Wolf Hollow (13 page)

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 the 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.

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 and 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.

“Go on now, and redd up your room, Annabelle,” my mother said.

Which I did in a trice, making my bed and putting away the clothes I'd shed. On second thought, I pulled the case from my pillow and spread the quilt over it again. Then I went hunting.

From the room where my brothers slept, I took
Treasure Island
, which my grandmother had just read to them for the third time and wouldn't be wanting again for a long while. I put it in the pillowcase.

From my parents' room I took an old pair of my father's pants, a soft flannel shirt much like every other one he owned, some thick socks, and a pair of skivvies. In the past, my mother had given identical ones to Toby, so these were perfect. From my mother's sewing kit, I borrowed her sharpest scissors.

All of this went into the pillowcase, along with a bar of Lava soap and a clean towel from the washroom.

At every turn, I was but steps from my mother or grandmother, but they were busy, and I was soft-footed as I took the pillowcase down to the cellar and left it just outside the door, behind a bush.

When I returned to the kitchen, I found my mother making pies.

“I want to search, too,” I said.

She turned from her work, hands white with flour. “Oh, Annabelle, I don't think that's a good idea. But when your father comes back with the boys you can ask him. I expect your brothers will be happy to stay home after a morning tramping through wet woods. Maybe you can take their place.”

All I'd really wanted was a reason to take a jar of soup and some rolls and head back out again, and now here I might have talked myself into an afternoon searching for a girl who had made a mess of things for everyone.

“All right,” I said slowly. “But no one's looking right around here. Why don't I go on a little walk through the woods back of the barn? I could take my lunch with me. I won't go far.”

My mother considered me for a long moment. “Do you know more about this than you're telling me, Annabelle?”

I forced myself to hold her gaze. “More about what?”

“About Betty gone missing.” By now she had turned fully toward me, her floury hands poised in the air as if she were about to lead a choir.

The truth suited, though it was a lie, too, and once again I knew that I would not be able to keep my secret for much longer.

“Nope,” I said. “I have no idea where she is. But I'd like to help find her.”

My mother nodded thoughtfully. “All right. Take what you want and go on out, but not off our hill, do you understand?”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

I chose a coat with deep pockets. In one I put a Mason jar filled with hot soup, wrapped in a dishcloth, and a spoon. In the other, a hot roll with a coin of butter tucked inside, the hole pinched shut, wrapped in a sheet of waxed paper.

“You look like you've got jodhpurs on,” my mother said as I stood by the door, ready to go.

“What are jodhpurs?” I said.

“Never mind. Just watch yourself, Annabelle, and don't go too far. When you hear the dinner bell, you'll know your father's back.”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said again.

“And take that egg basket back out to the coop,” she said.

“Yes, ma'am.”

Which was one “Yes, ma'am” too many.

My mother bent a little to look straight into my face. “What are you not telling me?” she said, not angry but plenty serious.

I looked steadily back at her. “I'm afraid,” I said.

I didn't know where that came from. It just came. And it was the truth.

She straightened up. “Of what?”

I shrugged. “Everything. Betty. Betty missing. Toby missing. What Aunt Lily said about Toby taking Betty prisoner. The police coming here. I've never even seen a policeman.”

And then I was crying.

I was crying, and I was more surprised about it than my mother, who bent down again and put her arms around me and made soft noises in my ear.

“It's all right, Annabelle. It's all right. Everything will be all right.”

Which was what I had said to Toby, whether I believed it or not.

I hoped my mother believed it.

But I had learned, over the past weeks, that believing in something doesn't always make it so.

I wiped my eyes and put on my cap. “I don't know what that was all about,” I said. “I'm not really very scared. I just wish they would find Betty so things could get back to normal.”

My mother smiled at me. “Me, too. Now go on and have a look around, but remember what I said about staying close by.”

When she turned back to her work, I said, “What would you say if I asked you to make a hickory nut pie?”

We had a few hickory trees and harvested enough for our own use, but the nuts were dear and generally meant for holidays.

She picked up her rolling pin. “I would say that you might expect something of the kind before long.”

“Don't forget to ring the bell when they get back,” I said.

I went out the door, down and around the back of the house, fetched the pillowcase, and swung it over one shoulder. Feeling a little like a hobo, I headed down farther into the trees and across the side of the wooded hill below the barn until I had worked my way around the back of it and could enter, again, unseen from the house or the lane.

The horses watched me cross the pasture, ready for an apple if I had one, but I paid them no mind, and after a moment they returned to their grazing.

“Me, again,” I called as I climbed the ladder to the hayloft.

This time, Toby had come out of his hiding place to meet me. “I didn't expect you back so soon,” he said.

“I brought some more food. When everybody comes in from searching I'll have to go back, and I may not be out here again for a while.” I emptied my pockets of the soup and bread. Handed Toby the spoon. “Lunch,” I said.

Watching Toby eat that soup and bread was a little like watching somebody pray. He made it last, dipping the spoon slowly into the Mason jar and then, toward the end, tipping the dregs into his mouth. When he bit into the roll and found the surprise of soft butter inside, he laughed. Just one quick burst.

He seemed as startled by that as I was. I'd not heard him laugh before. Nor seen him smile.

He finished the roll, capped the jar, and set it aside. “Thank you,” he said.

“You're welcome.”

He gestured at the pillowcase. “What have you got there?”

I knelt and opened it, pulling out the book. “Well, this is
Treasure Island
.” I held it out.

The book was soft from handling, its corners stubbed, but Toby wiped his hands carefully on his pant legs before he reached for it.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You're welcome,” I replied. “There's a big hatch behind those bales, for lowering them out to the pasture. You can open one of the shutters and get some light to read by.”

Toby nodded.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “You just did.”

I smiled and popped a fist against my forehead. “Okay.” And here I paused, suddenly afraid. “I like your hair and all. I like it very much. It's very nice hair.”

“Thank you,” he said again, puzzled. “Is that a question?”

“I used to have long hair like that, but I hated when I got rats in it and my mother would about snap my neck trying to comb it out.”

He waited.

“And then my aunt Lily cut it short one morning when I came in from chores with chicken feathers in my braids. My mother about had a seizure, but in the end she liked it better. Said I looked like Amelia Earhart.”

Toby nodded. “You do, a little.”

“And I wondered if you might let me give you a trim? I brought some scissors, just in case. But I like your hair very much, Toby. It's nice hair.” I felt like an idiot.

Toby pulled a hank around and looked at how long it was. “Keeps me warm in winter,” he said.

I nodded. “I'll knit you a scarf instead.”

I would have to learn to knit first, but he didn't know that.

“Why?”

“Why should you cut your hair?”

He nodded.

“Same reason I think you should trim your beard,” I said. “So you'll feel tidy. I like to feel tidy. I like how light I feel.” I shook my head. “Nothing to get in my eyes. Tidy.”

Which was the truth. What I didn't say was that his hair and his beard hid him too much, as if he were peeking out from somewhere inside himself.

“And then,” I added, before I lost my nerve, “you can have a good wash under the pump and put on some fresh things.” I pulled the soap and towel and clothes out of the pillowcase and set them on a bale of hay.

I stood back and waited.

“Am I too dirty?” he asked. He held out his hands in front of him. It hurt me to look at the scarred one, how it was puckered and gnarled.

“No, not at all. Aw, I'm sorry, Toby,” I said. “I don't mean that at all. Just that it will feel good to be, well . . .”

“Tidy,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Tidy.”

I thought that if I said the word
tidy
one more time he would pick me up and pitch me out of the loft.

But after a bit he nodded and said, “If you think so.”

We started with the hair. First, I cut off most of it in big hunks and put them in a pile to bury in the woods later. With the worst of it gone, I set to making it even. Tidy. Which I was ill equipped to do. But I'd watched my mother trim up my brothers and knew essentially how it should be done. I was glad, though, that I hadn't brought a mirror.