The nurse came to Rose’s door and looked in. Stink Bug was nosey, wanted to know what Rose’s only visitor in more than a decade had come to talk about.
Rose stopped talking when she saw Stink Bug there. Just looked at her.
Cotton didn’t get why she’d shut up, looked from the nurse to Rose and back to the nurse.
“Is there something wrong?” he asked.
“No, I was just making sure Miss Rosie is okay. Sometimes the residents get upset or overtired when they have visitors. I want to make sure she doesn’t wear herself out—”
“Horse hockey,” Rose said. “You wouldn’t let yore dog lift his leg and pee on me if I’s on fire.”
That got a rise out of her. Stink Bug’s face flooded with color, but she said nothing, just turned on her heel and stalked away. When Rose looked back at Cotton Jackson, he was smiling.
She liked him for that.
“Now … where was I?”
“You were telling me about the day your mother ran away.”
Rose took up the story with what had happened to her mother when she got home from the meeting at the Carthage Oak.
Lily is so mad she wants to cry and throw things and kick and scream. It isn’t fair.
It was Willie broke that pot. But Ma always loved him best, him being the youngest and all. And when Lily told on him he commenced to crying and carrying on, said he didn’t do it. Said Lily done it and was just blaming it on him.
And Ma believed Willie! Him only four years old and Ma took his word over Lily’s. She was the oldest girl, the one who took care of the twins and Willie. Ma’d believed him.
Lily had come into the kitchen and caught Willie playing with Ma’s favorite bowl. She’d told Willie to put down the bowl. It was a clay pot Ma’d got from that woman who made things out of clay. It was right pretty, this one was, cause the lady’d drawed flowers and butterflies on it, painted them with bright colors. It was Ma’s favorite and Willie hadn’t ought to be playing with it and she told him so, told him to put it back where he got it.
Don’t have to, he’d sneered and stuck out his tongue at her. She didn’t get mad — at least not then. She just told him he did too have to do what she told him, and he turned to run off with the bowl, but he tripped and dropped it on the floor and it broke into nothing but sharp pieces of pottery.
Lily went after Willie, was gonna whoop his butt with a switch off a tree, but he run out the door into the backyard where Ma was hanging clothes on the line and told her Lily was trying to hurt him, that she’d broke the bowl and was trying to blame it on him.
Ma b’lieved Willie! She grabbed the broom off the porch and commenced to whopping Lily, her jumping out of the way of the blows, hollering and carrying on.
Ma chases Lily around the backyard with the broom and then Lily runs off down the trail, Ma hollering for her to come back here this minute or she’d get a whipping with Pa’s belt.
Lily doesn’t go back, though. She is too mad to go back, her anger like some wild horse in her chest, making her legs pump hard down the trail.
After a while she can’t hear Ma yelling anymore but she keeps running, out past the men with their sacks in the woods, driven forward by anger and by a sadness and emptiness she’d never felt before.
It really was true. Ma really did love Willie more’n she loved the other five children. Certainly more’n she loved Lily. She was ten, the oldest girl. With Emma sickly all the time, Ma was always doin’ for her and left Lily in charge of the others — and she told them what to do. Of course she did! But then Willie’d go crying to Ma telling her that Lily had been bossing them around, that they hadn’t ought to have to do what Lily said.
How could Ma take Willie’s side against her?
Just thinking the thought made her run faster. Through the trees, up the hillside with the rocks sliding out from under her feet, down into a creek and up the other side, over rocks and downed trees and through oleander bushes … On and on. She runs until the pain in her side is more than she can stand and she collapses in the dirt, heaving, sweat running down her forehead and into her eyes.
She sits there, trying to get her breath back. And it isn’t until that moment that she realizes she doesn’t know where she is. She has run off the trail and out into the woods … farther than she’s ever gone before.
Lost.
The word is so scary she backs up from it. Scoots on her butt up against a tree and uses it to push herself back to her feet. She looks around frantically. Nothing looks familiar.
In fact, she can’t even recall which direction she’d come from. She whirls around in a circle, trying to see some trace of how she’d gotten here. Nothing.
Think. What should she do?
When she spots a scuffed place in the dirt a few feet away, she knows she did it, and she races to the spot and looks beyond it for another scuff in the dirt. She finds one and she’s off, running back the way she came, calling out to Ma and Pa.
She is really scared now.
Rose paused in the telling of the story, looked at the man who was listening so close he was leaning toward her out of the chair. And for the first time it occurred to her to wonder why he wanted to know the story of the Witch of Gideon after all these years. When she asked, he didn’t answer right away.
“You tell me why you want to know so bad you’re about to wet yourself or I ain’t gonna say another word.”
He looked at her, right in the eye, like he was searching for something. Like maybe if he looked hard enough he could tell whether she was as crazy as she was sure the staff had told him she was.
“I want to know because … it’s happened again.”
“What’s happened again?”
“Gideon vanished, all the people. When your mother finally found her way home the next morning they were all gone — every single person in town. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, though they’s people now says that ain’t true. That them people all moved away or went somewhere ‘thout telling anybody. One fella told Ma when she was in her twenties that she’d made it all up, that her family had moved away and left her behind because she was so ugly.”
He was one of them. The four men who caught Ma. They’d a’kept her and used her ‘til they killed her if she hadn’t cut the leader, cut him bad and then run.
“Your mother’s story is true. Every word of it. I know that because other people have vanished, the same way.”
Rose was so surprised she just looked at him.
“In fact … everybody in Nower County. They’re all gone. I came home from work in Lexington and the whole county was empty.”
“You’re making that up! Ain’t no way that’s true. If it was, I’d a’heard about it. They’s news shows on the television in the craft room, stuff on there about wars and the like … that building in Oklahoma City that was blowed up last month. If Nower County — the whole place disappeared … It’d a been on the news.”
“Nobody believed me.”
That stopped her cold. Not just that he said it, but the way he said it, with the same mixture of emotions that’d been in her mother’s voice when she’d described telling Mr. Tackett when he come to pick up the miners for their shift — they’s gone, everybody’s gone! Terror and anger and confusion and outrage and … all tangled up together.
“You told …?”
“The state police, the sheriff’s departments in every surrounding county. I even went to the FBI.”
“And wouldn’t none of those people go see for theirselves?”
“They all did. And they saw what I told them they’d see — that everybody was gone. They saw that every word I’d told them was true.”
“Then what …?”
“As soon as they crossed the Nower County line to leave … they forgot what they’d seen.”
That set Rose’s mind spinning and that wasn’t a good thing since the machinery in her head wasn’t in very good repair.
“When did they … how long ago?”
“Two weeks.”
“Some of them people’s still there, then. Maybe not all of ‘em, but some.”
“Still there?” Cotton’s voice was tight.
“Like my family and all them other folks was still there in Gideon … for a little while. Mama’s daddy was still there for three days. She knew ‘cause he left rocks for her to find.”
Tears stream down Lily’s face when she figures it out. Her father left her the rocks to tell her he was still there, still alive, a message. But there is no rock today. Wasn’t one yesterday or the day before. He’d left three pieces of that geode, but not the fourth piece. An empty trail sends its own message. Her father … her mother and brothers and sisters … all the people in Gideon — they’re really not there anymore. They are gone.
Cotton sat quiet after Rose told him the story. She knew that had to be hard to put it all together in his head. She hadn’t never had to try. It was just the world she lived in.
“My friend Stuart saw someone through the mirage on the road, on the other side, but he vanished and Stuart never had a chance to talk to him.”
“Your friend seen the Jabberwock gobble that man up, watched it happen?” She could hear the awe in her own words.
“Jabberwock?” He looked surprised. “Your mother named it that, the Jabberwock, because of what Mr. Tackett said?”
“No, the Jabberwock took the name its own self.”
“How do you know that?”
“The Jabberwock told Mama.”
Cotton’s eyes turned sharp but there was no disbelief in them. “She talked to it?”
Rose nodded. “He told her things.”
“What things?”
“Just … things. Mama and the Jabberwock, they had things to say to each other after Mama done what she done.”
“What did she do?”
Rose realized she’d gone too far, said too much, so she stopped talking. Wanted the man named Cotton to go away because she was tired and her mind had got that fuzzy feeling, so she couldn’t tell if what she said was true. Like being able to fly. Like that. Might be what she’d already said wasn’t true.
It was just that she didn’t never have anybody to talk to about anything, let alone the most important thing of all.
“She done right by the Jabberwock, that’s all. That’s why it left her be. I ain’t gonna say no more.”
And she didn’t.