On the morning of that terrible day, Garner followed the giant girl Em out of Yates. It was still dark and foggy, which was a good thing, because his shoes scoffed on rocks a couple of times, making Em startle and turn her head back toward the village. He would crouch and hold still until she went on walking. Even though he was almost certain she wasn’t able to see him, he could tell she was getting nervous. He didn’t mean to follow her for long, just until she was safely past the last field. Or so he told himself.
When she got close to his special tree, he sensed a stirring in the fields, heard rough whispers from somewhere behind. For some reason, they made him think about a dusty rope and the angry men’s voices that had wafted across the street from the store the evening before. And then his six-year-old heart started to thud just as a black monster on wheels came rushing silently down the road with a fierce swoosh. Its fiery round eyes stabbed through the fog straight at him. He dove into the ditch, flattened himself, and didn’t move again until a horse started screaming from the nearest field.
Scrabbling upward so that his head cleared the edge of the ditch, he saw that Em was now sitting inside the wheeled monster-contraption next to Driscoll. Then the boy Nev was running out to the road, blocking their way forward, his arms spread wide. Driscoll leaned out of his window and started arguing with Nev, who was shouting and refusing to yield. Garner couldn’t hear their words because the horse was screaming so loud. A few heart-beats later Driscoll and Em came out of the big old-timey car and followed Nev into the field. The moment they were gone Garner felt unfriendly eyes piercing through the fog and saw some half-formed shadows drawing closer. Without thinking, he abandoned the ditch and clambered up the tree, flattening himself against a massive branch up high. The climb was easy for him because he had made it many times before and knew where every hand-hold and foot-hold was. By the time the posse, led by the sheriff and Tilden, stepped out of the fog and surrounded the car, Garner had slipped into the little fort he had once built out of sticks and weeds, cleverly woven so that no one from below knew it was there. It was his safe place, where he often came to get away from his mother’s unpleasant, grating voice.
Holding very still, barely breathing, he saw what they did to the two giants. He hid his eyes when Driscoll started swinging from the rope. Next time he looked, the men were stuffing Em into the back of the car. She wasn’t even moving. He hoped she was still alive. He didn’t see what they’d done with Driscoll’s body, which was no longer hanging from the rope. When they were gone, he curled himself into a tight ball and threw up until he was raw and empty inside, staying right next to his vomit, shivering, until he could feel the little kitty, trapped under a rock in his garden, calling to him in hunger and thirst. The last thing he wanted to happen right then was for his mother to find out he’d lied about burying it.
As soon as he got back home, he sneaked into the kitchen and prepared the special mix Driscoll had told him to make, a little cream mixed with an egg-yolk. He took it to the kitty’s hide-out, lifted the rock and the grating, poured the stuff onto the saucer in the small pit he’d dug, added some water to the bowl, and watched the kitty surge out of the sleeve of the old down coat he’d sacrificed to help keep it warm. He touched the rough fur on the back of its bony neck, felt the deep purr tremble through it, and put everything back the way it was.
Straightening, he saw his mom lurch onto the porch from inside the house, eyes sleep-swollen and grouchy. He reached down to the ground and clutched up some twirlers just so she wouldn’t get suspicious about what he’d been up to. But when he asked her to watch them spin off the porch, she told him to march to the hen-house and gather the new eggs. He brought them to her in the kitchen. While she was cracking two for their breakfast, she asked him where he had been. He couldn’t have answered even if he’d wanted to because his jaw and his throat locked up on him. She made him go to his room for impertinence. He got under his covers, trembling until he fell asleep.
He had no idea how long he had slept by the time she burst in to drag him out of the house, a gleam in her eyes, clutching the mall. Judging by the sun, it was late afternoon. The street was filled with people by then, the crowd getting bigger by the minute as the villagers came running from every direction. She made him watch as they fought over Driscoll’s car, but when she let go of his arm, swinging the mall and shouting, “Burn the witches, smoke them out,” he turned, ran down the alley, and kept on running until he found a good place to hide. He was sure it was his fault that Em and Driscoll got trapped like that, because he knew he hadn’t warned her clearly enough. He hadn’t come right out and said that they were planning to catch Driscoll and make an example of him, didn’t explain that the strange boy, who came from the flatlands and called himself Nev, had told everybody who would listen that the giant was a devil spreading evil in the world.
Garner wasn’t surprised when the mountain blew that night. His mother had gone up to the witches camp with a crowd of other villagers, taking her mall. And when the mountain spewed, he saw the whole thing from the field—thick clouds of yellowish and brown smoke, the red glow of a spreading fire igniting the air and rushing downslope, burning hillsides. He was sure his mom was caught in it but not sure how he was supposed to feel about her being dead. Only, she came back all in one piece the next morning, gloating with satisfaction. It took her a few days to realize that Garner had stopped speaking. Nothing she threatened him with could get him to start again, though he did lose what was left of his smile.
Some said it was a spell Driscoll and Em had put on him in his garden the day they’d followed him home. Others thought it was the eruption that had silenced him, but all agreed that his mother quickly picked up the slack, jabbering enough for the both of them, and that most likely he would start talking again when he was ready. He did what he’d told Em he’d do. Let a mouse loose in the kitchen, watched his mom scream and climb a chair, and brought in his “new” kitten who soon turned into an excellent mouser. She let him keep it, but not in the house. He left his window open for it, and both he and the cat learned to stay out of her way. Half a dozen years later he still wasn’t talking. His mother, desperately tired of being alone, struck up a friendship with Fraser, the old drunk who spent his days sitting on the bench in front of the store. He’d recently found religion and was eager to be molded into husband material. And suddenly it wasn’t Garner’s house anymore but Fraser’s, who made up new rules every day. The last one was that Garner would no longer get a bite of food unless he started speaking again.
So Garner stuffed his cat into a backpack and left his house and Yates forever. As he had for the last six years, he skirted the big golden tree, careful not to look at it lest he see Driscoll swinging from that sturdy branch curving over the roadway. Reaching the forked path on the far side of the little hill at the end of the fields, he meant to turn toward the plains because it was the only way he knew out of Yates, but his feet insisted on taking him upslope on the old overgrown trail that led to the witches camp. He’d always wanted to see the place Em described as beautiful, her eyes going all soft, that one night she spent in his tool-shed.
He expected it to be a long climb, and it was. He followed the faint trail to its end. There he found the remains of Driscoll’s trailer, encased in weeds. The path leading around the rocks that Em had once taken, which got her stuck in the bramble sea, was now so blocked by blackberry vines that he didn’t even attempt it. Then he stumbled upon the one in the woods and took it all the way to the edge of the clearing. There he stopped, heart pounding, for he had suddenly remembered what the posse’s aim had been on the night of the raid—to leave no stone standing, to burn the witches, smoke them out, and finish them once and for all. Would he find skeletons sprawled here and there? Would Em’s be among them?
krisheywood 