MACKY WAS A HUGE bear that came straight at him, lumbering right over him like a grizzly over a log. Thomas fell flat on his back as Macky’s bear-clawed feet stepped on him.
It was a fleeting dream. Thomas awoke, feeling angry. He was lying facedown, with his nose pressed into the pillow. What … time? he wondered. Oh. Dawn. He saw faint light at the windows. It took him a moment to realize where he was, what day it was.
The easy chair was placed so he wouldn’t have to wake up and see the black opening of the narrow fireplace. He stared at the floor-to-ceiling windows, which were bigger and longer than they needed to be. There’s nothing out there, he thought. Just the day coming.
It’s a school day coming. Which day? Oh, my brain is fuzzy!
He thought of yesterday. Pesty. Macky, at dusk. He closed his eyes. It’s Friday, and I won’t have to go to school. We’re going to get Great-grandmother—what time? Must not be time because Mama would be here if it was, to make sure I’m up.
He closed his eyes, resting. But he couldn’t help thinking about Macky and what had happened in the woods.
Glad it’s light, he thought. Things look different in the light.
It was daylight when his mama came to wake him at six-thirty.
“Thomas. Thomas,” she called softly.
He didn’t open his eyes. He turned his head slightly, so he could put his chin in her palm, as her fingers gently touched his face.
“Come on,” she told him. “You’ve got a long way, you and your papa.”
They left at seven-thirty, after having dragged themselves out of warm beds, washed, dressed, and eaten. They would travel the distance in the family sedan, with the neat red trailer attached for Great-grandmother Jeffers’s belongings. They never disturbed the twins, Thomas’s baby brothers. The twins would sleep on until about eight. They would have two identical fits if they were to see Thomas and their papa going for a ride in the car without them.
“You take care now,” Mr. Small said to Thomas’s mama when they were ready to go.
“Mr. Pluto and I may do some house painting today,” she told them. “I am interested in having my kitchen a little brighter.”
“Be careful using the ladder,” Mr. Small said.
“I’ll be careful. Don’t worry.”
“Good,” Mr. Small said.
“You should wait until I get back so I can help,” Thomas told his mama.
“There’ll be plenty paint left for you,” she told him. “Plenty more rooms.”
They left the house of Dies Drear behind. Martha Small waved goodbye from the front veranda. Thomas looked back, waving. Even in the growing morning the Drear house appeared dark and shadowy.
His mama grew smaller. She still waved. Thomas had many impressions. His mama diminishing to doll size as the car sped away. So long, Mama.
The house got smaller, changed to a weathered doll’s mansion from the giant crow house. Goodbye, dreary house. I’m glad to be gone from you today!
The gravel drive wound down and away from the hill. They crossed the old covered bridge and the stream that was so like a moat protecting the house. There was the woods at the top of the hill. Winter trees wore stripes of snow on their trunks and limbs. Zebras, Thomas thought. Winter wild animals.
He wondered if Mac Darrow was up yet, out tracking somewhere among those striped tree animals. Sighing, Thomas sat up straight beside his father as they headed south on the highway, out of town.
It was a long drive, but they would be able to get back home by eight or nine in the evening. Wouldn’t do to stay overnight and leave his mama and his brothers home by themselves.
Anything might happen, Thomas thought. But we scared the Darrows away months ago, and nothing’s happened since. It’s a feeling, though. Papa feels it, too. But it’s been a long while without any trouble. The Darrows stay there on their own farmland most of the time. If you didn’t come into town on market or street fair day or go to church once in a while, you never would see them. Well, now there’s Macky at school, in the woods.
But there’s something about the house of Dies Drear, too, Thomas thought. Like, maybe it’s waiting. Like, the time is up. The truce is over.
He shivered. That’s too dumb, he told himself.
“Well, we’re off,” his father said, rousing Thomas from his reverie.
“Good and off,” Thomas said and his father chuckled.
The heater was on. They were dressed in boots and warm jackets, ready for anything. Ready for winter highways and cold mountain highs.
“Can’t wait to see Great-grandmother Jeffers,” Thomas said. “It’s been so long.”
“Too long,” his father agreed.
Great-grandmother Jeffers was his papa’s grandmother. She was the only elderly relative that his father had in North Carolina. Great-grandfather Canada Jeffers had passed away some time ago.
Thomas patted his papa’s shoulder and smiled up at him. Mr. Small grinned, not taking his eyes from the road.
They went south, first to Chillicothe, Ohio, and then on to Portsmouth, where they picked up Highway 52. The high hills made Thomas eager to see the mountains of North Carolina.
Thomas often made figures out of wood, and before leaving home, he had begun a carving. Now he took out the square piece of white pine he was working on and his sharpened pocketknife. Whittling would give him something to do with his hands on the long drive.
His hands moved expertly over the wood. His left hand appeared to feel out the shape he wanted from the pine while the right hand carved it.
Mr. Small glanced around, amazed again at how his son seemed to be working with something soft, like clay. He could shave the wood so quickly.
“Wish I could stop awhile and watch you do that,” he said admiringly.
“It’s not going to be a whole lot,” Thomas said.
“No? What is it to be?” asked his father.
“I’m not sure yet,” Thomas said. Usually he didn’t think about what he was whittling. “But there’re some things on my mind.”
He pictured his mama and his brothers back at the house of Dies Drear. He imagined the Drear house drawing away from the snow-white countryside. He thought about the old abolitionist Dies Drear, who had come from the East to help escaping slaves up from the Ohio River. Drear, moving through the house and outside it. Just vague notions and parts he recalled from the written history the foundation owners had given them about the Drear house and property, the section about the house as a station on the Underground Railroad.
Thomas’s hands never stopped moving over the carving.
They stopped for lunch and to fill the tank with gas. They took the interstate down through Virginia. Near Fancy Gap they picked up the scenic Blue Ridge Parkway, which ran along the top of the mountains. Misty light and shrouds of rain hung over deep valleys. White patches of snow on the ancient range were swirled by fugitive winds. Thomas stared out the window, his hands turning and feeling the shape he was making in the white pine.
“Hope we get there soon. Hope the sun comes out.” He spoke tiredly, suddenly bored with the long drive, of thinking about things over and over again.
The sun did come out in long shafts of sunlight, illuminating the western Appalachians.
“Nothing like my mountains!” he said, laughing.
“Not quite your mountains, but almost,” his papa told him.
“When do we get to North Carolina?”
“Soon,” his papa said. And it wasn’t long after that that they crossed the state line. They headed southwest on the Blue Ridge Parkway, passing along between Sparta and Roaring Gap.
“Just another eighty miles or so,” his papa said. Not long, and they were entering the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Pisgah National Forest.
The very space, the air, somehow shaped by the bluish distance, was different from anything farther north or anything Thomas had ever known. The mountains took his breath away.
In no time they found the little valley nestled where it had always been. And Great-grandmother Rhetty Jeffers’s house the way it always was.
Wasn’t a house, like houses in Ohio. It was a mountain cabin, really, planted in the valley. The cabin was smack against a hill that rose to mountains. Great-grandmother called all of the Blue Ridge “my hills.” That way she made them fit her, made them her size so she could live with them, and they, with her.
They crossed a creek and wound down a lane that ended in front of the cabin.
There she was, standing by the lane, waiting for them: Great-grandmother Rhetty Laleete Jeffers.