Jeffrey barely looked up at me he was working so hard.
“Jeffrey,” I said in a motherly voice, “I need to talk to you about something.”
He looked up then, but his hands never stopped swinging the hatchet.
“Okay, Thais,” he said. “I’m listening to you, I’m just really hard working. I want to make the best rowboat. I want to show Atticus and Grandpa that I can make good rowboats.”
I placed my hand on his arm.
The hatchet stopped then, and Jeffrey looked over; he set the tool on the grass.
“Are you tired?” Jeffrey asked, and there was a look of anxiety in his face I did not immediately understand. He reached out and put his hand to my forehead. “Are you tired like my dad, and Grandma June was?” He shook his head rapidly. “Please don’t be tired, Thais. Please, please, please—”
“Oh no, Jeffrey,” I said, realizing. I took his hands and gave them a comforting squeeze. “I’m not tired at all. I promise. I just have to tell you something that might make you sad.”
Jeffrey cocked his head to one side, a confused look lingered in his big, curious eyes.
“What will make me sad?”
I paused, absently licked the dryness from my lips. Then I squeezed his hands a little tighter and smiled at him with gentle eyes.
“Me and Atticus have to go away,” I said, and Jeffrey’s face fell in an instant. “But one day we’re going to come back and visit you, and see how great a rowboat you made.”
“But why are you going away?”
“We have someplace we have to go,” I told him. “It’s a place far away, and there are many good people there, and it’s where we’re going to live.”
“But you live here. In Mr. Graham’s house.” Jeffrey pointed at the cabin. “Why do you have to go far away to live somewhere else?”
I sighed, looked at the grass finally turning green again after the last rain, and it took me a moment before I knew what to say.
“Jeffrey, it’s not safe living out here alone. Maybe you and your grandpa could come with us. We would like that very much.”
Jeffrey nodded contemplatively.
I had no confidence in Esra or Jeffrey agreeing to go with us, but resolved to at least try to convince them soon.
ATTICUS
I watched them from the window while Going to California by Led Zeppelin played from the makeshift stereo in the background. And I thought of Thais with flowers in her hair; I pictured dancing with her in the fields on the way to Shreveport, floating together down the Mississippi on a flat-bottom boat; I pictured her playing a guitar and singing in that sweet voice of hers; I pictured us arriving in Shreveport and being surrounded by thousands of good people who welcomed us and took us in. And I pictured Thais and I having a life together, a real life where we were living and not just surviving.
But when the song faded into its end, so did all of my thoughts, and I was left only with the reality of our life. Not the bright and cheerful illusion we were living now, but the dark and perilous certainty that lay ahead.
~~~
THAIS
As expected, Esra refused to leave his home, and also as expected, Jeffrey refused to leave his grandfather.
Everyone said their good-byes. Jeffrey hugged me so tight. It broke my heart to let him go. Esra let us fill up our backpacks with as much as we could carry from the supply cabin; and he gave Atticus another baggie full of bullets.
It was dusk when Atticus and I made it back to the cabin. We packed the rest of our belongings and prepared to leave.
“I’m going to say good-bye to Mr. Graham and his family,” I said with heaviness in my voice.
“Okay, love.”
I went out onto the front porch and talked to Mr. Graham’s skeleton for a few minutes, and then went to his wife and son’s graves and told them how sorry I was they had suffered so terribly. Then I went to the backyard to look for George, but my little friend was nowhere to be found.
“I’m going to miss you, George,” I called out. “Stay out of the open, and hidden in the tall grass so no one finds and eats you.”
Lastly, I carried the canteen down to the pond to fill it up for our trip.
I sat down on the grass.
And in the quiet, surrounded by darkness and water and trees and the summer breeze, I looked up at the star-filled sky and spoke. To God? To the glowing moon? To myself? To my dead sister and mother and father? In the moment, not even I knew.
“I am afraid,” I spoke softly. “This journey so far away is risky, I know, but I also know that what Atticus said is right. We can’t stay here; we can’t live alone the way things are, and the only way we’re going to survive, our only chance at any kind of life is in a place surrounded by other people like us. People who believe in equality, who are compassionate and moralistic and just, who will fight for each other against the darkness that has spread across the world—we are those people, Atticus and I. He is a good man; he is strong and kind and honorable and incredibly flawed but incredibly human, and to still be human is a feat in and of itself—he is so strong. But so am I.”
My gaze fixed on one star in particular in the heavens, the blackness around it staved off by its immense light, and my eyes ceased to blink. I pressed a fist to my chest.
After a moment, I plucked the canteen from the grass and stood.
“Help us get to Shreveport,” I said, looking at that solitary star again. “Guide us, light our way so that we move in the right direction; help us get there safely and I will always follow your light.”
God? Family? Light? I still did not know. All I knew was that I would never break that promise.
I moved silently over the grass and away from the pond; the water licking the shore lingered in my ears as I drifted farther away.
Making my way back to the cabin, I grabbed the clothes from the clothesline and tossed them over my shoulder. I went up the back steps and pushed open the door; it didn’t dawn on me immediately that I didn’t have to turn the knob; the door had been left cracked. And it didn’t strike me as odd right away that the candles left burning on the kitchen counter had been snuffed out, leaving the space in a dark blue haze lit only by the moon.
My feet moved softly over the cool floor; the wood creaked beneath my steps.
“Atticus?” I called out as I passed through the kitchen. “I filled the canteen. Though we might want to fill—”
The rest of my words evaporated before they could form sound. The canteen fell from my hand, clashed against the floor as my wide, frightened eyes took in the sight of more than ten armed men standing in the living room, staring back at me.
Atticus lay unconscious—or dead—on the floor at their feet.
PART
III
~THE SWEET LIE~
56
THAIS