Ten Thousand Truths

by Susan White

  Rachel sat on a nearby rock and untied her laces. Sam had the stick back on the ground in front of her before she’d had time to remove her sneakers and socks. She threw it a bit farther this time. She watched as Bud, who was a little ways down the shore, explored a flower of some kind that was swaying in the breeze. Sam came back and dropped his stick again. This time Rachel waded out into the lake a bit before throwing it. After a few more throws, Sam took the stick in his mouth and curled up in a sunny spot on the shore.

  Rachel walked to the end of the dock and sat down, dangling her feet in the cool water. Bud followed her out and sat down on the weathered boards beside her. Rachel stared at the gently rippling water. She wondered if they swam in this lake. The kids at the Harriets’ all had memberships to the aquatic centre down the street, but Rachel had always refused to go. She told them there was no way she was going to waste her time there when she could be hanging out with her friends at the ball field or the skate park. But the real reason she never went was because she didn’t know how to swim. She couldn’t even do the dog paddle. She thought about walking out to her waist and letting herself drop into the water. What would it feel like to float? she wondered.

  A large fly buzzed around Rachel’s head and she swatted it with her hand. Bud moved closer and laid his head on her lap. Rachel patted his head and shifted her weight a bit. She could hear the hammering sound again. She heard another sound she guessed was a bird. She closed her eyes, listening to the echoing call. In the background she could hear the lapping of the water and the trees moving slightly in the breeze. The sound of Bud’s breathing was mixed with the other sounds. It was so very quiet here, yet not quiet at all.

  Rachel heard Amelia call her name. She stood up and walked to the end of the dock, shaking off the cramp in her leg from sitting too long in one position. Sam raised his head and shook himself awake. He picked up his stick and brought it to Rachel again. She threw it toward the path that led up the hill. Both dogs started the walk up without her as she put her socks and sneakers back on. When she stood up she could see that Amelia was walking down the path toward her.

  “Did you hear the loons?” Amelia asked as she got closer. “There’s a pair and two young ones on the lake this year. If you’re really lucky they will come close enough for you to have a good look at them.” Amelia continued talking before Rachel had a chance to answer. “Did Sam keep you busy throwing his stick? You met Zac, did you? He and Raymond have gone for a load of firewood now. He’ll bring us the kitchen wood first and after we get that all in the shed he’ll bring the furnace wood. We put that in the basement through the end window. Zac has a chute thing rigged up that makes putting it in pretty easy. Then we stack it up against the north wall.”

  The fact that Rachel didn’t say anything didn’t keep Amelia from talking the whole way up to the house. They stopped at the end of the house where a clothesline was set up. Colourful clothes filled the line from one end to the other. Amelia picked up a large wicker basket that sat on the ground and passed it to Rachel. “Take the clothes off the line and bring them in, please. I’m going inside to make a chicken pot pie for supper. You can fold the laundry, and then I’ll show you where everything goes and give you a tour of the rest of the house.”

  Rachel pulled the line toward her, none too happy about having to touch what she supposed was everybody’s underwear. As if reading her mind, Amelia stopped and turned back toward her. “Can you believe there’s a law in the state of Minnesota that makes it illegal to hang male and female underwear on the same clothesline? Silly, isn’t it? It’s just a piece of clothing like any other.” She laughed to herself as she headed into the house.

  Two sets of underwear in assorted pastel colours were the first things Rachel took off the line. The days of the week were embroidered on the front of them and both Fridays were missing. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum take the organizing of their undergarments very seriously, she thought. Next came several large pairs of boxers. She took the clothespins off them quickly and dropped them in the basket, trying not to think about the big butt they covered. Then there was a row of granny panties. She couldn’t believe she was going to have to fold them. Socks came next. About twenty pairs stretched out along the line. Then she took off several T-shirts and blouses. A huge pair of blue jeans came next and as Rachel set them in the basket she laughed, thinking that she could probably get her entire body into one leg of these massive things. Several towels and face cloths were the last things on the line. After taking them off, she put the clothespins in a bag hanging nearby and picked up the laundry basket. As she walked toward the house she could see the twins lying on opposite ends of a hammock fastened to two old trees in the middle of the lawn. They were giggling as Crystal made the hammock sway from side to side. The first word she had heard either of them say came from Chelsea as she hollered for her sister to stop.

  The kitchen was very hot when Rachel walked in with the laundry basket. Amelia was putting a piece of wood in the stove while holding the lid in her other hand with a tool of some kind. “I need a hot fire to cook the crust of the pie,” she explained, hanging the tool on the back of the stove and walking over to the table.

  Rachel could see that there was a dish on the table already filled with chicken and vegetables. Amelia spooned gravy onto the mixture then carried the dish into the pantry. Rachel could hear the sound of the wooden rolling pin clunking against the counter, and a couple of minutes later when Amelia emerged, the pie was covered with pastry. She opened the oven door and slid it onto the rack.

  “I may as well stick a peach cobbler in the oven while it’s hot,” Amelia said as she walked over to the table and reached for a peach from the communal basket. She peeled the skin, cut it away from the pit, and sliced it into a baking dish.

  Rachel folded the towels and facecloths and set them on a chair. She picked up a flowered blouse and started to fold it. “The peaches are really good.” The sound of her own voice startled Rachel. She couldn’t even remember putting the thought together and deciding to speak it—the words had just come out and at first she wasn’t even sure if Amelia had heard her.

  “Have another one,” Amelia answered. “That whole basket is yours and they go bad so quickly. It’s like so much else in our lives. We have to enjoy it while we have it.”

  Amelia pushed Rachel’s basket toward her. Rachel noticed that she had left the pit of the first one she ate in the basket. She picked it out and set it on the newspaper that held the peelings and pits of the ones Amelia was putting in the dish and then picked out another peach. She sat down and took a bite. The second peach seemed sweeter and tasted even better to her than the first one had.

  Rachel followed Amelia into a room with an old couch and chair. A larger table surrounded by an assortment of wooden chairs sat off to the side. There was a desk in one corner and Rachel could see an old-fashioned black phone sitting on it. So there is communication with the outside world, after all, Rachel thought.

  Amelia led Rachel upstairs. At the top of the stairs was a landing with an old rocking chair and a big trunk sitting near a window. A rug made with squares of bright colours sat on the floor in front of the rocker. Several doors led to rooms off the landing, but they were all closed. Amelia pointed to each of the doors and told Rachel whose bedroom it was without opening them. “We try to keep our privacy here, though I will check your room now and again,” she said. “Oh, and in an old house like this is you don’t want to leave food lying around or we’ll be overrun with mice.”

  Amelia opened a door and walked into the room. There was no window so she had to pull a chain on a fixture hanging from the ceiling for them to be able to see. Every wall of the room was lined from floor to ceiling with shelves, and each shelf was filled with books or magazines. There were also books piled on the tables, benches, and chairs. One wall was completely filled with yellow-bound National Geographic magazines.

  “January 19
15 is the first National Geographic we have. My grandmother said that her father began subscribing to the magazine when she was ten years old. They kept getting it just about every year after that except for a few years during the Second World War. I still get it. It wouldn’t seem right to stop now.”

  Amelia walked over and opened a door on the far wall and Rachel could see that it led into her bedroom.

  “You can come through this room from your bedroom to reach the hall and the front staircase. Feel free to read any book you like. They are in no special order except for the National Geographics, which are organized by month and year. I’d better go down and make sure that the crust of my pie isn’t burning and finish making the cobbler. Take your time and look over the books if you want, then grab the laundry from downstairs and put it away. You can put the towels in the cupboard in the bathroom downstairs, then bring the basket up here and leave it on the trunk in the hall. We can all put our own clothes away later.”

  Rachel didn’t know where to start. This was probably the most books she had ever seen in one place besides the public library. There hadn’t been anything to read at the Harriets’ except for a couple of Reader’s Digest condensed books. She picked up an armload of books that were stacked on the chair nearest to her and carried them through the door into her bedroom. She couldn’t get over the fact that she could walk right into a room next door and pick anything she wanted to read from hundreds of books. Right next door were enough books to fill her craving to read other people’s stories so she wouldn’t have to think anything about the miserable story of her own life. She sat on the side of the bed for just a minute or two before heading down to get the laundry.

  “I was right about the cobbler, wasn’t I?” asked Zac as he pulled down the tailgate of his truck. Supper was finished, Raymond had gone to the lake, and Chelsea, Crystal, and Amelia were doing the dishes. Rachel had been told to help Zac unload the firewood.

  Zac began to fill his arms with wood. Rachel followed his lead by placing some sticks across her arms and then setting them down on the pile in the woodshed the way he did. Even if she wanted to talk to Zac, it felt like any words she might say were stuck in her throat. She had never had trouble talking before, and as a matter of fact she had constantly been told by Bob to shut her smart mouth. Rachel always pretended that it was a compliment to be told she had a smart mouth even though she knew very well that it wasn’t what Bob meant. It seemed to Rachel that the drunker he got, the smarter her mouth got. Sometimes her mouth got so smart that he would try to slap it, though he almost always missed. His aim got worse the more he drank, too.

  Rachel would’ve liked to ask Zac some questions. Where did he live? Did he live by himself? What was wrong with Amelia’s face? Why did Chelsea and Crystal not seem to talk to anyone but each other? Where was the school around here? Questions kept coming to her brain, but she never opened her mouth. Instead she just continued to load the wood in her arms, carry it into the shed, and place it on the neat stack, trying not to walk into Zac as he did the same. Zac wasn’t asking her any questions either, and she was glad about that. Talking about herself was one thing she definitely hated doing.

  It was dark when they finished unloading the wood. Rachel looked toward the house and suddenly it hit her that she was staying here. She would have to sleep in this place and she started to feel a nervousness she hadn’t felt all day. It wasn’t like she hadn’t been dropped in strange places before, and it wasn’t anything great sleeping in her old room at the Harriets’, but this place was so different. It was so quiet here. There was no sound of traffic, no voices, no police sirens, and no lights to be seen. How am I going to sleep here? she wondered.

  “I’m going to take the raspberries up to the Farmers’ Market in the morning and you can come with me if you want,” Zac said as he walked back toward his truck.

  He closed the tailgate and turned to face Rachel, who still had not said a word. “I can show you some of the sights of the peninsula. You might want to see where the school is, though if you’re anything like I was at your age, the last thing you want to think about right now is going back to school in September. If you want to come, be ready by 7:30.”

  Zac jumped into the driver’s seat of his truck. “Look at those stars,” he said, pointing up at the brilliant canvas above them. “You don’t see a sky like that in the city.” Then he closed the door, put the truck in gear, and drove away.

  Rachel stared up at the sky as she walked back toward the veranda. The stars were almost hypnotizing. “Look at the stars!” she remembered Caleb saying when he was little. “There must be a hundred of them!” She and her mom had teased him about that for a long time. Rachel saw a brighter star moving through the sky. She closed her eyes and silently spoke their names before she turned and ran into the house.

  Rachel fell asleep quickly. She didn’t hear a thing until Amelia knocked on her door in the morning. She got dressed, went through the book room, down the front stairs, and into the bathroom. She washed her face quickly before heading into the kitchen, which smelled of frying bacon. Zac was sitting at the table drinking a cup of coffee.

  Amelia served Rachel up a plate of blueberry pancakes. “If you want to help Zac at the market this morning, you can keep a dollar from every box of raspberries you sell,” she said as she set the syrup on the table. “The girls bagged some yellow beans yesterday, so they can have the money from those. Raymond gets half the egg money this week. Did you know that a fresh egg will sink but a stale egg floats? Oh, and the lake today, when do you want your hour?”

  Zac stood up and set his cup beside the sink. “It’s going to be a hot day, Amelia. I’ll take the kids swimming later when we get back from the market. Are you ready, Rachel?” He walked out the door without waiting for an answer.

  “I’ll take my hour after supper,” Rachel told Amelia. She rolled the last bite of pancake through the syrup left on her plate, finished it, and hurried to put on her orange sneakers.

  Rachel carried the first wooden tray of raspberries to a long table on the veranda of the log building that housed the Kingston Farmers’ Market. People were already waiting at the table and one woman reached for a box as Rachel set the tray down.

  “I’ll take three boxes of raspberries,” the woman said. “And two dozen eggs please.”

  Rachel looked at the coins in the coffee can Zac passed her. She counted the change before she put the woman’s money in. Rachel had always kept a bit of the change when Margaret or Bob had sent her to the store. They never seemed to count it and never caught on. But today she was going to keep track of all the money and give every cent back to Amelia. It was too early to take that chance.

  The morning went quickly and by about 11:00 everything had been sold. Zac had let Rachel do all the selling and had spent most of his time walking around and talking to people. He had even brought a few people over to the table to meet Rachel, as if she were some celebrity or something. He knew a lot more about her than she thought he did. He knew her last name, her age, and what grade she was going into. One woman said that her daughter was going into Grade 8, too, and that she would tell her to look out for Rachel when school started. Zac also introduced Rachel to a man named Roger and told her he would be her bus driver. He shook her hand and joked about her always being able to get the back seat since Amelia’s kids were the first kids on the bus in the morning.

  Zac bought a loaf of bread, some doughnuts, and a couple packages of meat before they got in the truck and started for home.

  “Why doesn’t Wart—I mean, Amelia—come to the market herself?” asked Rachel.

  Zac slowed down a bit and turned toward Rachel. “She doesn’t leave home,” he said.

  At first Rachel thought Zac was going to say more, but he didn’t. She wanted to ask about Amelia’s face. Nobody had said a word about it and Rachel wondered how anyone could ignore it or pretend it looked normal.

&nbs
p; “This is Macdonald Consolidated School,” Zac said as he pulled into a driveway in front of the school and shut off the truck’s engine. “It goes up to Grade 8, so you’ll go here for one year, then move on to Hampton High School when you start Grade 9.”

  Rachel looked out at the big building. “Did you go to this school?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Zac answered.

  “Are you Amelia’s son?” Rachel blurted out, realizing she hadn’t even considered before that he could be Amelia’s son. He didn’t call her Mom, though.

  “No. I was a foster kid just like you. I ended up at Amelia’s when I was eleven years old. Let’s get you home. We’re just like a Brinks truck sitting here with all the money you made this morning.” Zac laughed and pulled out of the schoolyard.

  They were turning on to Walton Lake Road when Rachel spoke again. “I don’t know how to swim.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Zac said. “I’ll teach you.”

  Rachel passed the coffee can to Amelia as soon as she walked into the kitchen. Amelia stood up, wiped her wet hands on a towel, and set it on top of the fridge.

  “I’ll get you to count it after you eat lunch. How did it go? I suppose Zac found lots of people to gab with and left all the work to you. He does like to take someone with him so he can make the rounds. We’ve already eaten. There’s some corn on the cob in the pot on the stove, but before you sit down go holler to Zac to come have some, too. We’ve been cutting up mustard pickles all morning. You can ask Raymond what he was crying about. He chopped the onions. I’m just finishing up the cucumbers and then we’ll be done. I’ll stop talking and let you go get Zac.”