Free Verse Read online

  “He knocked the baby out of her high chair.”

  At that, Phyllis stopped, a shudder going through her like she just plain couldn’t figure out how she was going to manage one more child with her current number of hands. “Is the baby all right?”

  “No thanks to him!” Shirley was coming unglued completely. Her voice was pitched shrill and she didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands. They fluttered around her throat, then stretched out toward us through the air. I could see them shaking. I wondered if she would remember this later, because I recognized in her the same out-of-control that I’d been more than once, and I didn’t always remember everything later.

  “I didn’t mean to!” Mikey hiccupped. “I was . . . I was just running—I didn’t want the TV—” He stopped. “Dad didn’t come home!”

  “There’s been another one,” Shirley said at last, something about her voice making all of us feel cold.

  • • •

  There’s a doctor stitching my hand, so I can’t write. I have to do it in my head.

  I think:

  Something bad happened

  at the Dogwood Number Six.

  Hubert’s not home yet.

  But this doesn’t explain what really happened, so I write:

  Fire

  and smoke

  block rescuers from

  telling us the truth

  tonight.

  But I haven’t followed the rules, and this is not a true cinquain.

  So I write:

  Mikey got upset.

  He tried to run, didn’t mean

  to hurt the baby.

  But this doesn’t explain that the baby fell. That Mikey knocked her out of her high chair. He wasn’t trying to hurt Marla. He was trying to run from the house before the TV man could say what happened.

  So I write:

  Shirley lost her head.

  She’s worried about Hubert.

  I guess she loves him.

  I wish I knew what to say to Mikey. He’s sitting in the corner of the exam room with his knees pulled up to his chest, looking small, small, small.

  • • •

  In the dark night, Mikey’s house is lit. Nobody’s been to bed. The same lights are on as when we left. Shirley’s pacing, holding Marla, who is screaming, red-faced, and trying to get down. Shirley doesn’t seem to notice, but she’s patting the baby’s back with each step. Sara’s on the porch boards, wearing only a diaper, running a three-legged toy horse back and forth. She makes it jump the cracks.

  Hubert might not come back.

  The thought steals my breath. Hubert’s scrub-brush beard and his crinkled, kind eyes might be gone forever from my life and from Mikey’s. I don’t want Mikey to hear the news. I don’t want me to hear the news. After the call comes, everything will be different. Everything will be darker. I’ve waited for this sort of news before. Sometimes it seems like I’ll always be waiting for phone calls in the dark.

  • • •

  Mikey stays over. Nobody suggests that he go inside with Shirley. He doesn’t talk to me and Phyllis about what happened. We wait, but the headlights never arc across my window like they do when Hubert comes in after dark. We don’t admit we’re waiting. We just keep staring at the window.

  Phyllis and I sing to Mikey. He’s outgrown songs at bedtime, but he tolerates us with a tired smile too old for nine. We work our way through all of Phyllis’s standby favorites: Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, a Beatles song or two. Then all her old folk songs. So many of them are sad. She stops halfway through my mother’s song, like she’s just realized it’s the same one that led me to break her guitar. But I meet her eyes and keep singing. It seems so long ago, that day I broke the guitar. It was only three months ago, only three months since I moved into Phyllis’s house, but in the days since, there’s been Mikey and there’s been Phyllis and there’s been poetry club, and everything’s been better.

  It was a trick; it was all a trick. I can see it now. I started to relax and then something awful happened. I understand my mother’s song now. When Phyllis pauses, I keep singing “A Bird in a Gilded Cage,” and after a few lines, she joins me again. It’s all about being trapped and unhappy, and the only way out is to die. That must have been how my mother felt, trapped in a place where nothing ever really changes.

  I hold Mikey tight as we sing. That will not be our escape. Not like Ben and Michael and maybe Hubert. I’ll make sure we have a chance to grow up outside this cage. I won’t get tricked again into staying.

  We fall asleep after three and get woken up by the ringing, like the sound in your ears after you fall. The lights are still on, and we are all propped on the same bed like throw pillows. When Phyllis leaves to answer the phone, the room starts to seem smaller, the walls close, the lights dim. Mikey looks at me and doesn’t speak. It seems stupid of us to just sit here and wait.

  As dawn breaks, before Phyllis has a chance to come and tell us the news, I take Mikey and we leave this place.

  17

  Yesterday was late May, and today is late May, but the difference between yesterday and today is the difference between a blizzard and a summer-day picnic. The whole heavy world is pressing down on us, and Mikey keeps stumbling. I pull him up by his arm over and over again. I won’t let him fall.

  • • •

  It takes half a day in the woods to realize I’m completely useless. I’ve never learned how to hunt, fish, gather, scavenge, keep myself alive off the land. I’ve never learned how to hike, navigate, trailblaze. No one ever taught me how to scale a rock cliff or comfort a child. I don’t know the first thing about making clothing out of plant fibers.

  Mikey rips his jeans in two places in the first hour. He had a run-in with a creek bed. He’s wet and muddy. His underwear is showing. I didn’t think to pack us clothing. I brought the suitcase with the money, but I didn’t think to put clothing in it. I’ve packed an empty suitcase.

  We drink from the creek, which tastes like coal smells. I remember that we have to drink, or when they catch us, they’ll send us to the hospital. I can feel the stitches making my right hand itch, and I’d just as soon not go back to the hospital again.

  I’m not Phyllis—I can’t manage singing at a time like this. But I think Mikey needs to hear my voice. I guess I know that the same way Phyllis always knows when I need egg salad at four a.m. So I recite poetry while we walk. I tell him Anthony’s best poems. I tell him Lisa’s bad poetry, which would make him giggle if he wasn’t crying. I tell him my Mr. Powell poems and my Michael and Ben and Judy poems and my bird poems. I tell him new poems I make up about the brambles and the coal creek and the walking.

  “Coal,

  black, invisible,

  lives all over.

  Can’t get away from

  it.”

  And:

  “Here in the black creek,

  water comes and water goes.

  So do you and I.”

  And:

  “Walking.

  Slow steps.

  Picking through brambles.

  Someday we’ll get there.

  Wherever.”

  We eat a million skimpy strawberries. Mikey doesn’t speak all morning, and I keep telling poetry, keep praying poetry.

  • • •

  It was Michael’s job to make the escape plan, and he did, but now he’s gone and his plan won’t work because it involved a car and grown-ups and college scholarships. So now it’s my job to make the plan. If we follow the creek, we’ll hit Route 10 between Bent Tree and Dower’s Fork. From there, we can quit following the creek, with its briar bushes and mosquitos, and start following the road. The road will take us out of the county, and that, for the moment, is enough of a plan. We aren’t so much going to somewhere as we are coming from somewhere. Behind us are sad things. Boxes in sheds and phones that r
ing in the night. Fires that take away brothers and coal mines that take away fathers and mothers that go away. Up ahead are the things Michael promised. A different sort of life.

  • • •

  At first, I miss Phyllis terribly. I pick at the bandage on my hand. I think about how she sang for me while the stitches went in. I’m ashamed to have left without buying her a GUI-tar. But after night has come and gone, after we’ve walked till I can’t think of anything but walking, thoughts of Phyllis and of Hubert—thoughts of all of Caboose—are like the flowers in Town Center that blew away. All that remains is a faint scent, like rotting fruit, and a memory too vague to pick out specific kinds of flowers. All you know is there were petals. All you know is you have left them.

  • • •

  Following a creek through the woods on a West Virginia mountain is easier said than done. Our creeks aren’t polite. They spill sideways down rock cliffs. They churn and worry. They wear a path through solid rock.

  And our foliage. Isn’t that what people call it? I call it brambles. I call it briars. We’re both scratched and sweaty. Mikey winds ahead of me, and branches slap backward to hit me in the face. I’ve been out of breath all day.

  Phyllis—who has become one of the voices in my head—says I should think positive. And I do. I’m positive I am about to die of a heart attack. I’ve spent three months lying on my back on worn porch boards. I’m not in shape for hiking.

  There are words and phrases stuck in my head. Now that I’ve been reciting poetry, the floodgates in my brain are open and words are filling me up. Words like escape and flee and run.

  Mikey complains that he is too tired to go on.

  I’ve got to get us to the road.

  18

  The creek takes us to the bridge and the bridge takes us to the highway and the highway takes us to the town of Dower’s Fork, where I stop at Gas-Quik and fill the suitcase with bread and peanut butter, crackers and cakes. I remember to buy bottles of water that won’t taste like coal. Now the suitcase is heavy.

  My original plan was only to get us out of Caboose, and here we are in Dower’s Fork, someplace new. But Dower’s Fork feels the same as Caboose, gray and gritty. I want us to end up someplace clean and fresh, someplace that doesn’t smell like coal or floodwaters, someplace where the headlines aren’t so sad. I’m not completely crazy. I know it won’t be easy, just the two of us kids on our own. But we’re strong, me and Mikey. We can make it work. We can find someplace dry and warm to stay, and I can do odd jobs for other people instead of Hubert. I can save money and we can buy clean clothes that make us look older, and we can enroll in school again and study hard until it’s time for college.

  Me and Mikey both will be going to college. I’ve decided. It’s what Michael always wanted for me, and as for Mikey, well . . . I’m not going to let another Michael Harless miss out on seeing the world.

  The sides of the highway are chipping. The pavement is cracking. We keep our heads down. We catch ourselves trying not to step on the cracks.

  Mikey doesn’t speak, and I’ve run out of poetry. I’m trying to make up new poems, but I can’t remember the forms. Poetry club is at school. We’re walking in the other direction. I’m out of range of poetry club.

  • • •

  I think of hitchhikers. I think of those people in movies who hop into train cars. I think of how hot-wiring might work. I study the tired horses we pass in a crooked pasture by the road.

  I’m not as brave as I want to be. We walk.

  • • •

  It’s night. The kind with no stars. Then it’s morning. The kind with red sunrise.

  • • •

  Dawn and the thunderstorm break at around the same time. Mikey’s broken, too. He’s sniffling. Tears drip off the end of his pointy chin. His lip juts out like a much smaller child’s, and I wish I wasn’t too tired to scoop him up to carry. He’s scared. He’s tired. He wants his daddy. He wants to go home.

  I can’t let us turn around. I can’t let us give in to being tired and scared. There’s nothing left behind us but bad news.

  I tell him, “I know there’s a home for us up ahead.” I know he knows I’m lying, but neither of us says it.

  He doesn’t want to walk, so I pull him. I feed him peanut butter and pour the water into him. I feed him dusty strawberries growing too close to the road. A field opens up beyond the berries, and I know we’ve made tracks. There are no open fields down our way. There are only steep cliffs and filthy trees and twisting roads.

  I tell him, “We’re almost there.” He doesn’t ask where. I don’t tell him what I know: we’re in the middle of nowhere. Wherever there is, we won’t see it for days. This is maybe the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. But my feet refuse to turn us around. We can’t go back. We can’t go back.

  Mikey is stained pink from the strawberries. His tears make clean tracks through all the pink.

  We fall asleep under the raindrops, out in the open. The grass makes us itch. It’s dusk. The sky leans low. Mikey cuddles up to me. He holds my arm like a teddy bear. He’s so little, here in the grass. I pet his hair like he’s a kitten, and he doesn’t shake me off.

  I tell him, “We have to be there, almost.”

  I tell him, “Hang on another day.”

  Every once in a while, I’m overwhelmed by images of Hubert fixing the porch rail or holding one of the babies or looking lovingly at Mikey without realizing he’s doing it. I feel an ache welling up that only walking will numb.

  I tell Mikey, “We have to hang on another day.”

  • • •

  We hang on another day, and it’s dry. The sun comes out. We’re tired beyond tired. We’re filthy beyond filthy. We are not just walking. We have become walking. There’s nowhere we are going. But it’s good. There’s nowhere we’re coming from. We are simply steps. Step. Step. Step.

  Stepping is getting easier because, away from home, the land gets less steep. The mountains become hills. The hills are dotted with pretty things. Wild carrots. Mayapple. Pale yellow coltsfoot. Not the part of a horse, but the plant. The trees are pretty here, too. They’re not gray. They’re greener than green.

  Morning fades like blue jeans, and the midday sky is pale. Clouds wisp by. Mikey isn’t crying. He breaks the tops off weeds as we walk. He kicks gravel into the road.

  Midday deepens like water, and the evening sky is beautiful. The blue is so blue. The sunlight is orange and thin. We’re walking in a high meadow, grass and flowers all around us. Off to the left are flat-topped mountains with no trees—a strip mine. Ben used to talk about working the strip job, blasting off the tops of mountains to get at the coal underneath. The field we’re walking in might have been a strip mine once, but there are flowers now and open spaces, and the openness makes me feel like I can get a breath for the first time in days.

  Down below us, where the land drops off at the end of the meadow, the trees spring up like a boundary fence and then thin out. The fields give way. There are power poles. There are streetlights blinking on. We’ve made it to a new place.

  My feet slow, then stop altogether. Mikey walks six or eight more steps before he, too, grinds to a halt, blinking at me as if waking from a dream.

  “We did it,” I tell him. It’s the first word either of us has spoken since yesterday.

  “Did what?” His voice sounds scratchy and tired, but familiar and welcome under the blanket of summer bugs and treetop wind.

  “We . . . we got here.”

  “Where?”

  I’m so tired, I’m confused by his question. “Well . . . well, how should I know? Let’s go see.”

  • • •

  The sign says ALLEY RUSH. It’s surprising to end up someplace I already know. I’ve been through it a few times. It’s a town beside a town. If you keep going, you get to bigger places. You get to Hart with all its ho
uses. Way on up, you get to Beckley with its mall. You get to the interstate that takes you to Charleston, and from there you can get anywhere, because Charleston is near everything.

  “We walked six hundred years to get to a place we coulda drove in a half hour?” Mikey asks. He seems less than impressed with my running-away skills, but I’m too distracted to care. I’m so relieved that it makes me shake. We aren’t wandering in the wilderness anymore. I haven’t lost us; I haven’t gotten us killed out in the woods. Then, quick as the relief came, terror sets in. We’re near places now, and I’m not interested in being near anything. I don’t want to get found.

  But Alley Rush is small. Maybe it’s okay to stop here for a while. There are flowers springing up along the streets, so precise I know they were planted. Tame wildflowers—tameflowers?—in groups by color. I don’t see mayapple or wild carrots or coltsfoot. I don’t see anything here that I saw in the woods.

  Mikey says, “Dang.”

  He’s looking at a street vendor opening his stand. The vendor cranks down one cloth sign at a time: HOT DOGS. CHEESEBURGERS. CHOCOLATE-DIPPED FRUIT.

  “Dang,” I echo.

  There is a banner above the city:

  121ST ALLEY RUSH HARDWOOD FESTIVAL

  CARNIVAL! GAMES! PARADE! SHOPPING!

  “We’re just in time,” I say.

  “Caboose has its carnival in a couple weeks,” Mikey said. “I mean, if you were gonna walk that far for a carnival.”

  “Mikey—”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “We didn’t walk to the carnival. We walked to . . . we walked to get somewhere.”

  He shakes his head at the sky as if asking God for patience. It’s one of the mannerisms Mikey learned from Hubert, and it makes my muscles all go tense at the same time. Now that we’re not walking, the loss of my cousin might catch up. I can’t let it.

  “Hey, did I ever tell you about the time my brother and I walked for twenty-four hours straight, just to see if we could?”