This Tender Land (16 page)

We started work in the morning without food, carrying on with the same labor we’d begun the day before. Mose swung the scythe, cutting back the orchard grass. Albert pruned, following the pig scarer’s directions, and I gathered the cuttings and mounded them behind the barn. I saw that the great trash pile already there included, among other things, an enormous number of clear, empty pint bottles. The pig scarer was a man who liked his liquor. I figured that went a long way in explaining the neglect of the orchard and the farm in general.

Midmorning the honking of an automobile horn came from the direction of the farmhouse.

“You boys keep working,” the pig scarer said. “Try anything, little Emmaline pays the price. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” Albert said.

The pig scarer took off through the orchard. I let him get ahead, then dropped the cut branches I’d been gathering and started to follow.

“Where are you going?” Albert said.

“Just to see what’s up.”

“Get back here,” he snapped.

But I didn’t pay him any mind. I slipped tree by tree toward the farmhouse, keeping to the shadows under the great spread of the branches. I stopped where I could see a police car parked between the barn and the farmhouse. A man in a khaki uniform stood with his back to the orchard and to the pig scarer, who was crossing the yard in front of the
chicken coop. The chickens began to cackle noisily, and the cop turned. He was big, Nordic looking, with a face burned by the summer sun.

“Ah, there you are, Jack. Where you been?” he said in greeting.

“Pruning in my orchard.”

“With that shotgun?”

“Coyotes,” the pig scarer said. “What do you want?”

“Just alerting folks. You heard about the kidnapped girl?”

“Read about it in the paper. Saw her picture. Cute little thing. Reminded me a lot of Sophie.”

“Our roadblocks haven’t turned up shit. We’re thinking the hooligans that snatched her might be on foot and still in the area. Some folks over toward Lamberton reported that somebody took shirts from a clothesline yesterday.”

“Stole ’em?”

The cop shook his head. “Left money, which is what got us to suspecting it might be one of the men we’re looking for. Some of the money they stole when they did the kidnapping.”

“Got a description?”

“Naw, only a little girl was home at the time, and she couldn’t tell us much. Considering she was all alone, I figure she was lucky. A lot luckier than little Emmaline Frost. We figure the guys who took her might be making a run along the railroad tracks. And listen, Jack, they’re armed and dangerous. If we spot them, Sheriff Warford’s orders are to shoot first, ask questions later. So I’d keep that shotgun handy for a while if I was you.”

“Is that all?”

“You see anything, you let us know.”

The pig scarer gave a nod.

The cop studied the farmhouse, the barn, the chicken coop. “Any word from Aggie and Sophie?”

“I expect you got other people to notify.”

“All right then.” The cop got back into his car and drove away along the lane between the apple trees.

I quickly returned to the orchard, where Albert had climbed down from the ladder.

“Who was honking?” he asked.

“A cop. Came to warn Jack about us.”

“Jack? Is that his name?” He looked in the direction of the farmhouse and barn. “He didn’t say anything to the cop?”

“Nothing. That’s good, right?”

Albert shrugged. “Who knows?”

“That cop said the sheriff’s orders are to shoot us first and ask questions later. Jeez, everybody’s gunning for us.”

“Did you see Emmy?”

“No.”

“Here he comes.” Albert remounted the ladder.

All morning I mulled over the why of the pig scarer’s silence about us and figured his plan was probably to use us until the work was done and then turn us in. Maybe there’d even be a reward by that time. The whole while, I kept asking myself,
Who are Aggie and Sophie?

We labored all that day, with only water from the bucket. The sun was low in the sky when the pig scarer finally called a halt and marched us back to the tack room. We lay down exhausted and hungry and miserable, and I was sure now that the pig scarer’s plan was not to turn us in to the authorities but to work us to death.

“Albert,” I said. “How much did you and Volz and Brickman charge for a pint of moonshine?”

He was lying on our thin bedding of hay, and he rolled his head wearily toward me. “What difference does it make?”

“How much?”

“When he was on his own, Herman sold it for seventy-five cents a pint. Brickman was going to sell all the new batches for a dollar. What are you thinking about, Odie?”

“Nothing,” I said, because my plan wasn’t fully formed yet.

An hour later, the tack room door was unbolted and opened, and the pig scarer stood there with Emmy at his side. She no longer had
on the overalls she’d been wearing when we hightailed it from Lincoln School. Now she wore a pretty green dress.

I signed quickly to her,
You okay?

She nodded but couldn’t sign back because of the big bowl she held in both hands.

“Set their food on the floor, girl,” the pig scarer said.

When she put the bowl down, I saw that it was filled with scrambled eggs mixed with the same kind of chopped up and roasted potatoes we’d eaten the night before. Emmy reached into a pocket of her dress, brought out three spoons, and handed one to each of us. We dug in right away.

“You going to feed her?” I asked around a mouthful of food.

“She’s ate.”

“Nice dress,” I said.

The pig scarer glared at me as if what I’d offered was the worst insult in the world, and I was afraid for a moment that he’d clip me across the face with the barrel of the shotgun in the same way he had Mose.

“He only meant she looks happy,” Albert said.

Which made the pig scarer relax. He took a pint bottle from the back pocket of his overalls and sipped. While he did this, the hand with his trigger finger was momentarily occupied.

Mose signed,
Jump him?

But we were too busy eating, and the pig scarer recorked the bottle and said, “What’s all that hand stuff?”

“He can’t talk,” I said.

“What? Dumb?”

Which was a term I hated. I knew its meaning, but it always sounded like an insult.

“Somebody cut out his tongue,” I said.

“Who?”

“He doesn’t know. It happened when he was little.”

Then the pig scarer surprised me. He said, “Anyone’d do that to a child should be horsewhipped and hung.”

When we finished the eggs and potatoes, Emmy took the bowl and our spoons, and as he had the night before, the pig scarer set a hay bale in front of the tack room door, lit a lantern, and ordered, “Play that mouth organ, boy.”

“ ‘Red River Valley’?”

“Something fast,” he said.

I played “Camptown Races,” just about as snappy a tune as anyone could ask for. I followed that with a couple of more old standards. While I played, the pig scarer took frequent pulls off his pint bottle, and soon he was tapping his foot in time to the rhythm. And there it was again, the magic of music. This was a man who’d shown us nothing but harshness, had not smiled in all the time we’d been with him, but the music had found a way to slip beneath all that hard, bitter armor and touch something softer and more human inside him.

When I finished that last song, the pig scarer assessed his pint bottle, which was nearly empty, and slapped the cork back in the neck. I could tell he was ready to bring the evening to an end.

“How much did you pay for that moonshine?” I asked.

His one good eye studied me with suspicion.

“Seventy-five cents? A dollar?”

“Dollar and a quarter,” he finally said.

“Any good?”

“Might as well be drinking kerosene.”

I tapped the spit from my harmonica and put the instrument into my shirt pocket. “I know a way to get you the best corn liquor you ever tasted,” I said. “And it’ll cost you practically nothing.”

THE NEXT MORNING
the one-eyed pig scarer put Mose and me to work in the orchard and left in his truck with Albert. He threatened to turn us over to the sheriff if we crossed him in any way. As soon as he was gone, I dropped my rake, told Mose to keep working that scythe, and started to leave.

He grabbed my arm and signed,
What are you doing?

“I’m going to find Emmy,” I said.

He shook his head.
He’ll hurt her,
he signed.
You, too.

“I have to make sure she’s all right. But you need to keep working or he’ll see that you’ve been slacking off.”

He shook his head vigorously.

“Mose, we have to know about Emmy. And if we’re going to get ourselves out of this, we need to know everything we can about him, too.”

What if he comes back?
he signed.
Catches you?

I kicked over the water bucket so that it emptied. “I’ll tell him I had to fill it.”

I could see he wasn’t happy and probably not completely convinced, but he finally let me go.

The farmhouse door was locked, but the windows were raised and the pig scarer hadn’t bothered to latch the screens, so I slipped inside easily. I’d expected the place to be a pigsty but was surprised by its neat appearance. I suspected that in the same way we’d been put to work in the orchard, Emmy had been put to work here. The large main room was situated around a big potbellied stove, the primary source of heat for the farmhouse in winter. I stood in the kitchen nook next to a table and three chairs. A divan served as a divider
between the main room and a little sitting area with a couple of old, upholstered wing chairs. Between the chairs, on a table whose finish was worn almost down to the bare wood, sat what in those days was called a farm radio, powered by a battery pack. Herman Volz kept one in his carpentry shop and let us listen to music while we worked. And there’d been one in the Frosts’ farmhouse, and sometimes when we’d finished our labors, Mrs. Frost had let us listen to
Death Valley Days
or
The Eveready Hour
or
The Guy Lombardo Show
with Burns and Allen.

There were two doors off the main room. I tried the first. Inside was a bedroom, sparely furnished—an unmade bed, a chest of drawers, a washstand with a big enamel bowl and a straight razor, and hanging on the wall above that, a simple, round mirror. Atop the chest of drawers sat a photograph in a fine wood frame. It showed the pig scarer and a woman, sitting side by side on the divan in the other room. Nestled in the man’s lap was a little girl with pigtails, who appeared to be about Emmy’s age and who, in fact, resembled Emmy a good deal. The pig scarer and the woman looked deadly solemn, but the little girl was smiling.

I tried the door to the second room. Locked. I knelt and peered through the keyhole but couldn’t see much. “Emmy?” I said quietly.

At first, I heard nothing, then a rustling, like I used to hear when Faria was scurrying across the floor of the quiet room.

“Odie?” came Emmy’s voice from the other side of the door.

“Are you all right?”

“Get me out, Odie.”

“Give me a minute.”

A keyhole lock was one of the easiest to get around. I rummaged in the kitchen drawers and came up with a long finishing nail and a piece of stiff wire, which I bent at one end. I inserted the nail, then the bent wire, and, in a minute, had the door open. Emmy burst out and threw her arms around me. She was still wearing the dress from the night before.

“Did he hurt you?” I asked.

“No, but I don’t want to be here. Can we go?”

“Not yet, Emmy. It’s not safe.”

“But I want to go.”

“Me, too. And we will, just not yet.” I knelt down so my eyes were level with hers. “Is he mean to you?”

She shook her. “He’s just very sad. He cries at night, and when I hear him, it makes me want to cry, too.”

I stood and walked into the room where she’d been locked up. The bed was small and neatly made. The room was stuffy, and I saw that the pig scarer had nailed the only window shut. The work looked recent, and I figured it had been done to ensure that Emmy didn’t escape that way. A little chest the color of a green apple sat on the floor, and when I opened it, I found that it was half-filled with girls’ clothing—dresses and whatnot—neatly folded. There was also a child’s chair in one corner from which a Raggedy Ann doll stared at me with black button eyes.

“He took Puff away, Odie. He told me the doll was mine, if I wanted it,” Emmy said. “But it scares me.”

Outside Emmy’s room was a ladder that led to the upper story.

“Stay here,” I told her and began climbing. As I’d suspected from the beginning, what I found was the attic, a long low-ceilinged space containing mostly junk. Half the room was curtained off, and when I pulled the curtain aside, I found the rudiments of a living area—bed, chest of drawers, chair, washstand and mirror, and a chamber pot. There was nothing that gave me a clue about who had lived here, but one element of the scene disturbed me greatly. The bedding had been thrown to the floor and the cover of the thin mattress had been cut to shreds so that the cotton stuffing inside spilled out like the entrails of a gutted animal.

Downstairs Emmy was holding herself, frightened. “Odie, I want to go away from here. Please, I want to go now.”

“We can’t, Emmy. Not right away.” I made my voice silk soft, calm and soothing. “He has Albert, and he might hurt him if we leave. For
sure, he’ll turn us in, and the sheriff will catch us and send us back. We need to wait a little while longer.” Then came the hardest part. “I have to lock you back in the room.”

“No, Odie. Don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me.”

“I have to, Emmy, just for now. But we’re getting out of here, all of us together. I promise.” She stared at me, her eyes little white buttons of fear. “Do you believe me?” I said.

It was hard on her, so hard it hurt me to see, but she finally nodded.

“All right, then. But, Emmy, if he tries anything with you, anything you’re afraid will hurt you, you take off running and you don’t stop until you’re as far from here as your legs’ll carry you. I want you to promise me that.”