Beautiful Poppies

by Danielle L. Parker

conclusion

She went back inside and picked up her homework half-heartedly. They were reading Animal Farm for English class. But she could not settle. Maybe Andrew Bailey was a spiritual pig. "The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which." Deke was just a sheep. They had stood at the bus stop together for almost a month before he could bring himself to speak to her. When she had crested the hill and looked down to see his uplifted face crack into an involuntary smile that first time, she had felt the wordless joy of holding a wild sparrow in the palm of her hand.

She listened all day for the sound of a car driving up the road. But none came.

It was almost seven p.m. when the storm broke. Through the bay window in the living room she saw the first staccato play of lightening in the still-dry sky. Thunder cracked, with the ringing after-echo of a heavens-vast gunshot. The rain followed before the echoes had died; first hard nail-like individual pings on the metal roof. Then there was only a thrumming roar.

She stood on the front step and watched the drilling rain for an hour.

An SUV with bluish headlamps turned off the highway and nosed its way through the mud and overflowing puddles. The rear end dipped beneath the weight of the sacks of cement she could glimpse stacked inside. Her mother waved and grinned at her as she got out. The barbecue grill was going to happen.

“Hi, Mom.”

Her mother danced past her, a large cardboard box held to her chest like something precious. “Pizza,” she said. “We’re having tofu pizza tonight, baby. I’m going to put it in the oven right now.”

“That sounds great, Mom.” Soon Jade could hear her mother warbling Let It Be from the kitchen. Mom was in her Beatles groove, which meant a good mood.

Her stepfather carried armloads of white grocery sacks to the stoop.

“Your mother and I had a good time.”

“I’m glad.”

He put his six bags of groceries down on the step and stood watching the rain with her.

“Something wrong?”

“Sort of.” Distantly Jade could see a man walking down the hill in the rain. His face was deep inside the hood of his drenched nylon windcheater. “Look,” she said. “It’s Mr. Blake. I think we’re going to have to help him.”

The man’s jeans were muddy to the knees. There was something unsteady and yet inexorable about his approach. Her stepfather stood beside her a moment longer, watching.

“Well, I suppose I’d better get these groceries inside, then.”

Jade waited. After a while her stepfather came back out on the step and stood beside her with his hands in his pockets. Inside the kitchen, her mother had stopped singing.

“Hello, Mr. Blake.”

He had shaved, as well as changed his clothes. When he put back his hood Jade saw that his hair was plastered to his head. His lips were pinched. He nodded stiffly to her stepfather.

“Hello,” he said.

“You must be Deacon Blake. I’m Jade’s stepfather. Richard’s the name.”

Mr. Blake climbed the step to the stoop. The men shook hands. Mr. Blake’s lips were still pinched. His hand jerked back.

“I’m Deacon Blake,” he said. “Sorry to bother you. I was hoping Jade had heard from my son.”

“No.” She was sorry instantly that she had been forced to such a stark word. The man seemed to mutely dissolve. She saw he was trembling.

“Come inside,” Jade’s stepfather said. “We’ll talk.”

Mr. Blake refused to step further inside than the welcome mat. His boots left large muddy imprints on the coconut fiber.

“He’s never... never done this before. Gone away all day, I mean.”

“Dad,” Jade said. “Deke was with Andrew Bailey. I think I know where they might be.”

“That old abandoned mill?”

“Yes.” Jade shifted uneasily. She could see the same worry on her stepfather’s face. Richard Dawson helped coach the new middle grade basketball team in his spare time, so he was not entirely clueless. They both knew that no parent wanted to discover his or her child at the kind of party that was usually held at the old mill. Even less would they wish the sheriff to make the discovery.

“Do you want to call the police, Mr. Blake?” Richard Dawson asked bluntly. “Your son may be found drunk.” Or worse, Jade thought, but she could tell that her stepfather too had decided not to voice that concern.

“I... don’t know.” Mr. Blake’s pale face reddened. “The... the batteries are dead on my car. I guess I don’t have a choice.”

Jade’s mother came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel. “What’s going on?”

“Mr. Blake’s son is missing,” Richard Dawson told her. “Cissy, this is our new neighbor, Deacon Blake.” He made an abortive wave of his hand. “My wife, Cissy.”

Jade’s mother nodded, but she didn’t look happy. “OK,” she said. “The pizza’s in the oven now.” She turned around and went back inside the kitchen. Jade’s stepfather turned to their visitor.

“Would you like to call the Baileys, Mr. Blake? Or would you like me to call?”

Mr. Blake looked at his wet trousers and mud-encased boots. “I don’t think I’d better walk on your floor.”

“I’ll call,” Richard Dawson said.

He disappeared into the kitchen. Jade and Mr. Blake listened to the long silence and then the click when the handset was finally replaced. Jade heard her mother and stepfather exchange low words. They did not sound happy.

Richard Dawson re-appeared from the kitchen, followed by his wife. “No answer,” he said.

“Maybe we should run down to the mill and check,” Jade said. “Please? And may I go, too?”

“I guess it’s not too far.” Richard Dawson did not look happy either. “If he’s not there, we can call the police when we get back.” The phone lines ran on a little further than the power lines, but both stopped long before they reached the old bus at the end of the road. Perhaps they were all thinking the same thing. Jade saw the shamed comprehension tinge Mr. Blake’s pallid cheeks again.

“That’s very kind of you,” he said.

“Maybe forty-five minutes,” Richard Dawson said to his wife. Jade’s mother did not look as if she believed him.

They tramped outside mutely. Jade sat in the back. The interior of the SUV was dusty with the scent of the cement sacks that were still behind her seat. She looked out the window as the vehicle reversed out of the driveway. The warm yellow light flooded from the open doorway, where her mother stood with her arms hanging at her sides. Jade waved and waved, but her mother did not seem to see her.

No one spoke for long minutes of driving. Jade looked out the rain-smeared side window as the SUV heeled around a curve. The gray, rain-lashed river that ran closely beside them was turgid with the last late bloat of snowmelt. Underneath the fast-moving swells were hints of drowned and trapped things. An immobile branch stuck up above the surface like a limb frozen in rigor mortis.

“Sorry I interrupted your family supper.”

“It’s okay.”

Perhaps it was not entirely okay. Jade could see the tightness of her stepfather’s jaw. But after they had passed Curlew’s decrepit bridge he made an effort. “Haven’t been up here long?”

“No.” Now Mr. Blake sounded clipped in turn. But as the SUV slowed to take the curves past the railroad he spoke again. “I used to work at Microsoft. I was an account executive. So was my ex-wife.” The words not spoken were like the swells that hinted at drowned and choked things beneath the water.

Jade’s stepfather must have heard them too.

“Stuff happens,” he said finally.

“She didn’t want the kid now that she’s living with my old boss.” Mr. Blake gave a choked sputter. “I’ve been so damn sorry for myself, I wasn’t paying attention to my boy, I guess. Shit happens. Get over it. Isn’t that the rest of that phrase?”

“This is a tough place to raise a kid,” Richard Dawson murmured with monumental tact.

“Everywhere is, if the kid doesn’t have a father,” Mr. Blake said.

Bingo. Jade watched blurred scenes of aging mobile homes and deserted summer cabins out her rain-splattered window. She amused herself with counting derelicts in the yards that flashed past while her stepfather and Mr. Blake made cautious desultory conversation in the front seat.

Four, five, seven decrepit pickup trucks in that one, half-hidden behind the workshop that dwarfed its house; the next contender sported rusting farm equipment disposed like the cryptic bones of dinosaurs. A lonely white bus rested on its grave, the shadows of mystery garbage inside its windows.

“Here we go,” her stepfather said at last.

No one replied. The SUV braked and bumped off the paved road. Once there had been a guard station to discourage unauthorized traffic. But the guard shack was gone. The KEEP OUT sign lay hopelessly on its back. The muddy road crimped and wound. Below them were the ghosts, half-stripped charmless metal skeletons of uncertain usage. The millpond at their feet was a black Usherite tarn.

“I don’t see any cars,” Mr. Blake said in a low voice.

“Look, though,” Jade said. “There’s been traffic in and out, just since it started to rain. See the tracks.”

The tracks led them around the back of an enormously tall shed. On the backside half its white metal siding rattled in the wind like loose teeth. Paper wrappers and pinched cigarette stubs whirled in their own private tornado inside the darkened interior. When her stepfather shut off the vehicle Jade could hear the whistle of the wind through those loose metallic teeth and the loud intemperate banging of a single plate that was trying its furious best to escape.

“They’re gone.”

Richard Dawson opened his door. “Looks like, Jade,” he said over his shoulder as he stepped out, “I don’t want you to go inside. It doesn’t look safe.”

But the door-less gap exerted its chilly suction on all of them. Jade watched her stepfather approach with weighted steps. She saw him draw breath and put his hands to his mouth for his shout.

“Deke! Deke Blake!”

“Look,” she said. “Look.”

The boy was still clenching a scrap of paper. The paper was bright yellow and printed with a repeating picture of the sun. It had two tracks of perforations.

“Don’t touch that paper,” Richard Dawson said with the lash of a whip in his voice. “Jade! Don’t touch that paper!”

But Jade was already holding her broken sparrow in her arms.

“Dad,” she said. “My baby bird’s fallen out of his nest.”

* * *

It was Sunday evening before Jade went up the road again. For once, she did not run. It was enough to walk lazily in the cool beginnings of dusk, and stand and watch the calf suck at its mother’s teats for a while, and pick a handful of white-blossomed mock orange to take back to her mother.

When she crested the last rise she slowed. Smoke hung on the still air below. Mr. Blake stood with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, watching the lazy blue-gray spiral rise from his barrel.

When she was close enough, he spoke without looking up. “He’s coming back home tomorrow.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know that.”

He looked at her.

“He’ll be okay now. Really.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know that too. Because you’re burning all your poppies.”