The following is an excerpt from a novel written
by Dawn Wheat.
The backyard was an opus of chirps and squawks. Sparrows and chickadees flitted from feeders to a wide-mouthed birdbath. The aroma of cut grass blew through the air and mixed with the stray scent of hog manure and lilacs. Everything was colored bright like a basic set of markers.
The green garden hose was attached to a red water pump, and droplets flitted through a yellow, twirling lawn sprinkler. Mulberry trees, intertwined with thorny thickets and prickly ash, enclosed the private ground at the back of the yard. In the center of the wild brush was a clearing, an entrance to the main path forged by the Cameron ancestors. For the first time in her life, Gayle entered.
Large lobed Sugar Maples, and oval ridged Bigtooth Aspens created a condensed canopy and sheltered light from the uncultivated terrain. Greenbrier and Virginia creeper vines toiled around trunks and reached for the sky; white pitted morels and the Iowa wild rose grew interspersed, close to the earth, among three-leaf poison ivy, slender brome grass and foxtail.
Gayle jumped along and tried not to smash anything delicate, but a toe trounced a purplish-pink petal anyway and drove it into dirt. Spherical umbels and lance-shaped leaves brushed and scratched Gayle’s legs. She chased a ladybug but it spread ethereal, wedged wings and fluttered from her grasp. A yellow jacket jetted toward orange lilies.
The path widened into an open, grassy area and a broad, blue sky. She stood at the top of a large hill that rolled down and spilled into smaller hills, until the land met the horizon. The entire farm — all the fields, the cluster of trees that surrounded the spindly, two-inch deep creek, and the tractor-worn road that lead to the barns and the apple orchard beyond — was visible from this point. She stood in wonder as if she could see the entire world as well, the past and present too, displayed in a silent grandeur.
At the top like a marker, was the forbidden junkyard: Roy’s relics of a failed high school mechanic. Switchgrass, prairie clover, purple thistles, marsh marigolds and milkweeds burst and blossomed through crevices of rusted engines, tires and wire. The outer shells were sun bleached: once brilliant greens and blues shifted shades to dirt-encrusted browns. Windows were broken and tires were flat.
Gayle could not resist. She looked forward and backward, and knowing the way was clear, crept close to the first car. She reached out and touched the exterior. It was rusted and felt coarse, but nothing happened to her. No one came and no one saw her. She wasn’t hurt or bleeding or dieing. She snooped around the edge of the car, and approached one near the edge of trees. It seemed to be the oldest, but Gayle knew nothing about cars. The nameplate was gone, but the word Chevy was branded in off-blue paint. She touched the silver-scraped handle, and pushed her thumb down on the lever.
She pulled the door open and it sounded like metal scraping metal. She slid her thin body inside the hollow cabin and plopped on the torn, vinyl seat. Her feet touched the floor, but the pedals were ripped out and much of the dashboard had been removed for parts. It was eerie to be inside a thrown-away object and she felt like a diver swimming through a shipwreck. There weren’t skeletons, but Gayle felt the ghosts whistle though the trees. She wondered what these wrecks were like when they were newly made.
Gayle grasped the steering wheel and jerked it suddenly left, then right, then back and forth again. This was her perception of driving. She brushed her hair back, leaned her arm against the window and pantomimed a cigarette between her forefinger and middle. This was her perception of her mother driving. She spaced off in her imagination and this was her perception of her father driving. In her mind's eye the overgrown prairie was a busy interstate full of speeding cars and semis. She pretended to honk the horn and then she glanced in the rearview mirror.
Two bluish-gray eyes stared back in the reflection. Gayle jolted forward, gritted her teeth and spun around.
Gayle expected her cousins John or Carrie, but instead, a stranger sat in the back seat. His narrow, ruddy face was calm and the corners of his mouth crinkled and upturned involuntarily, as if he was fighting back a grin.
“What are you doing here?” Gayle sputtered.
“Readin’.” The boy held up a book.
“Why are you reading here? You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Are you supposed to be here?”
His voice was strange to her ear — light spoken, but foreign — as if he had a soft accent of some kind. It was most pronounced when he slurred soft consonants clusters of sh or ch or st.
“It’s my grandfather’s farm.” Gayle blurted, feeling defensive. She put her thin arms to her hips in the same manner Jennifer did when lecturing her father. “I can be here, but you can’t, if you’re not a Cameron.”
“Ssays who?” Again, the slight accent.
“My grandfather.”
“Ronald?”
Gayle was surprised that he knew the name. “Yes. You’re trespassing.”
“He lets me trespass.” The boy said softly.
Gayle sat up on her knees and leaned her midsection against the seat. She watched the boy’s face, and he feigned an interest in the book. She reached out and took it from his hands. The title page read “A Backyard Guide To Eastern Iowan Birds” and colored photographs of ducks, owls, hawks, and finches were printed on the glossy pages.
This boy must be so boring, she thought. The only people that read books about birds are old people! Red handwriting contrasted against white paper. In a scribbled hand, similar to her father’s artistic script, were the words “Property of Ronald J. Cameron, 1946.”
“This belongs to my grandfather.” Her forehead wrinkled. “What are you doing with it?”
The boy took the book from her hands. “Ask him.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the neighbor.” He leaned back and rested his square-shaped knees against the front seat. “I live down the way.”
“Down the way? Which way?”
“Down the path and through the trees,” he said.
Gayle stared out the back of the grimy windshield. Despite the haze and dirt, she could see the top of the trees in the distance. She recalled some mention the night before of a second house within the trees as the bottom of the hill, and that a family was now renting the place from her grandfather. Gayle switched her gaze again to the boy, but tried to pretend that she was not staring directly at him.
A flash of light caught her eye. The boy moved his head, and the sun sparked off a round, silver piece fitted in the canal of his left ear. He noticed her gaze, and moved his head abruptly to the right, so that she could only look at the other side of his face.
“You rent my grandfather’s house?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“And you know my cousins?”
“How long are you here for?” he asked.
“About three months. My father’s writing a novel.”
“I heard.”
“Everybody knows. It’s almost done.”
“He’s going to be famous,” he assumed.
“Maybe.” her face was vivid. She laughed like a maverick and casually turned her head without second thought. Her hair dangled in an unruly mess, and she brushed it behind one ear. A dark, shifting shape caught the corner of her eyes — a blur of white cotton and blue overalls. Her fingers clenched the seat suddenly and turned white. Her whole body went rigid.
“Oh, no!” she moaned, seeing her grandfather stomp through the tall grasses and wave his fist.
“Get out of those tin lizzies!” Ronald’s voice roared like a thunderstorm. His face was ferociously red, and his eyebrows cocked down in a v-shape. “Get out! Out of the damn tin lizzies right now!”
“Tin lizzie? Is that what they call you?” the boy asked.
Gayle glanced at the boy and realized he was too far down in the seat to be noticed by her grandfather. Only she had been spotted. Did the same rules that applied to her also apply to boy, or was he just a neighborhood renegade, going where he was not allowed and no one the wiser? She didn’t know, but she wasn’t a tattletale. She slipped out of the car and slammed the door shut.
Her grandfather’s voice pounded her eardrum and his rough hands tightened around her stick arm. Her heart galloped in her chest and she felt like a raggedy, bean doll in his grasp; her body swayed and jerked.
“What are you doing?” his eyes were like two dense, black dots. “I told you, not to play in the old cars. Didn’t you hear me?”
Gayle’s face trembled. “I’m sorry. I was just…”
“Are you now? You’ve been out here a total of five minutes and this is where I found you? How long were you tempted to disobey me? One minute or did it take 30 seconds?” The muscles in his face eased and he meant her no harm, other than to keep her safe, “no matter, you’ll have to come up to the house now and spend the rest of the afternoon cleaning with your mother as penance.”
“Please, I…”
“No please or buts or excuses. Someone has to help her clean, and its not going to be me,” he said.
Her grandfather tugged her by the arm. Gayle followed, and wiped her tears on the back of her free hand. She glanced back once to see if she could see the boy’s face again, but he was not visible from the back seat of the old car.