most afternoons from spring 'til almost winter. Her rocking chair didn’t creak, but her humming, like a million bees, carried across our quiet valley at the bottom of the baby mountains at the end of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Rumor came down from older to us younger kids that Mrs. Parsons spent her days cooking up poison that she put out at night for the neighbor’s cats and dogs. Mrs. Parsons hated cats and dogs -- we knew -- she didn't have any. Everybody else in the valley had one or more mutts lounging beside their front and back doors, snapping flies, moving when the shade moved. The cats lazied on top of any surface flat enough to hold them, tails snaking to some internal metronome.
In regard to Mrs. Parsons, every now and then my friends and I would spy white powder on the gray stone foundation of her house. It had to be poison.
The only visitors she ever had were scary to us kids. There were two of them. Glancing back I know, now, we lived in our imaginations and total fear.
Tim Moulton wore a shapeless hat with a white chicken feather in its brim. He carried a faded flour sack over his shoulder filled with junk he picked up any and everywhere. Suzy Owens dressed in layers before layering became fashionable, except her layers didn't blend or match.
Tim and Suzy never visited Mrs. Parsons at the same time that I could tell. Mrs. Parsons' house was on a hill up the road and across from our house. The houses of my three best friends were scattered among the trees nearby and we could all see her house. We planned that if anyone ever came to visit her, except the postman and the meter reader, Alvin Smith was to whistle to let us know. We didn’t want her poisoning real people.
The Saturday it happened Alvin was sitting in his tree house when Tim Moulton and Suzy Owens came from different directions out of the woods on the North edge of town, the part that opened to the highway. When Alvin saw what he had never seen before, two people coming toward Mrs. Parsons' house, he whistled two times. I went to my special spot at the window of the spare bedroom on our second floor. Junebug and his brother, Ward, climbed up their chinaberry tree.
It took Tim and Suzy about ten minutes to get to Mrs. Parsons' house after Alvin first saw them. They were both sort of old and walked slowly.
Last September, when we were playing in the cemetery -- reading dates on old tombstones, poking sticks into caved-in
graves, and Junebug stuck his foot in one and we had to pull him out -- we saw Suzy Owens talking to a grave. And everybody had seen Tim behind the BonTon café picking scraps.
My dad said, "Sergeant Moulton gets a check every month, and he lives in the house his mother and father left him; he doesn't need to dig in garbage."
Tim didn't talk to himself the way Suzy did. He always had a look on his face as if he carried a secret he could hear all by himself.
Mrs. Parsons came out on her front porch, just as Tim and Suzy got there. I could have sworn she knew they were coming, and I knew that Suzy didn’t have a telephone. Maybe Tim did, but I couldn’t think of anyone who would want to call him.
I climbed out of the window to the porch roof, slid down the drainpipe and ran to Alvin's tree house. Junebug and Ward, out of breath, came to a stop the same time I did. We pulled up to the tree house by the knotted rope. Even in winter vines and branches kept the house hidden. We could have been in another world, high up there.
Junebug, whose real name was Aloysius -- but with a name like Aloysius Junebug was an improvement -- said, "I know they're making a magic potion to kill me.”
"What did you do now?" Alvin asked. Asking Junebug "now" was just fine. Junebug subscribed to magicians' magazines.
"I put a fake rat in ol' Suzy's mailbox day before yesterday," Junebug said.
"And last week," Alvin whispered, "I bet they knew it was us rattling that piece of tin roof outside the school board meeting."
"Heck, nobody saw us. All the grownups were in the meeting," said Ward, who was Junebug's younger brother by eighteen months.
"Mrs. Parsons, Tim and Suzy don't go to school board meetings," I reminded them.
We flopped down on the boards that Alvin and his father had laid to make the floor of the tree house. Nobody said a word for a while. I stared through the space between two boards down to the rubbed clean spot at the foot of the tree. When we jumped to the ground we always landed on that spot. After a rain the worn place was slippery. That day it was plain dry, red dirt. I felt we were all going to soon be as dead dry as that dirt.
Alvin sat up. "We have to stop them before they hurt us," he said. "We got to put a spell on them, first."
"You've been reading too many ghost stories. We don't know how to make any old spell," Junebug said. Despite his nickname, you know, "crazy as a June bug," he was smart.
Ward asked, "How do we know they are going to do anything to us?"
We hardly ever paid Ward any attention. He was the youngest.
I didn't want to brag, but I wasn’t in on the tin rattling. I was home that evening with a sore throat. My lack of guilt did not go beyond the past week. Up to then I'd done my share of devilment.
Ward stood up, as much as he could in the tree house. "They’re coming outside," he said. "What are we going to do?" He began to cry. Ward was almost eight. He still cried sometimes. Alvin was nearly eleven. Junebug and I were nine and a-half, two months apart. We hardly cried anymore.
Peeking through the heavy summer leaves we held our breaths and stayed as quiet as we could.
"Oh, Lord," I whispered. "They're coming back here."
"Back where?" Alvin asked, his voice like he was three years old instead of nine and three-quarters.
"Here -- to your backyard, dummy." I needed to go to the bathroom.
Ward started to say his prayers. He'd gotten to "God bless Mama and Daddy" when a woman’s voice called, "All right, you boys and Alice, come down here." It was Mrs. Parsons. I’d never heard her say a word before -- I always crossed the street if she was rocking on her porch, or I took the long way around back.
"You go first, you're a girl," Junebug whispered. "They won't hurt you."
Whether because I was a girl, or because I was the bravest -- or somebody pushed me -- I slid part way down the tree trunk then dropped to the smooth, dry, red spot.
Mrs. Parsons didn't look as scary as she did sitting in her rocker on her front porch. She was a small woman with soft, brown eyes. Somebody felt close beside my right side. Suzy Owens smelled like the mothballs in my mother's blanket chest. Tim Moulton didn't look like a monster close up, either. His hat was just funny, an army cap with lots of little medals stuck on it.
"What do you want with us?" I managed to get out.
"We want to talk, that's all," Mrs. Parsons said. "Come down all of you. We won't eat you."
Ward began to sob loudly. To my surprise our three visitors began to laugh louder than Ward's crying. Not like witches or werewolves, but regular people.
Next thing I knew Alvin, Junebug, Ward and I were standing under the tree, our mouths and eyes wide, looking at them looking at us. Before we knew it we were laughing just as hard as they were.
Turns out the people we'd been so afraid of all our lives were not what we believed.
Suzy Owens said, "We've been watching you, like you watch us. We see you tipping around, playing ‘I spy.’ "
"We’re not bad people. We’re just enjoying life. Like you kids. Most grownups don't let themselves -- just be themselves," Mrs. Parsons said. "Suzy, Tim and I, we let ourselves do things the way we feel. Most folks can't do that. Scares 'em, I guess." Mrs. Parsons looked kind of hurt when she said that.
Ward peeked from behind his brother. His voice was real soft. ”Miz Parsons, do you poison cats?”
I held my breath. Ward was just baby enough to say something stupid like that.
The grownups laughed so loud I put my hands over my ears. Mrs. Parsons said. “Lord, child, I'm allergic to cats.” She was smiling nicer than Mrs. Green, the minister's wife, with her church day smile. “I put lime on my house’s foundation to keep mice out.
"You kids remind us of ourselves, always thinking, doing things -- real imaginative like," Tim Moulton said.
Tim smiled at Junebug, who tried to grin back. “Saw you pretending to be toting my sack down by the stable. My thinking is that people waste too much. I collect restaurant leavings for the birds and woods animals. I use the other stuff I find to build things for my house and yard.
I felt bold enough to ask Suzy Owens, “How come you wear lots of clothes, Miz Owens?”
Suzy looked at me kinda sad. “I have a medical condition, like my mother and grandmother before me. I feel cold all the time. Poor circulation, the doctor says.” She pulled her top sweater tighter, even though it was a really warm day.
Tim Moulton went close to the tree and looked up at the tree house. He put one hand on Alvin’s shoulder. First time we saw it was crippled. “Great job,” he said. Alvin straightened his shoulders and said, “Thank you, sir. My Dad and I built it.”
I'm not saying we became bosom friends from that day on. We stopped being afraid because they were different from other people. Alvin, Junebug, Ward and I toned down our funning, a little.
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