Wolf Hollow (8 page)

When Henry stood to have a closer look, I saw that the wire would have caught him in the neck if he'd been in the lead.

Henry ran his finger along the wire and jerked back. “It's sharp right here above the path,” he said. “Like someone filed it.”

He stepped into the brush and unwound the wire from one of the trees where it was anchored. Coiled the wire carefully and left it hanging from the tree on the other side of the path.

I used my sleeve to blot the blood from my brother's face. The cut was deep enough to bleed a lot, but it wasn't too bad.

“Come on,” I said to James, helping him to his feet. “We'll get you fixed up just fine.”

I took him by the hand and he let me, still blubbering. Henry went along in front, head up, as quiet and serious as a bull. From time to time he turned to look at me and James. At one point, as we crossed the fallow field on the brow of the hill, he turned and then stopped short. I looked back and saw Betty at the mouth of the path into the hollow, watching us.

“Not now,” I said to Henry, who seemed to know what I meant. He stood stock-still and watched her as James and I hurried past. “Not now,” I said again. And he turned to follow us home.

The wire was gone when I led my father back to where it had been.

“I know it was here,” I said. “Just where that hump of root is. I made sure of it so I wouldn't forget.”

My father stepped off the path and fingered the pale scar on the tree where the wire had taken a bite. There was another like it on the other side of the path. “You remembered right, Annabelle. This is where he tied the wire.”

My father didn't get angry very often. My mother usually got angry first, so there wasn't much need for him to get involved. But this was different.

“Someone has a snake in him, and it's woken up,” he said quietly.

I thought that was a very odd thing for him to say. He sounded a little like the reverend at our church or Aunt Lily when she got going, though he was not for the most part a churchy kind of man.

“But it's not a
he
, I don't think,” I said. “Or if it is a
he
it's a
she
, too. Probably. At least I think it is. A
she
, I mean.”

My father looked at me curiously. “Annabelle, it would be easier if you just spit it out.”

“And I will. I just can't be sure because I didn't see her do it. But I am sure, I guess. It couldn't be anyone else. Unless it was Andy, too.”

It was cold in the woods, the light going quickly, and I was happy to follow my father when he suddenly headed for the open fields above us. He took my hand as we crossed them, cut his stride down to half so I could keep up, and stopped at the top of the lane to pick a dozen apples for the sauce my mother would make that night. Then we went together down the lane through the trees that arched overhead, toward the house.

Only after we got inside and warm, spent a moment with James (my father calling him a “good little man”) and another with my mother (who gave us both a long look), did he sit me down in the front room, quieter there than the kitchen, and asked me to say what was on my mind.

So I told him everything from the beginning. About Betty and her threats. About the cucumber-shaped bruise on my hip. How Andy and Betty had become friends so quickly and how furtive they had been for days now. About the quail and what Toby had done. About Andy coming late to school that morning and how the two of them had huddled in the schoolyard at recess, whispering.

I ran out of things to say and realized, to my dismay, that none of it sounded nearly as bad as it had felt at the time, though the memory of that quail's neck breaking would stay with me for the rest of my days. “She's a terrible bully,” I said. “But I still don't know why I was so scared of her.”

“Annabelle, why didn't you tell us right when she started up?”

“It happened in little bits, not all at once, and it wasn't easy to figure out what to do along the way.” I felt like such a terrible fool. “Besides, she said she would hurt the boys if I told anyone. And then she went ahead and hurt James anyway when I wouldn't do what she said.”

My father stood up and scrubbed his jaw with an open hand. “It's all right,” he said. “I will take care of this now, Annabelle. Your mother and I. But from now on you tell us right away when you have a problem. Do you promise?”

I did. It was an easy promise to make. I had no intention of lying to my father or mother about anything else. I just didn't know how complicated things would become.

The next day was Saturday. No school. Chores, yes. But usually a chance, too, for some time on my own to spend as I pleased.

Not so, that Saturday.

“You and your mother and I will be paying a visit to the Glengarrys this afternoon,” my father said when I sat down to breakfast. He used the voice that meant there would be no arguing.

“Do I have to go?” I said anyway.

My father nodded. “Something important shouldn't be said secondhand. But we'll be right there with you, and you'll feel better afterward. She won't have anything to hold over your head once it's all on the table.”

That sounded right, but I still didn't want to go.

James sat across from me, moping over his eggs and worrying the edge of the white bandage across his forehead.

“This thing itches and it's dumb,” he said. “I can't think right with it on me.”

To which my mother had a quick answer, wrapping a bandanna around his head, pirate-style. “Now you look like Long John Silver,” she said.

We knew a number of pirates, thanks to Robert Louis Stevenson and my grandmother, who read to us after supper most nights.

In no time at all, James was prancing around the house like a madman, crying “Ahoy, mateys,” and thrusting and parrying with a wooden spoon until my mother shooed him out the door into the sunshine. Henry, too.

“Stay near,” she called after them.

“We'll take them out to prune trees,” my father said, pulling on his coat, my grandfather with him. Christmas season was nearly upon us, and it was time to start shaping the small spruces we grew for selling. My father did the pruning while my grandfather sat in the truck with a dog or two and supervised the operation. The year before, my father had let the boys practice on a crooked spruce, and they'd shaped it into an excellent toothpick. This year, the boys were again in charge of gathering what fell in the rows and bundling the best of it for wreaths.

The house settled a little with them gone.

We tidied up the breakfast things and began our Saturday chores, my mother ironing in the kitchen, the air charged with the smell of hot clean cotton, the sound of the iron striking the board. My grandmother sat at one end of the big tiger-oak table, mending socks and patching elbows.

I pared apples for pies, doing my best to make one long, curling ribbon from each apple. Whenever I fed the peels to the horses, they didn't seem to appreciate my efforts, but I liked things pretty if they could be.

Aunt Lily, restless without work or church, did her best to taint our Saturdays so we were as miserable as she was.

“It would be quicker if you weren't trying to do that,” she told me, picking up a long peel at one end and bouncing the coil until it broke.

I almost offered to share the chore with her, but Aunt Lily didn't have much of a knack for housework.

“Did you send in Toby's film?” I asked her.

She lifted her chin sharply. “Of course I did, Annabelle. Supervising the mail is a great duty. Once it is in my hands, it gets sorted and sent with no nonsense whatsoever.”

“Oh, I know,” I said. “I didn't mean anything.”

Aunt Lily gave a little nod. “You shall have the photographs in no time at all,” she said. “Though I'm not sure why that man has our camera or any right to what is ours, all that expensive film. Sending it in, getting it back, and so on and so forth. Making more work for us to do, and for what?”

My mother shook her head at the “ours.” She had won the camera and everything that went with it. “I'm going to visit Ruth,” she said to me. “Do you want to come along?”

Well, I didn't. The very thought of it scared me. But “Yes,” I said, “I do.”

And when the ironing and the paring and the washing up were done, I put on my jacket and hat and went with my mother out the door.

Ruth lay in her bed, the covers tucked up across her thin chest. She wore a black silk eye patch. Green-and-yellow bruising seeped from beneath it and across her cheek. Beyond that, she was as pale as February.

“Hi, Ruth,” I said after our mothers had spent a little time fussing over her and then settled themselves in the sitting room for a talk. “Does it hurt?”

Ruth nodded slowly. She had not yet said anything but “Thank you, ma'am,” when my mother gave her a twist of wax paper filled with molasses drops.

“Are you coming back to school soon?”

Ruth started to shake her head but then stopped. “My parents won't let me go back there,” she said, looking away from me. “I have to go to a school in Sewickley now.”

I was stunned. “All that way into the city?”

“My father works there, Annabelle. We only live out here because my grandpa left us this house when he died. We never meant to stay so long, but it was nice here. Quiet.” She looked back at me and I could see that she was crying. “But we're going to sell the house and move to the city now.”

I had spent years growing up with Ruth, one of the sweetest, gentlest people I knew, and I began to cry, too. “I'm so sorry you got hurt,” I said.

Ruth stiffened. “I didn't get hurt,” she said. “Someone hurt me.”

I wiped my face. “Did you see anything?”

“Not really. Something moved on the hillside and I looked up and that's why the rock hit me so square in the eye. If I'd been looking down just a little . . .” She brought her knees up and crossed her wrists under her chin. “They say I'll get used to it. But I don't think I will.”

“Time to go, Annabelle,” my mother said from the doorway. “Ruth needs her rest.”

When I said good-bye, I didn't even hug Ruth or wish her well. I didn't know that this would be the last time I'd ever see her.

The visit to the Glengarrys was worse.

It was strange to sit between my parents on a threadbare settee in the Glengarrys' front room while Betty and her grandparents sat on kitchen chairs arranged in a line across from us. They sat higher than we did, and their faces were serious, but my parents were calm and warm on either side of me.

“I'm glad for the chance to thank you,” Mr. Glengarry began. “For the jewelweed. By the time I got home from Ohio, Betty was already on the mend. We're very grateful for your help.”

“And we're glad to give it, always,” my mother said. The “but” hovered on her lips.

My father said, “We want to talk with you about what's been going on at school.”

“So do we,” Mr. Glengarry said. “Betty has told us some very serious things about what happened to Ruth.”

“To Ruth?” my mother said. “We're not here about Ruth. We're here about what happened to James, our youngest. And to Annabelle.”

The Glengarrys looked puzzled.

Betty simply stared straight at me, unmoving.

Everyone in the room knew why Betty had come to live in the country, so I did not expect to surprise anyone when I said, “Betty told me that if I didn't bring her things, she would hurt me and my brothers. Which she did. First me, with a stick, twice, and then a quail she caught, and then yesterday, my little brother, with a sharp wire strung across the path to school. But I think Andy Woodberry helped with that part.”

It came out faster than the silence that followed it.

“Betty?” Her grandma looked torn right down the middle, one half resigned, the other a little hopeful. “Did you do these things?”

Betty shook her head. “I never did,” she said. “I wouldn't do that.”

“But you did, and you know you did,” I insisted. “Even though I brought you a penny and tried to be your friend.”

My mother put a hand on my knee to hush me. “Annabelle wouldn't lie about such things,” she said.

“But Betty would?” Mr. Glengarry didn't sound angry quite, but I could see where this was headed. I imagined that my own grandfather would stand up for me no matter what I'd done.

“Ask Toby if you don't believe me,” I said. “He saw what happened when I gave her the penny. She threw it away and hit me with a stick, and I have the bruise to prove it. And when she killed the quail, Toby told her to leave me alone. But she didn't. She's the one who strung that wire. I know it.”

“Hush, now, Annabelle,” my mother said. “It's all right.”

“Toby?” Mr. Glengarry said. “That wild man?” He looked at his granddaughter. “Tell them what you told us.”

When she didn't say anything, her grandmother put an arm around Betty and said, “It's okay, Honey. You don't need to be afraid now.”

Betty tipped her head to one side, just a little, her eyes still on me. “I saw Toby on the hillside up above where Ruth got hurt,” she said. “But he scares me so bad I was afraid to say anything about it.”

I remembered Ruth telling me she'd seen something moving on the hill just before the rock hit her. But it couldn't have been Toby.

“You're the one who's scary, Betty,” I said. “Toby didn't have anything to do with all that. Toby would never hurt Ruth.”

“He surely wasn't aiming at her,” said Mr. Glengarry. “He was aiming at the German.”

Mr. Ansel. The German.

Mr. Glengarry had lost a brother in the first big war, and he was one of the people who didn't speak to Mr. Ansel. “Toby's crazy because of what the Germans did to him. If anyone would be throwing rocks at a German, it would be Toby.”

“I didn't see Toby,” I said, “and I was right there in the road with Ruth.” To Betty, I said, “You weren't anywhere around when she got hurt, Betty, so how come you're the only one who saw him?”

“I was up in the belfry,” Betty said. “Andy wanted to show me the school bell when everyone went out to recess. There's a little window up there, looks right out onto the road and the hill. I saw it happen better than you ever could from down below.”

My mother leaned forward a little. “But you didn't say anything about it until now?” If anyone was a friend to Toby, it was my mother. It was clear that she didn't believe Betty, but I, too, had kept a secret because I was afraid of someone bigger and stronger than I was, and she knew that.

“I thought he would hurt me if I did,” Betty said.

I was stunned at how small she sounded. She, who had turned the tables with no effort at all.

“Andy's not afraid of Toby,” I said. “How come he didn't say anything?”

“Because I was the only one who saw what happened. Andy was on the other side of the belfry, messing around with a swallow's nest, and by the time he made it over to the window, Toby was gone. I didn't tell him what I'd seen. I was afraid Toby might hurt Andy, too.”

She sounded so scared that I almost believed her.

“What about the wire across the path?” I said. “Toby wouldn't hurt James.”

“Maybe not, but I take that path, too,” she said. “Maybe Toby meant it for me.”

“That's enough now,” Mr. Glengarry said. “Toby's crazy. Everybody knows that. And you can't expect any-thing but crazy business from a crazy man.”