A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries by Kaylie Jones Page B

clothes, crying so hard I could barely see.
    It took me awhile to find the red handkerchief, but the boy did not follow. I dressed quickly on my side of the fence and ran all the way to Candida, who was sitting in the kitchen snapping green beans. Candida took one look at me and blanched. Her olive-colored skin took on a greenish hue, which terrified me more and made me howl. She could do nothing to quiet me.
    “Didi, Didi, Didi!” I cried.
    “ Bébé, mon bébé , what es happened to jou? What happened to jou?” She sat me on the table. Her sharp nose and small brown eyes were inches from my face.
    “I fell out of a tree,” I sobbed. Candida got the Band-Aids and mercurochrome out of the pantry closet.
    “Ay, ay, ay, Channa, why ara jou climbing trees by jourself?” She washed my knees and arms with a clean, warm and soapy rag. “Jou es crazy.”
    Whenever I cried, Candida’s eyes filled with tears as well. And when she cried because she missed her mother and the dusty farm in Portugal, I cried as though it were my mother and my farm. At that moment I couldn’t take her tears and cried all the harder, and Candida cried harder too, and we hugged each other, rocking from side to side. I wept because I was not telling her the truth and never could. Candida was scared to death of men, she often told me that all men wanted only one thing from a nice girl, and if she gave it to them, that made her a bad girl and then they wouldn’t like her anymore.
    “ God .” It was nasty Mary-Ellen standing in the doorway. “What do we have here ? Can I join the party?”
    Candida could not have understood what Mary-Ellen said, but the look of utter mockery on her face said it all.
    “ Sors d’ici tout da suita! ” Candida yelled. “Get out ofa here des minute!” Candida did not take mockery from anyone but me. None of the Smith girls had ever heard Candida raise her voice. She had a real fishwife’s voice when she wanted, and Mary-Ellen fled, horrified.
    “My poor littel girl,” she said to me. “Whatta dida we do to get sucha bad girls des summer?”

    Everyone was excessively nice to me that evening. My father tucked me into bed with Christmas Bear and told me that nothing was broken and I would be all right. I could have told my father what happened because my father always talked about Sex as a natural and good thing. But my father was a maniac when it came to protecting Billy and me, and I knew that he would have gone straight to the boy’s house and beaten him up and probably his father as well. Once when I was two, a five-year-old boy who was visiting with his parents kicked me in the face when the grown-ups left us alone in the playroom. My father found me lying on the floor, staring up unblinkingly while my assailant’s foot continued to bash into my bloody head. My father kicked the boy into a wall right in front of his protesting parents.
    My father, I knew, would blame Stephane and not me because Stephane was much older and stronger. For some strange reason I did not want Stephane to get into trouble because of me. I did not want the thing to become a big scandal that the Smith girls would be privy to, or for my father to make it so final that I could never, ever see the boy or his tree house again. So I cried instead as my father tucked me in, and kept my mouth shut.

    “He’s bad, Billy,” I told my brother the next day. “He’s really bad.”
    “He’s not that bad,” Billy said, looking away impatiently.
    “I’m not playing in the woods anymore,” I said with finality.
    “I am,” Billy said, heading off on the great green lawn with a new handkerchief in his back pocket.
    “BILLY, DON’T!” I yelled after him. “PLEASE DON’T!” But he would not stop to listen to me.
    I waited awhile, feeling both ashamed and betrayed. The Smith girls were haw haw hawing on the lawn, as usual. After a few minutes I followed Billy into the woods. I wandered around aimlessly, talking to the Elves, and