by M. P. Barker
“Efan’s home!” she started to sing out, but Pa scooped her up and silenced her with a kiss.
“It’s a surprise,” he said softly. “A surprise for Mama.”
“What’s a surprise?” a voice called out.
Ethan ducked under a strand of drying nappies and ran through the kitchen into the best room.
Ma was lacing up her dress with one hand and settling Benjamin with the other. Her brown eyes seemed to have faded to the shade of weathered wood, shadowed with ashy circles underneath. Frizzes of chestnut hair straggled from beneath her cap. Surely there hadn’t been gray in Ma’s hair when Ethan had left.
“Mama?” Ethan said tentatively. He hadn’t called her “Mama” in years—ever since Massey Dunn had told him that only babies and girls said “Mama” and “Papa.” Big boys said “Ma” and “Pa.” But now it was “Mama” again, and he envied the baby, who only had to squeak to draw her around him like a cloak against hunger, pain, and fear.
Ma smiled, reaching out with her free hand. “Oh, Ethan, don’t you look fine!” She held him at arm’s length, looking him up and down so long, he felt his face grow red.
Maybe it was wearing Pa’s hat that made him look so, Ethan thought. Ma looked fine, too, now that she was smiling, though when she hugged him, her arms felt thin and trembly. Pa’s hat tumbled off, landing on the floor with a hollow clunk.
Then her gaze shifted toward the doorway. “Well, Gideon!” she said softly, her eyes blurry with tears.
Pa leaned against the doorjamb with Chloe in his arms, a grin spreading across his face. “Now, Hannah, didn’t I promise I’d bring you something special from the store?”
“I had a talk with Mr. Lyman, and I didn’t like everything I heard,” Pa said. He leaned against the fence, knotting a twist of hay between his long fingers while he watched Ethan milk Tess. “He said he’s been forced to—to discipline you.”
Ethan’s hands pumped at Tess’s teats. The milk made a brittle splash in the bottom of the pail. He pressed his forehead harder against Tess’s flank. Funny how her hide suddenly felt so much cooler than his own skin. “I’m sorry about the plate and everything, Pa. I’ll work extra hard to pay for it, and—”
Pa’s long, thin fingers sat heavily on Ethan’s shoulder. “It’s not only a plate, son. Lying, stealing, disobedience. We taught you better than that.”
Fingers, udder, and pail melded into a blur of pinks and browns. Only the hollow sound of liquid against wood told Ethan that the milk still squirted into the bucket. “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”
Pa crouched next to Ethan. “Son, you have to realize how important it is that you do well at Mr. Lyman’s.”
Ethan couldn’t meet Pa’s eyes. “I don’t like it there. Can’t I just stay home?”
“You know we have a contract. There are penalties if I break it.”
Penalties. That was what Daniel had said, too.
“Mr. Lyman’s giving you a better home than we can, better food than you’ve had in your life. He’s teaching you things I can’t, things you need to learn. . . .” The weariness in Pa’s voice stung Ethan harder than anger would have.
Ethan bit the inside of his mouth, tasted blood on his tongue. It hadn’t been a lie, then, what Mr. Lyman had said about Pa sending him away to be disciplined.
“Your mama and your sisters and the baby,” Pa continued, “they’re all depending on you, just like they depend on me. You can’t come running home just because things don’t suit you. Remember what I said the day you left?”
I need you to go. The weight of that need sat harder on Ethan’s shoulders than Mr. Lyman’s switch. He nodded, chewing at his lower lip to stop it from trembling.
But Pa was remembering a different thing. “Remember what I said about setting your mind to be happy? It seems to me you’ve set your mind to be unhappy, and so you are. Like that Paddy.”
Ethan winced. “His name is Daniel. He’s my friend.”
“Mr. Lyman says he’s full of mischief and he sets you a poor example.”
Ethan looked up. Pa’s face had never seemed so long and stern before. The space between them suddenly looked like miles instead of only a few feet. “He’s not so bad as everybody thinks, Pa. He’s only lonesome.”
“Ethan, son. You’ve got a good heart. If you had your way, you’d take in every stray dog and orphaned bird you come across. But the world’s a hard place, with plenty of folk ready to take advantage of good-hearted people.”
Tess’s udder sagged loose in Ethan’s hands, the milk coming in trickles now. Pa’s long fingers ruffled Ethan’s hair. He fought the longing to close his eyes and lean into the familiar caress. “No. He’s not like that,” Ethan insisted.
“He’s a good six or seven years older than you. Why doesn’t he have any friends his own age?”
“They all laugh at him on account of he’s Irish and he talks different and he has red hair.” Surely Pa would understand that. If Pa remembered what it felt like to be taunted, he’d feel kindlier toward Daniel.
“If the boy has no friends his own age, there’s more reason to it than something as foolish as red hair. Maybe it’s because he’s a troublemaker.”
“He’s not, Pa! He’s not!” The vehemence of his own denial surprised Ethan. He’d never dared to contradict his father before. But Pa had never been wrong before, had he? Pa wasn’t supposed to be wrong. “Daniel works hard. Really he does. And he’s good with the animals, and he teaches me things, and—”
Pa’s voice hardened. “That’s enough. Paddy’s been given more than anyone in his position has a right to expect, but all he does is scowl and sulk and make trouble where there is none.”
Ethan opened his mouth to deny Pa’s accusations. But he couldn’t tell Pa how Daniel came to his defense against Mr. Lyman’s switchings, Mrs. Lyman’s pinches and slaps, without telling all the ways he’d gone wrong, all the ways he’d been a disappointment and a failure. Worst of all, he couldn’t bear to have Pa confirm that Mr. Lyman was right—that Pa had sent Ethan away because he was too soft to give Ethan the discipline he needed.
Ethan turned his face against Tess’s side as he stripped the final drops of milk into the pail.
“I know you’ve no choice about working with him or living with him,” Pa said. “But when your time’s your own, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to spend it with this Paddy fellow, do you understand?”
Ethan picked up the pail and swiveled off the stool, away from his father.
Pa took the pail. It bumped Ethan’s thigh and Pa’s knee as it hung between them. “Mr. Ward has a couple boys your age. I think you’d be better off spending your time with them, don’t you?”
“The Wards?” Their chant of “Sim-ple, sim-ple! Ethan’s pa is sim-ple” echoed in his head. But telling Pa about it would be like saying it himself. It would be like making it true. “I—I dunno,” Ethan muttered. A month ago, there was nothing he couldn’t tell his father. Now, suddenly, he couldn’t tell him anything. Anything but “Yessir.”
The pail shifted to Pa’s other hand. He picked up Ethan’s hat, perched atop a fence post. “That’s the way.” He settled the hat onto Ethan’s head. It slipped sideways over one eye. “Your mother and I have enough worries without wondering what sort of company you’re keeping while you’re away from home.”
“Y-yessir.”
Pa’s hat brim cast a band of shadow across his face. “And I don’t want to hear any more about Mr. Lyman having to discipline you, understand?” The band of shadow divided Pa’s features like a mask, the light touching only his angular jaw, lined hard and deep around nose and mouth.
“Discipline?” Ethan repeated, adjusting his hat. “N-no, sir.”
Ethan’s bare feet padded a silent and solitary path across the darkened kitchen toward the cellar. He eased the door open and peered down the stairs. The tiny circle of light from the candle seemed a feeble defense against the yawning blackness below. The cellar’s silent dar
kness seemed alive, waiting to swallow him up, just as it had swallowed Daniel.
Ethan quelled his fear and padded down the stairs, concentrating on the small charmed circle within the candle’s light. He held the candle high, sending the dark retreating behind barrels and crocks and boxes and bins. The smells of vinegar, rotting cabbage and apples, and damp earth stung his nostrils.
Daniel sat on one of the boxes of sand that held last fall’s root vegetables. His knees were drawn up to his chest, his arms wrapped around his legs. His head was bowed against his knees, and he rocked back and forth, murmuring in his secret language.
“D-Daniel?” Ethan said softly, then again, louder, when Daniel didn’t reply. “Daniel!”
Daniel’s head jerked up. He blinked twice, hard, at the light and took in a gulping breath. He turned away, rubbing his face with the heels of his hands. “Ah, lad, I must’a been dreaming,” he said. His voice sounded as though it stuck in his throat. The dark shadows and red rims around his eyes looked like something different from rubbed-out sleep.
“Are you all right?” Ethan asked.
Daniel coughed. “Aye . . . Aye,” he said hoarsely. “A bit damp and dusty is all.” His cough turned into a rough laugh with a hiccup at the end. “Least I’m too big for him to shut up in the potato bin.” His eyes fixed on the light the way a dog’s eyes might fix on a scrap of food. “You still fancy knowing what it’s like on a ship, lad, just pinch out your candle.”
Ethan suppressed a shiver. He wove his way between a pair of barrels and hoisted himself onto the box next to Daniel. He set the candle between them. “Why are you being punished?”
Daniel shifted to sit cross-legged, facing Ethan. “Can’t you guess, now?” His fingers plucked at the puddle of tallow at the candle’s base.
“We had to sit in the parlor ’til bedtime, listening to Mrs. Lyman read from Scripture,” Ethan said. “It was all about stealing.”
“Aye. Zeloda saw me going down to the root cellar after some carrots. Himself was standing at the top of the stairs when I come back up.”
“Did you tell him they were for Ivy?”
Daniel’s shoulders rustled his shirt. The shirt was untucked and ballooned around him like a skin that he’d never grow into. “Don’t you think he knew that? He said—” His eyes drifted toward the candle. “He said if I was that mad for carrots, I could stay down here and have me fill of ’em.”
“Oh. Did he thrash you very bad?”
A shudder worked its way down Daniel’s back. “It wasn’t the thrashing I was minding so much as missing me ride.” There was something else, Ethan guessed, that Daniel had minded more than either, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.
Ethan dug into his pocket for something wrapped in his handkerchief. “Ma gave me some cake to take back with me. You can have it if you like. I had plenty to eat at tea.” He unwrapped it and laid it on the box. “Oh,” he sighed. The cake had dissolved into a pile of crumbs. “It’s broken.”
Daniel moistened his fingertips, pinched some crumbs together into a lump, and stuck it in his mouth. “It’s fine, lad.” He licked his fingers noisily and took another lump of crumbs. “How was your visit?”
Ethan stuck his thumb in the warm tallow. “It was all right, I s’pose.” It wasn’t entirely a lie, nor entirely the truth. Some of it had been fine: working like a man alongside Pa to put in the potatoes, start Ma’s kitchen garden, fix fences, mend the shed roof. Doing three days’ work in a day and a half. Feeling a happy sort of exhaustion that his work made up somehow for not being there while Ma had been sick, for not knowing they’d needed him. Curling up on his old bed in the attic with the marmalade cat warm and purring at his back. Teasing Maria and Chloe and not even getting scolded for it. Catching Ma watching him across the table, wearing a smile that looked as if she’d been saving it up ever since he’d left.
But then he’d noticed the lines around Ma’s eyes, how she seemed to get tired so quickly. He’d noticed, too, that there’d been no singing in the evenings, less noise in the house altogether. Even the secret glances that Ma and Pa exchanged—the ones that used to warm Ethan inside like a swallow of good sweet tea—even those had changed. Something new about the tilt of an eyebrow or the curve of a lip that Ethan had caught passing between them had made his insides go still and dull.
Daniel’s hand stopped halfway to the cake. “As good as all that, eh? Something wrong to home?”
“No. Not really. I mean, Ma was sick, but she’s all better now. Mostly.” Ethan watched the wick curl, blacken, crumble inside the flame, the tallow oozing down in thick, slow drops.
Something that was not candlelight flickered across Daniel’s face and was gone. “Is she, now? Are you sure?”
“I—well, that’s what Pa says.” Ethan pinched a bit of soft tallow from the top of the candle. It seared his fingertips.
“And what else did your da say that has you looking as if you just felt the end of herself’s spoon on your knuckles?”
“Pa says—he says I’m not to keep company with you anymore.” Ethan peeked at Daniel’s face.
Daniel seemed to be concentrating on a pair of shriveled cabbage heads hanging from the ceiling in knobby brown fists. “Oh, aye? And how’re you s’posed to be getting your chores done, then?”
“I mean, after chores—in the evenings and on the Sabbath. He says you make trouble for me.”
Daniel folded the ends of Ethan’s handkerchief over the remains of the cake. “Your da’s right. You oughtn’t to be spending time with liars and thieves.” He set the little bundle in Ethan’s lap.
“But—but you’re not!”
Daniel hopped off the box and paced the cellar, tethered within the circle of yellow light. “Ain’t you heard me with your own ears and seen me with your own eyes? Ain’t that what I been locked up for all afternoon and evening?” The flame bent and twisted with the breeze from Daniel’s passage, turning his shadow into a dark, dancing ghoul against walls and ceiling, around barrels and boxes and bottles.
“But that’s different! That don’t count!”
Daniel stopped in front of Ethan. The flame straightened and stilled. “You ain’t but nine, lad. Who’re you to be saying what counts and what don’t? You’d best listen to your da.”
“But if I do, then you won’t have anybody.” Worse, though, Ethan thought, was imagining life at the Lymans’ without Daniel’s company to ease the time between work and sleep.
Daniel’s body moved carelessly inside his shirt. His face twisted before he turned away. “I got Ivy. She’s been enough for me this long.”
“He wants me to make friends with the Wards.”
“Oh . . . well, he don’t know them, now, does he?”
“He don’t know you, either.”
Daniel slowly turned back, shaking his head. “Neither do you, lad.”
Ethan frowned at the cake in his lap. He fumbled in his pocket. “I brought you something else.”
Daniel’s little horse stood in Ethan’s palm. The flame made its sides seem to heave in and out, its nostrils quiver with breath, its mane bob along its proudly arched neck.
Daniel stood frozen for a moment, a muscle trembling below one eye. He pressed his lips together and drew in a slow, steady breath. In one long stride, he was in front of Ethan, his hand closing gently around the horse. “Ta, lad,” he murmured.
“Ta?” Ethan asked.
“It means thanks.”
“Is that Irish?”
Daniel shook his head. “But it’s how—it’s how me da would’a said it.”
Chapter Fifteen
“She’ll go bald if you keep brushing her like that,” Ethan said. Ankle-deep tufts of copper hair carpeted Ivy’s stall. But the hair kept coming, and there was still no sign of her bare skin.
“You can help if you like,” Daniel suggested. He’d already brushed out most of Ivy’s loose winter hair and burnished the mare’s coat so that even in the shadowy stall she glowed softly. N
ow he gently brushed out the tangles in her mane. The mare arched her neck and crooned at his shoulder.
“Why should I spend my Sunday working?” Ethan’s lower lip jutted out.
Rain thudded on the barn roof. The relentless downpour had made the Lymans decide to stay home instead of going to the meetinghouse for afternoon services.
“You can do her tail,” Daniel said.
Ethan gave the thick chestnut hair a halfhearted swipe with his brush.
Daniel rubbed his thumb up and down the inside of Ivy’s ear. The mare closed her eyes and leaned toward him, her upper lip quivering. A delighted grunt rumbled deep within her throat. He responded with a secret word that sounded like the happy whicker Ivy made when she greeted him.
“That means horse, doesn’t it?” Ethan asked. He tried to repeat the word, but it sounded more like he was clearing his throat. “It means horse, or mare, or something like that. It must, because it’s what you always call her.”
Ethan thought he saw a splash of pink color Daniel’s cheek. “Umm—no—that ain’t it. You say it like this: ‘a mhuirnín.’ And it don’t mean horse.”
Ethan tried again, but he still couldn’t get his mouth to shape the word. “Well, what does it mean?”
Daniel retreated to the mare’s forelock and mumbled something.
“What?”
Daniel took an audible breath. “Sweetheart, or darling, or some such.”
Ethan lowered his head and grinned at the mare’s tail, giving it three hard sweeps with his brush. “Can you teach me? Teach me to talk Irish, I mean?”
Daniel’s “no” was brisk and definite. “I don’t fancy having a great spoonful of cayenne jammed down me throat. Nor do you, I’ll wager.”
Ethan swallowed, his imagination already stinging his mouth and nose. “B-but you talk it—”
Daniel stepped out from the mare’s shadow and waved his brush at Ethan. “Only out here, see? Never in the house, and never when himself is around. Nor herself neither.”