Pictures of Hollis Woods Read Online Free PDF Page B

Beatrice meant. “A trip?”
    “To the Southwest.”
    Josie nodded then. “Yes. Adobe houses, desert, flat rocks everywhere.”
    “I'll paint them all,” Beatrice said.
    I looked from one to the other. Beatrice had picked up the pencil again, sketching herself, drawing a suitcase in her hand. And then she looked at me once more. “You're going to be something, you and that language you speak on paper.” She drew her other hand waving. “I love what you have to say, Hollis Woods.”
    I sat there, hardly breathing.
    “You have that,” she said. “It's more than most people ever have. Count yourself lucky.”

I thought I was alone, sitting on the bottom step in front of the house, drawing the Old Man, working with a flesh-peach pencil. Quick sketches, one after the other: hat down over his eyes in the first, standing in front of the river in the next, sleeping in the hammock in the third. His beard and the way he leaned forward, listening. I was trying to capture what he looked like so I'd have it to take back with me. To remember.
The screen door opened in back of me with that soft swishing noise, and the Old Man came out to look over my shoulder. “Oh, Hollis,” he said. “Where'd you learn to do that?”
I shook my head.
“Hollis?”
I looked toward the river, green today, a willow hanging over the edge.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “It's a gift,” he said, “to draw things the way they are.”
I sat very still. No one had ever said anything like that to me before.
“And something else,” he said. “You shine through in your drawings.”
I looked up at him, really looked at him, not a quick glance that darted away so he couldn't see my eyes. “My name …,” I began as he folded himself down on the step next to me. “Hollis Woods is a real place.” I shrugged a little. “Holliswood,” I said. “One word, I think.”
When the Old Man spoke, I jumped. “It's where they found you, as a baby?”
“An hour old,” I said in an I-don't-care voice. “No blanket. On a corner. Somewhere.” Didn't a baby deserve a blanket? “And just the scrap of paper: CALL HER HOLLIS WOODS.”
One day I had gone to see that place. I ran away from one of my houses—tan, green, brick? I circled Queens, on the subway, off the subway, onto the Q2 bus and off the Q2 bus, until I found the spot.
It was winter, bleak, but the houses were pretty. I never did find the woods, though. I tried to picture it in the spring when I had been born, with birds chirping and the sun shining.
Now I saw Steven come into view in the rowboat.
“I play hookey,” I told the Old Man. “Everyone says I'm tough, they say I'm trouble.”
The Old Man made a sound in the back of his throat.
“Steven is a great kid,” I said.
The Old Man looked surprised. I waited to hear if he would say anything, but Steven banged the rowboat hard into the rocks along the bank.
The Old Man made another sound. “Watch that, Steven.”
“The kingfisher is on the branch downstream,” Steven called. So we went down to the boat and climbed in to go have a look.

“ O ver the river and through the woods …,” Josie sang one morning at breakfast. It was a late breakfast. We had stayed up most of the night watching an old black-and-white movie.
    “To Grandmother's house?” I asked, dropping a cornflake on the table in front of Henry's nose and jumping back as he raised one paw to warn me.
    Josie waggled her hand, her head still bent. She was carving my tree figure from a piece of oak, stripping the bark until the underneath showed pale and smooth. The head was there, still unformed, the nose just a slight sharp mark.
    Josie saw me looking at it. “A bit at a time,” she said. “The face last, when I'm sure I know you well enough.”
    I didn't say anything. Instead, I ran one finger over Henry's back. His eyes were closed, he was purring, and I figured he didn't know it was me.
    “Over the river …,” Josie began again, rocking in her chair with a