Wolf Hollow (6 page)

My mother poured the warm broth into the basin, soaked the rags in it, squeezed them out until they were just weeping, and laid them on Betty's horrible skin until nothing showed but her eyes, which followed me as I looked around her bedroom.

Her room was a lot like mine. A bed. A small table with a lamp on it. A chair in one corner. A closet, its door open enough so I could see that there wasn't much inside. Plain white walls. A bare wood floor. A picture of Jesus on one wall. On another, a photograph of a man and a woman in good clothes, he wearing a tie, she a red hat.

Standing here in her room, with Betty laid out on the bed, helpless, and two grown-ups close by, I gave my curiosity a little rein. “Are those your parents, Betty?” I asked.

But it was Mrs. Glengarry who answered me. “Yes, that's my son, Betty's father, though he's . . .” She pulled up short. Looked around at my mother.

“Gone,” Betty said, the same way she might have said
mud.

I didn't know what
gone
meant.

“There now,” my mother said. She pulled a blanket up to Betty's chin and cleared off the bed.

Betty turned her head slightly, caught me looking at her, and turned away again, but not before I had seen her eyes. They were a sore kind of red. The rags draped across her face dripped jewelweed brew into her hair. And maybe something more.

Despite all her meanness, I was glad, suddenly, that in this mild November there had still been jewelweed for us to gather.

“Do that every hour,” my mother told Mrs. Glengarry, handing her the basin. “Don't wring the rags out too dry. They need to be good and wet. And don't let her get chilled.”

At the door, my mother stopped and said quietly, “Margaret, if that wheezing gets any worse, give her some of the broth to drink and call Doctor Benson.”

“I will, Sarah. Thank you. Thank you. And you, too, Annabelle. Betty always says such nice things about you. Maybe you could come over and play when she's well.”

It was dark when we reached the beet field, but we worked by the truck's headlamps and had enough beets for supper in no time at all.

I would have gladly stayed in the field longer, doing such work, satisfied with the fat surprise that dangled from each cluster of greens I pulled.

They didn't look like much, those beets. Tough skins clotted with dirt, hairy with fine roots, hard as stones. But inside were sweet rubies, eager to be warmed into softness.

I longed for that order of things.

The jewelweed worked, but not as quickly as it might have on a milder case, so I was happy with the day that followed. Betty stayed at home, recovering. And Andy was still fair-weathering somewhere else. Mrs. Taylor opened the windows of the schoolhouse to let in the breeze and the sound of birds. And I learned about a thing called onomatopoeia, which I could not yet spell but practiced under my breath throughout the afternoon.

The next morning, Betty and Andy both returned to school.

Betty's face and hands still looked tender, a little scalded, but so much improved that I could hardly believe she'd been so recently poisoned. Even so, she wore long sleeves and trousers and moved a little carefully as she came down the path and into the schoolyard.

I watched her from the schoolhouse steps where I sat in the sunshine with Ruth and some of the other girls, waiting for Mrs. Taylor to call us in.

“Hey, Betty,” someone said.

Betty stopped, then came closer, her lunch pail in her left hand. She looked straight at me, lifted her right hand, and squeezed it slowly into a fist.

“Hey, Annabelle,” she said with a smile.

I hadn't expected any thanks for helping her get well. But I hadn't expected this either. How stupid I was.

“Why are you so mean?” I asked. And I was really curious. I really wanted to know.

“I'm just older than you, is all,” she said. “You'll learn to look after your own self, too. If you're not too dumb, which you might well be.”

But I wasn't. Neither dumb nor too young to know what mean was.

“Come on inside,” Mrs. Taylor called.

Only Betty stayed behind when the rest of us went in.

When she did eventually appear, nearly an hour later, Andy was with her.

He was newly brown with sun, his clothes clean. And Betty, despite her trousers, looked all girl next to him.

“I'm so glad you could finally join us,” Mrs. Taylor said to Andy. “I hope you're feeling better,” she said to Betty.

They took their seats, the lesson at the chalkboard resumed, and the rest of the morning passed quietly enough.

Andy slept through a good deal of it. As he slept, Betty watched him, ignoring Mrs. Taylor's instructions, the book on her desk closed. When he woke, Betty smiled and tugged on his sleeve. He turned to her, grinned through a yawn, and sat up straighter in his chair.

I thought about asking Mrs. Taylor if I could switch seats with someone so I wouldn't have to watch such moonshine. But I didn't want to abandon Ruth, and I seemed to be invisible to Betty as long as Andy was nearby. I didn't want to do anything to change that.

I wanted nothing more of bruises and threats and poor dead quails.

I wanted nothing to do with anyone who could close her hand around a bird's neck and smile about it.

I wanted Betty to go back where she'd come from.

I wanted to rewind the clock to where it had been before she arrived. I wanted to undo. To unremember. To be who I'd been before: someone who had never prayed for blisters. Someone who had never even considered doing so.

But if all I could have was a little respite from her attention, I would take it, and gladly. Andy drew her to him, away from me, and I would have to be satisfied with that.

Recess, for us, was a matter of spilling out into the clearing around the schoolhouse twice each day to jump rope or play hopscotch or otherwise sow some oats. We weren't supposed to go near the road that led past the schoolhouse, through the hollow where one hill ended and another began. And we generally ignored the cars that traveled past from time to time, but whenever I heard a team of horses plodding by, pulling a hay wagon or a flatbed, I'd stop what I was doing to walk alongside for a bit, chatting with the farmers or the horses, sometimes taking them a bucket of well water if they stopped to rest on a hot afternoon.

On this day, Mr. Faas and his grays came slowly down the road pulling a wagon full of fat apples in bushels and pecks, on his way to market.

Mr. Faas was so friendly and kind that he always asked us to call him Mr. Ansel, which we did, though when Henry once called him Ansel without the “mister” my mother cuffed him behind the ear.

“Hi, Mr. Ansel,” I called from the steps of the schoolhouse where Ruth and I were playing a game of cat's cradle. At which Mr. Ansel slowed the horses further and waved in reply. His “good morning” came out “goot morgan,” his tongue forever German no matter how many years he'd lived in these hills.

“And how are you, small Annabelle, smaller Ruth, on a morning as fine as this one?” He wore overalls that were Sunday-clean and crisply pressed, a well-brushed hat and boots as polished as his apples, which gleamed in the sun as if he were carting them to a jeweler's for setting.

“Just fine,” I said. His horses stamped a little, eager to get going, but I leaned my forehead for a moment against the nearest haunch and patted it with my open hands. “I just wish I were going to market with you and these sweet boys. They're awfully nice.”

Ruth—her dark hair in a tight braid, her skirt straight and sharp—kept back a little, clear of their hooves and their big yellow teeth. Her father was a bookkeeper. The only animal at Ruth's house was a tabby cat.

Later, everyone would wonder what Ruth had ever done to deserve what happened next.

The rock that caught Ruth square in the eye was small enough so her brow did not deflect it, large enough that it knocked her on her back and did her eye real hurt. That much was clear even to me as I watched the blood spill down her cheek.

Ruth was stunned the way a bird is stunned when it flies into a window full of sky reflected. She lay still, but her hands and feet twitched in the dust kicked up by her fall.

I knew when Mr. Ansel leaped from the wagon seat and knelt next to Ruth.

I knew when there was yelling and confusion in the schoolyard.

I knew when Mrs. Taylor came racing into the road, saw Ruth's face, and sped away again to fetch her car.

I knew when Ruth came out of her stupor and began to scream. When Mr. Ansel scooped Ruth up and into the back of Mrs. Taylor's Ford, and we both stood clear as she pulled into the road and away, quickly, dust rising in her wake.

“I will go as quickly as I can and tell her parents,” Mr. Ansel said to me.

There was a smear of blood on his perfectly clean coat.

He climbed into the wagon and snapped the reins smartly. His horses, already upset, lurched into a trot.

Behind the wagon, apples littered the road in a long and rolling trail that did not end until the road curved away.

A fly had come to light on the spatter of Ruth's blood. I watched it drinking.

The other children were still lined up along the road. Quiet.

Henry and James came to stand with me. Henry, who never did what I told him, said, “What should we do?”

Without Mrs. Taylor, we were all children now. Even the older boys, clustered behind the rest, looked small. I didn't see Andy. I didn't see Betty. At the time, I was glad they weren't around.

That's all I thought about them at the time.

I said, “Henry, run home and get someone.”

Ours was not the nearest house, but it was the one where my mother was.

When Henry took off, James followed, and I didn't call him back, which would have done me no good in any event.

Then I fetched a pail of water at the well, poured it over the blood in the road, and went inside to wait.

Some of the other children came along. Most collected their things and went home. The littlest ones sat at their desks with their hands folded until someone came to fetch them. I sat at my desk, which was so much bigger without Ruth, put my head down, and cried.

I was waiting on the schoolhouse steps when my parents trundled down the road in our old truck and pulled up alongside the gully by the schoolhouse.

They took me close to them for a moment before my mother went to be with the other children.

My father bent to look me in the eye. “What happened, Annabelle?”

I'd stopped crying long before I ran out of tears, so they threatened now to start again.

“I don't know,” I said. “I was standing just there”—I turned to point—“talking to Mr. Ansel. Ruth was a little behind me, scared of the grays. And then a rock hit her right here.” I tapped my left eyelid. “And she fell down. Mrs. Taylor took Ruth away in her car.”

My father straightened to look past me and the truck, at the road and the hill that rose up behind it. “Show me,” he said.

So I walked around the truck and into the road. There was still a wet spot where I'd washed away Ruth's blood.

“Here,” I said. “This is where Ruth was standing.”

“Facing the hill? Mr. Ansel was headed down the hollow?”

“Yes, to market. See, the apples there, from how fast he went to tell Ruth's mother. Yes, she was standing there. And I was here,” I said, moving to where I'd been, “and the horses right in front of me, and the wagon and Mr. Ansel here.” I sketched a box with my hand.

“So the rock came from the hillside there?”

I looked up at the facing hill. It was steep, trees and bushes rooted everywhere they could root, ledges of slate all over the place, the gully below littered with fallen bits.

“It must have, I guess, since that's where Ruth was facing.”

My father stood with his hands on his hips, considering the hillside. “So the wagon and the horses and you were all in between Ruth and the hill,” he said.

I nodded. “That's right.”

“Which means the rock couldn't have just fallen loose and bounced out of the gully or it would have hit the horses or the wagon before it hit Ruth,” he said thoughtfully. “It had to have come down from higher up to clear all of you and hit her.”

It wasn't a question, so I didn't answer it.

Far as I knew, no one had climbed that hill at recess, though the boys sometimes played King of the Mountain when school was over, grabbing hold of branches as they climbed, gaining footholds on the ledges and along the trunks of the trees. Rabbits and deer and boys had made zigzag paths that showed the easiest ways up and down.