Gather: Chapters 1–10

I asked my mom if I could get her a glass of water. She said yes, and when I was in the kitchen, I took care of Gather’s bowl, made sure the heater hadn’t caught the closet on fire, and poured the rest of my soup right down my own gullet.

Things might suck, but if you get people all riled up, you’re going to make it a whole lot worse.

A dog that big is bound to get you into trouble worth telling about, so I’m going to back up a few days.

If it’s “Sharpie,” she’s happy with the notion that the things she helps us write into our own brains won’t ever wash off.

But when I was in fifth grade, we did this unit in science on foraging: how to tell a fiddlehead fern, how to find ramps and wild asparagus and puffball mushrooms, the safe way to eat a cattail and stew nettles, even how to make flour out of acorns.

But when I was in fifth grade, we did this unit in science on foraging: how to tell a fiddlehead fern, how to find ramps and wild asparagus and puffball mushrooms, the safe way to eat a cattail and stew nettles, even how to make flour out of acorns.

Well, you have no idea how hard it is to get the meat out of a beechnut. The shells are hard as stone and sharp as diamonds, but you can’t hit them too hard or you’ll turn the meat into a mush you’ll never separate from the rubble. You’ve got to hold them just right, tap them just right, pry them apart with a jackknife.

The big dog raises his wiry gold eyebrows and wanders off to sniff around the yard.

The dog follows me and my throbbing thumb, and he’s carrying that branch like he thinks he’s a draft horse hauling trees out of a timber farm.

We’re right on the threshold, and the whole yard fills with moonlight.

Erin makes up for all that color in her life by wearing pretty much nothing but black shirts, black pants with steel rivets sewn in, black boots, even black makeup sometimes, which probably caused the infection she had in her eyebrow in ninth grade, because if she does agree with her mother on one thing, it’s piercings.

What happened is, I woke up to find water dripping onto the rug between the kitchen and the living room. I put the soup pot down to catch it, and the drips made so much racket they woke my mom, and she’s all, “Oh my god, what’s going on now?”

So with her being awake on account of that leak plinking into the pot, all I could do was make like I was going for the bus, then circle around through the woods back to the shed.

Anyway, the tailpipe had busted in half when Terry drove over the swale in the driveway too fast.

Gramps said the burned farmhouse had been the homestead for all of Maple Hill Farm, three-hundred-some-odd acres.

Gramps’s best friend, Ansel, he was a state game warden.

He points, and he’s like, “You see that island of little oaks, Ian? A grouping of small trees like that is called a copse. Clustered together, small trees have a better chance of surviving the wind and snow.”

There were tracks along the deer run, all does or yearlings, since they’re small and clumped together and moving around just grazing as a herd, but then I saw tracks I figured belonged to a good-size buck, his hoofs sinking deep into the ground, apart from the others.

I could see Gather was getting really hungry when he ate an acorn, which he then thought better of and hacked out.

While he’s waiting, Mrs. Ellsley digs around, pulling out meat so freezer-burned we can’t tell if it’s pork, chicken, beef, or venison.

Gramps always said farmers have to know how to do everything. Plumbing, propane, carpentry, mechanics, welding, electric.

“I want you to have this,” she’d say. And then when Mrs. Keebler was dozing off or away at some activity, Mom would put it back in the box on Mrs. Keebler’s bureau.

“I am unfortunately not aptly named. I, Mr. Hemberger, am a vegetarian.”

“Concession sales from Saturday night’s boys’ soccer game,” she said, hefting the bag.

So, he’s touching the blade and he nods, and we run to his trailer and get a ratchet set and a can of Liquid Wrench, and we run back, and he pulls the blade off, runs back again, and swaps that blade out with theirs, which had been so chipped, their mower bounced like a frigging jackhammer.

“You boys should take your skateboards and leave the premises!”

She happens to be bringing back one of the best plates of the day with mashed potatoes and gravy, half a roll, and a big strip of turkey meat that is mostly gristle and skin.

You just dump the gallon of change into the hopper, maybe not all at once, and the quarters eventually drop to one column, the nickels go to another, and all that.

Did I know Americans throw away 40 percent of their food, and do I think Mr. B would help us get a compost club started?

We’ve been watching you traverse the cliff and tight-walk the tree over the river.

Anyway, our dads were fishing downstream from the bridge, casting to a deep pool on the other side. We were on the inside of the meander where anything that floats gets piled up.

I thought about that again when Mr. D was talking about density in eighth grade: about volume and weight and how two things measured the same can weigh up completely different.

Might have been that same day Jillson’s Junkyard came to tow that rig away but leaving the trailer it used to pull right where it still sits on ten wheels behind our work shed, all hidden now by the best black raspberry patch you ever saw.

The steam from his breath billows out gold in the setting sun, which reminds me I still have to walk up the hill.

And when Peter saw the size of those piles of stickered wood, four pallets wide and tall as me, and most of the hemlock and pine planks over twelve foot, and that I’d had the sense to separate out the hardwood—a little ash and cherry, but mostly yellow birch and maple—he handed me four twenties.