LJ Idol: Week 1: Open Topic

What Knows Your Name

By the time the owl called, I had already sweated through my shirt.

Summer in Tennessee did not simply get hot; it grew heavy. The air settled over your shoulders and climbed into your clothes, carrying the green smell of leaves and grass and damp earth until breathing felt like drinking hot cider. Cicadas screamed themselves hoarse from the trees, and every now and then a grasshopper launched itself out of my path with the offended indignation of something whose afternoon I had personally ruined.

I was ten years old, all but done with chores and in a hurry. My Granny Pat was cooking, and it could not have been more pressing to get into that kitchen and see what I could get my hands (and more importantly my mouth) wrapped around.

I could smell the pork chops frying from outside, that rich salt-and-fat smell floating through the open air, and I already knew what else was coming because I had picked the yellow squash myself. Granny would put an obscene amount of real butter into a cast iron skillet, slice the squash and onions thin, and cook them together until they softened. Then she would scatter in just a little sugar and keep going until the whole glorious mess caramelized, the onions turning sweet and brown and the squash catching at the edges. There was a pot of seasoned pinto beans that had been on the stove for hours. She'd have a tail end of sweet buttered cornbread, I just knew it and I was always first in, last out.

There were, however, a few things in this world worth delaying Granny Pat's supper for and blackberry cobbler was one of them. The berries grew wild near the woods, fat and dark among canes that charged a little blood for admission. I had already scratched my forearms and stained my fingertips purple, but my container, an old milk jug with the top third cut off with a pocket knife, wasn't full enough yet. Granny couldn't make cobbler out of good intentions. I needed enough berries to make the argument irresistible, so I picked, with great restraint, allowing only a few to find their way into my mouth.

That was when the owl hooted. I straightened and listened. There it was again, somewhere beyond me, while the sun was still high enough to throw hard light across the grass: an owl in daylight.

I knew that meant something. I knew it was an omen because I had been taught that it was an omen, but at ten I understood the word more than I understood its weight. An omen was something you were supposed to notice. It belonged to the same enormous category as funerals, mortgages and arthritis, things adults understood and children knew were serious without quite grasping why.

So I did my due diligence and noticed. Then I went back to my blackberries. Cobbler was a concept I understood completely without the need for deeper meaning. I had worked my way farther along the canes when somebody called my name.

"Misty."

I stopped with my fingers around a berry. The voice came from the woods, and there was something familiar about it, just enough familiarity that my body recognized it before my mind did. For the smallest fraction of a second, I nearly answered automatically, the way you do when somebody who belongs to you calls from another room. But I couldn't place the voice. Then, from somewhere much colder than that blistering afternoon, I remembered Granddaddy.

The previous November had only just begun to bite. The real cold had not arrived yet, but dusk came early and brought enough chill with it to make Granddaddy fire the woodstove in his work shed. One of the big doors was cracked open, and the smell of cedar and pine smoke drifted through a room that always smelled faintly of wood, leather, iron and work.

Granddaddy's work shed was cluttered in the most orderly way imaginable. It had a dirt floor and two enormous doors, wide enough that you could have driven a truck through them, with workstations tucked everywhere for woodworking, leatherwork, tool repair, knife making and a little smithing. Under the lean-to outside, beneath the hickory tree, stood the trestle table where a hundred different things became other things.

Granddaddy was one of the largest human beings I had ever known. At six feet seven inches and somewhere around two hundred and fifty pounds, he occupied space in a way that made most other grown men look temporarily reduced. His hands were enormous even in proportion to the rest of him, broad-palmed and long-fingered, hands you would expect to overwhelm small things. But they never did.

I loved watching Granddaddy work because there was a grace in his hands that seemed almost impossible. Nothing fumbled; nothing hurried. Strength appeared exactly where strength was needed and vanished the instant it wasn't. Those enormous fingers could coax usefulness out of wood, leather and steel with the same calm certainty, and I had watched them repair tools, make knives and turn raw materials into things that seemed inevitable once he had finished them.

That evening he was working the hide from the deer I had brought down with my new bow, turning it toward buckskin while I kept him company. His hands worked with effortless mastery while we talked. The stove popped softly behind us, resin snapping in the pine, and smoke breathed faintly through the cracked door. I don't remember what I was saying. I only remember that somewhere in the middle of it, without thinking, I whistled.

Granddaddy's hands stopped. "Awi, you know better. Dusk is past us. No whistling. The forest will hear you."

I looked at him with all the enormous-eyed seriousness a ten-year-old can summon when an adult abruptly informs her that the forest has ears. "Is that bad?"

"Yes." He returned his attention to the hide, those huge hands finding their rhythm again. "And worse than that, don't ever answer if it calls your name. Pretend you don't hear."

"Why?"

"Because if it knows your name, it already has too much power. Don't give it any more."

I nodded solemnly. Granddaddy knew how things worked, and that was enough for me. November vanished, and I was standing in August with a blackberry pinched between my fingers.

In the echo of my spoken name, the heat had not changed, but my body had. Every hair along my arms stood upright beneath the sweat. A chill traveled over my scalp, down my neck and along my spine with such force that for a moment I couldn't feel the heat at all. My stomach pulled itself into a hard little knot. My mouth went dry, and I became abruptly aware of every thorn touching my skin, every cicada screaming in the trees, every drop of sweat slipping beneath my shirt.

I did not look toward the woods. Looking felt too much like answering, so I stood there staring at the blackberry in my hand while my imagination populated the forest for me. Eventually, embarrassment began to wrestle with fear. I had been in those woods. I knew those woods. I had played, hunted, wandered and gathered there. The woods had never required monsters to make them worthy of respect.

I glanced toward the tree line. Nothing.

The forest was beautiful. Sunlight lay across the leaves. Green crowded against green in a hundred shades, and somewhere inside it insects continued their small summer concert without concern for me. No figure stood between the trees. No shadow moved where it shouldn't. Nothing reached for me. After another minute, my heart settled enough that I looked down at the container in my hands.

I still did not have enough blackberries for cobbler. There are moments when a person must decide what she believes in. I believed in Granddaddy, but I also believed in blackberry cobbler, so I went back to picking.

For perhaps three minutes, nothing happened, long enough for the ordinary world to begin knitting itself back together. Berry after berry dropped into the container until I could finally look at the pile and know Granny would have no reasonable defense. She would surely say, "Well, I can't let all this hard work picking go to waste," which of course would result in the cobbler being made.

Then the woods called again. "Misty."

With no preamble or thought, I ran. I tore free of the blackberry canes and bolted for the house with every childhood terror I possessed running directly behind me. Briars caught my clothes and scratched my legs, my feet hit the ground hard enough to jar my teeth, and somehow, through either instinct or divine intervention, I kept the berries level. Fear was fear but y'all, cobbler was cobbler.

I never looked behind me. Yet as I ran, I had one final sensation so irrational that I have never found a sensible place in my memory to put it. The woods were disappointed. Not angry or threatening, but palpably, deeply disappointed. Something had called twice, and I had not answered.

Then I was through the door and back in Granny Pat's kitchen, where pork chops crackled in hot grease and squash and onions browned in butter until their edges went sweet. The smell wrapped itself around me. Granny was there, supper was there, and my berries had survived. And yes, there was cobbler. The strange day faded into memory.

For years afterward, when I thought about that afternoon, I wondered what would have happened if I had answered. I wondered whose voice I had heard, because even now I cannot tell you. I wondered whether somebody had really been out there, farther away than I realized, calling for someone else, or whether memory had embroidered the whole thing, taking an owl, a hot afternoon and an old warning and sewn them together into something stranger. Mostly, though, I wondered what Granddaddy had known.

It took me decades to understand that I had been asking the wrong question. Granddaddy never told me what would happen if I answered. For a long time I thought that was the missing piece, some consequence too frightening for a child, some thing with a name and a shape that he knew waited beyond the tree line. I wanted to know what would have happened because surely the danger was the point. The intervening years have taught me otherwise.

I have lived long enough now to know that not everything that calls you deserves to have you turn your head. Some things arrive wearing voices you recognize. Some know precisely where the tender places are and put their fingers there. Some things can reach backward through years you thought were finished, find the old shape of you still sleeping there, and call it by name.

There is something terribly intimate about being known, and something dangerous in mistaking that intimacy for a claim. A thing may know your name and still have no right to your attention. It may know where you are and still have no right to enter. It may call in a voice almost familiar enough to love, and you may still leave it standing unanswered at the edge of the woods.

I think about Granddaddy's hands now, those enormous hands capable of forcing almost anything and somehow defined in my memory by how carefully they didn't. Strength appeared where strength was needed and disappeared when it wasn't. I did not understand then that he had been teaching me about power long before either of us spoke the word.

At ten, standing among the blackberry briars with sweat cooling suddenly against my skin, I thought silence was hiding. I thought if I stayed still enough, quiet enough, whatever had spoken might lose sight of me. But the forest already knew where I was. It knew my name. Silence was never going to make me invisible. That wasn't what Granddaddy had given me.

He had taught me that being called does not obligate me to answer, that being known does not make me owned, and that sometimes the only power left entirely in our own hands is the power we refuse to give away. Whatever called my name that afternoon already had too much of me and it did not get any more.

Current Mood: chipper

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simplyn2deep

This gave me chills! I love how something as simple as picking blackberries slowly becomes eerie and unsettling. Granddaddy’s warning, especially the idea that answering gives something power, really stuck with me. I also liked how that lesson changes the meaning for the narrator as an adult. The idea that being known doesn’t automatically mean something has a claim on you or deserves your attention is such a strong way to end this. And ten-year-old you definitely had the right priorities: mysterious woods or blackberry cobbler? COBBLER. 😂

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LJ Idol: Week 1: Open Topic

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