Free A Place to Call Home by Deborah Smith Page A

slate-gray running track. Huge moths swarmed in the hot white beams of overhead lights and danced in the glow from the concession stand beyond the track’s far turn.
    It didn’t take light to draw me down to the track. The lure of candy would do it. I was a moth after sugar. I flew with a small, flashy gang—we thought our wings were five feet wide and bright orange, but I’m sure to everyone else we were just giggling, nickel-size flutter-bys.
    “I’m going to be a cheerleader when I get to high school,” Rebecca announced as we sashayed along.
    “Me, too,” Violet chimed.
    “Not me, I don’t care,” I said. I’d already flunked out of the small-fry-league cheerleading tryouts three years in a row. Something about wanting to add new moves eachtime I performed a routine. Cheerleading was serious, regimented business. They would take away your pompom license if you improvised.
    “I’m not gonna be a cheerleader.” Tula Tobbler spoke up firmly. “I’m gonna be Alvin’s manager.”
    We all looked askance at Tula. Elfish, with skin the color of chocolate, she stared back at us from under a stiffly styled cap of black hair with bangs and curved-under ends that wouldn’t so much as flex, even in a strong wind. No Afros for Tobbler children, because Tobblers were big on conservative traditions, just like Maloneys.
    In fact, though nobody talked about it, Tobblers were Maloneys. The doors to our two worlds might be connected by no more than a single hinge, but we were connected nonetheless. When people looked at a dark-skinned Tobbler, they might not see even the hint of it, but he was there, deep in the Tobbler past, a great-great-uncle of mine, a red-haired, pale-skinned Maloney.
    A roar came up from the packed stadium behind us and the band blared the Dunderry Panthers’ fight song, and we all turned to watch an enormous, long-legged receiver spike the ball in the end zone.
    Alvin Tobbler, Tula’s brother, was the brightest football star, black or white, ever to carry a pigskin across green Dunderry grass. “See?” Tula said, grinning. “Alvin’s gonna play for a big college and then he’s gonna play for the grown-up teams one day. And he’s gonna be rich. And I’m gonna tell him what to do with his money.”
    We all nodded solemnly and walked on. Any dream was possible for Tobblers, because they had some mix of African and Irish magic in them, and if you doubted that, all you had to do was go where we were headed and see it up close.
    Next to the concession stand, Tula and Alvin’s grandpa worked at a small card table piled with apples. This was something he volunteered to do at every game, his way of cheering for Alvin.
    Boss Tobbler was an apple man. His orchards stretched across stair-stepped hills outside town, and every Tobbler in the county worked for him in the autumn, harvesting apples and selling crates filled with apples from a roadside warehouse, plus every homemade apple concoction known to humankind—cider and fried pies and bread and jellies and cookies, to name a few—there was no end to the Tobbler apple kingdom.
    His first name really was Boss. He was short and muscular, with patches of tight gray hair on his thick forearms but not a speck on his head, and when he took off the limp fedora he wore year-round, his scalp gleamed like an eight ball. He’d been a sergeant in a black platoon during World War II, he’d won a Purple Heart, he had a year of divinity-school training, and he was a deacon of Dunderry’s African Methodist Church.
    He and Grandpa Joseph had hunted and fished together since they were boys. They’d both served in the war, they both hated stupidity and meanness, and they were both as sweet as honey, once a person got inside their hive. Grandpa called him Boss T. Everybody else called him Mr. Tobbler, with an emphasis on the
mister
.
    A fantastic aroma rose from the apples and the melted caramel bubbling in a stew pot on a hot plate. A small crowd watched, awed,