by Laura Best
The sunset was as red as the nightshade berries Pru had picked one day while in the woods. She had planned to eat them—they were such a lovely translucent red, tiny and round and so inviting to look at. But when Mama had seen what she was holding, she’d knocked them from her hand and they had scattered to the ground. “Those plants are poison,” Mama had said sternly, “deadly poison.” This had given Pru an odd feeling inside.
It was with that very same odd feeling that Pru now gazed at the sun and wished she could put it in her pocket for safekeeping, for if she had things her way the sun would not set this evening. Something ominous was awaiting them in the dark; Pru could feel it in her bones.
Pru had a good view of the hill from the window in the living room. They had been expecting this ever since Mr. Dixon left, so it came as no real surprise when a car popped up over the hill.
“They’re coming,” Pru called. “The law’s coming and there’s another car behind them. It’s Mr. Dixon’s car. Mr. Dixon’s with them!” The tires crackled on the gravel stones as the police car came slowly to a stop. The white lettering on the side of the vehicle said “RCMP.”
Pru sent Flora and Davey up to hide in the cubby at the top of the stairs, telling them to stay where they were no matter what. She did not wish to alarm them, but at the same time she needed to ensure that they understood the seriousness of the situation. There was no telling what was about to happen now that the law was here. She knew something the law did not: her older brother would not give up without a fight.
Pru glanced over at Jesse. He looked determined, more determined than she had ever seen.
Mr. Dixon hadn’t wasted any time. He must have sent for the police right after he left. Pru had not thought the law would come this quickly; she thought that perhaps she and Jesse would have several hours to devise some sort of plan. But with the money gone, there was nothing they could really do anyway. They were trapped with no place to turn, just like that poor little porcupine sitting in the apple tree the day Jesse shot it.
“I could sneak out the back, go get Reese. He might know what to do,” said Pru. There was hope in her voice. “We can’t. It wouldn’t be fair. If they find out that Reese knew about Mama he might go to jail. We’ve got to handle this on our own,” Jesse said quite firmly.
“But how?” came Pru’s reply as two policemen stepped out of the car.
“I knew he’d call in the law,” said Jesse with loathing as he moved the curtain to one side. “I hope he’s happy.”
“Mr. Dixon’s just doing his job,” Pru said, watching a look of what she believed to be pure hatred spread across her brother’s face.
“I meant Daddy,” he said with a sneer.
Pru could not think of anything to say. She was just as bewildered by Daddy’s behaviour as Jesse and could not imagine why he would have called in the law. It broke her heart to think he could do such a mean and horrible thing to them. It was bad enough that he had taken their money and left them without a word. But this? What would he have to gain by reporting them to the authorities? Had they not proven they were capable of looking after themselves? And hadn’t Mama prepared them for most anything that might arise? Then of course there was always Reese to fall back on if need be. Mama had always said that Reese was the best friend they had.
Pru studied the police officers from this distance. They stood by the roadside speaking with Mr. Dixon and adjusting their revolvers. Mr. Dixon’s arms were flying madly in the air, up and down, over and across. If only I could turn myself into a little bird, thought Pru. I could sit in a tree beside them and hear what they are saying to one another. Jesse paced back and forth by the window. He had a lot on his mind. His feet slapped against the floorboards; his brow knitted tightly.
“They’re coming!” cried Pru as two police officers proceeded toward the house with Mr. Dixon in hot pursuit. In desperation she looked toward Jesse for the answer. He was the oldest, after all, even though they had promised they would make all the decisions together. “They’re get–ting closer!”
Should they run and hide in the cubby with Flora and Davey, hoping they would not be discovered? But surely the police would turn the house upside down and eventu–ally discover them crouched beneath the attic steps.
Jesse gave no indication of what he was thinking. He was standing by the front door now, almost as though he had nothing on his mind at all. Pru could hear the police–men’s footsteps closing in on them, the sound of ground thumping with each step they took. One…two…three… four. Closer and closer. They did not appear to be hurried in their steps. Instead, they advanced toward the house as if they had come for a casual visit. When she heard their boots hit the bottom step, Pru looked to Jesse.
“What do we do?”
“Get the shotgun!” Jesse cried out.
The moment those words came out of Jesse’s mouth two things happened: Pru ran for the closet to get Daddy’s shotgun and the police officers reached for their revolvers and darted behind the woodshed.
Chapter Thirteen
“We just want to talk. Nothing else. You don’t want anyone to get hurt, son!” shouted one of the police officers.
“Stay away!” came Jesse’s reply. “Stay away or I’ll shoot!”
“Listen, son, you don’t want to start shooting. You’re in enough trouble as it is.”
“This is crazy,” said Pru as she watched Jesse check to make sure there was a load of shot in the gun. This had turned into a game of cops and robbers, only some–how they were on the wrong side of things and it most surely wasn’t a game by any stretch of the imagination. It was real life. Her life—hers and Jesse’s and Flora’s and Davey’s—and it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Not this way at all.
“Please, Jesse,” she implored. “Someone could get hurt.”
“We’ve got to show them we mean business, that we’re not just a bunch of dumb kids they can push around,” he said, opening the door a small crack.
As Jesse raised the shotgun, pointing it toward the sky, Pru raced to the bottom of the stairs. She had to warn Flora and Davey. They would be frightened by the loud noise that was about to follow.
“Stand back!” she heard Jesse call out at the officers.
“Flora, Davey! Don’t be scared. It will be loud,” Pru called up to her siblings just moments before the shotgun blast echoed inside the walls of the house.
Pru could not imagine a sound being so deafening. It was as if a mighty explosion had erupted right inside the house, causing it to vibrate. The walls and windows rattled from the strain of the blast. A cloud of gunpowder drifted in the air, filling the entire room with its overpowering odour. Hands over her ears, Pru ran to the front door, where Jesse stood braced against the wall, panting from fear or excitement—she wasn’t quite sure.
“Are you all right?” she called out, her ears still ringing from the effects of the blast.
“Don’t worry about me,” Jesse yelled back.
She went for the window and opened it, hoping the smell would escape, waving her hands wildly in an at–tempt to hurry it on its way.
“Go away,” Jesse called out to the police. “Leave us be.” Pru feared then that the police might storm the house, break down the door and start shooting. What would they care about the four of them? Even Daddy didn’t care enough to say goodbye when he left, surely some strangers would be no different. Would they all soon be dead, lying beneath the ground with Mama? Pru slid to the floor. Jesse joined her and they sat side by side, their shoulders touching, Jesse with the shotgun clutched tightly in his hands.
“We just want to talk,” a policeman shouted back. But Jesse was not about to give up without a fight; Pru could see that all too clearly. This was his home, his family, and no one could have worked any harder over the past months than Jesse to keep it that way. They had both made promises to Mama, and a promise was a promise no matter what the consequence. They would show a united front, just the way Mama had wanted. Pru didn’t like it, but it had to be that w
ay.
“It’s too late to talk,” shouted Jesse. “Now back off or I’ll fire again.”
“Do you have any more shells?” Pru whispered.
Jesse shook his head. “Reese was supposed to pick some up the next time he got to town.”
From where Pru and Jesse were sitting they had a clear view of the road in front of the house and all the area in between. It would be nearly impossible for someone to ambush them through the back door without them seeing. All the same, Jesse got up and barricaded the back door while Pru kept a lookout. She could hear the table being pushed across the kitchen floor, followed by the tall narrow cupboard next to the sink that held Mama’s cup towels in the small shelves at the top and her pots and pans in the bottom. She heard the clinking of pots and pans as the cupboard was dragged across the floor and pushed against the door. The last thing she heard was a muffled cry coming from upstairs.
Davey was crouched beside Flora with his arm around her shoulder when Pru opened the door to the cubby. As soon as Flora looked up and saw Pru she ran toward her sister’s open arms and hugged her so tight that Pru could scarcely catch her breath.
“I told her not to be scared, just like you said, Pru. But it didn’t work,” said Davey apologetically.
“That’s okay,” said Pru, holding Flora to her chest. “Sometimes we all get scared.”
“What happened, Pru?” asked Flora. “Did Jesse shoot another porcupine?”
“He was just shooting in the air,” Pru replied.
“Like when he shot the porcupine?” asked Flora, pouting.
“A bit like that, only nothing died or fell out a tree.”
“Can we come down now?” asked Davey. “It’s dark in here.”
“And it stinks like mouldy bread,” added Flora.
Pru could not say no, not with the both of them standing there with the most pitiful looks on their faces. Of course they were frightened. Why wouldn’t they be? She was frightened and was most certain that Jesse was too. “You can come down, but you have to be very quiet,” she said. “The law is outside the door.”
“Do they want to take us away?” asked Davey, his brown eyes widening.
Pru nodded.
Chapter Fourteen
There was something different about Mama that last night and sometimes I think I should have known. But what you really know and what you just think you know are two different things.
We ate supper around five thirty. Even though Mama didn’t come to the table those days she came out that evening and sat in her usual place with her robe wrapped around her, the bow tied and slightly off to one side. You could see the material was all bunched up in front on ac–count of the weight she’d lost. When she reached across the table for a cracker, the sight of her thin blue wrists startled me. I closed my eyes and thought instead of the evening Reese ate supper with us and how Mama had sat in that very same spot wearing that very same robe and how Reese had blushed over Mama’s thanking him again and again for helping Jesse cut up the maple tree. It was easy to see that Reese felt something special for Mama, and I think maybe she felt the same way too.
We ate the last of the cucumbers from the garden that night. I had picked them two weeks earlier because they were becoming too large. They were big and seedy, as it was late in the season, but it would have been too much of a waste to toss them away. I sliced them thin and sprinkled them with table salt and set a plate on top. I knew they would have little taste but at least we had some new pota–toes to go with them. I put a small round rock on top of the cucumbers for a press, one that Jesse had discovered and brought home to be washed in case it was needed. He had intended it to be put on a crock of beans to keep them beneath the brine, but the beans hadn’t done as well as we’d hoped and so there was only one crock down in the cellar for the winter ahead.
It would have been nice to have an onion to slice up to go with the meal but I’d used the last one when I’d fried up some deer steaks the previous week because Jesse was awfully fond of fried deer meat and onions. Although I called the dish cucumbers and cream when Jesse asked what we were having, it wasn’t really cream at all, but a can of condensed milk that I’d found under the cupboard. I’d added some sugar and a little bit of vinegar, some salt and a little pepper, and Mama had smiled and said I knew as much about cooking as she did.
“Tonight we’ll celebrate your cooking skills, Pru,” Mama had said, but that usual spark in her voice at the mention of a celebration wasn’t there.
“Tonight?” I’d asked in surprise. We could all tell that Mama looked extra tired. She had spent most of the day asleep in her bed and had not stirred even when Flora had crawled up in bed beside her to take a nap. When I had looked in and seen the two of them sleeping so peace–fully I’d wished I’d had a camera so I could snap their photograph. Then I’d become upset thinking about how we didn’t even have one photograph of Mama, not even a small blurry one. Whatever would we do to remember her once she was gone? I’d wished then that I had taken the money Mama had showed me and bought a Brownie camera, one with a flash to take photographs indoors. And I’d wished I had used up an entire roll of film snap–ping all sorts of photographs with Mama in them, but you only think of things when it’s too late to change them and Mama would have growled that I wasted the money anyway, even though it ended up not doing us a lick of good in the long run. But then we wouldn’t have known any of that.
Jesse told Mama she should lie on her bed while we dressed up to entertain her, but she said no. “Just play a little music and dance or sing,” she said. Although we did as Mama asked, our hearts were not in it. We knew her strength was low even though she tried to put on a brave front. When one of her nosebleeds started, Jesse ran for a cloth. Not until she’d held her head back for several minutes did it stop, and for a time I’d feared it might not stop at all.
“Look at the mess I made,” she said, holding the bloody rag in her hand, attempting to smile at the same time. Flora and Davey ran to her and buried their faces in her robe. Mama shushed them and said they shouldn’t be sad. Jesse and I helped her back into her bed and when I went to take the pink slippers from her feet she asked me not to.
“I’d like to lay here and look at them awhile,” she said. We all huddled on the bed beside her and talked about our many celebrations. Mama told Jesse and me how proud she was of us, how good she felt knowing that we’d do a good job looking after Flora and Davey once she was gone.
“For the longest time I waited for Tom to come but now I know he won’t,” said Mama. “Sometimes you have to prove what you can do all on your own without help from anyone.”
Mama went on to say how she had thought once about hiring Reese to take her to Annapolis, but that she couldn’t bear the thought that Tom might turn her away. “If only he had answered my letter,” she said.
“We’ll make out fine, Mama. We’re better off without Uncle Tom,” said Jesse with a confidence in his voice that made me a believer. There had been so many changes in Jesse this past year that I hardly recognized him anymore.
“You shouldn’t think badly of Tom,” Mama said, shaking her head. “None of what happened in the past had anything to do with you.”
“A man’s actions speak for him,” said Jesse without accusation, and I thought he sounded most grown-up. “Uncle Tom took Nanny Gordon’s house from you. He even cut his trigger finger off to get out of going to war. That’s the coward’s way. Just ask anyone.”
Mama reached out for Jesse’s hand. “Jesse,” she said quietly, “it was Harvey Greer. Harvey’s the one who chopped Tom’s finger off, fixing up some pussy willows when they were boys.”
“But Daddy said…”
Mama made for Jesse to be quiet. “Daddy sometimes twisted the truth, especially when he was angry,” she said. “Hurts can run deep. I guess there just wasn’t any way to make this one right.
“Your father wanted that house more than I did. He planted the idea in his own head. He fed it and watered
it and it grew into something he couldn’t control. He thought he could dream it into being his and I was a fool for going along with it. But he knew better—we both did. The boy always inherits the homestead. That’s just the way it is. But dreams are what tell us we’re alive. Sometimes you just need to have a dream, some way to keep you going.”
I caught Jesse’s glance. There was no denying the look on his face—thin lines of doubt were rising to the surface. All this time we’d believed the worst about Uncle Tom. I thought about the day Jesse had burned the letter Mama wrote to Uncle Tom and wondered if Jesse felt remorse over what he’d done. Perhaps Uncle Tom wouldn’t have answered Mama’s letter, but that was something we’d never know the answer to.
When Mama was ready to settle down for the night, she asked me to make some tea using the dried plant leaves she had in the dresser drawer where she kept the money. I made the tea and then right afterward I thought maybe I shouldn’t have. But Mama said not to worry because she knew the time was right and that was what mattered. She said the cold weather was coming. So she drank her tea and asked me to go and I did what she wanted. I only did what she wanted.
“Some things are best done sooner than later,” she said.
Chapter Fifteen
Pru forced herself to remain awake even though it was late. She looked long and hard out the window. The near-full moon gave the illusion of daylight outside, but it was close to one o’clock in the morning and a far cry from daylight. She wondered what difference the dawning of a new day would make to their situation.
There were only three candles in the drawer and the lamp hadn’t had any kerosene since winter. Pru had lit the first candle as soon as the dusk came and placed it in the middle of the floor. They’d sat around cross-legged on the floor while Jesse had kept watch for any movement out–side. Shadows were cast about the room as the darkness had settled in for the night and Flora had been frightened until Pru had showed her how to make shadow puppets of a dog and a bird on the wall with her hands.