The Journey Prize Stories 27

by Various

  “All right,” says Margaret, clapping her hands together. “Goodbye for now. Nice to meet you, and welcome to the farm!”

  When Margaret closes the office door, the girl holds up the little glass vial Margaret gave her. “What is this?” she asks Diane.

  “Let me see.” Diane takes the vial and unscrews the cap. She smells the contents. “It’s just lavender water,” she says, as she hands the vial back to the girl.

  “Lavender water?”

  “It’s part of Margaret’s natural horsemanship. It’s supposed to soothe maternal separation. Just dump it next to the water tub of whatever paddock you find the mule in. But try to make it look like you’re mixing it with the water,” Diane whispers. “I think Margaret might watch everything from the windows. I don’t want what happened last time to happen again.”

  “Last time?”

  “During the last heat wave It went off Its water completely—horses will do that sometimes, if they smell something funny. They think it’s poison, you see. The mule was just about dried to a crisp when I went down to check It. Trust me, it’s just easier to let Margaret think you’re doing exactly what she tells you to do.”

  The girl and the boy spend the rest of the day in the yard. The sun’s just setting over the distant hills when they finish work for the day and begin the climb back up to the log cabin.

  “What do you think of it?” the girl asks. Her shoes are soaked through with mud, and she’s so tired she feels like she could sleep on her feet.

  “About the mule?” the boy asks.

  “No. About the farm. About the work. About Margaret.”

  The boy doesn’t say anything for a long moment. “Well, it beats sleeping in the streets, doesn’t it?”

  The girl nods her head. “Of course it does,” she says.

  The next morning they walk down to the barn at half-past seven. The bottom of the valley is completely shrouded in a thick white blanket of mist, making it appear as though the stable and its courtyard are a solitary, floating island. As they reach the courtyard gate it begins to drizzle.

  They begin their day by helping Diane with the morning feed. Diane tells them that there’s no new hay on the property, so they pick through the rotten hay beside the stables.

  When the rain picks up, Diane pulls out a cigarette and moves underneath the eaves of the barn while she smokes. She exhales bluish clouds that coalesce with the puffs of mouldy dust that the girl and boy churn up from the hay with their pitchforks.

  “I was up all night in the kitchen, drinking a bottle of wine with Margaret,” Diane says, as she looks out over the valley. “She was afraid to go to sleep with Vasil still on the property. She thought he might try to rob her.”

  Vasil sleeps in a small camper on the other side of the manure pile. The camper is completely inert, the blinds drawn. But a pair of tall rubber boots sit on the top step of the little ladder that leads up to the door.

  “When is he leaving?” the boy asks.

  “We don’t know,” Diane says. “I translated for Margaret, but he only went into his trailer and drew all the blinds. Hopefully he’ll be gone by tomorrow. He was talking to me yesterday, after I told him Margaret had fired him. He told me that he has a daughter back in Romania, and a young wife. He came to Italy to try and find work so he could send money back to them. It’s almost the same thing that happened to that nice Hungarian couple who used to live up at the log cabin. They were managing this place before I got here. They left in the middle of the night.”

  “What?” the girl asks.

  “They packed up everything, and were gone before morning. Margaret was devastated.”

  “Why did they leave?” the girl asks. Suddenly, she remembers the rusted pots in the upper cabinets, the linens still hanging in the bathroom, and all of the groceries left in the cupboards and the fridge.

  “I suspect it had something to do with the pay,” Diane says.

  “Have you been paid yet?” the girl asks, tentatively.

  “No,” says Diane. “You know, the trail-riding business in Romania owes me thirty-five hundred dollars in back-pay. I don’t suppose I’ll ever see that money. That’s just the way it goes with horse jobs. I always say you’d be silly to do this sort of work for the money.” Diane flicks the butt of her cigarette away and turns to the boy. “Let’s get the yard taken care of first, then I’ll show you how to collect the eggs. Have you built up the fires yet?” she asks the girl.

  “No.”

  “You’d better go do that, fast. Margaret gets very irritable if the fire in her office isn’t built up. Don’t worry, she’s probably still in bed. She’s never up before noon. Since she had it out with that farmer, she’s been moping around the house. He came to deliver the hay last week, but she wouldn’t pay him. That’s why we’ve been using the stuff left over from last spring.”

  When the girl checks the wood caches in the office and the kitchen and in the sitting room upstairs, she finds them all empty. So she spends the next two hours carting in load after load of wood to pile beside each of the stoves. Soon, all of the fires are burning. But the girl has trouble keeping them hot, and often they subside to coals within minutes.

  While she’s stoking the flames in the kitchen stove, the girl notices that the room is packed with hoarded objects: the windowsills are lined with half-empty wine bottles and stacks of collapsed cardboard boxes. The clutter’s general equilibrium is punctuated throughout by empty pickle jars filled with quantities of strange objects: the rinds from fancy cheeses, tabs from cat-food tins, and a collection of small, black pebbles that shine dully in the light.

  The girl does her best to clean around the jars and bundles. She scrubs the pots and pans and other dishes that have been left in the sink, rearranging the cupboards so that all of the bowls and plates strewn atop the counter can fit inside. She dusts the lace curtains and sprays down the windows. All the while, she keeps running up and down the stairs to throw wood on the fires. But the fireplaces are so big that it seems like she could stand beside them all day throwing in wood and it would make no difference.

  At one o’clock, she stops for a break. As she pulls on the rain slicker she found in one of the cabin closets, she wonders if it belonged to the Hungarian couple who left in the night—she’s almost sure that she and the boy have been eating the groceries they left behind. She debates telling the boy, and wonders if he’s drawn the same conclusions.

  Out in the courtyard, Diane is standing in front of the boy, holding her pitchfork teeth up while the boy shovels straw into a wheelbarrow.

  “Look,” Diane says. “Do you see all of that, at the bottom? It’s not clean at all. It looks like you just kicked a bit of straw over all the shit and piss.”

  “I’m sorry,” the boy says. “I must have missed that stall.” He doesn’t meet their eyes as he shovels forkful after forkful of the spoiled straw.

  “Just make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Diane says.

  When Diane leaves to cart the wheelbarrow to the manure pile, the boy says, “I knew I wasn’t doing a great job. I didn’t think I was doing a terrible job.”

  “I know you’re not used to this sort of work,” the girl says. “I asked Diane if I could feed the chickens and do the mucking and the work with the horses, and you could do the housework, but she said Margaret won’t have it. She’s too old-fashioned.”

  The boy looks very worried. He’s covered in mud, and his hair is full of straw. His face is pale and his lips are white.

  “If I don’t do a good job, Margaret will fire us, just like she did that Romanian guy,” he says.

  “Never mind,” the girl says. “How were the chickens?”

  “Not bad. I only had to crawl around on my hands and knees in the straw and look for the eggs. The chickens didn’t mind me taking them. But they looked sad once I did. How was the kitchen?”

  “I don’t know how I’m expected to keep everything running in the house,” the girl says. “I didn’t think
Margaret wanted a maid when I answered the ad. I thought she wanted us both to look after the stable.”

  But the girl knows that neither of them had cared what the job was when they accepted Margaret’s offer. Margaret was the only employer who responded.

  They eat lunch together in the house kitchen and, afterwards, they drink tea that the girl boils in a kettle on the stove. Just as they are finishing, Margaret’s footsteps sound on the stairs. She appears in the kitchen doorway.

  “Good morning,” Margaret says. “And how is the work going today?”

  “It’s going well,” the girl says.

  “I had to build up the fires in the office and in the sitting room,” Margaret tells her. “It is very important that everything is kept nice and warm. It is not acceptable to have a cold house when one has guests. I am expecting a student at the farm by the end of the week. I will be preparing in my study, and I do not wish to be interrupted.”

  Margaret leaves the kitchen and disappears behind her office door, which is directly across the hall.

  “Don’t worry,” the girl says. “I’ll keep those fires high if I burn my hands to smouldering stumps in the process.” She lifts up her hands and shows her fingers to the boy. They have already been burned in several places.

  After lunch, when all three of them are mucking the paddocks, Diane tells them that she knocked on the camper door on Margaret’s orders, to try and find out when Vasil was going to leave. When she received no answer, Diane tried the latch, only to find the door unlocked. There was nobody inside, boots gone from the steps.

  “He must have left,” Diane says, “when he realized he wasn’t going to get any money out of her.”

  At seven o’clock, the boy and the girl walk back to their cottage to eat supper. Without saying anything to the boy, the girl begins to strip the bedroom and bathroom of their linens.

  “What are you doing?” the boy asks.

  “I’m just going to give everything a wash,” she says. “We’ll sleep in our sleeping bags tonight.”

  At eight o’clock, the boy pulls his boots and coat back on, even though they’re still soaked with mud. The girl watches him through the cabin window as he sets off toward the chicken coop so that he can feed the chickens once more before dark. While he’s gone, the girl picks through the cupboards and collects all of the unopened packages. She throws away most of what’s in the fridge, hoping the boy won’t notice.

  “Margaret was there,” the boy says, upon his return. His pants are soaked to the hips; even his jacket is drenched with mud. He strips off his clothes and the girl hangs them in front of the woodchip stove, on a clothesline that dangles from the ceiling. He stands shivering and rubbing his hands against the heat that pours out of the top of the stove.

  “I think she must have been looking down at me from the windows.”

  “She was watching you?” the girl asks.

  “She heard me cursing and swearing at the chickens,” he says. “The chickens saw me coming, and I think they remembered me. They knew I was the one who took their eggs away. They were pretending not to notice me, like they usually do. But when I spread the corn they started flapping everywhere and pecking at my hands instead of at the corn. It wouldn’t have been so bad, except the mule was there.”

  “The mule?” the girl asks.

  “I think It wanted to get at the corn too. It must be hungry—all It does is pick at that rotten bale in the courtyard. When It saw the chickens flapping around the corn It charged the chicken wire, and Its mane got stuck. Then It threw a fit, bucking and jerking Its head around—I thought It was going to tear the whole coop down!”

  “Oh no,” the girl says.

  “The chickens were terrified, and so was I. I panicked and tried to stand up, but I got my hair caught in the chicken wire at the top of the coop. I cursed and swore and chased all of the chickens away from me, because they were pecking and clawing at my legs. Finally, I managed to get myself unstuck and out of the chicken coop—the mule ran off too. But when I looked up Margaret was looking down at me from her window, just watching the whole thing.”

  “What did she say?” the girl asks.

  “She told me that if I can’t control my temper I won’t be allowed to go near the chickens. Or the horses. I’ll only be allowed to shovel mud in the bottom paddocks.”

  “Your temper?” the girl asks. “What temper? You don’t have a temper!” She stands up and runs her hands through her hair. “She’s just looking for an excuse to get rid of us because you can’t drive that tractor!”

  “I’ve never been so tired in my life,” says the boy. “Margaret would never find anybody to work as hard as we’ve been working for the pay she’s offering.”

  A few days later, a new man arrives at the courtyard gate, carrying only a worn, leather suitcase. He can speak neither English nor Italian. The girl watches from the house as Diane shows him the trailer and then sends him to work at the bottom of the valley with a pitchfork and a wheelbarrow. After that, the girl rarely sees him. He’s up and working before anyone else. He only comes into the courtyard when he’s carting a full wheelbarrow up the hill to the manure pile.

  “Diane says the new guy isn’t working out, either,” the girl tells the boy one afternoon a few days later, when the boy comes up to the house kitchen for tea. “She said that Margaret asked her to give him notice last night.”

  “But he’s hasn’t even been here a week! All he does is work! Why is she firing him?”

  “Diane said he refused to ask the ducks’ permission before feeding them or giving them water,” the girl says. “He was supposed to ask ‘permisso?’ And the ducks were supposed to return with ‘avanti.’ ”

  “That’s ridiculous,” the boy says. “How could Margaret expect him to say that to the ducks? He doesn’t even speak Italian.”

  “Diane says he threw a fit when she told him he was fired. He started smashing things in the trailer—the windows, the fixtures. Diane was afraid he was going to come after her. But all of a sudden he broke down and started sobbing.” The girl pauses. “You never would have thought he was violent, by the look of him.”

  “Anybody can turn violent if you back them into a corner,” the boy says.

  “I asked Diane if Margaret said anything about us. It’s the third time this week Margaret’s told me that I’m not keeping the fires hot enough. But Diane said she hadn’t heard anything. I think she was lying. There was another empty bottle of wine in the kitchen this morning, and yesterday, while you were in the fields there was a big fight between Margaret and a man who came to deliver a load of hay. Diane says that Margaret refused to pay him again.”

  “I guess our chances of getting any money out of her are pretty slim,” says the boy.

  “At least we have a place to sleep,” the girl says. “And we have food.”

  But that night they eat the rest of the pesto and noodles. The girl knows that their stock will be gone before the week is out.

  The girl and the boy spend the rest of the week trying to prepare the farm for Margaret’s guest. They pick up all the rotten hay from the courtyard, and sweep the stones underneath. The girl scours the hearths and the boy puts fresh straw in the chicken coop and scrubs the ducks’ pens with water.

  Margaret’s student is due to arrive on the morning of the boy and the girl’s first day off. The night before, the boy and the girl do not get off work until nearly ten o’clock. Margaret asked them to scrub all of the troughs and water-buckets before leaving.

  “She was supposed to pay us today,” says the boy, as they trudge up the hill toward the cabin. His teeth are chattering because the sleeves of his jacket are soaked with water. “Did she give you any money?”

  “No. Diane said she still hasn’t paid her, either. We’re almost out of food. We need to go to the grocery store.”

  “We can go tomorrow,” the boy says.

  “I forgot to tell you, Diane said that Margaret asked that we come down to the barn a
t eight o’clock tomorrow morning, just so I can build up all the fires and you can help with the feed and turnout before the guest arrives.”

  The boy doesn’t say anything; the girl knows he’s been looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow morning. He leans forward and wraps his arms around his stomach; his shoulders slump forward, as if he’s in pain.

  “Are you all right?”

  “It’s nothing. Just stomach cramps.”

  “I’m getting so sick of this!” the girl says. “Margaret has no idea what she’s doing! I never see her working with her horses, and her stupid horsemanship rules just make the animals worse off! She only runs this place so she can collect things.”

  “Collect things?” the boy asks.

  “She collects everything. She takes away the hens’ eggs even though she doesn’t sell them, and nobody’s allowed to eat them. I just end up throwing them out. She collects broken animals and broken machinery. And you should see the weird stuff she collects in the kitchen. What do you think she does upstairs, besides spy on everyone? It smells awful up there. You know, she might actually need help. Like, mental help. If it was just the farm and the animals, it would be bad enough. But she collects people.”

  “Actually,” says the boy, his voice hollow, “people are about the only things she doesn’t mind getting rid of.”

  The girl is beginning to worry about the boy. He should have been getting more and more confident in his work with each passing day, but he is only becoming more and more anxious. And his stomach pains seem to be getting worse.

  The next morning, the girl gets to the house half an hour early so that she can ensure all of the fires are built up. After tidying the kitchen and helping Diane and the boy with the morning feed, she cleans the upstairs bathroom, something she’s been meaning to do since she arrived.

  She scrubs the sink and bathtub, and she washes the floor. She prunes the plants that are hanging in baskets in front of the window. She throws out a number of cracked, dirty soaps from the soap dish and some rotting rolls of toilet paper she found beneath the sink.