Virginia Hamilton Page 4

  Striped lengthwise a pale yellow, lying in clumps or beds, all intertwined.

  “Bodies are covered with dry scales. You jerks, they ain’t slimy to touch. They’re ’bout the most useful creatures around. And they always nest at the Quinella Trace. Hundreds of ’em, year after year.” Telling boys and drum beating steadily on.

  Justice was surrounded by them, bedded in the short grass and in rocky, mossy shelters.

  “They can’t keep a constant body temperature. So they could die right off if and ever they stayed in hot sun too long.”

  Justice was horrified by them, but she knew enough to stand still now and to hold her ground. She watched them and waited, which, as Thomas had told was the best way to fit yourself into their world of quiet and shade. She saw them move, gliding over and under rocks. Some were large, so frightening, maybe three feet long. Others were busy young snakelets whipping around in brand-new skins.

  Sweat dripped from her face. A feeling like stripes of cold curled and knotted her stomach, insects found her feet and crawled over her sneakers.

  Stand still as long as there are no spiders. One thing I can’t stand is them big brown spiders!

  Watching second upon second, she pulled herself in from crawling creatures. She was a small, solid space in a cocoon of time. From its stillness, she saw the garter snakes move by making their skins crawl. Justice became fascinated by the larger snakes. Across their bellies was overlapping skin which seemed to grip the ground and move. Something, maybe muscles inside a snake’s body, actually pulled it along.

  I wouldn’t say they are good-looking creatures, she thought. They are so awful strange! But sure they aren’t ugly as sin, like I’d’ve sworn they would be.

  She saw forked tongues flicker out and in. It was then she forced herself from her safe detachment. She moved ever so carefully.

  Just a smallish one for now, she thought. But I’ll have to catch the biggest one I can find for The Great Snake Race on Friday.

  Snake eyes watched her every move. She stayed two or three feet away from each clump and bed of snakes.

  There’s only one of me. I’ll faint if I think about how many of them!

  Her legs felt shaky. She should have eaten breakfast; yet food would have made her sick by now.

  I’m weak, I truly am.

  She forced herself to head on downriver, searching for youngish snakes. And soon she closed in on a long, skinny garter stretched to its length on a bed of pebbles. At first, she thought it was dead. Then she guessed it had eaten something and was now digesting. Or maybe just resting.

  “They eat insects whole,” she recalled Thomas saying. And something else, but she’d forgotten some of what he had told.

  How could you know what a snake had been up to?

  The forked tongue of the snake flickered out and in, lightning fast.

  To grab it, move quick but quiet.

  The snake slithered, sensing her, perhaps seeing her. It glided over rocks as Justice stood beside it.

  Don’t let it find a hole.

  Well, pick it up.

  I can’t!

  Yes, you can—it’s what you’ve come to do. Want the boys to think you’re a fool?

  But it’s so awful hard!

  Not when you know it’s just a harmless creature. You don’t mean to hurt it. And it won’t have a mind to hurt you. Go on. Go on!

  Yeah, that’s it.

  She knew better than to make a sudden move. She crouched close to the tail of the snake and placed her hands some six inches above it.

  The garter commenced moving toward the black-water Trace. Never had Justice seen anything crawl so swiftly. Transfixed by its flow and slither, she nearly let it get away.

  Oh, brother!

  Her right hand darted sideways and forward. She caught the snake firmly in back of its head, her face screwed up in a terrible grimace as it struggled to free itself. With her left hand, Justice gently took hold of the tail end. And, quaking inside, she was happy to see that her hands were steady. She had done it.

  Such a thing—oooh!

  Trying not to jerk around, she stood up holding the snake. The garter twisted and slithered in fast motion, trying to get free. Justice held on. Its snake tongue flicked.

  Really, just like some miniature lightning in a tiny space. And they aren’t slimy, Justice thought.

  It felt like a strip of soft leather. Unreasonably, she had expected it to be warm and trembly, sort of like a baby rabbit or hamster. Suddenly, she recalled that snakes were cold-blooded. Sure enough, the garter’s skin felt cool.

  How to get it in my knapsack on Friday? Not this one, but the big one I have to catch for the Snake Race. She needed a large size for its strength, in case the race was long.

  Justice released the snake’s head to let it dangle by its tail.

  See?

  Gazing at it with wonder as it writhed to get loose.

  Just take it by the tail and drop it in the sack!

  All at once, there was a thin, ugly odor rising from the snake. And Justice let go of it.

  “You dirty thing!” It crawled away to disappear at the edge of the river.

  That smell—maybe poison! Justice backed away, looking all around her. There were writhing reptiles everywhere underfoot.

  Out of here!

  And she was running, cutting through the shade as fast as she could without sliding into a snake bed. All she wanted was to get out of the shade into the sun. But the shade didn’t end. It went on and on. Finally, she had sense enough to look up at the sky.

  Wouldn’t you know it?

  Those fluffs of white clouds were now low masses with gray undersides.

  Never trust you again, she thought to the forever sky.

  Justice had seen clouds build this way without raining a drop. The sun peeked through them, lighting the tops of trees nearby and then others farther off. It looked like someone had a light and was flashing it on and off through the dark.

  There was eeriness about the Quinella Trace lands without strong sunlight. It caused Justice to slow down, think vague, disconnected thoughts as she moved cautiously through the high weeds toward the fence. Where she could, she followed the path she had made coming in. There was a low, hot wind now. It made the weeds swoosh in waves around her knees, as if to engulf her. Fancying snakes and leeches crawling to catch her, Justice nearly screamed.

  Nearing the fence, she couldn’t find her bike where she had hidden it. Just frantic. And felt like crying.

  Someone’s stole it!

  The idea of her bike getting taken wasn’t half so bad as the thought that someone might be watching her.

  There it is.

  Finding the bike right where she had left it, not four feet from the fence.

  “That’s what happens when you panic,” she told herself.

  By the time she and the bike were through the fence again, she was sure it was going to pour down rain on her. The day had grown dreary; it felt full, as though about to burst. Ten minutes later, pedaling and pulling as hard as she could, she had reached the top of the Quinella Road and crossed the silver-smooth tracks of the B&O Railroad.

  Justice gave a glance to the tracks as she crossed them:

  What’d you go and do—bring this bad weather all the way from Nebraska? Well, we don’t want it, either. Better take it back by Friday, too.

  She was gone then, hurrying faster than it was safe over Morrey Street, full of potholes. Halfway home, she looked up to find an ugly rain cloud over her head.

  It never rained. The day brightened again. Patches of sun broke through and it was hot and still as ever.

  Justice turned down the Union Road into her gravel lane and passed under the great old tree.

  Cottonwoman! I did it today and I’ll be fine on Friday, too.

  Still, Justice didn’t know how she was supposed to race a snake. But she didn’t intend to let her brothers or any other boys know that.

  I’ll listen and I’m sure
to find out after supper, she thought.

  About every other evening, neighborhood boys gathered in the Douglass field; Justice would be sure to be there.

  She let her bike fall by the porch steps. There was a sudden thundercrash. Justice grabbed her bike again and hurried with it up onto the porch.

  She paused to listen for more thunder, but then smiled grimly. No thunder, it was Thomas. She stood the bike against the porch rail and went to open the front door. As she silently peeked around to her left within the house, a pulse of drumbeating swelled to crash in her face.

  Thomas in the living room, seated behind his set of five drums. Still in his pajamas, he was absorbed by the flashing sticks in his hands. He dragged his drum set into the living room each morning. And beat drums from the time he got up until lunchtime, and again after. Later on, he would switch to timpani or kettledrums, as the huge copper drums were most often called. A person had to have a keen sense of pitch and rhythm to play the kettles, Thomas was quick to tell everyone. And he had perfect pitch.

  Justice sighed.

  What I have to live with.

  She eased around the door unseen by Thomas and headed for the kitchen in search of Levi. There she found him with the table set. He always made lunch for her and Thomas. Justice had once asked her mother why Levi had to make the sandwiches every day. And her mom had said that Levi never minded, that he liked the responsibility. Justice guessed he did, too, for he never once forgot to make lunch for her. He was at the stove now, concentrating on a skillet too small for the three cheese sandwiches crammed into it.

  “Boo,” Justice said, coming up behind him. “I left you in the living room.”

  “Wha—?” Levi whirled around, knocking the skillet across the stove top. He looked stunned, staring at her as if, for a moment, he hadn’t known who she was.

  “Hey, I was kidding,” she said. “You know—I left you drumming in the living room. Don’t you get it?”

  His face had paled. And standing there, speechless, he looked kind of afraid.

  “Oh … oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Ticey. Hi.”

  “Hi,” she said back, wondering at his being so startled.

  He laughed nervously and turned back to the stove.

  She could tell he hadn’t really understood her kidding. Maybe he had just been concentrating too hard on his work. But she felt better when she joked once in a while about her brothers being duplicates of one another. It wasn’t fair that she must look in a mirror in order to see herself. All Thomas and Levi had to do was look at one another.

  Noise beat steadily from the living room.

  “You think he’s going to drum like that all summer?” she asked Levi. She was talking to his back and he did not turn around.

  “Tice, I have to do this right,” he said, and that was all.

  At least he hadn’t called her Pickle. He hardly ever did when they were alone.

  Levi took up a spatula to scrape semi-burned sandwiches from the skillet onto a plate.

  “Do you ever want to be like Thomas?” suddenly she thought to ask him.

  To be a drummer, she thought. To be so stubborn and willful all the time.

  He turned to face her. There was a weary look in his eyes. It wasn’t the first time she had seen it.

  “Sometimes I am Thomas,” he said softly. “I never know when.”

  She didn’t know what to make of that. But she took it as the way one identical might speak offhandedly of the other.

  “Does he ever want to be you, you think?” she asked him.

  Levi was holding the plate of sandwiches up over the stove, with the spatula on top of them. He had left the skillet smoking, and she reached around him to turn the burner off. She saw his shoulders shudder in rhythm with the beat of Thomas’ drums.

  “Leave me alone,” he said, like a whine. “Just … be quiet … don’t bother me now.”

  What can you do, she wondered, when your favorite brother says something like that to you?

  In some kind of mood, she guessed, and took her seat at the table.

  Levi always set the table so nice. There were yellow napkins, white plates and a bowl of potato chips. There was a big bottle of Coke, and ice all ready in the glasses. But she would have enjoyed it much better if her mom had been there making the sandwiches and munching chips as she worked. Levi wasn’t one to munch unless he was sitting down eating a meal.

  She noticed it was only eleven-thirty. Levi fixed lunch whenever someone was hungry. Must have been Thomas.

  If her mom had been here, she would have talked to Justice while she worked. Asking questions. Telling things. Her mom would talk a mile a minute and Justice would, too.

  It’s so different this summer, Justice thought. Noisy different. It’s a weird summer house, she couldn’t help thinking, and getting stranger every minute.

  “Y’all used to having folks watch over you too close,” Justice’s friend Mrs. Jefferson liked to say. “Never do, making children too self-conscious. Y’all think you important.”

  You wouldn’t call Levi and Thomas children, would you? Certainly, they weren’t to Justice. But wouldn’t it be oh so nice if some grown-up would come along and tell Thomas to cut out the racket so much all the time!

  Wish Mom were home. In four, five hours she will be.

  “Mrs. Leona Bethune Jefferson is better than having nobody,” Justice told herself.

  Maybe to sneak off and visit her. Justice thought about it.

  Biking down the Quinella Road each day, sometimes more than once. She hadn’t visited Mrs. Jefferson all week.

  If not today, then tomorrow afternoon for sure.

  Dimly, she was aware of a peaceful quiet in the house, but then Thomas came charging into the kitchen. Always, he seemed to be bursting with noise. Even his voice exploded from his mouth as though someone had set it off.

  Levi was about to serve Justice her sandwich, poised on the greasy spatula.

  “D-d-d-ooon’t touch it, Puh-piii-cle!” Thomas warned her. “N-n-not until I-I-hIII’m served!” Drawing out his words and popping them at her.

  Oh, brother! she thought. She sometimes thought he stuttered just to annoy her. But she was used to his demanding ways.

  Now she and Levi waited patiently as Thomas elaborately seated himself. He smoothed his hair back while peering closely at Levi.

  She didn’t know how many times she’d seen Thomas use Levi as his own reflection. Neither of them ever had to use a mirror.

  With his fork, Thomas speared a sandwich from the plate before Levi had a chance to serve him one. He drummed his fingers on the table and smoothly told Justice, “Now you may begin.”

  Grinning like an idiot, she thought to herself.

  Thomas wolfed down a third of his sandwich in one huge, disgraceful bite. He eyed Justice with a steady smirk.

  There were times when Justice wished he liked her better. But right now she hoped the sandwich would poison him.

  Tear him in the gut and flatten him out on the floor.

  Until her stomach began to hurt with a deep, cold feeling. Something tore at her insides with slithers of ice. She felt death-weak and knew suddenly that she was about to lose consciousness. But even before she could panic, she had seen a fleeting look of caution come into Thomas’ eyes. Quickly, she took up the sandwich and, for strength, hurriedly ate it.

  3

  IT WAS THE HOUR past suppertime and the neighborhood seemed deserted. The thorny osage hedgerow, twisted by hard weather, spread early-evening shade across half the Douglass field. The trees bordered the length of the west property line; near them, Justice, Thomas and Levi stood in separate pools of dappled sun. Occasionally, there was a wind sigh through the treetops, which made a sound of crowds ohing and ahing from a great distance away. Every now and then, Justice would feel a hot downdraft of air. It caused her tangled, sticky curls to spring up around her ears.

  Thomas wore his favorite hat, a purple toque with a large pink ostrich feathe
r stuck in the band. The feather fluttered in princely style, as fragile as a puffball. He appeared feverishly eager, yet confident behind a set of huge copper kettledrums.

  Levi observed his brother, whom he called Tom-Tom, so much a reflection of himself, and his sister, Ticey, trying her best to keep up with the both of them.

  Why must she be so excitable? And why couldn’t she find girls her age to be friends with? Poor Ticey. It wasn’t that she couldn’t find any, it was that he and Tom-Tom couldn’t keep her away from what they were doing or planning to do. And he supposed it was normal for younger ones to tag after older brothers and sisters.

  Levi caught a warm stir of air full in the face. He would have liked to be in the cottonwood tree on the east boundary. He could hear a breeze high up in the brittle osage branches. It might be cooler over in the cottonwood. Yet he remained where he was. Patient and ever alert, he waited for Tom-Tom to tell him, all of them, what was to be.

  Behind their field was a high wood fence with a gate in it. The fence separated the field from their backyard. The yard was overgrown on one side with planted beds of flowers—sweet peas, gladioli, hollyhocks, roses—and stubborn, blooming weeds which made that whole side a place wildly beautiful. On the other side of the yard, away from sundown and shade, grew a large, neat vegetable garden. Here Mr. and Mrs. Douglass often spent time when they came home in the afternoon. Hoeing rows of beans, tomatoes and cucumbers was for them a sure way to relax.

  Now, after supper, they were on the far side of their white house with black trim, away from the enclosed yard and the open field. Over there was a screened-in porch facing north. It overlooked the front lawn of snowball bushes, evergreen and fruit trees. The Douglasses delighted in sitting on the porch, talking, having tea, after the dishes were washed and put away. And it was not unusual for them to doze a bit there on the porch glider.

  Thomas and Levi, with Justice, delighted in the field. In the whole neighborhood, no family had as much open space as they. The acre and a half of field planted years ago in Kentucky bluegrass was kept mowed to an inch of springy turf by Thomas and Levi, taking turns struggling with their rattling gasoline mower. Endlessly, they talked over whose turn it was to mow this time; finally, they divided the field in quarters—one quarter, Thomas; one quarter, Levi—until the whole field was mowed.