far better than paltering around the boy. Once Holman redeemed me from the Knobs, I vowed I’d never allow my speech to deteriorate again.”
“Nor have you!” confirmed my mother. “Marion, she knits with a dictionary at her elbow.”
“I believe it!” he smiled. “Well, Mama Edmonds, if I may call you that, I look forward to being part of the family. And being your stepfather, Master Thomas,” he grinned as he addressed me across the table. He enfolded my mother’s left hand in his and kissed her fingers. “And to you, Tommy,” he raised his voice. “May your childhood be filled with unending joy.”
I don’t remember if I smiled, or thanked him, or looked away. Numb is not the word. Puzzled would have been more like it. Or nonplused. I could still feel his presence beside the horse, when he slipped his hand about its reins and shot Olan Crawford in the chest. Whatever I thought about this man, or however I felt about him, I liked his quiet mannerisms and manly, genteel qualities.
June did not end happily. Late one misty evening, Earl showed up at the back screened-in door with a lantern. “Little Ouida’s missing. Ain’t nobody seen her a’fore supper. Please pray for her, Miz. Edmonds. Somethin’s happened to her, bad. I just know it.”
Ouida was Earl’s niece, his oldest brother, Jessie’s, baby girl. She couldn’t have been more than three.
“Won’t you come in?” my grandmother offered.
“No’m, thank ye. I was hoping you could spare Pearl. We’re mountin’ a search party for her right now. Leavin’ from the barn and up through the orchard, where her mama last seen her. She didn’t come in for supper.”
“Oh, Earl! Let me call the sheriff. Or Everett. He’s got tracking hounds. He could be here in less than an hour.”
“We done got some of our own, Miz. Ginny. Ask Pearl to bring a lantern and follow us up through the woods.”
By now, Pearl had come down from her room over the kitchen. “Wait, Pa, and I’ll go with you.”
Earl waited on the steps while Pearl tossed a shawl about her shoulders. She laced up her brogans and lit a kerosene lantern, which she had retrieved from a table in the pantry.
“Can I go?” I begged.
“Most definitely not!” my grandmother retorted. “One lost child is enough. Get on up to bed,” she remonstrated. “Earl, I’ll make some coffee and send it up by Shaula to the barn.”
“Thank you, ma’am, we’d be much obliged.”
As he and Pearl disappeared in the night, I ran to the front hall windows and peered out into the dark. The orchard lay just across the road in front of the house, and I could make out a dozen or so glowing lanterns in the mellow night, as searchers wove their way up the hill in the mist. They gathered briefly under some apple limbs, on the edge of the woods; then formed a single file of fading light that grew fainter and fainter until they were swallowed by darkness.
I pretended to mount the stairs, stomping my feet and muttering pouting sounds as I climbed. But instead I was standing by Quelle and staring up at the indomitable Capt. Edmonds, with his balderdash eyes and gigantic sword. With that, I tugged quietly on the front door and slipped out into the night. I all but stumbled off the porch, as my eyes adjusted to the dark. It had been drizzling but had stopped. A white fog enveloped the yard. I ran toward the barn and hid in one of the empty horse stalls. Soon enough, my mother arrived with a large, enameled-covered pot of coffee, a tray of cups, and a pitcher of cream.
I could hear voices on the road. It was more of Earl’s kin people and a moil of dogs. The big, chained hounds were whining and baying and pulling the men behind them. They were coon dogs.
“Miss Shaula, how kind!” The men helped themselves liberally to the coffee and trudged back onto the road.
“I’ll have biscuits for you in awhile, as soon as Mama bakes them,” she called. “You’ll need something nourishing before long.”
They waved to her and slipped out of sight in the mist. I watched as my mother retuned to the house. Once she disappeared around the corncrib, I hurried after the men.
They passed through the orchard, stopped where I had seen the others pause, and stared down at the ground.
“Damn!” one of the men groaned. “That’s blood.”
“That’s a track,” another said. “A cat’s track. Some panther’s done drug her off.”
My grandmother had often told stories of how panthers stalked the Knobs, but when she’d see how much that frightened me, she’d change her story to, “Oh, that was long ago, when I was a little girl, and Holman first came over the Knobs to visit us. They’d scream like wild women in the night. And they would drag off an occasional lamb or ewe.”
This time it was no ewe, but a lamb—a lamb of a child. The dogs pulled the men onward, while I shrank back, uncertain what to do. Soon, caution gave way to fear, and fear, abetted by darkness, to panic; and, racing through the wet grass under the apple trees, I ran as fast as my legs would carry me down to the road. I climbed the rail fence, tore a hole in my overalls, cut my hands on the lone strand of barbwire on the top rail, and hurried toward the house. My grandmother was waiting for me at the door.
“You imp! You little ingrate! How dare you frighten us so! Look at you! And look at those hands! March that little butt of yours up those steps, right now! And don’t stop until you get to the bathroom. Oh, the likes of it! I should flail you with a switch!”
I scampered up the stairs and fled to the bathroom. “Wash yourself!” she commanded from below. “And go straight to bed!”
In the morning, I rushed down the stairs to learn of the night’s search results.
“Gone! The little thing’s gone!” Pearl muttered. “They never found a thing. Just a little shoe. I got it upstairs, in my room.”
“He dragged her up in some tree,” my grandmother hypothesized. “Or some cave. There’s a thousand caves back in there. Old mica mines, iron mines, salt mines. The Lord alone knows where she is.”
“Mama, Earl asked you to pray, not prophesy her funeral,” my mother commented.
“Oh, she’s dead all right, Shaula. You can mark my words on that. Many a night my father would have to sleep out in the cold during the lambing season, for, if weren’t dogs, a panther would kill a ewe, or carry off a lamb. They bite their little throats, cutting off the air to their windpipes; then drag them deep into the woods. And what they don’t eat, they bury under leaves. Those dogs of Earl’s brothers are coon dogs. Not bloodhounds, or real hounds. They probably got distracted and ran off after coons. Earl claimed as much. That’s why they came back.”
The entire morning past, and still no one found the child, or any sign of the child, or the predator that had stalked and killed her, no doubt. I was playing in the front yard, near the purple lilac bushes, when Uncle Everett drove up in his pickup truck. Two portable dog cages wobbled back and forth in its bed. As soon as he stopped, you could hear the hounds clawing to get out. I ran to his truck and climbed up on the bed.
“Careful,” he said. “These rascals are big and hungry and the first thing I want them to smell is something of that little girl’s.”
