Joy was wearing a jacket and it wasn’t dark yet. Gaps between walls’ wooden slats gaped like missing teeth, so the cabin probably had no insulation just when the weather was getting cold. How had Dad been living there alone for two months? Maybe longer, if her brother’s theory was true: that he’d moved into the cabin soon after Mom’s funeral a year ago. The bathroom her parents had added in the rear in the ’90s wasn’t in great shape, Jesse had warned, but it was better than the outhouse she still saw a few yards beyond the cabin, its wood blackened with age. The slanted roof had collected a thick blanket of dead leaves at the heart of the L shape that separated the cabin’s main room from its single bedroom. Their great-grandfather built this cabin in the 1920s to hide from lynch mobs roused by their envy that a Negro businessman could afford a shiny new Ford Model T.Įvery inch of the cabin was sagging a hundred years later, weary of standing. She’d imagined that she and her brother might fix the cabin up as a rental one day, but in real life it was puny and weather-beaten and sad, more relic than residence. The trees and wildly growing ferns dwarfed it, with no obvious path to the door from the red-brown dirt driveway. (Like her father, she didn’t want to sleep alone at her parents’ main house in the ashes of her childhood ten miles back toward civilization.) But her father’s old Bronco finally appeared in the glare of orange dusk light fighting through the treetops, parked in front of the cabin.Īnd the cabin looked so, so small-much smaller than she remembered. If she’d started her trip closer to dark, she would have had to turn around and wait out the night at the overpriced Hampton Inn off of I-10.
She’d never forgotten that wild, frightened look in their eyes. She howled so loudly from the vicious stinging that Dad and Mom heard her all the way from the lake, and when they reached her they expected to find her half dead. Once, Dad had made her play outside instead of sitting on the couch with her Virginia Hamilton books, and she’d stepped in an anthill up to her shin. Driving back to her family’s cabin twenty years later reminded her that the woods had rarely been restful for her.
Joy nearly got lost on the root-knotted red dirt path off of Highway 99, losing sight of the gaps between the live oaks and Spanish moss that fanned across her hood and windows like fingertips.
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