Virginia Hamilton Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  A Biography of Virginia Hamilton

  Copyright

  Justice and Her Brothers

  Virginia Hamilton

  For William Hamilton and Kenneth Hamilton, Jr.

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  A Biography of Virginia Hamilton

  1

  MIGHT AS WELL BE the same day as yesterday, she thought. Who’s to say it’s not?

  Pouting her displeasure, she sidled through limp and quiet rooms. Sun baked the east and south windows of her home in a blinding yellow glaze from morning until late afternoon. All of the windows were raised and rested on small wood-framed screens that let in the slightest air movement from outside. But steady breezes seemed to have disappeared with the endless heat wave. She was positive it would never rain again, and she decided this morning on leaving the filmy summer curtains closed.

  “You can see through them just as well,” she told herself, “and even feel the heat outside, too.”

  Sun scorched away as strong as ever.

  Her dad once telling her, “A fella’s prisoner to heat when he’s dang fool enough to build square in the middle of a flat, dusty field.”

  Talking about the house they now lived in and the fellow who had built it.

  “Why’d you buy it from him, then?” she’d wanted to know.

  “Cause I’m no better than he is,” her dad had said. “Cause I can’t get over that view down the field, either.”

  That had sure tickled her and she’d laughed her head off.

  Her dad telling: “I do like all that space between me and the neighbors, even when I sometimes fear the field will explode with fire from sheer hot weather. But some nights—I know you’ve seen it, Tice—the fireflies get to hovering in there and the next thing you know, that field is a haven a blinking stars.”

  She had nodded in agreement. “But you like that old hedgerow clear on across the west property,” she’d asked him. “Don’t you just like it the best of all?”

  Her whole family knew how much she cared for the hedgerow.

  “Even better than the field a stars?” she’d questioned him.

  “Oh, but sure, Tice,” her dad had said. “That’s the truth you are talking about right there. All of those twisting osage trees were just made for the finest sunsets this side of paradise.

  “Every evening forever,” her dad, going on, “sun’ll go down behind our own, very own hedgerow—I picture him a bright-eyed old fella sleeping it off. And never once snagging his crimson-and-gold undershirt on them sticker branches as he slips on down below the horizon.”

  This last had caused her to squeal with the giggles. Now the memory of it dissolved the pout and made her grin as she entered the parlor of her home and sat down a moment in her father’s easy chair.

  Called Ticey or simply Tice by all in her family and in the neighborhood, her real name was Justice. “Justice is as Justice does” was something she told herself quite naturally nearly every day. She liked being Justice and did not find the name odd or strange unless some stranger came around and commented on it.

  Now Justice snuggled in the chair and caught a feeling of her dad deep within it. She caught a whiff of his Aqua Velva after-shave, which caused her to summon up almost a shape of his joking and teasing. Then came to her a memory of wind swooshing through the side windows of his battered Oldsmobile.

  The parlor was mussed from the previous night’s use. But not badly so, Justice decided. Newspapers were piled on the green footstool where her dad had left them. There was a black pocket comb fallen at the foot of the sofa. One of her mom’s books, Contemporary Crafts, lay open on an end table. Balanced half on and half off the same end table was one of her brother’s drumsticks.

  How long had it been there like that? she wondered.

  As she stared at the stick, something came over her like a slow chill. She pulled her legs up against her chest and scrunched deeper in the chair. She had a cold, uncomfortable feeling whenever she was alone and came across something belonging to her brother Thomas, like that drumstick.

  Justice flicked her eyes this way and that. All else around the parlor appeared ordinary. The light of sun set the room aglow in corners and on the walls. It was an eerie effect, but not something she hadn’t seen before. The house was stifling, as it had been for weeks. But there was nothing odd about sunlight, about heat, at this early hour. Yet, since the summer started, she’d got the notion at times that something deadly strange was going on.

  Maybe it just feels different, she thought, with Mom out of the house each day for the first time this summer. No grown-ups around from morning until way late.

  She felt a pang of loneliness at being left all day and mostly on her own. Thomas’ drumstick caught her eye as, incredibly, it took a slow roll over the edge of the end table. As if someone had toppled it over.

  Justice gasped.

  Not someone, she thought, some thing!

  The drumstick had plopped on the floor and lay still.

  She began shivering uncontrollably, imagining a thing invisible moving away from the fallen stick to creep up behind her chair.

  So real!

  The hair on her neck seemed to crawl. Giddy with fear, she tried with all of her mind and will to control herself.

  Saying out loud, whispering, “Justice is as Justice does.” It seemed to help a little. Putting her thoughts in order helped even more.

  “It had to be on the end table since last night,” she told herself. “No one’s been out here yet this morning, I can tell. So why did that particular drumstick pick the particular minute I am sitting here to roll off the table?

  “It didn’t pick, you dummy,” firmly she told herself. “It fell because it fell, that’s all. And I happened to be here to see it. Maybe coming in here like I did jarred it some. … Sure! It would’ve fallen whether it was me came in here or not.”

  So there. It made sense. Just her and the drumstick meeting up with fate.

  But a gnawing fear wouldn’t go away. Some thing she imagined still waited behind her chair. All alone, she realized she’d had the feeling before.

  Yes, but never as strong as now, she thought. Before, it had been so vague, like a soft sound, and I had to glance around to see where it came from.

  And it came to her, a pure intuition: whatever it was she imagined behind her chair was a part of something strange going on. The whole weird feeling had begun with the summer and being alone in the house with her brothers.

  Least, I don’t recall the feeling before this summer.

  She had an awful urge to turn around and see if something truly was in back of her chair; but, stubbornly, she refused. The feeling of something remained, as did her determination not to look. Vague and formless as it was, she felt it dare her to find it.

  Ever so carefully, she got up from her dad’s easy chair, forcing herself not to look around. Casually, she slunk across the room and out, moving smoothly down the hall to the dining room. She let her fingers trail gracefully along the stippled yellow wall as though she hadn’t a care in the world.

  Something’s very weird, she told h
erself, and then pretended she had not heard.

  There were some neighborhood kids and grown-ups, too, who thought Justice’s family, even her house, were “weird.”

  Because we’re set away from all the other houses, she told herself. That’s the reason they think that. I mean, every day and night we are protected by the hedgerow, but able to see all their backyards way down our field. It’s what Dad meant by the view from here. You sure do get to know secrets about folks from the view of what goes down in their backyards!

  Justice giggled.

  All the junk they pile up and think they are hiding. Fights spilling clear out onto the back porch!

  And they can’t view us.

  She had to smile.

  Because, looking up the field, they only get to see this big wood fence around our backyard. We are so private at the end of our blacktop road, too. They are public on the street. That’s maybe why we’re “weird.”

  But she knew better.

  Oh, people are just so boring.

  All except for Mrs. Jefferson, and her husband, and her son, Dorian. They were fairly new people in the old neighborhood near farmland, and they lived directly down the field from Justice’s home. She visited Mrs. Jefferson and her son quite often because her own mom was never home and she needed someone like Mrs. Jefferson, or at least that age, to be around.

  But a lot of other people, other than the Jeffersons, were just so boring.

  I mean, she began to herself, they don’t get upset when they see a tract of houses just alike. Or a forest of the very same trees. But they have to go and pay all that attention to Thomas and Levi. Phooey!

  Thomas and Levi were her thirteen-year-old brothers. And on the outside they were identical.

  Seeing the dining room after dawdling down the hall, Justice realized suddenly that she’d better hurry. By the time she entered the room, she was moving fast.

  “Tice, where are you off to at this hour?” asked her mom.

  “Wha—?” Startled, Justice had known her mom would be there, but, thinking so hard, she’d forgotten.

  “I … Oh, you know I gotta get going,” she said, annoyed at having to defend herself at seven-thirty in the morning. Her mom looked bright and shiny without any makeup, Justice noticed, even though there were permanent creases at the corners of her eyes.

  “But I still don’t know why you have to go,” her mom said, “or in what direction you’re going.”

  She had seen her daughter going for the last two mornings since Monday and preparing to go again now. She’d heard from her sons that Ticey returned hours later, looking hot and sweaty but not really any the worse for wear. Tice would stay home for a while at lunchtime, but then would sometimes again disappear for another hour. Suddenly, Mrs. Douglass wondered if the boys were telling her the whole story.

  “I told you,” Justice was saying, racing around the table to where her mother sat with an open book and a mug of strong Morning Thunder herb tea.

  “You didn’t tell me anything,” Mrs. Douglass said. “And you haven’t had your breakfast.”

  “I don’t want any breakfast,” Justice said. She searched in every corner of the room. She raced into the kitchen to do the same there and ran back to look under the dining-room table one last time. Crawling out from underneath, she accidentally bumped the tabletop. And looked on in shock as Morning Thunder splashed out of the mug.

  “Ticey!”

  “Mom!” Tea spreading in a brown stain on the tablecloth. “You know I didn’t mean to. Where’s my jacket—please? Don’t you remember where I put it?”

  “I should remember where you throw things?” her mom said. “Here, hand me those napkins.”

  “You used to remember where I thro—put things, before.”

  Her mom soaked up spilled tea. Justice helped her roll back the cloth to wipe the table.

  “Meaning, I guess, before I had to study all the time,” Mrs. Douglass said.

  “Correct,” said Justice, watching her mom make a pile of soiled napkins. Still on her knees, she peered over the edge of the table at the open book her mom had shoved out of the way of the spill. It was Lecturas Escogidas again. She knew what the title meant. It was Spanish for Selected Readings.

  Her mom was a student at Marks College twenty miles away in some degree-completion program.

  When she should have been home to help when Justice needed her to find things, was Justice’s opinion on the subject.

  Her brothers, Thomas and Levi, thought it great to have their mom away all summer long, from nine in the morning until three and four in the afternoon.

  “Think of the devilment you can do,” Thomas told Justice one day. He beat his drumsticks on the back of her chair. “I’ll keep a list of it to show Mom.”

  The tone of his voice and those whirring sticks had caused Justice to suspect he would hit her deliberately. She had screamed at him, “I truly despise you!” And, unreasonably, she had burst out with, “If you ever touch my bike …!”

  It had made him turn on her, screeching with laughter. Even Levi had had to go laugh at her. But no one could fake screeching and shaking all over quite the way Thomas could.

  “You are a pickle,” he had said. It was the stupid nickname he had thought up for her. “Who’d want a dumb three-speed except a sour pickle?” Pounding his drumsticks so close to her ear she could feel the air move.

  Now Justice rubbed her nose back and forth along the smooth dining table. She felt unsettled, nervous, inside.

  He dislikes me enough to hurt me, Thomas does, she thought. Oh, phooey on him, and Levi, too.

  But she felt uneasy all the same.

  As soon as she’d found out that Thomas was planning a special event this coming Friday called The Great Snake Race, she had known what she had to do. This was Wednesday.

  Gives me either one of two days, she thought, as a ribbon of fear uncurled along her spine.

  Mrs. Douglass had cleared the table of soggy napkins and had sat down again with her book and tea. As she studied, she commenced running her fingers gently through Justice’s brown, curly hair. After a moment, she glanced sideways to find Justice staring at her, looking very sour.

  “Tice, what is it?” she said. “What’s troubling you?”

  “Nothing,” Justice mumbled. Thinking of her brothers and The Great Snake Race had made her glum and out of sorts. She did like the way her mom fluffed her hair, though. Her mom knew how to make it feel pretty and not at all tangly.

  “Do you dislike my going to school so much?” asked Mrs. Douglass.

  “No,” Justice said. It wasn’t a bother that her mom went to school.

  But that she’s gone for hours and hours, Justice thought. And not here to help. To be on my side from Thomas.

  “Shall I have a word with your brothers about calling you Pickle?” her mom asked.

  Justice looked surprised. “Why do you have to know so much?” she said, not unkindly.

  Mrs. Douglass smiled at her.

  Justice stared at Lecturas Escogidas. “Guess you don’t know everything,” she said. “I could read a book that size in two days. It’s taking you forever.”

  Mrs. Douglass laughed. “But it’s a study book, Ticey. You don’t read a textbook like this straight through.”

  “Oh, right,” Justice said. “I knew that, but I just forgot a minute. You have to memorize stuff, same as I do.”

  “Yeah,” said her mom.

  Justice suddenly looked smug. “Here’s what I memorized this week: ‘Breathes there the man with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, “This is my own, my native land.”

  “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” her mom said. “Well, I’ll be—are they still teaching that? But you said you just learned …”

  Justice cut in on her: “And I know ‘They have tormented me, early and late, Some with their love and some with their hate. The wine I drank, the bread I ate, Some poisoned with love, some poisoned with hate …’”

  “Y
et she who has grieved me most of all,” Mrs. Douglass broke in on her, looking somewhat astonished at her daughter.

  “She neither hated nor loved me at all,” finished Justice.

  They were silent a moment as the echo of words seemed to flow about them.

  “You didn’t learn that in school,” finally her mom said.

  “Nope,” Justice said. “I learned it from Levi. He’s always reading slushy stuff like that. When he’s up in the cottonwood, I climb up. He’s reading out loud and he sees me and says to me, ‘Tice, wanna hear? Then keep quiet and listen.’ So I hang on a limb and listen as long as I want.”

  “That’s wonderful,” said her mom.

  “I don’t like it much,” Justice said. “But I like Levi sometimes. Do you really like memorizing all the time?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s more that I study until I get to know stuff well. And, sure, I like it. You will, too, I bet, when you grow up.”

  She felt sleepy from the soft movement of her mom’s hand in her hair. But suddenly she leaped to her feet with slightly more drama than was necessary. “I shoulda been gone!”

  “Should have been—Tice? Where are you off to?”

  “Mom, I told you once. I have to practice.”

  “Practice what?”

  “Moth-er, I have to go—can’t you remember where my jacket is at?” She didn’t need the denim jacket. She knew the day would get blistering hot. But the jacket was familiar, like a second skin, tight and safe.

  “Practice what?” Mrs. Douglass repeated. “Maybe you’d better tell me what’s going on before you leave the house.”

  “You never make Thomas or Levi give you a rundown.”

  “Yes, I do, too.”

  “Shhhh!” Justice whispered, although her mother had spoken in the same voice as before. “The boys might hear!” she whispered. Why did her mom have to become more difficult with each new morning?

  “Then, what?” Mrs. Douglass, said, whispering.

  “Mom, trust me, will you?”

  “Tice, don’t sound so old,” Mrs. Douglass said in a normal tone. “And you can’t use that on me, either.”

  “Mo-om, I just have to practice something on my bike is all,” Justice told her. “It’s something Thomas and Levi think I can’t do—and that’s the utter truth!”