“There’s a few chestnuts left,” Aunt Al said. “Joe knows where some of them are, but he won’t show them to most folks.”
“They need to be left alone,” Joe said.
After a while, the trail started sloping sharply uphill. When we came to an old tractor tire lying on the ground, we turned off the trail and pushed through the branches. After a few minutes, Joe pointed through the woods to a tree with dark bark. It had two straight trunks that soared upward and some yellowing toothy leaves still clung to the branches.
“The first time Joe showed me this tree,” Aunt Al said, “I won’t lie to you, I fell on my knees and cried like a baby.”
When we reached the base of the tree, Joe set Earl on a fallen log, picked up a thorny chestnut hull, and held it out to me. It weighed almost nothing. He pointed out a rust-colored spot in the tree’s bark, about the size of a saucer. “She’s got the blight, but it ain’t killed her yet,” he said. He also pointed out four smaller chestnut trees and some young saplings sprouting out of an old stump. “I do believe they’re figuring out a way to fight off that blight.”
“Job, chapter fourteen, verse seven,” Aunt Al said. “ ‘For there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its tender shoots will not cease.’ ”
I looked over at Liz. She was staring up at the twin trunks of the big chestnut rising to the sky. “What are you thinking about?” I asked her.
“How sad it must have been for the tree to stand there all those years while the blight was killing off her brothers and sisters,” she said. “Do you think she wondered why she was the only one to survive?”
“Trees don’t wonder about things,” Joe said. “They just grow.”
“Now, we don’t know that for a fact,” Aunt Al said. “What I do know is that wondering why you survived don’t help you survive.”
The woods were quiet except for an occasional squirrel stirring up the damp leaves when it darted along the forest floor. We all knelt down and started gathering chestnuts.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
By Monday, Liz’s face was looking a lot better, and although she didn’t want to do it, Uncle Tinsley and I decided it was time for her to go back to school. Sitting in the bird wing, brooding and listening to her voices, wasn’t doing her any good.
Liz took forever getting dressed that morning, moving like she was underwater, pulling socks on and then taking them off, shuffling through her shirts and saying she couldn’t find the one she wanted. I was afraid we’d miss the bus and kept urging her to hurry up, telling her she was dawdling, but she insisted she was moving as fast as she could. We did miss the bus, and since Uncle Tinsley hated wasting gas on unnecessary car trips, we decided to walk to school. Classes had started by the time we arrived, and we both got tardies—our first.
I hadn’t told Liz about the way I’d been teased since she filed the charges. It would give her one more reason not to return to school. When we walked down the hall, people made a point of avoiding her, leaning away and stepping back. Girls who had ignored her now went out of their way to whisper loud enough for her to hear, some of them giving little shrieks and saying things like “Here she comes!” and “Crazy Lizzie!” and “We’ve got to get away!” At lunch hour, a whole line of them fell in behind her, imitating her walk while the rest of the girls in the hallway cracked up, cupping their hands over their mouths.
That night Liz joked that she felt like Moses parting the Red Sea, but it was horrible. She started to hate coming to school, and every morning I had to drag her out of bed and get her dressed. At school, it just got worse, with the other girls openly taunting her, mimicking her voice, and tripping her when she walked by.
At the end of the week, I ran into Lisa Saunders standing with a group of girls on one of the stairway landings. Lisa was one of the cheerleaders who had quit the squad when the football team was integrated. She had a bony nose and wore her blond hair in a high ponytail. Her father owned the Chevy dealership, and she was one of the few kids at Byler who had her own car. If she wasn’t with her boyfriend, who always had his arm around her, she was surrounded by other girls, all of them whispering together.
Lisa held a stack of mimeographed papers and was passing them out to the kids on the stairs. “Here, Bean, I’m taking applications for friends. Fill this out if you want.”
There were several pages stapled together. The title said “Application for Friendship,” and it looked like a test, with a bunch of questions and multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank answers. Most were what you’d expect: “Name your favorite TV show.” “Give the model and color of your dream car.” But some were spiky, like “What teacher would you most like to see fired?” and “What member of your class would you least want to date?” I heard Lisa’s friends giggling, but I didn’t understand why until I got to the last page. The final question was: