“You should have said sorry,” Leonie says.
I wonder if Pop ever did something like this for her when she made this trip before. If he snuck out in the morning when Leonie was sleeping, at 9 a.m. or 10 a.m., and secreted something in her car, some little collection of things he thought might be able to keep her safe, to watch for her when he couldn’t, to protect her on her trips to north Mississippi. Some of my friends at school have people living up there, in Clarksdale or outside of Greenwood. What they say: You think it’s bad down here. What they do: frown. What they mean: Up there? In the Delta? It’s worse.
Up ahead, the trees by the side of the road begin to thin, and there are suddenly billboards. A picture of a new baby in the womb: a red-yellow tadpole, skin and blood so thin the light shines through it like a gummy candy. Protect Life, the sign says. I put the feather, the rock, and the tooth in the bag. Roll Pop’s note so thin it could be a straw for a mouse, and put it in the bag before tying it shut and putting it into the small square pocket sewn into the waistband of my basketball shorts. Leonie is not looking at me anymore.
“Sorry,” I say.
She grunts.
I think I know what my friends mean when they talk about north Mississippi.
*
Pop’s told me some parts of Richie’s story over and over again. I’ve heard the beginning at least too many times to count. There are parts in the middle, about the outlaw hero Kinnie Wagner and the evil Hogjaw, that I’ve only heard twice. I ain’t never heard the end. Sometimes I’d try to write them down, but they were just bad poems, limping down the page: Training a horse. The next line. Cut with the knees. Sometimes I got fed up with Pop. At first, he told me the stories while we were awake at night in the living room. But after some months, he always seemed to tell me part of his Richie story when we were doing something else: eating red beans and rice, picking our teeth with toothpicks on the porch after lunch, sitting in front of the television in the living room watching westerns in the afternoon, when Pop would interrupt the cowboy on the screen to say this about Parchman: It was murder. Mass murder. When Pop told me about the small pouch he kept tied to one of his belt loops, it was cold outside, and he was splitting logs for the woodstove that heated the living room. We were out of gas for the weekend. Mam had all the covers in the house on her, crocheted blankets and quilts and flat and fitted sheets, and still she moaned: My bones. Her hands tucked up under her neck, wringing one against the other, the skin raspy and chafed white, even though I lotioned them every hour. It’s so cold. Her teeth rattling like dice in her mouth.
“Everything got power.”
He hit a log.
“My great-granddaddy taught me that.”
The log split.
“Said there’s spirit in everything. In the trees, in the moon, in the sun, in the animals. Said the sun is most important, gave it a name: Aba. But you need all of them, all of that spirit in everything, to have balance. So the crops will grow, the animals breed and get fat for food.”
He put another log on the stump, and I breathed into my hands, wishing I had a hat for my ears.
“Explained it to me like this: if you got too much sun and not enough rain, crops will wither. If you got too much rain, they rot in the ground.”
He swung again.
“You need a balance of spirit. A body, he told me, is the same way.”
The logs fell.
“Like this. I’m strong. I can split this wood. But maybe if I had some of the boar’s strength, a little bit of wild pig’s tusk at my side, something to give me a little bit of that animal’s spirit, then maybe, just maybe,” he huffed, “I’m better at this. Maybe it come a little easier to me. Maybe I’m stronger.”
He split another.
“But never more than I could handle. The boar share so much, and I take so much. No waste. Waste rots. Too much either way breaks the balance.” He rested his axe on the ground. “Get me another log.”
I returned from the pile, put the wood on the stump, balanced it just so. Snatched my hand away as Pop brought the axe down, clean through the center of it.
“Or a woodpecker could share something, too. A feather, for aim.”
My finger stung from the nearness of that blade, how close Pop come to my hand.
“That’s what you keep in your pouch?” I asked. I’d noticed his small pouch when I was four or five, and I’d asked him what he kept in it. He never told me.
Pop smiled.
“Not that,” he said. “But close.”
When that next log split, I looked up at Pop and shook, felt that splintering in my baseball knees, my bat spine, my glove of a skull. Wondered what power he had running through him. Where it come from.