The Journey Prize Stories 27

by Various

  When she’s finished, she and the boy go back up to the cabin and eat the last of their food for lunch. Then they put on their packs. Diane told the girl that there’s a small hamlet with a general store five or six kilometres down the road from the farm.

  Just as they are leaving, they see Margaret’s guest pull through the front gates. He’s a balding man in his mid-forties; he drives a very expensive car.

  “Who would ever take a course with Margaret?” the girl asks, as she watches the guest drive down toward the courtyard.

  “I don’t know, but Diane says Margaret is very well respected in the Italian horse community. Apparently, her family used to be royalty or something.”

  “What does that count for? The horses don’t give a shit.”

  The road beyond the gate is smooth walking, and the weather is warm. The light pours down through the lines of orange trees and onto the grassy fields on either side of the road. The girl holds the boy’s hand as they walk.

  When they finally arrive at the general store they buy frozen bruschetta and cheese, cereals and madeleines and four pounds of ground beef, milk and carrots and a favourite brand of packaged chocolate cake that they can only find in Italy. Then they pack all of their groceries into their backpacks and start off down the road back to the farm.

  “Well,” the boy says. “That was the last of the money.”

  “It’s all right,” says the girl. “Margaret has to pay us. We’ll stay with her until we have enough money to move on. Then we’ll leave. Maybe we’ll leave in the night, like the Hungarians.”

  The boy smiles slightly, but neither of them laughs.

  When they arrive back at the cabin they eat for nearly an hour straight, cramming the cakes and the raw noodles into their mouths without cooking them, eating slices of bread and drinking milk straight from the carton.

  At eight o’clock, the boy says that he’s going down to feed the chickens. The night is clear and pleasant, and the girl decides to go down with him.

  As they are walking down the path, the boy doubles over suddenly, clutching at his stomach.

  “What?” the girl asks. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” the boy says. “It’s just the cramps. I think I ate too much. We should have cooked those noodles.”

  After a moment, he straightens up and begins walking normally again. But the girl continues to watch him, nervously.

  When they enter the courtyard, they meet Diane.

  “Well,” Diane says, “I finally got the mule down to the bottom paddock. Margaret asked me to move It this morning when she saw It chewing one of the fences—she didn’t want her guest to see It misbehaving. It’s certainly not happy about it.”

  “What does she teach her students, anyway?” the boy asks.

  “I don’t know,” Diane says. She pulls a cigarette from her pocket and lights it. “They haven’t been outside with the horses, that’s for sure. They didn’t leave her office all day. I heard Margaret lecturing him, so I went to have a peek for myself. But when I got there all I saw was Margaret standing in front of a big dry-erase board, and her student sitting in front of her, looking up at her like she had him under a spell. When she saw me, she closed the door in my face.” Diane exhales a puff of smoke. “Oh,” she says, “Margaret wants to talk to you, by the way. I was just on my way up to the cabin to get you.”

  “Me?” the girl asks.

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Did she say why?” the boy asks.

  “No. Didn’t say why.” Diane exhales another puff.

  The girl finds Margaret sitting at the kitchen table, her hands folded neatly in front of her. “Why are you here?” Margaret asks.

  “Diane said you asked me to come,” the girl says.

  “No, I meant him.”

  “I thought you wanted to talk to both of us,” the boy says.

  Margaret sighs. She runs her hands through her hair and tugs at the ends. “This is what I mean. You do not listen. No one listens.” She stretches her cheeks into a quick, taut smile. “I wait all day for you to come back, and you stay away. I fed the fires all day by myself while I am trying to teach my student. I cannot teach when it is so cold, so terribly cold! Feel my hands—” She walks up to the girl and places her small, grubby hands on the girl’s face. The girl sees dark lines of dirt beneath Margaret’s fingernails.

  “Margaret,” the girl says, “today was our day off. We went to get groceries—”

  “Who used all of this paper towel?” Margaret asks, holding up a diminished roll. “I can’t understand, where did all of this paper towel go?”

  “I used it,” says the girl, “to clean the windows.”

  “And where are the wine bottles?”

  “I washed them and put them in a box underneath the sink.”

  “What about the kettle? And the pots?”

  “They’re hanging above the stove, on the rack. Look, there.”

  “Oh,” Margaret says. “Oh, oh, oh, oh.”

  She turns and marches back up the stairs toward her bedroom. At first the girl thinks she’s storming out, but then Margaret’s voice echoes down the stairwell. “Come with me,” she calls. “Come with me, please, now.”

  When the girl reaches the top of the stairs, she sees Margaret standing in the bathroom, a hand covering her mouth. Her eyes are wet with tears.

  “How could you do this?” she asks. “How?”

  “Do what?” the girl asks.

  “How could you … move everything? This is not cleaning. This is destroying. It is a disaster!”

  Margaret begins to rearrange all of the items that the girl had cleaned. “This was here,” she says, moving a toothbrush to a different slot on the wooden toothbrush rack. “And this was here.” She snatches up a rose-shaped soap from the porcelain soap holder and places it next to the large bar of soap that sits in a dish near the taps. “And these were here,” she says, moving the shampoos and conditioners back to their original positions, in the yellow rust-rings the girl had tried to scrub away from around the top of the tub.

  “You must never do this again,” Margaret says. “Do you understand? You must never come into my house and touch my things again. We use only one sheet of paper towel to clean the toilet seat, and another to clean out the sink. We do not ever move anything or throw anything away.”

  The girl watches Margaret without saying anything.

  “Do you understand?” Margaret asks, her voice frantic. “These possessions I need to stay in the relationships that they are, or I am unsure of how anything is. Do you understand? Are you listening?” She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Come,” she says, when the girl does not answer. “Come down to the kitchen.”

  Margaret goes back down the stairs. After a moment, the girl follows. She stands next to the boy, in the kitchen doorway. They are both facing Margaret, who’s next to the woodstove, warming her hands.

  “I am afraid I was hoping that one of you could drive the tractor—”

  “The tractor?” the boy asks. “What does the tractor have to do with anything?”

  “The tractor’s still broken,” the girl says.

  “It is still broken because I am very poor,” Margaret says. “And I cannot afford to fix it. I’m afraid that I cannot afford to pay you, either. I need to hire someone who can fix and then drive the tractor. That is the type of work I really need done around here.”

  “If you can’t afford to pay us,” the girl says, “then why did you hire us in the first place?”

  “I thought I could pay you, of course. But, no pay. I can’t pay. I am very sorry. What I can do is keep you here for a while. For a few more days, anyway, while my student is here. You work while you are here, and you can keep living in the cabin. But I can’t pay you. Right now I need for you to build up the fires—”

  “No,” the girl says. “We’re not going to keep working here.” She can hear her voice shaking with the pounding of her heart. “We’re leaving. Today.
And we want our money.”

  “What?”

  “We want our fucking money,” says the boy.

  The girl resists the urge to turn toward him, open-mouthed, shocked.

  “But I just said that I can’t afford to pay you.”

  “We worked,” the girl says. “We deserve to be paid. You’re going to give us our money, and then we’re going to leave.”

  “But I don’t have—”

  “Give us our fucking money,” says the boy. His voice teeters on the border of utter rage. He takes a step toward Margaret. His fists are clenched, as if he’s only just stopping himself from throttling her. “We’re sick of putting up with all of your bullshit. We want our money, now!”

  Margaret looks as shocked as the girl feels. “How dare you speak to me this way?” she asks, stepping backwards, away from the boy and closer to the stove. “How dare you? I won’t have this disgusting, disrespectful language in my house. You do not come to my house and speak to me this way—”

  “I don’t give a fuck about you or your house,” the boy says. “Give us our money! Aren’t you listening? We’re not leaving without our fucking money, the money we worked hard for—”

  The girl grabs the boy’s arm to stop him from moving closer to Margaret, but he shakes her off and takes another step.

  Margaret yelps. She’s bumped into the hot stove. She stays perfectly still, caught between the boy and the stove. Her eyes are wide and fearful.

  “We want our money—”

  “Shh!” Margaret hisses, cutting the boy off. Her voice is shrill. “My guest is still sleeping! You will wake my guest!”

  “We want—”

  “Fine!” she breathes. “Fine! I’ll give you the money. Move, move! Get out of my way!”

  Margaret skitters across the hall into her office, backing into it so she doesn’t have to take her eyes off the boy. “You will wait here,” she says. “I will return in one moment.” She closes the door behind her; the handle trembles as she locks it from inside.

  The girl kneels down and looks through the keyhole. She watches as Margaret pauses behind her antique desk, in front of a large portrait of a woman with dark, puffy hair and a husky build. The girl had often looked at the portrait while feeding the fire in Margaret’s office. Now she realizes that it must be one of Margaret’s ancestors.

  Margaret takes the portrait off of the wall to reveal a small, steel safe in a niche cut into the stones above the fireplace. She reaches into the safe and withdraws a thick, brown manila envelope. After pulling a handful of euros out of the envelope, she closes the safe and replaces the picture.

  “What’s she doing?” the boy asks. He’s stepping from foot to foot, as if he’s about to charge at the door.

  “She’s getting the money,” says the girl. “It looks like she has lots.”

  There’s a crinkling sound; the bills emerge from under the crack in the door, as if Margaret is the ghost inside a haunted ATM.

  “Thank you,” the girl says, as she picks them up. “Thank you very much.”

  “Now go away!” Margaret calls. Even though her voice is muffled, the girl can still hear the fear in it. “You will pack your belongings and leave the premises immediately.”

  The girl feels very strange as she and the boy start up the hill toward the cabin. She wants to say something to the boy—some words of comfort, or at least support. But she finds she can’t think of anything. Margaret gave them even less money than she expected; it won’t last long—maybe just long enough to get them to their next job. So instead she says:

  “All that food. We bought all that food and now we’re going to have to leave most of it behind. We’ll never be able to carry it in our bags. And the refrigerated stuff will spoil.”

  The boy doesn’t say anything. In the moonlight he looks deathly pale. His brow is dotted with sweat, as if he’s desperately fighting the desire to be sick. He’s looking at the courtyard gate. The girl sees Diane standing there, smoking another cigarette.

  “She knew,” the girl whispers. “She could have said something, at least.”

  “You really gave it to poor Margaret,” Diane says, when they get close enough. “I was listening, through the kitchen window.”

  “I—I just snapped,” says the boy. “It was almost like I couldn’t help myself.”

  “Well, some people just have that sort of temper,” Diane says. She blows out a lungful of smoke, making the girl cough.

  “That’s the thing,” the boy says. “Usually, I’m not like that at all. I’ve never yelled at anyone like that in my life.”

  “He’s not,” the girl says. “He’s the gentlest person I know.”

  The girl can tell that Diane isn’t really interested in anything she or the boy has to say. Diane doesn’t know that the girl and the boy had been starving before coming to Margaret’s farm. When Diane shows the cabin to the next set of new hires, and she sees the unwashed dishes piled high in the sink, and the muddy footprints leading to and from the furnace, she won’t take into account how tired, how overworked and overwrought they were. She’ll just think they lived like pigs.

  Diane follows them into the cabin and stands near the door while they pack their bags. The girl wonders if Margaret asked her to watch them, to make sure they didn’t break or steal anything before leaving.

  “Where are you going to go?” Diane asks.

  “To the town with the grocery store,” the boy says.

  “There isn’t a bus station there.”

  “There’s a hotel. We saw one.”

  “Nobody in that whole town speaks a word of English,” says Diane. “There’s no bus, and there’s no train. How are you going to find more work?”

  “Worst comes to worst, we can always just go home,” the boy says.

  “But first we’re going to Venice,” says the girl. She doesn’t know why she says “Venice.” It’s the first city that comes to her mind.

  Diane looks smug; or, somehow validated. “Venice?” she asks. “I hear it’s a beautiful city. But very expensive. Wish I had enough saved up for Venice. Well, I guess this is goodbye, then. You take care of yourselves. Take care, now. Take care.”

  Diane follows them to the door and watches them close it before turning around and heading back toward the house. But she’s only gone a few steps when a shrill whinny sounds from somewhere near the bottom of the valley. The mule’s mother, who’s eating from the rotten round bale just outside the barn, throws her head up and returns the call, her belly heaving. A split second later, a dark blur shoots into the courtyard, clatters across the cobbles, and then leaps over the courtyard fence.

  “It’s the mule!” the boy says.

  “Basta!” Diane cries. “Basta! Basta!”

  But the mule charges past her, gaining speed as It mounts the slope that leads toward the main gate.

  “Catch It!” Margaret screams. She’s hanging out of her bedroom window. “Someone catch It, now!”

  But neither the girl nor the boy make an effort to stop the mule as It gallops past them. They watch It come to within two strides of the main gate, collect Itself, and then leap high into the air.

  When It lands on the other side, It kicks up Its heels and then bolts down the road. The silvery rays of the moon highlight the glossy auburn sheen of Its coat as It picks up speed, travels around a bend, and then disappears into the night.

  “Do you think she’ll open the gate for us?” the boy asks.

  The girl shakes her head.

  They take off their packs and then the boy helps the girl over the fence. The boy passes the packs to the girl and then he too scrambles over, tearing his sweater on the way down. They start toward town, following the mule down the moonlit road.

  MADELEINE MAILLET

  ACHILLES’ DEATH

  Achilles. Not like the god, in French you say it like “a shill”—the s is silent. He was my grandfather and he was strong, he could crack a walnut in one hand, he could do that until he g
ot sick and died. I don’t remember what it was—I want to say it was his heart. I remember that they put a hospital bed in his room and that it looked funny with all the normal furniture. I remember that he looked like a child; is it a cliché, to say that dying people look like children? Because it’s more than just the way we tuck them in.

  The day he died we didn’t go to his deathbed because I had lice real bad. My mom shampooed my hair with insecticide and sat me at the dining room table and combed out all the dead lice, wiping the comb on a mottled old towel. She has a very expressive mouth and I think that’s why she didn’t do it in the bathroom. We had a vanity with a chair and everything and it would’ve been the best place for it, but she didn’t want me to watch her.

  “Are there a lot?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah, honey, there’s lots of these babies,” she said in her trying-not-to-sound-excited voice. It was the voice she used when she told my dad she was gonna pop his zit. “Wanna see one?”

  There was a dead louse on her thumbnail, its exoskeleton was beige, like a worm. I could see the brown food inside, my blood. But I couldn’t see the part that mattered, the piercing and sucking mouthpart.

  My sister stared at us. She was doing her homework at the table, because she wanted to gloat or she wanted to be near us. That morning, after my father had stood up from the table with his dirty plate and peered down at my head and told me I had lice, they had checked her too. She was hysterical, the eczema and the asthma made her meticulous about her person. Now, she stared like she wanted to see the lice and didn’t want to see them.

  “Do you want to talk about Pépé?” Mom asked.

  I felt itchy and sorry, but mostly for myself.

  “No,” we said. We hated feelings talks.

  I could feel the comb’s metal tines scrape my scalp. Well, the lice were almost gone, it would take two weeks of daily combing. It wasn’t fair. I was eleven years old—too old for lice. I was a lost boy in Peter Pan and one of the other lost boys must’ve had them. There was another girl lost boy, but most of us were boys. I had thick, mouse brown hair that I never brushed. It stuck out from my head like a triangle. I had to cut it. And I knew that instead of a girl with wild eyes and wild hair, I would look like a weak-chinned, weak little boy. I had a crush on Eric E. He was my birdhouse project partner. I wanted to be pretty. I wanted him to think I was pretty, but nobody thought I was pretty. I wished I were a boy and had a penis. I would write my name in pee. No, I would pee in a drinking fountain.