I do like Mr. Riggs a little bit.
Upstairs, Mrs. Pulnik takes us to the laundry room and gives us some things off a pile. She calls them playclothes, but they’re really not much more than rags. She tells us to get ourselves dressed and use the bathroom, and we do, and breakfast looks a lot like the supper they gave us last night after the bath—a little scoop of cornmeal mush. We’re late getting to the table. The other kids have already gone to play. After we’ve scraped our bowls clean, we’re told to get outside too and not to try leaving the backyard and the churchyard, or else.
“Andt you will not be goingk near to the fence.” Mrs. Pulnik grabs Camellia’s arm and Lark’s before we can make it through the door. She leans over us with her round cheeks red and sweat shiny. “A boy tunneledt underneat yesterday. Mrs. Murphy has given him the closet. To be given the closet is very, very bat. In the closet, it is dark. Do you understandt?”
“Yes’m,” I croak out, picking up Gabby and reaching for Lark to get her away. She’s standing still as a stump, not a thing moving but the big old tears dripping down her cheeks. “I’ll make sure they mind the rules till we can go see our mama and daddy.”
Mrs. Pulnik’s big lips push together and curl. “Goot,” she says. “This is a wise choice for you. All of you.”
“Yes’m.”
We get out the door quick as we can. The sun feels like heaven, and the sky stretches out big between the poplars and maples, and the bare dirt at the bottom of the steps is cool and soft. Safe. I close my eyes and listen to the leaves talking and the birds singing their morning songs. I pick out their voices, one by one, Carolina wren, redbird, house finch. The same birds that were there yesterday morning when I woke up on our little shantyboat.
The little girls grab on to my dress, and Gabby hitches himself back against my arms, trying to get down, and Camellia complains that we’re just standing there. I open my eyes, and she’s looking at the tall black iron fence that circles the yard. Honeysuckle and prickly holly and azaleas grow thick over most of it, higher than our heads. There’s only one gate that I can see, and it goes to the playground behind the run-down church house next door. That’s got more of the same fence around it too.
Camellia’s way too big to squeeze under, but she looks like she’s searching for the best spot to try it.
“Let’s go over on the swings at least,” she whines. “We can watch the road from there…for when Briny comes to get us.”
We move across the yard, Gabion in my arms and my sisters in a tight knot behind me, even Camellia, who usually picks a fight at every school we go to quicker than you can say spit. The kids eyeball us because we’re new. We pretend we don’t notice it. We’re usually good at this game—don’t act too friendly; look out for each other; let them know that if they mess with one of you, they’d better be able to whip the bunch of you. But this time it’s different. We don’t know the rules in this place. There’s no teacher around watching. There’s not a grown-up in sight. Nobody but kids, all stopping their games of jump rope and Red Rover to stare at us.
I don’t see the little girl who came with us from the river yesterday. Her baby brother—the one Miss Tann named Stevie—sits in the dirt with a tin truck that’s missing all its paint and one wheel.
“Where’s your sister?” I squat down beside him, Gabion’s weight putting me off balance so that I have to brace a hand on the ground to keep from falling over.
Stevie’s shoulders lift and fall, and his big brown eyes turn watery.
“You can come with us,” I tell him.
Camellia grumbles, “He ain’t our problem.”
I tell her to hush.
Stevie rolls a pouty lip and nods and lifts both arms. There’s a big bite mark on one of them, and I wonder who did it. I scoop him up and push myself back to my feet. He’s older than Gabion, but he weighs about the same. He’s a skinny little thing.
Two girls playing with dented tin dishes look our way. They’ve raked the old dead leaves and made a pretending spot in