A Foggy Beginning
Chapter 2
“I promise everything is going to be alright.”
Dad’s words were straight and true. They bounced around in between Marian’s ears like a pinball against the flappers. But no matter how much she tried to keep them afloat, the words would fall through the hole and she’d be out of tries. “Thank you for visiting Florida!” The big orange and blue sign shouted at her, and the long bridge over the swampy waters felt like a lifetime before “Welcome to Georgia” shined in her face, sporting a big fuzzy peach in the sky. A deluge of memories, friendships, laughter, and routine fell against her face and raced down her cheek in the shape of a tear. Two hours later, Georgia wished her a farewell, and the rough, rickety two-lane highway welcomed her to South Carolina. The Dolors stopped for lunch somewhere around Interstate 26, before they piled into Mom’s Ford Explorer and soon the road changed from long and narrow, to wavy, up and down, and her ears started to pop. Some of the trees were still barren from winter, reaching their crooked fingers over the highway. A turn toward the left over a gorge cut through the mountain, and she now realized how high she was. North Carolina’s red, blue, and white flag waved hello, and in no time it was waving goodbye. The mountains grew wild and winding, the clouds were thick and penetrating, moisture built up on the windshield and Dad hit the windshield wiper for the last hour of their descent.
“Welcome to Tennessee.”
The sign was smallish compared to the other states, and Marian wondered if it was serious about its greeting to her family.
“How much longer?” Her ten-year-old brother Herbert whined for the three-hundredth-seventy-second time.
“Almost there, bud,” Mr. Dolor answered.
Marian sighed and slunk into her seat. She was thirteen-years-old, halfway through middle-school, and had made up her mind a long time ago, when she was still a little kid, that her house in Florida was the one she was going to live in forever. And the friends she braided hair with and stayed up laughing all night with were going to be her best friends for life.
But Mom and Dad needed to move, leaving her brother and sister and her without much say in the matter. They knew everyone at Jack London Middle School and in Youth Group, too. They knew where their favorite restaurant was. The best ice-cream. The coolest parks. Now, as Dad turned the steering wheel and Marian spotted the big green sign “Welcome to Happy Valley”, it was anything but familiar, and surely didn’t seem Happy. Oh, sure, the mountains, trees, and rivers were pretty. But it felt like her first time swimming in Tavenier on Molasses Key—darting fish, vibrant coral, gliding sea turtles everywhere, but always in the back of her mind, this haunting feeling that somewhere out there on the perimeter was the elusive shark, never seen, but always felt, waiting to ambush, strike, and kill.
She shook her head and forced a giggle from her lips. She knew she had a terrible knack for letting her thoughts run too far sometimes and always end up in some dark, negative place. Moving here was going to be fun; it had to be. What was she worried about, anyway? Mom and Dad had promised they would invite friends up and visit Florida again soon. There was “opportunity for new adventures”, the way Dad put it. He had taken a new job in Maryville; something with “electricians”, “technicians”, or “superstitions”. And Mom was getting her dream of living near the Smoky Mountains like her family from a century before her.
The Smoky’s. The green was just coming back on them, covering the horizon in long rolling blankets; deep, rich, wild hills and cavernous depths behind puffy, wet clouds. They shouted to the heavens of their mystery and beauty. You could imagine getting lost in them for a lifetime, and somehow, on the other side of all this damp, magnificent beauty, a little town existed. And it was little.
The road pushed upward and Dad slowed the SUV down to a near stop to take the sharp turn back on itself. He hit the gas, and the car revved hard to get up the hill. Trees fell down the hillside and their branches stretched across the road. As far as the eye could see, trees crawled along the horizon; a small shack behind a chain-linked fence sped by; chickens waddled in the yard, uninhibited; under the shadow of a copse, a mansion set far from the road on three acres of pasture; another house sporting a garden with newly transferred tomato plants; three more little mobile homes, one nice and two in disrepair, stacked against one another behind a thicket of short maples and walnut trees; the quaint Happy Valley Missionary Baptist Church sat opposite its cemetery. The road curved downward to the east, and Bell Branch Road came into view. Mr. Dolor turned the Explorer slowly onto the single lane road and meandered down. A dozen houses scattered across ten acres; each with little gardens, pastures, and a large pond and creek running alongside the road. Mr. Dolor stopped the SUV and let an enormous oncoming truck, something between a 4×4 and monster, pass by; a quarter mile further, and he turned into their new home.
The new house was a colonial facing west, with its back to the forest; three-stories of rickety old board and batten, running vertically, painted white and blue, and wrapped by a porch on the north, east, and west. A metal roof pivoted over the attic and formed a pointed top that gave the whole thing the appearance of being an historic tower. A beaten patio was attached to the kitchen on the southern end, with the kind of door that slaps shut but never latches. Overhanging it were the thick and ominous arms of an old tulip poplar; its branches loomed over the yard on the front, side, and back, like a mother hen to her chicks, and reached their fingertips higher than the peak of the attic. The back of their property met the perimeter of the Great Smoky Mountains Forest. The forest line ran northeast by southwest, lined for miles with poplar, hackberry, walnut, elm, ash, sassafras, oaks and maples. About ten feet deep into the tree-line, was a wild dressing of honeysuckle, rhododendron, and trumpet vine that ran up and over a high brick wall; it gathered together like a ten-foot wave of green and brown lattice with dark green dots that later they found to be the buds of the rhododendron flowers.
The inside of the house was obscure and bizarre; like most century homes that have alterations and additions. Rooms upon rooms, scattered nonsensically, throughout and up two flights of stairs.
Of the Dolor children, Marian was the oldest. She inherited her father’s height, standing one and half feet taller than each of her siblings. Esther was eleven-years-old; she hated that she stood only half an inch over her younger brother, so she always put her hair in pig-tails to put him in his place. Both girls unpacked their things in their new bedroom with quick and fervent effort, filling it with nostalgic toys, trinkets, enough stuffed animals to cover two bunk beds, clothes upon clothes upon clothes, pink and white-laced curtains, and their old karaoke machine. On their dresser, a fish named Sparkles swam in a white and teal cubed-fish tank, and a leopard gecko named Lemon slept under a rock in a terrarium.
Above them, Herbert unpacked in his converted-attic bedroom. Herbert was the kind of ten-year-old boy who is tough, ornery, and wild when at home, but sweet, gentle, and shy when out and about or alone with his mother. He put his things into the strange pyramid shaped bedroom, lit by two opposite windows, split by French-cut beams, onlooking the front and back yards; the empty road was out the west side, and the giant tulip poplar obscured the view out the east end. Wedging a lollipop between his cheek and jawbone, Herbert pondered where best to put his dinosaur collection. The setting sun glimmered through the window, glanced off his round glasses, and drew his attention to the east window. Climbing on top of an unopened box and looking through the spindly branches and thousand shaking leaves of the poplar, he stared at the row of trees lining the enormous forest. Black walnut, maples, and tree of heaven stuck their brilliant heads through the criss-crossing branches, and the long line of honeysuckle and trumpet vine wrapped over the brick wall. His eyes made out the rough edges of an iron gate protruding from the setback wall covered in the vine lattice.
***
On their first night in the house, the family stayed up late with pizza, popcorn and a movie to make everyone feel happier and relaxed. Eating junk food can make any long, arduous day better. Yet ofttimes staying up late on below average food makes it harder to fall asleep. Happy Valley was quiet, and the sound of silence was deafening. Sirens and train-tracks put the kids to sleep in their hometown, Cocoa, Florida; here the floor-boards and crickets were ten times louder.
Herbert, bothered by the thought of sleeping alone in an old attic, made up an excuse about a loud hooting owl keeping him awake, so he could sleep on the floor of the girls’ bedroom for the first night.
“What are we doing tomorrow, Marian?” Esther whispered through the mattress of the bunk bed.
“Mom says we are going to a new school,” said Marian.“It’s called Carpenters Middle.”
“I don’t want to go to a new school.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve got it easy,” she replied. “Nothing but fractions and basic science. Wait ’til you get to seventh-grade. I’ve got algebra, experiments, and essays.”
“I like math,” Esther whispered sheepishly. “It’s not that…it’s the other kids.”
“I miss our old friends, too,” replied Marian. There was a long pause of silence and chirping insects. “But we might as well get used to it.”
“I like P.E.,” said Herbert. He startled both of the girls, who thought he was fast asleep.
“We know, Herbert,” replied Marian.
“Did you guys see the woods out back?” he asked.
“No—”
“I did!” exclaimed Esther. “They look amazing!”
“I want to go hiking tomorrow.”
“We can climb that tree and make a treehouse!”
“And take all our stuff up in there!”
“And do our homework in it…”
“Ugh!” Esther exclaimed. “We have school.”
“Well, then we will play in it after school!” Herbert shouted.
“Shh!” Marian hushed them, rolling over and peering at Herbert below. “Do you want Mom and Dad to hear us?!”
“We can talk as loud as we want,” Esther said. “They aren’t even on this floor.”
Marian didn’t reply, and Esther knew she was acting asleep in hopes that she would drift off. She best go to bed, anyway. Herbert lay wide awake on the floor, staring at the ceiling, his mind racing in thoughts about the backyard. The forest went on and on and on as far as he could imagine. Nothing could get his mind off seeing that iron gate up close.
***
Waiting for the school bus in the morning was one of Esther’s favorite times of day. For starters, it’s so early in the morning that the cars aren’t really racing about yet; the world is still sleepy, and the sun is only high enough to make it shimmer, but not shine. It’s easy to spot animals like hopping deer and scurrying chipmunks on their way to finding food; and to catch grasshoppers and ladybugs who come out to sip on the dewy grass. What makes it even more exciting is that the longer the bus is late (which it always is), a hope grows that it may never show up, and you get to skip school without it being your fault.
Mid-April in East Tennessee yielded nonsensical weather that one day required a full outfit of coats, caps, gloves, and boots, while the next may be a hot eighty-five degrees outside. On this particular morning, the clouds hovered close to the earth and formed a thick, cold fog up and down the lane. The Dolor children were a few blocks from home at the corner of Bobcat Street and Happy Valley Road. The girls huddled together to stay warm while Herbert counted how many footsteps it took him from one end of the block to the other. Another boy stood across the road waiting, but he refused to speak to them.
“What’s the bus number?” Herbert shouted from the end of the road.
“Herbert, don’t go so far down the street,” said Marian.
“Fifteen-twelve,” Esther answered him.
Herbert turned around in the grass and walked next to the street with his eyes closed. He was counting his steps out loud.
“Whar’d y’all a-come from?” The boy across the street called to them. He had shaggy red hair, an angry duck on his shirt, and a thick dirty accent.
“We just moved from Cocoa.” Marian smiled at him.
“Cocoa? Whar’s that?” Half the boy’s mouth curled up and his eye squinted.
“It’s in Florida,” Marian replied.
“Flahrida? Huh.” The boy turned his gaze down the road nonchalantly. “Mustn’t be a mighty nice town if’n I ain’t aheard it.”
Esther furrowed her brow at him and pitched her cheeks. She loved her hometown. It’s where they grew up, and its name reminded her of hot chocolate on frosty nights by the campfire. She rubbed her hands on her favorite Batgirl tee-shirt and yelled out to Herbert, echoing Marian’s sentiments, “Don’t go so far, Herbert!”
Herbert finished counting and opened his eyes. He was ten steps short.
Marian attempted diplomacy to the strange boy. “I’m Marian,” she said. “And this is my sister Esther, and our little brother Herbert is down the road. What’s your na—”
“Herbie?!” The boy’s eyes grew huge and his mouth opened wide. “What kinda name’s Herbie?”
Herbert heard him from the end of the street. He dropped his eyes and pursed his lips.
“Well, his name is Herbert,” Marian corrected. “And what’s your name?”
“Aarun,” the boy replied, and looked down the road again, disinterested.
Beep!
The Dolor children jumped, turning to see a large black truck aimed at them. Its bright headlights shone in Herbert’s eyes. He was standing in someone’s driveway, and that someone was trying to leave for work. Herbert and his sisters huddled into the grass. Marian looked back at Aaron. He continued staring down the road and seemed to have forgotten they were there.
“What’s our bus number?” Herbert asked again.
“Fifteen-twelve,” Esther repeated.
The smell of leather, rubber, and old cloth filled the Dolor children’s noses. The wheels rolled on the asphalt. The brakes squealed at the next stop. Steam rose from under the hood and a puff of black carbon monoxide exploded from the tailpipe. The accordion door opened. Four more kids entered the bus and found seats. The door shut. A gear thudded, and the bus thrust a step forward, paused, hiccuped, and took off for the next stop. On and on this went, until twenty-five kids were on the bus, waiting to arrive at Carpenters Middle fifteen minutes away, on a straight shot, from the Dolor’s bus stop.
The bus was a cacophony of noises, shouts, squeals, and laughter. Herbert sat, quiet, in the middle of the bus with a seat to himself. The girls sat at the back, making conversation with another young lady named Bethany.
The bus stopped again and let on another group.
“What is that smell?” A shout from the front.
“It smells terrible!” Came another howl.
A high-pitched shriek came from the tantrum. “There’s poop in the aisle!”
In an instant, all the boys and girls were jumping up and looking at the aisle. Fingers pointed. Accusations arose. Fights brewed. Everyone wanted to know where it came from and who had done it.
The bus-driver, Mr. Cunningham, stood up and hollered for silence. Every boy and girl shot into their seats while snickering and whispering. He looked at the aisle and sure enough, the excrement stamp of a shoe made its way down the bus.
“Everyone stay seated,” Mr. Cunningham said. He took a step and looked at the feet of the three kids in Seat One and Two. Nothing there.
He took a step and looked at the four in Seat Three and Four. Nothing.
The snickering and whispering grew in volume, and every boy and girl looked at their partner’s foot, pointing false accusations. Herbert looked at his feet, and to his horror, the brown filth of what once belonged to a dog at the house he waited in front of covered his right sneaker. The blood rushed from his face. He looked up and saw Mr. Cunningham only a few rows from him. He clutched his backpack in his lap, and his heart raced. The horror of his first day rushed down his spine and he melted into a desperate frozen stupor.
Mr. Cunningham stood between Seat Eleven and Twelve. Only one more before Herbert’s. He shifted his left foot and pinned his right between it and the wall of the bus. His eyes stared at the back of the seat in front of him, refusing to even glance at Mr. Cunningham.
Mr. Cunningham stepped forward and looked at his feet. Then he looked at seat Twelve. Then he took a step to Thirteen and Fourteen.
Herbert closed his eyes and exhaled. Mr. Cunningham continued on his way back to the end of the bus. He sighed and scratched his head, hurrying up the aisle and watching his step as he went.
“Who is it?!” A boy’s voice hollered.
The bus kicked into gear. Thrust, stop, hiccup, roll. The boys and girls once again laughed, pointed, and accused.
After a few minutes, the middle school came into sight. The bus veered into the bus loop, and fifteen-twelve parked behind twenty-one-oh-four. Every student stood at their seat like packed hens in a coop, and the accordion door swung open. The line crawled down the aisle while Herbert watched and waited at his seat for his sisters to meet him.
“Esther,” Herbert whispered in her ear as she approached. She looked away from her new friend and smiled at him. “It’s me,” said he. “Esther. I have the poop-shoe.”
Her eyes grew enormous. “Okay,” she whispered. “Stand behind me.”
The chicken line dragged on, and Herbert saw the end. Maybe, if he could get off the bus behind Esther, he could hide his feet in the grass quick enough that no one would notice. He’d have to get behind those bushes and clean his shoes. The thought of Mr. Cunningham’s disapproval, the kids laughing—Oh! It was too much to bear.
“Just stay behind me,” Esther said.
Through the window, Herbert saw a collection of boys gathering on the side of the school. They were waiting and jeering, pointing, mocking, imitating the act of defecating on one another’s shoes.
Esther stepped off the bus. Herbert tried to sneak behind her to the nearby bush. Oh! It was too late!
“It’s Herbie!” The snide voice of Aaron hollered.
Herbert’s eyes shot back and forth in disbelief. He looked down, and saw his foot covered in the excrement, a glistening, hideous, brown stain in the early sunlight; there was no way he would have been able to conceal it. It was everywhere! The group of boys cackled like hyenas and one fell over in the grass as Aaron bounced like a buffoon and mocked, “Herbie! Herbie! Herbie!”
“Herbie stepped in the poop!” they shouted. “Herbie stepped in the poop!”
Tears filled his eyes. Esther shot round to help him, but he was gone. Marian shoved her way down the rest of the bus aisle. She was three months older and two inches taller than Aaron, and didn’t appreciate the way he danced like a lemur at her brother’s expense. Aaron, lost in hysterics, didn’t even notice Marian lumbering toward him at a near gallop, before she squared him up and dropped him to his knees with her fist. Half the laughing group was shocked and taken aback; the other half cackled even louder, encouraging Aaron to strike her back. Scowling and barking, he leapt to his feet to say something ugly.
“Enough!” Mr. Cunningham shouted. “Get to class, all of you!”
Marian was lucky. Not because she didn’t have to fight Aaron—she’d probably do pretty well against him—but because teachers seem to send kids to the Principal’s Office for anything these days and hitting another student would definitely permit it. It would be a terrible thing to start your new school year with a detention or referral.
Esther and Marian looked for Herbert, but never found him. They considered waiting outside the school for him, but a lady with a short black haircut, tight blue skirt, and stern face ordered them to class.
In his absence, Herbert had found a bush to cry inside of, until every student had left the vicinity. He attempted to clean his shoe in the grass and dirt; it didn’t work very well until a lady from the nurse’s office found him. She invited him into the office to clean his shoe in a sink. After which, he went back to his class to meet his new teacher, Mrs. Taylor.
***
The kids expected to see each other at lunchtime, but Carpenters Middle has a strange block scheduling that kept them from one another. This probably hurt little Esther the most on her first day. It didn’t help that Aaron was in her class; even though he was as old as Marian, he was held back for bad behavior a year prior. He hadn’t missed the opportunity to tell almost all of the class about Herbert’s shoe ordeal and pointed out the fact that Esther was the poop-boy’s sister.
Outside the cafeteria, she leaned against its walls, waiting with her class to enter. Pursing her lips and furrowing her brow, she clutched the three dollars and fifty cents Mrs. Dolor had provided her for lunch. A long list of food options, prices, colors, and pictures on the small sign at the end of the line confused her. Why were there so many options? Her little hand began shaking as the line grew shorter and shorter and her inevitable turn approached.
“Excuse me,” Esther’s tender voice whispered to the boy in front of her. He turned and gazed down at her, towering over two and a half feet her height. “Do you know what we should buy for lunch?” She asked.
The boy’s left eye squinted, and his lip jerked up in a crooked smile. He gawked and looked at his friend. They chuckled together. Esther didn’t understand the joke.
“Whatever you want.” The boy shrugged and turned away, laughing at nothing apparent.
She looked down and clutched her money tighter. Behind her, three girlfriends chatted loudly; she faced them, hoping to be invited into the conversation; one’s eye caught Esther, and the group acknowledged; the closest to her studied Esther’s Batgirl tee that read: “I’m a Superhero!”, and then slowly drew her eyes back to Esther’s. Esther smiled to greet them.
“You’re not cool,” the girl said icily. The others burst into laughter, and the first turned to continue the conversation short of Esther.
Esther clenched her jaw and her eyes glazed over, ready to cry; but she couldn’t let anyone see. Her eyelids fluttered, her lips sunk between her teeth, and she looked away to the ceiling. Where was she? Why would her parents send her to a place like this? She wanted to be with her friends so badly; she longed for the halls of Jack London Middle School. She missed knowing what was for lunch and being able to pronounce her teacher’s name without looking like a fool. In that moment, she wanted nothing more than to curl up and die.
***
On the bus ride home, the Dolor children sat crammed together in one bus seat near the front. An unspoken pact had been formed, and they were to never split up again. Dad had said, “everything was going to be alright.” But he clearly had not known about this place.
Herbert never spoke a word to anyone in his class. A few of the faces he had recognized from that morning’s bus ride, and he saw the side glances and giggles from across the room. He would never look Mr. Cunningham in the eyes again.
No matter how hard Esther tried, she couldn’t push the cutting words out of her head. She was “not cool”; her heart swelled in pain like the time a yellow jacket ran up her leg and stung her a dozen times; Mr. Dolor had to tie up her leg with iodine and a tourniquet; she wondered what kind of medicine could mend her broken heart.
Marian was miserable, too. In Mr. Oulette’s class, she had made a fool of herself when she didn’t know the name of an ocean. The class didn’t laugh out loud, but she heard snide remarks and felt everyone staring at the back of her head all day.
Their new school was a nightmare. Things needed to change fast for the Dolor children.
Keith G. Alderman 