by Beth Kephart
That’s how Dad says it.
We don’t talk about what the seeds really mean. Why they mean so much to me.
At the curve in the drive, I hear Hawk’s tractor tires thump. I hear the pigs rushing back to the lookout posts in their red-shack village, the heads of the sunflowers swishing. The dirt drive runs a brown river between trees. Civil War trees, Dad calls them. Dad says the trees were here before he was, and before his father was, and maybe even before his grandfather was, and absolutely before the words that hang in the frames. It’s history everywhere at the Scholls.
“Sara,” Mom said, “Hawk’ll be all right.” Because we never had our family breakfast. Because Dad didn’t come back, and neither did Hawk. Because Mom had to go talk to Hawk all by herself and help him pack the pies and give him a hug to send him off.
Hawk’s not all right. I’m not all right. Who is all right? The smell of fire everywhere.
I carry the threshed seeds to the porch and leave them there for later freezing. I walk toward the drive, toward the tornado of dust that Hawk is making. He sees me and throws the skinny of his arm out toward me like he’s a human windshield wiper. He drives his tractor into the shed where all the tractors and the trucks live side by rusting side. He could say a million things, ask a hundred questions, make me say I’m sorry, but he hops out, he’s running. Running fast, and running past.
“To the pier,” he says, and I’m coming.
Spyglassing
He’s on the edge of the roof by the time I climb out, his yellow shirt blaring, his feet kicking. He has his binoculars up to his eyes—a country-fair auction special that he prefers to call his Spyglass. He dials in and out, breathes heavy.
“You should wear a sign,” I finally tell him. “Hey. Look. Over here. I’m a spy.”
“You’ve got a front-row seat,” Hawk says, “on a Spyglass situation.”
I lean back on my elbows, feel the early-morning heat inside the roof tar, close my eyes, say a little silent thank-you to my best-friend brother who is talking to me, finally. I hear the cows out there in a morning moo, the ducks on the low, low pond, the loose laces of Hawk’s Doc Martens making tiny ticks with every kick, and I wish I could make Hawk laugh. I hear him dialing in and out, perfecting his surveillance. I hear him holding off on questions.
“Sweet Davy Jones,” Hawk says, after a while. “She sure is stylish.”
I sit up and open my eyes. See the blurry glisten of the lighthouse. A second car sits beside the Silver Whale. A pink blur stands at the lighthouse door. Or maybe it’s a pink blur’s shadow. Beneath my glasses I rub my eyes. It doesn’t help. It never does. I make a grab for Hawk’s Spyglass. He swivels away so I can’t take it.
“She passed me on the road,” Hawk says. “New York plates on a brand-new Rover. Trouble. Had her hand on the horn for half of Mountain Dale. I thought Isaiah’s buggy was going to jump the rut.”
“You talk to her?” I want to know.
“I talked to her,” Hawk says. “She pulled right up beside me, waved at me to cut the engine. ‘You know any strangers come to town?’ she asked me. I said, ‘No, ma’am.’ ‘You know this man?’ she asked me, showing me a photograph. ‘Can’t say as I do,’ I said.”
“You said that?” My brother’s near beside himself. Telling a story with one single breath.
“ ’Course I said that. Rules are rules, right? Mom said.”
“Right.” I’m glad for this, glad for Hawk talking like he isn’t mad.
“ ‘You know someone I can speak to?’ the lady said,” Hawk says. “ ‘Not many people around here,’ I told her. ‘Not that many to talk to.’ She was rolling up her window before I was done. Punching numbers into her phone. Waving me off like I was the one who’d stopped her on the road. By the time she passed me again, she was zipping. She took the loop, Sara. The loop. What stranger you ever heard of knows something about our loop?”
The loop being the back way in, the second drive, the road that leads straight to The Mister, which is where she is now, knocking at the lighthouse. “Guess somebody told her something,” I say.
“Guess. So why was she asking me?”
“You’re looking real sly, Hawk,” I say. “One hundred percent incognito.” I make another Spyglass grab. My brother’s quick. He blocks but doesn’t tackle.
“Lady’s talking a blue streak,” Hawk says, ignoring me like he can. “Only thing is,” he continues, “she’s talking to the door. The Mister must not be in the mood for company.”
“Maybe The Mister’s out watering the pigs,” I say. “Somebody has to.”
Hawk sighs, a real quick sigh. He does a 360-degree Spyglass sweep. “No sign,” he reports, “of The Mister. But also: wait. Yeah. She’s carrying something. A box. A big—”
“What kind of box?” I say.
“Wait,” Hawk says again. “She’s giving up. She’s—” He’s whispering like the lady could hear him across the whole stretch of the fields. I wait for Hawk’s report, for a shift in the action, a twist in the plot, a rev in the Rover, a tornado of dust, and I’m so sick of waiting that I make another grab for the old Spyglass, and Hawk doesn’t put up a fight.
“Well, will you look at that,” I say.
Hawk whistles, long and low. “You see what I see?” he says, and I do, I see it now, I see the lady with her white-blond hair and her pale pink dress and her spike-heel shoes. I see her white Rover and I see that box, but not a regular box. More like a banged-together box built out of thick planks of wood. The box is so heavy, box is so wide, box is so big, she’s weaving right and left on her silly shoes, and now she drops the box and bends in half and drags and nags and pulls, until, at the red door of the lighthouse, she drops the box and stops.
She heavy breathes. Her dress is high on her thighs.
She yanks it kneeward.
She pounds the door.
She talks her streak.
She tugs her dress, throws up her arms, and turns, wobbling back to the Rover. All this way, she’s come. And The Mister isn’t answering.
She opens the door to the Rover. Slides in. Stays put. Finally engines up.
“Lady’s in full retreat,” I report to Hawk.
He has heard the Rover roar.
He has seen the sheets of dust.
He has seen The Mister, like now I see The Mister, in the third-floor window of the lighthouse. Standing up there. Both hands on his hips. His forehead on the glass. Looking down.
“A man in hiding,” Hawk says, his eyes big.
“What from?”
“A woman and a box.”
“What do you make of it?”
“Mystery,” Hawk says. “Pure and simple.”
No mystery is pure and simple.
“Sara?” we hear Mom now. “Hawk?”
He’s off the roof in half a second.
He’ll cut Mom off at the pass.
Phooey, Again
Phooey’s done it again,” Mom says. Says it to Hawk, out in the back, near the scorch, where Hawk has gone to give me time to crawl back into the house unheard—roof through window, down the stairs.
I sneak back out to where I’m supposed to be—out in the side garden with my pink basket, checking the full-sun crops in the beds I built, the eggplant and the peppers and the squash. Out by the char they talk, near the breeder birds, and I slip on past, Hawk giving me cover.
“That Phooey,” Mom repeats herself now. “That ridiculous bird.”
That beautiful bird, she means, with her muff and her beads and her red streak and her extra-sensitive tail. Phooey lays eggs with a touch of green, every egg a version of Easter. Phooey can walk among the peacocks and still be the primo bird, can leave her feathers wherever she wants without a scolding. Phooey came home in the arms of a stranger, and now she is missing again. Every hour, another trouble. She knows where she’s supposed to be, and she always goes free-ranging somewhere else.
I hear Hawk calling out for Phooey, headed up toward the woods, and Mom cutt
ing down to the shed where just last week the youngest goats had had their clove-oil cure. No horns make for better goats, Mom says, and she’s the only one among us we trust to get the injections right—keeping the needle flat against the goats’ skulls when she injects the stuff into their horn buds. She doesn’t hurt them. She helps them, she says. It helps me, sure enough, to milk goats that don’t have horns.
I pull the weeds from between the greens, check the chipmunk fence, pinch free whatever’s ripe to eat or sell, listen to Hawk calling out for his bird. I walk my basket across the garden and into the house and set it down by the silver kitchen sink and go back outside where the peacocks scoot. Maybe Phooey went off to the pigs. I start on down the road.
The cows are far, the soybeans near. The evergreens look like giants in green skirts on either side of the road. It’s a long walk to Pig Village when you walk it slow. I walk it slow.
We’ve got twenty-six pigs in the Village and a bunch of stiff sunflowers. Twenty-six pigs the color of ivory soap, the color of ash, the color of pie crust, some of them spotted. The pigs see me coming and they start running and all I can see for a time is the swish of the sunflowers over their heads.
There’s not a drop of rain in the sky.
The pigs follow me back to their shacks, where their water buckets sit inside old tires.
“Move it,” I tell the pigs. “Come on.” Nudging Mr. Dance this way and Mr. Livesey that, until we reach the spigot and the hose. I turn the water on, fill each bucket, snap the water off, quick. Stand where I am to catch my breath. Sit down, because I’m dizzy.
“Mind your own business,” I tell the pigs. And then I tell them what they already know. They’re noisy and they’re gross and I lots of love them, even if they do belong to Hawk, even if he’s named a bunch of them for the characters in his Treasure Island.
Out on the road, Isaiah’s horse is clopping and now a big truck from the lumberyard speeds through and then Johnny Gold’s ’55 Mustang, which he drives because he likes the show of it. Looking for water, I think. Looking for rain. Looking for trouble in August.
We’ve got plenty of trouble, I could tell him. Want some of ours? It’s free.
There’s a white blotch of sun in the east sky. There’s a black scorch where the hay barn was. There’s cut hay in the field that we’ll have to loosen up so it can dry. No more mold. No more combustion. Nothing spontaneous.
She’ll need to take care, Dr. G. said. We’ll need to watch her.
I watch Hawk’s pigs slurping the bottoms of their buckets, sponging the metal with their collapsible snouts. Hawk’ll come later with the tomato seeds and onion skins, the back ends of the watermelons, the leftover corn and soy, the stuff he wheels in the wheelbarrow. Hawk will come, after he finds Phooey.
I stand and back away from the pigs, toward the road. The sunflowers swish and their petals singe, and in a couple of weeks it will be harvesttime, the seed coats black and white and plump in the heads. I’ll bang the seeds loose. I’ll dry them super dry. I’ll store some in the cellar, and sell some at the market, and bake some for eating and split the hulls with my tongue, if there is time for all that. If.
The story of a seed is the story of tomorrow.
When I reach the part of the road that cuts beside the hayfields, I feel something that wasn’t there before, and turn.
I see—can’t really see.
I think—something.
A shadow, maybe.
A shuffle?
“Hello?” I say. But no one answers. Nothing moves. Slower now, I walk the road. Behind me again I hear the crunch of stone, the rub of something on the road.
This time when I turn, I see a thin and disappearing shadow.
“Hello?” I say.
Nothing.
“Hello?” I say it again.
The pigs don’t come this far. The cows are behind their fences. Old Moe doesn’t leave his barn unless he’s bridled up and ready, and if it were Hawk or Mom or Dad or any other farmer, they’d have said hello by now.
It has to be The Mister.
I cross my arms.
Not one thing happens.
There is pig talk in the distance, birds.
“Hello?” I say.
And nothing.
I need Hawk out here. I need my brother. I need someone to answer.
If I Could
I would:
Tell Hawk everything.
I would:
Tell him not to worry.
I would:
Ask him to help me not to worry.
Red Flannel Hash
Mom’s in the kitchen by the time I get back to the house. She’s making Red Flannel Hash. She needs onions and potato help. She puts the corned beef to rest, and then the beets. She takes the sour cream from the refrigerator. Dad came in with hay in his cap and the smell of cow all over, and Mom said he’d have to scrub up outside, which is what she does when she wants to talk, just the two of us.
We’re side by side, listening to radio songs, trying not to smell the stink of the fire, but the stink’s still here. The stink is living in my nose. We’re side by side with our spoons and knives. Mom talks. I have to listen.
“Your father and I will find a way, Sara. You have to have the operation.”
“Can’t afford it,” I say.
“Can’t afford to lose you,” she says.
“Why can’t we just—”
“Sara.”
She uses her best calm tone, her best calm words. Her hair falls out of her bandanna and into her face. She says what she has wanted to say, that Dr. G. had had another consult with his colleagues and that when I was out watering the pigs, Dr. G. called.
“Dr. G. has been talking to his colleagues, Sara,” she says. “They are working out the plan.”
“Don’t want to hear about it.”
“It’s called the David procedure, Sara. It’ll spare your valve. If it works out right—and it will work out right—you’ll be good as new. Less risk of a stroke. Less risk of endocarditis, which is a kind of inflammation. No blood thinners needed. No machine in your heart after that. Best operation there is.”
“No operation is a good operation.” I slam the knife down, quartering potatoes. I slam it again, halving the quarters.
“Best surgeons for the David are in Cleveland,” Mom says, doing nothing but talking now, doing nothing but looking at me, and now at the knife in my hand, which she takes away, pushes off the cutting board.
“Ohio?”
“Dr. G. is talking to Cleveland,” Mom says. “Dad is talking to the banks.”
“Since when have the banks ever helped us?”
“Sara. We have to—”
We hear Hawk’s boots on the porch, boots in the kitchen. Mom’s got my knife in her hand, and I can barely see through the way I feel, and Hawk’s got Phooey in his arms, and I hear them, two eggs in his pockets.
“Fugitive arrest!” Hawk says, and he might have wanted to laugh, but he’s not. He’s looking at Mom and looking at me and I have no idea how much he’s heard.
“Time to put that bird on curfew,” Mom says, but she doesn’t mean it. She just wants to save Hawk from the talk she’s had with me. She just wants us easy, family. She hooks one arm over Hawk’s shoulders and the other over mine and pulls us all so close that that bird drops some feathers to the floor. I feel Mom’s heart, and it’s hurting, and now Hawk tells us all about it—how he found Phooey up on the hill, in the spiderweb cabin someone built before we lived here and no one has lived in since. There’s nothing but stained mattresses and a rusty sink in there, a couple of plastic buckets in there. Somebody, or maybe a storm or maybe a bear, whacked out the window long ago, so the wind blows in, the loose seeds and leaves, the snow in winter, the squirrels and chipmunks and mice, the bees that don’t make honey, and Phooey, Hawk is saying, who must have squawked up that hill and hopped inside and settled down in the fluff of the split mattress.
“I talked to her the whole wa
y down the hill,” Hawk finishes his story. “I talked to her and she didn’t talk back. Bird knows she’s in trouble.”
He strokes her head the entire time he’s talking.
That bird will never be in trouble.
Mom unhugs us. Hawk looks up, and it’s almost like he looks up and then looks through me. We get the dinner on. Dad comes back, and Mom and I can’t talk anymore about the operation I need but will never have.
“You set the table, Hawk,” Mom says, and he does.
“You get the vase out, Sara.”
“Ma’am.”
Dad goes outside to the wildflower patch and brings some fresh-cuts in.
“Nice,” Mom says when he’s done, because Dad’s a real good flower arranger, and because now it’s time to eat together, to appreciate all we have.
Shuffle in the Shadows
I don’t tell Hawk about the shuffle in the shadows until the white balloon of the sun pops and the sky breaks into its berry colors and the night comes in with all its stars, and Hawk and I are alone again, the Spyglass pressed to his eyes, and I don’t even try to grab it. I don’t want him to get mad, or madder. I don’t want him to ask what Mom was saying about Dr. G. and Cleveland, and I don’t want him to look at me like I’m keeping secrets from him.
“Box is gone,” he reports, his voice flat.
“The special delivery?”
“Looks like. Someone has dragged it straight out of sight. Or maybe dragged it inside.” Hawk shrugs, casual, like he’s not itching to know.
“What’s it mean?”
“Have no idea. An interesting development.”
Hawk keeps his eyes pressed to his Spyglass. He watches the light of the lighthouse, which even I can see is third-floor bright. Nothing happens, and we’re just waiting, and he’s not talking, even though he’s the talker, so I tell Hawk about watering his ornery pigs. I tell him how I cut back through the sunflower patch and got to the road between the trees and how I started hearing things. The sound of a shuffle, I say. The sound boots make when their person won’t pick up their feet.