Virginia Hamilton Read online

  Little kids of long ago making toys of your leaves.

  He’d told her that Indians of past centuries had to have lived close to the tree. “Find a cottonwood,” he’d said, “and you’ll find fresh, running water, good for cooking and drinking.”

  Maybe back then, she thought. But there was no running water on the property now.

  Cottonwoman forever stands alone. You’ll find a black walnut tree nearby to stand as tall as she.

  Levi had explained how the scarce black walnuts grew wherever cottonwoods and sycamores stood. Sure enough, a black walnut, brittle-limbed with age, stood to the side of the field they owned.

  High up in the cottonwood, leaf upon leaf commenced a rustling. On the base branches, leaves hung limp and lifeless. Suddenly the whole height of the tree was caught in a gentle current of air.

  Well, woman, pull on your shawl, it’s just so cool up there!

  Justice laughed, screamed with the giggles and tore down the blacktop Union Road. At a wide street called Dayton, she paused to look both ways, then wheeled across it onto Tyler Street, which would take her clear across town.

  Justice used each of her speeds to see that they all worked properly. Squeezing the hand brakes, she brought the bike nearly to a standstill. Before stopping completely, she pulled on the pedals and raced ahead once again. She speeded, nonstop or skid, clear to Xenia Avenue, where she waited for a year for the light to change to green. For cars to stand at attention for her. Finally, the light changed. She glided safely across the avenue, still on Tyler where it narrowed with tight, sleepy houses on either side.

  “Not a lot of space for houses over here,” she said to herself. “Not like the open field where I come from.”

  She pretended she had come to town on the B&O line like the freight-hoppers of years ago that her dad once told her about. They had come undercover of the forever sky, fleeing a great dust bowl—something Justice couldn’t quite picture. But she noticed there sure were a lot of freight-hoppers around today. Boy and girl hoppers carrying the books they’d read on the long B&O ride from California. They hurried along, crossing Tyler Street and turning onto Xenia Avenue.

  Actually, they were students going to summer school.

  Glad I’m not big, Justice thought. Having to study even when school’s out—brother! How can you hop a freight with your pockets full of pencils and stuff?

  Tyler Street inclined gently and ended at a broken-down street called Morrey, which ran along the railroad tracks.

  Can’t they ever fix up this street? Now I can’t speed.

  She had to glide her way with care around potholes and broken shoulders of the road.

  Ought-a be a law! Won’t be long, though, on this ragged road. Just a short minute. Then to cross the tracks onto the Quinella Road.

  Blue sky stayed with Justice. She was hot in the denim jacket. Perspiration rolled down her temples to her chin. Soon she found herself beyond the dirty work of broken-down roads and ready for the hard.

  She turned left off Morrey Street and onto the lip of the Quinella Road where the B&O tracks cut across it like two silver scars. Next came a round knoll of road like a chin before the Quinella began its crazy three-quarter-mile curve and winding way down.

  Brother! Levi don’t know a thing!

  She wasn’t nearly as afraid of the fast plunge and deep shadow of the Quinella Road as Levi had thought. Justice almost loved it; had ridden it since Monday—mornings and afternoons; even one evening when she found the chance to slip away. Not many her age dared ride it. She’d heard tell that new drivers of cars who had driven the Quinella could pass the test of any mountain road.

  Better believe it, too.

  Justice never thought of the road as up but as always plunging down, as if it went under the earth. Of course, she knew it headed down and away to open country of some corn-and-cattle kind.

  The Quinella Road had a low guardrail on one side, with trees behind it that covered the dangerous edge of a jagged hill. On the other side, it was dirt wall, wet with natural springs and covered with bright green moss. Justice dared not look at the wall high up. She must keep her eyes on the downroad, keeping her pedals even as she coasted the first curve.

  She gained terrific speed, with wind and shadow turning her sweat cold. Here she soon felt chilly. And here, too, near the shoulder with the guardrail, she might skid and maybe bash her brains.

  She felt confident, as if some sure and certain luck would keep her safe. And the roll and coast of the Quinella thrilled her to her heart. Laughing, she gripped the handlebars. Her curls were soon plastered back from her forehead in waves. She felt wind pressure on her eyeballs, and her mouth went dry. At the crest of a plunge she’d not fixed firmly in her mind, her stomach suddenly rose and turned over. With a gasp, she flew off the seat and nearly wrecked.

  Chrissakes! But her luck was still grand.

  She steadied and all of her thoughts passed behind in the wind. Seeing each detail of wood and weed, she forgot them immediately. And plunged on and ever down.

  Until, three quarter-miles later, there was a pause, a recess of a flat place in the Quinella Road.

  Ready.

  Justice craned her neck around to check the last long hill behind.

  Nothing coming down.

  She studied the forward road.

  Nothing coming on.

  Listening hard, shaking wind from her hearing, she heard nothing coming down or coming on.

  Set.

  Swiftly riding, she released the handlebars and hand brakes to grasp the seat beneath her. Simultaneously, she removed her feet from the pedals to stretch her legs up and stiffly forward until they rested on the handlebars. With the slightest lean, she started the bike turning in circles in the road.

  Go!

  Justice had slid from the seat onto the crossbar. Letting go of the seat, she leaned her back over it. And she had speed enough for four good circles around in the road. With arms held out to the sides, she might have been a child asleep on a comfortable couch.

  There—yeah!

  Posed and balanced to perfection. On the last one and one half circles around, she lifted her arms straight above for the ear-splitting applause.

  You wish! was her fleeting thought.

  She had to struggle to get her feet down and scoot back on the seat before the bike fell over on its side. Not a second too soon, she leaped off and caught the bike in an awkward crouch.

  Have to figure a way to get down more graceful, she thought. But not now. Anyway, it’s a better trick than anything I’ve seen boys do.

  Practicing the trick was not what she was here for.

  “Best get off of the road,” she told herself. She pedaled a short distance through a part of the road that was even and ordinary. So began the straight-out Quinella, a hot country road on the way to farmland, small towns and nowhere.

  But on the right was an expanse of countryside. In the forefront, next to the road, was a field with a barbed-wire fence. Here Justice stopped the bike. The fence was as far as she had gone on Monday and Tuesday. Today she would go the rest of the way. This she had promised herself.

  First, she worked to get her bike through three barbed wires, which was what the fence consisted of. Sliding the bike between the lowest and middle strands, she took care that the barbs didn’t puncture a tire or scratch the paint.

  Whew! And once the bike was through, she held the strands apart and gingerly stepped in, one leg at a time.

  Justice hid her bike in the tall weeds along the side and headed on, the blue sky for company.

  Well, like a field, she thought as she walked away from the road and fence behind her. She had no idea how long a boundary the fence made, or where it ended. There was no sign of it ahead of her. The place like a field opened up, going on and on, with grand shade trees ahead of her and to one side. Within those trees was heavy shadow growing deeper until it appeared to be darkness. And shade, forever trapped under the trees, was as black as
night against the open land where she walked bathed in sunlight.

  Oh, don’t make me go in the shade by myself.

  Talking to herself. But she knew what she must do. Sooner or later, she must enter the shade and face the hard work.

  Trudging in sunlight through tall weeds, Justice soon had spiny burrs stuck to her pants legs. She didn’t mind them. Always, she seemed to have some weed mark or grass stain on her clothing. Her mom said she was as countrified as she could be. Better than to be citified, Justice would say. And her mom saying right back, Well, listen to her!—whatever that was supposed to mean.

  Now Justice heard the sound of water rushing. She smelled the river odor and believed it must be the smell of moss rotting, of edgewater drying up along the banks because of the lack of rain. Distasteful, stale, it flowed over her minutes before she came face to face with the Quinella Trace.

  Here, right on the water, everything burned with heat and brimmed over with moisture. The sun had taken up the river water on the air and spread it over the surrounding land. And here even the forever sky from California was a misty blue.

  “Breeder weather,” Justice whispered to the light of sky.

  Her dad often said that. Squinting into just such misty air, he told how such moisture and heat would eventually breed thunderheads of rainstorms.

  So far, he’s dead wrong, Justice thought. She couldn’t get it out of her head that it would never rain again.

  And wondered just a moment what her dad might be doing at this moment. Thinking about him easily, no pain. She never missed him the way she did her mom. Maybe because he had gone off to work for as long as she could remember. And by six-thirty in the morning.

  Justice squinted purposefully. White fluff clouds had grown a mite bigger, closer, but there was nothing about them to suggest thunder and rain.

  She strode on, sweeping her feet in a sideways motion to press the weeds down. In sunlight, she needn’t worry about what could lie hidden at the roots. She kept her eyes a pace ahead of the movement of her feet. And before she had expected it, she was standing on the bank of the Quinella Trace.

  “Well.” Weeds had not parted to show her that the river lay before her. They ceased to grow about a foot and a half from the edgewat?r.

  She was standing on the low bank that was a mud flat in proper weather. Now it was bone dry and a smooth slate gray. Bending, she dug at something white almost buried in the powdery earth. Got it out. It was a near-perfect skeleton of a tiny fish. Examining it a moment, but letting it loose as her eyes fixed on the black-water Trace.

  Means to follow lines. Trace, she thought, as, standing here, she had thought before.

  Or to disappear and—leave barely a clue!

  This last was a new discovery in her mind.

  If you did leave a clue, you’d leave a “trace.” That’s why it’s named Trace?

  She began to puzzle it out.

  The black water could have dried up, with just a trace left where the water once had been. So someone named it Trace.

  Centuries later, the black water had flowed again.

  Why didn’t they change the name to Filled Up, or something?

  Trace was what it used to be and still is. Maybe for a thousand years! But only seventy or a hundred years of being the Quinella Trace.

  “I don’t know,” Justice said softly.

  Her dad had told her that, long ago, boats had been raced on the river. And she’d thought Quinella was a person’s name until some boy said it was a betting game. But for sure she knew that the Quinella Trace was the blackest water anybody’d ever seen. Nobody, not one kid she knew, had any idea why.

  Wasn’t water supposed to be blue like the sky? They all thought so. There was the blue reflection of sky in it, but the water itself stayed fear-dark. Kids used to wade in it until a story got started around. The kind of darkness tale that someone like her friend Mrs. Jefferson, down their field, might think to tell. Mrs. Jefferson told lots of things that Justice had a way of forgetting. But she knew the story told about the Quinella was true.

  Levi sure proved it, too.

  The sound and the flowing sight of the black water made Justice shiver. Yet she was burning warm, standing so still by the edgewater. Whining sounds of insects were close around. Gnats were worrisome, trying to nest in the wet creases as she squinted her eyes. She mashed them with her fingers and rubbed them away. Her hands felt hot and clammy on her face.

  Maybe if I stick my feet in just once to cool off.

  But she hadn’t the nerve.

  ’Cause they come so fast on you. The slimy devils! she thought. Maybe something forms them as you set foot in the water. And warns them you are stepping in.

  Glancing all around, Justice thought about leaving.

  Run away and forget it!

  And thought again about sticking her feet in.

  “This whole Quinella place is just so devilish!” Saying it low on her breath seemed to calm her. “I’m not gonna put my feet in, not on your life I’m not!”

  Angry at not being foolish enough or brave enough to wade in the warmish black water. It had been right here at the Trace that something awful had happened to Levi.

  Never to forget it, either, never in my life.

  As she thought about the incident, something dawned, more important than the memory of it.

  Their dad had brought them down here to fish—her, Thomas and Levi. She had been about eight years old. Not that long ago. Thomas never could get enough of good fishing, and neither could her dad. Levi liked swimming, and Justice had felt at home searching the edgewater for flat stones to mark with her initials.

  Levi had waded to his waist in the water; then he had plunged flat out on his stomach.

  “Feels like lukewarm soup!” he’d shouted to them.

  “You’ve had experience swimming in lukewarm soup,” her dad had shouted back, laughing.

  It was the sequence of what had happened next that now loomed out of the memory, like pictures from a scrapbook suddenly spotlighted.

  Not another word had been spoken. Levi had looked peculiar. Thomas hadn’t been watching Levi swim, but suddenly he had dropped his fishing rod. Thomas had slowly got to his feet, his mouth hanging open, as Levi swam toward shore.

  Like clear snapshots torn from an album and held close to intense light.

  Justice stood absolutely still now at the edgewater, transfixed by pictures framed crystal clear and perfect in her mind’s eye.

  Levi wading out of the water, not aware of anything wrong but maybe sensing something was wrong because of the strange way Thomas was staring at him. Their dad leaping up as if something had stung him hard, gaping at Levi, also.

  Levi had begun running frantically around and around. He had started screaming in this terrifying wail.

  Fat, slimy worms had covered his chest and back. Black, blood-sucking leeches all over his legs. The river had to have been full of them. They’d been the most scary, the most devilish things to see.

  Their dad had tried to pull them off Levi. But the leeches had clung to his skin as they sucked his blood.

  Awful for her to think about even now.

  Their dad had hurried with matches, lighting two, three at a time for the bigger leeches. Burning the beasts off Levi. Levi’s body jerking, shivering. Him screaming the worst forlorn sound the whole time.

  “Never to forget it,” Justice told herself. “I can still smell them slimy beasts burning. And see ’em curl up like dry crisps and fall.”

  Not only the memory. That’s not all of it, she thought.

  But the way Thomas had dropped his fishing rod.

  The funniest thing!

  Dropping it and getting to his feet. Staring at Levi before they ever knew there were going to be leeches all over him.

  Justice jumped away from the edgewater, startled by the suggestion of her own mind.

  She began following the Quinella Trace downriver toward the shade.

  He knew what
was going to happen before Levi ever got out of the water!

  The thought turned her insides cold. And she denied it.

  “Oh, my goodness!” She had glided within the shade, unawares.

  The cool darkness of massive trees surrounded her. Justice was reminded of what she was supposed to be doing down here at the Quinella. She forced the past away, and the denial, to the back of her mind. Moving on, she watched her feet step silently. Shade and shadow were the only light under full, heavy branches of the huge trees. Weeds were low here and bushes grew lush with moisture but close to the ground. Insects did not shoot up from the ground and whir around her as they would have in sunlight. And here she discovered a multitude of crawling things.

  Hearing her own panting breath, Justice clamped her mouth shut. Breathing too hard and fast, she stopped a moment to calm herself. Fear weakened her insides, and she found she was shaking.

  Stop too long and you’ll never get it done.

  Clumsily, she moved up and down the shade close to the trunks of trees. It took her minute upon minute to steady herself. She could hear the sound of an occasional car back on the winding Quinella Road. It took her time until she was brave enough to work her way out, to walk between the trees and the edgewater. There stunted growth gave place to a rocky way, slippery with moss and wild ivy.

  Again Justice stood still, this time to watch. She had overheard Thomas tell neighborhood boys how to make a search.

  Here I’m about to begin, she thought.

  They won’t hurt you, Thomas says. Even if one of them attacks, it can’t hurt you. You are not born being so scared of them, he says. It’s what you’ve heard about them, what you learn wrong about them that makes you so awful terrified.

  I am scared. Scared to death, Justice thought. Oh, find one and do what you came to do!

  Justice found many. Watching and searching, standing still, soon she was able to separate from green-and-brown shade what looked to be long stripes of grass.

  Until they moved.

  Thomas beating on his drum—“You don’t need to holler like some babies.” Telling boys, “Or pick up some sticks and kill.”