Free The Moon by Night by Madeleine L'Engle Page B

wasn’t a sound, and when we sat down to breakfast Mother told us to be quiet because the Greys were still asleep. We were packing the car, still trying to be quiet, when the ranger came by in his green truck and stopped.
    â€œSorry about those kids last night,” the ranger said. He looked where the Coke bottle had made the dent in the fender. “That’s not so good. You want to take action?”
    â€œIt would delay us too much,” Daddy said. “But I hope it won’t happen again to someone else.”
    â€œAh’ll see that it doesn’t,” the ranger promised. “Ah’ve got
something to go on, now.” He had a nice kind of drawl, not snarly and nasty like the kid who asked for the Coke bottle back.
    Daddy asked, “What kind of an animal might have been trying to get in our ice box last night?”
    â€œA b’ar,” the ranger answered without hesitation. “A black b’ar. They come around the campgrounds looking for food. Won’t bother you if you leave ’em alone and don’t try to feed ’em. Wall, hope yawl had a good night.” He waved at us and drove off.

Seven
    N obody emerged from the Greys’ tent, no matter how often I looked towards it, and I had to quit when John made a snide remark. We got going about eight-thirty and if it hadn’t been for this funny feeling that I had about Zachary I’d have gone along with everybody else in being glad to get out, what with wind and weather and hoods and bears.
    John and Mother were right about Tennessee. It’s really a beautiful state, and everybody we talked to at filling stations and markets and places was lovely and drawly and friendly. Of course John had to go through Oak Ridge, which was fascinating but scary. I mean all that stuff about radiation and cancer and all. It’s facts and we have to face it and it isn’t any worse than the Black Plague and the Spanish Inquisition but that doesn’t make me have to like it.
    Well, that was Oak Ridge, and that isn’t Tennessee any more than the JDs were. What was Tennessee if I look back on
it with my mind instead of my feelings is roses, laurel, and rhododendron all in bloom, and birds flying across the road. Red earth and wind-ey roads and lots of mules, which the farmers at home don’t have. And people wanting to help us and saying Tinn issee instead of Tenn essee. And stopping at a funny little store up in the hills to get gas and cash a traveler’s check, and the little old lady who ran the store coming out in a gingham dress and an old-fashioned sun bonnet and a corncob pipe in her mouth and knowing all about credit cards but never having heard of a traveler’s check!
    Somewhere along in the early part of the afternoon a shiny black station wagon with a tent trailer whizzed past us on a curve, honking loudly. “That crazy kook,” John said. “I’m glad he’s not driving us . Just as well that’s the last we’ll see of him .”
    Montgomery Bell State Park all the way across Tennessee was one of the nicest state campgrounds we hit, with hot showers and laundry tubs, so we all got bathed and Mother and I washed out some of our drip dry clothes and hung them up on our laundry rope which John and Daddy strung for us between two trees. There was a ball park right by the camp, so as soon as John got his jobs done he was off and before long he was in the middle of a baseball game, with Suzy and Rob sitting on a fence with a group of other younger kids, watching. Meanwhile Mother and I started getting dinner ready and Daddy struggled with the fire. There must have been a heavy shower early in the afternoon, because all the firewood was sopping wet, and about all it did was smoke. So Mother said it was a good time to initiate Uncle Douglas’s stove, the fancy one he got us from Abercrombie and Fitch. The thing wouldn’t work. Big deal. So dinner was cooked exclusively