(continued from previous page)

It was after 6:00 P.M. when I wandered back to the house from the peach stand, having sold nothing, not one peach, and found Rosaleen in the living room. Usually she would've gone home by now, but she was wrestling with the rabbit ears on top of the TV, trying to fix the snow on the screen. President Johnson faded in and out, lost in the blizzard. I'd never seen Rosaleen so interested in a TV show that she would exert physical energy over it.

"What happened?" I asked. "Did they drop the atom bomb?" Ever since we'd started bomb drills at school, I couldn't help thinking my days were numbered. Everybody was putting fallout shelters in their backyards, canning tap water, getting ready for the end of time. Thirteen students in my class made fallout-shelter models for their science project, which shows it was not just me worried about it. We were obsessed with Mr. Khrushchev and his missiles.

"No, the bomb hasn't gone off," she said. "just come here and see if you can fix the TV." Her fists were burrowed so deep into her hips they seemed to disappear.

I twisted tin foil around the antennae. Things cleared up enough to make out President Johnson taking his seat at a desk, people all around. I didn't care much for the president because of the way he held his beagles by the ears. I did admire his wife, Lady Bird, though, who always looked like she wanted nothing more than to sprout wings and fly away.

Rosaleen dragged the footstool in front of the set and sat down, so the whole thing vanished under her. She leaned toward the set, holding a piece of her skirt and winding it around in her hands.

"What is going on?" I said, but she was so caught up in whatever was happening she didn't even answer me. On the screen the president signed his name on a piece of paper, using about ten ink pens to get it done.

"Rosaleen--"

"Shhh," she said, waving her hand.

I had to get the news from the TV man. "Today, July second, 1964," he said, "the president of the United States signed the Civil Rights Act into law in the East Room of the White House...."

I looked over at Rosaleen, who sat there shaking her head, mumbling, "Lord have mercy," just looking so disbelieving and happy, like people on television when they answered the $64,000 Question.

I didn't know whether to be excited for her or worried. All people ever talked about after church were the Negroes and whether they'd get their civil rights. Who was winning--the white people's team or the colored people's team? Like it was a do-or-die contest. When that minister from Alabama, Reverend Martin Luther King, got arrested last month in Florida for wanting to eat in a restaurant, the men at church acted like the white people's team had won the pennant race. I knew they would not take this news lying down, not in one million years.

"Hallelujah, Jesus," Rosaleen was saying over there on her stool. Oblivious.

Rosaleen had left dinner on the stove top, her famous smothered chicken. As I fixed T. Ray's plate, I considered how to bring up the delicate matter of my birthday, something T. Ray had never paid attention to in all the years of my life, but every year, like a dope, I got my hopes up thinking "this" year would be the one.

I had the same birthday as the country, which made it even harder to get noticed. When I was little, I thought people were sending up rockets and cherry bombs because of me--hurray, Lily was born! Then reality set in, like it always did.

I wanted to tell T. Ray that any girl would love a silver charm bracelet, that in fact last year I'd been the only girl at Sylvan Junior High without one, that the whole point of lunchtime was to stand in the cafeteria line jangling your wrist, giving people a guided tour of your charm collection.

"So," I said, sliding his plate in front of him, "my birthday is this Saturday."

I watched him pull the chicken meat from around the bone with his fork.

"I was just thinking I would love to have one of those silver charm bracelets they have down at the mercantile."

The house creaked like it did once in a while. Outside the door Snout gave a low bark, and then the air grew so quiet I could hear the food being ground up in T. Ray's mouth.

He ate his chicken breast and started on the thigh, looking at me now and then in his hard way.

I started to say, "so then, what about the bracelet?" but I could see he'd already given his answer, and it caused a kind of sorrow to rise in me that felt fresh and tender and had nothing, really, to do with the bracelet. I think now it was sorrow for the sound of his fork scraping the plate, the way it swelled in the distance between us, how I was not even in the room.

That night I lay in bed listening to the flicks and twitters and thrums inside the bee jar, waiting till it was late enough so I could slip out to the orchard and dig up the tin box that held my mother's things. I wanted to lie down in the orchard and let it hold me.

When the darkness had pulled the moon to the top of the sky, I got out of bed, put on my shorts and sleeveless blouse, and glided past T. Ray's room in silence, sliding my arms and legs like a skater on ice. I didn't see his boots, how he'd parked them in the middle of the hall. When I fell, the clatter startled the air so badly T. Ray's snore changed rhythm. At first it ceased altogether, but then the snore started back with three piglet snorts.

I crept down the stairs, through the kitchen. When the night hit my face, I felt like laughing. The moon was a perfect circle, so full of light that all the edges of things had an amber cast. The cicadas rose up, and I ran with bare feet across the grass.

To reach my spot I had to go to the eighth row left of the tractor shed, then walk along it, counting trees till I got to thirty-two.

The tin box was buried in the soft dirt beneath the tree, shallow enough that I could dig it up with my hands.

When I brushed the dirt from the lid and opened it, I saw first the whiteness of her gloves, then the photograph wrapped in waxed paper, just as I'd left it. And finally the funny wooden picture of Mary with the dark face. I took everything out, and, stretching out among the fallen peaches, I rested them across my abdomen.

When I looked up through the web of trees, the night fell over me, and for a moment I lost my boundaries, feeling like the sky was my own skin and the moon was my heart beating up there in the dark. Lightning came, not jagged but in soft, golden licks across the sky. I undid the buttons on my shirt and opened it wide, just wanting the night to settle on my skin, and that's how I fell asleep, lying there with my mother's things, with the air making moisture on my chest and the sky puckering with light.

I woke to the sound of someone thrashing through the trees. T. Ray! I sat up, panicked, buttoning my shirt. I heard his footsteps, the fast, heavy pant of his breathing. Looking down, I saw my mother's gloves and the two pictures. I stopped buttoning and grabbed them up, fumbling with them, unable to think what to do, how to hide them. I had dropped the tin box back in its hole, too far away to reach.

"Lileeee!" he shouted, and I saw his shadow plunge toward me across the ground.

I jammed the gloves and pictures under the waistband of my shorts, then reached for the rest of the buttons with shaking fingers.

Before I could fasten them, light poured down on me and there he was without a shirt, holding a flashlight. The beam swept and zagged, blinding me when it swung across my eyes.

"Who were you out here with?" he shouted, aiming the light on my half-buttoned top.

"N-no one," I said, gathering my knees in my arms, startled by what he was thinking. I couldn't look long at his face, how large and blazing it was, like the face of God.

He flung the beam of light into the darkness. "Who's out there?" he yelled.

"Please, T. Ray, no one was here but me."

"Get up from there," he yelled.

(Note: Hardcover - Part 5 ended on the top of page 24.)

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Suzanne Beecher
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