___
Bull and Jones
were the first up. Narrow watched his brothers leave the loft,
heard the barn door open and shut then climbed down after them. He
peered out the front door and saw Jones fastening up his pants.
Bull was casting his head from side to side, scanning the horizon
and sniffing the air.
"Bull’s after
breakfast," he told Porkchop when he returned to the loft.
"Good. Go get some
water from that well out front."
"It’s all busted
up. It can’t be any good."
"Well, look
around. There has to be another source of water."
Outside, Narrow
looked around the yard. He didn't want to see Pater or have any
kind of a repeat of yesterday. Around one corner of the barn a
large white plastic cistern stood on wooden blocks. White plastic
eavestroughing funnelled water from the roof into the cistern and a
tarnished faucet had been hammered into it near the base. A metal
bucket hung on a nail off the barn wall and Narrow grabbed it and
set it beneath the tap. As he loosened the faucet, clear rainwater
gushed forth.
Inside, Porkchop
built a fire in the stove. She sat in front of its open door,
relishing the heat, considering their situation. She would be
nineteen soon and had been looking after her siblings for as long
as she could remember. She knew everything that needed to be done
at the orchard and was angry that they’d had to leave their home.
But she also knew the Landlord; had known him all her life. He was
always angry, always yelling, and he never looked at them if he
could help it. Sometimes he would stare at Titania for a few
seconds but that had only started happening after her accident. He
didn’t like being touched and would flinch and jerk away if any one
of them so much as brushed his sleeve. It wasn’t a surprise that he
hadn’t wanted to keep them on.
She supposed she
ought to be grateful to Pater but her only impression of him so far
wasn’t a good one. She fed in a birch log and leaned back when the
bark caught fire and started to spit. She would simply have to wait
and see.
Bull had made a
beeline for the north woods; Jones followed at his brother's pace.
He'd only ever been allowed short spurts of speed at the orchard,
to fetch something or someone in a hurry at Ma's command. He tried
not to think about it much usually, but sometimes all he could
think about was running for hours and hours, never stopping.
"We've got a ways
to go," said Bull, stopping. "There's game but it'll be a
while."
"Okay." Jones
started to walk on but Bull remained. Bull wasn't particularly
sensitive to what people were feeling but it was impossible for him
not to see and be annoyed by Jones' constant fidgeting beside
him.
"If you want to
run, go ahead. Go east, but not too far. Listen for the signal."
Bull blinked and Jones was gone. He saw an after image of his
brother's grinning face.
Bull ambled north,
taking in the details of the forest. It was predominantly deciduous
with enough tree variety for excellent hunting grounds as well as
food and building materials. There were also many well worn paths,
human and animal. He had smelled as much from the road
yesterday.
He strayed off the
path he was on to check out an old foundation. He sat down on one
of the exposed footings. It looked like the remains of a house. He
waited a while to let Jones work off his energy then whistled,
wa-wa, the two short syllables of the Nellsen bird. Jones returned,
smiling and red-cheeked, and they continued north into the
woods.
Bull soon sniffed
out a small hare and three pigeons. Jones made short work of them
all, snapping the necks of each one, quickly and without feeling,
his hands a blur of motion from the moment he snatched the hare
diving into its warren, to the last pigeon, which he caught mid-air
as it tried to fly to safety. Jones carried the hare by its hind
legs, its head dragging near the ground. Bull carried the
birds.
With the exception
of Titania, the others got up and climbed down from the loft.
Porkchop set each to chores. Forest and Jelly went out to collect
plants and roots and Santa took over the fire and watched Mixer.
Narrow returned and set the water bucket on top of the stove to
warm then followed Porkchop around the barn as she explored it.
Mixer refused to sit still in Santa's lap and she put him down to
crawl.
Jelly soon
returned with her shirt front filled with potatoes, burdock root
and wild sage.
"The potatoes were
in the field behind the barn," she told Santa.
They were both
thinking the same thing: We're hungry, but will we get into trouble
for taking Pater's potatoes?
"There’s dock and
sage everywhere," she said, more to herself than to Santa, who had
already made her decision and was cutting up the spuds.
Forest returned
with his arms full of dandelion roots, several good sized Martin
apples and some stalks of rhubarb. Santa chopped them up as
well.
"There's more,"
said Forest. Forest had read the signs and knew that the coming
winter would be a hard one. The more food they could stockpile now,
the better.
While Santa
cooked, Forest and Jelly returned to their foraging. Bull and Jones
came back and plucked two of the birds and gutted them. Their
innards squelched as they dropped into the empty wooden trough just
outside the barn. Bull threw hay over them to mask the smell of
blood. Santa would collect the offal after breakfast.
They heard a crash
from somewhere inside the barn and rushed to the sound. It seemed
to take forever for them to reach the back corner, as though they
were running in slow motion. Finally, Forest, Jelly, Jones and Bull
arrived to find Porkchop standing Mixer up. Mixer promptly fell
onto his rump, twisted over and crawled away.
"Wow! Look at
this!"
Narrow pawed
through the heap of busted up cardboard boxes that Mixer had fallen
on. Out of them spilled a treasure trove: dishes, cups, cutlery and
utensils, pots, pans, a small grinder, a battered metal urn. That
was only what the children could see; dozens and dozens more
cardboard boxes and wooden crates were stacked along the barn's
walls, two and three deep in some cases.
Porkchop's stomach
rumbled and she ordered everyone to gather up the dishes and help
with breakfast.
"Plenty of time to
go through this later," she said, gesturing at the boxes.
When the others
turned back towards the stove, Porkchop reached down and fished
something out of the heap.
The smell of roast
pigeon wafted into the loft and finally roused Titania. She
gracefully descended the ladder and joined her siblings.
___
Porkchop wanted to
get this right. Despite a howl of protest from Narrow, Porkchop
decided that they would eat only the birds for breakfast. They'd
give Pater the hare. She took Bull with her. He was a good person
to have in a fight. Not that Porkchop thought it would come to
that, but it wouldn't hurt to have him there, she thought. And she
had the knife. She'd recognized the pocket knife in the heap. Pa
had had a similar one, although his had a crudely-drawn four-leaf
clover carved into the handle. He always carried it. He must have
died with it in his pocket.
From the base of
the porch Porkchop called out. There was a slight shift in the
front window curtain. Porkchop introduced herself and Bull.
"The rest are in
the barn," Porkchop said loudly. "Just as you asked," she
added.
Nothing.
"We know how to
farm. We could work the fields for you in the spring. Lot of good
land back there."
Silence.
"We got a hare for
you," Bull called.
The door was flung
open and the old man shuffled out. He had put a pair of pants over
top of his long underwear and wore a thick flannel lumberman's
jacket. He straightened up and spat. The gob landed just in front
of Porkchop's boot. He snatched the dead animal out of Bull's hands
and sniffed it.
"Fresh. Good." He
laid the animal on the porch. "I got some rules you gotta follow.
First off, this is my land. My prop'ty. My rules. You live in the
barn and you don't bother me."
Porkchop and Bull
nodded.
"You're a hunter,
eh boy?"
Bull nodded.
"Well anything you
guys catch, I get dibs on the best parts, unnerstand? That's called
paying rent. I don't care if you farm or not but I get dibs on the
best stuff. It's my prop'ty, my land, my rules. Unnerstand?"
They nodded
again.
"I may think up
other rules, he said. Let's get this over with." He made a shooing
gesture at Porkchop and Bull. Confused, they backed up. Pater
pointed to the barn. "Might as well get this over with," he said
again.
Pater followed
them back. The others quietly assembled into a line. Porkchop and
Bull stayed to one side as Pater walked up and down, peering at
each of them. He looked only briefly at Santa but his gaze lingered
on Mixer in her arms. Mixer waggled his fingers at him. Pater
frowned. He turned to Titania on the end. As always she wore a
shawl over her head to cover part of her face.
He stared at her.
Her eyes were an instant reminder. They were a painting thrown up
in his mind of the girl who had tried to trap him. His misjudgement
had caught up with him and now the grandchildren of that
misjudgement had found him too.
"I got rules," he
said to her.
"Rules," she
repeated.
___
Spoon Valley was
quiet. Splayed face down on a thick bed of moss at the base of a
cliff was a man. He was covered in mud and grass and his hair stood
out in wild knots around his head. His arms and face were covered
in welts. The only thing in his pocket was a small, fold-up
knife.
True to Pater's word,
so long as the children stayed out of his way, he stayed out of
theirs. During the first days on the farm Porkchop worried that
Pater would change the rules; that he would suddenly want to tell
them what to do and how to do it. But as the days progressed and
Pater ignored them, she relaxed. Bull often smelled Pater slinking
off. He was gone once for three days.
In the weeks
before the snow arrived, the children made themselves at home and
the days were spent investigating the fields, the woods, the creek
and the barn.
The loft was empty
of furniture, tools or anything else except a good store of thick
wool blankets and dozens of hay bales stacked against the wide
doors that faced the fields. Porkchop and Bull dismantled two bales
to use as bedding but left the rest against the doors to block the
wind. The only addition they made was a gate at the top of the
ladder that they latched closed each night at bed time. Jelly had
almost fallen off the opening to the wood floor, fifteen feet
below, on their second night. Narrow fashioned a gate from an empty
crate and attached it to the thick railing that ran the length of
the open loft.
Titania slept in
most mornings, climbing down only after everyone else had eaten
their breakfast and only Santa was around. Sometimes, she would get
up and sit quietly by the railing, watching her sisters and
brothers from above. At others, she would move a hay bale to one
side and peek out through the crack in the loft doors. She could
see the fields beyond and the creek and, looking down along the
side of the barn, a tall wooden ladder leaned up against the right
side loft door.
They slowly made
their way through the boxes and crates that lined the walls,
finding tools, clothing and equipment, some of which even Narrow
couldn't identify or figure a use for. Santa tailored the clothing
to fit her siblings. For the first few weeks, they found new things
about the barn almost every day, including six cold storage dugouts
that were hidden beneath floor boards and were filled with seed
potatoes, onions, bags of salt and ears of dried corn. The barn was
cavernous and as they slowly emptied the crates, they found
themselves having to shout to be heard from one end of it to the
other.
Narrow, Porkchop
and Santa spent a day shearing off the kernels and grinding them
down for meal and flour. Forest and Jelly foraged as much as they
could. Roots, tubers and apples were tossed into the dugouts and
dozens of bouquets of wild herbs and greens were hung to dry across
the hayloft railing. At the front of the barn they hung a bell they
found and Santa would ring it at mealtimes. Bull and Jones hunted
almost every day and were successful more times than not.
Nevertheless, Porkchop knew that game would become scarcer as the
temperatures dropped and had Santa salt some of their kills.
They didn't starve
but having enough food for all of them plus Pater was a challenge.
Everyone but Mixer lost weight. Jelly and Santa kept the family
healthy. Jelly combined herbs into teas that they drank daily and
Santa began to experiment with the food they had at hand. The two
of them would gather round the wood stove sometimes, their heads
bent over a steaming pot filled with all manner of roots and dried
plants. Ma would never have let them do this.
Porkchop kept an
eye out for the Constable but he never came. And when the snows
began she put thoughts of him out of her head. He rarely traveled
this far in wintertime.
The children spent
their evenings planning. They would gather at the table near the
wood stove, two oil lamps burning, and talk about what needed to be
done and when; what tools they had and which they might need. Santa
would tend the fire. She kept a crate full of shorn corn cobs
beside her and would toss several into the woodstove at a time.
Conversation would stop for a moment if they heard the pop of a
missed kernel.
Ma and Pa had
talked like this at this time of year. Over dinner, or doing
chores, or in bed they would talk and talk, filling in the gaps,
building up the next year's orchard plan in their minds. The
routine was familiar.