of the woods behind it before I pulled the gauze-wrapped package from my coat pocket and opened it.
Two glass medicine bottles and a few stainless steel instruments, priceless at any trade gathering, glittered in my hand. A sharp stitch of guilt knotted in my chest.
I’m no thief,
I thought again. But the fact was that we were broke. No wagon. No supplies. Nothing to trade. I couldn’t let that happen. With no one else around, it was my responsibility and mine alone.
I found a sharp, flat rock, pushed aside the leaves, and started digging into the soft ground until I had a wide hole cut about two feet deep into the earth. I set the gauze-wrapped medicines, along with the pencil and old nickel, carefully into the bottom. The way the gauze lay over the medicine bottles made them look like two bodies wrapped in a shroud.
I pushed the dirt over them quickly and sat back on the hill, leaning on my elbows, pulling in the cool air that tasted of wood smoke and decaying leaves. That pang of guilt hit me again. My hand moved around to my pocket and I laid Mom’s picture out in a patch of moonlight.
Hours after we’d taken the picture and made it back to camp, I’d slipped into Mom and Dad’s tent, squirming in between them. Mom lit a candle, opened one of our few books, and laid her arm across my back while Dad turned the pages. Mom would read a passage out loud and then I would read the next one, both of us quiet as could be, so as not to wake Grandpa.
I’d liked how, when I stumbled on words I didn’t know or couldn’t pronounce, Mom would reach for our battered dictionary and we’d go over the definition and sound it out, over and over until I had it down. It always felt to me like trudging up a tough and rocky hill, sweating and pushing until finally I made it up over the top to land that was flat and bright.
We made it through
Sounder, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
and
Great Expectations
that way, the words rolling from Mom’s mouth in her high, clear voice that was like a bird’s or a bell’s. We’d read until my eyes drooped and the steady in and out of Mom’s and Dad’s breathing on either side would rock me to sleep.
Grandpa thought the idea of my learning to read was a waste of time, and in a way I’d agreed with him. I was going to be a trader like him and my dad — what use would reading really be?
Mom had said that maybe the world wouldn’t always be like it was now. But even if it was, she said, sometimes it was important to do things there was no real use for. Like reading books and taking pictures.
She’d said we had to be more than what the world would make us.
A branch snapped and leaves rustled down to my left. I scanned the woods with my hand on the hilt of the knife, but everything was blurry, swirling like the forest was underwater. I reached my hand up to my eyes and it came back wet. I had been crying and didn’t even realize it.
Stupid baby.
I wiped the tears away with my dirty coat sleeve but still didn’t see anything.
Probably nothing anyway. A deer. Maybe a stray dog.
I swept leaves over the disturbed ground so it blended into the hillside, then marked the place by half burying the rock at the head of thehole. It didn’t matter what Mom would have thought. Like Grandpa, she was gone, and I was here.
I surveyed the highway and the land beyond, all flat plains of black and gray. The stars, straining through the thick canopy above my head, shone like bits of broken glass.
As soon as Dad was better, all we’d have to do is stop here on the way out of town. Then we could trade for whatever supplies we needed. Everything would be back the way it was.
The only question was, what would I do until then?
THIRTEEN
“So what do they do down there?”
I was lingering by the window over Dad’s bed a few days later, full from a breakfast of eggs and bacon and bread that Marcus had cooked and insisted I join them for. The sun was spread across the asphalt where it dipped
Two glass medicine bottles and a few stainless steel instruments, priceless at any trade gathering, glittered in my hand. A sharp stitch of guilt knotted in my chest.
I’m no thief,
I thought again. But the fact was that we were broke. No wagon. No supplies. Nothing to trade. I couldn’t let that happen. With no one else around, it was my responsibility and mine alone.
I found a sharp, flat rock, pushed aside the leaves, and started digging into the soft ground until I had a wide hole cut about two feet deep into the earth. I set the gauze-wrapped medicines, along with the pencil and old nickel, carefully into the bottom. The way the gauze lay over the medicine bottles made them look like two bodies wrapped in a shroud.
I pushed the dirt over them quickly and sat back on the hill, leaning on my elbows, pulling in the cool air that tasted of wood smoke and decaying leaves. That pang of guilt hit me again. My hand moved around to my pocket and I laid Mom’s picture out in a patch of moonlight.
Hours after we’d taken the picture and made it back to camp, I’d slipped into Mom and Dad’s tent, squirming in between them. Mom lit a candle, opened one of our few books, and laid her arm across my back while Dad turned the pages. Mom would read a passage out loud and then I would read the next one, both of us quiet as could be, so as not to wake Grandpa.
I’d liked how, when I stumbled on words I didn’t know or couldn’t pronounce, Mom would reach for our battered dictionary and we’d go over the definition and sound it out, over and over until I had it down. It always felt to me like trudging up a tough and rocky hill, sweating and pushing until finally I made it up over the top to land that was flat and bright.
We made it through
Sounder, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
and
Great Expectations
that way, the words rolling from Mom’s mouth in her high, clear voice that was like a bird’s or a bell’s. We’d read until my eyes drooped and the steady in and out of Mom’s and Dad’s breathing on either side would rock me to sleep.
Grandpa thought the idea of my learning to read was a waste of time, and in a way I’d agreed with him. I was going to be a trader like him and my dad — what use would reading really be?
Mom had said that maybe the world wouldn’t always be like it was now. But even if it was, she said, sometimes it was important to do things there was no real use for. Like reading books and taking pictures.
She’d said we had to be more than what the world would make us.
A branch snapped and leaves rustled down to my left. I scanned the woods with my hand on the hilt of the knife, but everything was blurry, swirling like the forest was underwater. I reached my hand up to my eyes and it came back wet. I had been crying and didn’t even realize it.
Stupid baby.
I wiped the tears away with my dirty coat sleeve but still didn’t see anything.
Probably nothing anyway. A deer. Maybe a stray dog.
I swept leaves over the disturbed ground so it blended into the hillside, then marked the place by half burying the rock at the head of thehole. It didn’t matter what Mom would have thought. Like Grandpa, she was gone, and I was here.
I surveyed the highway and the land beyond, all flat plains of black and gray. The stars, straining through the thick canopy above my head, shone like bits of broken glass.
As soon as Dad was better, all we’d have to do is stop here on the way out of town. Then we could trade for whatever supplies we needed. Everything would be back the way it was.
The only question was, what would I do until then?
THIRTEEN
“So what do they do down there?”
I was lingering by the window over Dad’s bed a few days later, full from a breakfast of eggs and bacon and bread that Marcus had cooked and insisted I join them for. The sun was spread across the asphalt where it dipped
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