Beginning only a few days after the fishing trip, the joy that had overwhelmed me tumbled down a dark tunnel to nowhere. It came over me suddenly, like a dose of the flu.
The stars didn’t twinkle and the moon didn’t shine. Raindrops were heavy as lead, and my poor heart was like a wet rock in the shade. Maybe it was because it was just after Christmastime and all the good moments were gone. Ronnie had gone back to school and Mr. Candles had gone back to work. At least I had Millie nearby, her good mind, her good heart, and her good cooking.
Another thing that made me blue was it was almost my birthday. I hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, but when the new year cracked, I would be fifteen. I think the idea of a celebration so soon after the wonderful Christmas holidays didn’t seem fitting. That was a broader celebration, but my birthday, my existence due to my mother and my father, didn’t seem worth mentioning. The idea of it depressed me.
On a shiny, cool morning, a couple weeks of rain having finally passed, the sun peeking out from between a blanket of gray clouds, I was sitting in the glider with Mrs. Candles, both of us wrapped in our heavy coats, full of breakfast and hot chocolate. She was reading to me from a book, teaching me about the mysteries of ancient Rome, preparing me for a history quiz she was going to give me at the end of the week. While we were doing that, Sheriff Dudley pulled up.
He wasn’t in his company car but instead in a black bomb of an automobile that looked as if it had been fished from the same lake where my father in his big-ass Buick resided. He was wearing his hat and khakis, no badge or gun. He was cleaned and starched and seemed proud to be there.
There was a man in the car with him on the passenger side, and I recognized him as the one who had brought Sheriff Dudley the fried-chicken-and-mashed-potato dinner on that cold, wet night when I first came to New Long Lincoln via the lake. I remembered his name was Duncan. The man had his window rolled down, and I could see he wore a dark hat and shirt, and his face was turned toward us. He wore a thin smile like he had farted and thought it was funny.
Sheriff Dudley got out of his car, removed his hat as he came up the steps to stand near the glider. He nodded at Mrs. Candles, called her Miss Millie. She nodded back.
“Dudley, how are you?” she said.
“Fine, mostly, and in places I’m not fine, nothing can be done about it. I’m going to get right to it. Son, your aunt is home in Tyler, Texas, and she said you could come live with her, get registered in a Tyler school.”
“My mother?” I said.
Dudley shook his head. “Can’t find anything that has to do with her in any kind of place. Your aunt said she has no idea where she is and that your mother didn’t have any real friends she might be with.”
I assumed that was correct. My mother was beautiful and mysterious—that silver star in her front tooth, her charming hippie outfits—but if you knew her for long, you realized how peculiar she was as well. It’s like she had clawed open a hole in the universe, gone into it, and clawed it back together again.
“Daniel, you be ready tomorrow morning, and I’ll come get you, drive you over to your aunt’s. I’m happy for you. Happy she’s home.”
Sheriff Dudley made with a few pleasantries and started for his car. I said to Mrs. Candles, “I don’t know I want to go live with my aunt.”
“And I don’t want you to, Danny,” Millie said. “I want you here.”
“Then I can stay?”
Millie’s right cheek quivered. “You don’t have a choice. They let you stay with us longer than I expected. You see, Danny, baby, they don’t see things the way they are. They see them how they believe them to be.”
“How’s that?”
“Colored with colored, and white with white. They’ll tell you that’s how it is with the birds and such. That they keep to their own. But people aren’t birds, Danny. They think they’re rescuing you, and they have the power of the law on their side. Do you understand?”
In theory, I did, but in my heart I was confused.
* * *
Next day, Ronnie stayed home from school and Mr. Candles took off the morning hours and, of course, Millie was there. They stood on the porch with me, waiting for Sheriff Dudley. It was cold, but the sun was bright and the birds were singing. For me, though, it might as well have been stormy weather.
The Candleses had given me a travel bag to carry the few things I owned, and I had eaten a big breakfast.
As the sheriff arrived, this time in his official car, Ronnie leaned in and hugged me and put her lips to my ear and said, “I will miss you, Danny.”
Her voice was choked, and in that moment, mine was so choked I couldn’t say anything.
I hugged her back and thought of that kiss in the hallway. I let my pretty mermaid go and hugged Millie. She said, “I love you, baby. You do well.”
When she let me loose, she gave me a brown paper bag she had been holding.
“For the road,” she said. “Cookies. You can share with Sheriff Dudley.”
Me and Mr. Candles shook hands and he asked if I had my books in my suitcase, my pocketknife in my pocket. I did. When we parted hands, I rushed him and hugged him.
Sheriff Dudley came and directed me down the steps, him with my travel bag in hand, me with the sack of cookies. I felt something had torn loose from me, and whatever it was, it hurt. I got in the car and looked at the Candleses standing on the porch, certain I had seen them for the last time. Ronnie and Mrs. Candles were crying, and Mr. Candles looked like he wanted to.
Smiling, Mr. Candles lifted both hands into boxing position, called out to me, “Keep your hands up, Danny.”
“I will,” I said, and waved at them.
* * *
It was about a two-hour drive. Sheriff Dudley played the radio; mostly mournful country tunes came out of it, and most of the songs fit how I felt. I think that was the day I became a country music fan. A George Jones song about how he stopped loving her today hit me hard.
I opened the sack Millie had given me. A warmth came out of it along with a fine smell. The sack was full of large chocolate chip cookies. I offered one to Sheriff Dudley. He took it without hesitation.
Around crunching, he said, “Millie bakes the best cookies. The best anything.”
I nodded, had a cookie myself, even though I wasn’t even close to hungry.
Sheriff Dudley glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “It won’t be so bad, son. You get to be with your own.”
“I liked the Candleses just fine.”
“Up to me, you could stay with them. They’re as fine a family as there is, but it’s just not customary.”
“Does that matter?”
“Some things just are,” he said. “You might can work around some of them, but black and white living together, like you’re a son of theirs, what it does is it makes things hard on you, and to be honest, it could make things harder on them. Not saying I agree with that, I’m saying things are what they are.”
“It doesn’t make much sense.”
“Hate to say it, but sometimes you do things that don’t make much sense, or you feel you have to do things you don’t like, and sometimes it can weigh on you. Heavy. That’s the side of life they don’t tell you about. Dreams get crippled from time to time, and the people dreams cripple the most are those without the right kind of backbone. You keep your backbone.”
“Is that hard?”
“You wouldn’t believe.”
“Have you kept yours?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
Couple hours later or thereabouts, we arrived at the little blue house sitting on the winter-brown lawn with the wide white porch and the big green and blue metal rocking chairs on it.
Sheriff Dudley cut the engine and we sat in the car and looked at the place.
“It’s nice,” Sheriff Dudley said. “Talked to your aunt over the phone, she said she bought it soon as she came back from traveling. Said she used what money she had left to buy it.”
We got out of the car, me with my sack of cookies, the sheriff with my bag.
We had just stepped up on the porch when the door opened, then the squeaking screen door in front of it, and my aunt stepped out.
My teeth almost fell out of my mouth.