“I looked up that word in our dictionary,” she said.
“Divorced?”
She nodded. “What do you mean by it?”
“You don’t know? I thought your mom was divorced?”
She was afraid to say anything about Mama’s divorce from the outside world.
“It means your mom and dad split up. They don’t live with each other anymore. Didn’t your mom tell you where your dad went?”
She couldn’t say anything about that. She shook her head to say no.
“Do you ever see him?”
Even if she had permission to say, the question was impossible to answer. She saw ravens almost every day, but those birds were not her father. They were an embodiment of her father, Mama said. She still didn’t understand that word.
He took her silence as a no. “I never see my dad either. He quit coming around when I was little. I don’t even remember him.”
An idea popped into her mind. Was it possible Jackie and Huck were born of earth spirits? Was that why they also lived in that place and had no father in their house?
“Do you know anything about your father?” she asked.
“No. My mom doesn’t like to talk about him. Huck doesn’t either.”
“What does your father look like?”
He thought about that. “Like Huck, sort of.”
Raven looked a little like her father. Dark eyes and hair. Her skin had taken some color from him, too, Mama said.
“How do you know what your father looks like?” she asked.
“From pictures. Didn’t your mom keep any pictures of your dad?”
She shook her head.
“She must be really mad at him.”
Raven supposed Jackie wasn’t the son of an earth spirit if he had pictures of his father and Huck looked like him. But the idea had been nice. She wished she could talk to another person like her.
Jackie got off the log. “Do you want to see something cool?”
He’d used the word cool before, and she was pretty sure it didn’t mean cold.
As they walked back to the stream, he said, “It’s more funny than cool, I guess.”
Huck stood as Jackie stepped into the stream. “Where are you going?”
“To show her the Wolfsbane,” Jackie said. “Your boots will get wet,” he told Raven. “You need shoes to walk in this stream. The rocks are killer on bare feet.”
She knew that and didn’t care if her boots got wet. They got soaked with dew every morning anyway. She wondered what the “wolfsbane” was.
Huck followed them into the creek. “What if she tells her mom?” he asked.
“She won’t,” Jackie said.
“It’s on her property.”
Jackie stopped walking and looked at Raven. “You won’t tell your mom, will you?”
“No,” she said.
“Did you tell her about us swimming in your creek?” Huck asked.
“No.”
“You see?” Jackie said to his brother.
“So you didn’t tell her about us at all?” Huck asked.
She shook her head.
“We didn’t tell our mom either,” Jackie said. “We didn’t think she’d like that we go far and on other people’s land.”
Other children kept secrets from their mothers, too. She felt better about not telling Mama.
As they waded downstream, she saw why the boys walked in the water to get to the swimming hole. Both shores were thickets of blackberry thorns and shrubs that made land walking impossible. She had never walked so far downstream.
After a long stretch of shallow water rippling over rocks, then a deeper bend, Raven stopped when she saw the strange thing ahead. The boys grinned at her surprise.
In the middle of another wide, shallow riffle was a stack of objects topped by a small humanlike shape.
“It’s better from the front,” Jackie said.
She followed the boys to the other side of the thing Jackie had called “wolfsbane.” Placed in the middle of the stream were two plastic milk crates, one blue, one red. On top was a boxy thing with broken glass in front. A TV, she guessed, because she’d seen them in pictures in books. Inside the broken TV was a deer skull with only one antler. On top of the TV was a rusty black microwave oven with a shattered glass door. And on top of that was a stone woman. She was carved to look like she was wearing a gown that draped over her hair down to her bare feet. She held her arms out with her palms up, but one arm was broken off at the elbow. The other shoulder had a piece missing. The woman used to be light gray, but now she was mostly green, covered in moss.
“Reece, Huck, and I made this last year,” Jackie said. “To scare the werewolf away. Reece calls it the Wolfsbane because it’s like that stuff in movies that scares away werewolves.”
“Not stuff, ” Huck said. “Wolfsbane is a plant.”
Raven didn’t understand any of what they were saying. She felt small in the presence of the stack that stood taller than Huck. The stone lady’s green face was the part Raven couldn’t stop looking at.
“The dog was chasing us down the stream,” Jackie said. “We ran over there,” he said, pointing into the woods, “and found a big pile of junk. There’s an old car and we hid inside it. But the dog was gone by then.”
Raven couldn’t see the car or junk he was talking about.
“This is where Hooper’s land ends and yours begins,” he said. “We built this to be like a jinx to keep the dog away from where we like to swim.”
“Reece and I built it,” Huck corrected. “Because you were so scared and wanted to go home. We had to do something to keep you with us.”
“I was not so scared,” Jackie said.
“You were,” Huck said, laughing. “You nearly peed your pants.”
“Shut up!” Jackie said.
“It’s okay,” Huck said. “That dog would scare the pee out of anyone.”
Raven looked more closely at the stone lady. Her eyes were looking downward, almost closed.
“Reece found the broken Madonna in the garbage,” Jackie said. “That was how he got the idea to make the Wolfsbane. Because she would scare away
