The Olivers They lived among thick pines off Baseline Road, its smell as penetrating as love, their unfinished house always under construction, Claudia’s father of sawdust, sweat, her mother’s apron smeared with chicken blood, the grandmother swathed in musty and wood-bleached furniture in a small house beside theirs. Like sisters, Claudia and I wandered through the pines, tasted iron in water, wondered if we’d rust inside. Sometimes we hunted for God, pretended we found him under the rafters. While we sat under the trees building a house with rocks and pine needles, we recited Bible verses we’d memorized. When Tony the rooster disappeared from the yard, I refused to eat fried chicken for supper and Mrs. Oliver made me a bologna sandwich. At night sometimes we ate watermelon down to the white rind, pink juice staining our clothes, our fingers sticky with sweetness and the next day we helped Mrs. Oliver make watermelon rind preserves. She always trusted us as we filled the jar. I like to watch her mop the floor, her lips moving without sound like a day’s invisible rhythm, the morning light filling her face as if she were the subject of a painting. I didn’t realize I had been so lonely that summer until I stayed there for six weeks. Long ago the Oliver’s house was finally built, grandmother dead, the pine grove thinner, the tree stump long dried with blood where Mrs. Oliver used to chop off chicken heads, I revered their simplicity, this family like I’d suddenly discovered a music that spoke only to me. Her mother became my own that summer when my mother had been so sick. I remember how Mrs. Oliver sang about Jesus as she braided my hair, held me as if I completed her when I told her I wanted her to be my mother. © Janice Tatter