by Summer Wood
“Oh, pretty bad, all right,” Willow said, standing anyway. She looked tired, her crow’s-feet and laugh lines deeper than usual. “I don’t doubt you, Len. At three they’re too small to spank, even if you could catch them. But we’re not talking a lifetime commitment, here. We’re talking about you getting a good night’s sleep and a little daylight before you drive six more hours through the trees. After the day you just had.”
Len rubbed his balding head. “I could use the rest,” he admitted. “I’d keep him at home, only—”
Willow waved him off. The picture he’d painted of Meg’s murderous advance was still clear in her mind. “Take your time in the morning,” she advised. “Don’t worry about him until you’re ready to leave.” She paused and looked away. “It’s been a while since I had a little fellow to look after.” Len caught a startled glance from Ruthie. “Who knows?” Willow added. The corner of her lip turned up, and again Len watched the fleeting expression lightly touch and vanish from her face. “I might even like it.”
Len nodded. There were so many things he didn’t understand. But Melody had gone, the one they called Johnny Appleseed had evaporated already, unobserved, and Willow was making her way toward the door. He needed to get home to Meg. “I can’t thank you enough,” he said, and meant it. The boy snuffled in his sleep and rolled onto his side. Len gazed at him. Then he turned on his heel and left.
The cab of his truck seemed oddly empty on the short ride home.
Ruthie slept in the chair that first night, waking often to make sure that the boy was still breathing, adjusting the blankets when he flung them off, once moving him back onto the cushion when his thrashing left him curled like a snail on the bare floor. She was too excited to sink deeply into sleep. His presence felt like an unearned reward, some random jackpot she didn’t deserve and couldn’t keep but which, however temporary, she was determined to treasure.
By morning her resistance was down. The light filtered in to play on the mottled pink wrinkles of her face, and her snores abraded the silence like the honks and squeaks of raucous waterbirds.
A catch in her own labored breathing startled her and she floundered toward consciousness, rubbing her eyes with both fists and creaking to standing. The boy was still there. Ruthie peered closer. Still there and awake, now. He had the blanket over his head and was observing her through the crocheted eyeholes. She stretched and yawned and looked out the window. “Well, I’ll be chicken-fried,” she said, loud enough for Wrecker to hear. “Snow?” She blinked hard to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. “I can hardly believe it.” She turned to face the couch and said, “Kid. Get up. This’ll melt by noon and you don’t want to miss it.”
A layer of white blanketed the world outside, ice riming the tree branches, the evergreen boughs dusted with snow. Inside, Wrecker froze in place beneath his blanket. Ruthie moved near him. She squatted down and put her face close to Wrecker’s, so her eyes filled the eyeholes from the other side. She did something funny with her eyebrows. Then she crossed her eyes, tightened her lips, and wiggled her ears.
“Good morning, Wrecker,” she said in a normal voice. “I’m Ruth. I’ll be your pilot for this morning, so fasten your seat belt, secure your tray table, and prepare for takeoff.”
“I’m hungry,” Wrecker said, his voice muffled by the throw.
“Right this way.” And Ruth didn’t seem to mind that Wrecker followed her into the kitchen with the crocheted throw draped over his head.
Len held on to the pay phone handset so tightly his knuckles were white. He’d never had a line put in at the house. Who had the money for that? When he had a call to make, he’d drive down the mountain and use the booth outside the Mercantile. “Miss Hanson,” he repeated for the eleventh time. “I’m holding for Miss Hanson.”
“Please deposit forty cents for the next three minutes,” the operator whined. Len searched his pockets. He had thirty-five cents. He dropped it into the coin slots.
“Please deposit—”
“This is Miss Hanson.”
“—five cents more for the next three minutes.”
“Miss Hanson!” But Len had no more change, and the operator terminated his call.
Len slumped against the grimy glass of the booth. He needed to reach the social worker to let her know he was bringing the boy back, could not keep the child. He flapped open his wallet to reveal three worn ten-dollar bills. He would walk over to the Mercantile and get change for one of them. He would return to the phone booth and feed quarters until, come hell or high water, the woman took his call.
“I’m sorry,” the receptionist said when Len finally reached her again. “Miss Hanson has left for lunch.”
“What time do you expect her back,” Len asked, weary. He’d been at this all morning. He winced to think what kind of trouble the kid was stirring up at Bow Farm.
“She’s scheduled to be out until Tuesday. Shall I take a message?”
“Tell her—,” Len said, and then stopped. Tuesday? Len stood there in despair. He could think of nothing to say.
“Sir? Are you there, sir?” A long pause and a sigh.
And then the phone went dead in his hand.
It was not a matter of keeping up with Wrecker. Melody learned early on how impossible a task that would be. She marshaled the efforts of Johnny Appleseed, short and furry and rapid as a squirrel, and woke Ruth from her recuperative slumber and stationed her at the far end of the field, and the three of them kept the boy corralled, herded him toward the others when his curiosity stretched past the boundaries of safety. He didn’t speak—they had begun to worry about this—but made noises to keep himself company: the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire, the growls and snarls of wild animals, a tuneless humming that resembled singing but was not. They wondered if he was deaf, so inattentive was he to their directives.
He was not deaf. When Melody shouted across the field, “Johnny Appleseed! Got anything good to eat?” the boy swiveled his head first toward Melody, taller than the others and lanky and so casual in her movements as to appear almost clumsy—watched her with eyebrows raised, extreme interest—and then turned to the compact man they called Johnny Appleseed and watched him dig in the pockets of his pants.
“Some nuts,” he called back. “Half a dozen dried figs. What’s left of this chocolate bar and a couple of cubes of cheese.”
Wrecker made a beeline for him and the others gathered, too. Johnny Appleseed had the sun behind his head. Wrecker squinted up. “Chocolate,” he said.
Johnny Appleseed raised his eyebrows in comic surprise. “So you do talk?”
“I want chocolate.”
Ruth laughed with something like triumph and relief. “Give him that chocolate, man!”
Johnny Appleseed knelt so his face was even with Wrecker’s and looked into his eyes. The boy stood stout, his chest high and his face unmoving. Blond hair lay in a tousled mat over his scalp and his bad haircut showed signs of resistance. Pug nose, red lips, blue eyes steady as steel and behind them a whisper of gray Johnny Appleseed locked in on. He knew the language of trees and of wild things and he watched that gray like a deer watches the leaves of the trees for what moves behind them.
Melody flinched for him. Ruth watched, silent, helpless, and her eyes shone with tears. But Wrecker stood stock-still, eyes open.
Johnny Appleseed reached for the hem of the sweatshirt Wrecker wore. He lifted it gently to make a pocket that he had the boy hold. Then he reached into the pockets of his own pants and emptied each into the fold. Cheese, chocolate, figs and nuts, and a piece of polished sea-glass, blue, and a stone in the shape of a heart, and two pieces of gum still in their wrappers and a folded photo of a dog, the creases gone white, and some lint.
“What’s mine is yours, kid,” he said, and stood.
It was for the night; and then it was until Tuesday, until Thursday, until the next social worker hired to replace the absent Miss Hanson could review the case and there was quite a stack of folders before W
recker’s and would Mr.—Mr.—would Len, all right, please be patient with the department, there were children in far more dire need than his son (not my son, he shouted over the phone, driven to distraction)—Very well! Very well then, Mr. Len, but he’d have to be patient, they’d get to it as soon as they could.
Which he gradually understood to mean never.
At Bow Farm they took turns sleeping in the chair beside Wrecker and during the day they traded off spending time with him. What took three of them that first day later required only two, and when they became more adept—more wily, faster, developed more stamina (which is to say when Wrecker grew comfortable enough on the farm to agree to stay, when he began to prefer their company to that of his own, solitary)—one alone could spend the day with Wrecker in relative peace and safety. It’s true that his feats acquired the status of legends. The day Wrecker jumped from the barn roof (two stories!) to bounce from the hay bales below. The day Wrecker was lost and they scoured the pond bottom for his body. The day Wrecker climbed into the pickup and released the brake, took it out of gear, and rode it all the way downslope into the field, where a big rock slowed it down by lodging itself in the oil pan. He seemed to need to feel his body collide with the physical world to know he existed. He threw his food, sometimes; he ignored them, he drowned out the sound of their voices by plugging his ears with his fingers and singing nonsense songs; he sometimes refused to put away the toys they gathered for him; he demanded bedtime stories at breakfast and pancakes at dinner. They couldn’t control him and so they gave up trying. But neither could he control them, and he, too, came to understand this, and the shimmering tentative thing that stretched between them those first days thickened into something workable, something like love in overalls, love with a spade in its hand.
The pile of firewood by the barn grew mountainous as Len struggled to repay them for keeping the boy. It had been five weeks, and something had to be done or they would be buried under the split rounds. Willow broached the issue one evening when Wrecker was asleep on the farmhouse floor and the others lounged around, warm-bellied from dinner and eager for spring. “Len’s shrinking,” she announced. The others nodded gravely.
“That man’s between a rock and a hard place,” Ruth agreed.
Melody furrowed her brow. “Not exactly our rock or hard place,” she growled, and the others looked at her, not accusing, just mildly surprised. They blinked and looked back at the boy. Melody persisted. “Look. One more night sleeping in this chair and I’ll turn into a lunatic. Where would we even keep him?”
Ruth faced her. “Well, he’s too big for a shoebox,” she said dryly. “And we’d be arrested if we stuffed him in the oven.”
Melody reddened.
Johnny Appleseed, who stayed so silent most times they almost forgot he was there, said softly, “He’s too small to sleep by himself.”
Willow raised her eyebrows. “Any volunteers to sleep with him?”
Johnny Appleseed shrugged. “Sitka won’t mind. She has the pups. I’ll make a mattress for him on my floor with the dogs.”
Ruth nodded. “Won’t hurt him, spend some time in a pack like that.” She tipped her head toward Melody. “What do you say? Harbor the fugitive a while longer?”
Melody cast guarded glances at them all. No one else seemed to think it odd, the arrival of this small interloper. None of the others seemed plagued by such rapid-fire emotion at his presence. He set something aflutter in her that was hard to name and harder to ignore. Melody frowned. She rose from her chair and then knelt on the floor beside the sleeping boy. He was curled like a question mark under one of Willow’s blankets, his fist clinging tightly to a rusty metal pipe he had salvaged from the yard. Asleep, he threw off heat like a stoked furnace. He was no bigger than her duffel bag packed halfway, no heavier than a crate of oranges, aromatic in the sun. His lips moved and his mouth opened and he gave a long, soughing sigh. Dreaming. Melody understood. She dreamed like that, too. She tilted back onto her heels and faked nonchalance. “If it helps Len.” Her voice betrayed her and she shrugged and cleared her throat. “I won’t be the one to say no.”
And so it was decided. Sooner or later the state would assign him a permanent family, but until that time he could call Bow Farm home. They thought of him as a puppy and they took him in.
CHAPTER TWO
Melody wrestled her bus along the muddy ruts of the farm road, gunned it uphill, and came to a valve-pinging, clutch-stinking stop on top of the small rise. Beyond this the drive gave way to weeds and water. They’d made a feeble effort to fix it the year before, digging channels and hacking away at the greenery for an hour until their hands blistered and Melody quit, dropping her shovel and slumping against a mossy rock. The forest wants the road that bad? She’d waved her hand royally, dispensing with the territory. Let it have it. We’ll carry our shit from here.
Carrying their shit didn’t seem like such a good plan at this point. Not when her shit included an eight-foot, hundred-pound post she’d just salvaged from a fish shack slated for tear down in Eureka. Melody got out and circled the Volkswagen. The bus was decorated with spots, painted one day in a pique of fancy (and with the assistance of mildly hallucinogenic mushrooms) to resemble a ladybug. It looked like a bread loaf with a bad rash, which is how Melody felt the day after, and she left it that way as a reminder to go easy on her body chemistry. She leaned back now and squinted up at her rescued treasure, strapped with loops of clothesline to the roof. There was no way she was going to get it off the bus, down the hill, past the farmhouse, and over the next hundred yards or so to the barn. Not by herself, anyway.
But Bow Farm was good that way. In a pinch there was always someone to count on for help. Or to bitch to, or to gripe about, or to bum money off of, or to suffer alongside—yes, and thank you, Jesus, there was room enough to get the hell away from one another when they needed that, too. That was its raison d’être, really. To be French about it. Which Melody was not. But it gave it a kind of weight, made what they were choosing to do seem considered, intentional, instead of the crazy shot in the dark they were really taking. The bottom line was simple: do what you want and no one will stop you. The alpha and omega. Freedom.
Melody hitched up her jeans, glanced over her shoulder once more at the post, and headed down the rutted path. Buying the place had been her bright idea, and now, with three wet winters under her belt, she could start to take some credit for the accomplishment. It was touch-and-go for a while there, admittedly. She’d gone to college for drinking, sex, a little art history and some basic accounting courses, and dropped out before becoming truly proficient at any of them. Twenty-five years old, loose-jointed, lazy, and green as this afternoon’s salad, she’d jumped off the path her parents had ordained and was beating her way around a miserable thicket. She’d been flailing for some years and had nothing to show for it but a number of psychic bruises and the growing sense that she would have to take action if anything were going to change. What she needed was a permanent address. A place to park her weary bones. It sounded like land to the more levelheaded of her friends, and land sounded like money. Ask your father, they suggested.
Melody said bluntly, No.
She winced, remembering. Ask her father? Hell, no. She would do it herself. Somehow. When she was eighty, maybe. When she was a hundred and twenty. But then she agreed to fill in for a friend at that beachfront gallery opening, and Willow turned up among the hundreds, and to avoid the crowd they ducked outside and walked and talked. Willow had just settled a divorce, changed her name, and begun to bend her considerable attention to forgetting the past twenty years. She had a good livelihood and similar aims, and in time Melody mustered her courage and launched her idea. Crazy, she knew. Harebrained, probably. But what if they were to go in on a piece of land, far enough north and neglected enough to afford, and cut loose from the rest of the world and its cranky opinions on how they should live?
Go in? Willow asked, her natural courtesy masking her natura
l skepticism. Did Melody mean split the cost? And did that mean—
Ask your father, Melody’s friends insisted.
She wavered. But why not? He’d bought her everything she didn’t want. Braces and prep school and two miserable years of college where she slept with every boy who asked her until she discovered, yawning, that that was just another brand of commerce. He’d paid her bail when she was busted sharing a blunt behind the local cemetery, hired his lawyer to clean up her record, bribed the newspaper to keep the family name off the roll of recent miscreants. Then he shelled out a healthy deposit for one of Miss Porter’s extended trips to Europe, where she would be properly chaperoned and might be encouraged to develop appropriate remorse for the mess she had gotten her family involved in. She declined to participate. And forgot to visit them for two years.
Just ask, her friends said. All he can say is—
Melody broke down, scripted an appeal, and went to her father. Look, she said, desperate to keep the waver out of her voice. I know how to read and write and do math adequate for my own use. I can speak French, which is utterly useless to me now, and I can spot a con man a mile away. I am not vulnerable to those who would use my ambition against me, as I have none and am furthermore indifferent to the standard brands of happiness that are most frequently purveyed. Give me twenty thousand dollars and you may omit me from your will without incurring any bitterness on my part.
Her father was a man who knew a good deal when he saw one. He looked up over his reading glasses at this young woman standing in front of his desk. He adopted a look of deep concentration. Melody was not fooled. If she had said one hundred thousand dollars he would have had exactly the same look on his face. And then he would have written the check.
He wrote the check. He handed it to her and when she reached to take it he continued to hold on. Their skin didn’t touch, but they were connected through the medium of that piece of paper.
Melody did not dare let go. It had taken all of her courage and more humility than she thought she owned to come this far. If she released the check she would not have had the strength to lift her arm and reach for it again.
