Swallowing Stones Page 19

  jenna rides her bike along the trail through the dark forest of the Great Swamp while the cool night air numbs her earlobes, and never once does she think of tangled vines grabbing her.

  She understands what the dream has been trying to tell her, and she knows why she is making this journey. She needs to put things to rest. She also knows her way of doing this might not seem like reasonable behavior to some. But she doesn’t care. She has begun to think that maybe the mind has different ways of knowing.

  She knows now that it was Michael MacKenzie who fired the shot that killed her father. She knows this in a way that she isn’t used to knowing. But she trusts her instincts. The knowledge doesn’t weigh nearly as heavily on her as she had thought it would. She doesn’t hate him, as she had expected to. She no longer wants to make him pay for what he’s done. She understands, intuitively, that he has been trying to tell her all along. And she has already decided that the next time she sees him sitting on the church steps, she will walk right up to him and give him his chance.

  When Jenna finally comes to the Ghost Tree, she sees how the moon, full and ripe, lights the space around the tree more brightly than any streetlight, so that she will not stumble in the dark. Then she leaves her bike by the side of the trail, climbs into the cradle of the ancient sycamore, and waits.

  In spite of the cool air, she feels the same warmth and comfort, sitting in the old tree, that she knew on that frosty winter afternoon when her father brought her here to feed the deer. She leans back against one of the upper trunks and gazes up through the branches. If the legend is true, her ancestors are there beside her, and so is her father. It doesn’t matter that she can’t see them; she welcomes them anyway.

  She understands that her mind has been trying to show her a way in which to begin to heal herself. That is what the dreams have been about. They have reminded her of a place that she shared with her father. A place that held a special meaning.

  On this night she will see her father again. She will tell him how much she misses him, how she wishes she could have saved him from what happened. She needs to tell him these things. She needs to let go.

  And perhaps the ancient ones will dance around her, chanting their wisdom. But most of all, she wants to believe, as she huddles closer to the tree, that this place, as her father once told her, is a place of healing.

  michael drives down Main Street. Fluorescent lights spill their cold white glow through the store windows onto the sidewalks outside. He can’t take his eyes off the metal gates that protect the storefronts. They remind him of steel prison bars, and his body shudders involuntarily.

  He turns up Jenna Ward’s street. His plan is to wait on the church steps until morning, and then he will knock on her front door. He wants to talk to her first, before he goes to the police. Because once he turns himself in, he knows he might not have a chance to see her alone.

  He will also tell the police about Joe. He will say he swore his friend to secrecy. He will tell them Joe did what he did out of loyalty, because this is true. And maybe that will count for something.

  Michael pulls the car up in front of the church. There is at least another hour until dawn. He wonders what will happen if the Hangman drives by again and sees him sitting on the steps at this hour. He will probably ask him to move on, or charge him with vagrancy. Maybe he will want to search the car. Michael looks over at the Winchester, trying to decide what to do.

  Then he stares across the street at Jenna’s house. Even though it’s still night, the moonlight reflects off the second-story windows, making it seem as if there is a light on inside.

  There is no place else to go at this hour. Not even Amy’s house. And he is beginning to grow nervous at the thought of what the morning holds. He decides it is better just to drive around for a while. It will keep his mind occupied. The last thing he wants to do is back out. He has to get through this somehow. That’s when he remembers the Ghost Tree.

  When he gets to the Great Swamp, Michael parks the car in the lot by the information center. Then he takes the rifle and follows the trail that leads to the Ghost Tree. He knows why he has come. He is testing his courage.

  The moonlight, brighter than he can ever remember, lights his way along the path, as dark shadows leak from tree stumps like oil spills. In the background he hears the owls calling to each other. Their mournful hoots echo as far as the sound will carry. Michael is reminded of sounds flowing through telephone lines. This is how the owls stay connected, he thinks. This is how they remind each other they are not alone in the forest.

  As he rounds the last bend he can just make out the tree up ahead. And when he is only a few yards away, he is stunned to find Jenna Ward curled into its cradle, sleeping soundly. Nothing in his experience has prepared him for this. Because such things simply do not happen.

  But as he stands there, pressing the rifle to his chest, he wonders if, just maybe, he is supposed to be here, that he has been coming here to meet Jenna Ward all along.

  He wonders if, like him, she has come to confront her own personal ghosts. And as he watches her sleeping so peacefully, with just the slightest hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth, it is hard for him to imagine the pain she must have endured these long weeks. Yet he does not try to fool himself; he knows she has suffered. Still, he clings to that trace of a smile on Jenna’s lips, because he knows that their meeting, when she awakens, will be the hardest thing he has ever done in his life. This is what swallowing stones is all about.

  Michael lets the soft, mellow hooting of the owls wash over him as he sits down on a large boulder a few yards from the tree. He waits. The rifle lies across his knees like the gift he intends it to be; then, worried that it might alarm Jenna, he lays the gun on the ground behind the rock. For this is the only thing he has left to give: the truth. And Jenna Ward will be the first one to hear it. Then he will take the rifle and his story to Ralph Healey.

  Michael is glad that it is almost dawn. He wants them to meet in daylight, so that Jenna can see his face. He owes her that. And as he waits, he begins to think that maybe coming to this place isn’t about old legends or proving how brave you are. Maybe it is about facing the things that haunt you.

  So as the early-morning sunlight sends its first rays across the horizon, Michael keeps watch over Jenna, just as he did on those other evening vigils when he sat across from her house on the church steps. Only this time, when she awakens, he will be there waiting.

  about the author

  Joyce McDonald received bachelors and master’s degrees in English from the University of Iowa. After working in publishing for fourteen years, she returned to the academic life and earned a Ph.D. in English from Drew University; she taught at both Drew and East Stroudsburg University for several years. She is the author of three children’s books, including the critically acclaimed novel Comfort Creek. Joyce McDonald lives in northwestern New Jersey with her husband.

  ALSO BY JOYCE MCDONALD

  For more than two hundred years the town of Bellehaven has harbored a sinister secret. Then one night Simon Gray crashes his Honda into an ancient oak—a tree the kids at school call the Hanging Tree—and strange events begin to plague the town. Could Bellehaven be cursed?

  Trapped in a coma, Simon is unaware that the police are investigating a possible computer hacking incident at the high school and he is a suspect. Meanwhile, in his comatose state, Simon makes a few discoveries through conversations with a man who was hanged for murder two hundred years ago, from the same tree Simon smashed into. What could a two-hundred-year-old murder have to do with Simon’s accident?

  Devil on My Heels

  15-year old Dove Alderman’s days are as smooth and warm as the soft sand in her father’s orange groves—until mysterious fires begin breaking out. It’s 1959 in Benevolence, Florida and rumors are spreading. The Klan could never exist in a place like Benevolence, Dove tells herself. Or could it?

  Available everywhere

  Here’s an early previe
w …

  Excerpt from Devil on My Heels copyright © 2004

  by Joyce McDonald.

  Published by Delacorte Press an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc.

  New York

  All rights reserved.

  Lately I have taken to reading poems to dead boys in the Benevolence Baptist Cemetery. They don’t walk away before I have finished the first sentence, like most of the live boys I know. When I read to them, their eyes don’t wander to something, or someone, more interesting. I can pretend these boys are listening. I can pretend they hear me.

  On Friday afternoons like this one, right after seventh period, I head straight for the cemetery. I like to sit beneath the Austrian pines in the cool shade, reading lines from Tennyson or Wordsworth, listening to the whisper of the wind through the branches—listening to the trees making up their own poems. Soft words in the language of wind and pine needles.

  Miss Delpheena Poyer, my English teacher, is the reason I am sitting in the Baptist cemetery reading poems to dead boys. This marking period we are studying poetry. All kinds of poetry. A few weeks back Miss Poyer sent us on a mission to find interesting epitaphs on gravestones. That was our homework assignment. I went to three church cemeteries in Benevolence looking for verses. My favorite epitaph is engraved on the headstone of Rowena Mae Cunningham, who died in 1871, wife of Cyril Cunningham.

  HERE LIES ROWENA MAE

  MY WIFE FOR 37 YEARS.

  AND THIS IS THE FIRST DAMN THING

  SHE EVER DONE TO OBLIGE ME.

  I think that says all that needs to be said about the Cunninghams’ marriage.

  This afternoon I am reading to Charles Henry Colewater, “Beloved son of Emily and Carter Colewater,” who died at the age of fourteen in 1903. He was only a year younger than I am now. His parents’ graves are to the right of his. Sometimes I have this eerie feeling their spirits are hovering over my shoulder, making sure I don’t read anything they’d disapprove of. This is, after all, a Baptist cemetery.

  I lean my shoulder against Charles Henry’s headstone. If I close my eyes, I can imagine I see his face, a friendly face dotted with light freckles across his nose and cheeks, like little muddy footprints left behind by ants.

  My mom’s grave is only a few yards from Charles Henry’s. All it says on her headstone is Caroline Winfield Alderman, 1922–1947, wife of Lucas Alderman. It doesn’t say a word about her being mother to Dove Alderman. I was barely four years old when she left this earth, so I don’t remember her very well. But it makes me a little sad that nobody took the time to write an epitaph for her.

  This week in Miss Poyer’s class we are studying sonnets. I flip through the Selected Poems of John Keats, pick out one of his sonnets, and start right in reading it to Charles Henry. Only, the first line stops me cold: “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” I know those fears Keats is talking about. Sometimes I lie awake half the night, worrying that Mr. Khrushchev and those Soviets might decide to drop an atom bomb right smack-dab in the middle of Florida before I know what a real kiss feels like. Not those slobbery head-on collisions after the bottle stops spinning, with everybody looking on. I mean the real thing. Although I’m a little vague on what that might be.

  Not that I haven’t been kissed a few times. I have. Even been French kissed by Bobby McNeill in eighth grade at Donna Redfern’s party when we were dancing and somebody turned the lights out. I was expecting a plain old spin-the-bottle kiss. The next thing I knew, I thought I had a raw oyster stuck in my mouth.

  I am absolutely positive that kissing gets better than this. Otherwise I would lie down right here next to Charles Henry and pull the sod up over my head.

  I rest my shoulder against the chiseled curve of his tombstone. Poor Charles Henry. He was so young when he died. This is why I read poems—love poems mostly—to boys like him, boys who most likely passed on before they ever had a chance to fall in love. If I were in their shoes, I would certainly be most appreciative of any visitors stopping by my final resting place to read a poem to me now and then.

  A wind suddenly kicks up its heels and tears the pages from my hand as I’m flipping through Selected Poems, trying to find something a little more cheerful to read to Charles Henry. It sets the Spanish moss into frenzied flapping over head in the trees. A storm is coming. They have a way of springing up unannounced on steamy afternoons in Florida.

  A loud crash of thunder rumbles through the trees, sending me to my feet. Dark clouds tumble all over each other. I smell the rain in the air, a chilled metallic smell, even sense it on my skin. But I can’t see it. It is as if the rain is stuck in some kind of purgatory between the earth and the sky.

  The Austrian pines have stopped their whispering and are beginning to moan—loud eerie moans that burrow into my bones. The first bolt of lightning makes a beeline for the woods behind the church.

  The sky turns the color of lead. Everything around me blurs into tones of gray, except for a large splotch of red in the distance. The red splotch zips along a few feet above the earth, picking up speed. A flash of lightning outlines everything in sharp blinding white. I recognize that faded red T-shirt and the person wearing it. I watch him stop to fold something and stuff it into his back pocket. Then he takes off running through the cemetery toward the road.

  I don’t move from my place beside Charles Henry. When the blob of red is only a few yards from me, it stops. We stare at each other. The wind blows sand in my eyes, making them tear.

  “Gator?” I shout above the roar. This is what goes through my mind faster than the next bolt of lightning can streak to the ground: Why aren’t you in the groves picking oranges? Travis Waite is going to fire your hide for sure if he hasn’t already. And what, for heaven’s sake, are you doing in a cemetery that’s for white folks in the middle of the afternoon with lightning bolts looking for any moving target in sight?

  I shout his name again, but Gator doesn’t answer. The wind beats at his red T-shirt as if it is trying to tear it right off his body.

  The thunder seeps into the soles of my penny loafers. It rumbles through my body. I pick up my books, tuck them close to my chest, and keep my head down. I have to find someplace to get away from the storm. I head across the cemetery, walking as fast as I can in a pencil-straight skirt with nothing but a tiny kick pleat for maneuvering.

  By now the wind has whipped itself into a frenzy. Flying sand stings my legs. A streak of lightning zigzags into the meadow across the street. When I look back, the red shirt is gone. Gator has disappeared.

  This is what I am puzzling over, in between rumbles of thunder, when I hear another sound: the piercing honk of a car horn. I look up to see Chase Tully, grinning at me from his silver-blue T-bird convertible.

  Chase Tully is one of those boys whose eyes glaze over whenever I try to read him a poem. Although the last time I tried to do that was four years ago.

  Chase leans into the steering wheel and shouts, “Come on, Dove, get in! You’ll get soaked.”

  Back when we were kids I would have yelled something smart-alecky at him, like “Well, riding in a convertible with someone dumb enough to leave the top down in the middle of a storm isn’t exactly my idea of an improvement.” I don’t say that now. The truth is, even though I’ve known him all my life, I’m not sure how to act around Chase anymore.

  Chase and I practically grew up together. Our fathers’ groves bump right up against each other. Jacob Tully has over a thousand acres, the most groves of anybody in all of Panther County. My dad has about seven hundred.

  Chase and I used to play in my dad’s groves every chance we got. If I had something on my mind, Chase was usually the first to hear it. Straight out, no holds barred. Back then, he was about as wide as a yardstick, with these large ears and a goofy-looking crew cut.

  Then he went and turned thirteen and everything changed.

  For the next three years he acted as if he couldn’t remember my name. Depending on the occas
ion, I was Twerp or Squirt—usually in front of his girlfriends. Around the guys he hung out with I was Spaz or Kid. The rest of the time he made up whatever name struck his fancy: Mouse, Noodlehead, Beanpole. The list was irritatingly endless.

  It wasn’t until I came to Benevolence High last year that he finally stopped calling me names and telling me to get lost every chance he got, and started giving me that lazy grin of his again. He still teases me, though, which is why I don’t know what to make of him these days.

  The wind cranks it up a notch, pushing me away from the car. “Come on!” Chase shouts over the thunder. He lifts his leather jacket from the passenger seat and tosses it in the back.

  The top whirs as it climbs up from the back of the car. Chase reaches up and locks it in place.

  Drops of rain tickle my arms and run down my nose. I hunch over my books, trying to keep them dry just as the sky opens up and sends a waterfall roaring down on my head. Like any sensible person, I lunge for the door handle and slide into the soft leather bucket seat.

  Chase glances in the rearview mirror and smooths the sides of his dark hair back with his hands. He’s got sideburns now. No more crew cut. And his body finally caught up to those ears.

  He flicks on the windshield wipers but keeps his foot on the brake. We sit there with the engine purring. “So, where we headed?” He doesn’t look at me. His eyes are glued to the dashboard. He licks his thumb and rubs at a smudge of dirt by the radio.

  “Just home,” I say.

  He grins and shakes his head. “That’s it? Home?” He reaches across my lap and opens the glove compartment. A whole pile of road maps tumbles out. “Dove, jeez, where’s your imagination?”

  For as far back as I can remember, Chase has had the largest collection of maps of any person I’ve ever met. Probably more than the whole state of Florida put together. He reads maps the way other kids read comic books.