“Honeybunch,” Lucile said, “did Daddy tell you? We’re moving. Daddy’s going to get a job teaching in a little college up in the north of the state.”
“What’s he going to teach?” Liberty said. She looked at the girl in the bathing suit and cap on the dark green bottle, preparing to dive. YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU the bottle said.
“Art, I think.” Her mother sniffed loudly. “It’s not much of a college.”
Liberty looked through the window at her father painting landscapes of teeth and gums from memory. “I don’t want to move,” Liberty said. “I’d miss school. I’d miss my teachers.”
“Now, honeybunch,” her mother said.
“I’d miss my friends.” Liberty clutched her knapsack and her bottle of 7-Up and widened her eyes to keep from crying. The thought of going off into some strange place with her parents terrified her.
“Well, actually, we thought you’d feel that way,” her mother said. “So Daddy spoke with Calvin Stone who apparently is very grateful for all the root canal work that Daddy did for him. Very grateful. And Mr. Stone said that you could live with his family.”
“Live with them,” Liberty said. “Live with Willie Stone?”
“Isn’t that nice?” Lucile said, cheerfully scrubbing the sink. “They have a little boy who’s in your class and you can be their little girl for a while.”
“Live with Willie Stone?” Liberty repeated faintly. Willie’s head and hands looked too big for his skinny body. He was so pale he looked as though he dusted himself in flour each morning, and his hair was dark and lanky. He wore boots and cuffed jeans like a redneck, although his father was a banker and his house had a swimming pool. Willie chewed on gum and a toothpick at the same time and always gave replies to the teacher’s questions that were wildly inappropriate without being exactly incorrect. At recess in the schoolyard when the girls combed one another’s hair and talked about the boys, no one ever talked about Willie Stone. No one wanted him in their heads at all.
“I think that a person thinks differently at night, Liberty,” Lucile said, “and last night I had a good think, and Daddy and I came up with this plan. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. That’s my feeling.”
Liberty pressed the bottle of 7-Up against her cheek.
Lucile looked radiant. She moved about the kitchen as though it were a ballroom. “Now, Mr. Stone is well off, I gather, and Mrs. Stone is quite religious. I don’t mean crackpot religious, the type who claims that Jesus enters them through the vessels of their ears and tells them what color to paint the kitchen cabinets, I mean Sunday morning services, Wednesday luncheon prayer, Friday evening faith healing type religious. So we may have to go to the expense of getting you a pair of black patent leather shoes or something. A realtor is coming over this afternoon so the house will be listed tomorrow. We’re selling it furnished, so if you want anything from your room, you should get it out. It will be a breath of fresh air for all of us, I’m sure. Daddy will teach and I hope to get a position with the Forestry Service. I believe that one can outwit Time if one pretends to be what one is not. That’s my feeling.”
“Mommy,” Liberty said.
“Some of us weren’t meant to be mothers, Liberty. But as far as I can gather, Doris Stone is a fine mother. She plants flowers from seeds — something that’s always impressed me — and she knows how to sew. These are good signs. Of course, I’ll call you every week, and after Daddy and I get settled, we can make other arrangements, but I know you’d prefer staying behind for now with your school and your friends.”
Liberty sat in the kitchen, which she had sat in more or less off and on since she was a baby, and felt it becoming increasingly unfamiliar. The improbability and injustice of her parents’ plan did not really occur to her. She arranged her books and papers in neat stacks, then examined the contents of her purse, a cheap and cherished zippered bag, which pictured a pink, sequined flamingo. In her purse was a snapshot of her mother and father taken at some cocktail party where they appeared somewhat flushed. There was also a pyramidical folded paper predictor, several shiny pennies minted the year of her birth, and one gummy quarter.
“I don’t have any money,” Liberty said.
“Oh, you don’t need any money!” her mother said. “From what Daddy told me, he absolutely recreated Calvin Stone’s mouth — made it better than new!”
Liberty did not receive calls every week from her mother. During the first year, her parents telephoned half a dozen times. Her father’s vague and cheerful tone was much as she remembered it being with his patients, while her mother related with breathless excitement her volunteer work for the Forestry Service. Liberty listened, holding her own phone in her own little room in the Stones’ house.
“The Florida black panther is, as I’m sure you know, Liberty, almost extinct, and my job is to go into the wild, deep into his habitat, and find out more about him or her, as the case may be. I find out more about him by finding his feces. Yes, that’s right. Yes, it is difficult. It takes a good eye. And I examine his feces and I find the hairs and little things of whatever he’s been eating and I analyze the hairs and whatever to determine his diet. And do you know what his feces tell me? Everything speaks to us, Liberty, remember that. His feces tell me that he eats rabbits and deer and armadillos.”
Liberty imparted this information at the Stones’ dinner table. It was received with respect. Conversation was encouraged at meals as well as any insight into God’s sometimes troubling ways. For some time, the subject discussed was Doris Stone’s daily struggle, through prayer, against a growing lack of confidence in her pastor who had cited wisdom from the cartoon character Charlie Brown in eighteen of his last twenty sermons.
Both Calvin and Doris Stone had always wanted a daughter and they were thrilled with Liberty’s presence in their moody home. Willie was a puzzle to them, as mysterious as a Communist. Calvin brought Liberty barrettes and comic books, taught her how to drive and how to fillet a fish. He wanted to teach her how to stuff an owl, something he had learned as a boy, but Liberty didn’t want to know. He taught her to dance by letting her stand on his feet, and he gave her a silver dollar for each of her years on earth. He taught her how to swim underwater with her eyes open. Whereas, once Liberty had stopped off at the dentist’s office on her way back from school, she now stopped off at the bank. They discussed the vile William Tecumseh Sherman and played a game of their invention called Beg-A-Loan in which Liberty would plead for large sums of money that would be used to put trees back together after they had been chopped down, or toward the invention of a new animal. At the bank, Liberty counted and added. She stuffed pennies into paper tubes and wrapped white bands around stacks of bills. Liberty was good and Calvin loved her. He was a simple man and he loved goodness. Choices had never been difficult for him to make.
Doris was kind to Liberty and told her many things. She told her that the way to prevent God’s anger was to be angry with oneself, and she advised her never to stumble over that which was behind her. Doris wasn’t a chatterer, but she told Liberty about menstruation and the idiosyncrasies of the Four Evangelists. She taught her calligraphy and stain removal and how to trim a rose bush.
The Stones lived in a development of two-acre tracts called Pelican Estates. The door knocker on each house was in the form of a pelican. Doris Stone had been drawn to this particular development because of the pelican motif. Pelicans were the bird of Christ, Doris Stone said, the bird of resurrection. The iconical pelican, as Doris had explained to Liberty, returns to its nest to find its young dead. Slashing its breast with its beak in grief, it draws blood which brings the young back to life. Pelican Estates had been built by the Abcoda Corporation, a fertilizer and insecticide giant, which had recently gotten into construction. Abcoda had no more connection with the bird of Christ than a tennis ball, but Doris lived her life by religious clue and inference, and it was Pelican Estates where inference had led her.