire. He and Sudie had become parent detectors, sensing whether a kid had a full set of parents, if their parents were married or divorced, alive or, every now and then, not.

After he’d fed the last stake to the fire, he closed the door to the stove and turned the damper down, so it’d burn steady.

There was a scratch at the front door and a bark. Grover opened the door for Biscuit, who trotted in and jumped onto the couch. He was about to close the front door when he noticed Clay’s big sister across the street sitting on the cinder-block steps, reading. Had she been there the whole time? She sat like he’d often seen her, with her legs crossed Indian style, her elbows on her knees and her head bowed over a book in her lap.

He closed the door. Sudie had turned on the TV and sat down on the couch with Biscuit.
This Old House
was on. “Maybe they won’t put any more of those stakes in the Bamboo Forest,” Sudie said.

Grover knew that pulling up a few stakes wouldn’t stop whoever from doing whatever they planned. He almost said that, and in the old days, when their mother was there, he would’ve. When she was alive, he could say out loud what he was thinking. He could test out his worries. Now he fought to keep his worries not only from his sister, but from himself.

He sat down with Sudie, and Biscuit whined at Grover.

“He wants you to pet him,” Sudie said.

“I don’t feel like it,” Grover said.

“It’s not his fault, Grover,” she said. “You can’t blame Biscuit.”

“I don’t.” He petted Biscuit, but Sudie was kind of right. Every time he saw Biscuit, he pictured him running into traffic and their mother running after him. The police had determined that the driver hadn’t been speeding yet hadn’t had time to stop.

Grover did his best to watch the TV. Men with New England accents were fixing up a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse. He liked this show. He liked seeing the old houses brought back to life. But after a while, what happened was what sometimes happened when he watched TV. He saw what the TV saw. This afternoon what the TV saw was him and Sudie huddled on the couch with Biscuit between them—the three of them adrift in the living room.

T
hat night Grover walked with Sudie down Edgemont as streetlights buzzed and flickered on. Their father had called and said that he’d meet them at Jessie’s. It had turned much colder that afternoon. Grover and Sudie wore sweaters that smelled like the cedar chest. For the first time this fall, Grover had had to get his and his sister’s sweaters out of the chest in the upstairs hallway. He’d always loved the dark chest that had first belonged to their grandmother’s grandmother and had been protecting Johnston sweaters from moths for generations. Its bright smell was old and safe. As he’d dug through the folded sweaters, he stopped. Last Easter, like she had every Easter, their mother had carefully folded the family’s sweaters and put them away. He remembered walking past her as she sat there, setting sweaters into the chest. At the time he hadn’t thought a thing about it. But now he knelt beside the chest, stroking the sweaters, holding them to his face, breathing in their bright cedar smell.

As Grover and Sudie walked down the street, leaves blew along the sidewalk, making a dry scrambling sound. In the distance dogs gave test barks to see if other dogs were out there. Grover’d always liked fall with its cold and its early dark. He liked seeing into the lighted rooms of neighbors’ houses. He liked watching them cook or sit down to supper or watch TV together. He wondered if his neighbors knew what they had. How quick they could lose it. How in one millisecond it could all be gone.

Gone
. The word couldn’t have sounded more like itself.
Not there anymore
boiled down to a single syllable, a solitary word.
Gone
. A word Grover had felt in his bones ever since that late afternoon in April when she hadn’t come back from her walk. Biscuit had shown up, his broken leash trailing behind. Their father had been on the phone to Videolife, when they’d heard sirens.

Grover and Sudie walked up Jessie’s stone walk, lined by leaf-shaped lights. Jessie lived in a small old Spanish stucco house with an arched front porch, a red tiled roof and big wavy glass windows that shimmered tonight with candlelight from inside. His yard stayed neat: the grass mowed, the shrubs trimmed, the beds mulched. Still, he wasn’t like some of the neighbors who Grover’s father called Yard Nazis—neighbors, most of them old with not much else to do except watch over their yards, swooping down on kids if they set foot on their lawns.

They found Jessie in the kitchen, turning over pieces of chicken sizzling in a frying pan. Without his big hat, he looked smaller. He’d tied his long gray hair back in a ponytail, and wore an apron that had printed in big bold letters across it,
The South
Shall Rise Again
, and under the words was a drawing of a plateful of biscuits. Jessie already had several golden brown pieces of chicken draining on a paper towel on the counter.