"I can do that," he offered as she bent to collect his streaky brown hair from the floor.
"It's as good as done. Wouldn't mind, however, if you took over the chore of feeding the pigs."
She straightened and their eyes met. In hers he saw uncertainty. It was the first thing she'd asked him to do, and not too pleasant. But what was unpleasant to one man was freedom to Will Parker. She'd fed him, lent him her husband's razor, shared her fire and her table and had put him to sleep with a comb and scissors. His lips opened and a voice inside urged,
Say it, Parker. You afraid she'll think you ain't much of man if you do?
"That haircut was the best thing I've felt for a long time."
She understood perfectly. She, too, had spent so much of her life in a loveless, touchless world. Odd, how a statement so simple formed a sympathetic bond.
"Well, I'm glad."
"In prison—"
Her eyes swept back to his. "In prison, what?"
He shouldn't have started, but she had a way about her that loosened his jaws, made him want to trust her with the secrets that hurt most. "In prison they use these buzzy little clippers and they cut off most of your hair so you feel—" He glanced away, reluctant to complete the thought, after all.
"You feel what?" she encouraged.
He studied his own hair lying on the dustpan, remembering. "'Naked."
Neither of them moved. Sensing how hard it had been for him to admit such a thing, she wanted to reach out and touch his arm. But before she could, he took the dustpan and dumped it in the stove.
"I'll see after the pigs," he said, ending the moment of closeness.
* * *
Donald Wade agreed to show Will where the pigs were, and Eleanor sent them out with a half-pail of milk and orders to feed it to them.
"To the pigs!" Will exclaimed, aghast. He'd gone hungry most of his life and she fed fresh milk to the pigs?
"Herbert gives more than we can use, and the milk truck can't get in here, what with the driveway all washed out. Anyway, I don't want no town people nosing around the place. Feed it to the pigs."
It broke Will's heart to carry the milk out of the house.
Donald Wade led the way, though Will could have found the pigpen with his nose alone. Crossing the yard, he took a better look at the driveway. It was sorry, all right. But Mrs. Dinsmore had a mule, and if there was a mule there must be implements to hitch to it. And if there were no implements, he'd shovel by hand. He needed the driveway passable to get the junk hauled out of here. Already he was assessing that junk not as waste but as scrap metal. Scrap metal would soon bring top dollar with
America
turning out war supplies for
England
. The woman was sitting on top of a gold mine and didn't even know it.
Not only was the driveway sad; the yard in broad daylight was pitiful. Dilapidated buildings that looked as if a swift kick would send them over. Those with a few good years left were sorely in need of paint. The corncrib was filled with junk instead of corn—barrels, crates, rolls of rusty barbed wire, stacks of warped lumber. Will couldn't tell what kept the door of the chicken coop from falling off. The smell, as they passed, was horrendous. No wonder the chickens roosted in the junkpiles. He passed stacks of machinery parts, empty paint cans—though he couldn't figure out where the paint might have been used. The goat's nest seemed to be in an abandoned truck with the cushion stuffing chewed away. Lord, thought Will, there was enough work here to keep a man going twenty-four hours a day for a solid year.
Bobbing along beside him, Donald Wade interrupted his thoughts.
"There." The boy pointed at the structure that looked like a tobacco-drying shed.
"There what?"
"That's where the pig mash is." He led the way into a building crammed with everything from soup to nuts, only this time, usable stuff. Obviously Dinsmore had done more than collect junk. Barterer? Horse trader? The paint cans in here were full. The rolls of barbed wire, new. Furniture, tools, saddles, a newspaper press, egg crates, pulley belts, canepoles, the fender of a Model-A, a dress form, a barrel full of pistons, Easter baskets, a boiler, cowbells, moonshine jugs, bedsprings ... and who knew what else was buried in the close-packed building.
Donald Wade pointed to a gunnysack sitting on the dirt floor with a rusty coffee can beside it. "Two." He held up three fingers and had to fold one down manually.
"Two?"
"Mama, she mixes two with the milk."
Will hunkered beside Donald Wade, opened the sack and smiled as the boy continued to hold down the finger. "You wanna scoop 'em for me?"
Donald Wade nodded so hard his hair flopped. He filled the can but couldn't manage to pull it from the deep sack. Will reached in to help. The mash fell into the milk with a sharp, grainy smell. When the second scoop was dumped, Donald Wade found a piece of lath in a corner.
"You stir with this."
Will began stirring. Donald Wade stood with his hands inside the bib of his overalls, watching. At length he volunteered, "I can stir good."
Will grinned secretly. "'You can?"
Donald Wade made his hair flop again.
"Well, good thing, 'cause I was needin' a rest."
Even with both hands knotted hard around the lath, Donald Wade needed help from Will. The man's smile broke free as the boy clamped his teeth over his bottom lip and maneuvered the stick with flimsy arms. Will's arms fit nice around the small shoulders as he knelt behind the boy and the two of them together mixed the mash.
"You help your mama do this every day?"
"Prett-near. She gets tired. Mostly I pick eggs."
"Where?"
"Everywhere."
"Everywhere?"
"Around the yard. I know where the chickens like it best. I can show you."
"They give many eggs?"
Donald Wade shrugged.
"She sell 'em?"
"Yup."
"In town?"
"Down on the road. She just leaves 'em there and people leave the money in a can. She don't like goin' to town."
"How come?"
Donald Wade shrugged again.
"She got any friends?"
"Just my pa. But he died."
"Yeah, I know. And I'm sure sorry about that, Donald Wade."
"Know what Baby Thomas did once?"
"What?"
"He ate a worm."
Until that moment Will hadn't realized that to a four-year-old the eating of a worm was more important than the death of a father. He chuckled and ruffled the boy s hair. It felt as soft as it looked.
I could get to like this one a lot
, he thought.
With the hogs fed, they stopped to rinse the bucket at the pump. Beneath it was a wide mudhole with not even a board thrown across it to keep the mud from splattering.
Naturally, Donald Wade got his boots coated. When they returned to the house his mother scolded, "You git, child, and scrape them soles before you come in here!"
Will put in, "It's my fault, ma'am. I took him down by the pump."
"You did? Oh, well..." Immediately she hid her pique, then glanced across the property. When she spoke, her voice held a quiet despondency. "Things are a real fright around here, I know. But I guess you can see that for yourself."
Will sealed his lips, tugged his hat brim clear down to his eyebrows, slipped his hands flat inside his backside pockets and scanned the property expressionlessly. Eleanor peeked at him from the corner of her eye. Her heart beat out a warning.
He'll run now. He'll sure as shootin' run after getting an eyeful of the place in broad daylight.
But again he saw the possibilities. And nothing on the good green earth could make him turn his back on this place unless he was asked to. Gazing across the yard, all he said, in his low-key voice was, "Reckon the pens could use a little cleanin'."
Chapter 5
T
hey went for a walk when the midmorning sun had lifted well above the trees—a green and gold day smelling of deep summer. Will had never walked with a woman and her children before. It held a strange, unexpected appeal. He noticed her way with the children, how she carried Baby Thomas on one hip with his heel flattening her smock. How, as they set off from the porch, she reached back for Donald Wade, inviting, "Come on, honey, you lead the way," and helped him off the last step. How she watched him gallop ahead, smiling after him as if she'd never before seen his flopping yellow hair, his baggy striped overalls. How she locked her hands beneath Thomas's backside, leaned from the waist, took a deep pull of the clear air and said to the sky, "My, if this day ain't a blessin'." How she called ahead, "Careful o' that wire' in the grass there, Donald Wade!" How she plucked a leaf and handed it to Thomas, then let him touch her nose with it and pretended it tickled her and made the young one giggle.
Watching, Will became entranced. Lord, she was some mother. Always kind voiced. Always finding the good in things. Always concerned about her boys. Always making them feel important. Nobody had ever made Will feel important, only in the way.
He studied her covertly, noting more clearly the bulk of her belly, outlined by the baby's leg. Donald Wade had said she gets tired. Recalling the boy's words, Will considered offering to carry the baby, but he felt out of his depth around Thomas. He'd be no good at getting his nose tickled or making chitchat. Besides, she might not cotton to a stranger like him handling Glendon Dinsmore's boys.
They went around to the back of the house where the dishtowel flapped on a line strung between teetering clothespoles that had been shimmed up by crude wood braces. Beyond these were more junkpiles before the woods began—pines, oaks, hickories and more. Sparrows flitted from tree to tree ahead, and Eleanor followed with her finger, telling the boys, "See? Chipping sparrows." A brown thrasher swept past and perched on a dead limb. Again she pointed it out and named it. The sun glinted off the boys' blond heads and painted their mother's dress an even brighter hue. They walked along a faint double path worn by wheels some time ago. Sometimes Donald Wade skipped, swinging his arms widely. The younger one tipped his head back and looked at the sky, his hand resting on his mother's shoulder. They were so happy! Will hadn't come up against many happy people in his day. It was arresting.
A short distance from the house they came upon an east-facing hill covered by regular rows of squat fruit trees.
"This here's the orchard," Eleanor announced, gazing over its length and breadth.
"Big," Will observed.
"And you ain't seen half of it. These here are peach. Down yonder is a whole string of apples and pears ... and oranges, too. Glendon had this idea to try orange trees, but they never did much." She smiled wistfully. "Too far north for them."
Will stepped off the path and inspected a cluster of fruit. "Could have used a little spraying."
"I know." Unconsciously she stroked the baby's back. "Glendon planned to do that, but he died in April and never got the chance."
This far south the trees should have been sprayed long before April
, Will thought, but refrained from saying so. They moved on.
"How old are these trees?"
"I don't know exactly. Glendon's daddy planted most of them when he was still alive. All except the oranges, like I said. There's apples, too, just about every kind imaginable, but I never learned their names. Glendon's daddy, he knew a lot about them, but he died before I married Glendon. He was a junker, too, just like Glendon. Went to auction sales and traded stuff with anybody that came along. No reason to any of it, it seemed." Abruptly, she inquired, "You ever tasted quince? Those there are quince.
"Sour as rhubarb."
"Make a luscious pie, though."