CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Liz hadn’t set foot out of the house since going to the cops four days earlier. She’d hardly even left the bird wing and I’d been bringing up bowls of stew on the silver tray. She kept obsessing about whether filing the charges had been the right thing to do and whether the whole mess was all her fault because she’d been stupid enough to think she could get her money back if she got in the car with Mr. Maddox. She wondered whether we’d have been better off if the bandersnatches had taken us away back in Lost Lake.
“Don’t think like that,” I said.
“I can’t help it,” she said. “I can’t control my thoughts.” The argument going on inside her head was so heated, she said, that she felt like different voices were making the cases for and against her. One voice kept talking about Alice in Wonderland’s “Eat Me” cake, saying a slice of it would make her grow so tall that people would be scared of her. Another voice recommended Alice’s “Drink Me” bottle—a sip would make her so small, no one would notice her. She knew the voices weren’t real, but that was what they sounded like, actual voices.
Liz and her voices had me worried. I’d kept trying to call Mom without any luck, but I figured she’d say what Liz needed was to get out of the house, breathe some fresh air, and clear her head. So on Saturday morning, I insisted that she come with me to the Wyatts’ to gather chestnuts.
“I don’t feel like it,” Liz said. “And my face is still a mess.”
“I don’t care,” I said. “You’ve got to get out.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Too bad. You’re getting out. You can’t stay in here forever.”
Liz was sitting in bed in her pajamas. I started pulling her clothes out of the chest of drawers, throwing them at her, and snapping my fingers to speed her up.
Uncle Tinsley was glad to see Liz up and dressed. To celebrate he opened a can of Vienna sausages to go with our poached eggs. After breakfast, we rode the Schwinns over to the hill. Aunt Al was, as always, in the kitchen. She had a pot of grits going and was grating cheese into it. As soon as she saw us, she gave us great big hugs, then offered us some grits. Liz said we’d already eaten and she was full.
“I’ve still got some room left,” I said.
Aunt Al laughed and passed me a bowl.
“I hope you all know, I believe every word of your story,” she said to Liz. The whole town was divided over the charges, she continued. “A lot of folks don’t believe you—but there’s a lot who do.” Thing was, she went on, most of them that believed Liz wouldn’t come out and say so. They were good people, Aunt Al said, but they were scared. They had jobs they couldn’t afford to lose, and they didn’t want to take sides against Jerry Maddox. But they were all too happy to see someone else stand up to him. “You’re one gutsy girl.”
“Or crazy,” Liz said.
“It’s not crazy,” I said. “What would be crazy would be to pretend nothing happened.”
Aunt Al patted my arm. “You got more than a lick of your dad in you, child.”
Joe came into the kitchen carrying two flour sacks. “Go get another sack for Liz,” Aunt Al said. “Come to think of it, get me one, too. I don’t hardly get out of this house except to go do my shift at that dang mill.”
Joe hoisted Earl onto his shoulders and led us up a trail through the woods behind the Wyatts’ house. At first the ground was covered with dense brambles, but when we got farther into the woods, the brambles thinned out. The leaves had mostly fallen, the sun shining down through the naked branches, and you could see the dead tree trunks and downed limbs and thick vines twisting up into the treetops.
For a woman who spent most of her time in the kitchen, Aunt Al acted right at home in the woods, booking up the trail like a kid out exploring. When she was a girl, she told us, gathering chestnuts was her favorite chore. Her family’s farm had been on the edge of a forest full of chestnut trees, some of them so big that three grown men locking hands couldn’t wrap their arms all the way around the trunks. One big chestnut was right next to the house, and at first frost, she went on, the nuts came falling down so thick they sounded like a hard rain on the tin roof. She and her ten brothers and sisters would get up before dawn to gather chestnuts, which they sold in town to buy goods like shoes and calico.
In the thirties, when she was about eight, the blight that made its way from China started killing off the chestnuts in her neck of the woods. Within a few years, all the beautiful giant trees had become lurking dead hulks. “People said it looked like the end of the world, and in a way, it was,” she said. The wild turkeys and deer that ate the chestnuts disappeared, and the farm families who hunted the game and counted on the chestnuts for a cash crop were forced off the land. They moved into towns like Byler, where they took jobs in the mills.