My brother Lee buried Skip about a foot away from where he'd found him in the woods beside our house. It was a Friday afternoon in late August 1971, and I was eleven years old. He dragged Skip's stiff orange body out from under the blackberry vines, the thick black and green canopy Skip had lain under to die. Something's died in the woods. This was the stench we had smelled for days and the reason Lee had not wanted to talk to anyone. He had searched the woods until he finally found his cat. Flies circled furiously over Skip's body--a black cloud confirming death. I could smell the familiar stench from where I crouched some forty feet away. Skip didn't look like a cat anymore. His pretty green eyes were gone, hollow-looking now. He had been missing since Tuesday, and the August heat had swollen his body. Lee stood over Skip for a long time, his clothes soaked through with sweat. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt and long white pants. He never wore shorts, even in the summer. Since early in the week he had been wearing only white. Some days he would wear only dark blue; this week it was white. Lee looked strangely calm. His usually carefully combed dark straight hair now hung down in his eyes, and he didn't bother to push it back. The sweat dripped off his brow onto the ground yet he didn't seem agitated by the heat or by the sight of Skip. My legs itched so from the flies biting me that I momentarily considered leaving my hiding place in the thicket to go and try to watch from our backyard where I could run water from the garden hose over my legs. But Lee would have seen me walking out of the woods. Besides, the wooden fence around our yard was taller than I was. I would have had to stand on the top step of our back porch, the highest point of our yard, to be able to see him. Lee could have looked up and realized his sister was watching. So I stayed right where I was.
