Sam's Yarn (Could Be Short Story #1)

The Break

It all started with Mrs. Oliver. She'd come into the mercantile one afternoon when Sam was minding the store, and Sam congratulated her on being in the family way. She'd taken one look at him, walloped him with her parasol, and stormed out without paying for anything. Mrs. Hasham saw the whole thing, and she must've told her spinster sister Anne, and soon everyone in Plainborough knew exactly two things: that Sam was a meddling fourteen-year-old fool with no sense of common decency, and that everyone must immediately ask Mrs. Oliver when the new arrival could be expected.

He wasn't quite sure how he knew, but he did. There was something in her stance, a tiredness in her face, and a definite aversion to having her figure called into question that clinched it. It was all very like their neighbor, Mrs. Harrison, who—as everyone knew—had a bouncing brood of seven. That's what he told his father anyway, the next day, when Sam came to work and found him waiting with the sad eyes that meant something more than the ruinous price of potatoes was on his mind.

His father shifted, rubbing a hand across his great bearded face. "What am I going to do with you?"

Sam wondered too. He wondered as his father's wooden footfalls disappeared into the back room, and he wondered as he watched the hanging hams twist gently in a draft from the door. He wondered as he dusted the canned goods, and he wondered as he helped the friends and family that mostly gave him a sour look when he suggested a cure for their dyspepsia or advised against chewing tobacco.

So, eventually, he stopped. He stopped helping, stopped warning, and most especially stopped congratulating women who were in the family way.

*******

It was easier, leaving people to discover their own problems. Some people even began to stop avoiding him, and that was nice. Sam had passed an optimistic summer and decided that the tenth grade would be the year he proved all the naysayers wrong—but there was little to convince them that there was anything in the space between his ears in the first report card that settled like a lead weight in his pocket. The one saving grace was an A in the biological sciences, but what good was that? Knowing the locations of the tibia and ulna did not prepare one to manage a mercantile, or to sow crops.

The bite of early winter was in the breeze as Sam walked across the drive, looking with dismay at the doctor's buggy which was parked in the farmyard. Either father's leg was bothering him, or his teacher, Miss Langley—the skunk cabbage in garden of youth—had already made it her mission to inform his parents of the need for Sam's head to be examined.

Sam stepped resolutely through the door of the cabin, and the warmth of the wood stove wrapped around him like a new blanket smelling faintly of smoke. He shut the door before his mother could complain that he was letting the cold air in, but was relieved to see the doctor's coat hanging on the hat rack. It was a pleasure visit, then. The doctor had a nervous habit of leaving his coat anywhere but the hat rack when he was working. Sam had even once found his coat in the kindling box.

"Aye, there you are lad," Doctor Blecham said, beaming at him from beneath scraggly gray eyebrows. "I was just wanting to talk to you." Both of his parents and the doctor sat around the little wooden table by the stove, but his father's face was unreadable, his mother's pickle-like as always, and the doctor—well—he was there.

Sam's heart seemed to freeze, but he wiped his feet carefully on the mat and forced a laugh. "I can't imagine why," he said, trying not to wince as his mother's frown deepened. What had he said? The report card burned a hole in his pocket; he'd been hoping to catch her in a good mood.

"Let's just step outside for a bit and talk business, man to man," the doctor said, still beaming, which Sam found suspicious.

Sam had no choice but to comply, and when the two were standing comfortably out in the dreary cold of a late autumn evening, the doctor got right down to the point. "I want to know how you did it."