I would lie on the ground with the trees folded over me, wearing her gloves, smiling at the photograph. I would study “Tiburon, S.C.” on the back of the black Mary picture, the funny slant of the lettering, and wonder what sort of place it was. I’d look it up on the map once, and it wasn’t more than two hours away. Had my mother been there and bought this picture? I always promised myself on day, when I was grown-up enough, I would take the bus over there.

I wanted to go every place she had ever been.

***********

After my morning of capturing bees, I spent the afternoon in the peach stand out on the highway, selling T. Ray’s peaches. It was the loneliest summer job a girl could have, stuck in a roadside hut with three walls and a flat tin roof.

I sat on a Coke crate and watched pickups zoom by till I was nearly poisoned with exhaust fumes and boredom. Thursday afternoons were usually a big peach day, with women getting ready for Sunday cobblers, but not a

soul stopped.

T. Ray refused to let me bring books out here and read,

and if I smuggled one out, say, Lost Horizon, stuck under my shirt, somebody, like Mrs Watson from the next farm, would see him at church and say,

“Saw your girl in the peach stand reading up a storm.

You must be proud.” And he would half kill me.

What kind of person is against reading? I think he believed it would stir up ideas of college, which he thought a waste of money for girls, even if they did, like me, score the highest number a human being can get on their verbal aptitude test. Math aptitude is another thing, but people aren’t meant to be overly bright in everything.

I was the only student who didn’t groan and carry on when Mrs Henry assigned us another Shakespeare play. Well actually, I did pretend to groan,

but inside I was as thrilled as if I’d been crowned Sylvan’s Peach Queen.

Up until Mrs Henry came along, I’d believed beauty college would be the upper limit of my career. Once, studying her face, I told her if she was my customer, I would give her a French twist that would do wonders for her, and she said and I quote – “Please, Lily, you are insulting your fine intelligence. Do you have any idea how smart you are? You could be a professor or a writer with actual books to your credit. Beauty school. Please.”

It took me a month to get over the shock of having life possibilities. You know how adults love to ask, so what are you going be when you grow up? I can’t tell you how much I’d hated that question, but suddenly I was going around volunteering to people, people who didn’t even want to know, that I planned to be a professor and a writer of actual books.

I kept a collection of my writings. For a while everything I wrote had a horse in it. After we read Ralph Waldo Emerson in class, I wrote “My Philosophy of Life,” which I intended for the start of a book but could only get three pages out of it. Mrs. Henry said I needed to live past fourteen years old before I would have a philosophy.

She said a scholarship was my only hope for a future and lent me her private books for the summer. Whenever I opened one, T. Ray said, “Who do you think you are, Julius Shakespeare?” The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare’s first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival. He also referred to me as Miss Brown-Nose-in-a-Book and occasionally as Miss Emily-Big-Head-Diction. He meant Dickinson, but again, there are things you let go by.

Without books in the peach stand, I often passed the time making up poems, but that slow afternoon I didn’t have the patience for rhyming words. I just sat out there and thought about how much I hated the peach stand, how completely and absolutely I hated it.

***********

The day before I’d gone to first grade, T. Ray had found me in the peach stand sticking a nail into one of his peaches.

He walked toward me with his thumbs jammed into his pockets and his eyes squinted half shut from the glare. I watched his shadow slide over the dirt and weeds and thought he had come to punish me for stabbing a peach. I didn’t even know why I was doing it.

Instead he said, “Lily, you’re starting school tomorrow, so there are things you need to know. About your mother.”

For a moment everything got still and quiet, as if the wind had died and the birds had stopped flying. When he squatted down in front of me, I felt caught in a hot dark I could not break free of.

“It’s time you knew what happened to her, and I want you to hear it from me. Not from people out there talking.”

We had never spoken of this, and I felt a shiver pass over me. The memory of that day would come back to me at odd moments. The stuck window. The smell of her. The clink of hangers. The suitcase. The way they’d fought and shouted. Most of all the gun on the floor, the heaviness when I’d lifted it.

I knew the explosion I’d heard that day had killed her. The sound still sneaked into my head occasionally and surprised me. Sometimes it seemed that when I’d held the gun there hadn’t been any noise at all, that it had come later, but other times, sitting alone on the back steps, bored and wishing for something to do, or pent up in my room on a rainy day, I felt I had caused it, that when I’d lifted the gun, the sound had torn through the room and gouged out our hearts.

It was a secret knowledge that would slip up and overwhelm me, and I would take off running even if it was raining out, I ran straight down the hill to my special place in the peach orchard. I’d lie right down on the ground and it would calm me. Now T. Ray scooped up a handful of dirt and let if fall out of his hands. “The day she died, she was cleaning out the closet,” he said. I could not account for the strange tone of his voice, an unnatural sound, how it was almost, but not quite, kind.

Cleaning the closet. I had never considered what she was doing those last minutes of her life, why she was in the closet, what they had fought about.

“I remember,” I said. My voice sounded small and faraway to me, like it was coming from an ant hole in the ground.

His eyebrows lifted, and he brought his face closer to me. Only his eyes showed confusion. “You what?”

“I remember,” I said again. “You were yelling at each other.”

A tightening came into his face. “Is that right?” he said. His lips had started to turn pale, which was the thing I always watched for. I took a step backward.

“Goddamn it, you were four years old!” he shouted. “You don’t know what you remember.”

In the silence that followed, I considered lying to him, saying, I take it back. I don’t remember anything. Tell me what happened, but there was such a powerful need in me, pent up for so long, to speak about it, to say the words.

I looked down at my shoes,

at the nail I’d dropped when I’d seen him coming.

“There was a gun.”

“Christ,” he said.

He looked at me a long time, then walked over to the bushel baskets stacked at the back of the stand. He stood there a minute with his hands balled up before he turned around and came back.

“What else?” he said. “You tell me right now what you know.”

“The gun was on the floor.”

“And you picked it up,” he said. “I guess you remember that.”

The exploding sound had started to echo around in my head.

I looked off in the direction of the orchard, wanting to break

and run.

“I remember picking it up,” I said. “But that’s all.”

He leaned down and held me by the shoulders, gave me a little shake. “You don’t remember anything else? You’re sure? Now, think.”

I paused so long he cocked his head, looking at me, suspicious.

“No, sir, that’s all.”

“Listen to me,” he said, his fingers squeezing into my arms. “We were arguing like you said. We didn’t see you at first. Then we turned around and you were standing there holding the gun. You’d picked it up off the floor. Then it just went off.”

He let me go and rammed his hands into his pockets. I could hear his hands jingling keys and nickels and pennies. I wanted so much to grab on to his leg, to feel him reach down and lift me to his chest, but I couldn’t move, and neither did he. He stared at a place over my head.

A place he was being very careful to study.

“The police asked lots of questions, but if was just one of those horrible things. You didn’t mean to do it,” he said softly. “But if anybody wants to know, that’s what happened.”

Then he left, walking back toward the house. He’d gone only a little way when he looked back.

“And don’t stick that nail into my peaches again.”

***********

It was after 6:00 p.m. when I wandered back to the house from the peach stand, having sold nothing, not one peach, and found Rosaleen in the living room. Usually she’d have gone home by now, but she was wrestling with the rabbit ears on top of the TV, trying to fix the snow on the screen. President Johnson faded in and out, lost in the blizzard. I’d never seen Rosaleen so interested in a TV show that she would exert physical

energy over it.

“What happened?” I asked. “Did they drop the atom bomb?” Ever since we’d started bomb drills at school, I couldn’t help thinking my days were numbered. Everybody was putting fallout shelters in their backyards, canning tap water, getting ready for the end of time. Thirteen students in my class made fallout-shelter models for their science project, which shows it was not just me worried about it. We were obsessed with Mr Khrushchev and his missiles.

“No, the bomb hasn’t gone off,” she said. “Just come here and see if you can fix the TV.” Her fists were burrowed so deep into her hips they seemed to disappear.

I twisted tin foil around the antennae. Things cleared up enough to make out President Johnson taking his seat at a desk, people all around. I didn’t care much for the president because of the way he held his beagles by the ears. I did admire his wife, Lady Bird, though, who always looked like she wanted nothing more than to sprout wings and fly away.

Rosaleen dragged the footstool in front of the set and sat down, so the whole thing vanished under her. She leaned toward the set, holding a piece of her skirt and winding it around in

her hands.

“What is going on?” I said, but she was so caught up in whatever was happening she didn’t even answer me. On the screen the president signed his name on a piece of paper, using about ten ink pens to get it done.

“Rosaleen…”

“Shhh,” she said, waving her hand.

I had to get the news from the TV man. “Today, July second, 1964,” he said, “The president of the United States signed the Civil Rights Act into law in the East Room of the White House.”

I looked over at Rosaleen, who sat there shaking her head, mumbling, “Lord have mercy,” just looking so disbelieving and happy, like people on television when they answer the $64,000 Question.

I didn’t know whether to be excited for her or worried.

All people were talked about after church were the Negroes and whether they’d get their civil rights. Who was winning – the white people’s team or the colored people’s team? Like it was a do-or-die contest. When that minister from Alabama, Reverend Martin Luther King, got arrested last month in Florida for wanting to eat in a restaurant, the men at church acted like the white people’s team had won the pennant race.

I knew they would not take this news lying down, not in one million years.

“Hallelujah,” Rosaleen was saying over there on her stool. Oblivious.

to be continued...