When I saw the old lady park her pickup in the drive, get out, and take a long look around, I guessed she’d come to browse or have some welding done. Fred was buying groceries and Henry had gone up the road to look in on Bessie. The snow’d finally melted enough for easy walking in the woods, and I was itching to get to the cabin. Henry and I were getting along better since the storm, but he’d been working day and night ever since, occasionally sleeping in his studio. School aside, it wasn’t a rotten life, but sometimes Henry was as absent as Mama, reminding me that people and situations could change. Any thinking orphan had a fallback plan. The empty cabin in Henry’s north woods was mine.
“Well, if it’s not the wild child,” the woman said the second I answered her knock. Her old eyes fixed on me, and starting at the top of my head, she studied every inch, giving me as close an inspection as I’ve ever had. I swore she counted I had ten fingers and ten toes and everything else besides.
“Beg pardon, ma’am?”
“It’s what the whole county’s saying. Thought I’d see for myself,” she said, and went on studying me from the other side of the screen. I studied her back. She was bundled against the cold; her coarse gray hair was pulled tightly into a bun at the back of her head. She was stringy, her face leathery, her old-lady eyes as penetrating as Ms. O’Keeffe’s.
“Uncle Henry’s gone out for a while,” I told her. “He shouldn’t be too much longer, if you’d like to leave word.”
“I didn’t come to see Dr. Royster,” she said. “Step out here where I can see you.”
She didn’t look dangerous, so I did.
“Nothing the least bit wild about you,” the woman said, shaking her head. “Small minds and wagging tongues, should’ve known.”
“Ma’am?”
“Though wagging tongues can serve a useful purpose. I’ve been grateful for the rumors that Roysters and Bookers shoot hunters trespassing on their land.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, remembering Ray. He liked to kill living things—squirrels, rabbits, deer—and he wasn’t too particular whose land he did it on. I was glad he wasn’t anywhere close by. The white deer wouldn’t stand a chance.
“He yours?” she said, nodding at the cat. Since the snow he’d taken to lazing in plain sight near his crate at the edge of the yard.
“He’s his own cat. But I’m working on him.”
“That left ear looks swollen.”
“It’s been that way for a while.”
“Does it stink?”
“Can’t get close enough to him to know,” I said.
“If it’s infected, it could kill him, especially considering how old he looks.”
“He won’t let anybody near him. Not yet.”
“The wild ones are like that,” she said, shaking her head. “Once they get a fear of people, it’s hard to talk them out of it. I’ve got a soft spot for old toms. Maud Booker, by the way. I’m the veterinarian around here. My land joins Dr. Royster’s about two miles north of here.”
She held out her hand and I shook it. Her handshake was like she was, cool and firm.
“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” I said, not sure if I meant it. At least she had good taste in cats.
“I’ve seen what I needed to see,” she said, turning to go. “I never mind other people’s business if I can help it. Just wanted to make sure you were all right.”
She walked out to her truck, opened the door, and took a small box from a cooler on the back seat. She handed it to me with four cans of cat food. “Fill the little bottle inside the box with water, shake it, and give him a dropperful twice a day in a little of this wet food till it’s all gone. If he tames, call me and I’ll come give him his shots. I’m in the book.”
“Thanks,” I said, setting the cans on the ground. I opened the little green box and took out the dropper bottle with white powder inside.
She climbed behind the wheel. “You favor your grandfather.”
“I do?”
“You have his chin.”
“You knew my grandfather?” I said.
“I knew Augustus well.”
“Did you know my daddy?”
“A short while.”
“When?”
She started the engine and jerked the pickup into gear. “For the nine months before I gave birth to him.”
And she slammed the door and drove off before I could say another word.
He watched her climb the snowy hill and started to follow, until he saw where she was going.
Though it had been years since he’d prowled the north woods, his memory of them was still strong. After she disappeared over the rise, he waited a short while in the cold, then turned back toward the crawlspace under the man’s house where it was warm.
When he was a kitten, he’d hunted the woods for rabbits. He missed those days, the time before the savage and his woman had roared up on their sputtering two-wheeled machine and moved into the silver house. The savage had spent his days motoring back and forth between the house and the highway and tending a rattling apparatus he built farther up in the woods. He sang loudly as he worked. Between songs he drank from a jar, and then he went back to tinkering and feeding the fire under his contraption. It was odd-looking, with coils spiraling out of it, smoke and steam escaping in clouds.
While the savage was away, the woman cleaned and swept the silver house. She left bread crusts for the birds and scraps of meat or fish for the cat. Her arms and legs were as fragile as a fawn’s, but when her belly grew over the summer, her graceful walk became a waddle. As big as she was, she worked hard. She sloshed bucket after bucket of water from the well into the house, then dragged a heavy basket to a rope strung between trees and hung wet things out to dry. She rarely spoke. The more her stomach grew, the less the man returned to her, though she sat evenings in the doorway as if waiting for him to come. Sometimes she sang in a soft, high voice.
When the savage did come back, he staggered about the yard. He teased the woman, talked loudly, danced her roughly around. Then he slumped to the ground and fell asleep as though dead. The woman covered him with a blanket where he fell. The next morning he seemed a different man. He brought the woman food and drink, laughed nervously as he helped her haul water, hang wash on the line. He put his arms around her, laughing and joking, tipping her chin to make her look at him, listen. She answered with nods, little shakes of her head, and sometimes a frightened smile.
The night the boy was born, the man was out of earshot, snoring beside his contraption. The woman cried out and tumbled down the steps, holding her belly. She writhed for hours in the dirt, straining, panting, rolling from side to side, calling out, but no one came. The boy slid from between her legs near dawn. He came feet first, covered in blood, and screaming at the top of his tiny lungs. The woman gasped, then lay completely still, her eyes open wide. The boy kicked the air, balled his bloody fists, and wailed.
At sunrise, the savage came. His face was swollen with sleep. He took in the scene as though dreaming. He knelt beside what was left of his family and wept in a raw baritone to the boy’s piercing cries. He cradled the inconsolable noise in the crook of his elbow, sliced the cord connecting him to his mother, and shut her staring eyes.
9
The minute the old woman claiming to be my grandmother had gone, I slipped my books into my backpack and headed over the bridge into the north woods.
I didn’t know what to think about her claim. The social worker had told Henry and me what she could about my daddy’s life. He’d been given up at birth by his unwed mother (Maud Booker, if you believed her), taken in by the Baptist Home, and put up for adoption. His adoption had seemed sure until doctors discovered a defect in his heart. Nobody had wanted a sick baby. So Daddy had grown up with the Baptists till he ran off at fifteen. After that he stole things and was in and out of trouble, till he was killed one night walking on a nearby road, a hit-and-run.
That was all I knew, except that he’d hooked up with Mama long en
ough to make me, and that he’d lain dead next to Mama longer than he ever had in life.
If Maud Booker had told the truth, she hadn’t mothered him long. I wondered if she regretted giving him up, if that was why she’d stopped by. But even if running hunters off her land and giving me medicine for the cat spoke in her favor, I couldn’t decide if I wanted to know her better or not. I’d keep her visit to myself until I made up my mind.
As October gave over to November, the woods and cabin became my favorite place to think. I’d given in to Henry about school, but that settled, he pretty much left me to myself. Aloneness was as much his way as mine. I doubted that Henry would have known what to do with me if I’d been a clingy child in need of entertaining—maybe bought a big TV and a DVD player and set me in front of it while he worked. Solitary work was plainly as vital to him as breathing, like reading and writing were to me.
We mostly ate dinner together. Usually it was just Henry and me, a you-read-your-book-and-I’ll-read-mine kind of thing, Henry’s mind still in his studio and mine with the cat or at the cabin. Now and then Fred and Bessie joined us. One night Fred argued with Henry and Bessie about me running wild. He said I was too young to be roaming the woods alone. Bessie called Fred an old woman, said she’d give anything to be able to run free herself, and threatened to do it one day when Fred wasn’t looking. Bessie and Henry said they’d wandered the woods when they were younger than I was. Fred lost, outnumbered. All Henry asked was that I stay on his posted land, wear bright colors against straying hunters, and be home by dark. I promised I would.
So after school on weekdays and after a quick breakfast on weekends, I headed into the woods, the cat not far behind. He started trailing me once Ms. Booker’s medicine shrunk the swelling in his ear. He kept his distance—left himself plenty of room to bolt—but stuck close enough to keep me in sight. He hadn’t let me touch him yet, but he seemed to be considering it. Every morning I found him waiting for me and his breakfast in the front yard. At night he headed under the house for warmth, but not before sitting for a long time alone in the yard, watching my window. I made him a soft bed by the furnace from an old feather pillow and a blanket and put my stuffed bunny down there so he’d get used to my scent.
Halfway to the cabin, though, was as far as he’d go. His fear of the north woods was powerful, and he flat refused to follow me past the old-growth trees. He’d shadow me over the bridge and partway up the path, then stop cold, turn around, and go back. He turned back in practically the same spot every day, like there was an invisible wall he couldn’t go past. I tried to coax him on with a trail of leftovers, but he was stubborn. Something up there scared him, maybe a memory of whoever had lived in the cabin before. I went on without him, but I stayed alert.
I kept a lookout for the white deer, too, but saw no sign of her, though birds and squirrels and other creatures flitted or rustled in the trees. I hoped she and her friend were nearby, watching, and might show themselves soon.
For weeks I cleaned the little cabin and worked to make it tight. I couldn’t get much done in the two hours between school and dark, but I made good headway on weekends, sweeping, dusting, and scrubbing till I was sore.
I used old newspapers and a screwdriver to chink the drafty open places between the cabin logs. I swept the floor and porch down to bare wood, and cleared out the cobwebs and dead bugs hanging from the rafters. I lugged the trailer seat cushions, pillows, and bedding out to an old clothesline and gave everything a good beating to free the dirt and rodent droppings, coughing and sneezing my head off as I did. My old T-shirts made good cleaning rags, and I borrowed one of Henry’s paintbrushes to dust the delicate treasures on the wall shelves. I put the small carved animals from the cigar box on a shelf with the photograph of whoever’s mama beside them, so she’d have company, though she seemed lonely still. Who was she? I wondered. What had her life been like, and whose mama had she been? Sad as she looked, she had a tender way about her, and I imagined her full of kind words and motherly attentions. Had she collected all the treasures for a child like me? Whittled the carvings herself? What had become of her and her child, and why had they left their treasures behind?
I wondered about these things as I cleaned and nailed and made the cabin my own. I’d never had a home that was mine before. Sure, I knew a drafty, one-room shack without even a toilet wasn’t really a home, but the cabin made me happy. It was my home, however humble. My home, my way.
I dumped the old fireplace ashes onto the weedy garden, thinking I might try to grow vegetables or flowers in the spring. After making sure I could see a rectangle of sky at the top of the chimney, I laid a test fire in the fireplace. When the smoke went up and out like it should, I added wood from the woodpile to warm up the room. I’d found an old window screen at Henry’s and used it to keep the sparks where they belonged. I filled the hurricane lamps with lamp oil I found under Henry’s kitchen sink, and cleaned the colored window glass with rags and soapy well water I heated over the fire in an old pot. The glass sparkled in all its multicolored glory, and the oil lamps created fair light for reading and writing in my brand-new journal, a present from Ms. Avery.
After the snow, Ms. Avery decided to give me an independent study project, so I could work on my writing. Each week, she said, I’d find a new assignment on my desk with books she wanted me to read. She even moved my desk to the back of the room by the windows, so I could write during lessons I already knew. Now Hargrove had to contort himself if he wanted to stare.
Turned out Ms. Avery had wanted to be a writer too, but she didn’t have the discipline for it. “You have to spend so much time alone,” she told me, “and then you have to keep going over and over what you’ve written, revising. I always wanted my first drafts to be brilliant, but it doesn’t work like that. I didn’t like writing so much as having written.”
I liked the way she said this and other things, and the way our talks seemed a meeting of like minds. Once I almost told her about the cabin in the north woods, about the treasures on the shelves and the sad woman in the picture, but I wasn’t ready to talk about them yet, and Ms. Avery didn’t pry. Maybe she had some of Bessie’s mind-reading ability, though, because some things she just seemed to understand.
“How’d you know I’d like that book you gave me?” I asked her.
“I didn’t. I gave you one I liked and hoped you’d like it too,” she said.
“I did, a lot. I like orphan stories.”
“Orphan stories?”
“You know, books where kids are on their own and their parents don’t get in the way of their adventures.”
I told her about books I loved, and not just books about orphans in the strict sense—kids with no parents, like Mary Lennox or Mowgli—but orphans of all kinds: kids with one parent, like Huck Finn or Jem and Scout Finch or Opal Buloni; kids with missing parents, like Charles Wallace and Meg; lost or stolen kids, like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys; kids like Lyra Silvertongue, whose parents might as well be dead for all the good they were; and even orphaned animals like Rascal, and grown-up orphans like Robin Hood—abandoned by King Richard, who was always off on a crusade.
“You have the instincts of a writer,” she whispered in a conspiratorial voice.
She handed me a fat notebook with a red leather cover and the word Journal written in gold script on the front. Part of my independent study was to keep a journal. No one was to read it without my permission, including Ms. Avery, but I was on the honor system to write in it every day. My old spiral notebook was almost full, and I was grateful to have a second, nicer notebook to write in. Ms. Avery said I could keep the journal safe in the locked drawer of her desk while I was at school. She also gave me my first independent-study assignment: to put together a class presentation about what it was like to live with Henry and his sculptures.
“The kids will love it,” she said, “and get to know Henry, and especially you.”
That was when I was tempted to tell her about the cabin; I wa
s so proud of it I was about to bust. Instead I wrote about it in my brand-new journal. Down deep I believed that the minute you talked about something, you risked losing it, and I couldn’t chance that. The cabin was my special place, something I shared with no one.
Or so I foolishly thought.
10
The day I found out the cabin wasn’t mine alone was a strange day all around.
Two weeks before Thanksgiving, winter had set in for good. Nearly every day had been freezing-rain slippery or digit-numbing cold. The light died by five in the afternoon, and between the creeping dark and the icy wet, I spent less and less time at the cabin and felt rushed and distracted when I was there. Seemed like I’d arrive, get a fire going, read or write for an hour, and then, because of bad weather or darkness, have to hurry back. I’d worked out a direct path that avoided the brambly and steep places, but it was still a fifteen- or twenty-minute hike from Henry’s, and that was in good weather. I stayed at Henry’s when the weather was really raw.
On that particular Saturday, I woke to a high wind rattling the windows. It gusted so bad it bowed the trees and vexed the sculptures, setting more than a few rocking and clanging. Henry was outside early staking down the ones that needed it. By midmorning, rain was pouring off the eaves in sheets, and if that wasn’t misery enough, I was in bed with a cold and we were up to our eyeballs in what Fred called “bad company.”
The owners of the New York art gallery that sold Henry’s work had turned up unannounced right after breakfast. Mr. Sasser, the gallery’s founder and an old friend of Henry’s, had died the year before and left the gallery to his awful offspring, Lillian and Sid. They made me glad I was an only child.
Lillian and Sid arrived with a little white dog who had a pom-pom hairdo so silly he must have been mortified. First thing he did was head under the house and ambush the cat. There followed a yowling, caterwauling, no-contest scratch-and-tumble, after which that dog came yelping out and hid under Fred’s truck, whining and nursing his brand-new face tattoo. Weather or no, I saw the cat dart off in the direction of the Padre’s church. I was real put out he didn’t take me along.
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