Preacher's Boy (12 page)

"The heads?"

"I need them for the soup."

"I—I pitched them into the woods."

She sighed at the waste. "I reckon the coons had a feast," she said, then paused, a little embarrassed. "No way you can fetch us any more of those pitiful taters and carrots, is there?" She didn't wait for an answer, just sighed again and headed for the spring.

I busied myself gathering wood and twigs for the next fire. I didn't want her to think I was mooching off her. But I was, wasn't I? She'd caught two small fish, and I had gobbled down most of one of them. I was worse than her dratted pa. I wasn't even kin.

It was hours until suppertime—whatever supper could be made from rotting chicken head and feet—but I went ahead and laid a fire in the fireplace inside. Zeb was snorting and snoring. The smell of him was nauseous, so I worked fast and got out to the fresh air as soon as I could. Vile wasn't back yet. I imagined her squeezing the pot against the earth. Trying to force the
spring to give up water would be worse than milking a dry cow. The North Branch was a long round trip, but in the end it might be easier. I planned to suggest it.

I wondered if I should go down to the tracks and pick some raspberries. I went back into the cabin and found two battered tin cups. They smelled of old soup. I shuddered. They hadn't even been washed clean. I took them outside and wiped them as carefully as I could with maple leaves, but the grease just smeared around the inside. Cold water wouldn't help. It was the only time in my life that I felt a longing for the smell of good strong lye soap. How could you eat raspberries that had sat in old chicken grease?

You should never run away from home unprepared, believe me. I didn't have so much as my own tin cup, and I didn't fancy sharing one of theirs. I tiptoed past the smelly body of Zeb to replace the cups on the mantel. Zeb snorted and turned over. How had he gotten liquor? I knew, if you had money, there were ways, but Zeb was dirt poor. He didn't have any money, or did he? The old scalawag. It was all I could do to keep from rolling him over and going through his pockets.

At that moment I wanted more than anything to show him up. To make myself a hero and savior to Vile.
See,
I'd say.
You ain't so poor. Here's money. You can go down into town and buy you some proper grub.
But I didn't go through Zeb's pockets. I knew Vile'd never forgive me if I made a fool of her pa. She was like Willie—loyal to the core. I'd have to think of some better way to help her.

Zeb was still asleep when Vile got back. "Might as well start the fire," she said. "It'll take eternity to make soup from this."

If she was grateful for my laying the fire, she didn't say so. Just took one of the big lucifer matches Willie and I had left on the mantel and struck it, lighting the kindling. I held my breath. I didn't want Vile to despise me for not being able to lay a proper fire. I watched the flames leap from the dried leaves and twigs, dance around the loose bark, and then envelop the larger branches.

Relieved, I went outside, leaving Vile to put the pot on to boil. When she came out, she was livid with rage. She waved a bottle at me. "Looka here!" she cried. "Can you beat this?"

The half-filled bottle she held out for my inspection was Willerton's Digestive Remedy. The drugstore sells gallons of it. Half the town, mostly the male half, fancies it has digestive problems that only Willerton's can ease. "He musta had a bellyache," I said lamely.

"Bellyache, my big toe!" She loosened the cap and jammed the bottle under my nose. "Just smell that."

"Smells like Willerton's to me," I said, my eyes smarting from the fumes. "Stomach remedies gotta be strong to work."

"You
are
a newborn babe, ain't you? Willerton's is nothing but booze with a fancy name. How you think he got drunk as a skunk?" She hauled back and threw the bottle straight and hard as a strike over the plate, crashing it against the rough bark of a nearby spruce. The liquid made a dark stain against the trunk. Then she did something that surprised me more than I can say. She sat down cross-legged on the ground, put her head in her hands, and burst out crying.

I didn't know what to say or do. I called her name
softlike a couple of times, but she paid me no mind. She was not going to be comforted by gentle words. I needed something more powerful than Willerton's to soothe her ills. That was when I came up with my brilliant idea.

Lord, deliver me from my brilliant ideas. But at the time, on a nearly empty stomach, with Vile crying her eyes out, it seemed born of pure genius.

T
HE TWO OF US WERE SITTING OUTSIDE, LEANING
against the side of the cabin. Vile was staring glumly at the ashes of our dinnertime fire. Through the wall I could hear Zeb snoring away like a bear in hibernation. It was time, I thought, to tell her.

"Vile," I said, "I've got an idea."

She sniffed and turned to look at me, one eyebrow raised.

"No, really. I got an easy way for us to make money."

"Yeah?" Ha! I'd figured the word
money
would make her sit up and take notice.

"We write a ransom note, see?"

"A what?"

I stopped to explain to her about the Clark baby and the New York boy and how it happened all the time. She was still giving me her puzzled expression.

"See, we pretend I got kidnapped and ask for money to get me back—"

"Who would pay good money—?"

"Just listen, Vile. People do it. They take up a collection. All we got to do is write the note. First they collect the money and put it in the secret place we told them to in the note. Next, you and I sneak down and get it and divide it up. Then you and Zeb skedaddle out of the county and I walk down the hill and appear on Main Street, sort of half dazed. I may have amnesia"—the look on her face made me hurry to explain—"can't remember anything about what happened to me, but since I've returned unharmed otherwise, everybody's happy."

"Especially the sheriff who's on Paw's and my tail."

"What sheriff?" I asked, and then was immediately sorry I had. Her look was enough to sizzle a sausage.

"You was talking about—"

"Yeah. My amnesia. See. For weeks I can't remember anything. Then, finally, after you and Zeb is well out of Vermont, little by little I start to recall stuff. But when I do, the kidnappers don't look anything like you two."

"Yeah? And who's going to believe you?"

"Oh, they won't doubt me. I'm the preacher's boy. Besides, I'm the only witness as well as the victim. They'll believe me, all right."

"No."

"No what?"

"Just no. I don't want no part of such a fool plan."

"I'm thinking we should ask for one thousand dollars—two might seem a bit greedy."

Out of the corner of my eye I could see new interest flickering up. "Your paw got that kind of money?"

"Oh, no. He's a preacher. But that's just what will make everyone feel sorry and want to help. The town will raise it, you see. Just like they did in New York when Marion Clark disappeared in the arms of her nurse. The banks, the stores, everybody will pitch in."

"But you ain't some darling little baby—"

"C'mon, Vile, they'd do it for any child in town that got lost." I was arguing with myself as well as Vile. Surely they'd do it for me. Didn't the whole town turn out when the Wilson baby wandered out on Cutter's Pond and the ice was about to break up? They risked their lives, laying a human chain across the ice to her. Course, she was a darling three-year-old with yellow curls, not some rapscallion of a boy. I looked over at Vile. She wasn't watching my face for self-doubts; she was counting the cash in her mind.

"You ask for it in small bills," I went on. "I mean, sure, if you was to show up in Tyler or even Montpelier, throwing hundred-dollar bills around—"

"They got hundred-dollar bills?"

"Sure," I said. Though I'd never actually seen one, I knew for a fact there was such a thing.

"There's some piece of paper that's worth one hundred dollars?"

"It takes ten of them to make a thousand," I said, in case her arithmetic was weak. "But you wouldn't want hundred-dollar bills. They'd look suspicious if you tried to spend one in a store."

She looked disappointed. I think she liked the idea of holding a fistful of hundred-dollar bills.

"And there's no chance we'll get caught?"

"None a-tall. They leave the money whatever place we tell them to. We already warned them that we'll kill the victim if they try to watch for us or call in the sheriff. Like I said, after we divide it, I give you and Zeb—Mr. Finch—a day's start, then I let myself be discovered wandering down Main Street in a daze. A couple of weeks later I dimly recalls these—uh—hoboes with great black beards who took me captive and threatened my life."

She gave a short laugh, picturing herself, I suppose, as a black-bearded hobo. Then she sobered. "Do we have to tell Paw about it?"

"Well, he'll sort of be in on it."

"Yeah, but if he knows about the plan, he'll turn all funny. Especially when he's liquored up. He might even brag."

"We can't have that!"

"No, we can't. So it'll have to be jest between us two, okay, Ed?"

"Okay." I'd given up reminding her that my name was supposed to be Fred.

After much thought I decided it would be fitting to write the note with a chicken quill dipped in berry juice the color of blood. Unfortunately, raspberries was the only thing I was sure was ripe. I didn't know how raspberry ink would work, but I sent Vile down to the patch with her tin cup to get some. We couldn't risk anyone seeing me down there. Using birch bark for paper would be a nice touch, but the Finches had all that paper tied up in the kerchief, so why not use it? Besides, only Indians would think to use birch bark. Hoboes, I figured, were more likely to use the backs of Wanted posters. I wondered if Zeb's picture was on one of those posters, but I wasn't sure I had the nerve to ask.

It seemed to take Vile forever. The more I thought of the chicken quill and berry ink, the less I liked the idea. I longed for the pencil stub that along with my pocketknife was at the bottom of Cutter's Pond. And that wasn't all. There was my taw (I'd never be able to shoot a decent game of marbles without it), a ragged handkerchief (my ma often checked to make sure I had one on me), even a few pennies, in case I was seized with pangs of uncontrollable hunger just as I was passing the general store and had to have a sourball or lemon stick. Darn it all.

I wondered if they were missing me yet. I sighed. Pa wouldn't start looking for me while it was still daylight. Then I remembered it was Wednesday. He wouldn't start looking for me until after prayer meeting was done. I told myself that was a good thing. It would give me lots of time to work out the scheme.

I squinted up at the sun. I made it to be no later than four in the afternoon. I shouldn't have thought about sourballs. I was seized with pangs of hunger unlike any I had ever experienced before. My belly had let those few bites of dace go past without hardly noticing. I tried not to smell the pot bubbling in the cabin, which I felt sure my gut would reject altogether.

I wondered what Mr. Weston had said to Pa, and what Pa had said back. Did Pa take up my side? If I'd been a Filipino, he would have. But how could he defend me? He knew the kind of temper I had. He was
not likely to doubt that I had indeed tried to drown Ned Weston, or at least scare the Devil out of him.

For a fellow who'd given up on God and the Ten Commandments, I was feeling myself strangely close to what Reverend Pelham would have called a vile sinner. I recalled the awful rage that had come over me, making me shove Ned Weston's head under the water. Willie thought I was fixing to kill Ned. He was right. I might have. I really might have. I felt sick all over just remembering it.

Then it occurred to me that it was really Pa's fault-not altogether, not even mostly, but surely a little bit. He had no business having those heathen books around where anybody, especially some pious deacon or hellfire reverend, could just wander in and see them sitting bold as brass on the shelf. Like Reverend Pelham said, Pa was a preacher. He owed it to God not to go flirting with the powers of evil and unbelief, now, didn't he? Surely Pa didn't think people descended from apes, no matter what trashy books he had sitting around.

But ever since the night Elliot was lost, I was thinking worrisome thoughts about Pa. Why did that crying over Elliot get to me so? Was he having some kind of nervous disorder? If so, what would my disappearance do to him? Or, for that matter, his knowing that his son was a near murderer? Would that do him in?

Yes, it would be better for him to think I was kidnapped than to think I was a fugitive from the law. Wouldn't it? I was banking heavy on Mr. Weston coming to feel sorry I was gone and forgetting all about my attacking his boy. What if, even after I was miraculously returned to the bosom of my family, Mr. Weston
still hadn't forgiven and forgotten? Then Pa would get it with both barrels—his son the victim of a vicious crime
and
his son the perpetrator, or near perpetrator, of an equally heinous crime, one against the son of the town's most important citizen. Oh, mercy.

Along about then, Vile trudged up the hill into sight. "Birds got most of your berries," she said. I couldn't help but notice that her mouth was stained light purple. She held out the cup. It was about half full. I got a stick and smashed the berries into a pulpy juice. Vile fetched me a handbill from the kerchief in the cabin. It had a sketch on the front of a bank robber in Albany. I restrained myself from asking questions about robbers
or
what she and Zeb had been doing in New York State. Avoiding as best I could the fish mess on the flat rock, I set to work.

Have you ever tried to write anything with a chicken-feather quill? I swear, I don't know how Thomas Jefferson could possibly have got through anything the length of the Declaration of Independence with just a quill pen. Of course, he had a proper desk and real ink. In about ten minutes I had only managed, in pale wobbly letters, to write "Help!"