What I Came to Tell You Read online

  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.

  Sudie squeezed grapefruit juice into her spoon. Their mother had had to make her eat fruits and vegetables. Now Sudie ate a grapefruit every morning, packed her school lunch box with carrots, peppers and apples or grapes and made sure they all had at least two vegetables for dinner. Sudie had been like that with a lot of things. Their mother had always been after Sudie to make her bed and pick up her room. Now Sudie kept her room as neat as a pin.

  After Grover ate his sandwich, he took his sister’s and his plates out to the kitchen, rinsed them off and put them in the dishwasher. When he came back, he told Sudie he was going back to his workshop.

  “I want to see how it’s coming,” Sudie said, turning off the TV. “Can you wait a second while I change out of my pjs?”

  While he waited, Grover roamed the front yard, looking for the morning paper in the tall
grass. Their mother had been the one to keep up the yard. Now the grass and the hedges had gotten out of hand. Grover cut it himself every now and then, but one day Sudie had been watching a program on the show Nature about letting your grass and hedges grow to make your yard a home for birds and small animals. “We’re a refuge,” she said, and sent off for a little plastic sign that said Certified Backyard Wilderness. She hung it from the abelia bush, which had grown to the size of a VW Bug. Grover didn’t bother mowing after that.

  A couple of crows cawed from the maple, flew away and settled in an overgrown nandina.

  Sudie came out dressed and wearing a coat, and Biscuit followed behind her. As they walked over to the Bamboo Forest, she said, “How come you don’t show Daddy your weavings?”

  “He never asks to see them,” Grover said.

  “When he’s busy with work,” she said, “he forgets about everything else.”

  The truth was that their father had never seemed to think much of the things Grover made. More than once he’d overheard his parents argue about him. His mother saying that Grover was talented and had vision. His father replying that might be true but that the boy could be a good student if he spent half the time studying that he spent in the Bamboo Forest. He is a good student, his mother would say. But he knew what his father’d meant. He wanted Grover to be like Sudie, born making As.

  The longer his mother had been dead, the more his father had seemed to worry about Grover’s grades. When Grover received a couple of Cs on English papers a few weeks ago, his father started making Grover and Sudie walk over to the Wolfe house so he could check his homework. Now Grover was only able to work in the Bamboo Forest after supper, and only after he showed his father his completed homework. With daylight savings switching back to regular time in a couple of weeks, it’d be dark after supper, and then how would he work in the Bamboo Forest?

  “What is that?” Sudie walked over to a stake on the edge of the Bamboo Forest. It had a red ribbon tied to it. “There’s another … and another.”

  A pit opened up in his stomach as Grover saw that stakes had been driven in along the edges of the Bamboo Forest. He hadn’t noticed these this morning. He’d been too busy working on the weaving. Or someone had put them in the ground while he was eating lunch.

  “What do they mean?” Sudie asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. He sounded miles away from himself. He remembered the afternoon his father had been driving him and his sister home from soccer practice. They’d seen their mother walking along Charlotte Street, with Biscuit trotting ahead of her on the sidewalk. Their father pulled over, rolled down his window and asked if she needed a ride. She shook her head and said she was going to Videolife to pick up a movie and that she and Biscuit both needed the walk. “See you in a little bit,” she said as they pulled away. Something made Grover turn around and look back out the rear windshield at his mother. She waved. He didn’t wave back. He’d started to. Probably every time she’d ever waved at him before, he’d waved back. But this time he’d felt childish, embarrassed that someone might see him wave to his mother. Besides, why wave good-bye to someone he was going to see in forty-five minutes?

  “Grover,” Sudie said, tugging on his coat sleeve. “What do the stakes mean?”

  “I said, I don’t know!” He bent down and took hold of the stake. He tried to jiggle it but it didn’t move. It must’ve been pretty deep in the ground. He tried to pull it up but it wouldn’t give. He tried again, this time with both hands, and remembered reading in The Once and Future King how the boy Arthur strained to pull the sword from the stone. With a couple more tugs, Grover slid the stake out of the ground and held it up.

  Sudie tried to pull up the next one. Feeling bad about yelling at his sister, Grover went over and tugged on it. “Give it a try now,” he said, letting her pull it the rest of the way out of the ground. They went all around the edge of the Bamboo Forest, him loosening the stakes and Sudie pulling them out. In the end they each had an armful.

  “What’ll we do with them?” Sudie asked.

  Grover thought about piling them up in his workshop. He could make something out of them. That was a stupid idea. Whoever put them there in the first place might find them. So he and Sudie started home with them, keeping an eye out for anyone who might see them.

  “What y’all got there?”

  They hadn’t seen Clay juggling the soccer ball in front of his house. He’d stopped when he saw them and ran across the street.

  “Oh, no,” Grover groaned. “Not that kid.”

  “Clay?” Sudie said.

  “You know him?”

  “I’ve kicked around a soccer ball with him a couple of times. He’s all right.”

  Clay trotted up to them. “What y’all toting?” Grover realized the boy’s accent was like the people up in the mountains where his family went to get their Christmas tree every year.

  “Somebody put stakes in the Bamboo Forest,” Sudie said, holding up her armful.

  “Sudie,” Grover hissed.

  “Surveyors,” Clay said. “Saw them over there yesterday.”

  “You did?” Grover asked.

  “I want to be a surveyor when I grow up,” Clay said, bending down to pet Biscuit. “You get to be outdoors. Not cooped up in some old office all day. My daddy was a surveyor.” He glanced at the stakes. “Those boys are going to be none too happy about you pulling those up. If I was you, I’d do a mighty good job of hiding them. Maybe even destroy the evidence.”

  Grover and Sudie went inside with the stakes, and Clay started to follow them. But Grover said, “See you later” and shut the door on him.

  “That kid doesn’t take a hint,” Grover said, dropping his stakes on the floor.

  “He’s just being friendly,” Sudie said, piling hers on top of Grover’s.

  “There’s a fine line between being friendly and being a pest,” Grover said.

  “There’s a fat line between being nice and being rude.” Sudie stood at the window, watching Clay walk back across the street.

  “He might tell somebody we pulled up the stakes,” Grover said.

  “He’s not like that,” Sudie said.

  “You better hope you’re right,” Grover said. He had to admit that, even if Sudie was his little sister and two years younger, she had a sixth sense about people. If she thought Clay would keep his mouth shut, he probably would.

  “What’re we going to do with all these?” Sudie asked, toeing the pile of stakes.

  “We can’t leave them here or Daddy’ll find out.”

  Grover studied the woodstove that sat in the middle of the den. Their father heated with it as much as possible to cut the oil bill. Every summer Jessie brought a load of wood that his father loved to split and stack at the side of the house.

  “Be back in a second.” Grover ran out into the yard, snapping some dead twigs off the abelia bush and the privet hedge. His father had taught him that the best kindling came from the bottom of bushes and trees where it was kept dry by the limbs above. Coming from under the abelia, Grover saw Matthew, Jessie’s assistant, in his Army coat and wearing a backpack, walking in the direction of the cemetery. Grover waved but Matthew didn’t wave back. He couldn’t tell if Matthew was ignoring him or just hadn’t seen him.

  Back inside, Grover set the twigs by the woodstove and, as he balled up some newspaper, asked Sudie to bring the stakes over to him.

  “What’re you doing?” She carried over an armful of stakes and dropped them beside him.

  “Deeeee-stroying the evidence.” He arranged the twigs in a miniature tepee over the ball of newspaper, then lighted a match to the newspaper. When the fire was going good, he stacked the stakes on top. The new wood popped and snapped, sending sparks out into the room, which Sudie was quick to stomp on.

  Sudie sat back down beside him. Both watched the stakes flame up inside the woodstove. “Did you hear what Clay said about his daddy?” she asked.

  Grover paused. “Tha
t he was a surveyor?”

  “That he was,” she said.

  “Probably has some other job now,” Grover said. “He was a surveyor, now he’s a plumber or a lawyer or a doctor or something.”

  “There’s no father over there now,” she said.

  “Maybe he’s finishing his job somewhere,” Grover said. “They moved ahead of him to get settled.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Grover watched his sister watch the fire. He and Sudie had become parent detectors, sensing whether a kid had a full set of parents, if their parents were married or divorced, alive or, every now and then, not.

  After he’d fed the last stake to the fire, he closed the door to the stove and turned the damper down, so it’d burn steady.

  There was a scratch at the front door and a bark. Grover opened the door for Biscuit, who trotted in and jumped onto the couch. He was about to close the front door when he noticed Clay’s big sister across the street sitting on the cinder-block steps, reading. Had she been there the whole time? She sat like he’d often seen her, with her legs crossed Indian style, her elbows on her knees and her head bowed over a book in her lap.

  He closed the door. Sudie had turned on the TV and sat down on the couch with Biscuit. This Old House was on. “Maybe they won’t put any more of those stakes in the Bamboo Forest,” Sudie said.

  Grover knew that pulling up a few stakes wouldn’t stop whoever from doing whatever they planned. He almost said that, and in the old days, when their mother was there, he would’ve. When she was alive, he could say out loud what he was thinking. He could test out his worries. Now he fought to keep his worries not only from his sister, but from himself.