Wolf Hollow

by Lauren Wolk

  “Time for you to be out, Bill,” I said, unlatching the Dutch door and pulling it open. He snorted at me and sauntered down the aisle toward the big open gate that led to the pasture. I freed Dinah next, and she followed him into the sunlight, her tail twitching. Next, the milk cows, Molly and Daisy. We never named the calves, since we had to give them up so quickly, but our milk cows we kept until they had to go.

  I put out my hand as they lumbered past me, and the second of them planted her big square black nose in my palm for a moment, the hair on it a soft bristle.

  Had my father not been out searching for Betty, he would already have set them loose by now. I hoped that the sight of them in the pasture would keep anyone from coming out to the barn to do that chore, though they might come to see who had done it.

  I wondered if anyone had missed me yet.

  “Follow me,” I whisper-called to Toby, opening the door to the stairs that ran up the middle of the barn to the threshing floor.

  Ours was a banked barn set into the side of a hill with stalls down below that opened onto a long aisle. A cistern squatted on a slab at the back of the barn, next to a long corncrib.

  A huge pair of side doors on the top level opened to a lane and staging area on the upper slope. We could drive hay wagons up that lane and in through the side of the barn, store the big equipment in winter, work there in foul weather. Big tubs of oats stood next to grain chutes that led straight down to mangers in the stalls below. Part of this upper level had a very high, peaked roof hung with ropes and tackle for hoisting bales into the loft that consumed the better part of the space along the rafters.

  It was an old barn with some missing planks and years of dirt and straw built up on the floor, but it was dry enough and plenty snug in the hayloft, where my father liked to nap on rainy days. I hoped for a nice stretch of dry weather.

  At the foot of the long ladder to the loft, Toby stopped. He looked at the ladder, looked at me, looked back at the ladder. I started up. “Come on,” I said over my shoulder. “You can wait in the loft until everything gets sorted out.”

  But he stayed where he was. “I don’t like high places,” he said.

  I almost fell off the ladder. He didn’t look pleased when I started to laugh, so I stopped and climbed back down.

  Here was a big man in a black oilcloth coat, three guns slung across his back, long gnarled hair and beard, a black hat, a white face barely visible in the shadow of its rim. A man who’d been through a terrible war. A man who lived mostly on game and berries in a smokehouse in the woods.

  “You’re afraid to climb up to the loft?” I asked him.

  He ducked his head. Shifted his guns.

  I chewed my lip. “You live in hill country,” I said. “You’re high up most of the time.”

  He shook his head. “Not the same.”

  “Well,” I said. “You can either climb up to that hayloft or you can hide in the corncrib with the mice.” This time, I, too, heard my mother in my voice.

  Perhaps it was the word hide or the idea of clambering into a corncrib that did it. Perhaps the suggestion that he was a mouse. Toby didn’t say. But after a moment he flapped a hand at me and, when I began again to climb the ladder, followed.

  From the top, I looked back and saw him slowly climbing, two feet on every rung, gripping the side rails hard, his left hand knotty and slick with scars, focused on what he was doing, never looking down. The hardest part was at the top. He slapped his good hand out flat on the floor of the loft and dug his nails in. I grabbed his wrist, though largely for moral support, and he crawled off the ladder and clear of the edge of the loft, breathing harder than he had as we climbed the hill out of Cobb Hollow. I didn’t tell him that it would be harder still to climb down.

  At least I could assume he’d stay where he was for a while. That first step down onto the ladder from above would keep him put while I figured out what to do next.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can with some food and water,” I said. “And a bucket for, well, you know.” I could feel myself pink up. “If anybody comes in the barn, just scoot back between the bales and stay quiet. The boys might come around, but they’ll probably stay out of the loft.”

  Toby sat down on a bale of hay. When he laid his guns aside and took off his hat, he looked like a boy himself. Much older, of course, but just as young.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Everything will be fine.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Before I returned to the house, I wandered around outside the pasture fence, picking milkweed pods until my pockets bulged with them.

  “Where have you been, Annabelle?” my mother said when I came through the mudroom door. “One girl gone is one too many. Do you know how worried I was when I found your bed empty?”

  I didn’t want to lie to my mother, so I aimed for as much truth as I could. “You were in the cellar when I got up,” I said. “The horses and cows needed to be put to pasture, so I did that, and then I figured I’d gather some milkweed for the troops.” I pulled a soggy pod from my pocket. “But I didn’t have a bag with me.”

  There wasn’t much we children could do to assist the war effort, but we’d been asked to collect milkweed pods for their floss, which floated better than cork. The navy needed it for life jackets, so all across the country children had been put on milkweed detail. “I’ll take the boys out and collect the rest before it’s too late.”

  Here was something a farmer dreaded: milkweed seeds wafting across orchards, setting down roots where they’d make a nuisance of themselves, driving the livestock mad if they rooted in pastures.

  My mother looked askance at me. “How come you’re wearing so many clothes but no coat?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Which, oddly, seemed to satisfy her.

  “Well, until everything’s calmed down around here you let me know before you go someplace.”

  “Where is everybody?”

  “Your brothers were up with the sun and pestered your father until he let them go on the search.” She sighed. “I can just see it. Your father, two boys, four dogs. Your poor grandfather driving the truck around in circles, looking for some way to be useful.”

  Which was fine with me, as long as they all stayed away from the barn.

  While my mother returned to her chores, I helped myself to some rolls from the bread box, filled a mug with coffee from a pot on the stove, and headed for the cellar.

  It was a big cellar with stone walls and floors and four rooms. One was for laundry, perpetually damp but clean, the wringer washer in one corner, lines strung from wall to wall, a wicker basket on a long table, in it a cloth sack of wooden pins, tin buckets for hauling wash water from the well, a one-burner stove for heating the water, and a drain in the floor.

  In another room, shelves lined with newspaper held jars of jam, pickles, peppers, beans, tomatoes, peaches, peas, and corn.

  The coal room had a chute set up close to the ceiling so my father could shovel the coal in from the lane above. It was a filthy, sooty place where nobody went until winter came and the furnace wanted to be fed.

  The fourth room was for everything else that didn’t belong above stairs. Buckets that needed to be patched. Empty canning jars. Gardening tools. Bulbs dug up and stored in bushels of peat.

  There was a door leading from the back of the cellar to the outside, lower on the hill than the rest of the house. Just outside was a separate entrance to the root cellar where we stored potatoes, onions, beets, carrots: anything that needed to last as long into the winter as possible.

  I took a tin bucket that was still sound but had seen better days and filled it with provisions: the rolls, a pot of strawberry jam, some carrots, a couple of empty Mason jars and lids; I filled one with the mug of coffee. The others I would fill at the barn cistern.

  I left the bucket outside th
e cellar door and climbed the stairs.

  I found my mother stripping the sheets from my grandparents’ bed while my grandmother sat in her rocker, darning a sock.

  “I’m going back for more milkweed,” I said.

  And that’s when I felt the first wave of sorrow that came from keeping a new secret. Perhaps, by the end of this day, Betty would be found and Toby could return to his smokehouse, no harm done.

  If not, I would tell my mother. I could not keep this secret forever. Nor could I hide Toby for long, cloistered in the hayloft like a stray cat.

  “Don’t forget to take a bag this time,” my mother said as she stuffed the soiled linens in a pillowcase.

  “I won’t.” I watched the two of them at their work for another moment. So different. So much the same. The room filled with things they’d made. All of it worn to softness.

  The second wave of sorrow, now, was for Toby, too long deprived of such things, if he’d ever had them at all.

  Without school, without brothers underfoot, I had plenty of time to myself. I would have spent much of it in the barn anyway, with a book and rock doves for company, but today was Toby’s.

  “It’s just me,” I whisper-called at the foot of the ladder. No answer.

  I climbed carefully, the bucket heavy, the metal bail hurting my fingers a little. When I reached the top, I set the bucket aside and climbed clear of the ladder. “Toby?”

  He appeared then from behind a wall of bales. He’d taken off his coat. Without it, he was as thin as a spring bear. Hatless, he had no shadow in which to hide. His eyes were blue.

  “You made yourself a hideaway,” I said. “That was smart.” I gestured at the bucket. “Are you hungry?”

  He shrugged. “I have jerky.”

  “And now you have bread and jam, carrots, and well water. Coffee, though it will be cold if you don’t drink it now. I can bring you more after supper.”

  Toby still hadn’t stepped any closer to where I stood by the edge of the loft. A rail ran along there, but no spindles. Next to nothing, for a man afraid of heights.

  “I’ll bring more water, too, but there’s a cistern with a hand pump where we came into the barn. If you need to wash up, after it gets dark. Or you could go a little farther down the pasture. There’s a trough. A spring feeds it so it’s nice, fresh water. Cold, though.”

  I imagined that Toby normally bathed and washed his clothes in the creek that ran near his smokehouse, though his coat was so stiff with weather and soot that he never seemed particularly clean, regardless. Now, as he stood there without it, he looked almost respectable, though his hair and beard were long and tangled. “But if you don’t want to climb down . . .”

  I moved the bucket well away from the edge of the loft, next to a bale Toby could use for a seat. He came closer, and I was reminded of the stray dogs when they first arrived at the farm.

  “Nuts,” I said. “I forgot a knife for the jam.”

  From his pocket, Toby pulled a jackknife.

  He sat on a bale and cut a roll in half. Twisted the band off the jam jar, pried off the lid with the tip of his knife, and spread some jam on half the roll. He held it out to me.

  “Toby, that’s for you. I can eat at the house.”

  He held out the half until I took it.

  Toby spread his portion with jam and set it on his knee while he wiped the knife clean between his fingers, closed it, put it away. He opened the jar of coffee.

  “I’m sorry if it’s cold,” I said.

  He ate the roll thoughtfully, drinking from the jar.

  I took a bite and only then realized how hungry I was. It seemed years since I had awoken to find the constable at our table and the state police on their way.

  We ate in silence. Toby finished the coffee.

  “Do you want me to bring you a book to read?” I asked, fearing, as I said it, that he might not know how.

  Toby looked at me sharply.

  “We have lots of books. All kinds. My brothers like Robert Louis Stevenson. I do, too.” I shrugged. “If you want, I could bring you something. But you’ll have to read it while there’s daylight.”

  Toby didn’t need to think about it. “Whatever you have,” he said.

  I sat down on the floor and crossed my legs. Tried to decide if it would be right to ask him some questions.

  I twirled a stem of hay between my palms. “Can I ask you a question, Toby?”

  He laced his fingers. “You just did.”

  I saw his mouth twitch again with the seed of a smile.

  I almost said, “Can I ask you another question?” but realized that that would itself be another question. So I said, “What’s your name? Your family name?”

  But Toby didn’t answer. He looked away. “No,” I said quickly. “I have a better one.” I wanted to know where he was from, if he had any brothers or sisters, whether he’d ever had a dog and what he’d called it, how old he’d been when he went to fight in the war, how he’d come to be hurt, how old he was now (though my mother always said he had to be forty-four, forty-five or so), and what he’d meant when he said that he’d done “something bad.”

  “What’s your favorite food?” I blurted, feeling like a child.

  This time, Toby looked straight at me and, after a brief pause, said, “Hickory nut pie.”

  “Really? My mother makes really good hickory nut pie. Did you know that?”

  He nodded. “She once saved me a piece. Best thing I ever ate.”

  Toby’s voice sounded different. Softer. “Said she was sorry it didn’t have any cream on top.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what I would have done if it had been any better than it was. Died, maybe.”

  We spent some time like that, me asking small questions, Toby giving me longer and longer answers, until we were simply talking, Toby asking me questions, too. So I told him about my grandmother, whom he had seldom seen. And about Aunt Lily, though all I said was, “And then there’s my aunt Lily, who’s a postmistress,” at which Toby interjected a quick “Yes, I’ve seen her,” and nothing more.

  Until we got to the point when I had to ask him something harder, though I felt it was mine to ask. “What did you mean when you told my father that they’d made scratches on the Turtle Stone?”

  Toby pulled back a little, tightened up to where he’d been, and spent a moment in thought. “They were sharpening a wire.”

  “Betty and Andy.”

  He nodded.

  “Do you know what they did with it?”

  He nodded again. “If I’d seen them put it there, I would have taken it before it cut your brother.”

  “You heard about that?”

  “I saw you three coming out of Wolf Hollow, James bleeding, that girl, Betty, watching you cross the field. When you were gone, I went down the path and saw her unwinding the wire from one of the trees. She ran off when she saw me coming.”

  “The wire was gone when I took my father to show him.”

  “She took it with her.” He looked straight at me. “She was a bad girl.”

  I didn’t know what to think about the “was.”

  I stood up and dusted off my seat. “I have to go gather up some milkweed,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “The navy needs it for life jackets.”

  Toby didn’t say another word.

  “I’ll bring you a book later,” I said. And left him to himself.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Now I actually had to fill a sack with milkweed pods, which took longer than I liked. But I reminded myself that while Toby might need me, so did the troops. I pictured a boy lost in a stormy sea, his life jacket keeping him above water until he could be rescued. A life jacket filled with milkweed floss from our farm, perhaps from the sack over my shoulder.

  I picked until my fingers were sore a
nd the sack overflowing.

  Alongside the grassy lane between the barn and the house, there was a wagon shed where I spread the pods on a workbench to dry. Said hello to the cats napping in the wagon bed. And went on to my regular chores, long overdue on this very odd day.

  First, I gathered eggs from the chicken coop, a nice place in cool weather, awful in the heat. Our birds were accustomed to me and didn’t raise a fuss, even when I reached underneath them to take their warm eggs, leaving some with the brood hens so we would always have young birds coming of age to replace those we ate.

  Of all my chores, the worst was plucking a chicken after my mother had wrung its neck and dunked it in boiling water.

  For the dozen eggs in my basket, I thanked the birds with corn and dried marigolds and left them in peace.

  At the well by the house, which had a proper housing so it was safe and neat enough for my mother’s liking, I washed the eggs under the pump and carried them inside.

  “Good girl,” my grandmother said after I took off my boots and put the eggs in a bowl by the stove.

  I went up to my room and stripped off some of the layers I’d worn for early-morning warmth, changed my damp socks for dry ones, and ran a brush through my hair.

  Back in the kitchen, I helped my mother and grandmother with a huge pot of soup. We had no idea when the searchers would return or how many would come back with my father for a hot meal, so we browned onions and stewing beef, added vegetables and tomato juice my mother had put up in August, and left the pot to simmer.

  My mother checked my hands to make sure they were clean enough, and then she set a huge bowl on the kitchen table, took off the damp linen that covered it, and let me punch down the dough that had risen into a soft, white belly. We all three twisted off dollops to shape into rolls, lined them up on greased pans, and slid them into the oven.

  In no time, the kitchen was so fragrant with soup at the simmer and browning rolls that I was hungry all over again. I could only imagine how Toby must have felt.