Chasing Redbird Read Online Free PDF Page A

RAWER
    T his is why I thought Aunt Jessie’s death was my fault:
    The day before Aunt Jessie died, I was up working on the trail. I was thinking about her because the anniversary of Rose’s death was approaching, and Aunt Jessie always got very quiet around this time, very still, as if her whole body were holding itself in, as if she were suspending herself in time in order to get through this anniversary without disintegrating into a million pieces.
    A cold wind reared up on the trail, sweeping heavy clouds overhead and dumping hail on me. I huddled beneath a pine tree near the path, watching the hail become bigger and bigger, sailing down from the clouds and whacking into the ground, bouncing in all directions. A thick layer of pine needles carpeted the ground around me, and I trailed my trowel through them.
    When the trowel hit something hard, I scraped the pine needles away, uncovering a flat piece of slate, similar to that used along the trail. It was odd for the slate to be there, some twenty feet away from the trail. I cleared a wider space, but there was only this single slab set in the dirt.
    Clumps of mud and a worm clung to the bottom of the slab. As I dug in the space beneath where the stone had been, the trowel snagged something. I unearthed a small leather pouch with a drawstring around its neck. Inside was a gold coin.
    What a discovery! Suddenly I was Zinnia Taylor: famous archeologist , single-handedly responsible for the discovery of the century. On closer examination, it didn’t seem to be a coin at all, but some sort of medallion. On one side was the outline of a woman’s head, and on the other side was a man’s head and these engraved initials: TNWM .
    I had the strangest sense that I’d held this medallion before, and it was a creepy feeling. Seeing it in my palm like that reminded me of something, something—but what? Had I been here long ago, maybe in another life? Had I held this coin? Had I seen someone bury it? I didn’t like the feeling, and so I slid the medallion back into the pouch and stuffed it in my jacket, and when the hail stopped, I returned to clearing the trail.
    But I couldn’t keep my mind on my work. I kept trying to guess what the initials TNWM stood for. Were they one person’s initials, like maybe Thomas Newton William Morris? Or were they two people’s initials, like maybe Tom Newton, Willa Morris? Did the initials stand for something else? Time Never Will Move?
    When a second bank of dark clouds raised their heads in the distance, I raced for home. Along the way, a harmless little grass snake slithered across the trail and, impulsively, I snatched it up. Zinnia Taylor: noted biologist captures rare species . In the barn I found an old coffee can wedged behind oil cans, dumped the sack of screws which it had contained, dropped the snake inside, and punched holes in the lid.
    Aunt Jessie appeared at the barn door. “I wondered where you’d got to,” she said. She was standing stiffly, her arms pressed against her sides.
    â€œLook—” I brought out the leather pouch and handed it to her. “It was under a rock along the trail.”
    She opened the pouch and emptied the medallion into her palm.
    â€œAnd look what else I found—”
    Now why did I do this? I knew she was afraid of snakes. I knew it, but still I held it up to show her. Maybe I was proud of it. It was so small, so innocent looking, not like a real snake. But maybe, maybe, I wanted to tease her, to scare her a little bit, to make her not so stiff that day, to make her like the other Aunt Jessie. She glanced from the pouch in her hand to the snake in mine, took a step back, and let out a thin wail. She dropped the pouch and staggered back toward the doorway, as Uncle Nate entered.
    That night, Aunt Jessie whipped out her bottom dresser drawer and plonked it in the middle of the room. She lined it with her marriage quilt and tried to curl up