This Tender Land (15 page)

“Barn,” he said and waved his shotgun barrel toward the beat-up structure.

Who argues with a shotgun? We filed out of the shed and walked ahead of him, keeping together. I held one of little Emmy’s hands, Mose the other. Albert took the lead, and like lambs to slaughter, we followed him into the dark of the barn.

The only piece of machinery inside was an old black Ford flatbed, the same kind of truck Emmy’s folks had owned and the tornado had thrown on its back. The place smelled of hay, although there were just a few bales in evidence. A whole array of orchard tools hung along the front wall, and hand tools hung from a pegboard above a workbench. In one corner, wooden pallets stood stacked higher than a man was tall. There was what looked like the remains of a large cider press against the back wall, broken into pieces as if someone, in a fit of anger, had taken a sledgehammer to it. The man pointed us toward a corner of the barn that was squared off by an inside construction, a room that, from the reins and harnesses still hanging there, I figured was an old tack room.

We marched in one by one. Once we were inside the tack room, the man grabbed Emmy and pulled her away from us. Mose lurched toward her, trying to bring her back, but the man swung the barrel of his shotgun and caught Mose full across the left cheek, and he went down hard. I started for Emmy, too, but Albert yanked me back by my shirt collar.

“Won’t hurt her,” the man said. “Unless you try to get away.”

He closed the door, and we heard a lock bolt slapped into place. Then we only heard Emmy crying as he took her off somewhere.

Albert went down on his knees to see to Mose, who wasn’t moving. My brother leaned close and tilted his head to listen.

“Still breathing,” he said.

“What’s he going to do with Emmy?” I was ready to rip those walls apart and go out and do whatever was necessary to get Emmy back.

“Call the sheriff, I imagine,” Albert said. He sat his butt down beside Mose, and I don’t think I’d ever seen him more dejected.

Mose made a sound and rolled his head, and his eyes slowly opened. He blinked, then understanding came back, and he sat up, looking around wildly.

Where’s Emmy?
he signed, his fingers flying.

“That one-eyed pig scarer took her,” I said.

“Pig scarer?” Albert said.

I didn’t bother to explain. “We’ve got to get her back and get ourselves out of here.”

Albert looked the little tack room over top to bottom. There was no window, and although the construction was old and ill-kempt, the boards that surrounded us appeared solid.

“Got an idea, Odie?” He wasn’t really asking. He was just trying to show me how dumb I was.

I tried kicking at the walls with my new Red Wings. I shook loose some dust, but that was all. Mose stood up, lowered his shoulder, ran himself against the door and just bounced off. He rubbed his arm, then gingerly felt the side of his face, which was already swelling from the blow of that shotgun barrel.

“So we’re just going to sit here and let them take us back to Lincoln School?” I said.

“Even if we got out, would you leave Emmy?” The quiet of Albert’s voice and the soundness of his reason only fed my anger.

“If we got out, we could jump him. You, me, Mose, we could take him.”

“And that shotgun of his?”

“We can’t just do nothing.”

“At the moment, Odie, we’re plumb out of options.” Albert picked up a loose hay straw from the dirt of the tack room floor and threw it. It went nowhere.

We’d been sitting silent for a long time, our backs to the tack room wall, when we heard the bolt drawn back, and the door opened. The one-eyed pig scarer stood there with his shotgun still at the ready.

“Out,” he said and stepped away.

We got up and left the tack room. I was watching for an opening, that moment when I could throw myself on him and wrestle him to the ground. Or at least lead the charge that Albert and Mose would follow and together we would overpower him. But he stood well back, and with that shotgun leveled on us, there was no way we were going to get to him before he blew us apart. I was sure a man that mean-looking wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger.

“You,” he said to Mose, “grab one of them scythes. You grab that ladder,” he said to Albert. “And you, boy, grab them loppers and that pruning saw.”

We did as he’d instructed, and he waved us outside.

“Where’s Emmy?” I asked.

“Emmaline’s just fine. You want her to stay that way, do what I say.”

He marched us out to the edge of the orchard, which looked poorly tended. The grass between the trees had grown high. The limbs were wild, tangled messes. Young apples hung like little green bells along the branches. I’d worked the Frosts’ orchard for a couple of years, and I could see that, left unpruned, those branches would eventually snap under the weight of all that fruit. I knew, too, that careful pruning would improve the quality of what the trees produced.

“You,” he said to Mose, “start down at that end with your scythe and cut all the wild grass between the trees. Work your way through the orchard row by row. If you run, I’ll beat the living daylights out of these two and your precious Emmaline. Understand?”

Mose nodded. He gave us a helpless look and walked away.

“You,” he said to Albert, “set the ladder up, then take them loppers from the boy.” When Albert had done as he’d asked, the pig scarer said, “Cut where I tell you. You, boy, you gather up everything that drops to the ground and haul it over there back of the barn, next to that pile of junk. See it?”

I saw the junk pile and nodded. And we began.

Tree by tree, Albert pruned the wild branches. He worked first on the ground, then set up the ladder, which I held secure for him. Periodically, I gathered the fallen branches and piled them behind the barn. Because of the Frosts, this was work we knew. But helping in the orchard that had belonged to Emmy’s parents had never really felt like labor, not like working for the wild pig scarer. For one thing, the Frosts had never held a firearm trained on us. The pig scarer kept that shotgun in the crook of his arm as he directed Albert, and his one good eye seemed plenty able to track all the activity going on in the orchard.

The sun mounted in the sky. It was a humid day and sweat dripped off me in rivers. After a couple of hours, I finally said, “We won’t do you any good if we die of thirst.”

The man considered this. “There’s a pump between the house and chicken coop. Should be a wooden bucket there. Bring it back full. And, boy, the little girl will pay the price for any stupid thing you might be thinking of doing.”

I found the pump and drank my fill, listening to the chickens cackling behind the mesh of the coop. I filled the bucket, then studied the farmhouse. It was two stories, but the upper floor was small, perhaps only an attic. There couldn’t have been many places to hide Emmy inside. I thought about slipping in and finding her. Then what? Emmy and I might get away, but that would leave Albert and Mose, and God only knew what that one-eyed bastard might do to them.

I carried the wooden bucket back to the orchard, and the man let Albert drink from it. Then he had me take the bucket to Mose.

Just like the Frosts’ place,
Mose signed after he’d drunk all he wanted.

“Except we didn’t mind working there,” I said.

Mose wiped the sweat from his brow.
Will he turn us in?
he signed.

“I’m betting not until he’s got all the work out of us he needs.”

Mose looked down the lines of orchard rows.
Long time,
he signed.

We got no lunch and we worked until the sun was low in the sky. Even Bledsoe had been kinder. When the pig scarer marched us back to the barn, the mounding of pruned branches was immense, nearly as big as the pile of junk beside it. I flopped down on the dirt floor of the tack room and every muscle in my body hurt.

Without a word, the man locked us in.

“Hungry people make bad laborers,” Albert called after him.

The dirt from the floor clung to every sweaty part of me. “This is worse than the hayfields.”

Mose signed,
Worried about Emmy. All right, you think?

“He was beating up on us all day,” I said. “He didn’t have time to hurt Emmy.”

Mose stood up and walked along each wall, testing every board.
We’re getting out of here,
he signed.
Don’t know how, but we’re getting out.

“And we’ll take Emmy with us,” I said.

We go nowhere without Emmy,
his hands vowed.

There were little gaps in the wallboards of the tack room, and the late evening light filtered through. Mose’s resolve to free us was like an elixir, and I felt better. I pulled out my harmonica, figuring if we couldn’t eat, at least we could give ourselves a little comfort.

I began to play one of my favorites, “Old Joe Clark.” It was a rousing tune, and Mose clapped his hands in time. After that I played a little ragtime number and was just launching into “Sweet Betsy from Pike” when the door was unbolted and opened, and there stood Emmy. She held a big bowl in her arms. I smelled roasted potatoes, and my mouth watered so fast and hard it hurt. The wild pig scarer stood behind her with his ever-present shotgun.

“Grub,” he said and nudged Emmy forward.

After not having eaten all day, even if what was in that bowl was no better than pig slop, I was ready to gorge myself. Albert and Mose and I dug into the meal with our dirty fingers. The potatoes were surprisingly tasty, with bits of salt pork and onions laced in. The pig scarer had Emmy give us a milk bottle filled with water to wash it down. He dragged one of the hay bales and set it just outside the entrance of the tack room and sat with Emmy beside him. While he watched us eat, he took a pint-size bottle of clear liquid from a pocket of his overalls and drank from it. I was pretty sure it wasn’t water.

When we’d finished every bit of the potatoes, Emmy took the bowl back and the man had her sit beside him again. It was going toward dark, and the pig scarer took a kerosene lantern from where it hung on the barn wall, lit the wick, and put the lantern on the dirt floor beside the hay bale.

“Who was blowing that mouth organ?” he asked.

“Me,” I said.

“Know ‘Red River Valley’?”

“Sure.”

“Play it.”

I did, and in the gloom of the barn, lit with just the little lantern glow, the haunting notes of that old ballad seemed like a heavy blanket of sorrow laid over us all. A great sadness came off the pig scarer. It was in his one good eye as he stared at the tack room wall, seeing something there that my own two eyes could not. It was also in the way he mindlessly drank the clear liquid from the bottle.

When I finished, he said, “Play it again.”

This time I watched him even more carefully, and I could see the alcohol was hitting him hard. I thought I’d play that song until he finished the bottle and then jump him. The shotgun lay on his lap, but the reflexes of a man deep into drink were unreliable. Maybe because I was thinking this, I didn’t play the tune with the same feeling I’d given it the first time, because the pig scarer suddenly cried, “Stop!” He put the cork in the bottle and stood up to leave.

“Are you going make us sleep on a dirt floor?” Albert asked.

The pig scarer considered this. I could see he wasn’t standing so steadily, and I thought about taking a run at him. Albert must have guessed my intention, because he put a restraining hand on my arm.

“Maybe we could have that hay bale to spread?” my brother said.

The pig scarer gave a nod to Mose, who got up and hauled the bale into the tack room. Then the man shut and bolted the door, leaving us in the dark.

“Night, Emmy,” I called.

“Night,” she called back.

We broke the bale, spread it out, and lay down. With the close four walls and the dirt floor overlaid with a thin mat of straw and a locked door to keep us in, this felt oddly familiar, as if I was back in the quiet room. I didn’t close my eyes right away. Not because I wasn’t tired. I was thinking.

The wild pig scarer had been deeply affected by the song I’d played. Whenever someone asked for a particular song, it was generally because the tune had special meaning for them. Sad numbers seemed to be especially meaningful. Something had happened to the pig scarer, something that hurt him. But it had also made him mad enough to cut off a second airing of the tune. There were still a lot of things about life I didn’t know then, but I knew this: when a man hurt really bad, it was usually because of a woman.

THAT NIGHT, MOSE
wept.

I woke to the pitiful sound of his sobs and sat up. The tack room was streaked with moonlight slipping between the warped slats. I saw that Albert was awake, too, sitting with his back to the barn wall.

At Lincoln School, kids often cried in the night. Sometimes it was because of a bad dream. Sometimes they were wide awake and just wept their hearts out over some private sorrow. So many came to the school already beset by demons. For others, the horrible things done to them after they arrived were enough to give them nightmares for life. Mose was the biggest, strongest, most physically capable kid I knew, and also the most agreeable. He never complained about anything, and no trial seemed too great for him. But sometimes at night, he wept those bitter, soul-wrenching tears, and wasn’t even aware that he was doing it. We had tried on occasion to wake him out of whatever horrible vision was twisting him up, but when he opened his eyes, the weeping stopped immediately and he seemed to have no idea what he’d been dreaming. Whenever we’d just let the crying continue, he’d claimed to have no recollection of it in the morning.

Everything that’s been done to us we carry forever. Most of us do our damnedest to hold on to the good and forget the rest. But somewhere in the vault of our hearts, in a place our brains can’t or won’t touch, the worst is stored, and the only sure key to it is in our dreams.

Wake him?
I signed to Albert.

He shook his head.

I wondered about Emmy. Was she crying her eyes out now? Because of the things I’d seen firsthand at the school, and because of the stories I’d heard from kids who’d come from other schools,
stories of unimaginable violation, I understood the terrible things an adult could do to a helpless child. What kind of man was the wild pig scarer? If I’d believed in a just God, a compassionate God, I might have prayed. But I believed in a different God now, the Tornado God, and I knew he was deaf to the cries of the suffering. So I listened for a long time to Mose’s sobs, which nearly broke my heart. And I thought about Emmy’s fit the night before and her situation now, and ours. All the bright hope I’d had only two days earlier as we set out on the Gilead for a new land and new lives seemed to have turned to dust.