I walk down the dirt path
from my house into the woods
and consider what I am doing.
In the twilight, as I step between the ruts,
crunching the sunburnt leaves of late September underfoot,
the tree frogs and crickets
announce the coming dark.’What do I know?
I am twelve.
Billy is only nine
and he has invited me for supper.

My parents would be nervous.
They don’t approve of the Jenkins.
Shrimp fisherman
from the Gulf of Mexico
returning each year in the off-season
to winter lodgings.
They cook outdoors,
sleep outside
more often than not.

The road curves.
I pass their camper.
Behind their rusty green and white GMC pickup,
their home emerges, unpainted
weathered wood,
three rooms,
a  wooden porch,
and underneath the house
fed by the kitchen sink.

I am curious.

Billy stares at me, excited,
from the wooden steps,
his hand in his mouth.
He had worried I wouldn’t come.

His dad is squatting by the firepit
at the end of the rutted drive
feeding the flames
with kindling and sticks.
He glances up at me but doesn’t speak.
A night owl calls out.
Billy says, He’s here, Mom!

His mom steps onto the porch
wiping her hands on an apron,
across her brow
a purple kerchief covering her head,

Billy’s sister, barely thirteen,
rushes out the door,
around her mom,
down the stairs,
stands at the firepit
beside her father.
She’s wearing a white dress
that falls straight from her shoulders,
twirling a strand of hair around her finger,
staring at me, wide-eyed.

Hi, I say.
She drapes her arm around her dad’s neck.
Hi, she says.

Billy’s mom welcomes me,
gestures to a chair in the family circle
near the fire.
The turtle caught in the Tombigbee
bubbles in a huge cast iron pot,
flames licking at its base.

Billy’s dad sits down cross-legged
on the ground
next to a blanket
spread with carvings:
a thin startled deer,
a runaway boy with his bindle stick,
and effigy of an aproned wife.
He picks up a block of dark wood,
firelight glinting from his knife,
wood shavings curling into the fire.
I am mesmerized
by the baying hound
emerging from the mahogany.
As the last of the day slips away,
his wife fills his tin cup with coffee.

I catch a glimpse of Billy’s sister
across the flames.
Yesterday, she pulled me
down with her into the grass.
Arms wrapped around,
we touched each other all over
without speaking a word.
I had felt completely strange,
unmoored by the feel of her.

Now the only light is the fire
and I get to try for the first time
something I have only eaten from a can.
Holding its spiky green crown,
Billy’s dad grabs a huge knife, machete-like,
uses four clean strokes
to cut off the rough brown rind
of a real pineapple.
Turning it on its side,
he slices the fruit just like that,
sweet, tart rings
for a bowl to share.
Billy’s mom smiles at me.
I am amazed

by the fresh sweet taste,
by the whittled sculptures,
by the worms under the unpainted place,
and the extraordinary occasional neighbors,

feeling something about them
so vulnerable,
all civilization seems a threat.