Myra Kelley recognized a child raised by the wild when she saw one.
The jutting rib bones, the darting eyes, the crossed arms, the recoil. Hood up, slumped, in different circumstances Leo might look like a punk thug thirsting for a fight, but right now Leo was holding a bucket and looked entirely young and alone.
“Is that really necessary, Gerald?” She pointed to the cell; the sheriff shot Leo a sideways glance.
“Yessah. Sober him up right quick. He’s only in there until his mom shows up anyway.”
“We both know she isn’t coming.” She was done being angry about her car and her barn; now she just wanted to get back home. And take that foolish child with her to give him something to eat.
The sheriff didn’t say anything, but his pencil had stopped. Leo puked.
“I’m not letting that boy sleep here no matter how fool-headed he is. He might have fallen off that cliff.”
Myra’s last name was originally Boucher, French Acadian. Her heritage was a motley mix of Acadians and Wabanaki, traders and sailors who settled on the coast of Maine. She was tough as rock salt. She was as bright as pine.
Some even said she descended from Burrbank and the Piratebird, but Myra Kelley never countenanced those rumors.
“I’ll wait.” She was still carrying her broom, and the loyal Dog sat next to her just as decisively. He was unlike any dog Leo had ever seen. He was a tall wiry horse of an animal with a snout that carried the distinguished frost of old age, and he stood at Myra’s waist.
“I saw a goddamned mermaid, Miss Myra. Like Burrbank’s mermaid. And, I ain’t drunk no more, I swear it. I don’t know how. She sucked it out of me, I swear. I’m hungover now. I’m never drinking again.” He puked out the period on the end of his sentence.
“Good choice, kid.” Myra and Sheriff Badger spoke synchronously.
“Mermaids, huh?” Sheriff Badger tapped his pen and looked directly at Myra.
“Just the one, he says.” Leo didn’t know if Myra was being serious or not, but the look the sheriff and the old lady shared was long and silent and tense.
“Glad you’re sober, kid. You might be crazy, though. And watch your mouth,” Sheriff Badger replied, put his hat on his head over his long braid and stood to unlock the cell, but then put his keys away. With a smile, he simply opened the door.
“Look at that. It was always unlocked.” Sheriff Badger chuckled and shook his head.
At four in the morning the sheriff drove Myra and Leo back to Myra’s, the boy asleep in the backseat, his head on the shoulder of Myra’s sturdy frame. The dog sat in front with the sheriff like he was born to it. Leo’s mother had been arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct in the parking lot of a Bangor bar and was sleeping it off in a cell out there. The light of the coming dawn was a hazy violet, framing the boats sitting silent in their slips. The boatyard had been awake for a while, the lobstermen setting out on the water.
As the car stopped, the sheriff tried once more. “You’re sure, Myra? I still think you should press charges. You don’t know this kid’s coming back.”
“I’ll have him sign a gentleman’s agreement.” She punctuated the sentence with her broom. “It’s fine, Gerald. I think fixing my barn is going to be a much better punishment than a permanent record, or one of those hellhole kid jails. Good morning to you.” She opened the door and hit a chicken and cussed.
Myra Kelley lived in a mint-green clapboard house with a farmer’s front porch framed by hydrangeas and holly, set on a small, scraggly hill dotted with clusters of blueberries. A blue cooler labeled KELLEY sat at the stoop. The hill overlooked a duck pond that froze over every winter. Leo had ice-skated (actually just slipped around the ice in his boots because he didn’t own skates) and ridden on the back of a snowmobile on the frozen pond with the wharf rats there.
Her barn was out back behind the house and to the left, its mouth gaping open with the car hanging off the side like a cigar.
The chicken coop was busted up from the accident and would need fixing. The chickens were as contained as they could be on the front porch. Myra’s late husband, Bernard Kelley Jr., loved hard-boiled eggs out on the boat, and in the twilight of his life had decided that he wanted to keep chickens. Unfortunately, shortly after he purchased twelve rambunctious chicks, cancer took him, and he never recovered. The chickens lived longer than he did, and they had been tripping up Myra’s stride ever since.
Leo had trick-or-treated at Myra’s house before. She gave out good candy. Her porch creaked, the screen door squeaked, but the light from inside was always golden and warm, and it always smelled like fried fish or bread baking, not like forgotten beer spills or sharp sweat like his trailer. Some of the kids said Myra Kelley was a witch.
When Leo stepped inside, Dog brushed past him to his food dish, nails clicking on the linoleum, and looked at Leo expectantly.
“Don’t let Dog lie to you. He’s already been fed.”
Dog sat defiantly and nudged Leo’s hand.
“See, he’s a liar, and good at it too. I suspect you’re tired. Let me show you where you can lay down, kid, and then I’ll fix you something to eat.”
The boy followed Myra to a room in the back of the house with windows facing the woods and the barn. On the bed was an exquisite quilt with nine panels, pictures of pirates and a shipwreck and mermaids and the sunrise, pictures orbiting the center where Burrbank and Nimuë embraced underwater in the famous Mermaid’s Kiss. The quilt that covered the bed told the tale of the founding of Mackerel Sky.
Leo sat on the soft bed, the biggest and cleanest he had ever been on, and Myra went to fetch another afghan. When she returned, though, little Leo Beale was snoring on the pillow, and Dog was at his feet, his shaggy head resting on the boy’s ankles. She covered him with two afghans that she had crocheted herself before retiring to her own bed, and they all slept deeply as the sun rose.
It wasn’t until the early afternoon when Leo woke, Myra fed him eggs and bacon and white toast and orange juice until he stopped eating (twelve eggs, six slices of toast slathered in butter, a half slab of bacon, and two and a half glasses), and then they discussed the terms of their agreement. But she would not discuss mermaids. Myra Kelley wouldn’t have it, and Leo was thankful to not be in jail or his mother’s trailer, so he shut his mouth.
Leo was to sell Myra’s car to a junkyard (“It’s far past time I get rid of that fossil”), clean out the barn, repair the chicken coop (or “pluck and roast every one of those damn little pains-in-the-ass”), and fix the barn. Myra had written it all up. He signed it easily, because the work was to begin in May, and being late March the work seemed forever away. Two months was a lifetime, especially in Poppy’s trailer. Plus, Mrs. Myra had been really nice to him, and he wanted to mend what he had broken.
After their late breakfast, Myra handed him a tube of medicine. He struggled to read its name.
“Arnica,” Myra explained. “It will help heal your bruises. I’m so, so sorry that happened to you, Leo boy.” Myra said nothing more, but she had opened the conversational door, and Leo felt something akin to relief.
They went out to check out the barn and the chicken coop. Dog started barking, and a clunker roared up the driveway. Leo recognized it and shrunk; his shoulders hunched up like he was trying to retreat into his body like a turtle. The passenger door opened, and Leo flinched. Myra saw it all. She stood up straight, as straight as she could against the body furl of old age, and stepped between Leo and the car.
Poppy Beale stumbled out, high; her driver stayed smoking in the dark of the car. She didn’t see them by the barn and so stalked and stumbled to the front door and banged loudly, flailing a lit cigarette around. Her clothes hung, her legs were skinny and bowed, her eyeshadow was dark and overdone. Her concealer did not conceal the drug decomposition. Myra called out to her. When Poppy saw Leo, she began yelling at him for stealing the brandy, for stealing the car, tweaking, twitching. Her words, a vile vitriol, an avalanche of grievances, what no mother should ever say to their child, were screeched with all the bravado and sense of a toddler until Myra Kelley had endured thirty whole seconds of the sound. Dog began growling and Myra Kelley swept the woman off of her porch with her broom. Poppy got back into the car and squealed off, abruptly, devastatingly, like an explosion.
“She smells like she’s rotting,” Leo stated, after his mother peeled off with D still smoking behind the wheel. His voice was flat, dull, defeated.
Myra stood soldier still, her hands on her housecoat on her hips, grinding her teeth. She was good and pissed.
“Nail on the head, boy.”
If Myra still smoked, now she would have, but she didn’t anymore, so she contented herself with chewing on the end of her husband’s empty old pipe. It had sat on his dresser for months after he died, the sweet musk an instant bridge to memory. She imagined him with it now, leaning against the corner of the covered porch like he did, arms and legs crossed.
“She’s a ripe bitch, ain’t she, my Lorelei?” he would have said, the smoke punctuating the point. Myra chuckled under her breath at the memory and looked out at her front yard.
“See that tree over there? The one with the low-hanging branch?”
Leo looked up with red, red eyes. It was an apple tree.
“That branch right there, the long one in front, it didn’t bear fruit for the longest time. I was going to cut it off for the good of the tree. Then one day my husband hammered in a nail at the branch’s base, right through the heart of it. And since then, getting that extra iron, that branch has been the most fruitful of the whole tree.”
“Miss Myra. I don’t know what the hell you are talking about.”
“Boy, watch your mouth. I’ll wash it out with soap next time. Not this time,” she added as a caveat, noting his round, wet eyes. “That’s okay, kid, you don’t have to know what I’m talking about. I do. It means that that mother of yours doesn’t get to decide if you rot or if you bloom. Not on my goddamned porch.”