This Life Is in Your Hands_ One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone - Melissa Coleman [89]
“Luckily it was so full I could just grab her out,” Mama told us. “Otherwise it would have been a disaster!”
“Ha-ha, you fell in the outhouse,” I teased Heidi for a while after that. “Hidi-didi, poopy breath.”
“Yuck,” Heidi admitted.
Later I’d take pity on her tears and hug her tight. Even falling in the outhouse couldn’t erase that tender sweet smell.
Heidi sang-talked in the bunk below me, having a conversation with herself about my tree-branch fort.
“Let’s go,” she whispered to my stirring. “We half to see if she’s there.”
I rubbed my eyes, stars popping and swirling behind the lids.
“Who?” I asked, protective. The fort was my place, made from a heap of spruce branches cut from the trunk of a tree and left in a pile a little way into the woods on the path to the drinking water spring. The curve of the branches formed a dome, and I’d noticed that the bristles were falling away to make a space to crawl inside. While I was still in school that spring, Heidi’d been hiding in my secret places. Disappearing and making Mama crazy.
“Telonferdie,” Heidi said.
“She’s coming?” I asked, goose bumps rising.
“Yes.”
Covers shuffled and bare feet padded the wooden floor.
“Wait.” I climbed backward down the bunk ladder, dirty toes clinging to the rungs as my hair parted like grass around my face. Heidi waited by the door of the cabin, skinny legs and arms sticking from the shirt and shorts she slept in, blue eyes deep as a well, hair a bird’s nest atop her forehead. She turned on tippy-toes to reach the latch, and the heavy wooden door swung open. We exploded from the house into the morning. The air was warm and moist, full of light that vibrated where the treetops formed the crooked edge against the sky of a broken eggshell, trunks fading into darkness down by the earth.
“Race you!”
Our bare feet leaped across the grass of the yard and onto the smooth, cool indent of the path in the woods. The forest closed around us with the smells of cedar and spruce and the white of bunchberry dogwood flowers popping from the muted greens and browns. We hopscotched over the exposed roots and past the old log covered in wiry-green moss and an army of red-hatted British soldiers.
When we neared the fort, I reached out to hold Heidi’s three-year-old hand, so much softer than my seven-year-old one. We slowed and ducked into the trees at the edge of the path around the fort. It was quiet down there below the cackle and chirp of birds above. We crawled into the cave of branches and waited.
“She’s not here yet,” she told me.
I had to trust her on this.
“She’s coming,” Heidi said.
After a while I could sense more than see an outline of something against the forest. The shape was constantly shifting, like tree leaves in a breeze. I could make it look however I wanted. “Yes, I see her!” I said to Heidi.
With a voice of rustling leaves, Telonferdie began to tell us an ongoing story that always picked up where it left off the last time. It was woven of the details of the day-to-day—the names of animals and plants and the little worries in our hearts—together with the greater knowledge of the world that flows through all our brains. Telonferdie became the key to this wisdom that would, in its way, save me.
When we’d tell Mama and Papa about the things we did with Telonferdie, they’d smile gently, but the more Mama and Papa began to fade in their vibrancy, distracted by their own troubles, the more clearly I could see Heidi’s imaginary friend.
Chapter Nine
Bicentennial
Eliot weighing vegetables at the farm stand (Photograph courtesy of the author.)
As the days warmed, Heidi and I often sat on the swing together under the ash tree by the house, gazing up at the crown of still-bare branches. I can see our two little figures hanging over the face of the curved green earth, the universe sighing above us, vast and unknown. The soil, forests, and waters held in them the promise of survival if we could learn their secrets, but pumping our legs together on the swing,