Was Go out and play! the only phrase her mother knew? Celia felt the slightest push to her back as her mother ushered her out the backdoor with undisguised annoyance. The country club pool was closed for the season. School started in a week. Emma Sue was on a late vacation to Panama City and had not asked her to go! Her parents were cheap turds! Celia missed being at the pool all day. Her mother would drop her off with the same reframe each day: When I tell you to get out of the pool…you get out of the pool!  I have to fix supper for your daddy! What did her mother do all day at home? She had Rita to help; it seemed like Rita did everything…even hugs…her large flabby arms so welcoming soft with a scent of mint. Not that she cared what her mother did, but she wondered about everything and never balked at asking endless questions even of angry parents. The pool…its sparkling, eye burning, hand wrinkling water was her solace as dear as Emma Sue; a constant entity, non-judging…soothing. Each day when the sun sank behind the pool house, her mother would stomp to poolside waving a towel, threatening grounding, even bodily harm; whispering unheard remarks accompanied by silly, forced faces to her friends also trying to entice their kids from the water. Her mother often seemed exhausted by that time of day; wobbling a bit as they would finally walk to the car.  What would her mother do without Rita? What would she do? She would have a maid like Rita when she grew up, maybe even Rita, with warm arms and mumbled affections.

Evicted…she had been on her way out, anyway…Celia turned and kicked the bottom of the screen and hurriedly jumped from the low porch. Her bare feet slipped on the dew-drenched grass; her daddy’s perfectly trimmed, dew-drenched grass. Unable to regain balance, she landed hard on elbows and knees. A stone, tiny yet jagged, (how had her father missed it?) scratched her right knee revealing little blood but a stinging itch and seeping anger.

Shit! Shit!

She brushed detritus away but her knee, now grass-green, would nag her all day; she could let nothing go. Down the slope of the backyard to the pine thicket, Celia limped, mostly for show; surely her mother was watching. Once in the pines, the carpet of desiccant, brown needles calmed her–their scent pungent as chlorinated water. Hurrying her steps, she hardly noticing the “fort” to the right, now in disrepair, falling back to its parts of pine needles, cones, fallen limbs and salvaged low growing branches, chopped with her daddy’s hatchet; still, lost in the woods. Old Man Carter’s yard boarded the pines to the left. She headed that way, slowing at woods edge to eye his grapevines, drooping with succulence. No one was in the yard. Their backdoor was closed. Hesitating only an instant, Celia advanced, head held high, as if answering an invitation, as if expectant of a welcoming wave; a friendly, hollered offer to help herself to handfuls of the blue grapes.  Grasping a cluster, she turned pulling it to her body, ripping it from its cane as she hurried away, ripping the cane itself partially from its wire, leaving it to dangle, to message its torn tendrils to search for new support.

Into the woods and Celia was safe, protected from detection and accusation. Two squirrels ran a raucous game of chase around and around a chunked bark pine alerting the woods with screeching encouragements and claw scratchings. Celia watched, envious of their unabashed play. One, she thought, had missed his jump from pine limb to neighboring oak and plummeted down, clawing the apathetic air, but with one miraculous tail-tic-tock managed to snag a savior limb at the last instant; the chase continuing without respite.

Worn paths through the woods, there from her earliest memory, were unconsciously maintained by kids in the neighborhood; at least, the kids like her; some, the wimps, like her sister would never know this place; spending their lives in rooms—rooms with smoky air and uncaring mothers. They were welcome to it! She ate her grapes one by one, cleansing each with rubs on her shirt tail. Old man Carter’s grapes were better than any her mother had ever bought at Piggly Wiggle; their skins thick and sweet like wild muscadines. Celia ventured off the path into the thicker, deciduous trees until dense undergrowth and briars blocked her way. She found nothing new, just an old coke bottle half buried, clouded, heavy; packed with dirt. 

She headed for the small stream in the adjoining field where she and Emma Sue often rambled, where broomsage and briars ruled. There, smashed into the malodorous mud bank of the stream, she found Turtle; dead. A large, bare footprint, heel and toes, crossed the circumference of Turtles body. Dammed people!  Was no place sacred; no instant that others couldn’t ruin? The sight disgusted her….the cruelty, but also drew her to touch, to trace with a fingertip the imprint of the track sealing Turtle in the mud. She became conscious of her own bare feet, stinky mud squishing up between her toes and of the old stone-bruise aching on her right heel. Celia stepped into the shallow water to clean her feet; solace the pain. She rubbed her knee but the grass stain would not wash off. The scratch already red with puckering edges clamored for attention. Sitting in the water, she reached for Turtle and with a tug the mud reluctantly released him with a greedy, final slurp.  He was small: tea saucer size. Celia dunked him several times, rubbing the stubborn mud with finger tips. Once cleansed, a tiny hole through the top of his carapace, almost perfectly centered, told the tale: a nail spear, a point blank BB shot; maybe even an ice pick had ended Turtles’ life. She examined the bottom of his shell: there was no exit hole. Turning him back over revealed a hint of red had risen to the top of the wound but had not seeped out to mar his brown and yellow markings. Holding him high, his nose to hers, she studied him: he still looked alive with opened red eyes and a silly…smirky smile that seemed to say, I know the answers, everything!  No stink of death gripped him, yet.  Had he been lonely like her? Turtles were always alone….slow; easily made to retreat into their shells. Was it dark inside? Did they ache in their solitary lives? The smile said No, but would his smile now fade away, day by day; just another fake grin, like her mothers’, trying to hide what was true?  

Normally, Celia, with Emma Sue hovering but not touching, would have scoured the water and surroundings for collectibles: tadpoles, periwinkles, frogs, walking sticks and the like but today with Turtle secure in her shorts pocket she made her way purposively downstream, wading the water as much as possible through the maze of ragweed, goldenrod, blackberry briars; the luscious berries long eaten. It pissed her off that other people, unknown, knew where the berries were and devoured them as greedily as she and Emma Sue. The stream led to the train tracks and passed beneath them through a dark culvert; “A riving nest of snakes!” her daddy had warned. “Riving” was an unfamiliar word but she had nodded an acknowledgement. The sound of the word itself and her daddy’s stare had been enough. She dare not enter. But when had he seen it? They had never walked here together? They did little together outside; her daddy was a desk jockey; a successful one. He spent more time primping in the bathroom than her mother did and claimed a whole drawer in the kitchen just for shoe polishing stuff. Every night before bed he spit shined a pair of shoes for the next day and would berate her for abusing her shoes.  He helped her with her school work but was way too serious about it.

At nine, snakes weren’t the only thing that gave her pause, but the Serpent; cause of all ruin, could freeze her with fear, more so even than talk of the Bomb or Fires of Eternal Damnation. Skirting the culvert, she climbed the tracks embankment, taking another nick to a shin. The tracks’ chunked gravel, hot and jagged, gnawed at her feet but she followed the tracks to the right toward her street and its welcoming shade. Shimmering rails were too hot to walk; creosoted crossties not much better, but Celia, quick-step-hopping from spot to spot hurried home to implement a plan. 

Pilfering sticks and string from her fathers shop she fashioned a cross with a sharpened point to be more easily pounded into the ground. A cigar box holding her little sisters’ used crayon trove was confiscated; its myriad colored bits (she loved their smell), without heed, dumped into “little shits” toy box at the foot of her bed. She left the house again without being questioned after a hurried lunch. A stern, Be home by suppertime. her mothers only parting words. Celia grabbed Turtle from beneath the back steps and returned to the pines and the communal fort. Retrieving her fathers lost hatchet from it hiding place she moved deeper into the woods through dense undergrowth to her spot where a towering water oak had assumed command and pushed lesser evolved trees aside. The undergrowth diminished but a few shade loving plants: a giant fern, jungle looking, and a few mountain laurels near a minute, trickling spring were allowed to flourish. In spring, tiny crested iris, violet-blue with slashes of yellow would try to hide but Celia would find them as they shyly peeked around the knurled roots guarding the massive trunk. This spot was special and she only came alone. There were no signs that others came here; she had lay claim to its serenity, its’ special blooms and scents. Celia straddled one of the huge roots, almost the width of her desk chair, and prepared Turtles’ bed.  

She had, at first, wanted to close him up. He could, maybe, rest in peace if he could retract into his shell and close his door. This morning she had gently tried to push his yellow splotched head and neck and legs back in, but it would not work. Turtle’s red eyes still stared; his grin still teased. She laid him on a bed of leaves inside the Hav-A-Tampa box along with two goldenrod blooms. Beneath a laurel, she chopped a hole into the earth, pulling rich humus towards her. Six inches deep and she hit harder clay; deep enough for her purpose. Placing the coffin into the grave, she quickly covered him, smoothing the scented earth. With the blunt side of the hatchet she pounded his cross into the ground. Still kneeling, she made the sign of the cross. She wasn’t Catholic, but thought it looked respectful. The new President was Catholic; it couldn’t be too bad. Mary Bright had taken her to Mass a couple of times, the structure and formality intrigued her, but Celia’s parents with uncharacteristic diplomacy and bribes had dissuaded her from returning. They were Methodist but Celia knew it was just for show. She now rushed home, a vague, unnamable sensation enveloping her. Coming in the back door she asked her mother, busy at the sink, if she had had a nice day. Her mother turned, open mouthed, speechless. Rita’s big face split with a grin as she motioned with her broom to tap Celia’s backside as the child dashed through her dust pile running to the upstairs. 

Three consecutive days Celia returned to Turtle’s grave. Each day she removed his coffin from the ground and looked in. Turtle, to her eyes, remained unchanged; still opened eyed, stubbornly revealing nothing, and taunting her with that smile. The goldenrod blooms had quickly withered. There were no signs or sniffs of decay; nothing was eating him. Without forethought, she plucked Turtle from the box, dumped his bed of leaves and shrinking blooms into the hole and placed him in on top. Celia quickly pushed the soil back into the hole. Ruthie’s crayon box was abandoned with a sling into thick undergrowth. On the way back home, she was caught lurking about Old Man Carter’s grapes and was scolded, but he did not go through with his threat to call her mother.  Maybe, there was a god; one who only dealt with petty things, silly kid things.

Friday was school clothes buying day. That meant having to put up with Ruthie all day! Her mother always had to take them to Nashville for this; had to ruin a whole day buying a new, too heavy, too long coat, new shoes that always hurt her feet, underwear with the days of the week, and a dress or two, plus school supplies. But that wasn’t all! Her mother sewed most of their clothes, Ruthie’s and hers and her own. Her talent she said and they were pretty but why should time be wasted sewing? There had to be more important things to do. There would be hours looking at patterns, fabrics, buttons, and thread colors while constantly asking the girls for their opinions which she would not give, anymore, even knowing that the process could be hurried along if she would cooperate. Celia had, last year, after it had turned cold, at a local store, chosen a fabric, expressed her delight at its vibrant colors and pattern but her mother had shaken her head in seeming disbelief. “Tacky…tacky.” she had dismissed.

She still remember that day: coming home, walking for what seemed like hours up and down her street in the cold, her nose running, eyes stinging and pulling a stick along Mrs. Perry’s picket fence; back and forth, back and forth….the picket’s click-clack soothing; a synchronous rhythm, a survival beat. Mrs. Perry finally emerged and once reprimanded, Celia threw the stick into her yard, saying nothing and walked away slowly wiping her nose on her pink sweatered arm. 

Her mother hated her. Celia knew this without a doubt; she had as much as said so a few months back during one of their fights. Celia believed in answers; if she asked a question she should get an answer….and that day when Celia was, again, asking about her adoption, about who her real parents were and why this and why that, her mother had, with a hard, red face and words like bullets, just lost it; screaming at her that maybe she should never have adopted her to begin with….maybe, they should have just left her there for someone else to deal with! That had ended it. Celia’s pain shriveled her to a silence that stilled…hobbled all that entered the house for days. Endless apologies and waffles would never balm the wound; remove the hurt that that perceived truth unleashed. Her mother spoke the necessary words trying to right her wrong but her face didn’t say she meant it; there was no softness, no light of verification in her eyes. Supposedly, her real father was killed in Korea, another one of those always wars, and her real mother wasn’t able to take care of her. Why? What was so hard? She was left at an orphanage and adopted when she was eight months old. There had to be more!

A few days later Ruthie had tried to enter Celia’s sheet tent. Celia drew back her scissors as to stab her and would have too if Ruthie hadn’t scrambled out in fear, whimpering. She did not run tattling to her mother as usual. Even at five, Ruthie knew the truth. You’re theirs, Celia said quietly after she ran.

They returned from shopping after dark; too late to check on Turtle. But the next day Celia was at the oak early digging with her hands again into the hole. Turtle had changed. Celia brushed off a couple of ants one of which had just crawled from his tiny wound. The blood had disappeared back into his shell. His eyes were a bit cloudy; their wonder diminished. Celia sniffed him; there was now a hint of decay, a sadness coming through even though his smile remained adamant. Turtle’s tiny protruding legs and feet were stiffening, further resisting Celia’s attempts to flex them. She returned him to his grave. Her daddy was demanding she trim the grass along the edge of the entrance walk with his whacking shears; her usual job when he mowed his precious yard. Her performance of the task would be checked, critiqued and afterwards her allowance begrudgingly, it seemed to her, handed over. Ruthie didn’t have to do a thing but hide in her room as if afraid to come out.

Celia sensed that her daddy was a bit weird, troubled. She and her friends never really talked about their fathers except to whine over occasional unfair treatment, but Celia just knew he was different; he drank every night after work, after supper, sitting in front of the TV in his chair; drink after drink, his tie still on but loosen, cuff links removed, sparkling on the end-table, sleeves rolled up, he sat silently, a sharp piercing whistle alerting her mother when he needed a refill…and often, after she had gone to bed, he came into her room. Celia would always pretend to asleep while he sat in the chair by her bed, he saying nothing, not moving, no goodnight peck; silent as her walls; the walls he religiously repainted the same ugly piss-yellow every summer while she was away at camp. The night of her mother’s truth telling, Celia, for the first time she could remember, had fallen asleep while he still sat by her bed. As always, she feigned sleep, but secretly cherished his intrusion…just that night. Daddy could be stern, profane, over demanding but when he looked at her she could always see a clinging softness in his eyes; a tinge of love no aloofness could camouflage.

He tried, she knew: there was the old photo of his great-great aunt Evelyn, hand colored with dyes, he had told her, around 1900 before color film. He knew his photography. His Brownie Bull’s Eye was always close at hand and honestly a pain in the butt at times. Poising was not her thing. The woman in the photo wore a lace embroidered, moss green blouse, the ones with the high collarless neck, highlighted with a beautiful beige and ivory cameo; her hair pulled up into a bun. The hand coloring gave her over obvious, pink cheeks but demure light lips. Look at her! He had demanded. Her auburn hair and white skin…her high forehead. Who does she look like? You! She looks just like you! He had insisted with a grin. You belong right here with us! You’re ours. You were meant to be here.

A divine intervention? Celia asked. Her sarcasm caught him off guard.

Maybe. He replied, giving her an unexpected, lingering hug.

He was right: the picture looked just like her and she had studied every detail of the woman’s face for days. Her mother, catching her for the third time in as many days, staring at the gilded frame photo, had snapped it from her hands without explanation and locked it in the secretary on the high shelf in the back. The key was moved to an unknown place.  

It was hard to get away on Sunday. Always, there was Sunday school at First Methodist (she had cheated on a Sunday school quiz once, writing the answers on her arm…you shouldn’t have to cheat in church) and then, worship service which was either torturously boring, droning on and on and on and on an hour or more or, sometimes, a scary story of her….someone burning in an everlasting fire if they could not profess belief (either way, nothing a kid should be forced to do….why were people….and God…so cruel?) and then, Sunday lunch at home; a meat and two sides and desert with no seconds. Sunday afternoons were usually spent at the club while her parents golfed, played cards or just talked with their friends, always drinking too much. There was no swimming on Sunday! She and Emma Sue usually rambled about, inside and out. If Emma Sue was not there, sometimes, her daddy gave her coins to play the small slot-machine sitting on the bar. Ruthie, the mouse, and the other little ones were watched by older teens earning spending money.

 On game days her parents friends came to their house; drinking, betting on sports while they watched the game on their only television. Today, they filled the house, drinking, stifling the room with their smokes, tossing cash on the coffee table, taunting each other in jovial voices and yelling at the TV. Kids were on their own. Emma Sue was still gone; no one answered the phone at her house. Celia finally snuck away around four, ditching the other kids on the back porch as they giggled at the radio. Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini had captured their attention; eliciting daring remarks and blushes.

When Celia reached her secreted spot and crawled beneath the laurel, she wailed a long gush of anguish—hatred she could not articulate other than through a scream. Turtle was gone—the grave violated, dug into by some beast unknown. Claw marks were clearly visible. Overworked dirt splayed on top of the surrounding leaves confirmed the vigor with which the thing had pursued Turtle’s death scent. Celia crawled about, searching for Turtle or bits of him. There was nothing. He was now cracked and eaten or left to rot someplace unknown, without respect. She could not continue to watch and learn. There was now no chance to see his body return to dust, to catch a glimpse of his soul ascending or hovering about; to learn if his smile was true. People told lies on purpose…or not…how could she know what was true when others didn’t know or care, or lied? Was it not all written down someplace?  Was there not something like the Ten Commandments to tell us, not what to do, but what was true? 

Celia slumped beneath the laurel, pinching her legs till welts appeared. Slowing calming….she began to hear the silence. There were no sounds encroaching: no whish or rattling of traffic, no irate or longing dog, no bird song or caressing wind. No voices. She was alone, hugging her knees. Would her whole life be like this….not knowing?  Maybe that was why so many grownups were mean and fought wars that killed fathers. Would she be one of them…or something even worse! She could never pretend, denied her anger. She only knew, letting it go was never possible. Tomorrow was the first day of school but she could play sick. Rita would not be there on Monday. Her mother would easily be fooled or worn down and in the afternoon she would recover and in her daddy’s shop was that old broom with the straw worn to a nub….she could cut it off with a handsaw and….and he had all kinds of nails and sharp things for a point…..and wire or string or….there was always a way…..and the weather was still warm…there were other turtles, other…live things about…ready to withdraw into their shells, crawl into their holes….ready to…sleep; ready to reveal the truth if she could only find the right questions.