Forgive the River, Forgive the Sky Page 2

  I was drifting along the river, thinking of all those times Dad and I had fished. The afternoon sun lit up the water so I could see the ripples of sand and the bright stones on the river bottom. As the boat rounded the bend, I noticed one of the men who had been putting up the fence. I didn’t recognize him, so he wasn’t a local. He must have been from some downstate construction company. He was pounding a row of cedar logs into the river bottom. The logs were like a stockade shutting off T. R. Tracy’s landing.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I screeched at him.

  He looked at me like I was something that had crawled up from the river bottom. “What I’m paid to do. Give the guy a little privacy.”

  “If you leave those stakes in, they’ll change the course of the river. Anyhow, they look terrible.”

  “That’s none of my business. And I’d guess it’s none of yours.” He began pounding again.

  I turned my canoe around and headed upriver toward town. There was no way I was going to let those logs stay there. I felt like a vampire must feel when some busybody drives a stake through its heart. It’s true I was angry with the river, but I still couldn’t let anything bad happen to it.

  Two nights later I was back with a rubber mallet in my canoe. You have to understand about the river at night. It’s not just a straight shot downstream. There are sandbars where you can get stuck and stumps in the middle of the river below water level that can knock a hole in your boat. There are sharp bends where the current takes you where you don’t want to go. Worst of all are the sweepers, dead trees that lean out over the river. If you don’t see them, they can sweep you into the water.

  Even though I know every inch of the river, Mom doesn’t like me to take the canoe out alone at night. But I knew she would never find out because it was Midnight Madness in Rivertown. The Chamber of Commerce had planned a night when all the stores were open until midnight and had big sales going on. Mom said it was too late for me to be up, so she got Ben Baker to help her. He’s a deputy sheriff and has eight kids, so he always needs extra money. Mom was at the store thinking I was safe in bed. I eased the canoe into the river and headed for Mr. Tracy’s. In spite of a bright moon, it was hard to see. The day had been steamy hot, but the river never stands still, so it’s always cold. That meant there was a fog over the river. Dad called it “a dance of veils.”

  An animal was moving along the shore, maybe a raccoon after crayfish or a fox nosing around for ducklings. There was a caddis hatch on, and clouds of fish flies were sneaking out of the water to try their wings. A bat was swinging through the air like a trapeze artist, gulping down the flies.

  Because of the fog, it took me extra long to reach the cabin. I was relieved to see everything was dark. The river was shallow at the landing, only up to my knees. I tied my boat up to a tree and waded into the freezing river. I started to pry one of the logs free, giving it some swings with the mallet. Because the mallet was rubber, it hardly made any noise. After a few whacks the log loosened. I yanked it free and gave it a push down the river. One after another I loosened the logs. It took nearly an hour. As the last one floated away, I heard a noise. When I looked up, I saw a light go on and a door open. A flashlight swept over me. A second later I had the canoe untied and was paddling upriver as fast as I could. I started worrying about what I had done. I remembered the warning my dad used to give me: “Don’t just do something, Lily, stand there.”

  I made it home and under the covers only minutes before Mom got there. I called out to let her know I was awake. She came into my bedroom, flung herself into a chair, and stretched out her legs. “As far as I’m concerned, the next time the Chamber of Commerce thinks up something like this, they can stay up all night themselves and do the selling. I broke another nail, and right in the middle of the rush Ben got a call from Sheriff Bronson and had to take off. The sheriff wanted Ben to go out on a call. Evidently something was going on at our old place. I can’t imagine what it was.”

  “Who called the sheriff?”

  “The mysterious Mr. Tracy.”

  “Did Ben say what was wrong?” My heart was pounding so hard I wondered if Mom could see my chest bumping the covers up and down.

  “Some sort of vandalism. We certainly never had anything like that when we lived there.”

  “He shouldn’t have put a fence up.”

  “No. I’m sure that made him enemies. Still, that doesn’t excuse breaking the law. After all, it’s his land to do with as he pleases. Now you better go back to sleep. Pleasant dreams, sweetie.”

  My dreams weren’t pleasant. I dreamed I was in prison and the Bad Hads were the jailers and wouldn’t give me anything to eat but dog biscuits.

  3

  It was halfway through June, and I wanted to see the moccasin flowers on our land before they were done blooming. They’re my favorite. So I borrowed a wire cutter from the store and took off. The last of the fence was up, and there was a lock on the gate. That meant that I could never walk over the land that I had grown up on, land that Dad and I had walked over hundreds of times. I picked a section of the fence hidden behind a thicket of blackberry briars and tried to cut a hole in it. I wasn’t getting very far. I didn’t have the strength to cut through the heavy wire. I was squeezing away and sort of grunting when I heard a whirring sound. It was like the noise a ruffed grouse makes when it flies up. Suddenly there was this man in an electric wheelchair making for me a mile a minute. I was so startled I couldn’t even run.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing?”

  I looked through the fence at the man’s angry face and froze. The problem I have is that I can’t lie. Whenever anyone asks me something, even if I don’t mean to, I tell the truth. “I was trying to cut a hole in your fence.”

  “I can see that. What I want to know is why.” He was plenty mad.

  “So I can crawl through.”

  “If I find you anywhere near my property again, inside or outside the fence, I’ll call the sheriff on you.” Suddenly he looked more closely at me. “I recognize you. You’re the girl who knocked down my stakes. I’ve got a good notion to have you locked up. I didn’t move two hundred miles from the city to have juvenile delinquents swarming over my land.”

  By now I was getting as angry as he was. “I’m not a juvenile delinquent.”

  “Just who are you, then?”

  “My dad and his family owned this land for a long time before you did. My great-grandfather lived here when he worked for a logging camp.”

  “You must be Irene Star’s girl. I bought this land from your mother, and I paid a good price for it. You don’t have any business here.”

  He had sort of calmed down, so I wasn’t afraid to look at him. He was about my dad’s age. If he had been standing instead of sitting in a wheelchair, he would have been tall. He was fishbelly pale with short black hair and eyes the color of a blue jay. He had a sort of dazed look, like he’d walked from a dark room into the sunlight.

  “This property has never been fenced,” I said. “Why do you want to shut people out?”

  “I’m not shutting people out. I’m shutting myself in. Now do me a favor and clear out.”

  I slunk away, but the next day I was back with my dad’s binoculars and a new notebook that cost me seventy-five cents. I was going to write down every suspicious thing I saw. I hid behind a couple of pine trees, where I could keep an eye on the cabin. I’d decided the Bad Hads and Laura were probably right. T. R. Tracy was some kind of dangerous character hiding out from the law.

  Sure enough. The door to the cabin opened, and the man wheeled himself out. He had binoculars that he trained on the sky. About half an hour from Rivertown there’s this training base for the National Guard. Their planes fly over the town all the time. I watched T. R. Tracy through my binoculars watching the planes through his binoculars. He was making notes. I made notes about his making notes. Maybe he was going to sell information about the planes to our enemies, whoever they were. I don’t
keep up with that international stuff where everyone’s shooting at everyone else.

  Just then a pileated woodpecker landed on the pine tree next to me and started hammering away like crazy. T. R. Tracy swung around, and the next thing I knew we were looking at each other through our binoculars. He wheeled over to the fence. I should have run, but I just stood there with my mouth open.

  “You might as well come out. I can see you. What do you think you’re doing? Just why are you spying on me?”

  “Why are you spying on the planes?”

  “I’m not spying. I happen to be interested in planes.”

  I remembered how Laura had said there were lots of model planes in the cabin. He looked at the expression on my face and laughed. “O.K., Mata Hari,” he said. I guess Mata Hari was some kind of famous spy lady. “I’ll show you what I’m talking about.” He unlocked the gate and motioned me to follow him into the cabin.

  I was a little scared, but curiosity got the best of me. The cabin was just the way Laura described it — empty except for what he needed just to live. There were planes, large ones and small ones, scattered around the room and hanging from the ceiling. “Aren’t you a little old for model planes?” I asked.

  “These aren’t the kind of planes you buy in a kit. I make them from scratch, and they’re one of a kind.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, look at the shape of this one’s wings.”

  The plane had a kind of kink in its wings that made it look like an osprey when it flies. I could see the planes were carefully made. They weren’t just crafts like Laura does. They were more like something you’d see in a museum if there were museums for model planes. “You’re not a spy or a criminal or anything?”

  “Of course not. Whatever gave you that idea?”

  “Well, it looked like you were hiding out.”

  “I just don’t want to get involved with people.” His voice got a little angry. “What’s the matter with my wanting a little privacy?”

  “Well, there are things I ought to be keeping track of here. Since you put your fence up, I can’t.”

  “You mean you want to keep track of something besides me?”

  “A lot of things. I don’t even know if the beavers still have their lodge in the pond or if the loon is back on its nest.”

  He gave me a long look, like he was rereading something in a book he didn’t understand the first time around. “I guess losing your father and then this land was hard. I’ve had a little bad luck myself. I’ll tell you what. Since you used to live here, you can have a key to the lock on the gate, but you’re not to give it to anyone else.”

  When he handed me the key, I was too startled even to thank him. He grinned at me and said, “I’ll tell you something. I waited until you had a chance to get away the other night before I called the sheriff.” He turned on the motor of his wheelchair and whizzed away, leaving me with my mouth open.

  I didn’t want to push my luck by tramping over his land right away, so I waited a whole day. I couldn’t wait any longer than that because I knew the moccasin flowers would be gone. I didn’t want to miss them.

  As I walked down the driveway, Mr. Tracy wheeled down the path to meet me. “You want to see some flowers?” I asked.

  “No. I couldn’t care less about flowers.”

  “If you don’t care about what’s on your land, why did you come here?”

  “Because it’s nowhere.”

  I wondered what the Rivertown Chamber of Commerce would think about that. “Have you always been in a wheelchair?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you in one now?”

  “Because I can’t use my legs.”

  “What kind of work did you do before the accident?”

  “You ask too many questions.” With that he whirred away.

  The moccasin flowers were on the riverbank about a quarter of a mile from the house. The blossoms are a rosy pink and all puffed up, with hundreds of tiny veins crisscrossing them like little roads. Some people call them lady slippers, but I call them moccasin flowers. I like to think of Indians along the river. A long time ago the Indians used rivers like expressways to travel across the state on their way from Lake Huron to Lake Michigan. The Indians kept to the river, and the river fed them: crayfish, grayling, trout, duck, and beaver. I’ve even found arrowheads in the sand. Dad used to say the reason the river chatters so much is that it has so many stories to tell.

  I had my shoes off and was wading in the river. I could feel the swift current sweeping the sand from under my feet in a way that tickled. As I reached for some watercress to chew for its peppery taste, I saw a bright red gleam on the riverbank. At first I thought it might be some sort of flower, but when I got closer I discovered it was a scarlet tanager. You see scarlet tanagers flashing through the trees like little flames. I had never seen one close up. It was bright red all over except for its black wings. All huddled down in the grass it looked dead, but when I picked it up, it fluttered in my hand. I was so startled I nearly dropped it.

  I could see right away what was wrong. It had a fish hook with an artificial fly stuck right through its beak. The fish hook was attached to the fine thread of a leader. Someone must have been casting for trout, and the tanager saw the fly in the air and not the fishline. When the bird snatched at the fly, the hook caught it. The fisherman must have panicked and cut his line. With the hook in its bill, the bird was starving to death.

  I stuck my wet feet into my shoes and took off with the bird cradled in my hands. Five minutes later I was running up a ramp and pounding on T. R. Tracy’s door. He opened the door with an angry look. “What do you want now? What are you doing with that dead bird?”

  “It’s not dead. Honest.”

  I think he was ready to slam the door in my face. “When I gave you permission to come here, I didn’t expect you to make a nuisance of yourself.”

  “The bird isn’t dead. But if you keep shouting at me, it’ll die of fright. It’s got a hook in its mouth. We’ve got to get the hook out and give it some food. It’s starving.”

  I guess Mr. Tracy finally realized how upset I was. He calmed down and looked more closely at the bird. “I’ve never seen a bird like that. What do you call it?”

  “It’s a scarlet tanager. Are you going to do something?”

  He sighed. “All right. Just this once. Let me get a clippers.” He whirred away and was back in a minute. Gently he took the bird from me and snipped off the hook’s barb, then drew the hook out of the bird’s beak. The bird rested in his hand, making only a few fluttering movements. “It might be better just to let the bird die,” he said. There was a sort of sad, faraway look on his face. He turned to me. “Now what?”

  “You need to mix egg with a little pabulum and give it to the bird with an eye dropper.”

  His eyebrows went up. “How do you know that?”

  “My dad raised some birds once from a nest in a tree that had been cut down.”

  “Fine. You take it home and do that.” Mr. Tracy started to push me toward the door.

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean you can’t?”

  “You have to feed the bird every hour or so, and Mom works at the hardware store, and so do I a lot of the time. But I’ve got my bike. I could go to the store and get the pabulum. I could pay for it, Mr. Tracy.”

  Mr. Tracy gave me a twisty smile, with one corner of his mouth turned down and the other up. It looked as though only half of him wanted to smile. “You win,” he said. He reached into his pocket and handed me some money. “If the bird is to be a guest in my house, I’ll be responsible for its keep. And call me T.R.”

  That afternoon I told Mom about T.R. and how he was taking care of the bird, and wouldn’t you know she thought I was “imposing.” She thinks things have to be completely equal between people. What I mean is she keeps score. If someone does something for you, you have to do something back right away. You can’t wait. I just figure eventual
ly it will all even out.

  Anyhow, a couple of days later Mom baked one of her blueberry coffee cakes and took off for T.R.’s. But I don’t think she did it just to pay him back. I think she wanted to see who it was I was spending time with.

  When she came back, she said, “It felt so odd seeing someone else living there, Lily. But I’m glad it’s T.R. He was very friendly, and we had a nice talk. Only he didn’t have much to say about himself, and I didn’t want to pry. He seemed so alone I asked him to have dinner with us one night. He looked like he could use a good home-cooked meal.” If there’s anything Mom likes more than keeping everything even between people, it’s being one up on them.

  The next afternoon when I was finished at the store, I stopped in to see how the tanager was doing. “That mother of yours is a first-class cook,” T.R. said. His mouth was stuffed with blueberry coffee cake.

  The tanager had started flopping around in a zippy way. T.R. kept the bird in a box on a table. Spread out on the table were parts for his model airplanes. When I asked what he was working on, he got so quiet and sad-looking I changed the subject. “Do you listen to the river at night?” I asked.

  “I’m too busy reading or thinking at night.”

  “Don’t you sleep?”

  He sort of barked at me. “I would if I could but I can’t.”

  “You ought to try listening to the river. It always helped me go to sleep.”

  By the end of the week, the tanager was strong enough to fly. T.R. and I took his box outside and put him on the grass. At first he wobbled a little. In a few minutes he was flapping his wings. We held our breath. The tanager skittered across the grass like it was a runway. It lifted a little and fell down, skittered some more, and was up in the air. It landed on a low branch and then hopped up onto a higher one. It rested there for a minute, then flew out of sight.