Blue Bottle Tree

1. Seven: Penny Molests her Clarinet-2

My grandmother is a hoodoo from way back. Actually, more Voodoo than hoodoo. Voodoo is a religion with soul possessions and it’s very real. It’s much more serious than hoodoo, which is just the potions that don’t even work—for most of the quacks who make them. My grandmother might even be Li Grand Zombi, come back from the dead as Marie LaVey and she used to be the famous New Orleans Voodooienne Marie Laveau. Sometimes, she is. She changes. But how are you going to tell Penny Longstocking that? It bothers me that I can’t, because I want to tell her. I know where the line is. I feel like I could trust her. I feel like we could make a great team. But there’s this hurdle of my crazy family and I can’t seem to get past that. Maybe I’ve got Penny all wrong—maybe she really could handle it. For example, my name is Seven because I’m the seventh generation born of Marie Laveau. But it’s not like I just have a famous ancestor. Her spirit still comes around. I’ve never even taken anybody to our house.

My grandmother has told me about our people from way back in New Orleans, and the man from Haiti who taught Marie Laveau. My grandmother pronounces Voodoo like vō-dün because that’s the Creole way. I remember some of the rituals from when I was a child, and I know this—if you happen to find yourself at a bonfire on Saint John’s Eve, with drums playing and a bunch of Voodoos dancing, and it all builds up and gets wilder and weirder until somebody shouts, “Papa Legba, open the gate!”—you better run. Papa Legba is the king of all Voodoo deities. He stands at the crossroads, the real one, between us and the loa, the gods. When that gate is open, gods come to us. They are not obliged to mind our laws. They are not required to mind anything. Some of them are vengeful, and shameless.

My grandmother is wise. She’ll say, “The only stupid question is the one you did not try to figure out yourself.” And she’s right. I feel better when I figure stuff out myself. She told me that real Voodoo isn’t the black magic everyone says it is. It’s the moment when the spirit comes into the believer, takes over, and possesses them. Like when they are dancing and go down to the ground on one foot, then come up shaking and wailing in a voice that’s not their own. Like what happens to my mom. That’s Voodoo. People go to Christian churches to speak about God, but in Voodoo they actually become God. My grandmother is keeping me out of it, but I’m still worried about getting the curse. The curse skipped my grandmother, but my mom has it. It makes her crazy, or so depressed she can’t get out of bed.

Penny Longstocking is going to grow up to be a scientist. She’s got it all planned out. People like her have always got it all planned out. I don’t know when I’ll tell her about the bones. I haven’t told anybody. If I do tell her, she’ll probably call the police, or at least tell her mother. Her mother is Sylvia. She’s one of the good-looking mothers—you can tell where Penny gets it. But if she finds out, Sylvia will spread the news like wildfire. Then the whole town will say I’m a freak because I didn’t say anything sooner.

I don’t really want anybody to know. At least not yet. If I tell, they’ll come up here and ruin my hideout. I’m sure they know there’s a cave. They have to know, but nobody comes here but me. It’s too far off the beaten path. It’s at the top of a hill, where it gets steep. There are two boulders that stick out like a giant’s shoulders bulging through the mountain, grinding through black dirt with a yawning mouth between them. That’s my cave. You can see Kentucky from here. They say Kentucky has blue grass. Not the banjo music. The actual grass. I was skeptical, but it’s true—it has a tint like that at sunset, not like here in Tennessee. Our grass is green in summer, brown in winter. Never blue. Bellin is tucked between hills, not mountains, and it seems very out-of-the-way from the rest of the state. Nashville is the closest city, and that’s a hundred miles away. We have all the modern stuff, but Bellin is still very much like the little town that time forgot.

Here’s why I don’t tell Penny Longstocking about the bones: one time I tried her out on a softer story—a more gentle one than human bones in a cave. I told her what this kid Rickey—Rickey “Mad Dog” Smith, whose name suits him and he even likes being called Mad Dog—and I did a few summers back, when we were kids. He said it was a scientific experiment. It did have a sciencey feel to it, but then it was gross and sad. It was the kind of thing that makes you lie awake and wonder why you did it—you think it was a needless experiment. What he did was this—Mad Dog was showing me about how you can open up a frog and look at its beating heart. It was actually a toad, but we called them all frogs back then. I don’t know why. I think we knew the difference. Toads were slow, so slow even I could catch one. Easily. I could catch two at a time without even trying.

Mad Dog showed me that you can thump a toad on the head and it will knock him out. I never knew that, but it was true. Not even a super-hard thump, just a regular one. Mad Dog caught a toad, and I wanted to try it out too, so I caught one and thumped it. Then we laid them out on a tree stump like a surgical table, put them on their backs, stretched their arms and legs out. They were still breathing, so they definitely were still alive. Then he pinched the skin of the underbelly. I did it to mine too. You don’t even need a knife—you just kind of tear it open. It’s very squishy and soft and a little rubbery. Inside the toad, there will be a beating heart. You can see it beat.

We watched the hearts beating for a while, and probably poked around the guts a little. There was a slimy yellow part like a sliver, the lungs were gray, and there was some black bile. Then we were done. Right away Mad Dog had another idea and was ready to take off for the next thing. I liked him. He had crazy ideas nobody else would ever think of. He recommended I not tell anybody about the frogs. So I didn’t, until Penny.

She got all grossed out, said it was cruel. I agreed and said I felt bad about it, but the fact that I had already done it was all it took. That’s how I knew she was not ready to hear about the bones. What happened after we opened up the toads was sad. Mad Dog threw his in the lake. I had already started to wonder what we were supposed to do with them when the experiment was over, and that was the answer. You throw them in the lake.

This is what I was getting at about Mad Dog Rickey, and why everyone calls him that. He probably never even thought about it, that we were torturing animals. But throwing those toads in the water, watching them float off, torn apart and belly-up, and thinking I don’t know what—maybe some big fish would come along and eat them, or else they would just rot in the water—it wasn’t worth it. It was wrong and unnecessary. Even a toad deserves some kind of a life.

Not only does Penny Longstocking wear stockings, but they are actually long. She has very long legs. She’s got long red hair—auburn, she says. Like the swirls on an old staircase banister. And there’s a lot of it. A spray of freckles parts along her nose and when she’s been in the sun too long they glow. She keeps her hair plaited and hung off her neck in a ponytail—it swings from one shoulder to the other when she’s walking fast. And she’s one of the tallest girls in high school. She must be nearly six feet tall, but I think I’ll be taller than her by next year.

Penny Longstocking has excellent posture. Especially for someone with no arches. I assume she has no arches because she wears those heavy clodhopper shoes. She can balance a book on her head while playing the clarinet and walk at the same time. If you’ve never seen anyone do that, it’s very impressive. Her ponytail doesn’t swing when she does it that way, practicing for marching band.

No one can tell it now, because I look almost exactly like every other white kid in Bellin, but from my grandmother’s side we were Creoles. The kids in Bellin think they’re pure. Mad Dog told me that it takes nine generations to be cleansed of any black blood. What kind of asshole even thinks like that? “I’m Seven,” I told him. But he didn’t get it. Mad Dog doesn’t get a lot of things.

My grandmother can still speak Creole French. Voodoo was hardcore back in New Orleans in the old days, and it was very serious stuff about Li Grand Zombi—which is where the word zombie came from, the one who died and came back to life. Hollywood has got it all wrong on zombies trying to eat everybody. Real zombies don’t do that. My grandmother has died and come back. It’s been proven by doctors she was dead—they pronounced her dead. But at her own funeral she sat straight up—sprang out of the open coffin while the preacher was praying. “I saw Papa Legba at the gate,” she said. “Papa Legba sent me back!” Then that funeral turned into the biggest party ever.

When my ancestors started getting in trouble with the law, they had to scale back on the Voodoo. They changed the name to hoodoo. My grandmother says it wasn’t really the dolls made of hair and feathers, or the sacrificing of goats that did them in. The goat without horns is a big part of it, but she never explained exactly what that meant.

There is a skeleton in my cave, of a child. It’s not scary and you don’t even think about it being a person or being alive. It smiles with empty eyes and a faraway grin. The bones have a nice weight, not too heavy, not too light, and they seem like they would last forever.

Penny Longstocking doesn’t have a boyfriend. I’m too young for her and besides, she thinks she’s too cool. She thinks I’m a weirdo. Now she’s putting her clarinet down and picking up the National Geographic.

Where are you now, whippoorwill? I’m going back in my cave.

Inside the cave it’s cooler. Outside it was heating up and smelled like green leaves and bugs. Summer is coming and it jumped straight from cold to hot with barely a day of medium in the middle. I have taken Penny Longstocking’s advice on the newspapers—not that we ever talked about it. I mean I adopted her method of staying clean. I don’t throw the newspapers away and get new ones every day like she does, though. Mine stay on the cave floor until I wear them out. I’ve made a little trail of newspapers where I have to get down on hands and knees to crawl to the back of the cave. I’m wiry, so it’s no problem for me, but I can imagine that adults would have trouble. This is probably why no one pays any attention to this cave. They assume you can’t really get to the back room because the crawl space is too tight. They might not even know it has a back room. In fact, after crawling for about fifteen feet, it makes a curve and then you go down over a rock. But then you can stand up. That’s where the bones are. You really have to know what you’re doing to find them.

It’s damp in here and very quiet—just the sound of dripping, the occasional ping. There is no smell of green like outside. It’s dank like dirt and worms. There’s a pool that has fish in it. They’re blind, living in the dark all the time, but they can tell a disturbance. Maybe they think it’s a cricket, so they swim over and take a nibble. But when they realize my finger is not a cricket, and I splash or try to grab one, they puff up. They even have spikes on their bellies. They get twice as big. When I take my finger out and don’t bother them, they calm down, and go back to their normal little sizes. I’ve never seen any other fish like them. I don’t think people put them here. I think these fish were here before people. Probably before the Indians. Probably a thousand years.