by Lauren Wolk
“I’m so glad you could finally join us,” Mrs. Taylor said to Andy. “I hope you’re feeling better,” she said to Betty.
They took their seats, the lesson at the chalkboard resumed, and the rest of the morning passed quietly enough.
Andy slept through a good deal of it. As he slept, Betty watched him, ignoring Mrs. Taylor’s instructions, the book on her desk closed. When he woke, Betty smiled and tugged on his sleeve. He turned to her, grinned through a yawn, and sat up straighter in his chair.
I thought about asking Mrs. Taylor if I could switch seats with someone so I wouldn’t have to watch such moonshine. But I didn’t want to abandon Ruth, and I seemed to be invisible to Betty as long as Andy was nearby. I didn’t want to do anything to change that.
I wanted nothing more of bruises and threats and poor dead quails.
I wanted nothing to do with anyone who could close her hand around a bird’s neck and smile about it.
I wanted Betty to go back where she’d come from.
I wanted to rewind the clock to where it had been before she arrived. I wanted to undo. To unremember. To be who I’d been before: someone who had never prayed for blisters. Someone who had never even considered doing so.
But if all I could have was a little respite from her attention, I would take it, and gladly. Andy drew her to him, away from me, and I would have to be satisfied with that.
Recess, for us, was a matter of spilling out into the clearing around the schoolhouse twice each day to jump rope or play hopscotch or otherwise sow some oats. We weren’t supposed to go near the road that led past the schoolhouse, through the hollow where one hill ended and another began. And we generally ignored the cars that traveled past from time to time, but whenever I heard a team of horses plodding by, pulling a hay wagon or a flatbed, I’d stop what I was doing to walk alongside for a bit, chatting with the farmers or the horses, sometimes taking them a bucket of well water if they stopped to rest on a hot afternoon.
On this day, Mr. Faas and his grays came slowly down the road pulling a wagon full of fat apples in bushels and pecks, on his way to market.
Mr. Faas was so friendly and kind that he always asked us to call him Mr. Ansel, which we did, though when Henry once called him Ansel without the “mister” my mother cuffed him behind the ear.
“Hi, Mr. Ansel,” I called from the steps of the schoolhouse where Ruth and I were playing a game of cat’s cradle. At which Mr. Ansel slowed the horses further and waved in reply. His “good morning” came out “goot morgan,” his tongue forever German no matter how many years he’d lived in these hills.
“And how are you, small Annabelle, smaller Ruth, on a morning as fine as this one?” He wore overalls that were Sunday-clean and crisply pressed, a well-brushed hat and boots as polished as his apples, which gleamed in the sun as if he were carting them to a jeweler’s for setting.
“Just fine,” I said. His horses stamped a little, eager to get going, but I leaned my forehead for a moment against the nearest haunch and patted it with my open hands. “I just wish I were going to market with you and these sweet boys. They’re awfully nice.”
Ruth—her dark hair in a tight braid, her skirt straight and sharp—kept back a little, clear of their hooves and their big yellow teeth. Her father was a bookkeeper. The only animal at Ruth’s house was a tabby cat.
Later, everyone would wonder what Ruth had ever done to deserve what happened next.
The rock that caught Ruth square in the eye was small enough so her brow did not deflect it, large enough that it knocked her on her back and did her eye real hurt. That much was clear even to me as I watched the blood spill down her cheek.
Ruth was stunned the way a bird is stunned when it flies into a window full of sky reflected. She lay still, but her hands and feet twitched in the dust kicked up by her fall.
I knew when Mr. Ansel leaped from the wagon seat and knelt next to Ruth.
I knew when there was yelling and confusion in the schoolyard.
I knew when Mrs. Taylor came racing into the road, saw Ruth’s face, and sped away again to fetch her car.
I knew when Ruth came out of her stupor and began to scream. When Mr. Ansel scooped Ruth up and into the back of Mrs. Taylor’s Ford, and we both stood clear as she pulled into the road and away, quickly, dust rising in her wake.
“I will go as quickly as I can and tell her parents,” Mr. Ansel said to me.
There was a smear of blood on his perfectly clean coat.
He climbed into the wagon and snapped the reins smartly. His horses, already upset, lurched into a trot.
Behind the wagon, apples littered the road in a long and rolling trail that did not end until the road curved away.
A fly had come to light on the spatter of Ruth’s blood. I watched it drinking.
The other children were still lined up along the road. Quiet.
Henry and James came to stand with me. Henry, who never did what I told him, said, “What should we do?”
Without Mrs. Taylor, we were all children now. Even the older boys, clustered behind the rest, looked small. I didn’t see Andy. I didn’t see Betty. At the time, I was glad they weren’t around.
That’s all I thought about them at the time.
I said, “Henry, run home and get someone.”
Ours was not the nearest house, but it was the one where my mother was.
When Henry took off, James followed, and I didn’t call him back, which would have done me no good in any event.
Then I fetched a pail of water at the well, poured it over the blood in the road, and went inside to wait.
Some of the other children came along. Most collected their things and went home. The littlest ones sat at their desks with their hands folded until someone came to fetch them. I sat at my desk, which was so much bigger without Ruth, put my head down, and cried.
I was waiting on the schoolhouse steps when my parents trundled down the road in our old truck and pulled up alongside the gully by the schoolhouse.
They took me close to them for a moment before my mother went to be with the other children.
My father bent to look me in the eye. “What happened, Annabelle?”
I’d stopped crying long before I ran out of tears, so they threatened now to start again.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I was standing just there”—I turned to point—“talking to Mr. Ansel. Ruth was a little behind me, scared of the grays. And then a rock hit her right here.” I tapped my left eyelid. “And she fell down. Mrs. Taylor took Ruth away in her car.”
My father straightened to look past me and the truck, at the road and the hill that rose up behind it. “Show me,” he said.
So I walked around the truck and into the road. There was still a wet spot where I’d washed away Ruth’s blood.
“Here,” I said. “This is where Ruth was standing.”
“Facing the hill? Mr. Ansel was headed down the hollow?”
“Yes, to market. See, the apples there, from how fast he went to tell Ruth’s mother. Yes, she was standing there. And I was here,” I said, moving to where I’d been, “and the horses right in front of me, and the wagon and Mr. Ansel here.” I sketched a box with my hand.
“So the rock came from the hillside there?”
I looked up at the facing hill. It was steep, trees and bushes rooted everywhere they could root, ledges of slate all over the place, the gully below littered with fallen bits.
“It must have, I guess, since that’s where Ruth was facing.”
My father stood with his hands on his hips, considering the hillside. “So the wagon and the horses and you were all in between Ruth and the hill,” he said.
I nodded. “That’s right.”
“Which means the rock couldn’t have just fallen loose and bounced out of the gully or it would have hit the horses
or the wagon before it hit Ruth,” he said thoughtfully. “It had to have come down from higher up to clear all of you and hit her.”
It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t answer it.
Far as I knew, no one had climbed that hill at recess, though the boys sometimes played King of the Mountain when school was over, grabbing hold of branches as they climbed, gaining footholds on the ledges and along the trunks of the trees. Rabbits and deer and boys had made zigzag paths that showed the easiest ways up and down.
“And you didn’t see anyone up there when this happened?”
I shook my head. “I was looking at the horses and Mr. Ansel. And then I was looking at Ruth.” And that was when my lips began to tremble.
“Okay, Annabelle,” my father said, his hand on my head. “It’s okay. We don’t have to talk about this right now.” But he turned and looked up the hill again, and I knew there would be more to come.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ruth lost her eye. It was as simple as that.
I heard about it later that night from my mother. Most mothers might have waited until morning to deliver such news, but not my mother. She knew that I would have nightmares, regardless. Everything was about to get worse, and waiting to face it would not change that.
“It could have been me,” I told my mother when she came and sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and told me that the doctor had not been able to repair Ruth’s eye. That no one could have repaired it. The rock had ruined the parts that Ruth needed in order to see. That’s how my mother put it.
“Yes,” she said, stroking my hair. “It could have been you, Annabelle. But I think that rock was meant for Mr. Ansel or his grays or even his apples. Not you. Not Ruth.”
“Why do you think that?”
My mother sighed. “Well, Mr. Ansel is German, Annabelle, and a lot of people around here are angry with the Germans. Have been since the last big war but especially now that we’re in another one. It’s not the first time someone has tried to do him harm, though before this they took it out on his crops or his truck. Broke windows. Put dead rats in his mailbox.”
“But Mr. Ansel has lived here most of his life,” I said.
“I know that. And you know that. But for some people it doesn’t make any difference. He’s the nearest thing they have, and they want someone to blame.”
“Who does?”
My mother chewed on her lip. Didn’t look at me. “People who have lost sons or fathers or brothers in the war. This one or the last one. People who fought in the war and came home angry or hurt. And really most everyone, since we all know soldiers over there right now, in harm’s way, because of the Germans.”
I thought about the gold stars on the flag at the church, one for each husband or brother or son who wouldn’t come back to us. I thought about Toby: his silence and his guns.
“But how could anybody in the hollow know that Mr. Ansel would be passing through just then? They had to be on the hill already.”
My mother shrugged. “I don’t know, Annabelle. I only know that no one was trying to hurt Ruth. What happened to her was just bad luck.”
Which only made things worse. How was anyone supposed to stand up straight and open-eyed when luck could decide everything?
The next day started hard and got harder.
Breakfast was a quiet meal. Even my brothers were subdued. I didn’t give a thought to anything but Ruth and what school would be like without her that day.
Despite myself, I began to cry, but as quietly as I could.
Aunt Lily said, “Oh, and what is it now that’s worth such tears?”
My grandmother said, without looking at her, “Even Jesus wept, Lily,” to which Aunt Lily replied, “And with good reason, which is more than I can say about this business.”
“You mean Ruth losing her eye?” my mother said, some vinegar on her tongue. “You mean that business?”
At which Aunt Lily said, somewhat peevishly, “Well, if that’s the root of it I suppose I misjudged the bloom.”
Aunt Lily was always saying things like that, but admitting that she was wrong was a rare thing.
I didn’t say anything at all.
James and Henry ate their breakfast like puppies, noisy and quick.
But my father drank his coffee slowly, his face grim, somewhere else.
“Stay away from the road and the hill at recess,” he said before the boys and I went out the door. “Keep to the other side of the schoolhouse, by the woods. I mean to find out what happened to Ruth. Until then, don’t go near the hill. Do you understand me?”
Yes, we nodded.
“Mind your sister,” he told the boys, which was like telling them to fly to the moon.
But the boys, too, surprised me, waiting until we reached the fields on the downslope above Wolf Hollow before breaking away at a run to spook a grouse at the edge of the woods and then disappearing down the path into the trees without me.
When the path turned and I saw Betty sitting on a stump ahead, I was filled with regret that the reprieve I’d had was over and I was again to be her target.
But then I felt something else rise in its place.
I can’t call it courage, since that’s what people have when they are scared but do a hard thing regardless.
And I can’t call it anger, though I’d been angry at Betty for the bruises she’d given me and the threats she’d made and the quail she’d killed.
I suppose I should have been both afraid and angry, but Ruth had lost her eye the day before, and what I felt now, looking at Betty’s empty face, was more like indifference. She seemed, on that morning, insignificant and small, even as she stepped out in front of me.
“What?” I said impatiently.
She looked at me curiously. “Did you think I would leave you alone just because that crazy man told me to? Or because your little friend got hurt?”
“She got more than hurt,” I said. “She lost her eye, Betty. Did you know that?”
Betty looked away. “My grandma told me. I’ll bet someone was aiming for that filthy German. Not her.”
“Mr. Ansel isn’t filthy,” I said. “You don’t even know him.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Way out here in these woods you might not know much, but I do. He might act all nice and jolly, but Germans are bullies who aim to take over the world. And they will if they can.”
I noticed a long red thread of fresh scab across Betty’s cheek, as if she’d been in brambles, and her socks were stuck all over with sticktights. I thought it odd that she’d been out in the rough so early in the day. And so soon after the ivy had laid her low.
“You’re the only bully I know, Betty,” I said. “But you’re going to leave me alone now. And not because Toby said so. And not because Ruth got hurt. You just will. I’m not going to give you anything. I’m not going to worry about you. I’m not going to run away from you. I’m just not. So you might as well leave me alone and get on with something else.”
I waited, looking her full in the face, determined not to cut this short. I wanted to be done with Betty. If she was going to hurt me, she could hurt me right then and there, and I could finally do something about it before the day was out.
But she didn’t do anything except spend another moment, thoughtful. And then she stepped aside.
I wasn’t relieved. I wasn’t happy about being left alone. I wasn’t anything much. Just so sad, and tired in a way I’d never been before. I wanted nothing more than to hide in the hayloft in the barn and watch the rock doves napping in the rafters. To close my eyes and think about nothing at all. Not Ruth. Not Mr. Ansel. Not Germans. And not Betty Glengarry.
But if I couldn’t retreat to the barn, school was the next best thing, and I gave myself over to my lessons. Andy didn’t come to school that morning, so Benjamin reclaimed his customary seat; no one sat with me a
s Ruth usually did, and we all passed the morning quietly.
When recess came, I sat on the steps with some of the other girls, making crowns from long grass and supposing what Ruth might be doing instead. The whole while I kept an eye on my brothers, but they didn’t go near the road or the hill on the other side of it. As usual, they spent their time racing each other from here to there, making mud pies in the dirt around the well, and throwing rocks through the forks of trees.
Betty stood and watched them with her arms crossed. She never played. Usually she went off somewhere with Andy, but today, without him, she sat by herself and waited for recess to be over. Today she seemed more intent than usual. But she did not look at me once the whole time, so I paid her little attention in return.
And then, just as Mrs. Taylor called us back in to school, Andy came strolling into the yard.
Betty went to meet him halfway across the clearing, and they spent a moment together, talking, glancing at me as they did, before following us into school. I wondered what they were saying and what it had to do with me.
For the rest of the day, Andy and Betty passed notes and looks, ignored Mrs. Taylor when she asked them to join her at the chalkboard for arithmetic, and were the first two out the door when she dismissed us.
By the time I left the schoolhouse, they were nowhere in sight.
I didn’t mind, then, when my brothers took off for home, racing each other up the hill and out of sight by the time I made it to the first turn in the path.
I heard them, though. First the sound of them racing away. The thud of their feet. A breathless hey! The mumble of loose pebbles on the path. Then a stretch of silence as they put more distance between us. And then a scream. And then Henry calling my name.
I ran to them up that hill as if it were flat ground.
I found Henry kneeling over James, who lay on his back in the path, crying, his forehead covered in blood.
I dropped to my knees beside them.
“I don’t know what happened,” Henry said. “James was ahead of me and he just suddenly fell back and started to cry.”