I saw her arms rise from the water and wheel slowly over her round, wet head and dip again beneath. She made no noise. She swam around the curve up into the shallows, stood up, and walked toward me and never took her eyes off my own.
She took my hand, and looked into the palm. She had a lean rangy skinned-cat body, and a deep little muttering voice.
“Small slim hands,” she said, “a sad and lonely man. You see the big picture, but you have no real life.” She grumbled a minute. “Short thin fingers, tapered ends. A stiff and waisted thumb, hmmm. Better off alone, I suppose.” She pressed into the flesh below my thumb. “Ummhmm,” she said, tracing all the little cracks and stars and broken lines in the middle of the palm with a light fingernail. She looked at it close for a second, then dropped it. She turned and sighed and looked back across the lake. I turned my eyes from her saggy little fanny and skinny legs.
“My name’s Callie. I’m your neighbor,” she said.
“I know it,” I said.
She said, “Who’s that little girl you taking care of?”
“My niece,” I said. She was my younger cousin, but I had told her to call me uncle because it sounded more natural. I said, “She’s had a hard life.”
“Mmm,” she said, and we were quiet for a while. “Well, the world ain’t no place for an innocent soul, now is it?”
“It is not,” I agreed.
“Must be hard on a man,” she said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean being alone out here with a pretty little girl.”
“She’s my niece, I’m not that way.”
She turned and looked at me and then at the house for a minute.
“Why don’t you come on up to the ridge sometime and pay me a visit?” Her thin lips crooked up and parted in a grin. She raised a hand and walked back into the water and swam around the curve into the cove and out of sight. I sat down on the bank. There was a sound and I turned my head to see Maeve up from bed and standing unsteady on the porch, fiddling with the little blue headphones radio, which she didn’t at the moment seem to understand how to use. Then in a minute she had them on again, and just stood there.
Now that she wasn’t carrying, she roamed the canyon with the strays. She ate raw peanuts from a sack I had on the kitchen counter, and drank her water from the lake down on her hands and muddy knees. She smelled like a dog that’s been wallowing in the lake mud, that sour dank stink of rotten roots and scum. I finally held her in the bathtub one day, took the headphones off her head, and plunged her in, her scratching and screaming. I scrubbed her down and lathered up her head and dunked her till she was squeaky, and plucked a fat tick out of her scalp. But when I tried to dress her in some of Greta’s old clothes, shut up in plastic and mothballs all these years, she slashed my cheek with her raggedy nails and ran through the house naked and making a high, thin, and breathless sound until she sniffed out the old rag she wore and flew out through the yard and into the woods buck naked with that rag in her hand and didn’t come back till that evening, wearing it, smelling of the lake water again, and curled up asleep on the bare porchboards.
When I went to the screen door she didn’t look up but said from where she lay hugging herself, “Don’t you handle me that way no more.”
“I had to clean you, child.”
“I can’t be touched,” she said.
“All right.”
“That woman at the big store said you was my daddy.”
“But you know I’m not, I’m your uncle.”
“I don’t want no daddy,” she said. “I just come out of the woods that day I come here, and I didn’t come from nowhere before that.”
“All right,” I said, though my heart sank when she said it, for I wanted her to care about me in some way, but I don’t think that was something she knew how to do. I fixed her a makeshift bed on the sofa in the den where I finally convinced her to sleep. As long as I kept my distance and made no sudden moves toward her and did not ever raise my voice above the gentle words you would use with a baby, we were all right. But it was not a way any man could live for long and I wondered what I could do — send her back to Sebastian’s place, where she was but chattel? I feared one day she would wander into the woods and go wild. I might have called the county, said, Look, this child, who has wandered here from my uncle’s house, is in need of attention and there is nothing more I can do.
Who would take in such a child but the mental hospital up in Tuscaloosa?
I figured Sebastian thought she’d been sucked up into the twister and scattered into blood and dust, until the afternoon I heard his pickup muttering and coughing along the dam and then his springs sighing as he idled down the steep drive to the house, and then the creaking door and I was out on the porch waiting on him. He stopped at the steps and nodded and looked off across the lake as if we were lost together in thought. Uncle Sebastian was old and small and thin and hard as iron and he had the impish and shrewd face of all his siblings. His face was narrow and his eves slanted down and in and his chin jutted up so that if you viewed him in profile his head was the blade of a scythe and his body the handle. He blinked in the sun and said, “We been most of the summer fixing up the house after that tornado back in the spring.”
I said, “Anybody hurt?”
“Well, we thought we’d lost little Maeve.” And he turns to me. “Then I hear tell she’s showed up over here, staying with you.”
“Where would you hear that?” I said, and he said nothing but I saw his eyes shift just a fraction up toward the ridge where the crazy woman’s house is perched.
The strays had shown little interest in Sebastian’s arrival and kept mainly to their little scooped-out cool spots under the bushes, a flea-drowsing shade. Hardly moved all August; through the long hot days all you’d hear was the occasional creaking yawn, wet gnashing of grooming teeth, isolated flappity racket of a wet dog shaking out his coat. Hardly any barking at all. We heard a rustling and Maeve stood at the edge of the yard in her headphones, a scruffy little longhaired stray at her heels.
“She was with child,” Sebastian said.
“She lost it.”
“That late?” he said and looked at me a long moment, then back at Maeve. “You keeping her outdoors and living with dogs?”
“If it was true, it would not be so different from what she came from,” I said.
“Go to hell,” Sebastian said. “Living out here by yourself, you going to tell me you ain’t been trying some of that?”
“That’s right.”
“Them boys of mine done all wandered off now she’s gone. I ain’t got no help.”
He walked slowly toward Maeve, who was standing there with two fingers of one hand pressed to the speaker over her right ear, head cocked, eyes cut left looking out at the lake. The little stray slinked back into the brush. Only when Sebastian laid his hand on Maeve’s arm did she lean away, her bare feet planted the way an animal that does not want to be moved will do. He began to drag her and she struggled, making not a sound, still just listening.
I walked up behind Sebastian and said his name, and when he turned I hit him between the eyes with the point of my knuckle. Small and old as he was, he crumpled. Maeve did not run then but walked over to the porch, up the steps, and into the house.
I dragged the old man by his armpits to the water, and waded out with him trailing. Maeve came out again and followed in her nightslip to the bank, and stood there eating a cherry popsicle. She took the popsicle out of her mouth and held it like a little beacon beside her head. Her lips were red and swollen-looking. She took the blue headphones off her ears and let them rest around her neck. I could hear the tinny sound of something in there, now it wasn’t inside of her head.