Zora and Me Read online

  Zora casually picked up her clothes, shoes, and books. “Who wants to go swimming, anyway?” she said, loud enough so Old Lady Bronson could hear. “There’s lots better things we could do.”

  I agreed. I couldn’t think of any at the moment, but I was glad for an excuse to get away from the Blue Sink. Between Mr. Pendir’s gator head and Old Lady Bronson’s juju, 200 degrees couldn’t make me want to swim there now.

  As we were leaving, we heard cracking twigs and looked up to see Teddy in his overalls, come to find us after his chores.

  “How come y’all ain’t swimming?”

  Zora motioned over her shoulder. “Old Lady Bronson.”

  Teddy needed no more explanation than that and fell in step with us. “Better things to do than swimming, anyways,” he said.

  Zora slowed to a stroll, letting her hands graze the pines on either side of us. “That’s what I just told Carrie. Lots better things.”

  “Such as . . . ?” I asked.

  “Well, there’s always —” Zora looked to Teddy, as if they’d planned that he was going to finish her sentence.

  Teddy seemed so startled by the responsibility that all of us burst out giggling. Then he got a funny look, like he was trying to decide something. “There is one thing. . . .”

  “What?”

  “What?”

  “Mm . . .” He looked back and forth between us. “I might could show you something, but you have to keep it a secret. Folks can’t know about it.”

  The word secret got our immediate attention, and we swore oaths from this life to the next that we would never, ever, on pain of death, reveal whatever it was that Teddy knew but hadn’t yet shared with us.

  “Come on, then.” He took us on the shortcut he always used to get from the farm to Blue Sink, though I never did understand how he followed it because there was no path to follow. The path was in his head; he just knew which spaces to press through.

  “Look out for the bramble,” Teddy said over his shoulder. He looked as serious as a preacher on a Sunday, and the more we begged him to tell us what we were on our way to see, the more serious he became. Still, there was something else in his grave face that made me think he didn’t mind us begging and begging him, that he might even be enjoying it.

  Zora and I couldn’t stop grinning like it was Christmas. Teddy had shared a secret like this before only twice in our lives, and each time it was something that filled us with wonder for weeks. If Teddy thought something was worth keeping secret, then it most surely was.

  Teddy slithered under the twisty trunk of a big fallen cottonwood tree, and we slithered under right after him. Then he spun around to look at us with big eyes, his finger to his lips.

  We froze. Teddy crouched down. We crouched down. Teddy duckwalked over to a chinquapin, and we duckwalked over to it, too. Teddy knelt and pointed through a hole in the branches, cautioning us with another sign for Silence!

  We peered through the branches. Under the starry leaves, a little ways past us — maybe twenty feet or so — there was . . . something. It was dark and bristly and sort of moving. No, not really moving. Sort of . . . shaking? A bear? No, not a bear — it was long but too narrow to be a bear, and it was making a kind of grunty, humming sound.

  I squinched my eyes, and I suddenly knew. It was a razorback! A big mama razorback pig. And what I had thought was her shaking was a squirming litter of at least a dozen piglets, all rooting and snorting and squinking to get at the mama’s teats while she just lay there with her eyes closed, grunting a little every now and then.

  Zora pinched my arm — we were both trying to keep from squealing with pleasure. She was beaming so wide and bright, there was hardly anything left of her face but smile.

  Teddy was still kneeling behind us, grinning like it was his babies all squirming and ernking behind the chinquapin. He just nodded for us to keep looking, and we didn’t need a second nudge. Zora and I kept watching the wondrous sight, poking each other every time one of the piglets got jostled out of place, like one of us might miss it.

  The surprise shouldn’t have surprised me, really, because nobody cared more for animals than Teddy did. He had names for every creature on the farm. Lots of farm kids do that, but Teddy could also tell you about their personalities, what they liked and didn’t like, how to calm them down when they got worked up, and more. And an animal didn’t have to be on the farm to get Teddy’s care — he was always finding birds or squirrels or rabbits that were sick or hurt. He tried to help them when he could, and when he couldn’t, he gave them decent burials. Once in a long while Teddy found the remains of a creature long passed, and he would clean up the bones and put them on his windowsill, where he had a small but wonderful trove of skulls and shells.

  I found myself staring at the tusks of the mama and had a shiver of fear — if she saw us, she could charge us. But then I thought about how Teddy had probably come this close a bunch of times, letting her get used to his smell so she knew that he didn’t pose a threat.

  We must have watched for close on to half an hour, and would have kept on watching if the mama hadn’t started to stir. Teddy tapped us on the shoulders, gave us the Silence! sign again, and motioned for us to move back the way we had come. We did our best, and I guess we did OK, since the steady grunting and sucking of the pigs just kept right on going.

  Once we got back past the bramble, Teddy figured we were far enough away to talk without worrying about waking the mama razorback.

  But before he could say a word, we were giving him a big old hug and just laughing and laughing. He still wore that serious look, but there was a proud little smirk around the corner edge of his mouth, too.

  “Did you see the little runty one that kept getting pushed away?”

  “Yeah, but he’s a fighter, that one. He’s scrappy.”

  “Why you so sure it’s a boy?”

  “Well, ’cause —”

  “Yeah, why? Girls can fight good, too!”

  “That’s right!”

  We pushed Teddy down onto the pine needles and tickled him so he couldn’t catch his breath, much less fight back. Though now that I think about it, Teddy could always fight back when he had to. I guess he just didn’t want to. And, really, we weren’t trying to show him what good fighters we were. It was that we had so much joy in him — he could be such a boy with the boys yet so gentle with animals, and he shared the best of everything he had with nobody but us: Zora and me.

  He finally said uncle, and we let him up.

  “So remember to mind what you say about girls now,” we said.

  Teddy was still laughing, brushing needles off his overalls and trying to shake them out from inside. “Yeah, y’all pretty tough,” he said, rolling his eyes. Before we could say something back, he got all serious again. “Listen, y’all got to promise again never to tell anybody ever about them pigs.”

  We looked back at him just as serious. “Teddy, we already promised you. And we don’t never break a promise.”

  He shook his head. “I know, but I’m just . . . If anybody finds out — if my daddy or my brothers ever find out” — he almost winced —“they’ll come here and kill ’em. All of ’em!”

  If my face was half as stricken as Zora’s, you would have thought the babies were mine.

  “But why?”

  “How could they do that?”

  Teddy jammed his hands in his pockets. “My daddy says a razorback’s a pest — dig up the dirt, feast on all the good eating birds, and don’t even have good fatback if you kill it.” He kicked up a cloud of dirt and needles. “But that don’t mean you have to kill it.”

  Zora had a soft look. “We won’t never tell nobody. Ain’t that right, Carrie?”

  “That’s right. And I bet if the three of us keep it secret, won’t nobody find out. Mama Pig’ll raise all them squinky little piglets big and strong before anyone knows, and then won’t nobody mess with ’em. Even the little runty one.”

  “Yeah,” said Zora.
“Can you imagine anyone picking a fight with a whole pack of wild razorbacks? I know I sure wouldn’t!”

  Teddy looked at us, looked away, and then looked at us again. “You right,” he said. Then he looked at me while motioning to Zora. “Be pretty funny to see her try, though.”

  Zora laughed. “Shoot! We already done whupped your kettle for you — but you give me a mind to do it again!” And before Teddy could even think of a smart answer, she tripped him so he went sprawling back on the needles he’d worked so hard to shake off. Then she tore away, pulling me after her and calling, “Last one to the Loving Pine is a rotten egg!”

  We hadn’t gotten a dozen paces when Teddy took off yelling and raced right past us, like lightning was running right behind him. I tried my best to be lightning.

  Zora had a way of giving personality to everything in Eatonville. Flowers alongside the road weren’t just flowers. One day they were royal guards saluting us on our walks home. Another day they were God’s consolation to the ground for putting it underfoot. That’s how Zora saw things. Everything in the world had a soul, and soul to her meant being more than anyone counted on.

  Even though the Loving Pine was a real-life tree, Zora made it much more than bark and branches and sweet needles, more than a beautiful longleaf pine. “Just because something can’t talk,” she said, “doesn’t mean it can’t give and get love.” I don’t think it ever meant to me and Teddy what it meant to her, but that didn’t stop us from calling it the Loving Pine and treating it the way she did anyway.

  Zora said the patch of rich moss under the branchy cover was a beautiful velvet blanket the tree had spread out for us, and when we lay ourselves down on it, we always said, “Thank you, Loving Pine,” because we couldn’t help feeling grateful. She also told us that the tree could feel, so we were careful never to hurt the Loving Pine’s feelings. Zora said it could give hugs, so we sometimes knelt around its prickly trunk and gave it hugs back. If it hadn’t been for Zora, we might never have given that tree a second look or singled it out from any of its neighbors. But we did, and we saw in bits and pieces what Zora saw all of the time.

  “Now who’s a rotten —?” Teddy said, but didn’t finish his question. He had beat me and Zora to the tree by half a minute and just stood there staring at a man sitting under the far green awning of the Loving Pine, legs crossed, guitar in his lap, and blinking like we’d just woken him from a nice nap. Which I suppose we had.

  The man smiled. It was a sunshineful smile, glinty and warm, not like Stella Brazzle’s, which was wasted on the face of somebody so mean. But like my daddy’s. The man’s skin was almost the same color as his hair and his eyes, like somebody had poured dark honey all over him, then washed it off but left the color stuck on.

  Without saying hello or waiting for us to say hello, he started to sing. He sang kind of dreamy, eyes half closed, head rolling slowly from one side to the other, like it was his way of waking up.

  “Aw, when the day is done, it just gets lent away,” he sang, strumming the guitar strung over his shoulder with a deep red braid of string. “Mm, when the day is done, it just gets lent away. Ain’t a thing gets gone, just goes somewheres else to stay . . .”

  He hadn’t sung but two words when I knew. Whoever poured the honey on his skin had let it run all down his voice, too. For my part, it was his voice alone that won me over, even as his song made my eyes cry.

  Zora couldn’t contain her excitement. She loved meeting new people, especially traveling folks, and from his clothes, the singing man looked to be an itinerant turpentine worker, one of the many who came from all around to tap our pines each year.

  When you live your life in a place where folks hold home dearer than any treasure, you don’t usually cotton to folks who like life on the road, even less if the road took someone away from you. Zora was different — she would hang off the fence in front of her house, waving down cars and buggies passing through Eatonville on their way to or from Winter Park or Orlando. That didn’t take a thing away from her love for Eatonville, but from the top of her head to the tips of her toes, Zora was a wanderer at heart.

  “You got an awfully pretty voice, Mister,” Zora said. “I bet didn’t nobody lend that to you.”

  The stranger smiled. “You got that right.” He took all three of us in with his eyes. “What are y’all names? They yours to keep, or are they out on loan?”

  We laughed and told him.

  “Zora, Carrie, and Teddy.”

  “Ivory at your service,” he replied, a single curl plastered to his sweaty forehead.

  “You a turpentine worker?” Teddy asked, a hint of wariness in his voice.

  Ivory patted the ground, inviting us to sit, and we made a little crescent in front of him.

  “Some days I am,” he said. “Most days I’m just me.”

  “You travel a lot?” That was always Zora’s first question for a stranger. In her mind, there wasn’t anything more marvelous in this world than going to far-flung places. Or, if you couldn’t get there yourself, hearing other people tell about it and then imagining it.

  “I figure I done a little traveling. Been to Savannah, been to Atlanta, been to Washington City, been to —”

  “What’s the farthest place you ever been?” Zora was so animated, I could tell she’d already packed her bags and bought her ticket.

  “Well, New York City got to be the —”

  “New York City! You been to New York City?” For the next few minutes, Zora was shooting questions at Ivory like she was a popgun. He hardly got to finish a single answer before she went on to the next question, but he didn’t mind being interrupted — just kept smiling that glowy smile and crinkling his eyes up in a way my daddy used to have. Finally he just bust out laughing, and even his laughing had music in it.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Zora, smiling in spite of herself. “Why you laughing? These important questions I’m asking!”

  “Honey, I know they important, but you got a hundred times more than I’ll ever have the answers to! I think you need to go on up and visit New York City your own self!”

  “I may just have to do that,” Zora said. I could see that she’d lost her ticket for the moment, but her bags were still good and ready.

  “I bet you will. You got the travelin’ bug. Some folks just made to go out and see the world. They’re like bees, spreading all kinds of pollen — gospel, news, stories, and songs. That’s what makes travel so magical; everyone that moves around leaves little seeds of themselves behind.” He strummed a chord and sang again:

  “I went down to the gypsy

  To get my fortune told.

  She said what’s lost is lost even if it’s got a home.

  ’Cause it’s the looking and finding folks

  That feel most alone.”

  I couldn’t help my curiosity and interrupted his song. “Mr. Ivory, are you a looking or finding folk?”

  Ivory took a slow breath. “I reckon everyone’s got someone they’re looking to find. Sometimes the problem is trying to find somebody who don’t know they lost or don’t want to be found.”

  I felt like he had looked down my soul. I didn’t think he would have known my father, but something about what he said made me want to hope.

  My father wasn’t a carpenter, like Zora’s daddy, or a farmer, like Teddy’s, but he was rangy and strong, and he loved to work hard. He always tried to find work nearby, but sometimes he had to “follow the pickin’,” and just go wherever they needed hands. He could get work anytime at the turpentine camps around Lake Maitland, but Mama was scared for him to be with men like that. I never asked Like what?, but I knew it couldn’t be good. It was the only thing I ever saw them even come close to disagreeing about; they liked each other more than any grown people I’d ever known, except maybe Teddy’s parents — but even Teddy’s mama and daddy never held hands like mine did.

  The last time my parents had talked about turp work was last fall. My daddy heard they needed me
n for a third shift at the factories down in Orlando to make things in time for Christmas. It was three or four good weeks’ work, but he would have to be away. It was either that or turpentine. So he went to Orlando. He never came back.

  A month later, his cousin Leon went to Orlando to look for him. He asked around for days, but couldn’t find anything — not even anyone who’d seen him or thought they might have seen him. Just nothing.

  I got used to falling asleep to the sound of my mother weeping, but around the time Sonny Wrapped met that gator Ghost, she stopped. First I thought it was a good thing, even a good sign. Until I realized that she had stopped crying because she had stopped hoping. That’s when a new kind of sadness settled on me and on our house like folks waiting for a train they know won’t come.

  “You been working turpentine down here a while?” I asked Ivory.

  He cocked his head. “About a year or so . . .”

  “Did you ever run across a man named Avery Brown? Little bigger than you, same color eyes as you, with a gentle manner?” I felt Zora and Teddy looking at me. “Did you ever know him?”

  Ivory’s face softened. “I never did know a man like that. I would have remembered him for sure if I did.”

  A dark cloud passed over Ivory’s face for a quick second, then left as he strummed a bright chord. “I reckon it’s like the song says. Nothing really ends. Even the spirits of folks don’t never end. They just get lent away.” He smiled, as if he meant his words to comfort us, but the sad look in his eyes said he wasn’t sure he comforted himself, much less us.

  Ivory stood up, stretched, and brushed himself off.

  “Well, now, y’all . . . I think I hear some pine trees calling me to come take their sap before the sun sets. That’s how I’ll earn my nighttime dip in that sweet little swimming hole down the road.”

  Hearing him mention the Blue Sink, Zora frowned. “You want to be careful of . . . gators in these parts, Mr. Ivory.”

  Ivory laughed. “I’ve outlived creatures much more dangerous than old gators. But don’t you worry. I’ll keep my wits about me.”