On the Savage Side by Tiffany McDaniel

Author:Tiffany McDaniel [McDaniel, Tiffany]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

The air is clean, and I feel even more like a queen.

—Daffodil Poet

The spring was heavy and hot, but being out among the trees was nice. Daffy and me started to go on long walks every day. We cut the legs off our pants. We had brought shorts with us, but turning old jeans into something new gave us the chance to imagine the shorts hadn’t been worn on the sidewalk in front of the Blue Hour, or slid across the leather seats of some john’s car.

Violet had given us pen and paper, and we wrote. We wrote to Mom and Aunt Clover, wondering if they read our letters or threw them down, unopened, with the bills. We wrote to our dead Mamaw Milkweed, too. Told her we were wearing her scarves like women riding the backs of trains. And we told her we blew our hot breath on the window glass at night and drew circles around the stars we thought were her.

“You know, Arc,” Violet said to me one day, “there’s a shovel in the groundkeeper’s shed. They won’t mind you borrowing it.”

I put my makeup brush in my back pocket and headed outside to the shed.

“You can watch me, Daffy,” I told her as I grabbed the shovel.

I chose a place under the pines. There I dug into the hard soil, flipping over the grass and telling Daffy I was digging in the sands of Egypt.

“You’re not going to find anything in this land here, Arc.” Daffy lay back on the ground, staring up at the blue sky. “The trees have sinned, and the soil is hot. It’s boiled everything to dust.”

“Oh yeah? Then what’s this?” I picked up a flat rock with jagged edges.

I used the makeup brush to dust it off, like I’d seen archaeologists on TV do.

“This is an effigy pipe of the Adena,” I told her.

Daffy flipped over onto her stomach, propping her face up in her hands. “Is it now?” She smiled, tapping her fingers across her cheek.

“And this,” I said, picking up the discarded cigarette butt, “this is the evidence of people before us. Their civilization must have been made of women who ate red plums and raised white rabbits and painted their barns blue.”

“Well.” She sighed. “I sure hope those women survived better than we are.”

She got up, dusting the back of her shorts off.

“Where you going?” I asked.

“Just for a walk,” she said. “You keep digging, Arc Doggs. Find Momma’s horse and set us all free.”

She slid her hands into her front pockets, leaving her thumbs out, which she twirled as she disappeared into the pines. I stabbed the shovel’s blade in deeper.

I stayed out there awhile longer, finding a frayed shoelace, a door handle broken off from a car, and even a glove with the thumb missing. It had been lying on top of a rusty license plate. I wondered why they were there in the dirt at Evergreen Daughters, but sometimes it’s easier to just fill a hole back in.

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