by Lauren Wolk
“Like what?” I said. I imagined myself lugging the purple window through the woods.
“Like whatever you have.”
I didn’t have much. Just my piggy bank and the coins in it and my silver dollar and my books. A beaver muff my grandfather had once made for my grandmother and which she had given to me when it got ratty. A lace collar that I snapped onto my church dresses. A pair of white cotton gloves that were too small for me now. And a sweater frog that I had borrowed from my aunt Lily and she had not asked about since.
I catalogued these assets quickly in my head, but I was not convinced that I would give Betty anything until she said, “I’ll wait for your brothers if you don’t come.”
They were tough little boys, my brothers, but they were smaller than I was and they were mine to look after.
I didn’t say anything as Betty leaned the stick against a tree and continued up the path away from me. “And don’t tell nobody about it or I’ll use a rock on the little one.” James. She meant James. The little one.
I waited until she was out of sight and then I got my breath back and thought about what it would feel like to be hit with a stick.
A year earlier Henry had thrown a toadstool the size of a dinner plate at me and I’d stepped back out of the way and tripped over a dog and broken my arm. I’d burned myself a couple of times, stepped on a hoe blade and snapped the handle back into my forehead, sprained my ankle in a groundhog hole. Nothing much else had done me bodily harm in my eleven years on earth, but I’d been hurt enough to know that a whack with a branch wouldn’t kill me.
Still, as I passed it, I heaved the particular stick she had chosen as far as I could into the woods. There were plenty of other sticks around, but I felt a little better as I cast this one beyond her reach.
I decided, as I plodded slowly up the path, that Betty wouldn’t go after Henry or James until she tried me, so I’d wait to see if she was a barker or a biter before telling my parents anything that might make Betty a whole lot angrier than she already was. But I confessed to myself that I was afraid in a way I hadn’t known before.
I hadn’t felt very much true fear in my life, except about the war . . . that it might still be raging when my brothers grew old enough to fight the Nazis . . . even though farm boys were often spared. Even though by that time someone would surely have won. And I was afraid of that, too—who would win, who would lose.
We girls in the 4-H club had made a flag to hang in the church, adding a blue star every time someone from the township went off to fight. When one of them died, we changed the blue star to a gold one. Just two, so far, but I had been to their funerals, and I knew that there was no “just” about it.
I sometimes sat with the grown-ups and listened to the radio in the evenings after the supper dishes were done. Nobody said anything when the news came on. My mother listened with her head bowed, her hands nested and still in her mending. The talk was of concentration camps, which I thought at first meant places where people went to think hard thoughts.
“I do wish they were that,” my father said. “But they’re not, Annabelle. They’re prisons for people Hitler doesn’t like.”
I had a hard time imagining why Hitler disliked so many people.
“Who does he like?” I asked.
My father thought about his answer. “People with blond hair and blue eyes,” he said.
Which made me glad to have hair that was brown. Eyes, too.
We listened to news of bombs and submarines, smiled at the announcement that the Allies were close to retaking Italy, worried about everything else.
“No need to be afraid, Annabelle,” my mother said, running her hand down my back.
But I was.
I wasn’t afraid of my mother, though, despite how hard she could sometimes be. She had forgotten what it felt like to ride a swing up into the sky, to stop hoeing at the first sign of a blister, to expect anything to be easier than it was. She had been seventeen when she’d had me, was only twenty-eight the year I learned how to lie, not much more than a girl herself, in charge of three generations and a good bit of farmwork, too. But even when she was most impatient with me, I did not fear her.
Nor was I really afraid of my aunt Lily, though she could be alarming. A tall, thin, ugly woman who might have been handsome as a man, Aunt Lily spent her days working as a postmistress and her nights praying and reading from her Bible and practicing dance steps in the small patch of floor at the foot of her bed. She sometimes invited me into her bedroom to listen to Peter and the Wolf on the phonograph, and now and then she put a penny into the china pig she’d given me, but her big, square teeth and her feverish devotion to God frightened me.
And there were times when I was afraid of my grandmother’s ailing heart that forced her to go up the stairs backward, sitting down . . . how weak and gray she became sometimes, no longer the strong and able woman she’d once been. When we could, she and I sat on the porch swing, playing I Spy, remarking on the butterflies in the front garden, hoping for a pheasant to come hopping out of the woods to poach the seed that she scattered for the songbirds. She loved those birds. Loved them. Even the drab little ones. Especially the drab little ones. There was nothing about my grandmother that frightened me, except the thought that she’d be gone soon.
But I shared that fear with everyone in our house.
Betty was mine to fear, and I decided that she was mine to disarm. If I could. On my own.
But for now I was simply happy that she was gone, and I followed so slowly that Betty was nowhere to be seen by the time I cleared the trees and made my way onto the field that was empty but for her footprints, which were deep and sharp and suggested that she was more freighted than she could possibly be.
CHAPTER THREE
Lots of people crossed our farm to get from down the hollow to the houses on the other side of our fields instead of following the road from the school all the way around the hill. I’d never minded—we knew everyone for miles around—but I was sometimes startled by the vagabonds who passed through from time to time.
In those days, not so very long after the Great Depression, there were people who had taken up wander-ing and didn’t know how to stop—cut loose from their roots and their people—never stopping anywhere for very long. And then there were those who had come home from the first big war so shaken, so silent, that they didn’t seem to know who they were any longer or where they belonged.
One of them, a man named Toby, had stayed.
He wasn’t like the others.
He didn’t ask for food or money. He didn’t ask for anything at all. But instead of drifting through on his way to somewhere else like the others, he circled the hills endlessly, and I confess that I had been nervous about him in the beginning.
But that’s before I had come to know him.
I looked for him as I walked home that day, scanning the field that wrapped itself around the long, low hill like a nubby shawl. I often saw him away in the distance as I made my way to school and home again. He liked to stand at the edge of the woods, still as a tree. Or on the very top of the hill, clear against the sky.
We didn’t know where Toby had come from or much about him, except that he had been a foot soldier, fighting the Germans in France. Decades earlier. That much we’d heard, in passing, at church, at the market, and took it to be true.
His left hand, terribly scarred, seemed to confirm the story. But nobody knew for sure where he came from except that he might have stopped in these hills because they reminded him of home. Or maybe they were simply like a place where he’d always wanted to be.
A lot of people worried about Toby as he walked the woods and valleys in his long, black oilcloth coat and his black boots, long black hair and beard, and always three long guns slung across his back. They didn’t know what to make of this largely silent man who never seemed to stop walking, morni
ng to night, his head down, plodding along neither faster nor slower than he had the day before.
I sometimes pictured him huddled in a trench while a thousand Germans ran around topside with bayonets fixed and spikes on their helmets and bloodlust in their eyes. Even though I was only eleven, I knew enough about fear to conclude that being completely afraid, body and soul, was probably enough to make a person strange forever after. And that’s what Toby was. Strange.
“Hard to know, but sometimes it’s more than fear or shell shock that makes a man like he is,” my grandmother said to me one day soon after Toby had first come to our hills. “He wouldn’t have been much more than a boy when he fought in that terrible war. But he must have seen and done things that would lay a strong man low.”
We’d heard that Toby was squatting in an old smokehouse in Cobb Hollow down below the Glengarry place, along where we grew potatoes and corn. Nobody owned that smokehouse anymore, not since Silas Cobb had died and his old house burned up from a lightning strike. The smokehouse was set back away from the burned-out foundation of the house, mostly hidden in the trees and brush that had grown up around it. It was a snug little place made of stone and wood with a metal roof. I’d come across it once when one of our cows went missing and we all scattered through the woods to bring her home.
I knew better than to go inside the old shacks beyond the borders of our farm, some of them built up around oil well pumps, some of them for curing meat, some for fowl, all of them apt to attract snakes. But I’d explored the old smokehouse before Toby took it for his own. Except for the smell of meat and smoke that was still strong inside, it seemed a nice enough place for a man like Toby to live. And the old well at the nearby Cobb place—though nothing more now than a hole in the earth, like the Cobb house itself—still meant water worth drinking when the nearby crick froze up.
I could imagine Toby warm inside the smokehouse, a fire in the spot where fires had once burned steadily. Perhaps he used the meat hooks dangling from the rafters overhead to hang his coat when he wasn’t in it, his guns when they weren’t slung across his back. On one, his black hat. On another, his camera.
We’d all been surprised when Toby had asked to borrow our camera, which was now his, more or less. It was amazing that he had spoken at all, that he had come close enough to any of us to make such a request, that he had suddenly seemed excited about something, especially something like photographs. But he had, and the whole thing had been an accident.
When I was seven and Henry five, James three, my mother had taken us to Horne’s, the big department store in Pittsburgh, to have our portrait done. My mother had one picture of herself, taken with her whole family shortly before her mother died. It was pressed in the family Bible, brown as summer dust. My father had many portraits of his forebears, a furious bunch of Scots: beetle-browed, mash-mouthed, goat-eyed. But nowhere in our house was there a simple picture of any of us smiling, arm in arm. My mother wanted such a thing, of her children, so she took the three of us to Horne’s and had us sit together for our portrait. The photographer told her that all portraits taken that month would be entered into a contest for a Kodak camera and a lifetime supply of film and processing.
“And when would I have time to take pictures of anything?” she said, smiling, as she paid the man.
Three weeks later, when a package arrived for my mother, we were astonished to find that it contained both our portrait, in which we all looked sweeter than we really were, and the news that we had won the camera. It was also enclosed, along with a dozen spools of film to get us started and some special envelopes for sending them in to be developed.
It was as if we had received a tiny spaceship or a time machine, so astounding was this gift.
Word soon spread, and before long our neighbors were dropping in on Sunday afternoons, still in their church clothes, angling for pictures. My mother was too busy to oblige them. Aunt Lily was willing to take the pictures, but she was so bossy and critical of her subjects that they always looked as if they’d had the flu in their pictures. When people saw the results, they asked for another round with another photographer, which was a waste of film and time. I tried my hand at it, but I tended to lop off their heads.
So people stopped coming after a while and the camera gathered dust until one afternoon—when the peaches were in their brief blossom and the sun behind them made a rosy miasma of the orchard—I took the camera out to try to save the sight.
I stood at the top of the orchard and took one picture after another, lowering the camera in between to sigh and breathe the chill, pink air.
At some point I became aware of Toby standing off to one side near the outermost trees, watching me.
I’d never spoken to him, had always found myself at least a field away from him until now. And I’d never known him to watch a person the way he was watching me. To stand still for so long in one place.
I slowly pointed the camera in his direction, expecting him to shy from it as if it were a gun, but he didn’t. I took his picture, even though—through the lens, from such a distance—he looked like nothing but a smudge of darkness in a hat.
When he began to walk toward me I waited. It was full light out and I was on my own farm. There was no reason to be nervous. That’s what I told myself. But I was only nine back then, too young to be very brave. Toby was a tall man who never smiled. Seldom spoke. Had those terrible scars on his hand. And those guns.
I could hear someone hammering something in the distance, probably my father fixing siding on the barn. The sound kept me where I was as Toby walked up to me. When he was a dozen feet away I became aware of the smoke-and-meat smell coming off him, mixed with his own scent. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant, but it was overlaid with the stink of kerosene from his lamp. Whenever the dogs got near him, they’d shake their heads and sneeze.
He looked at the camera and then at me. “Is that yours?” he said.
“My mother’s.” I thought about it. “And mine.” It was, after all, my picture that had won the camera. Mine and James’s and Henry’s.
Toby hitched his gun belt higher on his shoulder. I’d held a gun before. Three must have been very heavy. His black coat, long and stiff, had a high collar that framed his neck and made him look bigger than he was. Like some animals will ruff up their fur for purposes of warfare.
“You taking pictures of the blossoms?”
I nodded. “And you. Just one of you. Do you want it when it comes in?”
Toby shook his head. “I know what I look like.”
I wondered how many years it had been since he’d seen himself in a mirror.
He was staring at the camera. I took the strap from around my neck. “You want to try?” I held the camera out toward him.
Toby glanced at me and then away. At me again. And away. At the blossoms, then back over his shoulder toward the fields just plowed for planting. At a line of blue spruce higher than anything else for a mile. He walked close, took the camera, stepped back.
“I’ll bring it back tomorrow, if that’s all right.”
I was a little startled. From saying nothing to me, ever, to now taking this liberty was surprising. But I didn’t know how to say no, not to an adult, and I didn’t think my mother would mind. She often made an extra loaf of bread or pot of jam for Toby. She wasn’t scared of him. I didn’t think she’d mind if he used the camera for a day.
And so that was the beginning of a change in our lives. Had we not won the Kodak, had the peach blossoms been less beautiful that year, had Toby been elsewhere on his walk that day, had I fled from the sight of him, had I said no, Toby would not have learned how to take the pictures he took and, eventually, been given the camera for his own. Nor would I have come to know him as I did; and he, me.
We would have been spared some trouble if we had not crossed paths that day. But it’s important to look at how everything ended and not just what ha
ppened along the way.
CHAPTER FOUR
My mother gave me a funny look as I stood at the back door the next morning, readying myself, before setting off for school. When she said, “Something wrong, Annabelle?” I nearly told her about Betty. It would have been a relief to put the whole thing in her hands.
But although there were only apples and potatoes, beets and a few winter squash left to bring in, and although she, of all women on earth, was capable and strong, I had it in mind to spare her this particular battle. I’d thought it through: If I told her, she’d have to go to her friends, the Glengarrys, and tell them that their granddaughter was a hooligan, something they surely already knew but would not want to hear from a neighbor.
And despite the fact that she’d been able to fix nearly every broken thing in our lives, my mother could not promise me that Betty would not come at me again, even angrier—or, worse, go after my brothers—if I tattled on her.
I had learned what incorrigible meant. A scolding was not going to change anything, and so far Betty hadn’t done anything to deserve more.
So I said, “Nothing, Mother,” and went on out the door to school, the penny from my piggy bank like an anvil in my pocket.
Henry and James were waiting in the yard for me, which made no sense at all since they took off at a run as soon as they saw me coming. Before we were even out of sight of the house, they had run well up the lane, flinging lumps of dirt at each other and stirring up a tail of dust as if they were small, unbottled genies.
Up the lane and across the spent field at the top of the hill I walked alone—all the crops here plowed under—watching for arrowheads on the crests of the furrows.
Sometimes, from this hilltop, I would be surprised by a deer. One minute, the fields below me would seem empty. The next—there, a deer—nearly invisible against the plowed dirt.
So it was with Toby that morning. One minute, the crest of the hill to my right was empty. The next, there he was, standing in the distance, still, looking toward me.