When I was ten I had to go live with my Papaw out near Splinter Hill Bog. Nobody asked me; I just got taken. My mother had been sick and then she married that rat Jake and he didn’t want me around. I didn’t want to be around him, neither. Sorry bastard. I wasn’t sure about Papaw, I hadn’t seen him for a long time, but I figured he couldn’t be worse. I put my clothes and things in a bag and we left Mobile and drove across the Causeway and way up into the country and soon was on soft red dirt roads that had us sliding around like grease in a hot skillet. No seat belts. We were just fine without ‘em, too. Things were different back then; we didn’t expect the government to tell us when to breathe and when it was safe to change our britches. Every now and then we’d pass a burned field or a blackened stand of loblolly pines, but I didn’t think twice about it. I didn’t know nothing about woodsburning yet.

I remember pulling up to Papaw’s, how dark it was, hardly a moon at all, and the dogs going crazy barking. Then we heard him yelling at them to be quiet and saw a light. Ma told him I had to stay with him awhile. He didn’t seem mad but he didn’t seem happy about it, neither. He raised his lamp and looked at me a minute and said, “That’s her, huh? Well, come on.” I slept inside that night on a pallet up on some old crates. That turned out to be my uncle Jet’s bed. He was off in the Army. It was so hot that night it was sickening. Pretty soon, though, Papaw fixed up the screen porch and from then on I slept outside in hot weather and that was much better.

Papaw’s house was called a dogtrot house. You don’t never see them anymore. It was raised up off the ground and had an open passageway between its two halves. In one side was a wood stove we didn’t light till it got cold. One of my sons took me to look for Papaw’s house not long ago but we couldn’t find it; it’s probably melted right back into the ground by now. We found some of them old pitcher plant bogs, though. Anyway, back then Papaw had a big garden and a barn that leaned all over and some sheds and things. There was a water pump out back and also a big barrel for catching rain water for washing and such. The woods started just past the garden. It had to be fenced, or the deer would get in and eat all our greens and everything else. Deer are pesky varmints. Don’t tell me about that Bambi. That was one thing we did all the time, fix the fence. Of course I didn’t know all this the night I got there.

I woke up that first morning and went out and there was Papaw, already working, mending a busted handle on a shovel. The woods all around the house were pale with fog and looked like they went on forever. It was already hot, of course. In summer it’s always hot, day and night. “Coffee’s over there,” he said. In summer he cooked outside on a stone and brick firepit he’d made. It had a grate and sat under a roof that stuck out from the shed. He kept the fire going all the time; it only went out twice when I was there because it rained real bad. At night he’d bank down the coals.

I sat on the porch steps near Papaw with my black coffee, which I had never drunk before and didn’t like but drank anyway, and a chunk of cornbread. The dogs were slinking around near me, not growling but not happy, so I gave them little bites. I figured I ought to make friends. I didn’t want them taking my leg off.

Papaw was tall and thin, with bright greeny-blue eyes and freckly skin wrinkled all over, like paper that’s been scrunched up and smoothed flat. His arms and neck and face were burned brown but under his shirt the rest of his skin was white. He always wore bib overalls. His sandy red hair was turning white. He must have been younger than I am now, but he sure seemed like Moses to me then. He said, “Leonie, the refrigerator truck’s coming to Perdido crossroads today. We’re gonna go get some pitchers for it.” I didn’t know what he meant but I was too shy to ask. He sent me inside to get a pair of boots, big brown ugly things, a man’s, but later I was glad to have them. I helped him put five big tin washtubs in the bed of his blue pickup. Three of the dogs jumped in the back and durned if they didn’t get right in the tubs, just as happy, looking around like they were thinking, Ain’t we some fine dogs! At first I thought maybe we put the tubs there for them to sit in.

We drove till the sandy red road petered out and then we stopped and Papaw told me to put my boots on. We walked a little ways through thick woods, the dogs playing all around us, and went over a little hill and then suddenly the rough undergrowth was gone and before us was an open spread of gentle hills and low places, all dotted here and there with longleaf pine trees. Their trunks went straight up, like arrows, and then at the top was a burst of bristly green pine needles on crooked branches that curved out and down and back up again, like arms held wide to the sky.

The fog had burned off already and the sky was a pure, steady blue. Papaw pointed at the bushes growing along the ground and I looked closer and suddenly saw hundreds and hundreds of horns like white trumpets curving up out of the earth. It seemed like I should hear a sound coming out of those horns. I didn’t know if it would be voices crying from down below or clear white notes like prayers.

“Watch out for snakes,” Papaw said, and I felt ordinary again. Turned out the white horns were the pitcher plants we’d come for. We walked out into the field and the ground was pure muck, wet and slimy, and I seen why I needed the boots. It’s a bog; it ain’t never dry. It’ll suck your shoes right off your feet if you ain’t careful. Papaw showed me how to cut the plants: first, measure with my arm and make sure they was tall enough, and then make a clean cut as very low down as I could. He gave me a sharp knife and watched me do it twice and left me to work, no fussing about whether or not I was old enough or careful enough to have a knife, and I was fine and did not cut myself, no sir. We would cut plants until we had a big bundle and then we would take our bundles back to the truck. Until they got too crowded up, the pitcher plants would fan out loose in a pretty circle when we set them into the tubs.

Pitcher plants turned out to be strange creatures. They were hollow tubes filled with water and had a flap part that leaned over the tube’s mouth like a fancy little umbrella. They weren’t pure white, after all, but white with tiny dark red veins running all through them, like they had blood, and a red ruffled edge around the tube’s mouth. After awhile I noticed that my hands were stinking and I asked Papaw why. “Cut one of them open,” he said, so I sliced one down its side and pulled it apart. It was full of bugs, whole bugs near the top and mushed up bug guts further down. Those white horns were eating bugs, working them just like we do our food in our tummies. I guess the bugs try to get a drink of water and fall in. I never knew plants could eat bugs before.

We worked and worked, cutting armloads and going back and forth until our tin tubs were full. Sweat was pouring off me and Papaw. Then we heard some fierce barking and went to see what our dogs was upset about. Another truck had pulled up near Papaw’s, and a woman and two men were standing there. They had tubs with them, too, but theirs were empty. Papaw nodded to them but when he looked at me he was cross. He said “Let’s get.”

In the truck I said, “Were they gonna take our plants?”

“Not with the dogs there.” He shook his head. “I thought everybody else had forgot this part of the bog. But we got enough for now.” And we had, too. I don’t know if we could have squeezed any more pitchers into our tubs.

I untied those big muddy boots and let my feet loose. Heavenly! Papaw laughed at how happy I was. We drove all the way out to the paved road and down to the Perdido crossroads, where there was a church and some stores and houses. A big truck was parked near the buildings. Around behind was a bench and a water pump where we cleaned out our pitcher plants. That was a nasty job. You take them out of their tub and fill it with water and dip them in head first until the bug guts come out. Pretty soon I didn’t like putting my hands in there, but Papaw just kept working. We’d finish a batch and dump out the dirty water and put the cleaned pitchers back in right side up with a little clean water in the bottom for them to drink.

We worked right out in the sun and it was so hot it was making me slow and stupid, like I was sick. Finally I just put my head under the pump and let the water run over me. Papaw felt sorry for me and let me go lay down in the shade with the dogs and I fell asleep, even tireder than I was hot. Then voices woke me: Papaw was talking to two men who’d come out the back door of the building, a fat man in shirt-sleeves, red suspenders holding up his pants, and a thin young man in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was wearing a tie, too, pulled loose. We hardly ever saw anybody dressed like that in real life. Mostly only in movies. Nobody had T.V. yet.

The man in suspenders was saying “I knew I could count on you, Lycurgus” to Papaw. Lycurgus was Papaw’s name. I never knew why his folks named him that. “I got to leave tonight with a full load. You gonna get me another batch?”

“They’s other people out there today,” said Papaw.

“You do a better job than most. You don’t tear ‘em, you cut ‘em clean.”

“I got to see to the young’un,” said Papaw, waving toward me. The thin man in the white shirt and tie met my eyes and we looked hard at each other for just a second and then he blinked and looked away. It was like a door shutting, bang. I knew he’d judged I wasn’t worth thinking about. I found his name out later: Trey Hennessy. He still lives around here. Now he’s an old, old man. I saw him just once since I come back to these parts, driving through town in his big gray Cadillac. I could just see his bald head peeking over the steering wheel. He looked like a mean old snapping turtle in a shell too big for him. I was standing in front of the Food Tiger with my grocery bags, waiting for my daughters. He never looked over at me. He wouldn’t know me from Adam, anyhow. If I spoke to him he’d just stare at me: How come a scraggly old thing like you is talking to a rich old turtle like me?

“Well, who’s that?” said the man in red suspenders.

“Granddaughter.”

“I thought you was too mean to have any kin.”

“Meanness don’t have nothing to do with it,” said Papaw. But he was just joking.

“Mr. Parker,” said the man in the tie, Trey Hennessy, though I didn’t know his name yet. “Where were you gathering those pretty flowers today?”

“Over to Splinter Hill,” said Papaw.

“Don’t that land belong to the timber company?” Hennessy said.

“We didn’t hurt nothing,” said Papaw.

“No? Is that a fact? That’s something I want to ask you about,” said Mr. Hennessy. “You know anything about the woodsburning out there last winter?”

Papaw picked up a busted pitcher plant he’d left on the bench. It flopped right over. “These ain’t the flowers,” he said. “These are the leaves. The flowers look like pinwheels. Red mostly, with some yellow.”

“Arright now,” said the fat man in suspenders. “Florists can’t get them pitcher plants nowhere else. There’s a good market for ‘em. They go all over the world.”

“Can’t be burning down woods that belong to other people so some lady can have pretty flowers in her house,” said Mr. Hennessy. “That is arson.”

“We use them to catch flies,” said Papaw.

“I’ll be talking to you, sir,” Mr. Hennessy said to Papaw, and he went back inside the building. Papaw and the man in suspenders looked at each other.

“He’s working for them,” said the man.

“I reckon,” said Papaw.

I didn’t know it yet, but Papaw did burn the woods. He always done it. He didn’t see that it was bad. To him, it was just what you had to do to make the woods do right. He didn’t think about things the way the timber companies did. And he didn’t like them telling him what to do, neither.

The man in suspenders opened up the back of the big truck and we put the plants in. I climbed up to help. It was dark and lovely cold inside that truck. If I’d known, I’d of taken my nap back there. The man gave Papaw some money and he folded it up and put in his overalls. The dogs jumped in the back of our blue pickup and got back in the tubs, now that the plants were gone, and we drove away.

“Where do our pitcher plants go?” I asked.

“Florists use them, put them with roses and such for people to have in their houses,” said Papaw. “They ship them all over. Even as far as New York and Europe.”

“No lie?” I said. I knew Papaw had been to France in a war but I didn’t know anybody else that had been as far as those plants. I never went that far, neither. I wish I had. But maybe I’d get over there and think it wasn’t such a big deal. Paris, ho-hum.

When we got back to Papaw’s he said, “Go get cleaned up. We’re going to town.” It turned out that in summer we used that big barrel of rain water to clean off. You stood on a platform outside, behind a wooden wall, and pulled a rope to let a little at a time run over your head. I found ticks on my legs when I was undressing and started hollering and Papaw got them off me with a match. He didn’t say nothing but I think he thought it was funny.

We drove into Atmore and went to the hardware store and Papaw bought a big roll of wire screen. Then we went to the drugstore and sat at a little iron table with a marble top and got ice cream and it was the best thing I’d ever had. I can still feel that cold sweetness sliding so smooth down my throat. Then I thought we were done, but he took me to see a movie. That was lovely, too. In the movie Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney dressed up in costumes and sang songs and such. They was trying to earn money for some friend of theirs. Some rich people in the movie lived in a fancy house and had big bunches of flowers around and I looked real close but I couldn’t tell if they had any pitcher plants mixed in there. Papaw said he didn’t see any either. And on the way home Papaw said that I was a good worker and had been a help to him and I liked that, because I knew it was true.

We did a lot of interesting things that year I lived with Papaw. I helped him put that new wire screen on a big square part of the porch and we moved the beds there and slept outside as long as it was hot. Then it started getting cold and we moved back inside. When it got really cold we slept near the big stove. One day in winter Papaw and some of the men that lived around there went out and caught one of his hogs that lived in the woods and butchered it. That big ugly hog cried out like a scared baby. They hung it up in the yard upside down and its blood came all out on the ground. Nowadays you wouldn’t even know meat come from an animal. I ain’t never stopped eating meat, but I ain’t never forgot what it is, neither. Anyway, that was kind of terrible, but it was also interesting.

A couple of times I helped Papaw with woodsburning. He always did it with other men. We had to burn because if we didn’t all the wrong things would grow. That was what happened on timber company land; they let the rough grow just all anyhow and it made the woods useless. And, said Papaw, when the rough finally does catch fire it’ll burn like regular hell. It might even burn up the longleaf pines; might get so hot it jumps all the way up those smooth straight trunks to their tops. The rough wasn’t worth nothing and hid snakes and bears and other varmints. Without burning, the hogs couldn’t eat. You couldn’t walk in the woods. It was too hard to hunt. We even had to burn the pitcher plant bog. I was worried at first cause I thought the burning would kill all those white trumpets, but Papaw said no, without fire every three years or so they don’t get enough light and space and they won’t grow.

So I helped burn, me and the other kids around there. It was scary and dirty but I liked doing it once I got the hang of it. Our job was to watch the fireline and put out any little sparks that hopped across, heading the wrong direction. We called ‘em jumpers. We’d bring a bunch of wetted flour sacks and burlap bags and go up and down and beat out the little jumpers. It wasn’t smart work, just hard, but I liked it. Papaw and the other men figured out when it was a good day to burn; it had to be cold and the wind light and going a certain way. They’d burn toward a road or a firebreak, or rain would put the fire out after awhile. It was interesting to see the red and yellow flames licking along the ground, licking up the rough, sometimes bursting up to eat up a bush or a scrub tree, making gray smoke that drifted in the air. Papaw knew all about it from his pap; he said they had all learned woodsburning a long time ago, that it used to be everybody knew how to burn and that even the Indians did it before they got moved away. When we was done the hills were all black and strange, with the smell of burned bushes and pine straw in the air and smoke wisping around the blackened trunks of the long leaf pines.

My mother only came to see me twice that year. Papaw’s was a long way from Mobile. Her second visit was in spring, a few weeks after we burned the pitcher plant bog. I could see she felt bad about sending me off to Papaw like she didn’t want me no more and it worried her that I wasn’t going to school, but she was pregnant again and she didn’t ask me if I wanted to come home. She had brought a dress for me but it was too small and when I tried it on it didn’t fit and she started to cry. “I didn’t know you were so tall,” she said. But I didn’t cry or nothing. I wasn’t never a crybaby. I did go out in the woods after she left and walk a long ways. The burned bog was already creeping over with a shimmer of green.

When I came back Papaw said, “Your ma is right. You should be in school.”

“If she don’t care why should you?”

“It ain’t that she don’t care,” he said. “Things push her along. You’re already tougher than she is, Leonie.”

“I don’t want to go to school!”

“You can’t always run the woods like a little fox. Soon you’ll be a young lady.”

That gave me a shiver. I thought fast. “Well, it’s already spring. There’s no sense in putting me in for just the last few weeks of school.”

“I reckon not,” he said. I felt better, but I had a bad feeling school was in my future again. I told him I’d seen the bog already getting green and he looked interested and we went to visit it. Soon we started seeing the new pitcher plant flowers, stiff red double stars that did look a lot like pinwheels, just like he’d told Mr. Hennessy that time. There were lots of flowers; some were tiny shy things that hid away, ironweed and silkgrass, and milkwort like tiny purple or yellow bottle brushes, and some were bright look-at-me flowers like yellow honeycomb head. I liked the tiny cream-colored lilies with peachy middles that grew bunched up on tall stalks. I’d cut those -- Papaw had given me my own knife to carry all the time-- and bring them home and put them around. He never said nothing about it but I know he liked it when I did that. I still thought pitcher plants looked beautiful, crying out of the ground like they did, but I never wanted to bring them home because I knew that they were really like animals, eating bugs, full of rotting stuff; they were not pretty and tame and simple like the lilies. People in France and New York who put them in vases didn’t understand them.

Early one morning I heard the dogs going crazy and Papaw putting them up and I came outside and saw a man in a sheriff’s uniform talking to Papaw. Leaning on the side of the brown sheriff’s car was that Mr. Hennessy, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing regular clothes this time, a flannel shirt and jeans.

“Heard you been burning other folks’ land again this winter, Lycurgus,” said the sheriff.

“Naw,” said Papaw, which was a lie, sure enough, but I wasn’t going to say nothing. The dogs were whining and growling inside.

Mr. Hennessy threw down his cigarette butt and ground it out. “We’re fixing to get serious with you people,” he said all loud, like he wanted to be scary. “This is your warning. Things are gonna change around here.”

“Are they?” said Papaw.

“I think this here house may be on timber company land,” he said. “When did you build it?”

“I been here more’n thirty years,” Papaw said. There was a note in his voice I had never heard before. It took me a minute to know it. He was worried. That made me feel worried, too.

“Yeah? How much you pay?”

Papaw didn’t say nothing. He didn’t build the house; he’d found it and fixed it up. It was a good place cause there was clean water. He’d told me the story. The owners had told him he could live there as long as he wanted, it was waste land, abandoned -- but that was a long time ago. Maybe they’d sold it, or their children had sold it, and nobody told him. Him and Meemaw lived there and raised their kids until she died of diphtheria, her and my aunt Sukey. They both died in one day. That was all before I was born.

We started hearing trucks going through the woods after that, and a couple of times we saw surveyors out measuring the land. That made me mad, but Papaw said they was just doing their job. Then one time we heard shooting and thought it was somebody hunting, but it turned out there were timber company men out shooting people’s hogs, Papaw’s too. Nobody ever did that before. And then one day we came back from town and there was a big eviction sign on our door. They were not brave enough to do it while we were home.

Papaw said, “Gather your things, Leonie.”

I didn’t want to go, but he said I had to. He said, “You are only a child. This isn’t safe no more.”

“What are you fixing to do?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said -- but he did know, and so did I.

He drove me back to my mother’s house that afternoon. She did not seem too glad to see me. She had had the baby, a fat girl with black hair. Papaw drove away in his rusty truck. I couldn’t believe my woods life was over, just like that. I felt like squalling as loud as that nasty baby. I didn’t want to be back in town, back with all these ugly people who didn’t want me, hemmed in by all these ugly houses.

The next day was real hot, no clouds in the sky, with a hard gusty wind that kept switching around from north to west and back again. Bad weather for a good fire. Good weather for a bad fire. In the afternoon we could see black smoke to the northeast, up near Splinter Hill Bog, and I knew he’d done it, him and the other people that lived out there. All that rough the timber company had let grow in made their woods burn hotter than hellfire.

I never got to live like that again. When I think about it now it’s hard to believe that year really happened. All around us people were listening to radios and riding on airplanes and there we were, as old-timey as could be. And then wham, it was over. I wasn’t never a crybaby, but sometimes late at night I would be lonely and worried about my papaw and it would get to me. I admit it. Ma told me that he went back to his house after the big fire and waited on the front porch for the sheriff to come get him. I expect he was sitting there mending something. After he got out of jail he went to live with my Aunt Billie over to Dothan. I don’t know what happened to our dogs. They were good dogs, too.

For awhile I thought nothing nice was ever gonna happen to me again. Being back with Ma meant I had to live with Jake. She must have been truly desperate to marry such a worthless man. And she made me go Leinkauf Elementary. I just thought it would kill me. But then one day my teacher sat down next to me and looked me in the face. She smoothed my hair. She was white as milk, like she never been outside in her life, and smelled like mint. Miss Pearl. She said, “Leonie, you are a smart girl, and I am going to teach you how to read before you leave my class.” She promised, and I believed her, and it happened. I feel bad now that I never thanked her right. I wonder if her children know how good she was. Anyway, after that I wrote my papaw a letter. He never wrote me back, but I don’t know if he could write anyway. And I know he liked me. I hope he got it. In my letter I told him I missed him. I only saw him once more, a long time later. I was already married. He was real old and deaf. I think he knew me, though.

Sometimes I look down at my feet and I think, you ugly old things, did you ever really belong to that child I remember being? Did you ever run wild in the sand hills? Did you ever have a papaw like that? That time me and my middle son went looking for Papaw’s house it seemed like the whole woods was choked over with rough and scrubby little loblolly pines; that’s about all the timber companies like to grow. But we walked a long ways through the trees and over a little hill, and then suddenly there was an open space before us and I saw again the tall longleaf pines with their reaching arms and at their feet the pitcher plants like the stretched throats of the dead, like white horns calling out of the ground.