Ruby Holler Read online

  Mrs. Trepid swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. “Lord, spare me,” she said.

  CHAPTER 34

  BEARINGS

  “We’ll be able to tell what direction we’re going if the sun stays visible,” Sairy said, “and trees will help—moss usually grows on the north side of trees, and—”

  “I’m a stupid for forgetting that compass.”

  “You’re not a stupid. I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Sairy said, “just fine.” But she didn’t sound convinced as they hacked through the brush. “Let’s talk about something, Dallas. Make the time pass more easily.”

  “Like what?”

  “Tell me about the scary toothless lunatic you and Florida keep referring to. Was he really toothless? Really a lunatic?”

  “Yep.”

  “So tell me about him.”

  “Don’t like to talk about it,” he said.

  “Sometimes talking about it is good,” Sairy said. “Just pretend you’re talking to Florida.”

  “I dunno,” Dallas said.

  “What was his name, and what did that toothless mouth look like?” Sairy prodded.

  “Well, I guess I could talk about it a little,” he said.

  And so Dallas told Sairy about the toothless Mr. Dreep and his wife with the fidgety fingers, and how Mr. Dreep had locked them in the cellar and then made them spend the night there in the smelly, damp rat place.

  “But that’s criminal,” Sairy said. “That’s … that’s … a terrible thing to do to anybody.”

  “Well, he thought I sassed him, see? He told us we were going to have to dig a well, and I told him we couldn’t do that. So I guess being in the cellar was our punishment for sassing.”

  “Dig a well? But that’s criminal. I can’t get my head around this, Dallas. And even if you did sass him, that’s no reason to put you in the cellar.”

  “That’s kind of what we thought,” Dallas said, “but we weren’t exactly sure.”

  “Not sure? You mean you didn’t think that was strange? You didn’t think it was terrible?”

  Dallas shrugged. “What good would that do?”

  “But …” Sairy looked upset and confused. “Is being in that cellar why you and Florida are so afraid of rats and mice and—”

  Dallas turned away. He didn’t like to dwell on these things. His mind automatically stopped the scene and played a different one. Like now: he was imagining that he was a pioneer, the first person ever to hike this hill. Maybe he’d discover something incredible up here, something no one else had ever seen.

  Sairy interrupted his reverie. “How’d you get out of that toothless lunatic’s place?”

  “In the morning, Mr. Creep Dreep let us out and told us to follow him outside. We were so glad to be out of that rathole and breathing some real air that we followed him. Then he handed us a couple shovels and told us to start digging. We didn’t want to, but he said we wouldn’t get breakfast until we’d made some progress on the well. So we started digging—”

  “Dallas! You were digging a well?”

  “I pretended I was digging for gold—you never know, right? And Florida pretended she was digging Creep Dreep’s grave, so it didn’t seem so bad, the digging. We dug for about three hours, and then we saw Creep Dreep walking away from the house, like he was going out to the barn, so we watched until he was out of sight, and then we ran like nothing you’ve ever seen in your life. We ran and ran and ran and ran and hid in some trees, and then we heard him calling us, and he sounded really, really mad, so we stayed dead still—”

  “Dallas, I just can’t hardly believe this,” Sairy said. “It makes me feel mighty sick to my stomach.”

  “It’s okay,” Dallas said. “Don’t feel sick. We got away, didn’t we? Hey, will you look at that?” They’d reached a ridge and a clearing in the trees. “Look at all those bumpy lumps of dirt. Looks like giant anthills. Not as pretty as the holler, is it?”

  Sairy dabbed at her forehead. “Sure is hot. You thirsty? Got the canteen?”

  “Canteen?” Dallas said.

  CHAPTER 35

  STIFF

  On the banks of the Hidden River, Tiller and Florida were finishing their lunch.

  “You a little stiff?” Tiller asked, rubbing his back.

  “A little,” Florida said, “and I’m about swole up and itching to death from these skeeter bites.”

  Tiller stretched. “I didn’t count on my arms being so numb. Your arms numb?”

  “More sore than numb. I feel like I wrassled a hundred hogs,” Florida said. “How are we going to carry on paddling with our arms all sore and pitiful?”

  “We’ll take it a little easier this afternoon. Let the river carry us along. We’ll be lazy paddlers.”

  Florida stood on the riverbank, her feet kicking at stones. “It’s a stinky smell here, don’t you think?” she said. “With the muddy crud and these ugly weed things.”

  Tiller sniffed the air. “Phew.”

  “It’s not that pretty smell, like by the holler creek, where those itty blue flowers grow along the bank.”

  Tiller closed his eyes. “Oh, I know which flowers you mean.”

  “Tiller? You ever wish Dallas and Sairy were here with us, going on down the river?”

  Tiller took a deep breath, looked down the river and up the river, and let out his breath slowly, evenly. “About every two minutes I think that,” he said.

  “You’re not like Dallas,” Florida said.

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Neither one.”

  “Well, how am I different?” Tiller asked.

  Florida kicked at the dirt. “Well, Dallas is always thinking everything will be okay and stuff, but you complain a lot—”

  “Me? Complain?”

  “Yeah, like I do.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “It’s just our nature.” Florida knelt to examine a beetle scurrying along the bank. “I wouldn’t ever want to be all by my lonesome, would you?”

  Tiller felt his heart do its fluttering thing again. He couldn’t imagine life without Sairy. It pained him to imagine it. And yet, not a half hour earlier, he’d been wondering what it would be like to be floating down the river by himself. That’s different, he told himself. That’s not forever-aloneness. He glanced at Florida and felt another flutter. He hoped Florida would never be alone.

  “You hear me?” Florida said. “Would you want to be all by your lonesome?”

  “No,” Tiller said. “I need someone to listen to me complain.”

  Florida tilted a twig toward the beetle, letting it run up the side. “I didn’t mean it was such a bad thing to be a complaining person,” she said. “Don’t go and get your feelings hurt.”

  As they pushed off down the river again, Tiller said, “Florida? Aside from that scary toothless lunatic’s place, did you and Dallas ever get sent anywhere else?”

  “Oh sure,” Florida said, dipping her paddle slowly into the water. “You want to hear about the Hoppers who said we were thieves or the Cranbeps who thought we were brutes or the nasty Burgerton boys?”

  “Why don’t you start with the Hoppers?” he said.

  CHAPTER 36

  A LONG CHAIN

  The air was hot and sticky as Sairy and Dallas thrashed their way through a thicket. Vines tangled their legs and briars jabbed their arms.

  “It looked like this would be the shortest route over to that path on that hill, but I don’t know now,” Sairy said. “Let’s stop and rest a bit, okay?” She reached into her backpack and pulled from it a yellow scarf, which she tied around her neck. If she’d worn something like that at home, Tiller would have said, What’s that around your neck? You never wear scarves. But here, Dallas didn’t know—and wouldn’t care—whether she was the kind of person who would wear a yellow scarf or not. She felt a little silly thinking about it.

  “There’s more bugs here than in the holler, you notice that?” Dallas said, swatting at flies.

>   “Maybe my lucky yellow scarf will keep them away,” Sairy said.

  “Maybe your lucky scarf will help us find water. I bet there’s a creek right down there. I bet it’s real clear, not some old, muddy, poison creek, and we’ll splash in it and drink as much as we want.”

  Sairy sat against a tree and closed her eyes. She imagined that there was an invisible ball of twine unfolding behind her, all the way back across the hills to Ruby Holler. That invisible ball of twine was right there in her hand, and she had to hold it tight, because if she let go of it, she and Dallas would be lost out here.

  “What are you thinking about so serious-like?” Dallas asked her.

  “Nothing much,” she said.

  “You’re not homesick, are you?”

  “Me? Shoot, no. We’re on our adventure,” Sairy said. “Not homesick at all.”

  “You know who you look like, sitting there? You know that picture in your kitchen, of the girl and the lady sitting in the woods? You look like that lady.”

  “I do? That’s my mother, and that girl is me,” Sairy said. She felt a sudden, deep longing for her dead mother, and then wondered if it was harder to miss a mother you had loved, or, like Dallas and Florida, to miss a mother you had never known.

  “And that picture next to it,” Dallas said, “with the two men, who are they?”

  “That’s Tiller and his daddy. And the one next to that, the one of the couple by the creek, that’s my grandmother and grandfather. And the one next to that, that’s me and Tiller and our kids.”

  “It’s like a whole long chain of connected people,” Dallas said.

  “Yes,” Sairy said. “I guess it is.”

  “Want me to build a little fire?” Dallas said. “I know it’s hot, but we could eat that can of beans. They’d be better hot than cold. You got the matches?”

  “Matches?” Sairy said.

  CHAPTER 37

  WORD PICTURES

  Florida and Tiller were letting the swift current carry them along. Florida had just finished telling Tiller about the Hoppers and Cranbeps and Burgertons, when Tiller made an odd sound, as if he were in pain.

  “What’s the matter?” she said. “You feeling poorly?” She turned around and saw him with his chin bent against his chest.

  “I’m feeling like I want to strangle those Hoppers and Cranbeps and Burgerton boys,” he said.

  “Don’t you go feeling poorly over it,” she said. “You forget the worst bits after a while. Sometimes Dallas and I pretend it happened to somebody else. And you know what Dallas says? He says that it don’t mean nothing, that someday we’re going to live in a glorious place, and we’ll both get married to real nice people, and we’ll each have twenty kids of our own—”

  “Twenty?”

  “Maybe more,” Florida said, “and we won’t let anybody be mean to those kids, not ever. And our kids will grow up and get married and have bunches of kids of their own, and they’ll treat their kids good, and it’ll go on like that forever and ever.”

  Florida liked that picture. Maybe it was good that Dallas was dreamy, she thought, because whenever she was feeling as if everything was dark and scary and putrid, Dallas would paint word pictures that would fly into her mind and scatter the dark and scary things. When they’d been locked in the toothless lunatic’s cellar, Dallas had talked all night long about how they would live in a clean place someday, up in the woods maybe, and all around would be beautiful trees and clear rivers, and the only people nearby would be good ones, nice ones, no mean ones allowed, and on he went all through the night, making word pictures.

  CHAPTER 38

  SURVEYING

  Z had made his way down into Ruby Holler and was sitting on Tiller and Sairy’s porch. Sweat dripped from his face as he leaned back against the shaded wall.

  That Trepid fellow had gone a little too far this time. Z didn’t for a minute believe that Trepid wanted to know where Tiller and Sairy might have found oil. He was up to something else, and Z had a pretty good idea what it was.

  Z could have refused Trepid’s request right off the bat, but he figured that Trepid would just find someone else to do his dirty work, and that would not be good. At least this way, Z could stall Trepid until he figured out what to do.

  Z circled the cabin, glancing in the windows. Then he stood and looked around the yard. He spotted a pile of stones near the well and another pile beside the porch steps. There were stones by the barn path and a big gray stone near the fir tree. From his pocket, he took the pencil and paper he’d brought with him. He drew a square for the cabin and X’s around it, where the stones were. He hoped he found lots of stones. Lots and lots and lots of them.

  CHAPTER 39

  THE WORRYWARTS

  Dallas and Sairy had stopped for the day in a scrubby clearing. They were penned in by dense trees, and the ground was rocky, but it was the best place they could find to set up camp. They’d eaten cold beans and were trying to ignore their thirst.

  Sairy had settled herself on a flat stone and had pulled out her block of wood and her whittling knife, when Dallas said, “Sairy? I don’t get it. I mean, that you’d want to go someplace else where you don’t have your own bed that you’re used to, and you don’t have all that good food you make, and there are all these bugs and—”

  Sairy sniffed. “Well, if we ever do go to Kangadoon, I am sure it will be worth the trip.”

  “If we go to Kangadoon?” Dallas said. “If?”

  “I meant when we go,” Sairy said. “I don’t know why I said if.”

  Dallas stared at Sairy, who looked as if she might cry, and that shocked him. He couldn’t imagine her crying, but trying to picture it made him remember a time when Mrs. Trepid had grabbed ahold of Florida and shook her. “Why don’t you ever cry?” Mrs. Trepid had demanded, and Florida had replied, “’Cause I don’t putrid want to.”

  But Florida did cry sometimes. She’d cried at the Hoppers’ and the Cranbeps’ and the Burgertons’ and at the Creepy Dreeps’. Dallas hadn’t cried at those places. He didn’t know why he hadn’t. Maybe it was because Florida was crying enough for the two of them, or because he’d wanted to cheer her up.

  Dallas had cried after Joey died, but no one saw him cry except Florida. And sometimes at night at the Home he cried, and if Florida heard him, she would sneak into the closet and lift the cardboard flap and say, “Don’t think about it, Dallas. It will go away.”

  Out in the woods now with Sairy, Dallas pulled out his own block of wood and studied it. He’d already chipped at one end, but he hadn’t figured out what was inside yet. “What’s that one you’re carving?” he asked Sairy.

  “Not sure yet,” Sairy said. “Just have to see what comes out. How about yours?”

  “No idea. Maybe another robin.”

  “You don’t have to find a bird in yours,” Sairy said. “Maybe there’s something else inside yours.”

  “Like what?” Dallas said.

  “I don’t know, could be anything at all.”

  “It’s probably a slug,” Dallas said. “Or a slimy worm.” He felt odd, as if he was talking like Florida. “Or a putrid rat thing.” It made him laugh, to talk like Florida.

  “You know what I was just thinking?” Sairy said. “I was remembering a time when Tiller and I were out walking in the holler—this was a long time ago, before our kids were even born—and there, in the middle of the path, was a perfect piece of wood, and we both reached for it.”

  “Did you fight over it?” Dallas asked. “You pull it back and forth?”

  “Not exactly, I mean not the way you’re thinking. We stayed there a few minutes, bent over, both of us touching that wood, and I was thinking, Why doesn’t he let go and let me have it? If he loves me, he’ll let me have it. Tiller was probably thinking the same thing: If she loves me, she’ll let me have it.” Sairy put one finger against her lips and tapped softly, as if she were coaxing more words out of her mouth. “Finally, I said that I thought there was a perfect
bird in that piece of wood. I could see it in my mind, this little bird nestled in that wood, waiting for me to set it free.”

  Dallas examined the piece of wood in his hands, wondering why he couldn’t see what was inside.

  “And,” Sairy continued, “Tiller said that he could see a perfect boat in that piece of wood, a perfect, perfect boat just waiting to be let loose.”

  “So which was it, a boat or a bird? Who won?”

  Sairy tapped at her lips. “He gave in first. He said, ‘You have it,’ and I snatched it up and was so happy, and on we walked, and as we walked, I started to feel bad. I was trying to picture myself taking the first slivers off this perfect piece of wood. What if I ruined it? What if there was no perfect bird inside? So I told Tiller, ‘Here, you have it.’”

  “Did he take it?” Dallas asked.

  “He took it so fast, I didn’t even have time to blink,” Sairy said.

  “And he made a perfect boat out of that piece of wood?”

  “No. For days and days I saw him holding that piece of wood, turning it around and around. He’d get out his knife, but he just couldn’t seem to take the first cut. Then you know what he did? He placed that piece of wood on our dresser, and he said, ‘Sairy, I’m putting this here for a while. It’ll belong to both of us. Whoever wants to get started on it can do it.’”

  “So you grabbed it, right?”

  “I wanted to,” Sairy said. “I could hardly contain myself. I’d go in the bedroom and touch that piece of wood, but I just could not put my knife to it. And then when I wasn’t in there, I’d be worrying that he was in there getting started on it.”

  “You two sure are weird,” Dallas said.

  “Everybody’s a little weird, Dallas.”

  “So who finally got the wood?”

  Sairy grinned. “It’s still there, right on our dresser, a piece of wood with who-knows-what inside.”