“You got a TV?” I hadn’t seen one since we moved to the forest.
“We used to. One time my daddy put up a big metal pole he’d scrapped in the woods and rigged up a kinda machine that goes into the sky and picks up the shows. And we watched Little Rascals for a while, and Laverne & Shirley and I Love Lucy, which I bet you’d like because you’re sorta like Lucy—”
“Who’s Lucy?”
“The woman on the show. I’m trying to tell ya. She talks a lot, just like you.”
I ducked my head, my cheeks burning. The Prophet preached the virtue of quietude among women. I’d been quiet for most of my life, but meeting Jude, I felt I could talk freely for the first time.
“Sorry,” I mumbled.
“I didn’t mean it like that. She’s just got a lot of things to say. And she tells them to her friend Ethel. And to Ricky, her husband. He’s Cuban and he’s in a band and sometimes Lucy does dancing for his shows.”
“What’s Cuban?”
“It’s like a place. Like an island where it’s hot all the time.”
“It’s around here?”
“Naw, it’s gotta be like . . . two hundred miles from here.”
“Gawl.”
“So, anyway, I think we should build our clubhouse out here, halfway between your house and mine.”
“They’ll find it,” I said. By this time, Jude knew they were the deacons.
Jude suggested we build it up high in a tree where nobody’d ever think to look. He knew how to lift even planks of wood away from a fallen log, and eventually we whittled together a little camp inside the boughs of the larch. By the time we finished, the larch’s fingers were mustard yellow again. The autumn smell of soil and tree breath seeped easily through our meek wooden walls.
On one wall, Jude had tacked a colored photograph showing a brown-skinned woman beside a fair, lanky man with a sharp Adam’s apple. She wore a large ivory dress trimmed in violet lace. On the white border beneath the picture, someone had written a caption in pencil.
“What’s it say?” I asked.
“‘Waylon and Loretta,’” Jude said, “‘on their wedding day.’”
“Your parents?” I asked, matching the features in his face to the people in the photo.
He nodded from where he was cutting a window into the east wall with his father’s rusty handsaw.
“Your father let you keep this?”
“He won’t notice. He doesn’t much like to see pictures of my momma. Says he keeps the best pictures of her inside his head.”
He let the saw’s handle fall over his wrist. “You know what I wonder sometimes?” Jude asked. “I think there was something my daddy was running away from. That’s why he left the city to live up here.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno,” he said. “I know my grandparents didn’t think it was right, him marrying my momma. They couldn’t be together unless they ran away. But I wonder why they wouldn’t just head to a different town?”
“Yeah,” I shrugged.
I wondered it, too. Why would my mother and father leave their families and homes and jobs for the ramblings of a man they barely knew? Why would Jude’s parents trek into the woods to live on forest service land with nothing but a camp stove and two Bibles under their arms?
On those quiet fall days, Jude took to playing guitar. Tentatively at first, because at that height we were entirely in nature’s territory. Eventually, his strumming grew stronger, and he sang, too, high-pitched and clear in those days, rougher the older he got.
“Every morning, every evening, ain’t we got fun?
Not much money, oh, but honey, ain’t we got fun?
The rent’s unpaid dear, we haven’t a bus,
But smiles are made dear, for people like us.”
He threw down his guitar and held his hand out to me. I grabbed it, and he wheeled me around the wooden floor in a kind of disjointed dance—neither of us had much practice. Our bodies were feet apart, but his hand felt dry and warm in mine. Beyond the window, the sky was half illuminated with a yolk-colored sunset.
“In the winter, in the summer, don’t we have fun?” he sang, slightly out of breath now.
“Times are rough and getting rougher, still we have fun.
There’s nothing surer, the rich get rich and the poor get poorer,
In the meantime, in between time, ain’t we got fun?”
I was laughing loud enough to shake the trees around, to shake the bones in my own body. Jude swung his legs out the open side of the tree house and started plucking on his guitar again, the backs of his elbows moving up and down as he touched the strings, the sun touching his jaw.