Light as a Feather, Silent as the Grave

Chapter 24

I gave Trey a little while to process his mother's coldness toward him, but when we had lumbered nearly the entire distance back to town, I had to interrupt his shoegazing with some realness. "We need to figure out how to get ourselves back to Arkadelphia by six if we want to catch a train that will put us back on our way to California."

Retracing our steps along the highway, we'd taken to marching through the back yards of houses instead of walking along the road. We ducked under t-shirts and boxers fluttering on clothes lines, and stepped over Barbie dolls and baseballs that had probably been abandoned at the start of the winter. We glared at dogs who barked at us from behind windows. Traipsing through the property of total strangers was oddly appealing. It felt safe, sort of, to be marching across their lives as if it was just that easy to step out of our nightmarish reality and into the simpler existence of these Gurdon residents. If there were any towering mansions in this town, we hadn't seen them. This did not seem like the kind of town where a girl like Violet Simmons would ever move. It did not seem like the kind of town where little girls died in house fires while their families watched in horror on front lawns.

"Yeah," Trey finally replied, slowing to a stop and turning to face me. He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun and peered north as if considering the walking distance to Arkadelphia.

"Trey, it's like, fifteen miles," I said to discourage whatever he was considering. At my most motivated, fifteen miles would have seemed like a challenging walk. After three nights of restless, paltry sleep and a diet of pure junk since leaving my mother's house in Wisconsin, fifteen miles was a length greater than my imagination could handle. I knew it was possible to walk fifteen miles in an afternoon. It just didn't even seem remotely realistic that we'd make it much further than we already had that day. With each step I took, it felt like the bones held together behind my knee cap were grinding against each other. My heels ached. I never would have thought in my whole life that I'd find myself stranded in rural Arkansas, but there we were.

Trey squatted and rested his elbows on his knees. We had paused in the middle of stretch of grass in between two property lines, overgrown with yellow grass. A rusty weathervane turner atop the house behind me squeaked lazily in the light spring wind. "Any ideas?"

I dug my hands into the pockets of my winter jacket and roamed our surroundings with my eyes. The woods on our left, to the west, appeared to run deep. Somewhere behind all of those trees were the railroad tracks we'd abandoned last night. To the east was the rural highway we'd been following all day, and behind us was the high school we'd just left behind. A church bell startled both of us. I couldn't recall us having passed a church at any point during our explorations in Gurdon, but it rang twelve times, filling the stagnant afternoon with its tinny sound. Its announcement indicated that it was noon and reminded me of home. The copper bell in the steeple of St. Monica's used to interrupt my study hall every day when I still attended school in Weeping Willow. I didn't realize until that moment how much I missed my former daily routine in Wisconsin.

"Maybe we should head back toward town," I suggested.

As if the sound had beckoned us, we crossed the train tracks and headed toward its source as if both of us were in taciturn agreement that the answer to our problem of finding transportation to Arkadelphia would be found at the church. The white point of a steeple appeared over the tops of bare-branched trees that had not yet regained their leaves for spring. We trudged down a residential rural road curling toward it, catching the attention of a haggard-looking cat asleep on the front steps of a house that looked like a strong breeze could blow it to smithereens. When the full church came into view, both of us were surprised to find that it was a new construction, far more modern than any of the houses we'd passed that day.