by Steven Gould
This time Ruth didn’t wait for him to get up. She took one arm and used the elbow and shoulder like a crank, forcing him back onto his belly. Pinning his shoulder between her knees she took his pinky finger and cranked it (and the arm) toward the back of his head.
His response was less articulate than before, an animal grunt followed by a shriek.
“This,” Ruth said, “is where you apologize.”
“Sorry? You’ll be sorry, you bitch—”
He shrieked again. Kimble, watching, saw that she was mostly extending the arm and putting pressure on the shoulder socket. The finger was just an extra.
“When I’m done with your arm I’m pretty sure you won’t able to whip every man in this town. It’s already clear you can’t whip every woman.” She applied a bit more pressure.
“Jesus Christ, I’m sorry I fucking talked to you!”
Covas, the greengrocer, nodded and said, “Well, that, at least, sounded sincere.”
Ruth said quietly, “I’ll start with the finger. Then the elbow. Then the shoulder.” She gave him a sample.
“Ow! What do you want me to say?”
“Take back everything you said.” Ruth twisted slightly at the waist.
“I take it back! I take it back! I didn’t mean no harm!”
Ruth pinned his hand up between his shoulder blades and pushed on it while she stood. Before she let go, she said, “I’d just stay there for a while, if I were you.” She released him and said, “Let’s go home, Kimble.”
When Kimble answered, he made sure it was loud enough to reach all the way across the marketplace.
“Yes, Sensei!”
4
Rotten Eggs
Sandy Williams’ homestead was decent—not on the river, but on a major tributary creek—and he had a decent well, dug by him and lined with stone by his ex-wife. For all that he was a “farmer,” his wife had done most of the agriculture—planting, weeding, and gathering. She had called on her husband only for the most arduous work—turning the soil in the spring and hauling water.
One of their neighbors, Ron Tingly, a shepherd with sheep and goats, said, “Most farms keep a dumb beast of burden—in their case, it’s Sandy.” But he did not say this where Williams could hear.
Now that Williams’ wife was gone, there were only the chickens, three dozen, kept behind a coyote fence behind the house. There were only hens. One hungover morning the last rooster had crowed one too many times. That night he’d had coq au beer, but it was badly burned. He was a lousy cook.
Now he ate eggs and bartered eggs in the market. He wouldn’t be able to start a garden until mid-April. The village was at 7,000 feet and the heavy frosts could run into May. There’d been snow in June, once.
When the chickens laid well, he bought liquor, but this usually resulted in him forgetting to barter for feed. Underfed hens do not lay well.
When he was sitting at home, he spent a lot of time thinking about Ruth’s money.
* * *
“SENSEI.”
It was a bit after midday and Kimble had just returned from the village. He’d found, to his chagrin, that Ruth expected him to get an education, so he was spending his mornings at the half-day village school.
“There’s soup.”
“I saw Sandy Williams again.”
Ruth had been cutting reeds, for basket making. Now she put down her flint knife and looked at Kimble. “On our land?”
“No, still that place on the other side of the road. He thinks he’s hiding, but he really needs to wear something less bright or hide behind something that doesn’t lose its leaves in the winter.”
“Hmmm.” She coiled the reeds she’d cut and put them in the sink to soak.
The sink was new, just a ceramic basin with a rubber plug set in a rough wooden shelf. A plastic bucket stood on the floor below to catch the runoff. Ruth had plans to pipe water from the spring but, for now, and “in the best martial arts tradition,” Kimble was hauling the water and gathering the wood.
Ruth dried her hands and reached over the window to where several wooden weapons lay across two dowels. She took down a jyo, a white-oak staff an inch in diameter and reaching from the ground to her armpit.
“Eat your soup!” she said, and left the cottage.
Kimble quickly filled his bowl, but instead of sitting by the coals of the stove, he went outside and climbed the ladder to the roof. Seated beside the gravity-feed water barrel, he ate as he watched Ruth make her way up to the road.
She came back fairly quickly.
“He was gone,” she said. “I think he saw me coming.”
They practiced jyo that afternoon, tskui—thrusting—and the appropriate blocks and counterstrikes. After an hour of this, she put aside her jyo and had him attack her with his staff, a process that always ended with her in possession of the jyo and him flying through the air. Fortunately, his ability to safely fall was far superior to that of Mr. Williams.
They switched and he practiced the same jyo-dori (staff taking) techniques with far less definite results.
“Never mind,” said Ruth. “It will come.”
* * *
ON market day Ruth sent him off to school with the basket and some coin. “A dozen eggs, some kale from Mr. Covas, and, if a shipment has come in at the store, some green tea.”
When Kimble neared town, Sandy Williams stepped into the road, a straw-filled basket in each of his hands. “Good morning.”
Kimble nodded politely, but kept walking.
Williams, with his longer legs, easily kept pace. “What’s your hurry, boy?”
Kimble’s thought was none of your business. He ameliorated that to a short, monosyllabic, “School.”
“Buying eggs today? Give you a good deal.”
“At the market, after.”
“The deal won’t hold, then.” He pulled back the straw. The brown eggs in the straw were large and smooth. “Need a quick sale, half off for cash.”
The eggs did look good and Kimble could use the savings to buy some bread, the only thing he regularly craved. Ruth served lots of grains, but usually in soups or porridge. She’d managed biscuits, cooked in a covered crock, and flat corn griddle cakes cooked on a heated stone, but nothing risen, nothing with a good crunchy crust.
He stopped walking. “Let me see one.” He supposed Williams wanted the money to buy liquor, but that wasn’t really his lookout.
Williams tilted the basket and reached awkwardly for an egg at the far end of the basket.
“Not that one,” said Kimble. He pointed at an egg in the middle. “That one.”
Williams looked annoyed. “Sure, kid. If you want. You drop it, though, you bought it.”
Kimble accepted the proffered egg and formed a tube with his hands, the egg in one end, the other end pressed against one eye. When he faced the sun, the light shining through showed the bacterial ring, dark and prominent, and the air cell had expanded to half the volume of the egg.
He handed it back carefully. He certainly didn’t want to drop it. He’d smelled rotten eggs before.
“Well?” said Williams.
“Too old. No thanks.”
“You’re crazy, boy. This is a good deal.”
Kimble shook his head. “No, thank you.” This time when he walked on, Williams didn’t follow.
* * *
BY dint of superior comparison shopping, Kimble saved enough on the afternoon’s egg purchase to buy a small loaf of multigrain bread. When he presented it, along with the tea and the kale, he saw Ruth’s tongue dart out and touch her lips.
“How hard can it be to make an oven?”
It took a month, in their spare time. They made a traditional horno, the dome-shaped adobe oven of the southwest. They found that the soil down in the bosque, not too near the clay deposits, contained the right mixture of clay and sand. Chopping and shredding the straw without metal tools was one of the most labor-intensive parts. Their brick mold was made of finished outside lumber,
a piece of two-by-four, drilled and pegged with dowels. They made the adobe bricks five inches wide and fourteen long, thick as the wood mold. They left a smooth wooden log in to form a small chimney, high and to the back, and the door was a three-inch-thick flat slab of limestone chipped to the rough outline of the arched doorway.
Rosemary Werito, a Dineh who lived west of town, consulted on the design and talked them through the first day of baking. She walked back and forth from the horno to the cottage, supervising Ruth with the dough preparation and Kimble as he fed the fire. “Too much,” she said. When she returned fifteen minutes later, “too little.” Kimble was burning mesquite roots and dried cow manure. When he wasn’t building the fire, he was digging a nearby pit to safely dispose of the hot coals.
At the end of the day, Rosemary went home with two loaves of bread and some badly needed cash and Kimble proudly shelved five more loaves in insect-proof bags.
They only baked once a week, but this let them take a few loaves in on market day to offset the cost of the imported flour.
Sandy Williams did not see this as a sign of virtuous industry. He only saw it as proof of Ruth’s additional prosperity. It galled him.
* * *
SCHOOL closed for three months in the summer. The cycle had turned. Long ago, children were not taught in the summer because their labor was critical to keep the farm going. That tradition survived into industrialization, but now, in the territory, tradition became necessity again.
They were gardening seriously, both near the stream and down on the bosque. In addition, Ruth was using their red clay deposits to make storage crocks. As productive as the gardens were, the resulting food needed to be preserved. Now, every time they heated the horno for baking, there were pots in the back, being fired. The beans could be dried, of course, as were half of the tomatoes, but much of the food was canned in the crocks and sealed with wax.
Ruth now had ten students for the afternoon class, mostly classmates of Kimble’s, but also a few adults who’d been there the day Ruth had put Sandy Williams in the dirt. They still practiced on the grass near the spring, but there were the beginnings of a structure. The boundaries of the practice area were now delimited by a rising course of adobe bricks and, in the wash below the dam, fiber-reinforced concrete roof beams were being cast in plastic-lined trenches in the sand.
One market day afternoon they returned to the cottage to find the door open and most of their belongings scattered about. A smoked chicken, recently purchased, was gone from the rafters, and the last two loaves from the previous week’s baking were gone from the counter. But whoever had been there hadn’t found the hidden wall hollow where Ruth kept her cash, or messed with the growing collection of crocks in the new root cellar.
There were tracks in the dust, a man’s booted feet, larger than either of theirs.
“Williams,” said Kimble.
“Maybe,” said Ruth. “Whoever it was, I think we surprised him. He didn’t go through all the baskets yet.” She had Kimble stay home to pick up and trudged back into town to report it to Martha Mendez, the storekeeper who doubled as the county clerk, postmaster, and recorder.
The local law enforcement was volunteer and aimed more at transients and professional bandits. Disputes between locals were heard by the village council, which mostly depended on local quarrels working themselves out. For the worst things, messengers went twenty miles to the nearest Ranger barracks or one waited for the bimonthly visit of the territorial circuit judge.
“Did you see anyone?” asked Martha after hearing the details.
“Sandy Williams has been hanging around the edges of our property.”
Martha made a face. Williams was the community’s invisible elephant, the problem no one liked to talk about.
“Two loaves of bread and a chicken. Nothing else? No cash?”
“They didn’t find where I keep it.”
“I’ll tell the boys.” The boys were the council, grown men all. “Could be they’ll go talk to Williams. Not promising anything.”
Ruth snorted. “Well, I really just wanted it on the record and for you to spread the word. I’ll be watching my place more carefully and I’ll take care of it if I catch someone. Just suggesting others might want to keep an eye out, as well. You have any locks?”
She returned home with a Kevlar composite reproduction of an old mortise lock and enough epoxy to bond it in place on the inner face of the door. The door could be broken, but it would take time and effort. Their windows were small, head high, and double glazed. When they were swung open, Kimble could climb through them, but a large man couldn’t.
The next time they both went to the market, they came back to find the kitchen window, inner and outer panes, broken. Just within the window, a crock with cooked beans and the last loaf of bread were missing from the counter.
“Now that’s annoying,” said Ruth.
Kimble was more than annoyed. He hefted the small clay crock of honey they’d just traded four loaves of bread for. “That was the last. I really wanted to try the honey on some bread.”
Using some fine dark dust, Ruth checked the glass pieces for fingerprints, but the glass was still clear from the last cleaning. They did find some more boot prints though, in the threadbare yard.
“Looks the same,” Ruth said.
Kimble pointed at the right heel. “It is. That crack is the same.”
“Get some of that scrap cardboard and draw a full-sized picture. One you could hold up to a boot.”
“Yes, Sensei.”
There was one spare pane of glass stored in the cupboard beneath Ruth’s bed and it was the work of a few minutes to place it in the frame. Summer was full on and there was no need of the second glazing until later in the year, but Ruth put it on her list anyway.
Kimble was comparing his drawing with the boot print.
“Not bad,” Ruth said, looking over his shoulder. She tucked the drawing in her shoulder bag. “Fetch the dishpan, the one with the onions in it.”
“And the onions?”
“Put them in the sink for now.”
When he returned with the plastic tub, she carefully placed it over the boot print in the dust, then weighed it down with an adobe brick.
“Stay here,” she told Kim. “I’m going to talk with Martha.” She pointed two fingers at her own eyes.
Kimble bobbed his head. “Right, Sensei. I’ll watch.”
* * *
THOUGH Ruth had picked up the larger pieces there were still glass shards on the sill, counter, and floor, so Kimble gathered them all up. Goat-heads were bad enough—he had no desire to step on glass. It was a hot afternoon and stuffy in the cottage. He opened all the windows of the cottage, found a basket to put the onions in, and thought about the bread that was gone.
He deeply resented whoever stole the bread. Making more was really a six-hour job, between heating the horno, preparing the dough, and baking. In the summer, it was the sort of thing you began at dawn, before it got too hot.
There were many chores that could be done. They needed more clay from the riverbank for pottery, but he couldn’t watch the cottage from there. Same problem with fishing or seining for crawdads. He could do laundry, but they’d done it two days before.
It was the worst time of day for it, but everything he needed to mix more adobe for bricks was already on site over by the dojo. He locked the cottage door, hung the hard, plastic key around his neck, and headed over there.
He stopped short.
There were two horses tied to the small cottonwood by the spring, one with a riding saddle and one with two filled canvas panniers on a pack saddle. The visible brand was the Bar Halo, a small ranch west of town belonging to the Kenney family. This wasn’t too surprising. Ruth had let it be known that locals traveling her way were welcome to the spring’s water, but he didn’t see any of the Kenneys, or Orse, their hired hand. He heard distant movement and looked around the half-completed dojo wall.
Sandy Williams
was in the garden, stealing tomatoes.
The kitchen garden was on the far (northern) side of the pond, handy to water, with a plastic mesh rabbit fence around it. Deer could jump (and had) right over the fence but they mostly watered down in the bosque. Also, the nearest neighbors’ sheepdogs tended to keep the deer away from the top of the bluff.
Not very good at keeping people out, though.
“I’m seeing a couple of dozen Romas and a bunch of cherries in your basket,” Kimble said loudly, from the other side of the pond.
Williams jerked around, a half-eaten tomato in his hand.
“Looking at your face and your coveralls, you’ve gone through another dozen, as well. That’ll be six dollars. Then there’s the matter of the broken window, the stolen crock of beans, and my loaf of bread.”
Williams dropped the half-eaten tomato in the dirt prompting a cry from Kimble.
“Don’t waste! What did you say to me when you tried to sell me those rotten eggs? ‘You drop it, you bought it’?”
“Didn’t have any choice, kid. Coyotes got my chickens last night. It was the last straw.” Williams walked out of the garden gate. “Your house unlocked?”
“Sensei is going to beat the absolute crap out of you.”
“We’ll see about that. Anyway, I saw her head into the village just now. I’m done with this town—I’m gonna be long gone by the time she gets back. Just need a stake for the road and I know she’s got it.”
“The cottage is locked and even if you break in you’ll never find it.”
“So it is in the house,” said Williams.
Crap.
Williams set the tomatoes down and stepped into the pond. “I’ll bet you know where it is. I’ll bet you even have a key.”
Kimble’s first impulse was to run hard and fast, back toward town. Even if Williams pursued him on horseback, there were places he could go no horse could follow.
But he doubted Williams would follow. Instead Kimble thought he’d kick in the door and ransack the cottage. Williams had done it once before, so he knew where not to look. He might find Ruth’s savings this time.
Kimble circled to the left along the edge of the water. “You steal those horses? The council will ride after you for that. They’ll send for the Rangers, too.”
