Free Whistling Past the Graveyard by Susan Crandall

what needs be done.”
“No, Wallace! Please!”
“Get back, woman!” He shook me a little, and I hung there like a rag doll at the end of his arm. “Sometimes I think you’s dropped on your head as a baby! There ain’t but one way out of this now.”
“She just a little girl, nobody goin’ pay her no attention.” Eula’s hands clasped beneath her chin.
“She a white girl. You know they don’ ask a colored if a white girl tellin’ the truth afore they strike. They be all over us. Even if they ask, you done stole that baby.” He shook his finger toward the house with the hand that wasn’t digging into my arm.
“She won’t tell!” Eula cried, her hands out, palms up, pleading.
“I won’t!” I shouted. “I won’t tell! I don’t care ’bout no baby!” “I keep her! Keep her in secret!”
He breathed deep; his whole body shuddered when he let it out. He swung his free hand and landed Eula in the dirt. “This on you.”
He started to drag me toward the woods.
“No!” Eula screamed from down on the ground. Her arms reached toward me.
“I won’t tell! I won’t!” I twisted, but Wallace held firm. My feet dragged in the dirt. “Let me go! I just wanna go to Nashville!”
Eula crawled after us. Crying. Begging.
My insides turned to water. I shoulda broken that window and run last night while I had the chance.

6
    e
    verything after that slid by so fast, it wasn’t much more than a blur in my head. Somewhere, out beyond Eula’s crying and the thud-thud, thud-thud of my heartbeat, I began to hear something else.
    Wallace heard it, too, ’cause he stopped dead still and his head snapped up. I could hear the roughness of his breath as it rushed through his nose. His hand gripped my arm tighter and his eyes narrowed to slits.
    The sound rose and fell, swelled and shrank, until I recognized it. Dogs . . . huntin’ hounds.
Quick as a rattler, he reached down with the hand that wasn’t holding me and jerked Eula up off the ground. She came to her feet like she was one of those string puppets. I was pretty sure if Wallace let her go, she’d have gone flat back on the ground like just like a puppet, too. Her crying slid to whimpers.
Wallace’s eyes was crazy, with so much white showing they looked like cue balls.
I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out.
Before I could blink, he drug the both of us toward the house. He started moving while I was half on the ground; I didn’t have a chance to get on my feet, and Eula wasn’t even trying. My shins slammed into the steps, tearing chunks of skin off and setting them on fire. I sucked in a breath to keep from yelling out with the pain; all bullies got worse when you let them know they were hurting you.
Eula’s dragging feet caught the rug in the living room. It rolled up like a butter curl behind us. Wallace shoved us into the little bedroom where James was sleeping.
We landed in two heaps on the floor.
Just before Wallace locked the bedroom door, he warned us we’d both be sorry if we made a sound. I believed him. From the look on Eula’s face, she did, too. I’d seen her scared of Wallace before, but there was something sharp and new to this scaredness.
I started to see stars. I sat there for a second, sucking air back into my fear-pinched lungs.
Eula scooted on her backside until she was shoved in the corner beside the door. She pulled her legs up to her chest and held tight with both arms. Her eyes didn’t look like they was seeing anything around us. Somewhere deep in her throat, a thin, little whine rolled around, almost too quiet to hear.
I looked down at my scraped shins.That just made them hurt worse. It also made me wonder what Wallace would do next. I couldn’t think about that. If I let fear get locked in my head, I wouldn’t be able to think at all. And if I couldn’t think, and Eula was all messed up, we were goners.
I’d been so surprised by Wallace’s viciousness that I didn’t fight my best—and Eula was too scared to