A Part of the Sky (9 page)

“If you chance to scatter any grain or seeds,” said Mr. Ferguson, “don’t bother it. My sparrows are magicians. And they’ll make it disappear.” He winked. “Sometimes I even spill some on purpose.”

Never had I worked in a place with the music of so many birds. Everywhere I looked, a sparrow was pecking up a treat. Once in a while, a bird
would relieve his bowels on the gritty floor, but the owner didn’t seem to mind. Nor did I, even though I was barefoot. Being a farmer, assisting Papa for many a summer, I’d stepped in worse.

At Aunt Matty’s, there was a religious picture on the parlor wall of some old saint surrounded by a flock of white doves. Who knows, he might have been kin to Mr. Porter Ferguson.

I didn’t service any customers. Leastwise, not direct. My boss waited on every one personal, made change from the cash register, then ordered me to bear the grain bags to a wagon or a truck.

A lady tipped me a nickel. “Here you go, sonny,” she said. “But don’t spree it for peppermint. If you’re wise you’ll squirrel it away.”

“Yes’m. I certain will.”

It would be one more nickel into Mama’s old teapot, and eventual to the Learning Bank.

“Them salt blocks,” said Mr. Ferguson, “are all mixed up. Sort ’em out, and line ’em up proper, like soldiers. White together and brown alike. Even though a cow won’t give a hoot whenever she licks one.”

Straightening the big salt blocks made me sad. I’d always wanted to save up pennies, come to town alongside of Papa on the wagon bench, and purchase a block of salt for Daisy. She’d never had a
one. For her, I planned to get a white one, to match her black and white hide.

Now it was too late.

No matter. Soon, because of my new job, I might save up and buy a weaned calf from Ben Tanner. Then, when she become a heifer, we’d match her with Beowolf. She’d lactate, to become a full-growed milker. And then Mama and Carrie wouldn’t have to drink black coffee.

Then I remembered. At home, there wasn’t any coffee. We’d run clean out of it. Mornings, my mother and aunt would be drinking hot water. They’d done it before. Gone without.

“Rob, take that chain to the back. Circle it neat beside another one you’ll see there.”

“Right,” I said. But I couldn’t lift the chain, or even drag it. That length of big-link chain must’ve outweighed three men. Yet I pulled at it and tugged for close to a minute without even giving it a scare.

Mr. Ferguson was laughing fit to bust. “Yup, I gotcha, Rob. It’s a gear chain for a mill. Weighs better than half a ton.”

My old boss was mere playing a prank on me, and wowee, did I ever tumble over it. After that, he asked me to relocate about a dozen rolls of black tar paper, which I could do right easy. It didn’t bother me that it coated my hands all black, because
I had me a hunch that Mr. Porter Ferguson paid wages by measuring the dirt on a worker.

Maybe someday I’d own a store and be a friendly storekeeper like Mr. Ferguson. His extra pair of glasses was sitting on a countertop. So I hooked them over my ears and glanced at a mirror to see how I’d look. Smiling at myself, I said, “Yup.”

I’d managed to move the final tar paper roll when I noticed a customer entering the store. And he stopped my breathing. This particular patron was the shop teacher, Mr. Orr, carrying his umbrella. Nobody knew his rightful age. As a youth, he might have marched in the Crusades. All I knew was that his eyesight had dimmed and he was deafer than a stump. In other words, as Jacob Henry once said, ready to sit on the Supreme Court.

Just my sorry luck that Mr. Ferguson was busy in the back, jotting figures to his ledger.

“Anybody here?” Mr. Orr hollered in a voice that had learned to whisper in a sawmill, presuming that everyone else was earless, except himself.

“It’s Mr. Orr,” I said softly to my employer. “I think he might be looking for
you
.”

“Boy,” my boss said, “attend him. I’m too busy. See what he wants, and if you don’t know what it is, he won’t either, so sell the old skinflint anything else. Make him pay full price.”

“Me? You want
me
to wait on him?”

“Yup.”

I was sure in a pickle.

“Hello!” Mr. Orr hooted to all of Vermont and parts of New Hampshire. “Anyone here to service me?”

Long as I live (which could have proven that day to be a very short life), I’ll always pay homage to my favorite commodity among the entire inventory of Ferguson’s Feed & Seed. Tar paper! In a breath, I rubbed my blackened hands all over my face, put on the extra pair of Mr. Ferguson’s eyeglasses plus an apron, and (with white grain dust on my hair) paraded manfully forward to address Mr. Orr.

“Yup?” I asked.

Pop Orr near jumped out of his underwear. Or secretly disgraced it. Never had I seen so startled an expression. His eyebrows went scurrying toward his scalp, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down for several round trips. Then he blinked at me.

“Yup?” I repeated.

Cupping a hand to his ear, Mr. Orr squinted at me in total disbelief. Slowly he opened his mouth to speak.

“Porter, is that you?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to utter another word, one that might pack me off to prison, or to hang. Or worse, to have to suffer shop class again.

“You sick?” Mr. Orr inquired.

Again I nodded, and then faked a disgusting death-rattler of a cough in Pop’s direction. Mr. Orr could only mumble his next question.

“Good grief, Porter … what’s ailing you?”

Just before Mr. Orr, umbrella and all, went flapping like a goosed goose out the store’s double doors, I gave him the medical opinion he sought. A simple diagnosis. All I told him was two words.

“Black plague.”

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“Whoa.”

Mr. Sebring Hillman, who lived just uproad from us, contained his team long enough for me to step on a wheel spoke and then to sit beside him on the wagon bench.

“Thanks, Mr. Hillman. I sure could use a ride home. I’m beholding.”

With an easy looping snap of his reins, Mr. Hillman moved the team forward.

“What are you doing in town, Brother Peck?”

I smiled. “Working. Took me a job at the feedstore, helping out Mr. Ferguson.”

“A decent man.”

“Yup,” I said.

“How are you folks doing?” he asked.

“Well, I don’t guess any worse’n anybody else. You know, because of there’s not much rain.”

Mr. Hillman looked at the sky. “No chance today.”

We jawed about weather and crops, and that Ben Tanner was healing. Mr. Hillman’s wife, Astrid May, had taken a pie to the Tanners after the trouble with General Robert E. Lee.

When Mr. Hillman pulled his team to halt at our place, I was fixing to jump down.

“Hold it, Robert. Stay on. Because yesterday I found a tool in my barn that I’d borrowed from Haven. I want to return it. Would you bring it home?”

“Sure.”

At the Hillman place, Mrs. Hillman heard the team and wagon, come out the house with a dish towel over her shoulder, and waved. I waved back.

Dismounting the long wagon, Mr. Hillman led the way to an open toolshed. Inside, I admired the sturdy frame of a half-built and well-grained table.

Mr. Hillman nodded at it. “Like your pa, I make our furniture. Every stick.”

“It looks good. What kind of wood?”

“Cherry. Ought to look nice when it’s finished and polished like an apple. Astrid May always wanted a cherry table. Sold the last one I put together. A city fellow come along and told me that
Shaker-made was top grade. Offered me a price. So I took it glad.”

“Sister Hillman will be happy with this one.”

“Hope so. She’s a fine woman. A good wife.” He looked at me strange. “You fixing to marry soon?”

“No, I’ll be coming up fourteen this coming winter. I’m too young to think on such.”

“Well, I was not sixteen when I wed mine. Both of us young. Growing up has a way of making a man do, instead of consider.”

“How come you asked me if I was fixing to get married?”

Before answering, Sebring Hillman rubbed his hand along the raw table wood. It was yellow with dust. “Because,” he said, “I was down by the crick a few weeks back, fishing. I seen you kissing the Tate girl.”

“Oh. Well, we don’t talk at all about anything too serious. Not about a wedding or like that.”

Mr. Hillman nodded. “Come along with me, Robert.”

“Where to?”

“Inside my barn. Something in there you ought to study.”

We went inside.

Standing very still, Mr. Hillman looked up, then
pointed at one of the barn’s thick crossbeams. “Oak,” he said, “and solid as Sunday.” Lowering his arm, he kept staring up at the beam, shaking his head.

“What is it, Mr. Hillman? What’s wrong?”

“Happened years ago. Her name was Letty. Miss Letty Phelps. She was related to Haven. As you know, when my woman took sick, she hired out to us. Lived here. But Letty was too pretty to pass by. I took to her. And got her in trouble, you know in a family way. In pod.”

I didn’t speak.

“She bore a baby girl. My daughter. Then ashamed of it all, Letty drown the child. Done it just outside in my horse trough. After that, she tied a rope to that beam, right there above us, and hanged herself.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hillman. And I remember that rainy night in the churchyard, and the baby’s coffin you brung home, to here.”

“It hurt to own up. Yet the shame of not admitting my sin hurt worse. Took me a while. Too long. But I did make my claim, to you and to Haven that night, and to the Lord.”

Mr. Hillman walked back and forth, three or four times, shaking his head as if trying to shake an illness.

“Years back, my doing with Letty Phelps began near the crick, under those pretty white birches where you and your sweetheart were. The same spot.” He looked square at me. “Forgive me, Robert, for saying this to you. I have no son. You don’t have a father. No more will I say than this. To love is a blessing. But to trouble a young girl is a curse.”

For a time, I stood in the barn with our big neighbor, looking up at his sober face. He had nothing further to say about Letty. When I followed him back to the toolshed, Mr. Hillman handed me a mattock.

“Here’s the pickaxe I borrowed from Haven.” He paused. “My excuse for luring you here to point out a beam. Forgive me. I’m either a good neighbor or a busybody, and I’ll let you decide.”

Before I left, the Hillmans gave me one more thing to bring home, this one a gift. It was a twenty-pound catfish. I steamed it outdoors and we ate it for supper. Not much got left for Miss Sarah, but enough. The hot white catfish meat was a real treat and offered second helpings all around.

Aunt Carrie went to bed early.

My mother and I stayed up. We sat together in the kitchen, and I told her all that Mr. Hillman
had told me, things she already knowed. I figured that Mama might want to talk about Letty Phelps and her sorrow, but I was quite wrong. Instead, my mother told me things I didn’t know, or never suspected.

It was about my sisters.

“They all married young,” Mama said. “So very young. Fourteen or fifteen, no older than that. All four before they’d turned sixteen.”

“Why did they?”

Mama looked at me. “For their babies. To give their little ones a family name other than Peck.”

“You mean … it was Mr. Hillman?”

Mama shook her head. “No, Robert, it certain was
not
Sebring Hillman. But your sisters were pretty. As fair as Becky Tate. And in trouble.”

“Are you worried that Becky and I …”

“No. But both of you are yearning young. She’s a lovely lass, your Becky Lee, hair blacker than a raven’s wing, and eyes that dance with the Devil.”

“She’s a nice girl.”

“So were your sisters. All nice. Clean and respectful. I guess what I’m trying to say is this. Since your father left us, you’ve growed up so quick, and so sudden. Up until Pinky died, you were only a boy. Lately, you seem so much taller and stronger.
Close to becoming a man.” With her elbows on the kitchen table, my mother rested her chin in both hands and stared at me.

“Mama, I’m tired. Today I got told too much to contain. More’n I can carry.” I touched her face. “But I’m also old enough to think, to reason, and do right. Trust me.”

“I do.”

“Good.”

I clinked my nickel and both quarters, my day’s pay, in the teapot and replaced its little lid. It seemed so empty. Perhaps the pot only longed once again to hold tea. Yet there wasn’t a leaf of it in our pantry.

Mama kissed me and then tiptoed quietly up the creaking stairway to her bed.

I stayed up, walked outside, and studied a creamy three-quarter moon. After all I had heard today, the moon prompted me to a promise, to swear a secret oath.

“Never will I trouble a girl.”

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