Mislaid & The Wallcreeper: The Nell Zink Collection. Nell Zink
lived in a sprawling compound on a creek bank, hundreds of years old, with a four-seater outhouse and a shed full of broken farm implements from before the trees grew. The woods leading to it were dense with greenbrier through which deer had beaten paths like a hedge maze. There was only one party game: Run Wild. The adults would settle in, on and around the porch, while the children ran wild. Eventually one of Temple’s older brothers would throw a rope over a high oak bough and haul up the piñata.
The Moodys regarded piñatas as a neglected Native American tradition. They assumed partial descent from Indians. Temple’s mother had a fond uncle in Reno, Nevada, at the end of the Trail of Tears, and he mailed her authentic Indian crafts every year for Christmas: Navajo sand paintings, Pomo baskets, Hopi dolls. And for Temple’s birthday, a piñata.
Temple’s mother had grown up in Hampton and gone to junior college, but few other Moodys had been to school past eighth grade, and many not at all. The Brown decision in 1954 made a lot of school systems close their doors, and people like the Moodys lost out. Most were fundamentalist Christians, but inability to read kept them from getting pedantic about it. They deduced religious doctrine from the behavior of people more devout than themselves, and it made them a very tolerant and easygoing bunch of people. But with gaps in their knowledge of the world. Such as what lay at the ends of roads they had never driven. Where Reno might be. The look of an ocean. At the same time, they knew many things that were written down nowhere. For example, that they had lived on that creek bank continuously since the days when it was an Indian town.
Blindfolded and armed with a baseball bat, Temple would stand under the oak while an older brother raised and lowered the piñata and made it sway wildly. This spectacle moved everyone present to tears of laughter. The deliberate way Temple would duel his brother, faking and feinting, drawing his bat slowly through the air, mapping space, thrusting suddenly in unanticipated directions, trying to penetrate his enemy’s mind. The certainty with which he would saber down some years’ piñatas, having figured out his opponent’s tactics. The hopeless struggles of years when even he ended up laughing.
Third grade was a year of grandstanding. He let his weapon fall and clapped his hands together over his head. He caught the burro’s leg blind, as though he could hear the creaking of rope and the rushing of wind through crepe paper.
In fourth grade he failed to hit it at all, but did so with a dervish-like display of youthful joie de vivre. Karen was very impressed both times.
Meg spent the parties sitting at a redwood picnic table with other moms, doing what they all did: eat and offer color commentary on the children’s mode of running wild that year. She spoke little and employed her broadest accent. Occasionally a mother would jump up and intervene if things got too colorful, or do some shouting at the edge of the clearing if a group of children vanished in the greenbrier for too long.
Since the mothers were not all related, the gossip was not intimate. Clans not present came up for criticism for allowing first cousins to date each other, or beloved elders to retire to the woods behind a supermarket. (It was accepted practice to let your husband camp out in summer near a source of sweet wine and steaks past their sell-by date, but you had to take him back in winter.) When it started to get dark and the bugs came out in force, Meg would take Karen home. Karen would be limp from playing, as though she had been scoured inside and out, an empty husk awash in soda pop and cake crumbs.
Karen lacked playmates. She lacked toys. Without a TV or playmates she was unlikely to figure out about toys. She wasn’t a complainer. Meg saw that Karen was humble and a stranger to envy. Fads came and went without a peep from her. She felt no more entitled to an Atari than she would have to a Lamborghini. The gift of a Tootsie Roll made her quiver. She would nibble shavings off it like a mouse.
Meg was not overprotective, but she had doubts about Karen’s going into the woods alone. Turkey season seemed especially risky. Karen moved as irregularly as a bird, and she was about the height of a turkey. “This is like Red Riding Hood’s riding hood,” Meg explained as she unwrapped a protective cap from the Army/Navy. The cap had a dense fake fur lining and ear flaps that tied under the chin with ribbons. Karen was under orders not to take it off for even a second. She was very blond, and you don’t want to flash white in the land of the whitetail. Blue eyes, red lips: the colors of a gobbler in breeding plumage. You need that safety orange. Karen put on the hat after school every day and wandered lonely as a cloud.
The Advent when she was a seven-year-old fifth grader, she found a toy she wanted.
She had walked for an hour, on the banks of shallow ponds and under thick hanging vines, through all the fields she knew and beyond, and she came out in an unfamiliar clearing. A hayfield with a barn, and tied out in front of the barn, a Welsh pony. There was a dirt road leading to the barn, both sides mown back three yards. The work of a busy and orderly farmer, but nobody around.
The pony looked at Karen. It was a roan in its winter coat. Its eyes were brown, with long white lashes, and it had little striped feet. She picked dandelion greens and arranged them in a pile on the grass. The pony stepped forward and ate.
To Karen’s mind, its acceptance of that minor consideration placed it under a contractual obligation to her. It was the middle of December, but she couldn’t imagine why a pony would be alone in the woods. To her it was plainly a lost pony, destined to be hers if she could tame it the way the boy did the Arabian in her favorite bedtime story, The Black Stallion. (Meg didn’t have the book, but she remembered the highlights.) It was tied to a piece of rebar in the ground and had a bucket of water, and the rebar moved around every couple of days, while the bucket was regularly refilled. Presumably it spent its nights in the barn, where its feed was very likely stored. But Karen was pushing eight years old and raised on poetry, so nothing in the world was clearer to her than that whoever first sat astride that pony would become its partner and master.
Still, she was a little child, not an idiot, so she regarded its substantial weight advantage, hooves, and teeth as potential risks. She was drawn to it by forces so strong she had not dreamed they existed, and repelled by caution so strong it was insurmountable. Which added up to: She hovered near it every day for an hour, staring. Over the course of a week and a half, she approached and touched it twice on the ribs, avoiding the reach of its kick and bite. She ran terrified when it turned to look at her. On Christmas Eve, it was gone.
She asked Meg in despair why a pony would disappear. Where did it go? Could mountain lions or timber rattlers have gotten it?
“It was probably some little girl’s Christmas present,” Meg said.
Karen had written to Santa asking for a banana split. She could find no words to express how Meg’s information made her feel. She trembled, aching with longing for something sweeter than sugar: money.
Meg’s financial situation was delicate. Her expenses were low. She had a thousand dollars of capital left in her emergency fund. If something worse than that came up, she’d cross that bridge when she got to it. She had no rent, no utility bills, and a daughter who could survive on a noodle a day. Karen ate dutifully, not with feeling. But sooner or later she was going to get her growth spurt and start liking food. And there was the little matter of clothing. The county had a thrift shop. Like thrift shops everywhere, it specialized in the leavings of the elderly dead. People always had acquaintances who needed children’s things and seldom donated them. Well-off children wore late-model hand-me-downs, but to get in on the action, Meg would have had to join a church. And although she was prepared to accept that the world was adopting stodginess as a fashion trend—that girls were putting away their mules and feather earrings and donning prim sweater sets like Lee’s mother—she could not face praising Jesus in song to put Karen in Pendleton kilts. You have to respect your boundaries.
Still, they needed clothes. Even polo shirts are born and die, in delicate pastels that show every stain. She needed an income.
Waitressing was out of the question. Waitresses are high-profile public figures. It doesn’t get any more visible