Gather: Chapter 23–"The Sharpe's Fifth"

He’s like, “The shirt appears to be inflammatory. Until we get to the bottom of this, do you have a different shirt?”

Then he bent down to move Mom’s head, which just lolled.

Mr. Collins told me to call 911, and I told him I had no phone. And as he’s calling, he remembers the tree blocking the driveway, which he tells the dispatcher.

The chaplain, she says she’s amazed by how many people around here love me, and, when I’m ready to look for comfort, to remember they’re there.

He’s like, “I hate to have to think logistics, my friend. But we need to make sure you’re safe. Tonight especially.”

One of the cops says, “It’s protocol, son. We have to ask him independently.”

“It will help me, in the meantime, to know about next of kin,” he says.
I’m like, “You mean my family?”

“CSP means Coordinated Services Plan,” Nick says. “It is a meeting of people and agencies who gather to make a plan to help a person, in this case, you.”

My gram is in the hospital on account of chest pains and heart palpitations.

Christine explains, an emancipated minor gets adult status. I’d be able to sign my own papers, hold property in my own name, have my own business, things like that.

What I wanted was to be clearing the stone wall of scrub brush grown in over the years behind the shed, saving the black raspberry bushes, though. Or to be in the woods cutting firewood to sell, or ripping the rot and checking the joists on the front porch.

Gramps once told me the great horned owl had the strongest grip in all the bird kingdom, genus, phylum, or whatever the hell.

Gramps once told me the great horned owl had the strongest grip in all the bird kingdom, genus, phylum, or whatever the hell.

With my red rain jacket on, I stuck out like a cardinal in winter.

Jitters are tiny little pistons sprinkled through your body, all ready to pump stupid into your system, so I’m trying to drag him along, and the leash pulls the collar right off his neck.

Off to my left is what’s maybe an abandoned water tower, rotted wooden shingles, and there’s brambles and vines all grown up the ten-by-ten timbers keeping the thing in the air.

Off to my left is what’s maybe an abandoned water tower, rotted wooden shingles, and there’s brambles and vines all grown up the ten-by-ten timbers keeping the thing in the air.

The ball landed in the driveway and rolled way on down, bouncing off both sides of the driveway ruts until it got hung up in the tall grass on the right at the base of a honey locust there.

While I’m doing that, I see a fishing line all snagged up in the branches and just left dangling, lure tied on. The line’s not rotten, so I untangle it, and I guess there’s fish in here, too.

He showed us the way to read the water: the midstream boulders and the pools, the bankside eddies, the shadows and lights, how to know what lure to use.

It was Danny who usually reeled them in, filleted them, helped me and Drew untangle our lines. Fishing is something Danny understood.

Every other day, we traipse through the woods, never forgetting to keep our feet in the streams, coming home and drying my shoes as much as I could while I’m cooking every night.

“I never thought a Yankee could give his Tennessean counterparts such a run for the money in our own wilderness, let alone I’d be helping him out. How’s your dog with children?”

And the latest paper’s got a map pinpointing all the spots I made phone calls, which I suppose that reporter must’ve put together from the police blotter, with a headline, “Runaway Teen Believed to Be Residing in Single Location.” And there’s a little sidebar with a diagram on how cell phones betray where you are. Another sidebar shows how a dog’s nose works.

Christine argued I was still a ward of my own home state.

Being as it was Danny, not my dad, who made the missing-persons call, and my father hadn’t once gone looking for me, nor had he tried to text or call my phone more than once, nor had he seen fit to show up for the signing of these papers—which by itself may have been understandable on account of him becoming a dad for the second time more or less as we were signing all that crap—my father would be deemed unfit for guardianship.

So in the town hall, this guy in a suit who has come to town from Memphis, I guess, he’s all, “Are you aware of the expenses incurred in the manhunt for you, young man? Of how much money it costs, by the minute, to fly a helicopter? Of the cost of personnel and dogs? Of clerks and dispatchers?”

So in the town hall, this guy in a suit who has come to town from Memphis, I guess, he’s all, “Are you aware of the expenses incurred in the manhunt for you, young man? Of how much money it costs, by the minute, to fly a helicopter? Of the cost of personnel and dogs? Of clerks and dispatchers?”

And she says, “Ian, watch your language. That’s why you study history—to learn how things affect each other in ways that might have been hard to see. It’s very nuanced.”

So of course, I want to know who all is coughing up the money, and she tells me it’s pro bono.

So anyway, this much farther along into our drive, what The Sharpe wants to know is, she’s looking for about twelve students for next year willing to share their stories of what it means to be growing up with a lack of means, meaning poor as a pothole, in rural America.

If the right people hear you, it can drive change, just like with your hunting poem. They’ll be more likely to listen if you follow convention.

I’m all, “You want my voice, but you want my voice to be out there using somebody else’s rules, somebody else’s voice. Otherwise, they ignore me. Isn’t that what you call censorship or oppression or whatever? Don’t you see how screwed up that is?”

The Sharpe, she said she saw how schools up here might have been proud as hell to let you love who you wanted, but as far as what she called your learning and working orientations go, well, she knows what rejection looks like when it’s felt from deep inside, and she sees it in the faces of too many people.

I know I tilled deep enough to bring the black gold back up close after a couple years of planting nothing at all.