Voices Ramona DeFelice Long
“Lila, you have to hold my hand.” Michael is using his Big Voice, the one to remind me he is five years older and this, in his mind, makes him the boss of me. I don’t like my brother’s Big Voice. My right foot is on the bridge, my left still on the path. I put my hands behind my back and twine my fingers together. “De. Li. Lah.” Michael holds out his hand. “Gimme your hand.” I feel like spinning around to run back home. If I do, Michael will have to follow me because it is the last week of summer and Mama said he has to take me with him to the creek while she gets her classroom stuff ready. “Okay,” I say, “but only across the bridge.” I hold my hand out but he doesn’t take it. “And the road,” he says. I grab his hand, but it’s like grabbing old Play-doh. “Say it,” he says. “You’ll hold my hand across the bridge and the road.” “Okay!” I cry. “The bridge and the road!” He smiles. I don’t want to smile back, but I do anyway. On the other side of the bridge is the road. Michael stops and looks—left, right, left—and says, “All clear.” At the woods, I forget to let go of his hand and we walk together, bending where a stand of bamboo hangs over the path, past a clump of rotting trees somebody cut down but never cleared. Bugs crawl all over the logs and some on the path. I raise my foot to stomp on one, but Michael yanks me back. “Don’t, Lila. The bugs eat the wood so it can decompose and feed the earth. It’s the cycle of nature.” Now he’s using his Smart Voice, the one that reminds me he gets straight A’s and wins the 6th Grade Science Fair while my first grade teacher tells us about cocoons and butterflies, which I already know because Michael read a book about it to me one night when thunder cracked all around, and I went to his room to make sure he wasn’t scared. “Bugs are gross,” I say, but I don’t try to stomp any of them. We leave the path past a tree with a piece of twine wrapped around the trunk. Michael says that won’t hurt the bark the way a nail does when the county puts up signs about trespassing on city property and beware of controlled deer hunts. Michael won’t put a nail in a tree because he says all things, even trees, have feelings. “If that’s true,” I asked the first time he said it, at dinner when he refused to eat Mama’s meatloaf and only ate mashed pota-
toes and broccoli, “Why aren’t your potatoes crying?” Daddy had sputtered out his drink and Mama had bitten down hard on her lip. Michael’s face got stiff and he didn’t talk for all the rest of dinner. At bedtime, I went into his room to make sure he wasn’t worried he had hurt the mashed potatoes' feelings. He told me to go away, but I didn’t, and after a while, he clicked on his reading light. He read me a book about someone named Boo Duh until Mama came in and said it was time to sleep. She tucked me back into my bed. I said, “Won’t Michael ever eat meatloaf again?” She answered in her Smiling Voice. “Oh, I think your brother will get past this when he gets hungry enough.” But Mama was wrong. Michael never ate meatloaf, or chicken, or even fish sticks ever again. At Thanksgiving, though, Daddy said Michael could believe whatever nonsense he wanted about trees and bugs, but Grandma’s human feelings would be hurt if he refused to eat her turkey. Michael said okay, but I swiped the slice of turkey from his plate and ate it for him, and for Boo Duh. The twine around the tree marks where we go off path. There’s a spot where the trees block out the sun and the ground is covered with moss. We cross over the moss on the rocks. It’s dark, and I was scared the first time, but Michael explained the leaves make a canopy just like the one that hangs over my bed that used to belong to Mama’s grandma. It’s called a sleigh bed, and it is draped with a sheet of what Mama calls eyelet. Sometimes I look up at the white eyelet overhead and pretend I am in a real sleigh, and the canopy is a sky full of snow. Other times, I imagine the sky is backwards and the dark eyelet holes are the stars and the white fabric is the night sky. Or I think about the King Tut story and I pretend my canopy is all that’s between me and the top of a pyramid. Or maybe it’s a magic carpet. One time, when I had chicken pox, Michael came into the bed with me and I told him all the things my canopy could be, and it made me forget to scratch. He said my canopy stories were stupendous, a big word I liked. I felt Big when I told him my canopy stories. If not Big, the same size as him, anyway. Tonight, maybe, I’ll make the canopy over my bed a layer of moss. I daydream about that until we reach the creek. Michael stops in front of it. The bank is supposed to come right up to the carpet of fallen leaves and grass, but there is drying mud there now. “Why is it so low?” he says, but not to me.
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