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The next week, after the firefighters removed Jodie Kae's body from the tree and gave it to the girl's family with false condolences, school dragged on as it normally did, with feet scraping against the ground and heads down on it too.
Jodie gazed out of the backseat window, looking at nothing in particular. The buildings grew smaller and smaller in the distance, yet she continued to stare even after all she saw were trees and bare road.
Even after the raggedy red car hit the bridge and pulled them out near New Orleans hoping to reunite with another black witch.
She picked at the hem of her ankle-length denim skirt then fanned at her armpits cloaked in a raw cotton shirt. The summer heat damn near ate Jodie whole.
"I just don't understand why you had to go and make a show for, Jodie Kae."
Her grandmother threaded a button onto a coat that lived through too many winters as her mother rambled, "Now we gotta move away. You know ya grandmother don't like leavin' nowhere and goin' somewhere new. We gon' get to that city and look as wild as feral kittens."
Jodie repeated the same thing she did when the ambulance dropped her off in the shack in the woods with a white sheet covering her open eyes, "I just wanted to scare them a little bit. I was gonna jump, but then I ain't want to anymore cause I ain't wanna die. Somebody pushed me. You and granny were there too! Y'all was watchin' from the woods."
She swore she felt a hand push against her back after she stumbled to get down from the tree. Her neck jerked forwards and the rest of her body came tumbling down and swaying like a pendulum. She found herself screaming louder than she did the day she came into the world.
Everything went dark behind her eyes, but she swore she heard somebody whisper, "It ain't time yet. You die when I say you die."
Jodie Kae told her mother the same story over and over again, but the woman refused to believe her. She was too wrapped up in the fact that the baby whose lungs she gave air to wanted to lose it — ungrateful.
While giving birth in those woods with flowers and weeds crawling over her ankles, Majorie promised herself that everything would be right in her life if she had a boy. Its father would stay and he would take her away from her mama's shack in the woods to a house somewhere in the city. She would drink water with lemon wedges on the glasses like she saw in magazines and read about in books. As she clenched her mother's hand and hollered into the dark woods, she pushed the baby out, hearing its loud cries, and prayed for it to be a boy.
She remembered the tears flooding her eyes when her mother smiled and announced,"It's a girl. Hurry up and feed her so we can clean y'all up. Got dirt all in ya hair, girl."
Majorie frowned at her dirty nails gripping the steering wheel and she could feel anger and disappointment leaking back into her dark skin.
"I was out in the garden, Jodie, and ya grandmother don't never leave the house. You just making stuff up now."
Jodie stopped listening after that, but then her mother snapped her fingers and her voice filled back into her ears: "Don't be tellin' everybody what happened, you hear me? They gon' think we all types of crazy, especially since ya grandmother don't speak. Mama? Mama? Close ya mouth, mama."
The old woman continued to sew the coat even after she pricked her thumb so many times that she stained the white thread red. She never even wore that coat, nobody did, she just kept sewing it whenever she had nothing else to do with her hands. Elodie was always cooking, scrubbing things, chopping wood, and braiding her daughter's hair. She didn't have a job, not because nobody wanted to hire the crazy black witch lady from the woods, but because she refused to leave them. She never stepped foot on paved road.
"What would I even tell them? Oh, I tried to fake hang myself, and when I was backing out somebody pushed me and I died. Here I am, breathing and blinking," Jodie quipped. "I know what I saw and felt. I just wanna know who pushed me."
Her grandmother pulled the string from the coat taut and bit down on the thread to cut it. Then she started on another button. She hummed under her breath a tune that Majorie knew to be her lullaby.
"Gon away, crow, fly high away. Leave my baby, we're here to stay. Gon away, crow, leave us be. I've got my baby and he's got me."
She snapped the thread again, smiling softly at her granddaughter in the backseat.
Majorie pressed on the gas, taking them further from the soil in Pinnoak.
