The Steep and Thorny Way(44)
In the Creole story about the prince whom a wizard turned into a fish, the girl’s father killed the fish to keep his daughter from visiting him by the river. He forced her to cook the fish. And then he ate him.
“Hanalee.” Mama set her hand on the crook of Uncle Clyde’s arm again. “Are you all right?”
I shoved my hat onto my head and slid off the seat. The soles of my sandals thudded against the dirt, and the ground coughed up a cloud of dust. “I’m just dandy.”
Mama frowned.
The three of us entered the picnic grounds, my mother walking in the middle and Uncle Clyde on her right side, still carrying the basket. From beneath the brim of my hat, I glanced around for signs of Fleur but didn’t see her or her mother and brother.
“Greta . . . Dr. Koning,” called Mrs. Adder, coming our way with two glasses of lemonade. “Oh, I’m so glad you came, despite all.” She squinted into the sunlight and stopped a few feet in front of us. “There’s no sign of Joe yet.”
Mama and Uncle Clyde glanced at each other with weary eyes, as if they had both tired of speaking about the preacher’s son for the day.
“I’m sorry.” Uncle Clyde placed his hand on Mama’s back. “I hope he’s safe.”
“Thank you. I do, too.” Mrs. Adder’s gaze flitted toward me for the briefest of moments. She gave a strained smile and then continued onward, toward an area occupied by Joe’s six brothers and sisters—all well-dressed children, younger than he, with hair ranging from caramel-brown to Joe’s darker walnut shade. The weight of an absence settled over me again. The Adders struck me as a jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece. A multi-angled, not-quite-the-same-shape-as-the-others piece that they tried to cover by squishing closer together on their picnic blanket.
Mama and Uncle Clyde walked faster than me, so I ended up trekking behind them through the obstacles of blankets and families, including the Witten twins’ parents, who were dressed in Sunday-best attire and didn’t seem at all like people with sons who carried around knives and gin. Faces shifted my way. Glances settled upon me, no doubt because of the inevitable spread of rumors about Joe and me, but also due to the fact that most people stopped and stared whenever I made an appearance in town.
“Will I ever stop sticking out like a sore thumb?” I remembered asking Daddy one morning on our walk home from buying seeds at the farm-supply store. I only came up to his ribs at the time, so I must not have been much more than seven or eight.
Daddy’s smile had faded at my question, yet the light from his eyes never dimmed. “Probably not, baby doll,” he said. “Not when you’re the only one who looks like you. Just lift your head and show them who you are deep inside. Look them in the eye and smile, and the kind ones will see that brown is a beautiful color.”
I did my best to lift my head on those church grounds, and I tried to ignore all the eyes, although I noted that some of the faces smiled with expressions of understanding, or maybe pity, as if they didn’t blame me for running off with another Elston misfit. No one whispered unpleasant words about me—no hisses of “slut” or “floozy” or even worse. I pressed forward to the patch of grass Mama had selected for our picnic blanket. I helped my mother and stepfather spread the checkered blue cloth over the ground and thought of Joe flapping his brown blanket over us on the forest floor in the dark. I knelt down and stretched out a corner of Mama’s blanket and had to stop and rub my hands over my eyes.
“Hanalee?” asked Mama. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
The lingering dew on the grass bled through both the blanket and my skirt, moistening my knees. I sat there for a moment and wondered how the universe had seen fit to throw me together with a person I was supposed to hate. A person who wouldn’t ever want to be with me, even if my skin was whiter than his. I imagined someone from up above—certainly not God, I hoped—devising all the various stumbling blocks he could place in front of me, all the barriers to love and freedom and simple happiness, just to see how I’d react. Just for a laugh.
Before I could answer my mother, someone called my name. I raised my head and found Mildred Marks plodding toward me, dodging through a three-legged race that was claiming more victims than victors. She wore her usual fedora and filthy brown boots and looked like a cross between a gangster and a farmhand—a furious one at that, with her hands balled into fists by her sides. She plowed straight toward me, her mouth clamped shut in an ugly scowl.
“I . . .” I jumped to my feet from our blanket. “I think I might need to step away for a spell and talk to Mildred.”
Mama stopped pulling dishes out of the picnic basket and raised her head. “I don’t want you stepping too far away from us.”
“Joe’s not going to come anywhere near the church grounds, Greta,” said Uncle Clyde, leaning back on his hands. “I can guarantee he won’t show up within a mile of this crowd.”
“I need to speak to you, Hanalee.” Mildred stopped right in front of me, smelling a little tangy and pungent, like the grains distilling inside that back room in her house. “Do you have a moment to spare?”
I glanced down at Mama, who then glanced at Uncle Clyde.
“Just as long as you stay on church property,” said my stepfather. “No wandering out of sight.”
“It’ll only take a moment.” Mildred grabbed me by an elbow and yanked me through the maze of picnickers until we reached a row of birches on the edge of the church grounds. She then threw my arm back at me as if it were a stick.