in front of our mailbox and sighed open its door, releasing Perley and Bexley. I stood up and waved. “Perley! Bexley!” I called, but at the sound of my voice, Bexley took off running across the road toward the Epps place. Perley came bobbing straight up the pipeline in his hopelessly oversize T-shirt, his dorky sweatpants. Skill is one thing, style is another.
“Mean Aunt,” he said when he reached the top, “are you ready to get acorns?”
“Why did Bexley run off like that?” I asked, and he let out that new laugh of his, a mirthless one-note thing.
“That kid’s been a shithead to you, isn’t it?” said Rudy. Perley smiled at the ground.
“Bexley’s my friend,” he said.
“Just say so if you want me to kick his ass for you,” said Rudy.
“You will not be kicking the ass of a seven-year-old,” I said.
“Bexley’s eight,” said Perley. “He got held back.”
“It’s because you don’t have a dad these little rednecks think they can say what they want,” said Rudy. “I told you no good could come of it. Now you see what happens.”
Perley, who still slept with Rudy’s dirty shirts under his head, filled his cheeks up with air.
“Fuck dads,” I said. “Perley, don’t say fuck.” I took Perley’s hand and he let me lead him away from Rudy, over the ridge and down into the coal company land, where our best oak stood. Our climbing gear, our wheelbarrows, and our tarps for collecting were stowed beneath it.
* * *
Perley didn’t remember, but I remembered that first year, when we hadn’t gathered enough acorns. I remembered the second year, when we only gathered acorns from up in the trees, because the ones already on the ground were sure to have worms. I remembered those years when we rolled the dice and were hungry, and that memory drove me. Now, of course, we went for windfall first, prizing the stowaway grubs, their burst of protein. As a three-year-old, Perley had run behind me picking up the fallen acorns, his first real chore. He separated each nut from smartweed, oak leaves, moss, and coltsfoot, sorting them into the leeching sacks. At first I pretended not to notice him, but soon I couldn’t deny that we were teammates. When Perley was six, I fitted him with a harness and sent him up into the trees to shake the branches. Lily brought in sweet potatoes and squash, planted garlic and coaxed along the winter greens, but Karen hovered around Perley and me, looking for a way in. Eventually she had to concede. Now that he was seven, it was understood that acorn gathering was for Perley and for me.
That fall, we’d already filled one barrel, fifty-five gallons, and we were working on the next. Harnessed in, Perley scrambled out onto a branch and shook hard, while I raked up the nuts below. I gathered up the tarp and unfurled it, letting the acorns beat into the wheelbarrow. Perley lay on his belly on the branch, peering down at me through the leaves. I knew he had more to say, but I knew my job was to act like it was the last thing on my mind. After I had spread the tarp out again, he said, “Mean Aunt, does it bother you that you look like that?”
“What do I look like?” I asked, looking up at him.
“A man with a mean face,” said Perley. It had been some time, maybe years, since I thought about the way I looked. I felt best in rubber boots and a flannel shirt, a big canvas jacket over the top. I cut my hair with the kitchen shears, taking it short in the front to keep it out of the way, tucking the rest under a woolen watch cap. In the shadowy sliver of mirror above the sink I saw the way the weather had beaten me about the face and neck, I saw the wrinkles pressing in. I was thirty-nine that year. It made sense to me.
“Perley, name the men you know, and then tell me which of them I look like,” I said.
“We don’t know any men,” he said. “That’s part of the problem.”
“We do know men. We know plenty of men. They just don’t live with us. And I don’t look like a man, I look like a rope,” I said. “Or a reliable piece of leather. A good tarp. A well-tanned hide. A wheel with all its spokes.”