THE GIFTS
It seemed fitting that at this point in my story of Phoebe, Gramps called out, “I-dee-ho!” We were high in the mountains and had just crossed the Montana border into Idaho. For the first time, I believed we were going to make it to Lewiston by the next day, the twentieth of August, my mother’s birthday.
Gramps suggested we press on to Coeur d’Alene, about an hour away, where we could spend the night. From there, Lewiston was about a hundred miles due south, an easy morning’s journey. “How does that sound to you, gooseberry?” Gram was still, her head pressed against the back of the seat and her hands folded in her lap. “Gooseberry?”
When Gram spoke, you could hear the rattle in her chest. “Oh, that’s fine,” she said.
“Gooseberry, are you feeling okay?”
“I’m a little tired,” she said.
“We’ll get you to a bed real soon.” Gramps glanced back at me, troubled.
“Gram, if you want to stop now, that would be okay,” I said.
“Oh no,” she said. “I’d like to sleep in Coeur d’Alene tonight. Your momma sent us a postcard from Coeur d’Alene, and on it was a bountiful blue lake.” She coughed a long, rattly cough.
Gramps said, “Okay then, bountiful blue lake, here we come.”
Gram said, “I’m so glad Peeby’s momma came home. I wish your momma could come home too.”
Gramps nodded his head for about five minutes. Then he handed me a tissue and said, “Tell us about Mrs. Partridge. What was she doing leaving a gol-dang envelope on Peeby’s porch?”
?
That’s what Phoebe and I wanted to know. “Did you want something, Mrs. Partridge?” I asked.
She put her hand to her lips. “Hmm,” she said.
Phoebe snatched the envelope and ripped it open. She read the message aloud: “Don’t judge a man until you’ve walked two moons in his moccasins.”
Mrs. Partridge turned to go. “Bye-bye,” she said.
“Mrs. Partridge,” Phoebe called. “We’ve already had this one.”
“I beg your pardon?” Mrs. Partridge said.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Phoebe said. “You’ve been creeping around leaving these things, haven’t you?”
“Did you like them?” Mrs. Partridge said. As she stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, with her head tilted up at us, and that quizzical look on her face, she looked like a mischievous child. “Margaret reads them to me from the paper each day, and when there’s a nice one, I ask her to copy it down. I’m sorry I gave you that one about the moccasins already. My noggin forgot.”
“But why did you bring them here?” Phoebe said.
“I thought they would be grandiful surprises for you—like fortune cookies, only I didn’t have any cookies to put them in. Did you like them anyway?”
Phoebe looked at me for a long minute. Then she went down the steps and said, “Mrs. Partridge, when was it you met my brother?”
“You said you didn’t have a brother,” Mrs. Partridge said.
“I know, but you said you met him. When was that?”
She tapped her head. “Noggin, remember. Let’s see. Some time ago. A week? Two weeks? He came to my house by mistake. He let me feel his face. That’s why I thought he was your brother. He has a similar face. Isn’t that peculible?”
Phoebe said, “No more peculible than most things lately.” As Mrs. Partridge tottered back to her house, Phoebe said, “It’s a peculible world, Sal.” She walked across the grass and spit into the street. She said, “Come on, try it.” I spit into the street. “What do you think?” Phoebe said. We spit again.
It might sound disgusting, but to tell the truth, we got a great deal of pleasure from those spits. I doubt if I ever could explain why that was, but for some reason it seemed the perfect thing to do, and when Phoebe turned around and went into the house, I knew that was the right thing for her to do too.
With the courage of that spit in me, I went to see Margaret Cadaver, and we had a long talk, and that’s when I found out how she met my father. It was painful to talk with her, and I even cried in front of her, but afterward I understood why my father liked to be with her.
Ben was sitting on my front steps when I got home. He said, “I brought you something. It’s out back.” He led me around the side of the house and there, strutting across that little patch of grass, was a chicken. I was never in my life so happy to see a chicken.
Ben said, “I named it, but you can change the name if you want.”
When I asked him what its name was, he leaned forward, and I leaned forward and another kiss happened, a spectacular kiss, a perfect kiss, and Ben said, “Its name is Blackberry.”
?
“Oh,” Gram said, “is that the end of the Peeby story?”
“Yes,” I said. That wasn’t quite true, I suppose, as I could have told more. I could have told about Phoebe getting adjusted to having a brother, and to her “new” mother, and all of that, but that part was still going on, even as we traveled through the mountains. It was a whole different story.
“I liked that story about Peeby, and I’m glad it wasn’t too awfully sad.”
Gram closed her eyes and for the next hour as Gramps drove toward Coeur d’Alene, he and I listened to her rattly breathing. I watched her lying there so still, so calm. “Gramps,” I whispered. “She looks a little gray, doesn’t she?”
“Yes she does, chickabiddy, yes she does.” He stepped on the gas and we raced toward Coeur d’Alene.
THE OVERLOOK
At Coeur d’Alene, we went straight to the hospital. Gramps had tried to wake Gram when he saw the lake. “Gooseberry?” Gramps said. She slumped sideways on the seat. “Gooseberry?”
The doctors said Gram had had a stroke. Gramps insisted on being with her while she underwent tests, though an intern had tried to dissuade him. “She’s unconscious,” the intern said. “She won’t know whether you’re here or not.”
“Sonny, I’ve been by her side for fifty-one years, except for three days when she left me for the egg man. I’m holding on to her hand, see? If you want me to let go, you’ll have to chop my hand off.”
They let him stay with her. While I was waiting in the lobby, a man came in with an old beagle. The receptionist told him he would have to leave the dog outside. “By herself?” the man said.
I said, “I’ll watch her. I had a dog just like her once.” I took the old beagle outside, and when I sat down on the grass, the beagle put her head in my lap and murmured in that special way dogs have. Gramps calls it a dog’s purr.
I wondered if Gram’s snake bite had anything to do with her stroke, and if Gramps felt guilty for whizzing off the highway and stopping at that river. If we hadn’t gone to that river, Gram would never have been bitten by that snake. And then I started thinking about my mother’s stillborn baby and maybe if I hadn’t climbed that tree and if my mother hadn’t carried me, maybe the baby would have lived and my mother never would have gone away, and everything would still be as it used to be.
But as I sat there thinking these things, it occurred to me that a person couldn’t stay all locked up in the house like Phoebe and her mother had tried to do at first. A person had to go out and do things and see things, and I wondered, for the first time, if this had something to do with Gram and Gramps taking me on this trip.
The beagle in my lap was just like our Moody Blue. I rubbed her head and prayed for Gram. I thought about Moody Blue’s litter of puppies. For the first week, Moody Blue wouldn’t let anyone come anywhere near those puppies. She licked them clean and nuzzled them. They squealed and pawed their way up to her with their eyes still sealed.
Gradually, Moody Blue let us touch the puppies, but she kept her sharp eyes on us, and if we tried to take a puppy out of her sight, she growled. Within a few weeks, the puppies were stumbling away from her, and Moody Blue spent her days herding them back, but when they were about six weeks old, Moody Blue started ignoring them. She snapped at them and pushed them away. I told my mother that Moody Blue was being terrible. “She hates her puppies.”
“It’s not terrible,” my mother said. “It’s normal. She’s weaning them from her.”
“Does she have to do that? Why can’t they stay with her?”
“It isn’t good for her or for them. They have to become independent. What if something happened to Moody Blue? They wouldn’t know how to survive without her.”
While I prayed for Gram outside the hospital, I wondered if my mother’s trip to Idaho was like Moody Blue’s behavior. Maybe part of it was for my mother and part of it was for me.
When the beagle’s owner returned, I went back inside. It was after midnight when a nurse told me I could see Gram. She was lying, still and gray, on the bed. A little dribble was coming out of one side of her mouth. Gramps was leaning over her, whispering in her ear. A nurse said, “I don’t think she can hear you.”
“Of course she can hear me,” Gramps said. “She’ll always be able to hear me.”
Gram’s eyes were closed. Wires were attached to her chest and to a monitor, and a tube was taped to her hand. I wanted to hold her and wake her up. Gramps said, “We’re gonna be here a while, chickabiddy.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out his car keys. “Here, in case you need anything from the car.” He handed me a crumpled wad of money. “In case you need it.”
“I don’t want to leave Gram,” I said.
“Heck,” he said. “She doesn’t want you sitting around this old hospital. You just whisper in her ear if you want to tell her anything, and then you go do what you have to do. We’re not going anywhere, your grandmother and I. We’ll be right here.” He winked at me. “You be careful, chickabiddy.”
I leaned over and whispered in Gram’s ear and then I left. In the car, I studied the map, leaned back in the seat, and closed my eyes. Gramps knew what I was going to do.
The key was cold in my hand. I studied the map again. One curvy road ran direct from Coeur d’Alene to Lewiston. I started the car, backed it up, drove around the parking lot, stopped, and turned off the engine. I counted the money in my pocket and looked at the map once more.
In the course of a lifetime, there were some things that mattered.
Although I was terrified when I drove out of the parking lot, once I was on the highway, I felt better. I drove slowly, and I knew how to do it. I prayed to every passing tree, and there were a thumping lot of trees along the way.
It was a narrow, winding road, without traffic. It took me four hours to drive the hundred miles from Coeur d’Alene to the top of Lewiston Hill—which, to me, was more of a mountain than a hill. I pulled into the overlook at the top. In the valley far below was Lewiston, with the Snake River winding through it. Between me and Lewiston was the treacherous road with its hairpin turns that twisted back and forth down the mountain.
I peered over the rail, looking for the bus that I knew was still somewhere down there on the side of the mountain, but I couldn’t see it. “I can do this,” I said to myself over and over. “I can do this.”
I eased the car back onto the road. At the first curve, my heart started thumping. My palms were sweating and slippery on the wheel. I crept along with my foot on the brake, but the road doubled back so sharply and plunged so steeply that even with my foot on the brake, the car was going faster than I wanted it to. When I came out of that curve, I was in the outside lane, the one nearest to the side of the cliff. It was a sharp drop down, with only a thin cable strung between occasional posts to mark the edge of the road.
Back and forth across the hill the road snaked. For a half mile, I was on the inside against the hill and felt safer, and then I came to one of those awful curves, and for the next half mile I was on the outside, and the dark slide of the hillside stretched down, down, down. Back and forth I went: a half mile safe, a curve, a half mile edging the side of the cliff.
Halfway down was another overlook, a thin extra lane marked off less as an opportunity to gaze at the scenery, I thought, than to allow drivers a chance to stop and gather their wits. I wondered how many people had abandoned their cars at this point and walked the remaining miles down. As I stood looking over the side, another car pulled into the overlook. A man got out and stood near me, smoking a cigarette. “Where are the others?” he asked.
“What others?”
“Whoever’s with you. Whoever’s driving.”
“Oh,” I said. “Around—”
“Taking a pee, eh?” he said, referring, I gathered, to whoever was supposedly with me. “A helluva road to be driving at night, isn’t it? I do it every night. I work up in Pullman and live down there—” He pointed to the lights of Lewiston and the black river. “You been here before?” he said.
“No.”
“See that?” He pointed to a spot somewhere below.
I peered into the darkness. Then I saw the severed treetops and the rough path cut through the brush. At the end of this path I could see something shiny and metallic reflecting the moonlight. It was the one thing I had been looking for.
“A bus went off the road here—a year or more ago,” he said. “Skidded right there, coming out of that last turn, and went sliding into this here overlook and on through the railing and rolled over and over into those trees. A helluva thing. When I came home that night, rescuers were still hacking their way through the brush to get to it. Only one person survived, ya know?”
I knew.
THE BUS AND THE WILLOW
When the man drove off, I crawled beneath the railing and made my way down the hill toward the bus. In the east the sky was smoky gray, and I was glad for the approaching dawn. In the year and a half since the trail was hacked out, the brush had begun to grow back. Wet with dew, straggly branches slapped and scratched at my legs and hid uneven ground so that several times I tripped, tumbling and sliding downward.
The bus lay on its side like an old sick horse, its broken headlights staring out mournfully into the surrounding trees. Most of the huge rubber tires were punctured and grotesquely twisted on their axles. I climbed up onto the bus’s side, hoping to make my way down to an open window, but there were two enormous gashes torn into the side, and the jagged metal was peeled back like a sardine tin. Through a smashed window behind the driver’s seat, I saw a jumbled mess of twisted seats and chunks of foam rubber. Everything was dusted over with fuzzy, green mold.
I had imagined that I would drop through a window and walk down the aisle, but there was no space inside to move. I had wanted to scour every inch of the bus, looking for something—anything—that might be familiar.
By now the sky was pale pink, and it was easier to find the uphill trail, but harder going as it was a steep incline. By the time I reached the top, I was muddy and scratched from head to toe. It wasn’t until I had crawled beneath the railing that I noticed the car parked behind Gramps’s red Chevrolet.
It was the sheriff. He was talking on his radio when he saw me, and he motioned for his deputy to get out. The deputy said, “We were just about to come down there after you. We saw you up on top of the bus. You kids ought to know better. What were you doing down there at this time of day, anyway?”
Before I could answer, the sheriff climbed out of his car. He settled his hat on his head and shifted his holster. “Where are the others?” he said.
“There aren’t any others,” I said.
“Who brought you up here?”
“I brought myself.”
“Whose car is this?”
“My grandfather’s.”
“And where is he?” The sheriff glanced to left and right, as if Gramps might be hiding in the bushes.
“He’s in Coeur d’Alene.”
The sheriff said, “Pardon?”
So I told him about Gram and about how Gramps had to stay with her and about how I had driven from Coeur d’Alene very carefully.
The sheriff said, “Now let me get this straight,” and he repeated everything I said, ending with, “and you’re telling me that you drove from Coeur d’Alene to this spot on this hill all by yourself?”
“Very carefully,” I said. “My gramps taught me how to drive, and he taught me to drive very carefully.”
The sheriff said to the deputy, “I am afraid to ask this young lady exactly how old she is. Why don’t you ask her?”
The deputy said, “How old are you?” I told him. The sheriff gave me a stern look and said, “I don’t suppose you would mind telling me exactly what was so all-fired important that you couldn’t wait for someone with a legitimate driver’s license to bring you to the fair city of Lewiston?”
And so I told him all the rest. When I had finished, he returned to his car and talked into his radio some more. Then he told me to get in his car and he told the deputy to follow in Gramps’s car. I thought the sheriff was probably going to put me in jail, and it wasn’t the thought of jail that bothered me so much. It was knowing that I was this close and might not be able to do what I had come to do, and it was knowing that I needed to get back to Gram.
He did not take me to jail, however. He drove across the bridge into Lewiston and on through the city and up a hill. He drove into Longwood, stopped at the caretaker’s house, and went inside. Behind us was the deputy in Gramps’s car. The caretaker came out and pointed off to the right, and the sheriff got back in the car and drove off in that direction.
It was a pleasant place. The Snake River curved behind this section, and tall, full-leaved trees grew here and there across the lawn. The sheriff parked the car and led me up a path toward the river, and there, on a little hill overlooking the river and the valley, was my mother’s grave.
On the tombstone, beneath her name and the dates of her birth and death, was an engraving of a maple tree, and it was only then, when I saw the stone and her name—Chanhassen “Sugar” Pickford Hiddle—and the engraving of the tree, that I knew, by myself and for myself, that she was not coming back. I asked if I could sit there for a little while, because I wanted to memorize the place. I wanted to memorize the grass and the trees, the smells and the sounds.
In the midst of the still morning, with only the sound of the river gurgling by, I heard a bird. It was singing a birdsong, a true, sweet birdsong. I looked all around and then up into the willow that leaned toward the river. The birdsong came from the top of the willow and I did not want to look too closely, because I wanted it to be the tree that was singing.
I kissed the willow. “Happy birthday,” I said.
In the sheriff’s car, I said, “She isn’t actually gone at all. She’s singing in the trees.”
“Whatever you say, Miss Salamanca Hiddle.”
“You can take me to jail now.”