This Tender Land (18 page)

When I was inside and he’d set the bolt in place, I slipped the wire through a knothole in one of the warped door boards and worked it until the hook snagged the knob at the end of the bolt. I carefully drew the wire back and the bolt with it, and in less than a minute, I’d freed myself.

Albert and Mose both gave me a look of admiration.

When escape?
Mose signed.

Albert said, “Not until we can free Emmy, too. Hide that wire under the hay in the tack room, Odie. And good work.”

The rain seemed to have put the pig scarer in a foul mood. Or
maybe it was the discussion from the night before. Whatever, he wasn’t talkative when Emmy brought us our supper, and he didn’t have his fiddle with him. As soon as we’d finished eating, he ordered Emmy to gather up everything and locked us in for the night.

The rain finally let up, and the cloud cover broke. The moon was up and slid its bright yellow fingers through the cracks in the barn wall and across the tack room floor. I could hear Mose and Albert sawing z’s, but my own eyes wouldn’t close. I lay there thinking about the pig scarer, about the foul mood he seemed to be in, and I worried about Emmy. Finally, I slipped the wire from its hiding place under our mat of hay and crept to the door. I threaded the wire through the knothole, hooked the bolt knob, and drew it back slowly. When the bolt was clear, I edged the door open.

The hand on my shoulder made me jump. I spun and Mose stood there in moonlit stripes.

Where going?

Emmy,
I signed.
Worried.

Me, too. Coming with you.

Most farmhouses I’d visited had a dog, but not the pig scarer’s place. More and more, I thought of him as a man so deep in his misery that it had become what he breathed and ate and clothed himself in. I figured he wanted nothing, not even the companionship of a dog, to lessen that misery. I didn’t know the why of it but expected that it had something to do with losing his wife and daughter. Or maybe just Sophie, because I hadn’t heard him mention his wife’s name at all. Mose and Albert and me, we were just free labor to him. But Emmy, she might mean something else, or the promise of something else, and if she didn’t fulfill that promise, who knew what the pig scarer in his misery might do?

We crept to the farmhouse, our shadows tagging along behind. Through an open window I could hear the sound of music from the radio inside. I eased myself against the wall and slowly peeked over the sill. The room was lit by an oil lamp. The pig scarer sat in one of
the upholstered wing chairs, drinking moonshine from a pint bottle. When we had the still up and running, we’d probably save him a fortune. He laid his head back and closed his good eye. I signaled to Mose, and we headed around to the back of the house.

The window of Emmy’s room was still nailed shut, but a river of moonlight flowed through the clear pane and fell across Emmy, who was asleep in her bed.

Mose smiled and signed,
Angel.
Then he signed,
Devil,
and nodded toward the front room.

Not the Devil, I thought. But maybe a man capable of doing the Devil’s work.

The door to Emmy’s room opened suddenly. Silhouetted against the lamplight stood the pig scarer. I dropped to the ground and Mose did, too, and I held my breath hoping we hadn’t been spotted. A few moments later, the window above us rattled. Everything in me screamed
Run!
Mose must have sensed my panic and put his hand over mine on the ground and gave his head a faint shake. We stayed that way for five minutes, frozen against the back side of the house, but nothing more happened. The window didn’t shatter and the pig scarer didn’t shoot us. We finally eased ourselves up and risked another peek through Emmy’s window. She was still asleep in bed and was alone once again.

Back now,
Mose signed, and I started to follow him to the barn.

Before we could cross the farmyard, the front door of the house opened, and the pig scarer stepped out with a lantern in his hand. He closed the door behind him and began walking, a little unsteadily, until he’d entered the orchard.

Free Emmy?
Mose signed.
Get away from here?

I shook my head and signed,
He might come back quick. We’d be in big trouble.
I glanced where the pig scarer had gone.
Follow,
I signed.

Mose shook his head and signed,
You crazy?

The pig scarer was far enough away that I could whisper. “Where does a man go in the middle of the night, Mose?”

Pee,
Mose signed.

“He could pee in the yard. Come on, before it’s too late.” And I took off.

The moon lit the scythed grass between the rows of trees with a silver luminescence. Mose and I kept to the black shadows of the apple trees. The pig scarer’s lamp was easy to follow. He headed west to the end of his orchard. When Mose and I arrived at the last of the trees, we saw him fifty yards out, kneeling beneath a lone oak in a fallow area, bent so far over that his forehead touched the ground. The sound of his deep sobs was enough to make a stone weep. It’s impossible to witness such open grief and not feel pity wrung from your heart. I’d heard little kids at Lincoln School cry all night long, and I’d heard Mose, too, but I couldn’t recall ever hearing a man cry this way. It made me think that no matter how big we grew or how old, there was always a child in us somewhere.

Mose touched my arm and signed,
Go now.

I’d seen what I came for, though I still didn’t understand it exactly, and I nodded and we slipped back toward the barn.

THE PIG SCARER
was in a surprisingly good mood the next morning. I wondered if the tears, like rain, had washed him clean of his misery, at least for a while. Or maybe it was because of the news Albert gave him, that the mash was ready for its first run in the still. Or it could have been something else entirely.

The stack in the woodshed was pitifully low, and Albert told the pig scarer that we would need that and more for both the firing of the still and any cooking that he hoped to do on the stove in the farmhouse. When Emmy had finished gathering eggs from the chicken house, which was one of her daily chores, he put her to work helping Albert get things ready for the first run of the still. He took a two-man saw from where it hung on the barn wall and handed it to Mose, then he pulled down an ax for himself. He pointed toward a wood cart in the corner and said to me, “Bring that, and you and the mute come with me.”

He led the way, carrying his ever-present shotgun, and we walked through the orchard to the edge of the Gilead River. The whole distance the pig scarer merrily whistled “Wabash Cannonball,” as if whatever labor awaited us was something to look forward to. He stopped where a great cottonwood stood, long dead but still upright, its branches dry and brittle, its trunk riddled with holes where squirrels or maybe woodpeckers nested. The tree was only a stone’s throw from the brush on the riverbank in which we’d hidden the canoe, and I caught Mose’s eye, and we exchanged a look of concern.

“There she is, boys. Been meaning to take her down for a while. Looks like today’s the day.”

The morning air was fresh and smelled of blooming wood lily
and wild rose and prairie smoke, which had all taken root in the fallow between the orchard and the river. It was going to be a hot day, I could tell, and the idea of spending hours cutting down a tree and splitting it into pieces small enough to feed a stove or a still fire wasn’t particularly enticing. But the beauty of the day itself and the mood of the pig scarer helped. Sweating in Hector Bledsoe’s hayfields wouldn’t have been half the hell it was if the man himself had been anything but a bastard. The pig scarer was downright jovial that day, and it made a difference.

Before he and Mose set to work cutting down the cottonwood, he walked around the base of the trunk, as if taking its measure. On the side that faced the river, he knelt and said, “Son of a gun.” He reached down and pulled something from the ground, then held it out in his hand so that we could see.

“A toadstool?” I said.

He shook his head. “A morel, tastiest mushroom there is. Been a long while since I went hunting morels. Here,” he said to me. “Take this and go see if you can find any more along the river.”

It was brown, four inches long, and looked like the ratty cap some gnome might wear in a Grimms’ fairy tale. It didn’t look appetizing in the least, but I was a whole lot more interested in locating mushrooms than in working up a sweat on that old cottonwood.

“You find ’em,” the pig scarer said, “you bring ’em back here directly.” He winked at me with his one good eye. “I know what you’re thinking, that you’re getting out of the hard work. There’ll be plenty waiting for you when you get back, I guarantee it.”

I walked away. At my back I heard the saw teeth begin to bite into the cottonwood.

I went slowly among the trees on the riverbank, looking closely at the ground and all the wild things that grew there. I found several more of the odd-looking mushrooms. The river curved around the edge of the orchard, and very soon I was completely out of sight of the pig scarer and Mose. I was intent on my mission, eyes to the earth,
when I looked up and realized I wasn’t far from the lone oak tree where the pig scarer had knelt the night before and had wept his heart out. I glanced back to be sure I couldn’t be seen and ran to the oak.

What I found was a little graveyard, a family burial plot. I’d seen them before in rural areas, where the laws that governed interment didn’t reach or were ignored. Some that I’d seen had fences around them, but not this one. There were a number of wooden grave makers, upright plaques so bleached by the sun and weathered that whatever had once been written on them was now obliterated. There were also three graves with no markers whatsoever, but they were clearly outlined by wild clover. I stood there thinking that probably I was looking at the pig scarer’s family, those who’d come before him and had maybe first tilled the soil. Because he was the only one at the farm, I wondered if he might be the last of them, the end of the line. I considered our one-eyed Jack, and how lonely it must feel believing that you’re all alone, with no one to remember or grieve for you when you’re gone. I had Albert and Mose, and now Emmy. The pig scarer seemed to have no one.

Still, those three unmarked graves gave me pause, especially coupled with the fury evident in the torn-up attic room, and I left the little cemetery full of unsettlingly dark speculation.

When I returned with my hands cupped full of morels, I found the cottonwood had been felled and Mose and the pig scarer were taking a break from their labors, sitting atop the trunk, which was prone on the ground. They had their shirts off, and their skin was glistening with sweat. The pig scarer was smiling, as if he loved the work. And, oddly, so was Mose.

“The hunter home from the hill,” the pig scarer declared exuberantly, and when he saw the mushrooms, he clapped me on the back and said, “A fine haul, boy. This’ll spice up our chicken dinner tonight real swell. Put them under the wood cart and get ready to sweat.”

They’d already sawed several sections off the trunk, and the pig scarer put me to work lifting those sections and loading them on the
cart. They were heavy and the labor was hard, and while I was at it, Mose and the pig scarer continued working the saw.

We took another break, and the pig scarer said, “You got a name?”

“Buck,” I said.

“How about our mute friend?”

I looked at Mose. He spelled out in sign,
Geronimo.

The pig scarer laughed when I told him. “Sure it is,” he said. “What tribe?”

“Sioux,” I said.

“Let me show you boys something.” He took a pocketknife from his overalls, cut a slender branch from the cottonwood, and showed us the cut end. “See that star in there?”

He was right. At the heart of the branch was a dark, five-pointed star.

“Your people have a story about this,” he said to Mose. “They say that all the stars in the sky are actually made inside the earth. Then they seek out the roots of cottonwood trees and slip into the wood, where they wait, real patient. Inside the cottonwood, they’re dull and lightless, like you see here. Then, when the great spirit of the night sky decides that more stars are needed, he shakes the branches with his wind and releases the stars. They fly up and settle in the sky, where they shine and sparkle and become the luminous creations they were always meant to be.” He looked at the star in that cottonwood branch with a kind of reverence. “And we’re like that, too. Dreams shook loose. You boys and me and everybody else on God’s earth. Your people, Geronimo, they got a lot of wisdom in ’em.”

Mose smiled as broadly as I’d ever seen.

“You didn’t like the story?” the pig scarer asked me, because I wasn’t smiling like Mose.

“It’s fine, I guess,” I said.

“You like it here, Buck?”

“It’s hard work.”

“Let me see your hands.” He studied the calluses on my palms. “You’re used to hard work.”

“Doesn’t mean I like it.”

“Everything’s hard work, Buck. You don’t wrap your thinking around that, life’ll kill you for sure. Me, I love this land, the work. Never was a churchgoer. God all penned up under a roof? I don’t think so. Ask me, God’s right here. In the dirt, the rain, the sky, the trees, the apples, the stars in the cottonwoods. In you and me, too. It’s all connected and it’s all God. Sure this is hard work, but it’s good work because it’s a part of what connects us to this land, Buck. This beautiful, tender land.”

“This land spawned a tornado that killed Emmy’s mother. You call that tender?”

“Tragic, that’s what I call it. But don’t blame the land. The land’s what it’s always been, and tornadoes have been a part of that from the beginning. Drought, too, and grasshoppers and hail and wildfire and everything that’s ever driven folks off or killed ’em. The land is what it is. Life is what it is. God is what God is. You and me, we’re what we are. None of it’s perfect. Or, hell, maybe it all is and we’re just not wise enough to see it.”