Chasing Redbird Read Online Free PDF Page B

running after his Redbird.
    And my parents? They were so busy, as they always were, that it would be easy to think they weren’t grieving for Aunt Jessie. My mother had always been distracted—simultaneously tying Sam’s shoe and scooping up someone’s muddy clothes and making out a grocery list and yelling at Will to get off the roof. But now she was bewildered, as if someone had spun her around and around, and then set her free to weave and wobble through our house.
    She put the milk in the oven, and the sugar in the refrigerator. She lost her car keys every single day that first week. At least once a day, while Uncle Nate was out, she slipped into his house to tidy it up, and she’d come back with her eyes all red and puffy, and you’d know she’d been crying over Aunt Jessie. Sometimes she’d go out to Aunt Jessie’s bare flower border and just stand there, staring at the dirt.
    For a while my father seemed as helpless as a turtle on its back. He took to digging in the garden a lot. This is not something he used to do very often, but in the first few weeks after Aunt Jessie died, you’d see him out there with his shovel and hoe, digging and scraping at the bare earth. At the dinner table, he’d turn to where Aunt Jessie used to sit and automatically say, “Jess—” and then he’d catch himself and turn beet-red and try to cover it up by saying, “Mess—what a mess that airport was today!” or “Jest gonna get some more potatoes!” and we’d all look down at our plates and pretend we hadn’t heard him.
    My brothers and sisters? Well, Gretchen and May did a fair amount of whispering in the first few days after Aunt Jessie died, but as to what they said, I don’t know. Will lay around the house like a rug, and absolutely never mentioned Aunt Jessie’s name. I heard him tell Ben, “I hate this bit about dying! I hate it!” and that’s the only way I ever heard him refer to Aunt Jessie’s death, as this bit.
    Sam, the youngest, became obsessed with everything to do with funerals. He wanted to know where the coffin came from, and what it was made of, and if it was waterproof, and why did people send flowers, and did many people get buried alive, and why was the coffin put under the ground—why couldn’t it be kept in the barn, on and on and on and on, until people started avoiding him because they couldn’t bear to think about these things one more minute.
    In a way, Ben seemed to be the calmest, and at first I thought he didn’t mind too much. Later I found out that he had his own way of coping.
    And by the time Jake Boone came to town, we were just beginning to emerge from our dazed states, like sleepy bears after a long, hard winter.
    A few days after Aunt Jessie’s funeral, I was up on the trail. To avoid thinking about Aunt Jessie, I kept trying to imagine the people who had ridden this trail all those many years ago. That’s when an idea burst into my brain like fireworks exploding: I was going to uncover the whole trail and travel it on horseback.
    There were a few problems with this, which I didn’t consider at the time: to uncover twenty miles of trail was a hard job, and, secondly, I didn’t have a horse to ride this trail even if I did clear it. At least I knew how to ride a horse. That I had learned at Sal Hiddle’s farm, where she and I had spent whole days weaving through their woods on her horse, Willow. Unfortunately, Willow had been sold when the Hiddles moved to Ohio.
    The more I thought about my plan, though, the bigger it got. This plan zipped through my brain like a dog tearing up the pea patch. Not only would I clear the trail, but I would plant zinnias all along the way, and it would become the Zinnia Bybanks–Chocton trail, and everyone who saw the zinnias would think of me, Zinny, and be flabbergasted at what I had done. It would still be my trail,