We all stood there except Sweetie, who was still snoozing in her basket. I looked down and noticed she was getting too big for it.
“We’ll have to move her,” Aunt C said. “Out of range of the fall.”
I followed her instructions. I set the shallow basket down some distance away, on the other side of the border of bushes, nearer to the house.
“Okay, that one, go out—” Aunt C told him.
We knew Daniel had to get up on roofs from time to time, to paint dormers and metal gutters, but Sidney was fearful, said, “You be careful, you are no climber!” He grabbed a higher, narrower limb for balance and then did a sideways step out on the first big branch. Halfway along, he began to bounce. Sidney called, “Well, you really up there good now,” and just as she did so, the crack hit us like a pop of thunder. His balance branch gave way. He bowed backward. We all whooped, shouted, Sidney the loudest. But then another Daniel took over. He caught himself, crouched, doubled in half, and gripped the big limb under his feet. In a second, he was swinging, leaping the last three yards to the ground. He landed on two feet like a trained trapeze man. All the jostling produced a fusillade of pecans. First we clapped, and then we picked up half a bushel.
After a while he went off looking around the grove for another tree, then he came back and announced, “The big one’s got the most. The others are not bearing this year. But the real crop on this one is up high—I saw it.”
He leaned down and pointed to the top of the queen, then he bent over and produced a Kool cigarette from the knee pocket of his spattered pants. He struck a long wooden kitchen match on his cracked, spotted brogan shoes and waved the flame around like a magic wand as he began a long speech about how to know when a pecan tree would deliver, why it wasn’t every year, how they got in the mood. Moisture, cold snaps, winds in spring, the temperatures, and rainfall the week of the full moon—not to mention hope—were all factors. When he was done with his speech, he touched the end of his Kool, and then his eyes settled on me. After taking a long drag and exhaling a volume of smoke, he asked, “What you weigh?” as one would ask an ally.
I was standing there in a pleated skirt. Underneath were my underpants. Only my underpants. This ruled out my climbing any tree. “Fifty-three,” I said, truthfully and boldly, but ashamed. My friend Lily Stark weighed forty-seven and she was an inch taller, so I thought there was something wrong with me.
“Just about right,” Daniel said, with a narrow wink.
“No! No!” I said, still thinking of my skirt, though climbing had its attraction.
“We will stand back here, darling, nothing we can see, honest,” Sidney said, grabbing Daniel’s hand and pulling him back even with her, farther away from the trunk.
“No, she cannot,” Aunt C said, with a shake of her head, the one teachers gave us when we were breaking a big rule.
“Please,” I said, my hands together as if in a prayer. In a second, I had forgotten about my underwear. Perhaps it was that she forbade me.
“Climb that tree, fall down, and your daddy will never forgive me. I’ll never forgive myself.”
“Please,” I said.
Her mouth was suspended, open. She was trying to figure out how to put her foot down with me. She had never done it—the both of us knew it. She’d been with the family since late June. It was November—five months of “yes.”
“I can climb,” I said.
She sighed and said, “Just the branch opposite the one Daniel went out. Then come down.”
A few minutes later, I was shimmying along that limb, making pecans plop. I watched the others spreading out below me, picking them up, but after a while looking down made me anxious. I discovered that if you kept looking up or straight ahead, there was a great thrill to being twenty feet in the air. It was really the easiest thing in the world as long as you kept your confidence. I decided to try higher.
“That’s far enough!” Aunt C shouted from below.
Something came over me. I didn’t do what she said. I kept going up. Soon, I could see the Fayton Bank and Trust Building, the Terminal Hotel, and the steeple on the Methodist Church. These buildings were miles away—the plain was that flat. From up a little higher, I could fit the whole of the town in the yoke between my thumb and index finger. When I pinched, it disappeared. This thrilled me. Its importance might be swallowed up by the rest of the world, or by the sky. The idea also felt dangerous. I had never left home. I’d never been anywhere except Raleigh. Even thinking of leaving made me feel like I was cheating.
I had the strangest idea. I would run off with Aunt C and Sweetie, Sidney, and Daniel. We could stay in his jalopy; we’d already come this far. From up in the tree, it was easy.
I saw the life I did have as one led under a dark enchantment. I could see this because of the height, and the distance from gravity. We just weren’t going to stay. We weren’t going home. We would keep driving.
Then, as I was scanning the ground below, I saw Sweetie’s basket was turned over. I could see it clearly—I thought Cleo had done it.
“Get her!” I said. “She might be underneath, caught!”
Cleo started making a great racket, but nowhere near the baby.
I had put her down in the wrong place. I had stopped thinking of her.
Aunt C was at the other end of the circle, below, from my vantage, a little blade-shaped figure with broad shoulders and narrow legs, heaving underneath the disk of her cloth cap. I yelled, “Get her. Help her! She turned over the basket! She’s under it!”
Daniel called to me, “What?”
Then, at the end of the dirt road, my father’s Mercury speeding toward the old house, going way too fast. As it cleared Mam’s garden, I saw my mother’s pale, determined profile behind the wheel, her blonde hair tight in a French twist.
At the same instant, I saw a little dark head, rounded, bobbing up and down, moving a few feet from the basket, on the grass. I screamed down to Aunt C and all of them. “Car! Sweetie!”
Daniel was the first on the ground to see what was coming and the first to move through the bushes, the first to scream at my mother to stop. I didn’t know a person could yell as loud as he did right then.
But she didn’t stop. She kept going, full speed. Daniel and now me and Aunt C were yelling at the tops of our lungs, but she didn’t stop.
At the last second, he dove down to cover the baby. Aunt C came through the bushes an instant later. When my mother finally braked, her tire missed Daniel’s head, and Sweetie in his arms, by less than a yard.
It was over, but Aunt C could not stop screaming.
My mother paused and then opened the car door. Daniel stood. It wasn’t until that second that we saw Sweetie was all right.
My mother got out and stood behind the car door for a second, as if it were her shield. Her pale, flared yellow skirt stuck out in the opening, her two hands on the frame on the top of the glass. She had been in town, I could tell because she had a short-waisted jacket over her dress.
“Why on earth didn’t you stop?” Aunt C screamed.
“Well, what is Odile doing in the dirt?”
“She rolled out of the basket. Turned it over! We didn’t see it. She inched along!” As she said this, Aunt C cupped Sweetie’s face in her hands, took a look at her. “Daniel saved her,” her voice hoarse.
With his free arm, Daniel took Aunt C’s hand and walked her over to a stump, where she could sit and receive my sister.
My mother remained as she was, behind the car door, accusing.
“And you haul her out here without telling me and then ignore her?” she said.
“It