by Lauren Wolk
It gave me a start to see him.
I waved good morning.
I was not put out when he did not wave back. It meant nothing at all except that he wasn’t like other people. Toby wasn’t friendly, but he had been good to me when he didn’t have to be.
Like the time I was skirting the edge of a newly planted field and stepped in a groundhog hole, spraining my ankle so badly that I couldn’t walk on it. I was alone. There was no one else around. Still, I called out a couple of times as I tried to limp along. And Toby came.
I was younger then and didn’t weigh all that much, but it couldn’t have been easy to carry me up over the hill and down the lane to my mother, baby-style.
Close to him like that, I was most aware of his own scent and not the smokehouse’s where he lived. He smelled a lot like the woods in thaw or a dog that’s been out in the rain. Strong, but not really dirty.
Along the way I said a number of things: Thank you. I’m sorry. You’re nice to help me like this. And then, at the door to the mudroom, Will you come in for a drink of water?
He replied to none of it, though his silence didn’t feel mean.
He did not come in for a drink. In fact, he left me on the step and then strode off, back up the lane, and was gone before my mother came to the door to find that I was the one knocking.
Another time, when my father hurt his back and was laid up for a couple of days in the middle of pumpkin harvest, my mother and grandpap and we small kids arrived at the patch one morning prepared to do the work without him, only to find that the flatbed we’d left empty the night before was now loaded with pumpkins, ready for market.
No one else took credit for this kindness, and I knew that it was Toby’s.
I pictured him in the darkness, working by moonlight and night-eyes, lugging the pumpkins to the wagon, some of them bigger than one man should have been able to carry. It must have taken him all night.
My mother baked a pumpkin pie for him that very day and gave it to me to take to the top of the lane in the hope of seeing him nearby. The pie was still warm in my hands. I waited long enough that the pie had cooled before I left it in a crate where we sometimes put food and hand-me-downs for Toby when he wasn’t around.
Two days later, I found that he’d left the clean pie plate in the crate along with a posy of bittersweet and wild asters tied with a leaf of quack grass.
I headed down the slope and took the path into the woods, not at all watchful. The boys had scared away any bear within earshot, snakes were somewhere sunny and warm, and I did not expect to see Betty until after school. But suddenly there she was, just as before, standing in the path ahead of me.
The stick in her hand was smaller than the first, which worried me. She’d chosen yesterday’s to make an impression. Today’s was a better size for swinging. And green, which meant hard. And I admit that I was afraid.
“Hey, Betty,” I said as I made to walk right on by her.
She stepped in front of me and put out a hand. “We’ll walk to school together,” Betty said. “First you give me what you brung.”
I was tempted to correct her poor English, but I didn’t. I was tempted to try to push past her, but I was pretty sure that wouldn’t work.
“We’re not rich,” I said, as if to get at least that one thing straight. “I ain’t got anything to give you.” The “ain’t got” hurt and surprised me on its way out; some part of my brain had assumed that stooping a little might actually make me stronger, but in the next instant I could see that it hadn’t.
Before I had time to think about moving, Betty had swung the stick in a small, tight arc. She’d chosen my hip, perhaps because a bruise there would not show. I worked hard not to let her see how much it hurt.
“Give me what you brung,” she said.
I hated to give her anything at all. Even the penny in my pocket.
“This is the only thing I’m going to give you,” I said, holding the penny out on a tight palm, the way I knew to feed a dog. “Don’t ask me for anything more. I don’t have anything else.”
Betty looked at the penny, picked it up with her fingertips, peered into my face. “A penny?”
“You can get two pieces of hard candy for that,” I said.
“I don’t want two pieces of hard candy,” she said. She tossed the penny into the undergrowth. “Tomorrow you bring me something better than a penny.”
“I don’t have anything else to bring you, Betty. And I think it’s just mean of you to be like this. We could be friends, you know,” I said, quite aware that I sounded pretty dubious as I said it. “If you would stop being so mean.”
Betty’s answer was to swing the stick again. Harder this time—hitting the same spot, which was already aching—and I was on my knees before I knew it. When I looked up, Betty was staring at me, her face slack, her mouth hanging open a little.
She made me think of the strays that wandered onto the farm now and again but were not taken up by our pack.
I saw her fingers tighten on the stick and I knew she was going to hit me again, and the tears came.
Her fingers relaxed on the stick. Her eyes cleared. “You’re just a dumb baby,” she said. “Remember what I said before. If you tell anyone, that little boy will pay for it. Now git.”
I gathered myself up and let the hill take me down toward school.
At a curve in the path, I glanced back. Betty was bent low in the place where she’d thrown my penny, folding back the undergrowth with her open hands.
When I went to Aunt Lily’s room that evening, she was brushing her hair. She did that a lot. And put on lipstick, then wiped it off.
“What do you want, Annabelle?” She looked at me in her mirror.
“Well.” I held my hands behind my back. “I wondered if I could borrow your sweater frog again,” I said, though I knew it was still up in my room. “The one with the glittery stones on it.” One stone was missing, which was probably why Aunt Lily had lent it to me in the first place. It was old and a little bent, too. Not worth anything.
“My sweater frog?” With a fingertip, she stirred the dish of notions she kept on her dresser. “But you already have it, Annabelle. I haven’t seen it since I lent it to you, have I?”
The little question she tacked onto the end gave me some hope.
“Haven’t you?” I said, which wasn’t a lie. How could a question be a lie?
“No. I don’t believe I have. And I don’t remember you returning it.” Aunt Lily turned on her stool and looked at me from across the room. “But if I don’t have it, I can’t very well lend it to you again, can I? Go see if it’s still up in your room somewhere.” She turned back to the mirror, a pair of tweezers in her hand.
As I turned to leave, she said, “All your sweaters have buttons on them, Annabelle. No reason on earth to bother with a frog.”
I shrugged. All of her sweaters had buttons, too. “It’s just pretty,” I said.
“Pretty. Nothing less important in the eyes of God, Annabelle, than pretty.”
It was a good supper we had that night: chops fried in bacon fat, potatoes baked soft, and slaw my mother made with cream and sweet onions.
After supper, when we were clearing everything away, my mother wrapped two rolls, a chop, and an apple in a scrap of oilcloth and tied it up by its corners. “Take this up the lane,” she said. “If you don’t see Toby, leave it in his box. But make sure you close the lid tight or the dogs will get into it.”
There were times when my mother told Toby he was “entirely too thin” or that he needed “some color” and she’d send me with something extra for him to eat. She didn’t dare send my brothers, who would use the excuse to horse around out in the dark until there was no time left for homework, barely enough for a bath.
“Squirrel is not enough for a grown man,” she said as she handed me the bundle.
“There’s plenty of culls in the orchard,” I said, “and potatoes and beets not too far from his shack. I don’t know why he’s so thin.”
My mother just looked at me. “Do you think he would take something without our say-so?” She shook her head. “Well, he would not.”
I considered her answer. “Then why don’t we say so?”
“Never mind that,” she said, turning again to the sink. “Just get going and back again before it’s too dark to see where you’re putting your feet.”
“And why doesn’t he just ask?” I said, though my mother’s back usually meant she’d said all she had to say.
“Same as I said before,” she said without turning. “Now go on before all the light’s gone.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Toby appeared in layers as I walked up the steep lane: first his hatted head, then more and more of him down to his boots as I reached the flat ground at the top of the lane. He was a scarecrow, but for the guns on his back and his arms hanging loose at his sides.
If he saw me coming, he made no sign of it. Toby never came to meet a person.
“Hey, Toby,” I said. “Mother sent me with a little supper.” I didn’t know I would say it until I did: “We had too much for just us.”
Toby’s face in the shadow of his hat brim was as quiet and mild as an old dog’s.
I noticed the camera hanging from his neck. “Do you have any film to send in?”
We mailed it for him when he did—gave the film to my aunt Lily, since she was the postmistress and went into the office every weekday—and I usually carried around the prints when they came back until Toby and I crossed paths. We had never once opened the package, though I was sometimes tempted. When Toby wanted us to see what he had done, he offered.
One time he had showed me a batch that featured a red-tailed hawk with a rabbit in its beak, a thunderhead glazed with evening light, a deer napping in a patch of mayapples. I had never known anyone quiet enough to approach a sleeping deer. Nor had I known any hungry man who would shoot one with a camera instead of a gun.
He took a little spool out of his pocket and handed it to me. I gave him the bundle of food.
“Do you still have some film?”
He nodded. Every time the photographs came back to us, there were two fresh rolls in the package. Kodak keeping its word.
He shifted the guns on his back a little. Didn’t turn to leave right away, as he usually did.
I waited.
He reached into his pocket. “This is yours,” he said, handing me a penny. It was warm when I took it.
I recalled Betty searching through the ivy along the trail to school. Toby must have been watching from the trees.
I put the penny in my own pocket.
Toby waited some more, in an almost hopeful way. If he knew that it was my penny, then he had seen Betty hit me. Perhaps he had heard her threats. But he had not intervened.
If he was waiting for me to tell him about it, to ask for his help, I couldn’t. I just wasn’t sure how I felt about all that.
With a last little nod, Toby turned and walked away, his guns and boots making their simple music. How he stilled it at will was beyond me. I had never yet been able to surprise so much as a milk cow, let alone a doe.
I stayed for a bit and watched him make his way back across the turned ground between the strawberry patch and the woods, dipping and rising a little as he walked against the grain of the furrows, like a boat crossing a small sea.
On my way back down the lane I paused at the sight of my house in the growing darkness, lit from within, and wondered if Toby ever stood where I did, saw what I saw.
Fingering the penny in my pocket, I thought that perhaps he did.
I found my father sitting on the back step. He always seemed to be there when I returned from taking Toby some supper. “And how was Toby tonight?” he asked as he followed me into the house.
“Same as ever,” I said. “Quiet.”
“I do like that about him,” my father said. “But you should tell me if he ever worries you, Annabelle.”
Which startled me. “Like how?” I said.
My father shrugged. “Anything at all.”
“Like if he seems sick or if he’s hurt, you mean?”
He answered by putting his hand on the top of my head and smiling a little.
“Go on and do your homework now,” he said.
But first I went in search of my aunt Lily, who would send in the film that Toby had given me, neither of us knowing that, on that small spool, another piece of trouble was waiting for someone to find it.
As I got ready for bed that night, I examined my aching hip and the bruise that Betty had given me. It looked like a red cucumber, not yet gone to black, sore to the touch.
And I made up my mind right then that she would not have Aunt Lily’s sweater frog. It wasn’t possible that even a girl like Betty would hurt my brothers, or me, beyond a bruise shaped like a cucumber. That sort of thing didn’t happen. And knowing that Toby might be nearby gave me some reassurance. I was certain that he wouldn’t let anything really bad happen to me or my brothers. If he was nearby at the time. If he saw it happening.
And if I did get another bruise in the bargain, I would tell my mother. She would know what to do.
When my brothers ran off ahead of me the next morning, I ran too and kept them close to me—and me close to them—up the lane and down the other side of the hill, across the fields, toward Wolf Hollow. More than once they stopped to look at me, and at one point Henry said, “You’re fast for a girl,” and another time James told me to slow down and get lost. “We can walk to school by our own selves,” he yelled as he put on speed.
Which was true, of course, but beside the point.
When we reached the path into Wolf Hollow, I caught up with them and grabbed James by the arm. “I want to walk with you the rest of the way,” I said.
James shook me off with an uh-uh, but Henry said, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Except I saw a big snake on the path yesterday.”
Henry seemed to accept this. He knew how I felt about snakes.
James, big-eyed: “A king snake?”
I nodded. “Biggest one I’ve ever seen.”
“Well, nuts, Annabelle. I would have come back for a look if you’d told us yesterday.”
“Which is why I didn’t tell you yesterday,” I said. “But let’s go quietly and maybe we’ll see him again.”
So it was that the three of us were together on the path when Betty stepped out from behind a tree.
The boys stopped so suddenly that I bumped into them. “Hey, Betty,” Henry said. James just stood still. I cut around in front of the boys and continued down the path.
“Come on,” I said, “or we’ll be late for school.”
I didn’t look back. The boys followed close by. At the first turn in the path I ushered them ahead and off they ran, and so did I, all the way down the hill and into the schoolhouse.
“I don’t like that Betty,” James said as we unbuttoned our jackets and hung up our caps. “She’s spooky.”
“She’s just a dumb girl,” Henry said, but he kept his voice down and looked over his shoulder when he said it.
Betty arrived then, but she paid us no attention at all.
She focused, instead, on her desk. In it sat one of the biggest boys, Andy Woodberry. I liked that name—Woodberry—but I didn’t like Andy. Nobody did. Not even the other big boys, though they did whatever he told them to do.
Andy had not been in school since before Betty joined us. He and his father and uncles worked side-by-side farms not too far from ours: dairy cows, mostly, but corn, too, and hay and potatoes. A kitchen garden. Enough ewes for wool and Sunday dinner lamb in the spring. Chickens. Some goats. Pretty much what
you’d expect at a dairy.
End of October, Andy came to school from time to time, mostly for a change of scenery, I thought. He paid no attention to his lessons or to Mrs. Taylor.
“You’re in my seat,” Betty said to him. Even sitting down, he was nearly as tall as she was, standing, but she didn’t seem the least bit nervous.
The other children had gone quiet, watching. Mrs. Taylor, writing a lesson on the chalkboard, hadn’t yet noticed.
Andy looked Betty up and down. “Who are you?” he said.
“Betty Glengarry. Who are you?”
“Andy Woodberry.”
She considered him, her hands on her hips. “Do you live in the woods?”
“No.”
“Are you a berry?”
“No.” He sat up straighter in his chair. “Do you live in a glen?”
“As a matter of fact, I do,” she said.
Which gave him pause. “And are you a . . .” at which even Andy seemed to understand that there was no good way to finish this. Betty was already smiling.
“. . . a garry? No, I am not a garry. Unless a garry is a girl who means to sit at that seat you’re in.”
By now, Andy looked so baffled that I concluded no girl had ever spoken to him this way. Not even his ma.
If anyone had asked me, I’d have said that Betty would at the very least have burrs in her hair by the end of recess, but I would have been wrong.
Without another word, Andy stood up and waited while Betty took her seat. Then he stood looming over Benjamin, the small boy in the desk next to hers, until he gathered up his things with a sigh and shoved in next to someone else.
Andy sat down and stretched out his legs. His pant cuffs and boot laces bristled with sticktights.
When Mrs. Taylor turned from the chalkboard and saw him sitting there, her shoulders went up and down slowly, and she slumped a little.
“Good morning, Mr. Woodberry,” she said. “Have you brought your books with you?”