What I Came to Tell You (2 page)

“Partly,” Grover said.
Mostly
is what he should’ve said.
Mostly
he didn’t believe in God because their mother was dead. Since then he’d paid closer attention in school when they’d studied the slaughter of the Indians, the horrors of slavery, the nightmare of the Holocaust, the bombing of Hiroshima, not to mention all the
wars that ever were. The evidence had been there all along; he’d just been too happy to see it.

“I’ve been dreaming again.” Sudie was looking at the headstone, her eyes rimmed in red.

“Same dream?” he asked.

“Daddy pulls over, asks Mama if she wants a ride, and she gets in the car with us and I think everything is going to be okay. She climbs into the backseat between you and me, holding our hands. Daddy drives home, turns onto Edgemont, pulls in front of the house. I turn around …”

“… and she’s gone,” he said in an almost bored tone.

“I’ve had that dream a hundred times,” she said. “Every time I tell myself,
this
time,
this
time, I’m going to hold her hand tighter.”

“Sudie, nobody can hold that tight.”

She bit her lip and for a minute Grover worried she might start sniffling again. He hated when she cried, when anybody cried, for that matter. He never knew what to do.

“My butt’s getting cold,” Grover said, standing up. “Let’s go home.”

Sudie looked up at him.

“Come on.” He motioned for her to stand. “Maybe
This Old House
is on.”

“That doesn’t come on till three,” she said, getting up. “
The New Yankee Workshop
is on right now.”

The only TV channel they’d ever been able to get with their antennae was public TV. Their mother had never allowed cable.
Never allowed them to play video games. Never allowed them to have a computer in the house. She believed children were losing the ability to entertain themselves. She said it was something she’d noticed over the years at her job. But her rules went for their father too. He had to leave his laptop at the office. One of the biggest fights Grover could remember his parents ever having, and they didn’t have many, happened on a night when their father had smuggled his laptop into the house, and their mother had caught him in the kitchen late at night checking his e-mail.

They found Jessie trying to lift the sapling with its heavy root ball. He looked at Sudie, who was still sniffling a little bit.

“Can y’all help me tote this to the hole?”

Sudie nodded, and the three of them lifted the sapling and set it into the hole. “I’ll take it from here,” he said, shoveling dirt around it.

Sudie and Grover walked out of the cemetery entrance with Biscuit leading the way, and as they did, the wind picked back up. They were passing by the Bamboo Forest when Sudie stopped. “Do you think God’s mad at me for calling Him stupid?”

“If there is a God,” Grover said, “He’d be a pretty sorry one to get bent out of shape because some girl in a little town in the middle of nowhere called Him stupid.”

“I’m not some girl,” Sudie said. “I’m Sudie Johnston, and this isn’t the middle of nowhere. It’s Asheville, North Carolina.”

“If God spent His time jumping on people every time somebody called Him something,” Grover said, “He’d never get anything done.”

Grover was relieved his sister didn’t say anything else. These God talks tired him out. With their mother dead and their father gone so much, Grover needed Sudie to believe in God. It took some pressure off him. Also, a microscopic cell of himself wondered if he was wrong, if maybe there was a God. Even if he couldn’t manage to believe, he liked to think that his sister believed enough for the both of them.

O
n a Saturday morning one week later Grover smelled the sandalwood. He’d been working on a new weaving in his workshop in the Bamboo Forest. He’d reached into the shoebox and pulled out a bloodred sugar maple leaf. He carefully worked it in with the other leaves, then stepped back, blew into his hands to warm his fingers and looked at his work.

He breathed in. There it was. The unmistakable sweet smoky smell. His mother had burned sandalwood incense every morning at her altar upstairs. He looked around but saw nothing except bamboo. He pictured how it used to be in their house every morning. Their father, a thin, balding man with bright eyes made even brighter somehow by his thick, bushy eyebrows. He moved easily around the kitchen, cracking eggs, stirring grits and turning over the bacon that buckled and shriveled in the frying pan. Upstairs their mother sat straight-backed on a little round cushion, chanting and ringing her brass bowl in front of a fat,
smiling, little wooden Buddha. When their father called them all to breakfast, she would come downstairs in her robe and sit at the kitchen table, smelling like sandalwood.

Grover looked through the shoebox of leaves. Red oak, tulip poplar, basswood, ash, beech, sycamore, Japanese maple, red maple, sugar maple, paper birch and weeping cherry. He picked out a narrow yellow birch leaf and worked it in. He’d gotten up early this morning, on a Saturday even, put on a coat and hat and headed out to the Bamboo Forest just after daybreak. The weaving, his biggest yet, was about half finished. It hung from a section of bamboo that he’d tied at eye level between two bamboo stalks. The more leaves he’d worked into it, the more the weaving caught the morning breeze, lifting and falling as if it breathed.

Loud caws. Shadows glided through the air. Black, shiny wings. Something had startled the crows. They settled back into the bamboo, flapping and cawing. A couple of years ago he’d found the dangling skeleton of a crow that had somehow gotten caught in the bamboo and hung itself.

The Bamboo Forest took up half a vacant lot next to Grover’s house. The half without bamboo was a field that kids sometimes played softball or football in. The rest was bamboo—a maze of footpaths worn by generations of kids’ feet. Grover had been coming here since he was old enough to walk. Years ago his mother had given him a small bow saw and a Swiss Army Knife, and he’d made spears, blowguns, bows and arrows. He learned how to lash the bamboo to make chairs, tables, fences and gates.
As he got older, Grover didn’t come as much to the Bamboo Forest. Like his friends, he rode his bike or skateboarded or went inside and watched TV. But for the past six months all he’d wanted to do, all he could
stand
to do really, was go outside and put things together—sticks, grass, leaves—anything he could get his hands on.

Something whizzed over his head. He heard a crack, looked up and saw his weaving crumpled on the ground. A soccer ball rolled to a stop beside him as someone came crashing through the bamboo.

A small boy with big ears and freckles stepped into the clearing. “Whoa, I didn’t know this was back here,” he said.

“This yours?” Grover held up the soccer ball. His heart pounded.

“I was practicing with my left foot,” the boy said. “What is this back here? A hideout or something?”

Grover threw the ball hard at the boy, then picked up the weaving, which had been torn from the section of bamboo it had been tied to but otherwise looked okay. He turned over the weaving, gently running his hand over it.

“What is this place?” the boy asked.

“You almost smashed a month’s work!” Grover snapped. Well, technically a couple of weeks’ worth but he wanted the boy to feel bad about what
could
have happened. He turned the weaving over a couple more times and, when he saw it was okay, began to calm down.

“What’re you making?” This boy looked familiar, and his
accent sounded familiar too. “Is this your hideout?” He walked around the neat piles of bamboo arranged by size and length, the piles of grasses, leaves, pinecones and small branches from other trees. A bamboo lean-to occupied the middle of the clearing. Underneath the lean-to sat a small bamboo table and chair where Grover worked when it rained.

“It’s my workshop,” Grover said, picking out a bamboo section from the pile.

“This isn’t no workshop,” the boy said. “This is outside.”

Grover opened a big toolbox. He had several handsaws—one with a curved blade, another with a big square blade, a couple with long narrow blades. Some with large teeth, some with small. He had rubber bands, twine, string, electrician’s tape, duct tape. Nails, screws. He pulled out a big ball of twine, then took his Swiss Army Knife, which he always kept oiled and sharpened, out of his pocket. He cut off four lengths of the twine, and retied the weaving to the bamboo section it had been hanging from, then, with a couple more pieces of twine, retied the whole thing back to the bamboo stalks.

The boy went up to the weaving, gently touching it.

“Don’t!” Grover said. “You’ve done enough already.”

Holding his hands behind his back like he was in a museum, the boy studied the weaving, then looked around the clearing, then looked back at the weaving. “Now I get it,” he said. “You’re some kind a artist!” The boy pointed at the weaving. “And this is your art!”

“I wouldn’t call it art exactly,” Grover said.

The boy cocked his head one way and then the other as he studied the weaving. “I’m not sure what else you
could
call it.”

Grover remembered where he’d seen the boy. One morning last week Grover had been in the front yard looking for the
Asheville Citizen-Times
when a tired-looking van pulling a very large U-Haul trailer rattled up to the house across the street, which Jessie owned but rented out. A mother and her two kids had climbed out of the van. The mother looked young to be somebody’s mother, at least younger than Grover’s mother. The kids were this round-faced, big-eared boy here and a tall, dark girl with long black hair. After a while, a huge pickup had pulled in front of the rental house. It had a Confederate decal on the rear window, a
Bread Not Bombs
sticker on the bumper and an umbrella in the gun rack. A man Grover’d guessed to be the father got out. He helped them unload the U-Haul, but then a couple of hours later he climbed back in his truck, shouted “So long, Sis” to the woman and drove off. Grover hadn’t seen him since. Not that he’d paid much attention. Families came and went in the rental. It wasn’t worth the effort to make friends with renters. One day you’d be playing with them, the next day they’d be gone.

“Name’s Clay.” The boy held out his hand. “I’m real sorry about knocking down your art.”

Grover looked at the boy’s hand. He’d never had another kid want to shake hands. “Grover” is all he said as he shook the boy’s hand.

“Grover? Now that’s an interesting name. A mighty interesting name. Don’t believe I know a single soul with that name.
I have a cousin name of Sturgess, but I’ve never met a Grover.”

“I’m trying to finish this.” Grover bent down to his shoebox.

“Oh, sure, Grover,” he said. “You go right ahead. Don’t mind me.”

“I don’t like people watching me work.”

“Don’t blame you, Grover,” he said. “I’ll be quiet as a mouse.”

Grover turned on the boy but something in his eyes, something easy and open, made it hard to stay mad. Grover sighed, then turned back to his work. He wove a birch leaf into the bamboo, then bent down to pick out another leaf.

Clay bent down with him, peering into the shoebox. “Where’d you get all the leaves, Grover? Back home we learned that it’s when the chlorophyll drains out that you get your colors. A funny thing if you think about it. You don’t know a leaf’s true colors till it’s dead.”

Grover shot the boy a look.

Clay put his finger to his lips, then whispered, “Quiet as a mouse, Grover.”

Grover went back to his weaving, surprised the boy knew a word like
chlorophyll
. He searched for another leaf in the shoebox. He’d always used his mother’s shoeboxes to bury his pets that had died over the years—three salamanders, a frog, a turtle, too many goldfish to count and a guinea pig. When he’d gone into his mother’s closet a few weeks ago to get this shoebox, his heart had begun to pound. The silent stacks of shoeboxes made him feel like he’d stepped into a mausoleum.

Grover wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he reached into the shoebox for another leaf and found it empty. He noticed the sun overhead. Noon already? He’d been working for five hours! He looked around for Clay, but Clay was gone. With his stomach growling, he headed home for lunch.

Grover lived with his father and Sudie in a green, two-story, hundred-year-old house. Grover’s room faced out on the Bamboo Forest. From his downstairs window all he could see was the calm, cool green of bamboo stalks. Sudie’s downstairs room looked on to a bright goldfish pond with tall grasses growing on the far side.

Sudie, who’d always been a late riser, sat on the couch in her pink flannel pajamas, watching a cooking show and eating a grapefruit half. Biscuit was curled up on the couch beside her. On TV a man wearing an apron, who spoke with a French accent, chopped up a red pepper so fast it was a blur.

“Daddy gone to work already?” Grover asked. He went out to the kitchen and made a peanut butter and honey, then sat on the couch with Sudie and watched the man, who was named Jacques Pépin, chop up a few more vegetables and toss them into a skillet. Watching the chef pull a brown loaf of bread out of the oven, Grover noticed the dusty DVD player underneath the TV. It was one of the few technological things their mother had let them have, because, she said, they could watch movies as a family. And last year their mother had surprised everyone by
giving Grover an iPod for his birthday, making him promise to use it only at bedtime. It was to replace the worn CD player he’d kept on his nightstand. Ever since he was little he’d needed music to go to sleep.