Then Miss Carrington reappeared, striding toward the school, accompanied by two boys who were half-carrying, half-dragging a third. The third was covered in blood. It was running from his nose, from his mouth, from his ear, running down his neck, soaking his shirt. Miss Carrington strode past us, white-faced. She said, “Bring him in,” to the boys, and went into the school. The injured boy was Alex Kirby, a farm boy and a prize bully.
The rest of the boys arrived, glancing back over their shoulders at a straggler, who walked slowly, stiffly, and who also had blood on him. Their expressions were slightly awed, slightly alarmed. The straggler was Laurie Pye.
The other boys crowded around the step with the girls. Laurie stopped a little way off. I watched him. I was standing by the wall, where I’d been all along, watching the other girls skip. (Watching was all I did that year. Rosie Pye had been standing by the wall too— watching was all Rosie had ever done, but our isolation had not formed a bond between us.)
Laurie’s nose was bloody and the knuckles of his right hand were split. He stood for a minute or two, looking at the crowd around the step without any expression. Rosie was looking at him, her face as expressionless as his, but he didn’t notice her.
Then he must have become aware of his hand because he looked at it, and in doing so caught sight of his shirt, which was practically hanging off him. It had torn right down the side seam and partway across the back. He lifted it out from himself, turning slightly, examining the damage, and I saw his back and side, his ribs like a washboard. There were marks on his back. Small curved marks like little horseshoes. Some were bluish red and stood out from the skin, and some were white and faded and flat. His back was covered with them, all the same shape, like a U on its side. Then Laurie pieced the edges of the seam together and tucked the shirt into his jeans, awkwardly, not using his right hand, and you couldn’t see the marks any more.
He’d just finished when Miss Carrington appeared. She stood in the doorway, looking at him, and then seemed to become aware of the rest of us. “You’re dismissed,” she said to us. “You can go home. Alex is all right—the doctor’s coming. You can all go home.”
Then she looked past us at Laurie again. She looked worried. I don’t imagine Laurie had been involved in a fight before. He was not popular with the other boys, but they’d avoided him rather than picking on him. As I say, there was something about his eyes.
Miss Carrington said, “Come in, Laurie. I want to talk to you.”
Laurie turned around and walked away.
I don’t know what the fight was about, though I’ve no doubt Alex Kirby started it. He suffered a broken nose and his left ear was partly torn off. He was back at school the next day, with gruesome black stitches holding his ear on.
Laurie didn’t come back at all.
As for what I had seen—well, I didn’t know what they were, those small horseshoes. They had no meaning, no significance. Even if I’d known what was going on at the Pyes’ farm that autumn, I doubt if I’d have put two and two together. I wasn’t taking much in, that year.
So I didn’t mention the marks to anyone. And of course there’s no way of knowing if it would have made any difference if I had.
chapter
TWELVE
Sunday October 11th
Dear Aunt Annie,
How are you? I hope you are well. We are all well. Bo is well. Miss Carrington came. Mrs. Mitchell came she brot stew. Mrs. Stanovich came she brot pie.
Love, Kate
Sunday October 18th
Dear Aunt Annie,
How are you? I hope you are well. We are all well. Mrs. Stanovich came she brot a chicken. Mrs. Tadworth came she brot ham.
Love, Kate
I have those letters now. Aunt Annie died a year ago of cancer, and after her death Uncle William sent them to me. I was touched that she had kept them, particularly given their remarkably consistent lack of style and content. There was a whole box of them, covering a period of several years, and when I read through the early ones, I thought, good God, they say absolutely
nothing.
Looking through them again though, trying to imagine Aunt Annie reading them, picturing her unfolding the ragged little scraps of paper, adjusting her spectacles, and peering at my scrawl, I realized that if she looked hard— and she would have looked hard—she probably found a certain amount of comfort between the lines.
For a start, she would know that we were not starving and that we had not been forgotten by the community. She would know that I was in good enough shape to sit down and write a letter and that Luke and Matt were organized enough to see that I did. The fact that I invariably wrote on a Sunday implied that we had a routine, and Aunt Annie was of the school which set great store by routines. And every now and then there would be a scrap of genuine news:
Sunday November 15th
Dear Aunt Annie,
How are you? I hope you are well. We are all well. Bo is well. Mr. Turtle brok his leg he fell off the school roof there was a ded crow in the chimny and he klimed up to get it out. Mrs. Stanovich came she brot rice puding she said Miss Carrington said Laurie had to come back to school and Mr. Pye was rood. Mrs. Lucas came she brot pikles and beens. Last night it snowed.
Love, Kate
With regard to all the food: I don’t know if the church women had established a rota or if it was just left to each individual conscience, but every few days a major meal would arrive. Either we would find it sitting on the doorstep in the morning or a farm truck would come bounding down the driveway and any one of a dozen farmers’ wives would climb out with a stewpot tucked under her arm. “Here you are, dear, just passing. Put it on the stove for twenty minutes, it should do two meals. How is everyone? My goodness, look at Bo! How she’s grown!”
They didn’t linger long. I think they didn’t know quite how to deal with Luke. Had he been a girl, or younger, or less obviously determined to manage everything himself, they might have sat down for a chat and in the chatting have passed on much useful advice. But Luke was Luke, so they would hand over their offerings, tactfully not looking around them at the chaos, and leave.
There was one exception to the tact. Mrs. Stanovich arrived at least twice a week, heaving her bulk out from behind the steering wheel of her husband’s battered truck and puffing up the steps to the front door with two loaves of bread balancing on the top of a bushel basket of corn, or a leg of pork tucked under one arm and a sack of potatoes under the other. She would stand amidst the chaos of the kitchen, legs planted wide, bosoms heaving together under her cardigan in a great round agitated mass, hair raked back into a bun as if she knew Jesus didn’t care what she looked like, and gaze around her, chins wobbling with distress.
She couldn’t actually bring herself to say anything to Luke, she had enough sensitivity for that, but her face said it for her. And if she caught sight of Bo or myself, the distress welled up and spilled over.
“My darling, my sweetie,” (dragging me to her bosoms. Only me—after the first time she knew better than to try to smother Bo). “We must try to accept the will of our blessed Lord, but it is
hard
sometimes, it is
hard
to see the sense in it, it is
hard
to see the point.”
Sometimes I thought I detected an edge to her voice, as if she were actually speaking not to me but to someone out of sight but within earshot. She aimed the words at me, but she intended the Lord to get the message. She was angry with Him. She thought that in taking our parents away from us, especially our mother, whom I think she had truly loved, He’d been guilty of a quite disgraceful error of judgment.
“How long’s it going to go on?” Matt asked. “Forever? Week in, week out, for the next thirty years?”
Luke looked at a half-demolished ham from the Tadworths’ pigs sitting on the counter. “It’s damn good ham,” he said thoughtfully. “You gotta admit it.”
We’d finished dinner, and he’d put Bo to bed. I was sitting at the kitchen table, theoretically learning my spellings.
“That’s not the point, is it?” Matt said. “The point is we can’t go on taking this stuff.”
“Why not?”
“Come on, Luke! We can’t live off charity all our lives! You can’t go on expecting other people to look after us. They’ve got families of their own. They’re not exactly rich, you know, the people around here.”
“They’re not exactly poor,” Luke said.
“Where’d that pike come from last week? You telling me the Sumacks aren’t poor?”
“They can only eat so many fish,” Luke said, “‘specially pike.”
“They
sell
the rest, Luke. They
sell
the rest because they need the money!”
“Yeah, well, what am I supposed to say? Hey, Jim, thanks buddy, but I can’t accept it ‘cause you guys are poor’? He came for a chat, for God’s sake, and he’d been fishing so he gave me a fish! You go on about it like it’s going to be forever! It’s just until we get ourselves sorted out. Get ourselves some proper work. Then they’ll stop because they’ll see we don’t need it any more.”
“Yeah, well when’s that going to be? When’s this proper job going to appear?”
“Something will turn up,” Luke said equably.
“Well I’m glad you’re so sure of that, Luke. It must be useful, having inside knowledge.”
Luke said, “You like to worry, don’t you? You’ve always just loved worrying.”
Matt sighed and started unloading his schoolbag onto the table.
“They like bringing us things,” Luke said, pressing his point. “Makes them feel holy. Anyway, you’re not the one who has to thank them. You’re off at school. I’m the one who has to think up what to say for the millionth time, one lady after another standing at the door. Some days there’s a steady stream of ladies all day long.”
Matt looked at him. You could see him considering something in his mind. He sat down at the table beside me and selected one of the books from the stack he’d brought home. The arrangement was that I could sit across from him and learn my spellings, and he’d test me in between doing bits of his own homework. When I’d learned them to his satisfaction (or more likely when he’d given up hope), I was allowed to sit on beside him and draw pictures while he worked.
Now though, he didn’t get down to work straight away. He unzipped his pencil case and spilled out the contents onto the table and then, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, said in a loud whisper, “Do you think Luke’s good-looking, Kate? Give me your honest opinion. I need a woman’s view.”
He was teasing, and I was glad because it meant he’d dropped the argument. I hated it when they argued.
Luke snorted. He was scraping scraps off the plates into the garbage pail. He didn’t empty it often enough and it smelled. His housekeeping was on the basic side. All the vegetables were cooked in one pot and banged out onto our plates in a heap to save washing up. Clothes were washed only when they reached Luke’s definition of dirty. My school lunches consisted of an apple and a couple of slices of bread with a hunk of cheese between them. But I don’t remember him ever failing to make me a lunch and you could always find something to wear if you looked hard enough. We didn’t go without anything important.
“I mean, he has a point,” Matt said, still whispering. “Something must bring all those women to our door. Is it Luke himself, d’you think? His beautiful body?”
Luke thumped him. In the old days, when everything was normal, he used to thump Matt a lot—whenever, in fact, he couldn’t think of a reply to one of his smart remarks. There was no heat behind it, it wasn’t like one of their rare but terrifying fights. It was just his way of saying, “Watch it, little brother, or I’ll wipe you out.” Matt never retaliated, which was his way of saying that it would be beneath him to stoop so low. He just rubbed whatever bit of him had been thumped and carried on.
“All day long, you see, there’s this queue of fabulous, sexy women: Mrs. Lucas, Mrs. Tadworth, Mrs. Stanovich. All lined up at the door, panting, tongues hanging out, tails wagging.”
“Piss off,” Luke said. He’d started washing the dishes in a haphazard sort of way. Matt’s chair was right behind him, so they had their backs to each other.
“Don’t talk like him, okay?” Matt said, still whispering. “Only inarticulate people use language like that. Like the way they resort to physical violence when they see they’re losing an argument.”
“Yeah, well, they’re about to resort to it again,” Luke said. “Any minute now.”
I was giggling. I hadn’t giggled in a long time. Matt was looking deadly earnest.
“The thing is,” he said, frowning gravely at me, “rumour has it that several women and one in particular, I could name names but I won’t, but she has red hair, find Luke absolutely irresistible. So irresistible that they just can’t leave him alone. Seems crazy to me, but then I’m a man. You’re a woman. What do you think? Is Luke irresistible?”
“Matt?” Luke said. “Shut up.”
He still had his hands in the sink, but he’d stopped washing things and had gone still.
“I really want to know,” Matt said. “Whadya think? Do you think he’s irresistible?”
“No,” I said, still giggling.
“Matt,” Luke said quietly.
“That’s what I thought. So why is it that a certain redhead—Ow! Hey! What’s up with you!”
He swung around in his chair, clutching his shoulder. Luke’s punch had nearly flattened him. Luke wasn’t smiling. He was standing with his hands by his sides, dripping dishwater.
Matt stared at him, and after a minute Luke said seriously, “I said, shut up.”
I know why now. I pieced it together years later. Something had taken place that Matt didn’t know about, and it made the subject of Sally McLean a touchy one as far as Luke was concerned, and definitely not a good one for jokes.
It had happened the previous Saturday afternoon while Matt was doing his stint at the Pyes’ farm. The fall ploughing was long over, but there were fences to repair and Calvin Pye wanted the floor of a shed concreted, so Matt was out and Luke and Bo and I were at home—we were outside, working on the woodpile.
It had snowed on and off in the previous weeks and though the snow hadn’t settled, winter was definitely on its way. There was a stillness in the air that you don’t get at any other time of year. The lake was still, too. There was a rim of ice along the shore, thin and lacy and gritty with sand; sometimes it melted in the afternoon but it was always back the next morning, and it was thicker every day.
So the woodpile had become a priority, and that afternoon we were all working on it. Luke was splitting logs, I was gathering kindling, and Bo was busily taking off the pile everything that Luke put on it and putting it down somewhere else. It was fairly late, about four o’clock, and the light was starting to fade. I went off into the woods to where an old tree had blown down to get some more branches to break up for kindling, and when I got back, dragging the branches behind me, Sally McLean was leaning against the woodpile talking to Luke.
She was wearing a dark green heavy-knitted sweater which made her skin seem even paler than usual and her hair even redder, and she had painted a line of black stuff around her eyes, which made them look huge. She kept toying with her hair as she talked to Luke, winding it around her fingers. Now and then she’d put a tail of it in her mouth and draw it smoothly through her lips.
Luke was fiddling with the axe. First he’d drop it head down on the ground, holding on to the end of the haft; then he’d swing it upright again and rub his thumb across the blade as if testing its sharpness. Then he’d drop it down again and thump it thoughtfully up and down.