Oakwood Grange

Chapter 3

        

A glum and lonely supper passed without a word between Mae and her father. Neither had eaten much, and now the evening's shadows had begun to crowd their little kitchen like unwanted funeral guests.

Mae took the tinware dishes off the table and brought them to a rickety, worn-out washstand near a thick log wall. There was still a good amount of food on the plates, and from the leftovers she plucked a couple untouched biscuits and then wrapped them in a napkin of old cloth.

She would not eat the biscuits herself, she decided. Tomorrow they would be as hard as rocks and not even a jar's worth of molasses would help to make a decent breakfast of them. But outside there were house sparrows that made their nests under the cabin's eaves, and she thought that it might cheer her to crumble biscuits for them and watch the small birds peck the crumbs up with their tiny beaks.

Something told her she would need a lot of cheering in the morning.

"Pa?" said Mae, calling through the kitchen's doorway to the family room. "I'm gonna check on Stormy, and then I'll fetch some water for these dishes, all right?"

No answer.

Mae wiped her hands on her apron and peeked out of the kitchen.

"Pa—"

"Go on," he said, his voice low and crawling like something the world had kicked too many times. He sat unmoving in a wooden chair beside the fireplace—her mother's rocking chair, Mae noted—one of the few treasured items they'd kept with them every time they'd moved. He sat there and stared into the fireplace and said no more.

Mae's impulse was to go to him and squeeze his callused hands and tell him everything would be all right. She did not do this, however; she did not know if anything would ever be all right again. Instead, she tiredly put on her sheepskin coat and took a lantern outside into the night.

The air was crisp and chilly with the season's ghosts. Soon it would be wintertime, and though her father said there would be no snow in that land, Mae knew that her carefree days of running barefoot out of doors were over.

She shivered and pulled the woolly collar of her coat. If it were only cold, the night would not have been so bad, she thought, but it was dark as well—so dark it seemed the whole world had been dunked in sticky tar. All around the cabin, shadows oozed and slipped and tried to seep in through the lighted doorway cracks and warmly glowing windowpanes. All around was blackness, and always was the blackness creeping closer.

Mae turned the lantern's wick knob as its yellow flame flared bright and cast a friendly halo on the floorboards of the porch below. She grabbed a fat, rope-handled bucket near the door and clunked her boots across the porch and out into the yard.

As she walked, Mae glanced warily from side to side. She had always distrusted the dark, fearful of the things it could conceal, yet still moved through its gloom with all the boldness of a shooting star. The lantern lit the ground enough for her to make her way without stumbling, and she thought that maybe life was like that in some ways—that maybe a girl could find her way anywhere if only she could see where next to step.

Rounding a corner, Mae came to a tall and plumply laden apple tree standing near the cabin's western wall. From the lowest branch she yanked several shiny apples and dropped each with a thunk into her wooden bucket. Then she went a couple paces further to a rusty hand pump and began to crank its lever.

Water spurted into the bucket with the apples. The hand pump creaked and groaned as Mae worked it up and down. She did this until the bucket was half-full and then walked toward the fallen oak tree and the barn.

The night was quiet. Mae listened to her breath puff as she lugged the heavy, sloshing bucket past the oak tree's battered canopy. Lantern light sheened over dark green leaf clumps of the foliage, causing them to flicker through the boughs like tiny candles in a vigil, and once more Mae felt mournful of the felling of it.

The flat walls of the barn loomed closer as clods of dry earth crunched and crumbled underfoot.

Then, all at once, she stopped. A chill crawled up her backbone like a spider.

She'd heard something—a small noise coming from the shadows of the severed tree trunk.

Slowly, Mae turned and raised her lantern high. . . .

That was when she saw the girl.