Finding Esme Read online

  I still remember the day my daddy Harlan left for good. I’d watched from my bedroom window as he drove down the gravel drive in his white Chevy pickup, slowly, so slowly that for one ridiculous moment I thought perhaps he was thinking about turning around. I knew that she, my mother, was watching from somewhere in the house like me. A cloud of dust swirled behind his back wheels, and I could still make out the rainbow splatters on the tailgate where countless cans of paint had spilled. If I squinted, it almost looked like one of his paintings.

  Harlan McCauley is an artist, but no one around here understands what he does. Bee describes his paintings as “ain’t-no-picture” paintings (not to mention a waste of perfectly good paint). Amidst all of the swirls and blobs, most of his paintings have June Rain’s beautiful face in there somewhere, haunting us at every angle. But since no one round here wants one of his “ain’t-no-picture” paintings, he became a house painter. The ironic thing is, people in Hollis hardly can afford to have their house painted either, so he has to make his living by leaving, moving from town to town drumming up what little work he can.

  But that day he left, three years ago, I knew it was for good. And so did June Rain. She threw all his paintings into the yard. Before Bee hauled them to the trash heap, I managed to save one with half of June Rain’s face obscured behind giant turquoise and pink swirls. I put the painting behind my dresser, but it sticks out, the left eye calling Harlan home.

  I know Bee tried to find Harlan. I saw an old newspaper from San Antonio one time in her sewing basket and there was an ad in there: “Missing: Harlan McCauley. Itinerant house painter. Tall, thin boned. Dark haired.” And our phone number. That’s all it said. My daddy, summed up in ten words. Despite it all, I still thought he’d come back, at least I did for a while, and I’d watch for the dust and his white pickup coming up the drive. Bo kept pestering me about it till finally I lied and told him Daddy was on a long trip and coming home soon.

  Bee is a finder. She can find just about anything, but her specialty is water witching. She pulls a switch from one of our peach trees and bends it like a boomerang, and everything that’s been tossed out to the world comes back to her. Somehow she just knows where to go and when she gets there, that witching stick points down to the earth, like magic. But nobody really needs her much to find water, not like in the olden days.

  It’s everything else they want. She found Vera Godly’s Busbee’s Abdominal Supporter for the Stout, otherwise known as a girdle, hanging on the flagpole in the Hollis town square, and Lottie Broadway’s car that someone had joyridden around town, then left at Bitter Creek with a bunch of beer bottles rolling around on the floor, and Reverend Foley Hopper’s runaway horse who was over courting another horse at Bent Creek Ranch. Lost keys, dogs, cats, cows, everything you can think of and more. She hadn’t found Harlan yet, though.

  Some call us peculiar, but Bee says her way of finding things is God-given. Just as God told Moses to use a rod to find water, God tells her where to go. But even if folks gossip about Bee McCauley, everyone always ends up at Peach Hollow Farm, one way or another, wanting something from her. Bee says I have her finding gift, but it’s tucked down deep. It’s something she’s known since I came out early, quiet as a lamb, from June Rain’s tummy. My eyes took in the room, looking for something. I just haven’t found it yet. She said I would know when “the finding” found me. I would just know. And there’d be signs ahead, like an icy wind before a tornado. Is that what had happened yesterday?

  I asked Bee once that if she could find someone’s lost car keys, why couldn’t she find my missing daddy. She said he’d gone so far away she can’t see him anymore. Sometimes I go in the bathroom and pull out Harlan’s Rise Aftershave Balm and squeeze a little on my hand and rub it on my nose. Then at least his smell is with me for a while. And Bo sleeps with one of Harlan’s old paintbrushes under his pillow.

  I could barely make out the outline of Solace Hill through the rain. My heart seemed to turn over. Then a flutter, a movement in my peripheral vision. But it was only Sugar Pie, our horse, chomping on one of the peach trees. Bee called her the Great Houdini ’cause that horse was always discovering a way to get out of her pasture, old as she was. She must’ve knocked down another line of the fence, and that meant Miss Lilah’s geese might be coming for an unwanted visit, too.

  I knew I’d better go get Sugar Pie and check the fence because peaches and honey brought in about the only money we had, except for the occasional dollar here and there people paid Bee for finding things. Most times they gave us goods, like a sack of grain or a coupon for a burger at the Sonic.

  I knew that Bee worried mightily about us, even though she said God would always provide. But most times he didn’t. Recently I’d found a letter from the Hollis Grand National Bank torn up and thrown in the trash. There were words like foreclosure and demand and money and August. I figured it meant Bee had till August to come up with the money, or something bad was going to happen to us.

  I pulled on a white T-shirt, my overalls, and the beaded moccasins Harlan had brought back from one of his trips. I stared at myself in my long mirror, wondering when I was going to fill out the training bra Bee had bought me in Paradise, like the other girls did last summer when we were all turning twelve. Perhaps this summer. Then again, maybe not. Nothing ever happened to me, at least not when it was supposed to. But I’d found bones up on Solace Hill. I closed my eyes a moment, taking a deep breath.

  The rain had trickled down to a fine mist. At least I wouldn’t be fighting Sugar Pie in the rain. I heard June Rain stir in her room next door, and I thought how it was June now and it was raining. Was she born on a day like this? Sweet and lazy? Whenever it rained I liked to think it was her birthday, for she’d never told us when it was.

  Harlan met June Rain when she was sixteen at the Trinity Baptist Traveling Revival Show when they came and set up their big billowing white tent outside Hollis. Bee says those tents are full of fools and her son Harlan brought one home. No one knows where June Rain came from before that, and since she doesn’t talk much I guess we’re never going to know. She guards her secrets well, but she’s no match for Bee.

  I’d gathered up few precious clues about her in the years: two bubblegum-colored dots on her ankle, a snake bite, she told me, that she’d barely survived; a pale blue movie ticket stub stamped “Majestic” with the words “meet me” written in faded pencil; and a heart-shaped locket inlayed with mother-of-pearl. With her wide, dark eyes; flawless, cotton-puff skin; and long, dark-as-night hair, she had the look of a princess or one of those movies stars she was crazy about. She definitely didn’t look like anyone else around here, that’s for sure. The boys in town thought she looked like Cher and sang “Gypsys, Tramps and Thieves” at her back when she walked downtown to the Just Teasin’. Sweetmaw would come out and whap them on their rears with her broom and tell ’em to get on home.

  Of course I didn’t look anything like Cher. No sirree. Bee says I look more like Harlan but I didn’t know what that meant anymore because I hardly remembered him. June Rain says he’s handsome and that she was caught in his web like a helpless bug. I often wondered if it was the other way around, though. I looked in her eyes sometimes and thought they were the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, like dark inky oceans, with mysterious things swimming beneath.

  The only thing I remember distinctly about Harlan was his brown work boots, which looked like his “ain’t-no-picture” paintings with all those splatters of paint. One day Bo painted rainbows across the tip of each boot and said that they were now Daddy’s rainbow boots. Even though I was mad at Harlan for leaving, I knew I’d give anything to see those boots coming back through the screen door and June Rain running into his arms. She always forgave him no matter what, and sometimes I don’t think I can forgive her for that. But now, I’d do anything to see her smile again.

  Someone was pounding on the back door. The tight curl of hope in my heart unfurled just a tiny bit. I heard someon
e thundering up the stairs, and my door burst open. Then Old Jack bounded in, Bo behind him.

  “Sugar Pie’s out again and Finch Aberdeen’s at the door. Says Miss Lilah’s gone,” Bo told me.

  Chapter 3

  My first memory of Finch Aberdeen: we were five and he was sitting behind me at church, yanking on my hair. When I turned around and stuck my tongue out at him, he told me I was uglier than a fence-post buzzard and I told him he was a Mr. Potato Head like all the Aberdeens were, ’cause I’d heard Bee say it once, although really, Finch didn’t look anything like the rest of them lowdown Aberdeens. I made him cry. Then Bee pinched me for causing a scene even though I was just repeating something she said. Better to keep your mouth shut, she says, and seem a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. She should talk, though; her mouth gets her in trouble more than there’s summer fleas on a backyard hound.

  Finch has been my best friend ever since, even though Bee says I’m too old to be roughhousing and playing make-believe with a boy. Bee thinks it’s not fitting anymore, and it’s high time I started wearing dresses instead of my old overalls and moccasins. She even bought me some Odo-Ro-No deodorant from the Ben Franklin, said my armpits were stinking to high heaven. But I’d hidden it under the sink in the bathroom I shared with Bo and June Rain. I wasn’t ready to grow up. It’d had been a long time since I’d played with my Chatty Cathy doll, but I wasn’t ready for Maybelline Kissing Potion either. Besides, my bra looked the same in the front as it did on the back. I was never gonna grow up, whether I wanted to or not.

  Finch was trying to grow his hair long like his brother Granger and the other Hollis High boys, who were all trying to look like David Cassidy, but it wasn’t quite working out because of his cowlick. The cowlick was sticking up funny now as he stood at the door, his freckles tinged blue-green from the cold rain. Finch had a habit of rubbing his nose, pushing his thick glasses up, and then smoothing his cowlick down in one fell swoop, but it just made him look like Prince Valiant from the comic strip, with glasses.

  “What’s wrong, Finch?” I asked him, biting into a peach. I glanced nervously at Solace Hill. My stomach lurched as the image of that bone sticking out in the rain flitted through my mind. Over Finch’s shoulder I could see Bee coaxing Sugar Pie back to her pasture, Miss Lilah’s geese waddling in a line behind them. I knew Bee knew I’d seen Sugar Pie and had taken my sweet time. She shooed the geese to get a move on. Miss Lilah’s geese had long been a sore spot for Bee. Sometimes in the winter, Bee would bring a folding chair out to the pasture, turn them over one at a time, and pluck all their best feathers, then she’d send them back to Miss Lilah looking bald as the day they were born. But we’d all have nice fresh pillows.

  “Miss Lilah’s gone,” said Finch, sucking on candy, his words slurpily garbled. The smell of root beer wafted through the screen. Ah, my favorite. Bottle Caps. I opened the door and reached out my hand and he begrudgingly pulled the packet of Bottle Caps out of his back pocket and tilted it till one came out and rolled around in my palm. I curled my fingers, meaning more please, and he shook out a few more. If one of us was lucky enough to procure any candy, we shared it with the other; it was a sacred pact. I gobbled up a Bottle Cap. Since Paps had been gone, I hadn’t had any money for candy. He used to slip me a dime now and then when Bee wasn’t looking.

  Bee says Finch is empty-headed, that he wakes up and it’s a new world every day. But Finch Aberdeen is the smartest person I knew, the smartest boy in all of Hollis Junior High. He just didn’t show it in the normal way. Maybe he couldn’t hit a home run or make a touchdown, but he could tell you about every skyscraper in Dallas, and that the site for the Parthenon in Greece had to be cleared of dinosaur bones before it was built, and the Leaning Tower of Pisa is banana shaped and leans over twelve feet, even though neither of us has every traveled farther than Paradise, which is fifteen miles away from Hollis.

  “Miss Opal went to give Miss Lilah breakfast this morning and found her bed hadn’t even been slept in,” Finch told me.

  Miss Lilah Ames is ancient, old as the hills. She doesn’t get out much anymore, so about a year ago Bee made Finch and me start visiting her once a week. We bring her and Miss Opal Honeycutt some of our peaches and honey and whatever else is blooming in Bee’s garden.

  Opal Honeycutt lives in an old, rickety cabin behind Lilah’s house. At one time Miss Lilah’s family had been rich. Opal was the daughter of the Ameses’ housemaid, but they were raised together as sisters. She was old, maybe even older than Miss Lilah. She says she doesn’t know when she was born.

  “Maybe Sweetmaw picked her up for her appointment at the Just Teasin’,” I said.

  Bee was coming up the front walk now, wiping hay off her plaid shirt. That’s her uniform, dull mud-colored work shirts, the kind rancher men wear, and old khaki dungarees rolled up haphazardly, one leg usually higher than the other. Her hair billowed out around her like she was some old wind-blown witch.

  “Who’s missing?” Bee asked. She already knew it was a person, not someone’s teeth, or car keys, or milk cow. She frowned at Finch.

  “Miss Lilah,” Finch answered, pushing his glasses up. We followed Bee inside to the kitchen.

  “Old woman like that,” Bee said with a sniff, for even though she made us visit Miss Lilah, she never liked her for some reason. “She likely wandered off.” Bee looked out the window as she washed her hands. I recognized that faraway I’m-thinking-leave-me-alone look. She got that look before she knew something, knew something sure as salt.

  “I know Miss Bee,” Finch answered. “But that’s what Miss Opal’s worried about. Yesterday all Miss Lilah could talk about was her baptism in Bitter Creek when she was ten and how she was sure she was going to drown right there where she found the Lord. And ’cause the creek rose during the night from the rain, Miss Opal’s beside herself, sure she’s in the water.”

  A shiver ran through me. There’s a legend about Bitter Creek that says that sometimes amidst the rolling water, you could hear the ghost of a drowning woman calling for her lost love.

  “Only fools are sure, Finch. You know Miss Opal’s not quite right.” But neither was Miss Lilah. Finch and I had seen her slowly decline in the last year, the light leaving her. Bee closed her eyes a moment. “No,” she said firmly. “She’s not by water. But we better go. Hold on, let me fetch my hat.” Bee never went to find something without her hat. “Esme, you go fetch me a willow branch. A good one. The rain will make it better for bending.”

  Then we three got in the Bee Wagon. Several years ago Bee bought a 1952 Pontiac ambulance from Paradise that doubled as the Paradise hearse. Life is about leavings and comings, Bee reminded us when we’d stood around it, not believing what she’d brought home. Bee had Harlan paint the twenty-year-old car a cheery blue, and Paps had tuned up the engine. It even had the white eyelet curtains still in the back. But sometimes you just can’t perfume a hog.

  Bee revved the wagon and put her in reverse even though Finch was still getting in and hadn’t closed the door yet. Miss Lilah’s geese were in the back peeking out through the curtains. We waved at June Rain and Bo, who were watching us from the front porch. June Rain had those hare eyes that worry me sometimes, all soft and lost. Old Jack barked and ran after us till we turned down the gravel drive that led us away from Peach Hollow Farm.

  I was mesmerized by Bee’s large, sun-spotted hands clutching the black leather wheel of the Wagon. I closed my eyes a moment, remembering when those old hands helped the firemen carry Paps in from Solace Hill. He was so stiff, they had to pry his fingers open. In one fist was a faded photo of Bee when she was young. I didn’t even recognize her, she was so beautiful, so elegant. There was something in his other hand, too. But when they pried it open, I only got a hauntingly slow flash of a small golden coin before Bee snatched it. I’ve never seen it again.

  Miss Lilah Ames still lived in the house she was born in. Her property butted up to the Aberdeen place. Finch told me in the car that
the last few days he’d seen Miss Lilah take the long walk to her mailbox and back at least ten times a day.

  “Maybe she’s waiting for a letter,” I said. I knew about waiting for letters. June Rain made that same walk to our mailbox every day, but nothing ever came, not even a postcard to give us a clue where Harlan had gone. No sirree, not a word. Ever.

  “No,” Finch said. “She’s forgotten she walked out there by the time she steps back on the front porch. Then she goes out again.”

  Miss Opal had hobbled over to the Aberdeen house that morning when she couldn’t find Miss Lilah, raising the alarm. No one even thought of calling the police. Not when Bee McCauley lived round yonder down the road.

  Bee pulled the Bee Wagon into the driveway. Miss Opal met us at the house, leaning on her cane, the same cane she’d been leaning on forever.

  “Something different this time, Miss Bee,” she said. “Something different. I’m mighty worried. All this looking back at the past. She’s all stirred up about something and—”

  “That’s all right, Miss Opal,” Bee said. “I’ll find her.” She said it with conviction, as if she’d said the sun was going to come up. She walked past Miss Opal with her witching rod in front of her. It was already bent, jiggling at the end, like a hound dog that’s picked up a scent.

  “Maybe it’s best if you stay here, Miss Opal,” Finch said to her. “It’ll be all right.”

  Bee was already fifty feet in front of us. Miss Opal stood there, both hands on her cane, tears forming in her eyes. Finch went after Bee. I knew well enough to stay back some. Give Bee her air. She didn’t like anyone right next her, said it crowded her “signals.” But of course, Finch had forgotten.

  He soon came running back to me, nursing a pinched arm. We then followed a ways behind Bee, the only sound our shoes squashing in the mud. Last night’s rain was now just a fine mist in the air. I never realized how far back the Ames property went. We scampered up and over several ridges, Bee marching like a soldier, her hat squashed down low. Suddenly she stopped. I signaled to Finch that it was all right for us to catch up with her now.