by Jeffrey Lent
Their seventh winter was mild, with meager snow, a few cold barren stretches, days warming above freezing even in the short light of January. Rain fell, and often toward dawn turned to ice. The ice would melt to slush and freeze again at night, then more sunny days revealed bare brown grass, bare brown earth. People spoke of an open winter. In early February there were five days in a row when it was warm enough to work in shirtsleeves and the ground remained soft overnight. On the fifth day Cyrus had made his way to the barn to sit and watch a first-calf heifer a week overdue while Malcolm worked in the woodlot. Around noon a light rain blew in and a couple hours later the sky suddenly swam to a foreboding indigo and within twenty minutes the air was cold as an anvil, every limb, twig, stem and blade of grass sheathed in hard ice. The sledge was frozen into the mud. The steaming mules were encased and brittle, the harness leather stiff, buckles frozen. Malcolm tore free a beech limb from the brush pile to beat the ice from the mules and climbed on and rode the team home, a slow journey as neither mule wanted to do anything but stand stock still and wait for a thaw, clearly seeing all about a land designed to break their legs and smash their jaws. He pressed them on. It was late dusk, twilight, near the dropping swift dark of night when they eased into the farmyard, where the ice was even thicker. He pulled them up short and jumped down to go toward the body he’d seen tumbled and sprawled only feet outside the barn door. His feet shot away and he bruised his tailbone and was breathless, scared for a bad moment as he tried to get to his feet and could not, then slowed himself and studied the situation. He might not walk but he could crawl, except when a hand or foot shot away and he smashed his chin down on the ice. Cyrus had not moved at all and Malcolm was certain he was dead. He knew if he could reach his grandfather it was only feet more to the barn and up close among the cows, warmth. He eased himself down flat on the ice and rolled himself over. And did that again. He slipped back a bit with each roll but was gaining, then of a sudden was up against something cold but soft. He reached and his crimped stubbed fingers held cloth.
Cyrus Hopeton spoke. “My hip’s broke again. Help me to the house?”
Malcolm said, “We’ll do something here.”
“That cold come down like the wrath of God.”
“It did. Can you hold on a bit more?” The barn wasn’t more than ten feet away.
“I willed myself to fly but it didn’t take.”
“I’ll be right back.” Without waiting for a response he commenced rolling again until he hit up against the siding, reached until he felt the give of the door, gained purchase and pulled himself upright, just catching the latch as his feet began to slide away. Once inside the barn he found the lantern and lighted it, took down a coil of rope and tied one end to an upright post, set the lantern on a stool so the lantern threw light sideways out the door. He wrapped the rope once around his waist and on his knees paid out rope until he was beside his grandfather again, all the time waving his free arm above his head to keep the mules spooked and from charging the door. They loomed at the edge of the faint sprawl of light. He worked more rope free and looped it under the old man’s arms, about his chest. Cyrus was silent throughout but for his ragged rasp of breath.
Malcolm said, as much for himself as the old man, “I’m going to haul us both inside, a hitch at a time. Can you stand that?”
“It kills me, I’ll die happier than I expected a bit ago.”
“Don’t get maudlin on me. I’m the one doing the work.”
“Go on and do it then. Christ, I’m busted like a rag doll.” He hacked out a cough that trailed to the slightest whimper of pain.
It rained again, then snowed four inches overnight, and Malcolm was able to carry Cyrus from the nest of hay between two cows where they’d spent the night to the house and settled him into bed. It was the same hip broken again but the old man refused a doctor or any attention at all but spent the remaining winter and spring mostly in bed. He’d hobble down in the late afternoon and eat supper, sit in a padded horsehair-stuffed chair and talk of the day, reading the newspapers and weeklies before being helped back to bed. Once spring came and his windows could be opened he seemed to revive but only to the point of lying propped on pillows, watching what he could of the world outside of his room, in all ways. With summer Cyrus was not better but no worse, easier perhaps for the warm weather. Shrunken from his months mostly abed.
It was this way the morning Malcolm walked out into the peach orchard and saw the peach stones on the grass. Several times that week he’d strolled through to lift one of the first ripe fruits and stand and eat it and so knew soon would begin the cascade; but that morning he studied the stones in the grass and knew he’d just missed it. But someone else had not. He leaned and picked up one of the stones. Clean as a whistle. These peaches were best stewed or dried, the old Indian fruit that would begin to rot before it lifted easily away from the hard knotted stones. Something had been working, stealing his own pleasure.
He ate a peach, pocketed three more, and went on to cut his oats. Mid-morning, his hair slicked with sweat, eating a peach, juice running down his chin and a forearm also, he almost laughed. Coons, was what he thought. They’d been stripping the sweet corn not yet ripe and so moved on and found the peaches. He gnawed the stone clean, tossed it off into the creamy tan stand of oats, and clucked up the team. The binder teeth chattering. It was later in the morning when he’d stopped to let the team cool in the shade and prized another peach from his pocket, was eating it when he paused.
He could see a coon or two climbing a tree and sitting on branches to eat the fruit. Dropping the cleaned stones. Perhaps they even had the nose and knowledge to tell ripe fruit from hard or perhaps they’d eat a hard peach happily as a soft one. But could it be possible they were so sure-handed to never drop one as they plucked it free? Or partly eat a hard peach, drop it and seek a better sweeter one? It was not dead of winter and he knew with sweet corn that coons would be picky, leaving half-gnawed cobs dangling or down in the dirt between the rows.
Coons had never got into his peaches before. Or if they had they’d gathered drops and carried them off to eat elsewhere.
He tossed the stone and went back to work. He’d thresh his way until the binding platform was half full, halt the team, and step around behind to tie up the stalks in a bundle, stand it upright behind the machine and go on. He knew it was slow for want of a hired man but was delighted with growing oats and wheat and barley and having the machine do work that as a boy he recalled being done on a scant acre of thin oats by his father and grandfather and himself, with hand sickles, each man slowly working to make a small bundle and passing it to the boy to tie with braided oat-straws. Three days, maybe four to gain scant ration for a single horse over the winter. When there was prosperity they bought wheat flour from the merchant overstreet; when not, and most of the winter anyway, they ate griddle cakes and dodgers made from coarsely ground flint corn. So he went on, hot as blazes, sweated through his trousers and shirt, wishing he knew how to flatten wheat straw and braid a hat as some men he’d known could; but he worked on, bareheaded. He wouldn’t spend the money yet to buy such a thing in town.
By the end of day he had four acres of oats cut and bundled and those bundles stacked neatly on the threshing floor in the barn. Another day and four more acres of oats, then on to the barley. The wheat still ten days or two weeks away. Just when he’d be starting his second cutting of hay, but he was young and game and looked forward to the challenge of reading which to do on what day, portioning his days and time, each to the next.
Which he as all men already did.
Still thinking about peaches, he milked and fed up, made up a supper from the garden and slabs cut from brined pork and fried in bacon drippings, ate with his grandfather and left the old man propped abed in the summer evening heat with the most recent American Agriculturalist and the local weekly Chronicle, then went off downstairs to his own long, late summer twilight. He puttered about intent on his regular routine,
not wanting to alert his grandfather to any change, knowing the old man heard everything and knew every pattern of life about him.
There was a crescent moon just risen and a wash of stars when an hour before midnight he stepped off the front stoop with the smooth-bore shotgun loaded with a charge of number-eight birdshot, and keeping to the house shadow the moon cast, made his way until he could dart to the shadow of the barn, hugged that tight and went around the end to sit on the bench that overlooked the peach trees. He took a great amount of time doing so, silent all the way but for the faint slur of dew against his bare feet. Barely seated he made out a dark form up in the blanket of leaves in the third tree down. He almost raised the gun but reconsidered and slow as he could he set the shotgun aside, upright against the bench. He heard the phewt and then the spit stone plop into the grass beneath the tree. He laid both hands flat on the bench and launched himself.
The boy saw him and dropped out of the tree and took off running. Malcolm charged hard and scooped the boy up, arms locked around his chest, and the boy kicked wildly, striking Malcolm in the groin, and both together hit the ground and rolled over, Malcolm not letting go. Then the boy started using elbows, knees, feet and hands to hit whatever he could hit that held him, writhing and striking all at once, a gritty earth-bound determination to get free.
One elbow caught Malcolm against his nose and he huffed a cough and gripped the boy tight and rolled over, pinning the boy between his much larger self and the ground. The boy could squirm but only.
Malcolm said, “Quit. I got you.”
“You ain’t.”
“I’m flat on top of you. Now quit.”
The boy twisted his head and bit Malcolm’s hand hard, and he reared back. The boy began to squirm out from under him and Malcolm jumped to his feet, twisting the boy around so he had one arm levered up against the boy’s back. As he was doing this he stripped off his suspenders and quickly lashed one end around the jerked-high wrist, so the boy grunted with pain even as he was tied tight. Because his hand hurt, and to show the boy he was truly caught, Malcolm booted him in the butt, sending him reeling forward before the suspender snapped him back, upright.
“Now,” Malcolm said. “We can have us a talk.”
The boy shrugged and turned sideways as if he was done fighting it, then slapped his free hand down against his trouser pocket and snapped out and open a jackknife, was slashing toward the suspender when Malcolm realized what it was and jerked the boy off balance as he also kicked him hard in the groin. The knife flew into the dark as the boy sagged and Malcolm jerked again, causing the boy to stumble forward, and caught him with both arms, spun him around away from where the knife had gone, and sucker-punched him in the stomach.
Finally he had the boy subdued on the ground. Malcolm squatted some feet away, close enough to loom and pounce, far enough to see the need coming. The boy was sucking to get his wind back.
“I’m half of a mind to lock you in the smokehouse.”
“That’s kidnapping. I’d have the law on you.”
“No. Come morning, I’d truss you like a roasting hen and haul you to town and show the sheriff the knife you pulled on me and explain how you was stealing my peaches and I’d guess he’d see it my way.”
After a moment the boy said, “You can’t eat em all anyway.”
He considered this and then said, “It’s not about what I eat or store for winter. It’s that they belong to me. Every winter I prune the trees, so they bear best. If I had extra, I’d likely give em to a neighbor who helped me out some way.”
“You do that?”
“That’s not the point. There’s a value to em. When you slink in at night and eat your belly full, you’re cutting into my value. It’s mine, see. To do with as I want. If I didn’t care for peaches at all and let em rot on the ground, that’d be my choice. It still would not excuse you eating em.”
“That’s flat stupid. If you was to let em all rot, you’d never known I was here.”
“You’d come and asked me, I might’ve said, fine, take some. Maybe even loaned you a basket if you hadn’t thought to bring one.”
“There’s something wrong with your head. Do you know that?”
“There’s no talking to you. I’m thinking the smokehouse is best.”
“It’d just be trouble for you in the morning. Ain’t you got work to do?”
“What’s your name?”
“I ain’t saying.”
Malcolm sighed. He said, “Best I figure you ate a bushel, maybe closer to two. So far.”
“I never.”
“So it’s between seventy-five cents and two dollars you owe me. Since we never will agree, let’s call it a dollar on the slim side. Do you know what a dollar means?
“Nothing. My count is three peaches tonight, less the half a one I dropped when you come running after me.”
Malcolm said, “So call it a dollar. That’s two day’s wages for a hand. You being but a scrap of a man, I make it four days work you owe me. You shoot bluster but you don’t want the law in this, so let’s make it easy. Starting first light you’ll work those four days dawn to dusk and I’ll feed you breakfast, dinner and supper to boot. How’s that sound?”
“It’s awful late, to put in that sort of day come dawn.”
“For me as well. And though I’ll work you hard, I’ll put in the bulk of it.”
The boy was quiet a while. Then he said, “All right.”
“All right what?”
“You leave the law out of it and I’ll give you four days.”
“We’re agreed, then? You’ll be here first light?”
“As soon as I can.”
“Oh, I know that. Look, walk along with me a bit and I’ll show you a shortcut.”
“A shortcut? Mister, you don’t even know where I live.”
Malcolm snorted and stepped off toward the bulk of barns before the night sky. The moon was low. The forgotten suspender jerked tight and Malcolm slowed to let the boy come even with him, as if they weren’t tied together. So they went around the barn and into the farmyard, up toward the icehouse and buttery, the other outbuildings between the house and the barns. Malcolm paused then and looked up at the stars, twisting his neck a bit and reached in his pocket and pulled out the last peach picked that morning. He held it out and said, “You want this?”
The boy was nerved right up. He said, “I don’t reckon. You said there was a shortcut.”
“I also asked your name.”
“Yer fucking me, ain’t you?” And swung a wild, desperate roundhouse.
Malcolm stepped under it and popped a fist to the lower jaw, the other into the boy’s midsection. And once more watched the boy go down. He hauled him a dozen feet to the pump and ran cold water onto his upright gaped face until the boy came up stuttering and spluttering.
Malcolm Hopeton said, “There’s a dozen ways to skin a cat. But only one right one. We’ll be talking about that, the days to come. Don’t never ask me why I chose you; you needed choosing and that’s all I know. Now, get on to bed.”
He walk-stepped the boy the short distance and pulled back the door of the smokehouse and kicked the boy inside. It being summer there wasn’t any fire, just the tight confines and the high peak where hams and sides of bacon, beef brisket, a venison ham were shelved, and rows of dangling hard sausages rested. With no ladder, far from the reach of even the most intent and practiced thief. The boy landed on his side, hawked a gob from his lungs and spat it into the small circle of dead fire.
Malcolm said, “You’re the Wheeler boy, ain’t you?”
“Fuck you.”
“I was only thinking you know my name and if I knew yours maybe we could get on faster to a better place. But that ain’t my call.”
He shut the door and latched it and turned toward the house. He was terribly tired and more so because he knew he’d just taken on something he didn’t want or truly need. He hated this part of himself but also knew he couldn’t live without
it. Life had informed him against trusting other men, a message reinforced by the old man laid up until death in the home neither would have if not for both of them; and yet Malcolm knew hope in his heart for the business of life. How to sum that equation, beyond countless ways? And why should it be otherwise?
Then, walking away from the smokehouse, the voice came over him, frightened, plaintive.
“It’s only Amos, here. That’s all. Just Amos.”
Amos Wheeler looked fully small as possible for a ten-year-old, not five hours later when Malcolm unbarred the smokehouse door. Skinny as a starved rat, trousers and rough linen blouse rotting off of him, sunken eyes encircled with bruises not made by man but most of all trembling with a terror of where he was. First thought Malcolm had was, I should send him on his way. But he needs meat on his bones and peaches won’t do that. When he reached in through the pale light as the sun crested over the eastern edge of the world, the boy shrank away.
Malcolm said, “If I was of a mind to kill you, last night would’ve been the time. What there is right now is a pot of coffee and a table of eggs and ham, dodgers and molasses. After that oats to harvest. It’s not terrible work and easier with two than one. So follow on and learn something or cut and run, I don’t care. But if I ever see you again I’ll fill you full of buckshot and know I did a good thing.” He walked away, hungry himself and tired but already stepped into the day. As if he had a choice. And was almost surprised when Amos Wheeler pattered after him. Malcolm Hopeton had never been hungry for food, but had been for much else, and could only guess where belly-hunger would take a person.
By noon Amos had got the hang of bundling the oats, riding on the platform of the thresher. Behind them stretched a line of sheaves that wobbled and then straightened. In the long evening after milking and supper they’d returned to the shorn oat field with the wagon and brought the sheaves to the cover of the barn. Beyond questions and directions they’d not uttered a dozen words all day. Walking out of the barn into twilight, Malcolm picked up an old horse blanket.