Sharon Creech - Walk Two Moons

The next thing I knew, Mr. Birkway was saying, “Right, Phoebe? Are you awake? You have the second report.”

“Report?” Phoebe said.

Mr. Birkway clutched his heart. “Ben is doing an oral report on Prometheus this Friday. You’re doing one on Pandora next Monday.”

“Lucky me,” Phoebe muttered.

Mr. Birkway asked me to stay after class for a minute. Phoebe sent me warning messages with her eyebrows. As everyone else was leaving the room, Phoebe said, “I’ll stay with you if you want.”

“Why?”

“Because of him hacking up Mr. Cadaver, that’s what. I don’t think you should be alone with him.”

He did not hack me up. Instead, he gave me a special assignment, a “mini journal.” “I don’t know what that is,” I said. Phoebe was breathing on my shoulder. Mr. Birkway said I should write about something that interested me. “Like what?” I said.

“Oh, a place, a room, a person—don’t worry about it too much. Just write whatever comes to mind.”

Phoebe and I walked home with Mary Lou and Ben. My brain was a mess, what with trying not to flinch whenever Ben brushed against me. When we left Ben and Mary Lou and turned the corner onto Phoebe’s street, I wasn’t paying much attention. I suppose I was aware that someone was coming along the sidewalk in our direction, but it wasn’t until the person was about three feet away that I really took notice.

It was Phoebe’s lunatic, coming toward us, staring right at us. He stopped directly in front of us, blocking our way.

“Phoebe Winterbottom, right?” he said to Phoebe.

Her voice was a little squeak. The only sound that came out was a tiny “Erp—”

“What’s the matter?” he said. He slid one hand into his pocket.

Phoebe pushed him, yanked my arm, and started running. “Oh-my-god!” she said. “Oh-my-god!”

I was grateful that we were nearly at Phoebe’s house, so if he stabbed us in broad daylight, maybe one of her neighbors would discover our bodies and take us to the hospital before we bled entirely to death. I was beginning to believe he was a lunatic.

Phoebe tugged at her doorknob, but the door was locked. Phoebe beat on the door, and her mother suddenly pulled it open. She looked rather pale and shaken herself.

“It was locked!” Phoebe said. “Why was the door locked?”

“Oh sweetie,” Mrs. Winterbottom said. “It’s just that—I thought that—” She peered around us and looked up and down the street. “Did you see someone—did someone frighten you—”

“It was the lunatic,” Phoebe said. “We saw him just now.” She could hardly catch her breath. “Maybe we should call the police—or tell Dad.”

I took a good long look at Phoebe’s mother. She did not seem capable of phoning the police or Mr. Winterbottom. I think she was more scared than we were. She went around locking all the doors.

Nothing more happened that evening, and by the time I went home, the lunatic did not seem quite so threatening. No one called the police, and to my knowledge, Mrs. Winterbottom had not yet told Mr. Winterbottom, but right before I left Phoebe’s house, Phoebe said to me, “If I see the lunatic once more, I’ll phone the police myself.”

That night I tried to write the mini journal for Mr. Birkway. First I made a list of all the things I liked, and they were all things from Bybanks—the trees, the cows, the chickens, the pigs, the fields, the swimming hole. It was a complete jumble of things, and when I tried to write about any one of those things, I ended up writing about my mother, because everything was connected to her. At last, I wrote about the blackberry kiss.

One morning when I awoke very early, I saw my mother walking up the hill to the barn. Mist hung about the ground, finches were singing in the oak tree beside the house, and there was my mother, her pregnant belly sticking out in front of her. She was strolling up the hill, swinging her arms and singing:

As she approached the corner of the barn where the sugar maple stands, she plucked a few blackberries from a stray bush and popped them into her mouth. She looked all around her—back at the house, across the fields, and up into the canopy of branches overhead. She took several quick steps up to the trunk of the maple, threw her arms around it, and kissed that tree soundly.

Later that day, I examined this tree trunk. I tried to wrap my arms about it, but the trunk was much bigger than it had seemed from my window. I looked up at where her mouth must have touched the trunk. I probably imagined this, but I thought I could detect a small dark stain, as from a blackberry kiss.

I put my ear against the trunk and listened. I faced that tree squarely and kissed it firmly. To this day, I can smell the smell of the bark—a sweet, woody smell—and feel the ridges in the bark, and taste that distinctive taste on my lips.

In my mini journal, I confessed that I had since kissed all different kinds of trees, and each family of trees—oaks, maples, elms, birches—had a special flavor all its own. Mixed in with each tree’s own taste was the slight taste of blackberries, and why this was so, I could not explain.

The next day, I turned in this story to Mr. Birkway. He didn’t read it or even look at it, but he said, “Marvelous! Brilliant!” as he slipped it into his briefcase. “I’ll put it with the other journals.”

Phoebe said, “Did you write about me?”

Ben said, “Did you write about me?”

Mr. Birkway bounded around the room as if the opportunity to teach us was his notion of paradise. He read a poem by e. e. cummings titled “the little horse is newlY” and the reason why the only capital letter in the title is the Y at the end of newlY is because Mr. Cummings liked to do it that way.

“He probably never took English,” Phoebe said.

To me that Y looked like the newly born horse standing up on his thin legs.

The poem was about a newlY born horse who doesn’t know anything but feels everything. He lives in a “smoothbeautifully folded” world. I liked that. I was not sure what it was, but I liked it. Everything sounded soft and safe.

That day, Phoebe left school early for a dentist appointment. I started walking home alone, but Ben joined me. I was completely unprepared for what happened on the way home, and for what would happen later. Ben and I were simply walking along and he said, “Did anyone ever read your palm?”

“No.”

“I know how to do it,” he said. “Want me to read yours?” He took my hand and stared at it for the longest time. His own hand was soft and warm. Mine was sweating like crazy. He was saying, “Hm” and tracing the lines of my palm with his finger. It gave me the shivers, but not in an entirely unpleasant way. The sun was beating down on us, and I thought it might be nice to stay there forever with him just running his finger along my palm like that. I thought about the newlY born horse who knows nothing and feels everything. I thought about the smoothbeautifully folded world. Finally, Ben said, “Do you want the good news first or the bad news?”

“The bad news. It isn’t real bad, is it?”

He coughed. “The bad news is that I can’t really read palms.” (I snatched my hand away.) “Don’t you want to know the good news?” he asked. (I started walking.) “The good news is that you let me hold your hand for almost five minutes and you didn’t flinch once.”

I didn’t know what to make of him. He walked me all the way to my house, even though I refused to speak to him. He waited on the porch until I was ready to go to Phoebe’s, and then he walked me to her house.