Her back is to Annie, and Caroline is spraying the light across a patch of ground a few feet in front of her. Those are tomato plants, heavy with green tomatoes. They have fallen over, haven’t been properly staked. And there’s something on the ground, a large stick probably meant to hold up the tomatoes.
“He looked right at me,” Caroline says, squatting to prop up one of the top-heavy plants. Still holding the flashlight in one hand, she does her best to gather the leafy stems, but without twine and a stake, the plant falls again. As she works, the light bounces around the small overgrown garden.
“Pity,” she says, stands, stretches her arms out to her sides, and tips her head toward the sky. She turns in a slow circle until she’s facing Annie.
“It was like he knew it was me,” Caroline says. As if remembering Olsen Weber again, or, more likely, smelling the foul thing Annie is again smelling, Caroline twists her face up for a second time. “Like he already loves me. Yes, he had blue eyes.”
Slowly at first, but faster when Caroline doesn’t move, Annie begins waving Caroline away from the garden. When she still doesn’t move, Annie reaches out, grabs the flashlight first and then Caroline’s arm. With one good tug, Caroline is at her side. Annie holds her by one wrist, squeezing so hard Caroline swats at her and cries out.
“Look,” Annie says and points the flashlight on the ground a few feet from the small plant Caroline had been trying to rescue.
It’s a slender arm. That’s the thing she is first certain of. And as she lets the flashlight slide up that arm to the shoulder and the tangle of wiry long hair spread across what must be the side of a face, the smell is the next thing Annie is certain of. She gives Caroline another yank, nearly knocking her from her feet, and they run.
4
1936—SARAH AND JUNA
I’M STILL LACING my boots as I walk out the door. Hunched over and moving with an awkward gait, I tug those laces tight, tie off the both, and glance back at the house. It stands already in the shadows, though the sun has barely risen. No one watches me from the doorway or from the window. Not Juna or Dale. Not Daddy. No one is watching, so I walk faster and faster still. I take deep breaths of clean morning air to flush the smoke from the cigars Daddy is all the time sucking on. I fan my blouse and my skirt because the stink of them clings to my clothes, and I walk faster and faster until I’m running.
Ellis Baine always gets an early start. He and his brothers will be driving by on their way north of town to check the land passed down through their mama’s side of the family. They always do it first thing and leave the youngest two to see to what needs doing. If they spot me walking alongside of the road, they’ll offer me a ride. They do it for Juna most mornings. She tells me this at the end of each day, even knowing what an ache I have for Ellis. She tells me how they hoist her onto the back of that truck, talk with her and smile at her until they drop her wherever she’s going. Sometimes Ellis hops down ahead of her, reaches up, and lets her fall into his arms as she hops down too. She tells me even though I have such an ache.
Up ahead, the lay of the hills is such that the sun breaks through and the shadows end. The hollyhocks are in full bloom here. They’re waist-high already, and by July, they’ll be covered in mites. I run on toward that sunlight and toward the road and hope like hell Ellis and his brothers didn’t already pass by.
There was a woman in my childhood, Mary Holleran, and I know her still, who knew I was a girl when I was no more than a sickness that woke Mama every morning for six weeks. On Sundays, after the preacher finished preaching, Mary Holleran and the other women would gather around Mama, all of them congregating on the worn, dry grass outside the church’s double doors, and Mary would close her eyes and lay her hands on Mama’s belly. The women would cackle, Mama would say, debate the height of the bump in her belly, the flush in her cheeks, the thickness of her hair. They would pat Mama’s damp face with a kerchief, lead her into the shade thrown by a cluster of red maples, and sit her on a stump or the tail end of a wagon.