This Tender Land (17 page)

“I don’t want to go without you and Mose and Albert.”

“If he tries to hurt you, promise me that you’ll run. You need to promise.”

“I promise,” she said at the edge of tears.

“Cross your heart.”

She did.

“Okay, back into your room. He’ll probably let you see us again at supper.”

She went, head down, and I suspected that as soon as I locked her back in, she would throw herself on the bed and soak the sheets with her tears.

Outside I picked up the water bucket and started back to the orchard. Before I’d gone a dozen steps, I heard the drone of an automobile engine approaching on the dirt lane that split the orchard. I ducked behind the chicken coop. A dusty Model A came to a stop in front of the house, and a woman got out, a straw basket in the crook of her arm. She shaded her eyes, glanced around the farmyard, and called, “Jack?” She waited a moment, then walked to the door and knocked.

“Jack?” she called again.

She turned back to the farmyard, looked everything over carefully. I could see in her a kindred spirit, because the next thing she did was
reach to open the door of a house where no one was home. When the door didn’t yield, she started peeking in at the windows.

I stepped from behind the chicken coop. “Can I help you?”

She was clearly startled, her face awash with guilt. “I was just . . . I . . .” Then she scowled. “Who are you?”

“Uncle Jack’s nephew,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Frieda Hines. A neighbor. I came for my weekly eggs.”

“Uncle Jack didn’t say to expect you.”

“No? Well, he’s forgetful sometimes these days. Especially since . . . well, you know. I didn’t realize he had family here,” she said, warming to my presence. She walked toward me. “But it’s good he’s not alone. Where is he?”

“In town. Supplies,” I said.

“Nephew.” She scrutinized me in the same way she had the farmyard just before she’d tried to trespass. “He never mentioned you.”

“Never mentioned you either.”

“What’s your name?”

“Buck.”

“His side of the family or hers?”

“Who do you think I take after?”

She laughed. “You’re Aggie’s kin, I can tell. Is she all right?”

“Fine,” I said.

“We were all so worried when she took off that way, in the middle of the night. I heard she went back to Saint Paul. Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“How’s little Sophie? It’s been almost a year.”

“She’s not so little,” I said. “Shooting up faster’n a weed. But she’s still got her pigtails.”

“Of course.” She tried to hide the sly look before she asked her next question. “And Rudy?”

I wasn’t quite sure about that one. I’d learned a long time ago that in uncertain situations it was best to assume an attitude of secret knowledge and keep my mouth shut. So I did.

“Deserted her, didn’t he?
Men
.” She practically spat the word.

“You want me to tell Uncle Jack you were here for your eggs?”

“Thank you, Buck. I can come by for them tomorrow morning, if that will work for him.”

“I’m sure it will, ma’am.”

“Well, you just go right on with whatever. It’s been a pleasure to meet you.”

She got back into her automobile and drove away, waving a hand at me as she did so.

When I returned to the orchard, Mose was still hard at work, swinging his scythe. He looked relieved to see me and signed,
Find Emmy?

“She’s all right,” I said.

Find out anything about him?

“Maybe,” I said.

I took up my rake and spent the morning trying to imagine the pig scarer’s sad life and wondering what had really happened to the woman and the little girl in the photograph, and thinking about someone named Rudy, and worrying over that ruined mattress.

WHEN THE SUN
was directly overhead, the pig scarer drove up the lane and parked near the barn. He sent Albert to fetch us, and we unloaded the materials from the truck bed while he held his shotgun and directed our labor. Into the barn we carried a three-by-five sheet of copper, a two-foot length of rigid copper pipe, ten feet of copper tubing, a sack of metal brads, several pounds of cornmeal and sugar, a thermometer, and yeast.

When the last of it was unloaded, I said, “A woman came by looking for you.”

The pig scarer stopped dead still. “Woman? You talked to her?”

“She said her name was Frieda Hines. She came for her eggs.”

“Eggs, goddamn it.” He squeezed his good eye shut in disgust at his forgetfulness. “What did you tell her, boy?”

“That I was your nephew and you were in town buying supplies.”

He thought a moment. “She come all the way out to you in the orchard?”

“I was filling the water bucket at the pump.”

“You didn’t say anything else? About the others maybe?”

“Not a word, I swear. She asked about Aggie and Sophie.”

A look came over his face, as if a hard wind had just hit him.

“She asked about Rudy, too.”

His next words came out like slivers of ice. “What did you say?”

“Didn’t have to say anything. She had it all figured out on her own. Believes they’re in Saint Paul. Well, Aggie and Sophie, anyway.”

“And Rudy?”

“Seemed pretty clear to her that he deserted them.” I gave a shrug. “Sounded good to me.”

The pig scarer thought this over, then offered me a satisfied look, as if he approved of how I’d handled things.

“Aggie and Sophie. Your wife and daughter?”

He considered whether to answer, then gave a simple nod.

“She’s coming back for her eggs tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll be ready for that biddy,” he said.

Albert and Mose went to work. It was going to be a small operation, only a gallon still, so I knew it wouldn’t take any time at all to put together. While they worked, I made the mash for the corn liquor. The pig scarer stood by, shotgun in hand, watching with silent interest.

After a while, I ventured, “That’s a cider press in the corner.”

He looked at the machinery broken into pieces against the back wall. “Was,” he said with a note of regret.

“Looks like a tornado hit it. What happened?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“I play the odds. Every once in a while, I get an answer.”

I thought he almost smiled. Instead he said, “Old and just fell apart.”

Like hell. Somebody had taken a sledgehammer to that press, or my name wasn’t Odie O’Banion. Revenuers did that sometimes. But maybe sometimes men who went crazy with rage did, too.

By evening, the little still was completed and the mash was fermenting. Though it would take several days before we would be ready to do the first run, the pig scarer seemed pleased. That night when he unlocked the tack room door, Emmy brought us a good meal of baked chicken and roasted carrots. After we ate, the pig scarer sat on the hay bale outside the tack room, with Emmy at his side, and said, “Can you play ‘Goodbye Old Paint’ on that mouth organ of yours?”

“ ‘Leaving Cheyenne,’ you mean? Sure.”

I pulled out my harmonica, but before I put it to my mouth, the
pig scarer surprised me. He lifted a fiddle from behind the hay bale and settled it beneath his chin.

“Go on,” he said.

So I launched into that old cowboy tune, and the pig scarer began to bow that fiddle along with me. He was pretty good, and we sounded not half bad together. The whole time I was aware of the fact that both his hands were occupied with the instrument and not his shotgun. But he wasn’t stupid. He’d positioned the hay bale far enough out that even Mose, who was the fastest of us all, probably couldn’t have reached him before the shotgun was in his hands. Still, it gave me hope.

“You play a good fiddle,” I said.

“Haven’t had occasion for a while.” He cradled the instrument gently in his hands and for a moment seemed somewhere else. “Sophie used to beg me to play at night when I put her to bed.” Saying that name woke him from whatever reverie he’d been in, and he set the fiddle down.

The song had put me in mind of horses, so I asked, “What happened to the nags who used to wear these harnesses?”

“Sold ’em,” he said. “Year ago. Was going to modernize, buy myself a tractor.”

“Never did?”

“You see one around here anywhere, boy?”

“Nope. And I don’t see any animals either, except those chickens in that coop.”

“Used to have some goats,” the pig scarer said. “Mostly pets for Sophie.”

There was that name again, stumbling accidentally from his lips. As soon as it was out, it seemed to turn like a boomerang and hit his heart. He sat up straight, snatched the hooch bottle from his back pocket, and took a long pull.

“What happened to the goats?” I asked.

“Ate ’em,” he said.

“You ate your daughter’s pets? That doesn’t seem right.”

“How old are you, boy?”

“Thirteen.” Which wasn’t true, strictly speaking. I still had a couple of months to go, but it sounded better. Older, wiser. Tougher.

“When you got a couple more decades behind you,” he said, pointing a finger at me, “then you can talk to me about what’s right.” He stood up directly, grabbed his shotgun and fiddle, and said to Emmy, “Collect those chicken bones and them dishes. Night’s over.”

“He didn’t mean anything by it,” Albert said.

“Think I give a good goddamn about what that boy means or don’t mean, Norman? Come on, girl.” He hustled Emmy out and bolted the tack room door.

I lay in the dark thinking about the bitterness inside the pig scarer and the sadness that was there, too, and I figured they were probably twins joined at the hip. I thought maybe it wasn’t love that consumed him but a terrible sense of loss, which was something all of us who’d taken to the Gilead knew about. I’d considered loss only from my own perspective and Albert’s and Mose’s and Emmy’s, because our parents had been taken from us. But it worked the other way, too. Losing a child, that had to be akin to losing a good part of your heart.

Slowly, the pig scarer was becoming like Faria when I’d first met the little rat. The more I knew about him, the less frightful he was.

In the moonlight that slipped between the wall slats, I saw Mose tap Albert on the arm and spell out in sign,
Norman?

“The old clerk at the hardware store was asking all kinds of questions,” Albert explained. “Said to Jack, ‘What’s the boy’s name?’ I told him I wasn’t a boy. Jack said I was no man neither. So I told the clerk my name was Norman. Neither boy nor man.”

Damn, that was smart, I thought. Me, when I was pressed, all I could come up with was some stupid movie cowboy’s name. Albert, he’d come up with a corker. I decided next time somebody asked me, I was going to give them a name just as slick as Norman.

BY OUR FOURTH
morning with the pig scarer, we’d finished the work in the orchard, and he set us to painting the barn and tending the big garden. Except for the fact that we’d been locked in the tack room every night and fed only once a day, it hadn’t been that different from the work we’d done on the Frosts’ farm. We saw Emmy every evening at supper, and she seemed to be doing okay. After we ate, the pig scarer would bring out his fiddle and I would put my harmonica to my lips and we’d play tunes together. He didn’t seem to me to be a bad sort. It was just that life had been pretty cruel to him. He’d been visited by his own Tornado God.

I asked him one night about that eye patch he wore.

“Lost it fighting the Kaiser,” he said. “The war to end all wars. Ha!”

“You don’t believe it did any good?” Albert asked.

“There are two kinds of people in the world, Norman. People who have things and people who want the things other people have. A day don’t go by that there’s not war somewhere in this world. A war to end all wars? That’s like saying a disease to end all diseases. Only way that’ll happen is when every human being on this earth is dead.”

Mose signed,
Not everybody’s greedy.

Emmy translated for the pig scarer.

“Boy, I never knew anybody didn’t have their own best interests at heart, and the hell with everyone else.” He scrutinized each one of us with his good eye. “Be honest. Given the chance to get yourselves free of me, you’d slit my throat, wouldn’t you?”

Although I’d killed a man already in order to be free, slitting the pig scarer’s throat was a sickening thought. “Not me,” I said.

The pig scarer drank the last of the alcohol he’d brought with him, eyed the clear, empty glass bottle, and flung it against the barn wall, where it shattered with an explosion that destroyed the fragile camaraderie the evening’s music had created.

“Let me tell you something, boy. Whatever you think you’re not
capable of doing, the minute you think it, the moment it enters your mind, just in the imagining, it’s already been done. Only a matter of time before your hands follow through.”

He grabbed Emmy, yanked her to her feet, bolted the tack room door, and shut us up in the dark.

It rained all the next day, a steady drizzle, and the pig scarer had us working inside the barn, sharpening and oiling his tools, seeing to the fermenting whiskey mash, while he stayed in the house with Emmy. I took a good look at the broken-up cider press against the barn’s back wall. That cider press had been the object of some great rage. I’d been thinking about what the pig scarer said the night before, about the moment when something terrible comes into your head, that it’s only a matter of time before you do it. I couldn’t see into his head or his heart, but whatever was there, no matter how terrible, I figured the pig scarer was capable of it. I kept thinking about Aggie and Sophie and Rudy, and wondering more and more what had really happened to them. And all along I’d been trying to figure a way to escape.

That day, while eyeing everything in the barn, I finally had a decent idea. There was a roll of stiff, heavy wire hanging on the wall among the hand tools. I used a pair of cutters, clipped off a two-foot length, and made a hook at one end.

Mose signed,
What doing?

“You’ll see. Albert, lock me in the tack room.”