A Difficult Boy (30 page)

Ethan nodded. “Silas is going to Blandford tomorrow, or maybe the day after.” The coarse stalks of grain prickled at his arms as he gathered them and bound them with a twist of straw.

“So that's why Silas was mad after making a start on the rye today,” Daniel said. “He won't be liking having to trust the harvest to anyone else.”

Ethan decided not to mention that Mr. Lyman wanted Silas to trust the harvest to Mr. Pease. Daniel felt bad enough already. Ethan looked around and saw that Mr. Pease and Mr. Wheeler were out of earshot on the opposite side of the field. “Daniel, I think . . . I think maybe there
is
a way for you to buy Ivy.”

“Oh, aye? You been stealing bank notes down at the store, have you?”

“No, no. Remember how you told me Mr. Lyman showed you that black book of his—the one he carries back and forth to the store? Remember how you said he had all sorts of things written down there that weren't true? Clothes he said you got and things you broke and such?” The rye stubble pricked Ethan's bare feet as he tried to keep pace, binding the rye into sheaves after Daniel cut it.

“Aye. And he has the nerve to call
me
out for a liar.” Daniel's work grew more ragged as he talked. He no longer paid attention
to cutting the stalks evenly or keeping the grain from shattering as he worked. He waved the reaping hook carelessly, making Ethan fear that he'd cut off a finger along with the rye.

“I've been thinking,” Ethan said. “If you could prove that Mr. Lyman's book is wrong, maybe—maybe you really would be able to buy her.”

“And how would I be proving Lyman wrong?” Daniel straightened, his face red and dripping with sweat.

“Silas would remember, wouldn't he, if you got all the clothes Mr. Lyman says you did, and if you did all the damage he said you did?”

“Maybe . . . maybe some.” Daniel pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and scrubbed it across his face.

“If we could get Mr. Lyman's book and show it to Silas . . .”

Daniel shook his head. “He wouldn't cross his da.”

“He's not like Mr. Lyman. You said yourself Silas is fair and honest. I think he'll want to help. Remember—remember how you said he lied for you that time you ran away?”

“That was a long time ago, lad. I fancy he remembers the thrashing more than the helping.” Daniel jammed the handkerchief back in his pocket and tested the edge of his reaping hook with his thumb.

“He's too big for Mr. Lyman to thrash now.” The sweat running down Ethan's back felt like ice water at Daniel's talk of thrashing. But for Daniel to lose Ivy would be worse than any beating—maybe even worse than death.

“You don't go calling a man's da a thief and expect to get help from him.”

“You don't have to call him a thief. Maybe just ask Silas if Mr. Lyman maybe . . . maybe made a mistake.”

“A mistake.”

“Then you can show him the book and let him figure it
out for himself. Or if not Silas, what about Lizzie? She knows what clothes you really have. She's the one that makes 'em and washes 'em and mends 'em. I think there's something queer about that book, and not just what Mr. Lyman's written down about you. Nobody ever gets to look inside it but him—not even Mr. Bingham—and he writes in it most when—well, when certain people come in the store.”

“Certain people?”

“People he cheats . . . I mean, I think he cheats. Measures their cloth short, puts his thumb on the scale. Not everybody. Mostly folks who aren't—well, who don't pay attention or who get confused real easy.” Ethan fidgeted, thinking about his own father. If they looked in the black book, what would there be about Pa in it? “I think—I think maybe he cheats with his figuring, too. If we could show that book to somebody—maybe get Mr. Bingham to compare it to the ledgers in the store . . .” He'd been mulling the idea over all day, and it still terrified him. But what else was there to do?

“And how are we supposed to be getting our hands on this book?”

“He keeps it locked in his desk. We could go in there at night and—”

“Oh, aye, and break his desk open? Themselves'd sleep through that, sure enough. Anyway, what'll himself say in the morning when he sees his book missing?” Daniel stooped to begin cutting the rye again.

“Do you want to buy Ivy or not?” Ethan said, growing hot with the same anger he'd felt when Daniel had lost the race with Mr. Stocking. He kicked impatiently at a sheaf of grain. He'd tied it badly, and it fell open in a dry golden tumble.

“Aye, but she won't be doing me much good if I'm in prison, will she, now? We got to be sure we got time to show it
to Silas or somebody we can be trusting before Lyman raises the alarm.” Daniel rubbed his chin. “He'd notice the whole book gone missing, but maybe . . . maybe we could just cut out some of the pages—near the beginning, where he wouldn't notice.” He snapped his fingers. “Aye, that'd do it. You don't s'pose you could find a way to be getting at the key, do you?”

Ethan shook his head. “He never leaves his keys where anyone else can get 'em. But maybe we could use a little piece of metal to get it open. There's plenty of broken tools and things in the attic.”

Daniel bent back to his work, his strokes steady and even again. “For an honest lad,” he said, “you surely do a grand job of thinking like a thief.”

Ethan heard the scratch of a lucifer and smelled sulfur, then watched the flame flare in Daniel's hand. He opened the lantern's little door so Daniel could light the candle inside it, though there didn't seem much need for the extra light. The full moon washed the room with an eerie pale blueness, so that Ethan felt as if they moved about inside a dream. “What if we get caught?” he whispered. Even though it had been his idea, his plan, he trembled like a cornered mouse.

“Fine time to be thinking of that.” Daniel set the lantern on the floor next to the secretary. He pulled a bent fork from his pocket and maneuvered one of its twisted prongs around in the keyhole.

“Won't matter if we can't open—Here now, I think I've got it.” The lock made a little snick, and Daniel pulled down the leaf that served as both door and desktop to Mr. Lyman's secretary. “Let's have that light here.” He traded Ethan the fork for the lantern and set the light on the desktop. “We might have to put it out fast,” he said, opening the lantern's door.

Ethan pocketed the fork and peered into the secretary at the six black ledgers lined up in a row against its back wall. He reached for one of them.

“Wait.” Daniel opened the window next to the desk and propped it with a stick. “You stand there.” He indicated the spot in front of the window. “Anyone comes, it's out the window with you, and me right behind. If I can, I'll shut things up, so he can't tell we been here.”

“And then?”

“If they ain't seen us, we'll sneak back upstairs and pretend we know naught.”

“And if they know it was us?”

“Then we pray, lad.”

Ethan swallowed hard. He took his place by the open window. A languid breeze tried feebly to relieve the stickiness of the summer night. The chirps of crickets and frogs and the thrumming of cicadas that normally comforted him to sleep now sounded ominous.

“One for each year,” Daniel said, glancing quickly at the first few pages of each book, then putting them in a stack in front of him. “Here, you take the oldest one and I'll take the newest.” Daniel handed one of the ledgers to Ethan.

Ethan flipped through the book first, feeling daunted by the pages and pages of words and figures. He prayed that Mr. Bingham's lessons had taught him enough to help Daniel. A piece of paper slipped from between the pages to the floor. It had been folded by halves again and again until it was only a few inches square, like the notes that girls passed to each other in the schoolhouse. Carefully, he opened it. The paper was splitting along the folds and some of the ink had run, but the date was still clear: December 22, 1834. At the bottom was a signature in handwriting that was little more than a scrawl:
Matthew Linnehan
. His hands stopped
shaking as he got caught up in the excitement of his find.

“Daniel, here's something about your—” He couldn't get all the words out before Daniel had clapped one hand over Ethan's mouth and pinched out the candle with the other. Ethan's heart was pounding so hard that he had to strain to hear anything else.

They waited for an eternal second before Ethan heard it, too: the squeak of floorboards as somebody—Mr. Lyman, no doubt—lingered at the top of the stairs, perhaps trying to decide whether he'd really heard something or only imagined it, whether it was worth the bother of coming down. Then the decision was made, and footsteps began to descend.

“Out with you, lad!” Daniel whispered. He grabbed Ethan by the collar and the seat of his trousers and shoved him bodily out the window.

Ethan gritted his teeth so he wouldn't cry out when he landed. The stick propping the window open tumbled to the ground along with him and the sash slammed shut.

Ethan looked up to see Daniel's face in the window, contorted with an expression Ethan had never seen before. Resignation, cynicism, apathy—Ethan knew those expressions. But he'd never seen stark fear cross Daniel's face, not even with the worst of Mr. Lyman's thrashings. Daniel's mouth silently formed the word
Run!
as his hands scrabbled at the muntins, lifting the sash a few inches. Then he was jerked away from the window and disappeared into a darkness filled with growled curses and thumps.

Ethan rolled to his feet and ran. He trembled in the doorway of the back ell, unsure whether to run away or to hide in the attic as Daniel had told him. Stay, he decided. If he ran, they were both lost.

He slipped into the house and crept up the back stairway, crouching at the second-floor landing to see if there was anyone in the hall who might spot him. A group of ghostly figures clustered at the top of the stairs, white nightgowns almost glowing in the moonlight. Mrs. Lyman had her back to him, her arms wrapped around her daughters.

“George! Are you all right?” she called, her voice strained with worry.

“Mama! Papa!” the girls whimpered. “What's happening?” The baby wailed from his crib in the Lymans' bedroom, drowning out most of the noise from downstairs as well as Ethan's cautious journey up the stairs.

Once inside the attic, Ethan took a breath and unclenched his hands. He still held the mysterious paper that Daniel's father had signed. Pulling out his pocketknife, he ran to the bed, where he slit open a seam in the mattress and stuffed the paper deep into the straw and corn husks. He gulped at the humid night air, but his lungs refused to fill. It felt as though a giant fist squeezed his chest as he tried to figure out what to do next.

Pretend you know naught
, Daniel had said. Ethan tried to imagine how he would do that. He closed his eyes and thought, but it was hard with the chatter of the girls below, the baby's shrieks, and the muffled thumping noises coming from the first floor. Was Mr. Lyman killing Daniel even now? It would be easy, wouldn't it? He could kill him and tell everyone Daniel had run away, and who would be the wiser? No. No, Ethan couldn't think about that just now. He had to think what to do.

He decided to pretend the noise had woken him up and that he'd come downstairs to find out what had happened. He scrubbed his hands frantically through his hair, shrugged one strap of his braces from his shoulder and pulled his shirttails out. Then he made his way back down to the second floor.

Mrs. Lyman was gone, leaving Florella and Zeloda teary-eyed in the hallway and Ruth huddled in a corner, sucking her thumb and clutching her rag baby. The noise from downstairs had subsided, though Aaron still wailed unattended.

Ethan stepped out timidly, rubbing his eyes and pretending to stifle a yawn. “What—what's happening? What's all the noise?”

“It's a burglar,” Zeloda cried. “A burglar and he's killing Papa and Mama and he's coming upstairs to kill us all, too.”

Florella rubbed Zeloda's back. “Hush. It'll be all right. Didn't Papa just say it was all right? Didn't he just call Mama downstairs?”

Ruth ran to Ethan's side and took his hand, her fingers moist and sticky with spittle. “Ethan and Paddy will help us, won't you?” She looked around the hallway. “Where's Paddy?”

“I—I don't know,” Ethan lied. “Gone to the privy? He said—said he was going.”

Zeloda snuffled. “He
would
disappear at a time like this. He just would.”

“I wish Silas was here,” Ruth said. She squeezed Ethan's hand hard.

Aaron's shrieks grew louder and more desperate. “Hadn't you ought to take care of the baby?” Ethan suggested.

“The baby!” Florella said. “Oh, dear!” She grabbed Zeloda's hand and dashed with her into their parents' bedroom.

“Is it burglars, Ethan?” Ruth asked, clutching her doll tighter.

“I don't know.” Ethan went to the stairway and sat on the top step. Suppressing a shudder at the thought of how the banisters looked like prison bars, he peered between them, trying to see downstairs. There was no sign of light from the doorway of Mr. Lyman's study.

Ruth plunked herself down next to Ethan and nestled against him. “I'm scared,” she said.

“Me too,” Ethan replied, then realized he was supposed to be reassuring her. “But they—he—the burglar won't come up here.” Of that, at least, he had no doubt.

Finally, the baby's crying subsided enough that Ethan could hear what was going on downstairs. A door slammed and a bolt rammed home. The noise sounded as though it came from the kitchen. He could hear somebody walking about there.

“It's all right, Mercy,” Mr. Lyman was saying. “He's locked up good and tight now. A padlock and two good solid bolts between
him and us, and a length of stout rope holding him fast.”