Ten Thousand Truths (2 page)

“You are about a size 6, I would guess.” The warty woman's voice broke through Rachel's thoughts. “Did you know that in 1324 the King of England decreed that barleycorn would be used as a unit of measurement for shoe size? Three barleycorns—which is just a grain of barley, I don't know where the corn part comes from—laid end to end is about 1 inch. An average man's shoe size is 33 barleycorns, or size 11. A size 6 would be 18 barleycorns. Are those beautiful orange sneakers 18 barleycorns?”

Rachel didn't know what to say to this grotesque woman, who was obviously certifiably insane—so she just shot her a dirty look and reached into the car to pull out her stuff.
Warty,
Rachel thought.
They are dumping me here in the middle of nowhere with Crazy Warty Walton.

After Mrs. Thompson drove away, Rachel picked up her backpack, a garbage bag full of clothes, and one large Rubbermaid container containing the rest of her worldly possessions and followed Amelia into the house. The first room they came to was the kitchen and it looked to Rachel like something off the set of the
Little House on the Prairie
movies she had watched non-stop when she was a kid. The main feature in the room was a big woodstove covered in steaming pots. The heat of the kitchen felt suffocating.
It's August, for God's sake,
Rachel thought to herself.
Why do they need a fire in the middle of summer?

The look on their faces is always the same when they first arrive
, Amelia Walton thought as she moved a large boiling pot toward the back of the stove. Everyone always looked for a second or two too long at her face. She sometimes forgot herself, what her face looked like until an accidental glimpse in the small rectangular mirror hanging over the bathroom sink would remind her. She usually felt like she was still her twenty-year-old self when the only things on her face were a couple of light brown marks.

Rachel shifted her backpack, set the garbage bag on top of the container, and followed Amelia through a wooden door beside the kitchen sink and up a steep staircase to a landing where an old sewing machine sat under a small window. From the window Rachel could see some bushes behind the house. Three heads were sticking up out of the greenery.

“This is your room,” Amelia said as she opened the door at the top of the stairs and led Rachel into a bedroom. “You get your own staircase right to the kitchen and the biggest and warmest bedroom in the house. This was my bedroom when I was a little girl. Believe you me, you will be glad for this room in January. This old house is not insulated very well and it can get pretty cold in the wintertime. The stove you saw downstairs and the old wood furnace in the basement are how we heat this house. The chimney comes up through here as you can see and you'll be surprised at how much heat will come off of those bricks when the fire is going well. It will be your job to keep the fire going on cold nights since you have the back stairs outside your door. Don't worry—I look after the furnace. It is old and temperamental and likes to be loaded just so or it won't give a bit of heat. Zac keeps telling me I am going to have to break down and put in a new one. He says a new model would give out more BTUs. That stands for British Thermal Units which is a unit of energy needed to heat one pound of water, one degree Fahrenheit. That old thing has been warming this house for as long as I can remember and I can't see any reason why it won't keep doing it for as many winters as I have left. I just tell Zac he has to be more selective in the wood he cuts me. The old thing has a preference for maple and a bit of hemlock and if you give him that he gives back plenty of BTUs.”

Rachel had no idea what Amelia was talking about. She was still stuck on the fact that she would have to keep the fire going. Not only had she been dropped into this other world, with a crazy lady who didn't seem to stop talking, but she had been pushed back a couple of centuries.
Is there even electricity here?
she wondered.

The light bulb sticking out from a white socket on the wall answered that question for her. There was a little chain hanging down from the socket. The two windows in the room gave enough light so there was no need to pull that chain to see if it actually worked.
This is going to be like being in some kind of country bed-and-breakfast jail,
Rachel thought to herself.

“The other kids are out picking raspberries. Zac will come by tomorrow morning and get whatever they pick today and take them to the Farmers' Market and sell them for us. With the few strawberries we have, along with the raspberries, the eggs, the chickens and turkeys, and the vegetables from our garden we do pretty good this time of year. You're lucky you came today. It's grocery day. Zac buys surprise treats for the kids every week but believe me they don't last long. Just leave your box and bags here on the floor. You can unpack later. Let's get you outside to meet the kids, the dogs, and the other beasts that make up this funny farm. Oh, I'll show you where the bathroom is first. You probably need to go after that long drive from Saint John. The toilet is a bit finicky. During World War II a German submarine was sunk due to a malfunction of the toilet. No fear of that, though, that flood last week was a bit of a nuisance.”

Rachel considered her options as she sat on the toilet. If she tried to run away, she wasn't sure she'd even remember the way back to the ferry. But if she did get that far, she knew she could walk to the highway and probably hitchhike her way back to the city.

Rachel hadn't even seen a phone here yet. There was that house with the green roof they had passed, Rachel remembered. The people who lived there probably had a phone—if she ran away from here, maybe she could go there. But who would she call? She remembered her grandmother's phone number, but she doubted Hilda Garnham would even remember she had a granddaughter. It had been easy to forget that, apparently, since she hadn't even come to see Rachel since the day she'd driven her to the first foster home, three weeks after the accident. She'd called the first year on Rachel's birthday, but not a call, a card, or anything else came for the birthdays or Christmases afterwards. And there had been six birthdays and five Christmases, not that Rachel cared or was counting. She'd given up counting a while back when April 18, the date of the accident, and all the days and months afterward had become too hard to think about. What was the point? It didn't change anything about her shitty life.

Not even one of the four social workers she'd had would want to take a call from her. The list of foster mothers and fathers and the one lesbian couple would not be thrilled to hear from her either. And the Harriets would get their number changed immediately if she dared to call them.

Maybe this Zac guy Warty was talking about has a big trunk in his car,
Rachel thought.
I could hide in there and get a drive somewhere when he comes with the groceries.
She shook her head and laughed at herself.
With my luck, he probably drives a horse and buggy.

Rachel headed out to the bushes she'd seen from the upstairs window. There were about six paths fenced off through the thick growth, and as she got closer to them she realized they were raspberry bushes. A big black dog and a shaggy grey dog were sleeping in the sun nearby, and they just slightly raised their heads when she approached. Amelia was kneeling beside the bushes, placing small green cardboard boxes full of berries in a wooden tray. The three people whose heads Rachel had seen from the window were standing there, each holding another full box. Two of them were girls who looked like mirror images of each other, except one was wearing pink shorts and a purple tank top and the other one was wearing purple shorts and a pink tank top. Their identical heads had massive tangles of red curls and they looked like they should break into a chorus of “The Sun Will Come out Tomorrow.” The other was a boy who was as wide as he was tall.

“This is Chelsea, Crystal, and Raymond,” Amelia said as she passed Rachel an empty box.

Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum and Balloon Boy
, Rachel thought as she started dropping raspberries into the box Amelia had passed to her, getting the unspoken message that she was to start picking.

“And our lazy dogs are Sam and Bud. Not guard dogs by any means. I just read somewhere yesterday that in a town in Oklahoma you could be sent to jail for making an ugly face at a dog.”

Rachel had picked two boxes of raspberries before she heard the call for lunch. Amelia was draining a pot into the white enamel sink when she entered the kitchen. Chelsea was filling glasses with ice water and Crystal was carrying a plate of chicken to the table. Raymond was already sitting down, slathering half a pound of butter onto a roll.

“Rachel, get the pickles from the fridge please,” Amelia instructed, turning slightly toward a doorway at the end of the kitchen. “The bowls are on the middle shelf in the pantry. Get one for mustard, one for chow, and another one for the beets.”

Again it seemed to Rachel that Amelia was speaking a different language.
What's chow?
she wondered as she walked toward the ancient-looking fridge. The handle on the Frigidaire pulled down stiffly and when the heavy door opened she began her search for something that looked like what she guessed were some kind of pickles.

Amelia came up behind her with a bowl of steaming potatoes in one hand and reached in the fridge with the other, lifting a jar off the shelf. “These mustard pickles are my grandmother's famous recipe. I never thought I could make them as well as she did but after about 30 years of practice I've got it down pat. This is our last bottle of last year's batch. We'll have to get started on this year's supply next week. I asked Zac to get me lots of sugar and white vinegar at the grocery store today. We've got lots of cucumbers in the garden still, though some of them are getting too big. I don't like the great big ones. Speaking of big things, the largest living thing on the earth is a mushroom underground in Oregon that measures 3½ miles in diameter.”

Rachel took the bottle from her thinking,
Does this woman ever shut up?
Amelia passed her a larger bottle and then pulled out a third one and carried it across the room and into the pantry, setting the potatoes on the table as she walked by. “This is green tomato chow-chow. We made that last week. We made 15 bottles, but I gave Zac 5 of them. Chow is his favourite and as good a cook as he is he doesn't try to make pickles or jam. I'm happy to do it for him, though. God knows he does enough for us.”

The pantry was a small square room with shelves on three sides. The end wall had a wide counter that came out about a metre past the bottom shelf. There was a large wooden board on it that was covered with flour and bit of dough. Beside the board sat a rack with more of the rolls Raymond was eating.
At least there'll be some left for me if Balloon Boy devours the whole basketful on the table by the time I get there,
Rachel thought to herself.

Amelia set three bowls on the counter and opened the jar of chow-chow. Then she walked out of the pantry, grabbed two pots from the stove, drained them into the sink, and put the contents in bowls. She was sitting down by the time Rachel had filled the small bowls with the pickles and carried them to the table.

Everything smelled really good. There were pieces of chicken covered with a light-brown coating, potatoes, peas, and yellow and green beans. There was also a bowl of some sort of orange-coloured lumpy stuff that Rachel didn't recognize. They had been lucky to get any vegetables at all at the Harriets', and if they did they came from a Green Giant bag.

“Pass the squash to Rachel, please, Raymond. Eat up now, kids. You worked hard this morning. 31 boxes. It looks like our raspberry crop will be good this year. Whatever we pick tomorrow we'll either use for jam or put in the freezer for later. We wouldn't want to be caught short for the winter by getting greedy and selling them all. There is nothing like the smell of raspberries on a cold February day to give you the hope of summer.”

Rachel filled her plate and even tried the squash, which was something she had never tasted before. She spooned some mustard pickles beside her potatoes but stayed away from the chow and the red round things she assumed were the beets.

Amelia just kept talking though the whole lunch. Rachel wasn't sure how she had time to take a bite of food between sentences. Chelsea and Crystal didn't say a word but seemed interested in the conversation. Raymond laughed at something Amelia said but never stopped chewing long enough to speak. Rachel just ate quietly, consumed by thoughts of how to escape this nuthouse and barely hearing what Amelia was saying.

“I suppose we will have to start peeling the potatoes soon,” Amelia said to Rachel, breaking through her thoughts and bringing her back to the conversation. “I love the new ones that we can eat skin and all. We are going to have a good crop this year, I think. Raymond has kept them well hoed up and I haven't found a sunburned one yet. The largest potato grown was in Lebanon. It weighed 24.9lbs. We'll be lucky if a couple of our turkeys weigh that much.”

Rachel noticed that Amelia always said we—
we
this,
our
that. Most of what she was saying meant nothing to Rachel, who wasn't going to be a part of this
we
, no matter what Amelia said. She wondered how long the others had been here and if they felt like they were part of the
we
. Mrs. Thompson had said on the drive out that Miss Walton had been taking in children who had nowhere else to go since she had left her job at the New Brunswick Protestant Orphanage in the early 70s. Apparently Social Services had complete faith in her methods and she had done wonders with some
very difficult
children.