branch of a scraggly pine, and then gave out a whistle as a cardinal flitted by, though
most folks from the mountain would have certainly called it a redbird.
"Look, Lou, a cardinal, like us."
Keeping an eye out more for birds than cows, they quickly saw many varieties, most of
which they did not know. Hummingbirds twitted over beds of morning glories and wood
violets; the children scared up a mess of field larks from thick ground-cover. A sparrow
hawk let them know it was around, while a pack of nasty blue jays bothered everybody
and everything. Wild, bushy rhododendrons were beginning to bloom in pink and red, as
were the lavender-tipped white flowers of Virginia thyme. On the sides of steep slopes
they could see trailing arbutus and wolfsbane among the stacked slate and other
protrusions of rocks. The trees were in full, showy form, and the sky a cap of blue to
finish it off. And here they were, hunting aimless bovines, thought Lou.
A cowbell clunked to the east of them.
Oz looked excited. "Louisa said to follow the bell the cows wear."
Lou chased Oz through groves of beech, poplar, and basswood, the strong vines of
wisteria clutching at them like irksome hands, their feet tripping over bumps of shallow
roots clinging to uneven, shifting ground. They came to a small clearing ringed with
hemlock and gum and heard the bell again, but saw no cows. A goldfinch darted past,
startling them.
"Moo. Moooo!" came the voice, and the bell clunked.
The pair looked around in bewilderment until Lou glanced up in the crook of a maple and
saw Diamond swinging the bell and speaking cow. He was barefoot, same clothes as
always, cigarette behind his ear, hair reaching to the sky, as though a mischievous angel
was tugging at the boy's red mop.
"What are you doing?" Lou demanded angrily.
Diamond gracefully swung from branch to branch, dropped to the ground, and clunked
the bell once more. Lou noted that he had used a piece of twine to tie the pocketknife she
had given him to a loop on his overalls.
"Believing I were a cow."
"That's not funny," Lou said. "We have to find them."
"Shoot, that's easy. Cows ain't never really lost, they just mosey round till somebody
come get 'em." He whistled and Jeb broke through the tangle of brush to join them.
Diamond led them through a swath of hickory and ash; on the trunk of the latter a pair of
squirrels were having an argument, apparently over some division of spoils. They all
stopped and stared in reverence at a golden eagle perched on a limb of a ruler-straight
eighty-foot poplar. In the next clearing, they saw the cows grazing in a natural pen of
fallen trees.
"I knowed they was Miss Louisa's right off. Figger you'd probably come traipsing
through after 'em."
With Diamond's and Jeb's help, they drove the cows back to their farm pen. Along the
way, Diamond showed them how to hold on to the animals' tails, let the cows pull them
uphill, to make them pay back a litde, he said, for wandering off. When they shut the
corral gate, Lou said, "Diamond, tell me why you put horse manure in that man's car."
"Can't tell you, 'cause I ain't do it."
"Diamond, come on. You as good as admitted you did to Cotton."
"Got me oak ears, can't hear nuthin' you saying."
A frustrated Lou drew circles in the dirt witii her shoe. "Look, we have to get to school,
Diamond. You want to come with us?"
"Don't go to no school," he said, slipping the unlit cigarette between his lips and
becoming an instant adult.
"How come your parents don't make you go?"
In response to this Diamond whisded for Jeb and the pair took off running.
"Hey, Diamond," Lou called after him.
Boy and dog only ran faster.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LOU AND Oz RACED PAST THE EMPTY YARD AND IN-side the schoolhouse. Breathless,
they hustled to their seats.
"I'm sorry we're late," Lou said to Estelle McCoy, who was already chalking something
on the board. "We were working in the fields and ..." She looked around and noted that
fully half the seats were empty.
"Lou, it's all right," said her teacher. "Planting time's starting, I'm just glad you made it in
at all."
Lou sat down in her seat. From the corner of her eye she saw that Billy Davis was there.
He looked so angelic that she told herself to be cautious. When she lifted up her desk top
to put away her books, she could not stifle the scream. The snake coiled in her desk—a
three-foot brown and yellow-banded copperhead—was dead. However, the piece of paper
tied around the serpent, with the words "Yankee Go Home" scrawled upon it, was what
really made Lou angry.
"Lou," called Mrs. McCoy from the blackboard, "is anything wrong?"