Chasing Redbird Read online

  When Uncle Nate went off into the hills, he’d sometimes be gone the whole day, and now and then he’d even take a sleeping bag and camp overnight. He rarely chose to work the farm because he’d made his resolutions about farming.

  He once tried to raise chickens, but then decided he couldn’t bear to see them killed, so he made a resolution not to raise chickens anymore. Next, he grew tobacco. Our land is perfect for tobacco, as it is moist, dark earth that gets a fair amount of sun and rain. Although Uncle Nate liked his smoke every now and then, he got worried when the Surgeon General said that tobacco was dangerous to everybody’s health, and so he made a resolution that he would not raise tobacco.

  We had a whole big herd of dairy cows for a while, but they got a disease and we lost twenty-seven in two days. Uncle Nate said he couldn’t bear to see such sweet creatures die, and so he made a resolution not to keep cows, except for two which gave us our milk.

  Pigs would be like chickens and have to be slaughtered, so he made a resolution about pigs. Corn and tomatoes were next. Uncle Nate practically gave them away at the market, being unable to charge hardly anything for them, as this was against his resolution not to cheat people. Aunt Jessie finally told him to quit planting them, as they were going to waste and we were losing our shirts. So now corn and tomatoes were okay, but not in too much abundance, only what we could eat ourselves and give to the neighbors. Since we didn’t make much money off of Uncle Nate’s efforts on the farm, it was a good thing my dad worked full time as manager of the county airport.

  Aunt Jessie was a redhead, which is how she got her nickname Redbird from Uncle Nate, and because of her red hair she stood out from the rest of us. Uncle Nate and Dad were sort of average-looking, but all of us kids looked like my mother: dark hair, dark eyes, little noses and ears, long skinny legs. Mom once said she felt like a photocopy machine. She said this to Mrs. Flint one day in the grocery store, and Mrs. Flint must have thought Mom was complaining about the number of children she had, because Mrs. Flint said, “Ain’t you ever been told about birth control? A person doesn’t have to have a million kids, you know. You can go to the doctor and get a pill.”

  Aunt Jessie was with us at the time, and she said, “Doctor, schmoctor. God gave her these children, and if God wants to give her a pill, then let Him do it.”

  It was a sensitive issue, and I wouldn’t have touched it with a ten-foot pole, so as usual I kept my mouth shut.

  CHAPTER 6

  TADPOLES AND PUMPKINS

  The day I’d seen Jake Boone at the store, May stood up after dinner and said, “I’m tired of people asking me which Taylor I am. I’m tired of you all saying ‘Bonnie—Gretchen—Zinny—May—’ before figuring out which one you’re talking to.”

  May was launching into one of her rages, but I knew exactly what she meant. My parents were always saying “Bon-Gret-May-Zinny?” or “Will-Ben-Sam?”

  May plunged on. “I’m going to make it easy for you to remember exactly which one I am.” She waggled a striped ribbon in her hair. “It’s multi-colored,” she said. “M is for multi-colored and for May.” I thought she was a bit old for hair ribbons, but apparently she’d seen a magazine article that said that ribbons were back in style. May was big on style.

  Gretchen, who is seventeen, then announced she would wear only green (“G is for green and Gretchen,” she said). This wouldn’t be a big hardship for her, because green had always been her favorite color.

  Eleven-year-old Bonnie decided to wear only blue. This did not leave me with a good option, as I could not think of any colors beginning with Z. Bonnie suggested I paint a zinnia (it’s a flower) on all my clothes.

  That night I did exactly that. When I went downstairs, with a newly-painted red zinnia on my shirt, my mother looked at that red flower, obviously puzzled. In her tired mind, she was probably trying to remember if she had named one of her children something beginning with R. Rebecca? Ruby? Or did the f lower mean my name began with F ? Had she named me Fanny? Frances?

  “It’s a zinnia, Mom. I’m Zinny.”

  “I know it,” she said. “I can tell you all apart. It’s just that my head is full of other things. If I were blindfolded and you walked in the room, I’d know it was you.”

  “How?”

  “Because I know who Zinny is. I know what she sounds like, smells like. I know what she—radiates. I know who she is.”

  I wanted to ask And who is that?, but I didn’t.

  “Anyway, Zinny,” she said, “that’s not a zinnia you’ve painted. That’s a rose, isn’t it?”

  What do you know about that? I’d gone and painted a rose on my shirt. It was spooky.

  My younger brothers took a different approach. Will (he’s ten) decided to eat only white foods (rice, potatoes, bread, the whites of eggs, etc.); Ben (he’s nine) would eat beans with every meal, even breakfast; and Sam (at seven, the youngest) chose soup. It wouldn’t necessarily make it easier to tell them apart unless you were at the dinner table with them, but you could usually count on the fact that some of their food would be on their clothes, and so that might give you a hint.

  Mom and Dad made an effort to use these hints and call us by our right names, but Uncle Nate didn’t even try. He had always called all the boys tadpole (sometimes referring to “the littlest tadpole” or “the biggest tadpole”) and all of us girls pumpkin. I can assure you that Gretchen was not thrilled to be known as “the biggest pumpkin.”

  Except for my brother Ben, my sisters and brothers liked to be inside with the computer and television and stereo and phone. Ben and I would rather be outdoors, especially since I had gotten healthier. I hadn’t had a cold or anything like that in years. The worst punishment was to have to clean the house or stay in my room. “There isn’t enough air in there,” Aunt Jessie used to say, and I agreed. She and I did a lot of inside things outside: peel potatoes, sort laundry, fold clothes. We even ironed outside, as long as it wasn’t raining, and she had a twenty-foot-long extension cord that ran from her kitchen to the outside, just for this purpose.

  I shared a room with my three sisters, and at night, when May and Gretchen thought Bonnie and I were both asleep, they would whisper. Once I heard them playing the -est game. It went like this:

  May whispered, “So what am I? You’re the oldest and smartest, Gretchen. Everyone knows that.”

  “You’re the prettiest, May.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Of course. Everyone does.”

  “And Bonnie—she’s the nicest,” May said.

  “Will’s the strongest and Ben’s the gentlest, don’t you think?” Gretchen asked.

  “Yes, and Sam, he’s the cutest.”

  “What about Zinny?” Gretchen asked. “We forgot Zinny.”

  “She’s the—the—strangest and stingiest dirt-daubing doodlebug!”

  They laughed and laughed.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE TRAIL

  The day after I saw Jake at Mrs. Flint’s store was Saturday. Dad and Uncle Nate were up in the field setting out tomato plants. They’d left a tray of plants down by the “squirt gardens” behind the house. These were the mini-gardens that each of us kids kept, and the week before, I had planted zinnias around the border of mine. I didn’t like to see that lonely brown earth, so plain and bare like the top of Aunt Jessie’s grave.

  There were three rules for our squirt gardens: We could plant whatever we wanted; we had to take care of our own gardens (weeding and watering and de-bugging); and we could do whatever we wanted with what we grew, which was basically eat it or sell it. The first year I planted mine, I was so selfish with what I grew that I wouldn’t even let myself eat any of it, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to give it to anyone else. Then I cried when it all went rotten.

  That Saturday, I planted and watered six tomato plants in my squirt garden, and then told each plant it would be okay. Aunt Jessie had firmly believed that if you treated each plant as an individual, it would be a happier p
lant and give you more tomatoes.

  When I was finished, I snuck off, raced up the hill behind the barn and down the other side, and ran along the creek until I came to the start of my trail. I felt like I owned the trail because I had discovered it. Actually I had rediscovered it, a few weeks before Aunt Jessie died. The trail had been there for at least two hundred years.

  I had found it by accident when I was poking along the creek bank, following a sleepy frog. It wasn’t a very clever frog, for he leaped away from the water into the grass and soon was tangled up in it. That’s when I stepped on something hard, which shifted beneath me, slurping in the mud. It was a large, flat piece of slate, covered with dead leaves and grass.

  When I moved back, there was another slurp as I stepped on a slab laid end to end with the first one. For the next few hours, I cleared away grass and debris, uncovering a row of similar stones, leading in a line from the creek on up the hill. Zinnia Taylor: explorer!

  For a few days, I kept my discovery a secret, wanting to have something of my own, but Ben and Sam followed me one day, and when they saw my newly uncovered trail—which, by this time, was half a mile long—they raced back to get Will and Bonnie. Soon the whole family was up there, stepping along the stones. Everybody was flapping around, saying, “What is it?” and “Where’d it come from?” and “Who did it?” and “Where does it go?”

  Only Uncle Nate and Aunt Jessie were quiet. Uncle Nate was kicking the stones and looking all around, as if he’d just landed on this planet. At last he said, “I never heard such a noisy bunch of tadpoles and pumpkins in all my born days.”

  “Do you know what it is?” Dad asked.

  “It’s the dag-blasted trail,” Uncle Nate said.

  “What dag-blasted trail?”

  “The dag-blasted trail. Goes nowhere.”

  “It must go somewhere,” Will said.

  “Goes nowhere,” Aunt Jessie said, echoing Uncle Nate.

  “I’m going to walk the whole thing,” Gretchen said.

  “Me too!” Will agreed.

  I don’t know what came over me. “You can’t go,” I said. “It’s covered. Only this part is cleared because I cleared it. It’s mine.”

  “Don’t be a toad,” Will said. “It isn’t yours.”

  I felt as if he were robbing me of my most prized possession. There was something about the trail—I couldn’t have said what—that was suddenly so important to me that I became determined to defend it. “I discovered it. I cleared it.”

  “You didn’t discover it. It was already here. You just found it again. Big deal. I might have found it, if I’d been out here,” Will said.

  “I did all the work.”

  Will glared at me. “You didn’t uncover the whole thing yet. I can uncover some.”

  “Me too,” Bonnie said.

  I’d had plans for my trail, and now they were all taking it over.

  Uncle Nate repeated, “Goes nowhere.” Aunt Jessie seemed uneasy—because she didn’t want us all wandering off into the hills, I figured, but I was wrong. Uncle Nate and Aunt Jessie knew what was on that trail, and they didn’t want anyone else to find it.

  Not long after this, I discovered the maps. Our class took a field trip to a local historical museum, and I hate to say it, but it was the most boring place on this earth. It was dark and musty inside, and you walked around and looked in glass cases which held tiny bits of broken pottery and yellowed books and portraits of old people. Just as I thought I was going to perish from being held captive in that dark room, I wandered over to one exhibit and stared inside at a map. I saw a dotted line, and my eyes followed it across the map, and across these words: Bybanks–Chocton Trail.

  The Bybanks–Chocton Trail! I studied the map. The portion in the case showed the start of it, at Bybanks, just down the road from our farm, but it didn’t show our farm or the rest of the trail. When I asked the guide if there were any more of these maps, she led me downstairs to a cobwebby, dark room, with only a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Here were books of maps, loose maps, big maps, little maps—all yellow, all dusty. It didn’t take us long to find other maps of the Bybanks– Chocton Trail, and at last we had three separate ones that showed it from start to finish: a twenty-mile trail. We photocopied the maps, and I brought them home and hid them in the back of my closet, underneath my bottle-cap collection. No one ever looked there.

  For the next week, I studied these maps every day, memorizing every inch of them. I found the place where our farm was now, the creek, and the stretch of trail I’d already uncovered. They were primitive maps, rough sketches of the trail’s course with handwritten legends and names of places that sounded both fabulous and strange. I envisioned myself gliding through Maiden’s Walk and Crow Hollow. I’d forge my way along Baby Toe Ridge and recline on Sleepy Bear Ridge. I wasn’t so sure about Spook Hollow and Shady Death Ridge, however.

  Twice, I returned to the museum, where I learned that the route had originally been an Indian trail, later used by trappers, and later still by loggers. A now busted railroad, set up by a logging company to haul timber down from the hills, ran across the trail near the midpoint.

  It was a narrow trail, wide enough for men on horseback, but too narrow for wagons. The lower portions of my trail were laid with stone slabs. The museum guide said this was to make travel easier during the spring, when the ground was muddy and swampy. She also said that settlers had blazed a wider wagon route down near the river, following its meandering course, and that that had evolved into the main road between Bybanks and Chocton.

  In the museum, I also found faded photos of people riding on my trail, and each time I set out to clear a new section of the trail, I wondered about these people. Who were they? What were they thinking? Why were they going to Bybanks or to Chocton?

  On that day that I planted tomatoes in my squirt garden, I made my way along the mile of the trail that I’d already cleared. Down below me was the farm, our house, the long gravel drive leading to the main road, and beyond were pale rolling hills swooping to the Ohio River, soupy brown from the recent April rains which had swept the bare soil into it.

  When I reached the place where I’d last stopped clearing, I found my trowel wedged beneath a bush. The trowel and a hoe were the only tools I had, besides my own two hands, but that’s all I needed. I’d pull and scrape, clearing one stone at a time. This was easiest right after a rain, when the earth was loose around the roots of the weeds, or when, for some mysterious reason, the weeds had skipped over a stone and left it nearly bare. But usually it was not so easy, and I’d have to wrench and tug to pull the weeds loose.

  Sometimes I’d lie back in the grass and watch the clouds and listen to the deep, dark woods that stretched behind me. The trail was curving in the direction of those woods, and part of me was eager to enter them to see where the trail would lead, and part of me was pigeon-hearted, uneasy about what might await me there.

  Clearing the trail was slow work that day. On my way home, when I rounded the bend where I could see the farm below, I noticed Mr. Boone’s truck parked beside the barn. During the time his wife and Jake had been away, lonely Mr. Boone had often come to our house. But we’d not seen him since his wife and Jake had come back, and I was surprised that his truck was there.

  I made my way down the hill, stopping to check the newly planted tomatoes in the squirt garden, and headed for the house. It may have been Mr. Boone’s truck there, but it wasn’t Mr. Boone who was visiting.

  CHAPTER 8

  BOTTLE CAPS

  “Guess who’s on the porch,” Bonnie said.

  “Mr. Boone,” I said.

  “Wrong.”

  “Mrs. Boone, then.”

  “Wrong.”

  “So who is it?”

  “Guess.”

  You can never get a straight answer out of Bonnie.

  The whole family was on the porch, even Uncle Nate, and with them was Jake Boone. Everybody was yapping at him a mile a minute, asking
him so many questions you’d have thought he was Elvis Presley himself dropping in for a visit. May was sitting next to him on the porch swing, gazing at him dreamily and twirling her hair ribbon. They didn’t see me right away.

  “So you’re working at Flint’s store?” Dad was asking.

  “Yep, I am,” Jake said.

  “How much they paying you?” Uncle Nate demanded. Since Aunt Jessie had died, he’d some-times act irritable and grumpy like this, as if people were annoying him by simply being alive.

  Jake told him his hourly wage.

  “Highway robbery!” Uncle Nate said.

  “It’s the minimum wage,” Jake said.

  “Highway robbery. I never made that much in a whole dag-blasted week. Dag-blasted inflation. We oughta run them poll-u-ticians out of the country. We oughta—”

  “Hey, Zinny!” Jake said. As he stood up, the swing bumped against the back of his legs. May gave me a sour look.

  “You’re welcome to stay on for dinner,” Mom said.

  Jake thanked her, but he had to get to work.

  “This time of day?” Uncle Nate said. “Stores oughta be closing at this time of day. Shouldn’t be open on a Saturday night. People oughta be at home doing their chores, being with their family. You tell that to Mrs. Flint, you hear?”

  Jake stepped off the porch and poked me in the side. “I can’t get over you, Zinny. You sure have changed.”

  May followed him as if she were attached to him with a string. “Do you think I’ve changed, Jake?” she asked.

  “Not a bit,” he said, and May blushed. “Want to see my truck, Zinny?”

  “Your Dad’s truck?” I said. “Seen it before.”

  “I want to show you something.”

  “I’ll come too,” May said.

  On the floor of the truck was a small cardboard box, which Jake handed to me.

  May reached for the box. “Here, I’ll open it.”

  Jake said, “It’s for Zinny.”