Free (2006) When Crickets Cry by Charles Martin Page B

painted with her hands. Every time I walk in here, I want to feel as if a candle were lit in every corner. The rooms should glow ... with a golden hue. She had pointed to the old pine floors in the original kitchen. Like those floors.
    "How do we get a `golden hue'?" I asked.
    "Pine," Charlie said, pointing down at the floors. "Old pine. Preferably the heart, and you can't get it at the lumber store. At least not the good stuff. The kind you want ... like that"-he pointed again-"has been setting up a few hundred years."
    So we got in the Suburban and spent six months scouring old Georgia highways and farms, knocking on doors and asking suspicious farmers if we could disassemble their rotten barns and leaning shacks and haul off the timber. Most nodded, bolted the door, and pulled the shotgun down from the mantel while we pitched a tent in whatever field was available and spent three days pulling apart boards and studying the craftsmanship of men who'd worked almost two hundred years ago.
    With lumber starting to pile up, I bought a warehouse off the Clayton courthouse steps. The abandoned warehouse was located just a few miles up in the hills, so Charlie and I trimmed away the vines, swept out the floors, and started stacking our lumber in racks up off the ground where the moisture couldn't reach it. After six or eight more months, we had enough for my house and a couple of others. Everything-floorboards, walls, trim, ceiling, even the plate rack in the kitchen we built from wood that we had resurrected from barns and shacks throughout pecan groves and oak stands in Georgia. There's a gold mine in salvageable wood draped in kudzu, pine needles, and acorns if someone is willing to peel back the vines and plane the wood. It's a slow process, and you're bound to uncover a few snakes, but maybe life is like that-you never know when something that's been hidden is going to rise up and bite you, or glow with a golden hue.

    After eighteen months and more sore thumbs than I care to count, I handed the air hammer to Charlie, and he drove the final nails into the ceiling trim. We unplugged the compressor, hung up our tool belts, blew the sawdust out of the workshop, split a beer, and stepped back to "look" at our work. Charlie ran his fingers along the walls and trim like a man searching a cave in the dark, his hands spread out across the wood and his nose close enough to smell it. When he finished, he nodded and said nothing.
    A few days shy of Easter, I spread my sleeping bag across the floor, lay down in an empty house, looked out through the window, and noticed for the first time that I was surrounded by dogwood trees. The next morning, they were in bloom. I lifted the window of our second-story bedroom, poked my head out into the branches, and shook my head. Emma had known all along.

     

Chapter 13
    e were swimming in the stream behind the O'Connors' house when Emma hit puberty. I was twelve, she was eleven, and Charlie just eight, which might explain his reaction. Emma was floating around like a seal in about a foot of water, not a care in the world, when the water around her started changing color. I probably don't need to paint you a picture. Scared and surprised, she stood up, and that's when it became apparent that Emma was bleeding-a lot.
    Charlie ran up the bank and started screaming, "Mom! Mom! Emma's dying! Emma's dying!" which probably wasn't what his mom needed to hear. I wasn't quite sure what was going on, but I had a pretty good idea she wasn't dying because she seemed fine, and when she stood up, she looked just as surprised as we were.
    Charlie disappeared inside while I helped Emma up the bank and tried not to look at her legs. She was scared, and my staring wouldn't help matters any. I turned my back, and she slipped off her suit and wrapped herself in my towel. Then I held her hand, and we just stood there. She didn't want to sit down for fear of staining the towel.
    "You okay?"
    She nodded and tried to