Wolf Hollow: Chapters 15–19

Here was something a farmer dreaded: milkweed seeds wafting across orchards, setting down roots where they’d make a nuisance of themselves, driving the livestock mad if they rooted in pastures.

My mother looked askance at me. “How come you’re wearing so many clothes but no coat?”

One was for laundry, perpetually damp but clean, the wringer washer in one corner, lines strung from wall to wall, a wicker basket on a long table, in it a cloth sack of wooden pins, tin buckets for hauling wash water from the well, a one-burner stove for heating the water, and a drain in the floor.

I took a tin bucket that was still sound but had seen better days and filled it with provisions: the rolls, a pot of strawberry jam, some carrots, a couple of empty Mason jars and lids; I filled one with the mug of coffee.

I found my mother stripping the sheets from my grandparents’ bed while my grandmother sat in her rocker, darning a sock.

I could not keep this secret forever. Nor could I hide Toby for long, cloistered in the hayloft like a stray cat.

The second wave of sorrow, now, was for Toby, too long deprived of such things, if he’d ever had them at all.

Now, as he stood there without it, he looked almost respectable, though his hair and beard were long and tangled.

He sat on a bale and cut a roll in half. Twisted the band off the jam jar, pried off the lid with the tip of his knife, and spread some jam on half the roll.

And about Aunt Lily, though all I said was, “And then there’s my aunt Lily, who’s a postmistress,” at which Toby interjected a quick “Yes, I’ve seen her,” and nothing more.

By now she had turned fully toward me, her floury hands poised in the air as if she were about to lead a choir.

“You look like you’ve got jodhpurs on,” my mother said as I stood by the door, ready to go.

He made it last, dipping the spoon slowly into the Mason jar and then, toward the end, tipping the dregs into his mouth.

“And then my aunt Lily cut it short one morning when I came in from chores with chicken feathers in my braids. My mother about had a seizure, but in the end she liked it better. Said I looked like Amelia Earhart.”

“Am I too dirty?” he asked. He held out his hands in front of him. It hurt me to look at the scarred one, how it was puckered and gnarled.

If I hadn’t known it was him, I wouldn’t have recognized Toby looking down at me. He was that different, shorn.

I sidled around to stand by my grandmother, who was ladling out soup while my mother carried the hot bowls, one by one, to the men.

He sat on a bale and looked at me expectantly. “What?”

Perhaps it had been such a long time since someone had touched him that those few moments of his hand in mine were enough to split him open.
What showed through the breach was so sad that I’ve never stopped wondering how he survived it.

And he talked about a baby, just born, its belly still tethered to the womb, and the mother, too...beyond which he didn’t say much that made any sense, if any of it had.

She and my grandmother were making enough slaw for “a posse of Huns,” one of many confusing things my grandfather liked to say.

I slipped into the mudroom and put on my coat and boots, rummaged through the closet until I found an old wool plaid hunting coat my grandfather hadn’t worn for some time, stuffed some gloves in its pocket, and slipped out the mudroom door.

“You sound like James.”
He didn’t seem to mind the comparison. And it didn’t prompt a better explanation.

I stepped back as the men converged around it. How horrible. How horrible. How horrible that she could be in there. That anyone could be in there.

The men were worried about dislodging her, sending her deeper into the well, hurting her worse or even drowning her.

“Yes, but we really ought to use a tripod and a winch,” the constable said.

“He can’t get the rope under her arms,” the constable said. “She’s swaddled in that poncho. But if he moves it out of the way it might come off that pipe.”

My father leaned in closer above the hole. “What do you mean, stuck on it?”
“It impaled her,” the constable said. “It’s through her shoulder.”

But they still flinched, as one, when the rope tried to cope with its new burden, the branch bowed overhead, and the constable yelled, “Now heave but slowly!” standing again and signaling with his arm to heave, heave, heave until up came Toby’s feet, his legs, all of him slowly up into the lantern light, and in his arms, tight against his chest and neck, a bundle of wet rags and matted hair, blue lips, blood streaming off the poncho...

But they still flinched, as one, when the rope tried to cope with its new burden, the branch bowed overhead, and the constable yelled, “Now heave but slowly!” standing again and signaling with his arm to heave, heave, heave until up came Toby’s feet, his legs, all of him slowly up into the lantern light, and in his arms, tight against his chest and neck, a bundle of wet rags and matted hair, blue lips, blood streaming off the poncho...