I stepped off the back porch and took in the already-hot morning, knowing that by the end of the day it’d be blazing. It was a reading and writing lesson day for Ray, and Mama’d told me to scoot. I took my book and made for the woods. All I could think to do was find a spot under a nice shade tree to read where nobody’d come along.
Taking my time, I walked to the edge of our yard where the trees seemed to welcome me. Stooping down to smell the flowers that’d popped up on top of long stalks I told God He’d done a good job making that day. I wasn’t sure He needed encouragement, but it felt real nice to be thankful.
Over my head a big old blackbird beat at the air with its wings, heading directly to the forest. I watched it until it disappeared into the thick trees. Even though I couldn’t see the bird anymore, I could hear it cawing.
“One for sorrow,” I whispered to myself, remembering an old nursery rhyme that’d been in one of Daddy’s books. “Two for mirth.”
Turning round and round I hoped to find another crow so I could break the spell of sorrow, but there were no more. Not out in the open anyhow. Maybe, I thought, there was just one more in the woods.
I decided I was sick of sorrow and wanted to be done with it. A good dose of mirth never did anybody any harm.
Quickening my steps, I walked into the woods, holding my breath when I remembered the spooky sounds I’d sworn I’d heard coming from there not two nights before. No ghouls swooped down at my head and I didn’t hear the moaning of any ghosts. Still, I’d learned plenty enough about forests from all my reading.
Nightmares. That was what lived in the forest.
But the sunshine was kind that day, beaming down in glistening light-puddles on the ground. Dappled. That was what Aunt Carrie had called it. In her mind, she had a whole treasure chest of words that sounded like a poem all on their own.
“Dappled,” I said out loud, not caring if anybody heard me.
Just the sound of that word lifted my spirits.
I couldn’t think of a single bad thing that could happen just so long as the ground was covered in dappled sunlight.
I spent a good hour reading at the base of the twisted tree. Skipping along through the pages with my fingers, I read only the parts that I liked best. When Dorothy met the Scarecrow and when they entered the Emerald City. Flipping forward and back through the book, I ran fingertips over the smooth pictures, wishing they’d come alive like a movie.
Not far from my foot I saw something move across the ground and stop. Move and stop. I pulled my feet back and hollered at it before it slithered away, quick as lightning, under the porch of the cabin.
I didn’t know if the snakes in Michigan were full of poison like the snakes in Oklahoma were, but I wasn’t in the mood to find out.
Getting to my feet, I ran until I got to the opening of the woods guarded by the two tall pines.
I thought it only made sense to go visit with Aunt Carrie a bit, seeing’s I was nearly to her house.
Besides, I was sure she’d have a cookie for me.
I found Aunt Carrie upstairs, sweeping the hallway floor. She stopped soon as she saw me and leaned the meat of her arm on the broom handle.
“Well, I was hoping you’d come today,” she said.
“Yes, I was.” She pushed her dust pile to one side and leaned the broom against the wall. “Come on.”
I followed her into the room Ray and I had shared when we stayed there. On top of the dresser was a hair bow I hadn’t known I was missing.
“It’s yours, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“When I saw it, I thought of you and smiled.”
“Thank you,” I said, letting her put the bow into my hand.
It was the kind that Mama’d thought was real pretty, one that was just about as big as my whole head. As for me, I’d never cared for it so much. I thought it made me look too little-girlish. I had every intention of dropping it along the way on my walk home.
“Now, if you can wait for me to finish sweeping the hallway, I have a cookie with your name on it,” Aunt Carrie said. “Sound good?”
It did and I told her so.
I stood in the doorway of the room I’d borrowed and watched her finish up. When she was ready, I stooped and held the dustpan for her while she pushed the dirt into it. Once I stood upright, I saw a door at the end of the hall. Aunt Carrie turned and smiled.
“You’re wondering what’s behind that door, aren’t you?” she asked. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Didn’t you notice it before?”
I shook my head.
“You were too busy, weren’t you?”
“I reckon I was.”
“I’m happy to show you.” She wiped her hands on her apron. “Go ahead and put that dustpan down, dear.”
I did as she said and followed her to the far end of the hall.
“Ready?” Aunt Carrie asked, looking at me over her shoulder, her hand on the doorknob.
I told her I was, not sure what it was I needed to be ready for. Curiosity sparked in my mind, eager to see what was behind that door.
A spiral staircase filled the small room and Aunt Carrie told me to go ahead. I climbed, holding tight to the railing on account I felt nervous about falling.
“It’s safe, Pearl,” she said, following right behind me. “I’ve climbed up here a thousand times. Maybe more. And I have never fallen.”
I did try to believe her even as my knees knocked together.
At the top of the stairs was a room that was glass window on all four sides. There was just enough space for the two of us to stand in there, side by side. It let in so much light it almost hurt my eyes.
“They call this a widow’s watch,” Aunt Carrie told me. She rested her fingertips on the sill of one window and looked out over the fields where Uncle Gus was sure to be working. “These rooms were popular long ago on houses that overlooked the ocean. Women would have them built so they could wait and watch when their sailors came home from months at sea.”
Taking my time, I turned and looked out over the front yard and the fields of growing corn on the other side of the old dusty country road. Turning just a little more, I saw the chicken coop and the girls pecking away at the grass under the weeping willow. Then I moved and saw the apple orchard and the woods beyond. If I squinted just right I was sure I could see the tip-top of the twisted tree.
I wondered aloud why anybody’d call it a widow’s watch.
“Because many of the men—the sailors—were lost at sea. They’d be declared dead.” Aunt Carrie’s eyes rested on me. “Widows would come to their watch even though their husbands were never coming home again. But they held onto hope, no matter how unlikely it proved to be. I think it may have been all they had left.”
“That’s sad,” I told her.
“Isn’t it?” A wrinkle of flesh formed between her eyebrows. “Yes. It is.” One for sorrow, I thought.
“I used to come here often when my brother Charlie was away at war,” she said. “I’d pretend I could see him coming home to us.”
“What do you pretend now?”
“The same thing,” she said. She took in a breath and sighed it back out. Then she made her face brighter, less sad. She smiled even. “In the fall, when all the leaves drop from the trees, I’ll be able to almost see the chimney of your house.”
Lifting up on my toes I tried to see so far, but the green leaves blocked my view. I did plan on asking if I could come back after fall.
But then my eyes fell back to the twisted tree. Of all the trees in the forest, that one looked most desperate in its upward reaching. Its sparse leaves flickered in the soft blow of wind.
“What made that tree twisted?” I asked.
“Hmm. I don’t know.” Aunt Carrie crossed her arms. “It’s been like that for ages. I wonder if that was just how it grew out of the ground. God must’ve wanted something a little different when He allowed it to grow.”
“I heard it got twisted when the runaway slave’s ghost screamed,” I said. “The woman who’d lost her son.”
“Who told you that?” she asked, pulling her head back.
“Bob,” I said, not remembering if he’d ever told me his last name.
“He did, did he?” She laughed. “That surprises me not at all. Bobby has always been a creative boy. What story did he tell you?”
I tried remembering it as he’d told it. A runaway slave woman waiting for a son who never came because he was lynched. She cried until she died and turned into a haunting ghost. Aunt Carrie listened to every word even quick as I told it.
“So it isn’t true?” I asked.
“No,” she answered. “A good story? Sure. But not even close to the truth.”
“Then what really happened?”
Aunt Carrie kept her eyes trained on the fingertips of the twisted tree. “While it’s true that runaway slaves hid in the woods, Ada was no slave,” she said. “She wasn’t born until right after the Civil War was won. And she was born free, here in Bliss.”
Aunt Carrie said that Miss Ada and her family lived in the hiding cabin long after it wasn’t needed for the runaways anymore. She stayed even after she got married herself and had a couple kids. Both boys.
“One of her sons works here on the farm,” she told me.
I remembered the Negro man who’d taken his lunch on the back porch of the house on Magnolia Street. “What’s his name?” I asked.
“Noah Jackson.” She smiled. “He’s a good man.”
But Miss Ada’s other son hadn’t ended up so good. Where Noah was good, Ezra was mean. He’d been like that since a child, Aunt Carrie said.
“And when he got old enough, he went away,” she said. “I’d let Miss Ada come and watch for him in this very room. It gave her some small comfort, the idea that she might see him come back.”
“Did he?” I asked.
Aunt Carrie shook her head. “He did not. We never heard from him, not in all these years.”
I turned my back toward the window that pointed at the twisted tree, leaning against the glass.
“Now, how her story turned into one about a ghost haunting the woods, I don’t know.” She gave me the kind of smile that looked more sad than happy. “But it is a sad story. A sad story for Miss Ada.”
I nodded so she’d know that I felt the sting of sadness. “Some prodigals don’t come home,” Aunt Carrie said. “Why not?”
“Because it’s just too hard.”
We went down the spiral of stairs and out the door. The cooler air of the hall made me realize how warm the widow’s watch had been. Aunt Carrie asked if an icy glass of milk would taste good with my cookie.
I did think it would.
But all the time I took small bites of oatmeal cookie and sips of milk, I thought of Miss Ada, there in the window, hoping for a look at her returning son. I imagined she’d readied herself to see him, to race down the stairs and out the door to grab hold of him, welcoming him home.
But he had never come down that path. Never returned to her. One for sorrow.