A Place Of Light Read online

  She went in the back door to the kitchen and dropped her school things on the table, then started snooping for something to eat. She hadn’t touched the breakfast her mother had made for her. “I’ll throw up,” Josie had told her.

  “Fine,” her mother said. “You always know what’s best anyway, don’t you? That’s why you’re going to be the first one in our family to repeat a grade. I hope you’re proud.”

  Josie found some powdered donuts in Uncle Jo Jo’s cupboard. At least somebody knew what good food was, She cleared a place on the table, next to a pile of dirty spark plugs and a couple of grease-smudged magazines. Aunt Irene always had a fit about Uncle Jo Jo’s hunting and fishing and car magazines and his books about fruit trees. She told him things would have been better all around if he’d paid half as much attention to Eddie as he did to those “pictures of oil gaskets and deer heads.” She used to be okay, but lately anything anybody did was wrong. She had a line between her eyes, straight up in the air like a flagpole, worse than the one her mother had.

  Josie poured herself a glass of milk and sat down to look at the pictures in the fishing magazine. But when she reached for it she noticed an opened letter, poking out from under the junk basket.

  The letter was addressed to Aunt Irene and was from Cousin Eddie in New York City. After Irene’s name Eddie had printed: And Nobody Else. Josie looked up at the doorway and listened for Uncle Jo Jo. When she heard him working on the car, she took the letter out and read it.

  Eddie told Aunt Irene that his hepatitis was better and he was working out in a gym and had a part-time job, but he didn’t say doing what. The weather was okay. He had to pay seventy-five cents for one lousy apple. If she still wanted to come visit, he could find her a place to stay. And thanks for the birthday card and the money.

  Cousin Eddie had just turned eighteen. “He’s a man now,” Josie’s mother said. “Too bad his father had to miss everything.” Josie’s mother had sent Eddie a card with five dollars, and Josie had signed her own name to it.

  Josie folded the letter and put it back. Cousin Eddie was what Josie’s father called a “hellion”– except when he had a pen or pencil in his hands. Then he drew real-life pictures: wrestlers straining to pin each other, or heavyweight boxers throwing punches, the muscles in their legs and arms bulging. Uncle Jo Jo hated Eddie’s drawings. He said Eddie should learn to do something useful, instead of “living in his head” or “wrecking every damn thing he laid eyes on.” He told Eddie he should study to be a car mechanic, or a hotel manager, or even a salesman, anything but a bum. A lot of people said it was because of Uncle Jo Jo that Eddie turned out the way he did.

  Of course, Josie knew that wasn’t true. Eddie really was a hellion. When he was fourteen, Eddie broke into the high school with some other kids and spray-painted the halls and threw books and papers all over. Later he stole a car and almost got sent to juvenile detention. Then he ran away from home a couple times, but somebody always found him and brought him back. Now he lived in a warehouse in New York City and nobody was trying to make him come home anymore, not even Aunt Irene.

  Josie knew Uncle Jo Jo felt bad about Eddie, even though he pretended not to, because one time he came over drunk when Josie was supposed to be asleep and told Josie’s mother all about it. Josie sneaked out of bed and sat on the stairs to watch and listen. Jo Jo said that Eddie’s hatred for him was a knife in his heart, and he didn’t know how much longer he could go on. “Every time I gave him hell, every time I slapped him – don’t you know I was just trying to make him turn out decent?” And then he told Josie’s mother about the money he tried to send Eddie. He’d mailed it without a note or return address, and even drove to the city for the postmark so Eddie wouldn’t know who it was from. Eddie returned it to him, unopened.

  Josie brushed the powdered sugar from her face. It was funny how one person could think somebody was wonderful while another person couldn’t stand him. Like the way people always said Josie’s mother was so friendly and nice when Josie knew the truth: that she was really a witch. Anyway, it didn’t matter to her if nobody else on earth liked Uncle Jo Jo. She liked him.

  As she headed for the door she wondered what it would be like to live in New York City in a warehouse. If things kept going the way they were with her mother, she thought, she might have to write to Cousin Eddie and find out.

  Uncle Jo Jo was putting his tools back in the box.

  “We’re just about ready to roll,” he told her, sounding a little more like himself. “What say we take this buggy out on the Oxbow and see what she thinks about hills?”

  “I have to get leaves,” she reminded him.

  “Where we’re going,” he said, “you can get all the leaves you need just by standing in one spot and waving your arms through the air.”

  She followed him into the house and watched him scrub his hands at the sink. He used a special soap that came in a can and looked like the paste they used in school. It smelled awful.

  He looked over at the mess she’d left on the table. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s pack a lunch and take it up there to eat.”

  She made the baloney sandwiches while he found a couple beers and a soda and half a package of Lorna Doones she hadn’t seen.

  Uncle Jo Jo revved the engine. He pulled out of the drive and headed for the highway. Every once in a while he stepped on the gas, then let off and listened. “Still got a little knock,” he said.

  The open country did something to him. When they turned onto the Oxbow road, he hit the gas. “Okay, baby, this is it,” he called out.

  Josie turned up the radio, and they spun along with the radio blaring “Heart of Gold.”

  Keep me searching for a heart of gold, they sang, and I’m getting old.

  “We’re Bonnie and Clyde,” he shouted to her over the radio. They had seen the movie together, and everything they did now was from the movie. “Stick with me, kid,” he said. “We’re gonna outrun those Feds.” He looked in the rearview mirror and pushed the gas pedal to the floor, as they started up the Oxbow hill. “Whatever happens,” he shouted, “remember I love you, Bonnie.”

  She felt warm and gushy all over when he talked like that. Josie’s secret fantasy was that Aunt Irene would get cancer and die. She was always afraid she had it anyway. Then Josie would have to go live with her uncle so he wouldn’t be all alone.

  “Don’t go off the road, Clyde,” she shouted back to him.

  The car barely made it up the Oxbow. “We’ll just have to tell old Snyder to keep his jalopy on the flatlands,” he said.

  They had to park on the side of the road because the county had put a chain across the bridge to keep kids from having beer parties in there. She ducked under the chain, and he stepped over it, lifting each leg with both hands. She waited for him to catch his breath, and then they crossed the bridge.

  Josie had never been there before. Right across the bridge was a wide meadow of weeds; everything else was trees. A single bird chirped; otherwise the place was so still it was almost eerie. They took an overgrown trail that led into the woods. Uncle Jo Jo grabbed at leaves. “See what I mean?” he said, and he tossed them into the air.

  They came out at the waterfall – or what used to be a waterfall. Now barely a trickle ran down the gorge, even though it was still early in the year.

  “The whole world’s drying up,” Uncle Jo Jo told her. “Those damn scientists keep trying to tell us we’ll be in trouble if the glaciers melt, but I say it’ll be the best damn thing that ever happened.”

  “What’s that tree?” she asked.

  “That’s a horse chestnut,” he said. “Don’t you know that?”

  “It’s not in our book.”

  He pointed to the creek below. “See if you can figure it out. The creek’s always full and running down there, just like up at the bridge, but nothing goes over the edge.” He looked at her and shrugged.

  They left the lunch near the gorge and went into the woods. Uncle Jo Jo picked le
aves and handed them to her. “Aspen,” he said. “Beech. Chokecherry . . .” He watched as she wrote the names down in her notebook. When they came to a big spreading tree he clasped his hands together and gave her a boost up. She felt his legs wobble a little as she reached for a leaf. When the steam valve broke loose at work it shot a plug of metal right through his chest and out his back. He got a collapsed lung, a couple broken ribs, and a bruised spinal cord that put him in a wheelchair for nearly a year. Now his legs were half as strong as they used to be, and he got bronchitis all the time. He let her down. “Oak,” he told her, and he watched her lay the leaf in her notebook and write its name.

  “Look at this,” he said. He showed her a maple leaf. “See those little brown bumps? This tree is in trouble.”

  She looked at the leaf, then back at him.

  “It’s got a disease,” he said. “You can tell everything there is to know about a tree by looking at its leaves.”

  “I don’t want to know anything,” she told him. “I’m going to quit school when I’m sixteen and go on a safari to Africa.”

  The minute she mentioned quitting school she was sorry, but it didn’t seem to bother him.

  “Look at this sucker,” Jo Jo said. He held up a leaf as big as his hand. “Speaking of going on a safari.”

  He found another and pressed one to each side of his head, then bent forward, swinging his head from side to side. “Put these in your collection,” he said. “Elephant ears.”

  “There’s no such thing.”

  “Make up a name,” he told her. “Your teacher’s not going to know what they are.” He dropped the leaves and put his hands in his pockets.

  “She’s got a book,” Josie told him.

  And then, before she knew what she was doing, she blurted it out to him: “My mother’s going to send me away to an institution if I don’t pass.” She stopped walking and looked at him.

  He gave her a funny look, like he hadn’t really heard what she’d said, but was trying to figure it out. “Why, that’s the craziest thing I ever heard of,” he told her.

  “All she ever does is yell at me,” Josie said. “And I’m not even failing. Except science. Do you think she’ll really do it?”

  Jo Jo picked a leaf from a low tree and looked at it. Then he tossed it. “She’s not sending you anywhere.”

  “She says I’m getting just like my father.”

  “Is that right?” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Josie’s father lived in a rented room over the barber-shop because Josie’s mother had “come to the end of her rope” with him. His construction business was going bankrupt, and Josie’s mother was through patching things up for him. He could do it himself if he was so smart, she told him.

  “It’s just her female trouble,” Uncle Jo Jo said. “Everything in the world is female trouble.”

  “She says the trouble is my father,” Josie told him.

  “Let’s go back,” he said. “There’s nothing but box elder over this way.” He plucked a handful of leaves. “This is one worthless tree if I ever saw one.”

  “I’ve already got that one anyway.”

  Uncle Jo Jo dropped the leaves and leaned back against a tree. He looked up into the branches. “Jesus,” he said.

  Josie thought his lungs were hurting him, from all the walking. But then he looked at her and said, “I’ve gotta remember to buy some glue.” He shook his head. “Let’s take a break,” he told her.

  They sat at the top of the gorge, and Uncle Jo Jo opened a beer. “Boy, that’s good,” he said. He took another swallow, then set the can down.

  Josie lay the notebook in her lap and started flipping through the pages, counting.

  “That thing looks stuffed,” Jo Jo told her.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. “I only need one more.” She looked at him. “One more and I’m finished.”

  “No kidding?” he said. He leaned back on his hands. “Great. That’s great.”

  He looked out at the gorge in front of them and motioned with his head. The sky was deep blue with little puffs of clouds. Bright evergreens grew down the gorge walls and spread out in a widening valley.

  “That valley runs all the way to the lake,” he said.

  Josie bit into her baloney sandwich. “When can we go swimming?” Uncle Jo Jo always took her once the water warmed up.

  “We’re going fishing this year,” he told her. “As soon as I get my boat fixed, we’re taking her to Dead Man’s Island.”

  She had never been there before, although she had seen it from the beach. She had never been to any island. She imagined herself hiking the craggy, deserted shore, hiding out from pirates.

  “What’ll it be?” her uncle asked her. “The usual?” He had almost finished his beer.

  “Okay,” she told him. “Give me the usual.”

  He set the beer can down on the grass in front of her with a wink, just one more good reason why she should live with him instead of her stupid mother.

  They ate everything. They finished all the Lorna Doones and lay back on the grass, looking up at the sky. Uncle Jo Jo started talking about how he was going to fix his boat. It was a little motorboat he’d bought from a friend last summer, but he still hadn’t gotten it in the water. Then he told her how he’d been thinking of buying one of those giant cabin cruisers someday and “doing the Great Lakes” – like Huck Finn, only more sophisticated, he said. He’d travel the whole summer, up the St. Lawrence and through the chain of lakes, clear all the way to Duluth.

  He sat up. “Jesus,” he said. “What the hell do I want with a boat?” He looked around at the trees, then out at the valley. “This is such a frigging beautiful place,” he said. He dropped his head in his hands. “God Almighty.”

  Josie sat up and looked at him.

  After a while he raised his head. He looked out at the valley and shook his head, thinking. “I’m in big trouble, Little Jo,” he said. He stared hard at her. “I steamed open Irene’s letter from Eddie,” he said, and he looked miserable.

  Josie didn’t see what was so awful about that. Sherlock Holmes steamed open letters. Perry Mason probably did it too. Besides, she’d read the letter herself, though she felt a little funny about it now.

  “I’ve got a couple more of those letters I never let Irene see,” Jo Jo said. “I know she knows something’s up.” He opened another beer and took a long swallow. “I have to glue that frigging letter shut before she comes home.”

  This was the most exciting news Josie had heard in a long time. She tried not to smile.

  “We’ve got Elmer’s glue at our house,” she told him.

  “He hates me,” Jo Jo said. “They both do. They talk on the phone. She sends him things, money. Now she’s gonna go visit, who knows what’ll happen next? Nobody says a word to me. It’s like I’m dead, like I don’t exist.”

  He brushed his hand through the grass, as if trying to clear something away. “Do you know how that makes me feel?” he said. “The bastard.”

  Josie didn’t know what to say. Uncle Jo Jo never talked about Cousin Eddie – unless Eddie was there and he was yelling at him, or else complaining to somebody about things Eddie had done.

  “I don’t know what’s happening to me,” Uncle Jo Jo said. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing anymore.”

  He took another swallow of beer and handed her the can. She looked at him, then took a sip. She set the beer can down in front of him.

  “You want to know something else?” Uncle Jo Jo said. He looked at Josie for the longest time. Then he told her: “Irene sleeps in the spare bedroom. She’s been doing that three months now.” He fell back on the grass. “God Almighty, I think I’m losing my mind.”

  She felt funny hearing him talk like that about Cousin Eddie and Aunt Irene – telling her private things. His voice sounded funny, too, like he was going to cry, and that scared her.

  She tugged at blades of grass and let them drop. “You’re not l
osing your mind,” she told him.

  He lay still, with his hand covering his eyes, for a long time.

  Then he said, “At least you love me. Don’t you?”

  She looked away at the trees. “Well, sure,” she answered.

  He sat up again. “You’re the sweetest, dearest girl in the world.”

  He was so serious that she felt herself blush.

  “Do you want to get that leaf now?” she asked him.

  “In a minute,” he said. “Come sit next to me.”

  She looked at him, puzzled.

  “Oh, Bonnie, I’m so cold,” he said. “Come here and warm me up. Just for a minute.”

  “My science project is due tomorrow,” she told him. He clasped his hands to his chest. “They got me, Bonnie. The Feds got me.” He looked down at his hands. “I’m losing blood fast. Get some bandages.”

  When she didn’t move, he said, “Just sit next to me for a minute, till I get my bearings. Then I’ll find that leaf for you.”

  She wasn’t sure what was wrong with him, but she inched over anyway. He smiled and nodded for her to get closer.

  She sat beside him and held herself still.

  “Thanks, Bonnie,” he said. “I’m feeling better already.”

  They sat together for a while. “There must be a million birds out there,” he said. He sighed, listening. And then he put his arm around her shoulders.

  She started to move away, but he pulled her close. “Don’t go,” he said.

  He pulled her to his side, and she could smell the grease from the cars, and the special soap he used. He bent his face down to her neck. Josie shoved his head away and pulled free while he mumbled, “Please, Bonnie.”