Chapter I

Me and Hank go up to the top of the world and from there watch it burn. A red line comes across the sky and below the water is moving. Lilac can’t see us from where she is, so we just lie there real still, not even swatting at the mosquitoes as they come up into our ears and bite our necks and throats and ankles. Through the last of the standing pines, we can see the men working below, swinging axes at the knot of timbers that were broken down and washed up here after the flood.

At the end of the day, me and Hank and sometimes Lilac go down to the place when the men have finished working and their all-day smell still hangs close in the air. The trees are fallen and pushed up together one on top of the other like a mess of building logs. Lilac won’t come climbing through them with us. She says that it’s filled with ghosts and snakes and calls us monkey boys as me and Hank disappear howling into the cave of logs.

“Go on…” Lilac calls.

“Go on and hide yersefs.” She yells.

A train passes. It throws up leaves and stones in its going. Where it passes me I feel that a piece of me is shaking loose and thrown into the air pierced with loneliness and daylight until my body and the sounds of Hank and Lilac and the men at their work call for my return.

Hank lays close beside me and we hold our breath to keep Lilac from hearing. We are chest and belly-bare on the rough ground, and I cannot tell whose heart it is beating back at me through the earth. Lilac grounds her feet into the sand but does not call out for us. I can feel Hank is ready to laugh, so I give him my elbow up against the side of his rusty, nearly bald boy head.

“You is some stupid.” I say.

“Why?”

“You want she should find us up in here?”

“Unno?” Hank shrugs.

“She’ll go on and tell your Ma is what she’ll go on and do.” I rush the words out of the back of my throat.

“Tell her we’s up in here.”

“Shit no.”

“Ahlright then, keep the gums a still.” I say and put my dirty finger up to my mouth.

I am sorry to keep my games from Lilac but the days are for me and Hank. Tonight
I’ll wait for my uncles, Big Jim and Lightning Rod, to come home from drinking. I’ll listen to them water up against the side of the house and stumble in too loud to avoid Mama. Then I’ll sneak out barefoot over their fresh coppery puddles and wake Lilac through her window.

We have taken to the night now, the two of us. She waits, dressed beneath the bedcovers, for me to arrive breathless. It is hard for me to keep her from laughing, she gets so excited by the night game.

The night game is usually the same. The two of us walk out together, her walking behind me in the dark, out to old Pickett Road where the trucks come down carrying fuel, then rise up and out again loaded with timber. They come and go in the dead of night. Spectral trains, Lilac calls them; her Daddy told her that. Years back, he was a state trooper; so now on most nights, Lilac and me come down to her Daddy’s old post to watch the lights shine like burning water in the fog and feel the earth shake as the big rigs roll up and down old Pickett Road with their loads.

We don’t tell Hank about the night game. No one knows but us, and Lilac says we’ll take it with us to the grave. Some nights that is where the game takes us, up near Buford Hill where trees still stand in green patchwork above the flood line. The cemetery starts at the top of Buford Hill and goes down all the way below the fields and forests that were covered by the black flood water, where the hulls of trees now lay rotting and the earth is exposed and raw in the sun.

Most of the old bones were carried away in the early days of the rain. After the waters went down, Old Man Cricket shot at a wanderer who was picking around in the slop mud for the turned-up burial things of the dead. Me and Hank heard him cussing as we hid beneath the porch of the Sheriff’s house, and he was saying that scavenger animals coming out of the woods at night was one thing but a man doing such a thing was another.

From up where I am, I can hear the thump and the echo of axes against hard trees. I turn from Lilac and watch the men. Two black men lace chains around the belly of an old pine, tying the chain in a knot like a piece of rope, then lacing it across the shoulders of a draft horse. The men all wear wet rags tied across their faces against the smell. Hysterical moss green yellow and burst flesh red berries and ivy come up out of the logs, and the men fan themselves against hornets. The dying is done. From inside the tangle of timbers, stronger things reach up out of the ruins.

“At night say,” I ask Lilac, “are you ever scared?”

“Scared a what?” She answers.

“Most anything I suppose.” But that isn’t the answer I mean. It isn’t the answer.

“Ain’t no time to be scared.” She says.

She goes on.

“I suppose I could be scared of a monster or an animal if there was one to be scared about. What scares you?” She asks.
“Nothing.” I say.

Sad orange twists quick through the shell of a dead cicada grasping moss mess and tree flank. I stop and go to the tree. I touch the cicada husk. Then I take it from its place and hold it in between my thumb and pointing finger.

“Whut?” Lilac asks.

“Bug.” I say.

“Locust?” She says.

“Close enough.”

“Empty.” She says.

“Mama lays her eggs inside. When they hatch they suck up the guts.”

“I know.” She says. She sucks on her teeth. Then whistles the air out. She has a baby tooth in the top of her mouth. It shakes a little as she breathes. It is being pushed aside by something else.

She takes the shell from me and puts it in her hair.

“How do I look?”

“Pretty.” I say.

I reach out and take the cicada.

“Ought to put it back where it belongs.” I say. I put the shell back on the tree. The feet grab onto the moss and bark like there was life still left in them.