before. Carol dug her fingernails into the back of Alice’s hand and yelled for her to let go. It was odd, how quiet the world had gone. Alice was surprised she was doing this. Carol’s fingernails hurt, but it didn’t matter. It made no difference whatsoever. In a detached sort of way, from behind the wall of her fury, she wondered what would happen. The only thing she knew for sure was that she was not going to let go of Carol’s hair until it came out of her head in a hunk. Kathy simply stood there with her mouth open. Carol looked so deeply surprised.
“Hey!” said Felicity, behind her. And then, “whoa!” with something very close to admiration.
In Alice’s head, she heard her father’s words. Fight this thing. Punch it in the nose, kiddo. She tightened her grip. She had never felt stronger.
DIRTY MONEY
It happened last summer, a season I call The Time of the Naked Guys. Of course, I was ten then and didn’t know as much as I do now. It was a real hot summer, and the air around town smelled of baking asphalt during the day and barbeques at night, since none of the mothers wanted to cook much. This one afternoon I was sitting on the porch eating a blue Popsicle, which is my favourite colour Popsicle although it doesn’t really taste like anything blue, but then what does? Blueberries, I guess, but Popsicles don’t taste like that. Anyway, a white van pulled up in front of our driveway and the man driving asked me to come over.
“Hey, kid” he called, as he leaned over and rolled down the passenger side window. “I’m looking for the public swimming pool.” He was alone.
“You’re on the wrong road,” I said, going over to the van. “You got to go back and down Biscayne to Castle road. This is a dead end.”
“You think they’ll mind if I don’t wear a bathing suit?” He moved his hand in his lap.
That was when I realized he had his pants unzipped and his thing was all big and purple-y in his hand. It was as if I’d just dived into cold water.
“You’ll have to ask them,” I said, which at the time I thought was a cool, un-freaked out thing to say. It was the first thing I’d ever seen, since I don’t have any brothers or cousins or anything and I wouldn’t of minded taking a longer look, but it scared me. I hightailed it back in the house to tell my mom.
I came into the kitchen opening and closing my mouth like a fish. When I finally sputtered out what had happened, I figured she’d phone the police or something. Like the week before when the same thing happened to Janet Drury and her father and brother chased the car all the way down the street, her father waving a rake around like a sword.
“What are you talking about?” my Mom said. Her hands were sticky with marshmallows from the Rice Crispy squares she was making, and her permed hair had gone frizzy in the heat.
“Some guy! You know, with his thing out,” I said.
“Sweet Jesus! You shouldn’t be going near strange men,” she said.
I ground a lost kernel of puffed rice under my foot until it was nothing but dust on the black and white linoleum. The way Mom looked at me, I felt like I was the one who’d been out there with my God-givens bouncing around for the whole world to see.
“Why can’t you stay in the playground and play with the other kids? I blame your Aunt for this. The way you run wild in the woods all the time.” I watched the skin under my mother’s arm flap back and forth as she stirred the thickening goo.
“You’re ten years old, Kathy, very nearly a young lady. You’re far too old to be running wild the way you do. You’re just asking for trouble. He didn’t touch you, did he?”
“Course not,” I said.
“Well, good then. And take your hair out of your mouth; you look like a little idiot.”
I have long straight mouse-brown hair and chewing on it is a bad habit I’ve had since I was a little kid. I pulled it out of my mouth.
“I don’t know what the world’s coming to,” Mom said. “It’s not like we live in the city, with all those Eye-talians and J-e-w-s.” Mom always spelled out anything she didn’t think was fit to say outright. I waited for her to say or do something more, but that seemed to be her final word on the subject. She wasn’t a ‘making-a-fuss’ kind of Mom, not one to get into a tizzy, as she called it, about trouble. Although my experience was it was only my trouble she didn’t get bothered about. She sure was prone to pitching hissy-fits when it came to stuff she personally didn’t like.
I went out onto the porch and sat down on the step. The boards were so hot they near burnt up the back of my thighs.
“You stay outta those woods, Kathy, you hear me? I want you to promise me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, although I couldn’t see the sense in it. I hadn’t been in the woods. The naked man had practically driven right up to our own house, after all. Sometimes the way grown-ups think is a bafflement to me. I was suspicious that Mom wasn’t mad about the man at all but was, as usual, mad about Aunt Shirley and getting things all tangled up in her mind.
It was Aunt Shirley, my Dad’s sister, who taught me the magic of the woods, although if my Mom and Dad knew, they’d skin me alive and boil Aunt Shirley in oil. They already figured she was half-crazy, but she’s not. She knows stuff. And she’s a wood-walker, just like me.
I’ve always been drawn out into the woods like under some enchantment. In the field past the stone wall, the first stand of birch trees and the big oak is my special place: an abandoned apple orchard with a stream running through it that isn’t much more than a trickle in August, but runs like a chorus of glory in the springtime. The trees are all ramble-down and scrabble, pretty much forgotten by everybody.
Except me and Aunt Shirley, that is.
Aunt Shirley came down and spent three weeks with us every summer. Mom didn’t like it much and didn’t put flowers in her room like she did when her own sister came to visit. For me, though, it was the best time of the year.
We went walking out in the woods early every morning she was there. Sometimes she’d come and get me before the house was even awake. She put her fingers against my lips to rouse me quietly and we snuck down the narrow stairs in the dusty shimmers of first light, being careful of the creaky third step. It was our private ritual, she said. We went out across the back field and over the stone fence, which was slick with moss and dew. Our feet got wet and we shivered against the chill, but stood it, knowing we’d be warm as soon as the sun was full up in the sky. She showed me plants that made medicine.
“The forests and meadows are God’s drugstore, Kat,” she said. “A living, breathing pharmacy.”
We picked stuff like five-finger grass, which is good for loose bowels; yarrow, which cleans the blood and treats the piles; blue cohosh for women’s cramps, and black snakeroot for bad skin and nervousness. Aunt Shirley gathered the plants in her sweetgrass basket that had been woven by a special friend. Then we’d go to the stand of cedars near the stream and she’d put her basket down and raise her hands up to the light.
“You must always breathe in beauty, walk in beauty, dance in beauty,” she’d say. She twirled around in slow circles with her robin’s-egg blue shawl that came all the way from Spain and her black hair swirling around her. I thought Aunt Shirley was the most beautiful woman in the world.
“There is magic all around,” she said, holding my face in her cool hands, my nostrils filling up with her smell of vanilla and something deep and woody. “Close your eyes and repeat after me: God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is alive. Magic is afoot.”
We repeated the words over and over until they became a chant and then a song and then nothing but sound rising in the air. She caught my hands in hers and we spun around and around and fell back on the soft mossy earth, the sky reeling, and our eyes wet from laughing.
She taught me it was places like this, under the protection of the trees and sky, which were most sacred to