Wolf Hollow

by Lauren Wolk

  “Don’t need books,” he said, tapping his head. “Got it all up here.”

  I was sitting behind Betty, but when she turned toward Andy I could see that she was smiling. “He can share with me, Mrs. Taylor,” Betty said. “I don’t mind.”

  “Well, that’s very nice of you,” said Mrs. Taylor.

  “It sure is,” Andy said.

  From the way Betty was looking at Andy, I thought maybe she’d be inclined to pay less attention to me from now on.

  The rest of the morning went pretty well, though Andy fell asleep at one point and punctuated the lessons with his snoring. Betty, to wake him, laid a hand on his bare arm. When he woke, Andy gave himself a shake, yawned loudly, and crossed his arms like a lord.

  He was not a bad-looking boy and was cleaner than some, but Betty was the first girl to take to him. I wondered about that: how quickly an attraction had sprung up between them. But I had seen such a thing before, when a new dog showed up on the farm. Sometimes, there was a fight before anyone knew the reason why. Sometimes, quite the reverse.

  CHAPTER SIX

  For the next few days, Betty seemed to ignore me. I walked to and from school without incident, spent each recess playing games with my friends, and took lessons at the chalkboard with Mrs. Taylor uneventfully, while Betty and Andy huddled at their desks behind her back, whispering and grinning. At recess, they disappeared, came back to lessons late, left school together, arrived the same way in the morning.

  Everyone noticed this—what I thought of as a courtship, odd as that seemed, given how young Betty was, just fourteen. But my own mother had married at sixteen, so I did not spend too much time questioning the thing that had made me a smaller target.

  Andy’s was a sporadic education at best, however, and I soon learned that even Betty could not compete with an Indian summer day.

  Walking to school that morning was pure joy. The ground was soft and fragrant, the birds talkative, and the sun somewhat hazy, as if it wore a silk stocking. Before I headed down the long slope into Wolf Hollow, I took off my jacket and hat and hung them on a peach tree that clung stubbornly to a very few leaves, and those an autumn gold.

  Where my brothers were, I neither knew nor cared. I felt that with very little effort I might fly away over these hills, the sun on my back, the forest flaming gorgeously beneath me.

  I might even have been whistling or singing beneath my breath as I entered the woods that morning.

  I don’t remember.

  What came next erased most everything but the fact of Betty again.

  Perhaps she had been waiting for Andy and he had not appeared, which had left her angry, with time on her hands.

  Or maybe she’d simply gone too long without dominion, however small.

  In any event, she was ready for me at a time when I was not ready for her.

  And she had chosen a more brutal weapon than before.

  Here, ahead of me on the path, was an odd sight.

  Betty sat on a fallen log with something in her lap, while my brothers crouched before her, moving in an oddly slow and gentle way.

  “Henry,” I said.

  “Shhh,” he replied without turning. “She has a quail.”

  And she did have a quail. A hen, brown and soft. A young one from the look of her. Fresh-eyed and sleek.

  Betty held her easily under her left arm. She had made a choker of her right hand, her fingers circling the bird’s neck just tightly enough to hold her still. The quail blinked and murmured as the boys stroked her soft head with the tips of their small fingers.

  “She’s so nice,” James whispered. “I wish I could have her.”

  “Well, maybe you can,” Betty said. “Maybe you can start a quail farm.”

  To which Henry said, “Naw, it’s a wild bird. It’s not a chicken.” But he said it softly, almost wistfully, and he never took his eyes off the sweet, brown darling in Betty’s lap.

  I stood behind them, wondering if Betty had changed but pretty sure that she hadn’t.

  “Come on now, boys,” I said. “We’re going to be late for school.”

  They ignored me so completely that I felt invisible.

  “I’ll bring her down to school with me,” Betty said. “You go on ahead. We’ll be right along.”

  She sounded a lot like I did. Older sisterish. But they obeyed her as they never did me.

  The boys backed away slowly so as not to startle the bird and then scampered off down the hill, hissing nonsense at each other as they jockeyed for the lead.

  I began to follow them, but a sound drew me back.

  My mother had wrung the necks of many chickens, but she had always done it so quickly that there was no time for sound or struggle.

  This was different.

  I turned at a rasping sound behind me. Betty held the quail out by its neck, its plump little body swinging as it fought the noose she’d made with her fingers, its talons curling and stretching, its stubby wings frantically beating the air.

  “Betty!” I cried. “Let her go. You’re killing her!”

  I reached for the quail, and as I did Betty squeezed her hand around its neck and held it high, out of my reach, stepping back and up on the fallen log, a serious look on her face, her eyes on mine, unblinking.

  “Let go!” I cried again.

  But as I grabbed for the bird, she squeezed her fist all the way shut, crushing its neck. I heard the sound of the delicate bones snapping.

  She tossed the poor, limp thing at me, and I backed away, tripping on a root in the path and landing hard on my back.

  Where Toby came from, I don’t know. One minute, I was lying on the path, struggling to regain my wits, and the next he was between us, his back to me, snarling like a farm dog.

  I don’t know what he did. I couldn’t see Betty at all. Just Toby. And I couldn’t make out a word of what he said to her. Mostly it was noise. Terrible noise.

  And then he turned and helped me to my feet without uttering another sound. He gathered up the dead bird. She looked small and perfect in his ruined hand.

  He took a breath and straightened himself before heading up the path and out of Wolf Hollow.

  All of it, from my brothers running off, to Toby leaving us, had taken less than a minute.

  Betty lay on her back in the undergrowth, wide-eyed and almost smiling.

  “What did you do that for?” I said, as amazed as I’d ever been. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “He stole my bird,” she said, almost to herself. “And he said he’d make me sorry if I touched you again.”

  How it was possible to be pleased under the circumstances was a mystery to me, but I was. Just a little.

  Perhaps Betty had met her match in Toby.

  “What a dumb nut,” she said, gaining her feet. She brushed herself off. Leaves stuck to her hair.

  She clearly didn’t realize that she’d been lying in a bed of poison ivy, and I wasn’t about to tell her.

  If I went to hell for wishing a plague upon her, then that’s where I would go.

  “You’re nothing but bad,” I said to her. “Right to your bones.”

  Which made her laugh. “My grandma taught me to wring a chicken’s neck and we ate it all up that very night, with mashed potatoes and gravy. Nothing bad about it. And if there was, then she’s bad, too, and your own mother with her.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not the same thing and you know it,” I said, though I wondered if she did.

  I left her there, musing in that patch of poison, and prayed that she would wake tomorrow with scarlet boils and hard scabs. I prayed for a rash to veil her face with pustules and scales. And I prayed for scars. I did. I prayed for scars on the hands that had killed that harmless bird. And I wasn’t sorry that I did.

  By afternoon recess, Betty was scratching her
neck. By the time school let out, a rash had broken out across one cheek. And when I got home that day, I found my mother down below the house in a bed of jewelweed that grew where a spring welled from the ground.

  “What are you doing?” I called to her from the lane.

  She waved for me to join her, so I followed the path past the kitchen garden to where the spring had birthed a little downhill stream.

  Had there been a frost hard enough to freeze the jewelweed, there would have been nothing but muck around the spring, but most of it was still green and living, if leggy. The translucent seedpods that had grown from its orange blossoms had long since burst, scattering their cargo, but enough of the leaves remained.

  My mother had pulled a number of the watery stems, folding them up into a peck basket, and began to pile more into my arms.

  “We’re going to need a lot of this,” she said. “Betty Glengarry managed to wander into a patch of poison ivy and she’s covered with blisters.” My mother shook her head. “I thought everyone knew better, but apparently Betty’s never had poison ivy before. She’ll know better now.”

  A baby ant wandered from a leaf and onto my hand. I blew it off. “Why do you have to do all this?” I said. “They don’t have any jewelweed by their own spring?”

  My mother stopped to give me a look. “Mr. Glengarry went to Ohio to help his sister move house, and Mrs. Glengarry has sciatica. She isn’t about to go traipsing around the woods when we have plenty right here.” She pulled out another fistful of weeds and stuffed them into my arms. “She called to see if we had any still growing so late. And we do. So I’m going to make some broth. And you’re going to help me.”

  I wanted to tell her about the quail, but I didn’t want to talk about it. I felt sick when I remembered the sound those bones had made as they broke. And I needed time to think about the rest of it, too, and what to do next.

  I thought about the quail. I thought about my brothers. I remembered the sound that Toby had made in his fury.

  “All right,” my mother said. “That should be more than enough for one girl.”

  She picked up her basket and led the way back up the hill to the house.

  Together, we began a brew to soothe the hurt I’d prayed for.

  In our biggest pot, we boiled water and stuffed the jewelweed in, one stalk at a time. In moments, the stems and soft leaves melted down and greened the water, filling the kitchen with a smell much like spinach makes as it cooks.

  “Who’s been into the ivy poison?” my grandmother called from the back room where she was catnapping.

  “Betty Glengarry,” my mother called. “She’s got it terrible.”

  “City girl,” my grandmother said, but not unkindly. “She’ll know better next time.”

  Despite my better self, I hoped there would be a next time and that it would come after a good, hard frost.

  When we’d boiled up all the weeds, we poured the broth into Mason jars, let it cool, fitted the jars with lids, and tucked them back into the peck basket.

  “This ought to do the trick,” my mother said. “Get your coat on. We’ll take this over there and pull some beets on our way back.”

  “Do I have to go?” I asked. “I can start supper while you’re gone.”

  “We won’t be long,” my mother said, lugging the basket into the mudroom. “Now go run out to the barn and fetch your grandpap. It’s too far to walk with all this heavy business.”

  I vowed to stay in the truck with my grandfather while my mother made her delivery. But when we pulled up in front of the Glengarrys’ house, she put a jar in each of my hands and hustled me ahead of her. “You helped make the medicine,” she said. “Betty should know that. Maybe you two can be friends.”

  There was nothing I could say to that, so I said nothing.

  When Mrs. Glengarry answered our knock she looked uncommonly upset. “Good grief, Sarah, come in. Come in, Annabelle. You are angels. Nothing less. Wait until you see Betty. Goodness, but she’s awfully sick.”

  And she was. “Good grief” didn’t approach what I wanted to say when I saw her. Blisters I had prayed for. And blisters I had got.

  Wherever Betty’s skin had touched the poison ivy, she was ferociously red and swollen, some of the blisters so huge that I could see through the skin to where the fluid had collected inside. I was reminded of a bullfrog in full croak, its throat bulging out in a bubble.

  It was difficult to look at her. It was more difficult to look away. I’d never seen anyone poisoned the way Betty was.

  “Lord, that’s quite a case you’ve got there,” my mother said, taking off her coat and laying it on the foot of Betty’s bed. “Margaret, get some clean rags, will you?”

  While Betty’s grandmother fetched the rags, my mother gently moved Betty’s arms and legs out from her body and tucked her hair away from her face. “You poor thing,” my mother said. “You must itch terribly.”

  Betty watched my mother as she worked. Through her teeth, she said, “I don’t care.” She wheezed a little. “It’s just a stupid rash.”

  My mother shook her head. “What a brave girl you are, Betty.”

  “Rags,” Mrs. Glengarry said, piling them on the foot of the bed. “What else?”

  “Get a basin. Annabelle, bring me two of those jars.”

  One of God’s best ideas was to invent jewelweed. As miracles went, it didn’t quite stack up to parting the seas or turning water into wine, but if anything could make Betty well, it could.

  My mother poured the warm broth into the basin, soaked the rags in it, squeezed them out until they were just weeping, and laid them on Betty’s horrible skin until nothing showed but her eyes, which followed me as I looked around her bedroom.

  Her room was a lot like mine. A bed. A small table with a lamp on it. A chair in one corner. A closet, its door open enough so I could see that there wasn’t much inside. Plain white walls. A bare wood floor. A picture of Jesus on one wall. On another, a photograph of a man and a woman in good clothes, he wearing a tie, she a red hat.

  Standing here in her room, with Betty laid out on the bed, helpless, and two grown-ups close by, I gave my curiosity a little rein. “Are those your parents, Betty?” I asked.

  But it was Mrs. Glengarry who answered me. “Yes, that’s my son, Betty’s father, though he’s . . .” She pulled up short. Looked around at my mother.

  “Gone,” Betty said, the same way she might have said mud.

  I didn’t know what gone meant.

  “There now,” my mother said. She pulled a blanket up to Betty’s chin and cleared off the bed.

  Betty turned her head slightly, caught me looking at her, and turned away again, but not before I had seen her eyes. They were a sore kind of red. The rags draped across her face dripped jewelweed brew into her hair. And maybe something more.

  Despite all her meanness, I was glad, suddenly, that in this mild November there had still been jewelweed for us to gather.

  “Do that every hour,” my mother told Mrs. Glengarry, handing her the basin. “Don’t wring the rags out too dry. They need to be good and wet. And don’t let her get chilled.”

  At the door, my mother stopped and said quietly, “Margaret, if that wheezing gets any worse, give her some of the broth to drink and call Doctor Benson.”

  “I will, Sarah. Thank you. Thank you. And you, too, Annabelle. Betty always says such nice things about you. Maybe you could come over and play when she’s well.”

  It was dark when we reached the beet field, but we worked by the truck’s headlamps and had enough beets for supper in no time at all.

  I would have gladly stayed in the field longer, doing such work, satisfied with the fat surprise that dangled from each cluster of greens I pulled.

  They didn’t look like much, those beets. Tough skins clotted with dirt, hairy with fine roots, hard as st
ones. But inside were sweet rubies, eager to be warmed into softness.

  I longed for that order of things.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The jewelweed worked, but not as quickly as it might have on a milder case, so I was happy with the day that followed. Betty stayed at home, recovering. And Andy was still fair-weathering somewhere else. Mrs. Taylor opened the windows of the schoolhouse to let in the breeze and the sound of birds. And I learned about a thing called onomatopoeia, which I could not yet spell but practiced under my breath throughout the afternoon.

  The next morning, Betty and Andy both returned to school.

  Betty’s face and hands still looked tender, a little scalded, but so much improved that I could hardly believe she’d been so recently poisoned. Even so, she wore long sleeves and trousers and moved a little carefully as she came down the path and into the schoolyard.

  I watched her from the schoolhouse steps where I sat in the sunshine with Ruth and some of the other girls, waiting for Mrs. Taylor to call us in.

  “Hey, Betty,” someone said.

  Betty stopped, then came closer, her lunch pail in her left hand. She looked straight at me, lifted her right hand, and squeezed it slowly into a fist.

  “Hey, Annabelle,” she said with a smile.

  I hadn’t expected any thanks for helping her get well. But I hadn’t expected this either. How stupid I was.

  “Why are you so mean?” I asked. And I was really curious. I really wanted to know.

  “I’m just older than you, is all,” she said. “You’ll learn to look after your own self, too. If you’re not too dumb, which you might well be.”

  But I wasn’t. Neither dumb nor too young to know what mean was.

  “Come on inside,” Mrs. Taylor called.

  Only Betty stayed behind when the rest of us went in.

  When she did eventually appear, nearly an hour later, Andy was with her.

  He was newly brown with sun, his clothes clean. And Betty, despite her trousers, looked all girl next to him.