excuse. You will like the appointment, Perley, it’s with a counselor, a nice person who is there to help you. And I knew about the Wolf Council where they make important decisions just by being together with their minds and their yellow eyes, and afterward they stand in their pack on the hilltop and they howl at the moon, so I was like, Sweet, and I kept eating my pancake and looking at the next pancake which was also on the griddle and the Outside Girl zipped up her hoodie and left.
Grandma Barlow sat down across from me and she leaned on her elbows and said, You are welcome here, Perley, and you are safe here. You’ll soon see there is a way we do things, with chores and the like, you will catch on, and I was like, Yes, ma’am.
But seriously this was not the way I envisioned it would be to go over or to mix more. I mean, the pancakes were good, but it was just me and one old lady. When I imagined going over I thought it might be a place with like an obstacle course and a PlayStation and a cool dad that smoked cigarettes inside the house and Diet Pepsi to drink. So I was like, Are there any other kids here? Yes, said Grandma Barlow. My grandson, Altemonte, who is only a year older than you. Where is he? I asked. Is he still asleep? Oh no, she said, he was up hours ago. He’s out in the woods, that boy’s mostly in the woods. When she said that Altemonte was mostly in the woods I said, I know all about the woods I know a mushroom you can eat that smells like licorice but doesn’t taste like licorice. Oyster mushrooms, Grandma Barlow said. I know, I said. She said, There’s plenty in the woods back there on them ash logs in the springtime and in the fall but not now not in the winter. I know, I said. She said, Why don’t you go find Altemonte and tell him to come have some breakfast and tell him I’m making pies today and tell him there’s a letter from his mother?
So then I was in the woods again, out back of the house which now I could see was really a trailer, a big one, with lavender paint and a cement patio. The more I kept moving away from it the less I was a Velvet Piglet because I could see that this was woods like our woods with the same winter weeds, stalks of greenbrier, and spears of blackberry and goldenrod all frozen and soaked brown, and the same trees, sugar maples and tulip poplars and beech trees and even one or two walnuts, and I kept walking deeper, I walked so far that I couldn’t see the trailer anymore. I knew that if I walked far enough I could just walk right home anytime I was ready. That made me feel better. Just knowing I could go home anytime I wanted made me feel like I wasn’t ready to go home, at least not yet. I had to find out more. I had to discover my mission. I walked deep into the woods and I didn’t see any grandson but I started to see other things. Signs. I saw willows bent over and tied together to make a hut and I saw a pile of stones arranged in a tall tower and I saw an arrowhead sitting on a churned-up pile of clay and then I saw this other kid a chubby kid with red boots and he was the acorn kid from school who turned out to be Altemonte.
He saw me and stopped what he was doing which was twisting joe-pye weed into a knot like a secret.
He said, You’re that snakebite kid.
You’re that acorn kid, I said. And you can call me Friend of Snake.
You’re the new one come to stay with my grandma? he asked. Did they make you come stay because of that snakebite?
Did you make all this stuff? I asked.
What stuff? he asked.
The willow hideout and the stone tower and the arrowhead, I said.
You think I can make an arrowhead? asked Altemonte. He started twisting the joe-pye again. He said, Obviously an Indian made the arrowhead, probably a mound builder that used to live around here but vanished and no living person knows why.