by Jessie Haas
With a jolt he realized they were leaving.
He mustn’t lose them. Gripping his stick, he slipped through the brambles and along the bear trail, picking up the voices again. He expected to come to a waiting horse and buggy, but when he got to where he could see them, there was no vehicle in sight.
They were at the edge of the briar patch now. Poplar saplings rimmed the sky, leaves shivering. The mother was digging at the base of a bramble while Abby tugged with gloved hands. The grandmother, also gloved, was putting a just-pulled bramble into a sack. Lucky sat watching.
After a moment his nose lifted. Phin saw the tiny motions of his head as he tested the breeze. Bristling, he turned toward Phin and barked.
“Lucky, enough!” The old woman grabbed for him; he eluded her, but Abby dived on him, startling out a yip. She held him with one arm while she unfastened her apron and tied the strings around his neck. Then she led him to the grandmother, who stood firmly on the dragging fabric. All the while Lucky barked.
The mother wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist and said something to the grandmother, who cupped an ear at her.
“I said—we won’t get up here again soon! I want to get enough.” She turned toward Phin, brandishing her shovel. “Get out of here! Scoot!”
Did she see him? Phin froze, realizing too late that it would have been smart to crash away, as an animal would.
The three worked quickly, glancing over their shoulders. The mother pried at the blackberry roots, Abby hauled them out, the grandmother shoved them into bags. All the while she stared in Phin’s direction. Phin was too far away to see her features, but that face turned his way was a threat, a warning.
At last they were done. They gathered up buckets and sacks and hurried downhill. Lucky, hauled along by Abby, twisted his head around and raved over his shoulder.
They must live nearby, then. Phin hadn’t dared hope for that; a house, farm animals, a garden. He stood up to follow, letting Lucky’s noise guide him. He could pick up what he needed; food, a water bottle—
Pick up? the inconvenient voice within asked.
Phin touched the roll of cash in his pocket. Okay, buy—though these were large bills. It would be a lot to pay for the few things he hoped to take. He could hardly ask for change, though.
Wrestling with conscience, he followed them down an old wagon road; shallow wheel ruts grown over with thin, silky grass. The road began to look more used as it passed under large maples. A stone wall ran along one side, a brook on the other. Below him now Phin saw a roof, then the gray walls of barn and house, a cow at pasture and—his heart thumped—a dark horse.
It wore no saddle or bridle, was grazing peacefully, and was, as he got close enough to see, a mare; not a bad one, though not of the quality of Fraser’s stallion. She raised her head, chewing, to watch the berrying party, then pricked her ears uphill as if sensing the follower.
The warning went unheeded. Mother, grandmother, and dog disappeared inside. The girl spread the blackberry plants on a rock in the sun. Then she, too, vanished into the house. Phin crept closer, to the corner of the stone wall that divided the uphill pasture from the farmyard, and looked the place over.
It was a large house, and the barn seemed large, too, but both were shabby. Phin could tell no man lived here. Oh, there might be a male invalid inside, or an ancient grandfather. But so many jobs had been left unfinished, unbegun, or improvised. The front door sagged. The garden fence was mended with a section of iron bedstead. The cow was staked, not pastured. The mare was lame; no need to pasture her, and a good thing because there was no pasture fence, just a few weathered rails atop the stone wall to show there’d been one once. The hens weren’t penned either, but scratched in the yard.
Hens. Eggs.
And chicken—roast chicken, fried chicken, chicken pie…the plump hens, live and crooning as they were, made Phin’s stomach growl. As if in response came a suspicious bark from inside the house.
Phin slunk back to higher ground. He found a maple with a low branch and settled there to watch, like a fox watching a henhouse. He didn’t relish the feeling. He’d been brought up to help and respect women. But food. He had to have food.
He was jerked from a reverie—chicken and biscuit, chicken fricassee—by the sound of a train whistle.
It could be any train. It could even be doing him good, carrying Plume back to Bittsville or Fraser to wherever he might be going—if he’d given up the hunt; if either of them had given up. But this little farm road connected to some other road downhill and another after that, to the valley and the railroad and coal country. He must feed himself and move on, quickly.
The sun edged closer to the hill. A breeze came up. The old lady appeared, visited the outhouse, split a little kindling rather handily with a hatchet, and went back inside. A few minutes later smoke puffed from the chimney.
Lucky was put out; probably interfering with supper preparations. He sniffed around the yard and backtracked uphill the way they’d all come, bristling when he came to where Phin had turned around. He raised his head and woofed several times, staring hard in the wrong direction. The breeze was coming uphill from the yard, not downhill toward the dog. After a while, with a sort of huff, Lucky turned to other business.
Now Abby came out with a pail. She reached through the barn door and took down a faded blue army coat, buttoned it over her clothes, and walked out to the cow. By clenching his fist and looking at her through the smallest opening he could make, Phin brought her into focus; a small person with regular, determined features, pretty in an unextravagant way. He couldn’t tell if she was his age or a little older. She seemed like someone who had come into her looks and wouldn’t change much from now on.
Down on one knee in the grass, she pressed her forehead against the cow’s flank. Phin imagined the milk filling the pail—white, sweet smelling, warm, and frothy. He could take it, drink it all down. How could she stop him?
Lucky could probably stop him.
After milking, she set the pail aside, pulled up the stake, and moved the cow to fresh grass, tempting her along with a treat—something white, a piece of bread maybe, or a slice of turnip. Phin wanted it, whatever it was. He wanted the cow, too. His thoughts ran on pickled beef and beef tea and steak and stew….
Abby carried the pail back, pausing to hang the coat up. She hugged herself briefly as the cool air struck her. Phin wished she hadn’t. He’d managed to ignore the growing cold. The sun had set, taking the warmth with it.
Abby went into the house and came out wrapped in a shawl. She sat on the bench by the door and took a sock on four needles out of her apron pocket, spread a book open beside her, and bent, reading fiercely, as if this was the moment she’d waited for all day. She knitted, too. Phin saw the moment when it was shawl fringe instead of sock yarn that her busy fingers worked. She only noticed when the shawl began to pull at her neck. Then she tugged the fringe loose impatiently and crushed the sock in her lap, reading on.
Phin wanted the shawl and what was cooking in the kitchen. He wanted the book, too. What was it? Had he read it? He wanted to look over her shoulder. He wanted her to go inside and leave it on the bench.
Lucky scrounged around the foundations, sniffing for mice.
Tender little morsels, mice—
Finally the mother came out to the front step. A brief exchange; Phin couldn’t hear it, but it was perfectly clear. Abby wanted to read more. Her mother thought it was too dark. Besides, supper was ready.
They put on gloves and carried the wilting blackberry canes into the barn. What were they doing? Phin wondered. Those plants wouldn’t live now with the roots dried out—
But blackberry root bark was an infallible cure for diarrhea. They’d been harvesting medicine on the hill, he realized, the way people did at home.
The house door shut behind them. Phin slid out of the tree. Time to make his move.
16
PHIN AGAIN
First he drank from th
e brook. Then Phin walked down the farm road through the deepening shadows. The horse lifted her head as he passed.
He climbed the wall that divided yard from field, and crossed silently to the garden. It was near the end of the house, overlooked by two dark windows. The house seemed cold and lonely at this end.
But at the corner where house and barn connected, yellow lamplight glowed. A river of scent drifted Phin’s way; fried apples and onions; salt pork. His mouth flowed with saliva. He pushed open the garden gate.
It was nearly dark, the world all sepia colored like a brown old photograph. Phin made out a stand of currant bushes, and rows of plants he didn’t recognize. Brushed with his hands they gave off medicinal aromas; some sharp and fresh, like mint and lavender, others dark and musky and powerful.
There was a row of turnips, half a row of greens. He broke off a leaf and crunched it—kale, maybe? A long patch of dug-up ground must have held potatoes. He groped in the dirt for a few minutes, but found only stones.
He inventoried the rest: a tall plant with spines; several patches that looked bare, but released an herbal smell when stepped on; a squadron of dry cornstalks shivering in the breeze. Frost had hit this garden already. Back home they were talking about when it might come.
Phin unwrapped his flour sack from around his neck, stepped in among the corn, and took hold of a long ear. It cracked loudly when he tried to break it loose. The house didn’t seem to notice, but Phin felt uneasy. He got out Dennis’s knife and cut it off, dropped it in his sack.
He took only two more, because he didn’t know how he’d eat them. The kernels were hard as pebbles. Maybe he could crush them between two stones, but he’d still have to cook them somehow. Vivid in his mind were tales from Murray’s of things soldiers had been driven to eat, and the consequences. He couldn’t afford to cripple himself with dysentery.
But turnip was good raw. Murray used to snack on it, rather than the salty, thirst-making free lunch he provided for his customers. With a pang of homesickness almost as sharp as his hunger, Phin remembered the calm bulk behind the bar, the steady, disillusioned eyes, the crunch of crisp raw turnip and the big paw holding out a slice to him, just a little boy then….
He wrenched a large turnip out of the ground. The crushed greens gave off a spicy scent, and he gobbled one with its seasoning of grit.
Two, three, four turnips; into the bag.
His hands tingled with cold by now, and he was shivering. He let himself out of the garden, closing the gate, and moved toward the buildings.
“—good thing the mare’s lame,” said the grandmother as he passed the kitchen window. Her voice was small through the glass. “If we’d taken her up there today, she’d have likely run off—”
“And lamed herself!” Abby said. “Yes, Mr. Emerson!”
Phin paused, arrested. This was how he and his mother had talked, Emerson and Wordsworth joining them over the washtubs like uncles.
“It’s not Emerson’s best essay,” the old woman said, a little stiffly, “but I’ve found it useful to walk around a thing and see it from the other side. Just now I’m trying to see the other side of your sass!”
“Sass, Gran? That’s just my erect soul, inspiring all beholders with some of my own nobility.”
“The devil can quote scripture to his own purposes,” the old woman said, while Phin struggled to place Abby’s quotation. The essay was “Heroism,” and the line Phin remembered from it ran something like this: “The hero doesn’t ask to dine nicely and sleep warm.” Outside the window, cold to the marrow and bathed in the smell of fried onion, he had to smile.
Ask them for help. Why not? Just knock on the door and explain. Yes, his sack was heavy with their turnips and corn, but he meant to pay. If he came to the door, if he confessed freely, might he be forgiven?
He could imagine the scene, but couldn’t make himself knock, not until he knew how close the town was and if it harbored recently arrived strangers. Shivering, he skirted the pale rectangle of lamplight on the ground and made for the black opening of the barn door.
He reached in as the girl had, and his fingers brushed good army wool. Many a coat like this had come home from the war. They were hard for his mother to see and launder, but when Phin put the coat on, he felt at home.
He was warm almost at once, but it was more than that. While he stood waiting for his eyes to adjust, something else adjusted. He felt like Phin again, not a wolfish skulker. A small change; he was still hungry and desperate, with a sack full of food he hadn’t paid for yet and no idea what to do next. But the coat put him together, made him whole.
His eyes adjusted to the deeper dark. He could see the things on the wall. A bottle; one sniff told him, horse linament. A can of pine tar, not, so far as he knew, edible. Harness. Ropes, skillfully coiled and hung. Dennis had taught him that, to loop the last bit around the coil and make a slipknot, and another knot in the very end to hang it by. “Don’t just ball it up and throw it at the wall!” he could hear the old man say.
Rope might be useful. He chose a piece small enough to fit in the pocket of the coat.
There was a grain bin. Phin opened it, ready for mice, but the bin had a clean smell. It must be tight and well sealed. Way down in the bottom he found oats, not a large supply. He put a handful in his mouth and a couple more in the flour sack.
That was all for this wall. On the other side were three stalls with hay stored above them, piled high like an extravagant thatch. He saw several hens up there, dark plump shapes. He reached, but the hay was well above his head.
He felt his way along the wall and found a ladder, securely nailed straight up and down. Sack in his teeth, he swarmed up and dived one hand under a hen, seizing her warm legs. She flapped her wings and squawked bloody murder. Phin lunged, pinning her under his elbow, muffling her in the coat, and with his fingers on her silken-feathered throat, hesitated.
He could kill her, but then he couldn’t stay. He’d need to quickly find a place where he could pluck and gut her before the meat spoiled.
He relaxed his grip. The hen fluttered a few feet away, setting up a murmur and crooning among the others.
In the morning, Phin thought.
He turned away, crawling across the hay toward the back of the mow. Trapping himself again, but this time no Fraser lurked below, no Plume. The women weren’t a threat. If he was discovered, he could walk right past them.
Or he could ask—
His hand came down on something small and smooth. He knew what it was, but couldn’t stop in time. Eggshell crunched. He recoiled, expecting a cloud of stench.
But this egg was fresh, not rotten. Only a smell of wetness came, and before Phin knew what he was doing he’d put his head down, slurping thick mellow yolk and slippery white. Eggshell gritted in his teeth. Wetness and chaff stuck to his chin. Part of him was shocked; but haste was needed, or the hay would soak up the egg, and haste kept him from gagging.
As he finished, the house door opened. A moment later Lucky gave a suspicious woof. He roamed the yard, making comments, and finally began barking in the barn doorway. Phin crouched with his back to the wall and waited.
“Lucky?” Abby called. Lucky barked in answer; an officious dog, Phin felt, a busybody.
“Remember the boy who cried wolf, Lucky!”
“Remember the skunk!” her grandmother said, and Phin heard the little yelp he’d come to know, a scrabble of paws as Lucky was towed toward the house.
“Do you suppose something followed us off the hill?” the mother asked. “A bobcat’ll do that, I’ve heard.”
“He was quiet all afternoon,” Abby said. “He’s not the most reliable dog, Mummy, you know that.”
“All the same, shall we go out together?”
Out? Oh. Outhouse.
Lantern light wandered out into the darkness. Dry leaves swooshed. Lucky barked inside the house. After several minutes the three came back, chatting quietly. “I declare,” the mother said, “that moon�
�s almost bright enough to read by, Abby.” Abby said something through a yawn, and the door closed behind them. Soon the rectangle of lamplight on ground puffed out.
Early to bed; though if Phin knew that girl, and he was beginning to feel he did, she was lighting another lamp somewhere and opening her book.
Phin wouldn’t have minded a book himself. He’d plumbed the depths of solitude and his own company. But he had his turnips. He crunched more greens, making as much noise in the quiet barn as a stabled horse eating hay; rubbed dirt off one turnip with a handful of hay, and carved slices with his knife. Fresh, spicy, the turnips were a feast. After a while he even felt full.
And comfortable, in the warm coat and soft hay. He pulled more hay over him, making a deep bed, and took a handful of oats from the sack. Dessert.
He should make a plan now. At least start thinking what to do, where to go. How to pay. Tuck a bill under that bottle.
Outside an owl hooted. Another answered, a long way off, and in the barn a mouse squeaked, and…
ERRRRRR!
Phin leaped up. Pale light, gray-gold mounds of hay. On the beam in front of him a rooster swelled its chest, threw its head back, and bellowed a challenge to the dawn.
Phin sank down, nerves twanging. Hens dropped off the beams around him. Some flapped to the floor below. Others strolled across the hay, clucking and pecking and seeking secluded corners.
No sound from the house yet. Phin put his eye to a crack between the barn boards. All he could see was treetops, gold and green and scarlet, sloping downhill under a pearly sky.
Apparently he hadn’t made a plan last night. Apparently he’d fallen asleep instead.
Now what? He rubbed his face hard with both hands, trying to wake up all the way.
Off in a corner, one hen began a raucous squawking. A few minutes later another joined in. With a last yawn and vigorous headshake, Phin got his mind to work.