Torrent Falls

by Jan Watson

  “What should I do with this lovely day?” she asked the cat.

  As if her question offended his dignity, Tom stalked away, the tip of his tail twitching like a worm on a fish hook. A patch of golden sunshine on the bottom step met his particular requirement, and he stretched out, soaking up the warmth.

  Copper sat beside him, resting her hand ever so lightly on the cat’s bony spine. The steady vibrations from his purr tickled her. Sometimes she wished she were a cat. All play and no work. “You’re so right, Tom. It’s much too pretty to stay indoors.”

  After fetching her walking stick, a linen sack, and her slingshot in case of trouble, Copper set off. A walk was what she needed. She could check on the pear orchard she and Lilly had discovered a few months ago. The skirt of her brown- and white-checked gingham dress swayed as she marched across the barnyard, and the brim of her matching bonnet cast a shadow on her face. She’d piled her thick red hair on top of her head and secured it with combs, but still she could feel tendrils escape the bonnet. She might as well give up on taming that mass of curls and just keep it braided as other mountain women did.

  It was an easy climb up the steep trail without Lilly Gray on her back, but Copper missed the baby who was as much a part of her as her right arm. She knew Darcy would take good care of Lilly. Still she wished she had not let her go to Fairy Mae’s. Her baby was becoming a little girl, and Copper was not sure she was ready for the coming independence. She laughed at herself. I’m going to give myself the vapors if I keep this up. It’s way too pretty today to spend my time fretting.

  The ground was slippery mud from the rain, so she watched her step, but her troubles fell away as she climbed. A crow cawed in a tall pine, and somewhere far off a cow’s bell tinkled. The only other sound was the even, calming resonance of God’s creation: branches sighing in a sudden breeze, leaves falling delicately to carpet the forest floor, small creatures scampering away from a hawk or snake, her own breath mingling in perfect timbre. She drank it in like fresh cold milk, a sweet taste on her tongue.

  The meadow was as she remembered, except she hadn’t noticed a deserted cabin at the edge of the field before. Nearly hidden by tangles of honeysuckle, blackberry, and wild rose, it listed to one side. The pears were past their prime, most already fallen, but she gathered some up anyway; they would make a few pints of pear butter.

  Copper hung her linen sack and her bonnet over a low branch before plucking a piece of yellow-brown fruit and settling in the doorway. Oddly, what she could see of the yard—the part that was not covered in purple thistle and jimsonweed—was chopped up like frozen ground, and a pool of mud as thick as pudding looked like a wallowing hole for something big. Probably a bear on its way up the mountain looking for a cave to hibernate in come winter. Bears wouldn’t stay this far down for long. Interesting. She’d have to remember to tell Dimm about it.

  Idly, she wondered if the house had never had a porch or if it had just rotted away. Entertaining herself for a moment, she thought of the family who might have lived here, conjuring up a tall father and a slight mother as three little girls in airy muslin slips ran through the rooms of her imagination. Fruit juice trickled down her chin, and she barely caught it before it stained her collar.

  The inside of the cabin beckoned her, and she left the sunny doorway for its shadowed interior. The floor was hard-packed dirt, and hunks of chinking lay scattered along the bottom of the walls. Sunlight filtered in through the missing mortar and laid a game board at her feet. Delighted, she danced a crooked hopscotch on its surface. In one corner stood a rusted bedstead with a ticking mattress pocked with holes. Across the room, a wardrobe’s door hung ajar, begging examination. Not wanting to come upon a snake unaware, she found a stick and poked inside. But nothing rustled or threatened, so she rummaged the shelves and found a long cotton nightdress and a tiny infant gown.

  Her mind filled with questions. What had happened to this woman, and why did she leave behind her bed and nightgown, not to mention the cabin and pear orchard? It was a puzzle as strange as the riddles Daddy teased her with when she was a girl. “Round as an apple, flat as a plane, hole in my pocket, beggar again.” She remembered that one and her favorite: “I found a thing good to eat, white and smooth and ever so neat, neither flesh, nor fish, nor bone, in three weeks it ran alone.” Daddy gave her a penny for her pocket when she guessed the first one, but the second had her stumped for days until he took her to the chicken house and they watched a doodle peck its way out of a smooth, white shell.

  Copper folded the musty nightgown carefully, as if the lady of the house might return anytime, then laid it and the baby’s gown on the shelf and closed the crooked door.

  Suddenly, an odor as evil as death filled the room, and she sensed a dark presence behind her. Alarm pricked up her spine.

  Daring a glance, her mouth went dry at what she saw. A huge hog sized her up with narrowed piggy eyes. Where was her slingshot? Her heart did a double beat when she remembered hanging it on the pear tree in her linen sack. She had made a terrible mistake. In seconds that seemed like hours, she remembered every story she’d ever heard about the wild boars roaming the mountains, killing indiscriminately. Legend was they’d eat skin and bone, leaving nothing behind.

  Holding her breath, Copper turned to face her fear. At least two hundred pounds of meanness blocked the doorway. Unlike the pigs in her pen at home, this boar was tall and rangy with a narrow build. Bristly hairs stood up along his spine, which ended in a long, straight tail. One yellowed tusk was broken and jagged, and the other projected from his mouth like a dagger. Grunting with pleasure, the hog scratched himself against the doorway, dislodging clods of dirt. A fine gray dust rose off his body and danced in the streams of sunlight that made the hopscotch board. Slowly, he lifted his ugly snout and blew dirt bullets across the room.

  Copper’s mind screamed, Run! But there was nowhere to go. She opened her mouth to yell at him, to show him she was not afraid, to maybe buy herself a little time, but her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and only a whimper issued forth.

  The hog eyed Copper’s discarded pear. He slurped it up before turning his attention back to her. He clicked his teeth, a strange warning, as his calloused snout dipped and twitched, scenting his prey.

  Copper took the only chance she’d probably get; she dropped and scrambled under the bedstead. Her hair caught painfully on the strung rope that held the bed together, trapping her with her feet sticking out. The hog nosed her ankle, the touch of his breath as hot as sin. Screaming, she yanked free and gathered herself into a ball, willing herself to silence. Maybe he would forget she was here.

  Instead the boar charged the bed. From her hideout, Copper watched his hooves retreat, then pound forward like a bull seeing red, bent on destruction. The bed shuddered and creaked with each assault until finally it collapsed. Copper covered herself with the feather bed, but the enraged hog hooked it with his tusks and flung it away. Feathers shot high in the air, then fell like snowflakes as the mattress ruptured.

  Copper closed her eyes; she couldn’t bear to see what happened next. Lord, she prayed, help me.

  Angels come in many forms, and Copper’s guardian was in the shape of a coon dog named Faithful. Copper dared to look when she heard the hound’s baying bark. Incredibly, the feral hog was cornered by the dog’s quick countermoves when he tried to dodge away. It would have been a show to watch if her life was not at stake. Ready to flee, she cowered instead when the sound of gunshot filled the room. It was over. The hog was dead, and she was safe.

  Her legs wouldn’t support her when she tried to stand. But there was no need, for John lifted her up and carried her out into the sunshine. It seemed she would never stop trembling as she sat there under the pear tree in the circle of his arms.

  “You’re safe now,” he kept saying, giving her sips of water from his canteen and wiping her face with his wet handkerchief.

  “Faithful?” she managed to ask.

  “Aw,
she’s okay. She won’t leave the boar until I release her.”

  Taking out his knife, he peeled a pear, cut it in small pieces, and fed her. “You need some strength.”

  “How did you find me?”

  “We’ve been tracking Old Hitch for weeks. Today was our lucky day.”

  Copper shuddered. “I think this was God’s mercy instead of luck. You and Faithful saved my life.”

  He laid his hat aside and turned his face toward hers. “Does this mean we’re on speaking terms again?”

  She couldn’t help but laugh. “John Pelfrey, you’re a sight.”

  “Speaking of sights . . .”

  Her fingers searched through her tumbled hair as she tried to find her pins. “I lost my combs.”

  “You’re the prettiest thing I ever saw just as you are.”

  Tears filled her eyes, and she leaned her head on her bent knees. “John, we can’t just go back to the way we were as if nothing happened.”

  “I’m ready to tell you the whole story,” he said in his earnest way. “I never meant to keep it from you.”

  Copper wiped pools of tears from under her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “Then why did you?”

  Shrugging, he said, “It never came up, and when it did, you wouldn’t let me.”

  Copper felt sick and shaky and tired. When she thought about it, she realized John had lost someone too. She didn’t have a lock on sorrow. “Well, call Faithful out first. I can’t bear to think of her in there with that . . . that thing.”

  One sharp whistle and John’s hound ran out of the dilapidated cabin. Then she settled under the pear tree at their feet.

  Copper opened her mouth to speak. Now that she had agreed to listen, a dozen questions arose in her mind.

  But John shushed her. “Just listen,” he said, turning her in his arms so she couldn’t see his face.

  Giving in, she settled her head in the curve of his shoulder and listened. . . .

  There was a freezing rain that January day, John recollected. He was sitting by the roaring fireplace mending a harness when Faithful left the hearth and set to barking. The door was frozen shut, and ice shattered around him as he jerked it open. He didn’t see anything at first, only drifts of crusted snow and shimmering, ice-covered trees.

  Faithful bounded out, skittering across the porch to a body collapsed on the ground beside the porch steps. John joined his dog and feared the worst as he hauled whoever it was into the house.

  Finally the lump thawed, revealing the strangest-looking person John ever hoped to see. She was as colorless as the snow outside, and her eyes were pale blue and pink-rimmed like a rabbit’s ear. It took him a while to make out her age, for her hair was as white as a granny’s and her voice was as old as time. Not that she said much. She just sat there on his hearth, her sky blue shawl dripping dirty water on the floor.

  He rustled around in an old trunk and found some clothes he thought would do. After stacking them beside her, he shrugged on his coat and trekked out into the cold. He guessed he’d have to feed the woman; then he’d take her to Jean Foster’s. Jean would know what to do. They’d have to walk, because a horse would break a leg on this ice.

  He felt better for having a plan, and after an hour he opened the cabin door feeling like a stranger in his own house. The woman was dry at least, and the boots he’d laid out seemed to fit. The clothes she’d changed out of steamed on the hearth, and her shawl hung across the rocking chair.

  John took out a bowl and filled it with brown beans and fatback from the pot on the cookstove. He wiped the rim of a drinking glass with his shirttail, poured cold buttermilk to the top, set the food on the table, and pulled out a chair for her.

  Grabbing the spoon, she wolfed down the food, then licked the bowl.

  He stood back, dumbfounded. No matter how much ice and snow, he couldn’t wait to get her out of his cabin and safe in Jean’s.

  But when he told her of his plans, she swelled up like a bullfrog and said, “Mister, I ain’t going.”

  “Well,” he answered, standing foolishly by the door, his galoshes on his feet, “what’s your plan? You can’t stay here.”

  The woman looked somewhere over his shoulder, her strange eyes never meeting his. “Humph. Right now I ain’t got no plan.”

  John didn’t take his overshoes off. “You can see the problem,” he pleaded. “There’s no missus here, and I can’t have you staying here—with me—alone.”

  “I ain’t afeered.”

  “No need for you to be, but Jean Foster’s close by. She’ll make you welcome.”

  The woman just sat there, turning his words away. “I’m so hungry my belly’s eating my backbone.”

  John clomped across the floor, piled more beans in her bowl, and slapped it back on the table.

  Attacking the beans with one hand, she handed him her empty milk glass with the other. Revulsion mixed with intrigue as he watched her gulp her meal. Bean juice and milk trailed down her chin when she pushed the empty bowl away. Who was she? What was she doing in his kitchen?

  John felt her watching as he took off his boots and hung his coat on a peg. He’d sit with her and talk reasonable to get her away from his table and out the door. Might as well start with the obvious. “Why’d you come here?”

  “Yore Purty’s friend.” Her voice was as thick as molasses, mesmerizing him.

  “Purty?”

  “I heered you call her Pest.”

  His heart hammered against his rib cage. This was Copper’s fey friend Remy Riddle. Once he and Copper had searched for her in vain; he remembered Copper’s tears.

  This changed everything. He’d put her up for the night like Copper would expect him to, though he’d probably freeze to death in the barn, grown accustomed as he was now to the easy life.

  And he had. He had nearly frozen to death, or it felt like it anyway. He and Faithful had taken refuge in the stripping room. His acre of tobacco was long since stripped and tied in hands, but the small stove he used to cure the burley would do for the night, he reckoned. But it didn’t put off much heat. He was grateful for the warmth from the sleeping dog.

  After another day and one more night in the stripping room, he decided to talk straight to Remy. He’d had enough of her. “I’m going to fetch Jean and her husband to take you to their place.”

  He couldn’t believe her answer. “Mister, mind yore own business.”

  “This is my business!” he exploded, throwing his hat to the floor. “Ain’t them my biscuits you’re eating and ain’t that my coffee in my cup?”

  Remy didn’t even wince, just squinted at him and stuck one foot out from under the table. “I figure I need a week.”

  Then he saw her ankle puffed like rising bread over the top of her unlaced boot. Anyone else sitting at his table and he would have knelt to take the foot to assess the damage, but he couldn’t bring himself to touch Remy, and he sensed she wouldn’t let him anyway.

  “Who are you running from?” he asked instead. “What brought you out in such weather?”

  She barked a dismissive laugh. “You don’t rightly want to know.”

  “Try me,” he said, pouring two mugs of coffee and taking a chair across from her. “I figure you owe me as much.”

  Sleet beat against the windows with icy fingers, and a log in the fireplace burned through, sending a shower of sparks shooting up the chimney. Faithful leaned against his knee and yawned until John said, “Lie down.” He could see she was grateful as she curled up by the fire.

  “My pap was in the pen a long time but not near as long as we’d thought he’d be.” The sluggish voice started in the middle of the story, John supposed.

  “You mean jail?” he asked.

  “Thing is Ma died whilst he was gone. My brothers and sisters is scattered all over, living with this’n and that’n.” Remy broke a piece of biscuit and dunked it in her coffee.

  “Why was your pap in prison?”

  “Collarmoggis.”


  John tugged at his shirt collar. “Pardon?” Suddenly the room seemed very small and very hot.

  “It’s what took Ma.”

  “Cholera morbus?”

  “Ain’t that what I just said?”

  John got up and cracked the door. “I’m sorry about your ma.” The sting of sleet felt good against his face. The world beyond the cabin was starkly beautiful. Snow piled in drifts against fence rows, and trees reached gray skeletal arms to the pewter-colored sky. Maybe he’d just whistle to Faithful and walk out across the barren fields—walk and walk until he never had to face the unwelcome person who had taken root in his house. Instead he took a draft of clean, cold air to clear his mind and sharpen his senses before he shut the door.

  He twirled a straight chair and straddled it, facing her, his arms resting across the back. Might as well be comfortable; getting the truth from Remy might take a right smart while. He rested his chin on the backs of his hands. “Tell me. I’ll set here all night if that’s what it takes.”

  “He cain’t make me.”

  John never spoke, just sat there astraddle the chair staring at her. Her gaze slid all around the room, never lighting, never meeting his.

  He knew he was making her uncomfortable, and he knew she was cracking, thawing toward him like she’d thawed the day Faithful found her, in little drips and drabs.

  “Pap says I have to marry up with Quick Hopper,” she finally explained. “But I ain’t jumping no broom with that smarmy old man. Pap’s blinded by Quick’s gold. He won’t never let up.”

  John guessed that Remy was a little off-kilter—tetched in the head. “So what are you aiming to do?”

  Her eyes met his. “Soon as I can hobble, I’m going to fling myself over Torrent Falls.”

  He felt like he’d been sucker punched. “It’s a far piece to Torrent Falls,” he said stupidly.

  She shrugged as if the distance was of no consequence, of no more consequence than her life. “It’s a purty place and peaceable. They’s angels living there.”