A Home in the Country Read online

  ‘Them cop dogs found these here stuffed in that old hollow tree down past the hog pens,’ she said. ‘Do you beat that? The three of ’em out there in the woods changin’ into their Sunday finest and then headin’ off to the bus stop – that’s where the dogs was pointin’ – with my money in their pockets and my tomatoes layin’ out there dyin’ on the vine.

  ‘I hope they have a right good time to theirselves,’ she went on, ‘’cause time they get back here I’ll have figured ways to fix ’em ain’t nobody even dreamed about yet.’

  Sally hiccupped on her sobs, moaned, and a puddle spread around her feet.

  Agnes’ eyes lit up. The time for revenge had come. Her lips pulled back from her teeth in a savage grin. ‘Always said you wasn’t nothing but a animal,’ she exulted, ‘Time now for me to treat you like one!’

  Grabbing Sally by her overall straps and the seat of her pants, she carried her, face down and screaming, outside.

  Not caring that if Agnes were to look our way, we’d be next, Cathy and I ran to the screen door to see what she was going to do with Sally.

  She carried her to a place in the yard where she had the barn straight ahead of her, the chicken house to one side, the hog pens on the other and there she hesitated, as if she couldn’t make up her mind where to dump her.

  Watching her, it wasn’t hard to figure out how her brain was working. She took a step towards the hog pens. Weren’t they the dirtiest, smelliest of the animals? And wasn’t that what she always said Sally was, a hog?

  But we could see her arms were tiring and Sally was getting heavier by the minute with all her screaming and kicking and the hog pens had a high fence she’d have to lift her over. She turned towards the barn. It was closer, but wait … the cows weren’t there. The Old Man had staked them out earlier so what was the use?

  How about the chicken house, then? It was close and the door was wide open. Yeah, that would do it! After manoeuvring her noisy burden through the wire gate to the run, Agnes approached the house, threw Sally in, then slammed the door and bolted it shut on the outside.

  Cathy moaned, ‘That there’s got to be the meanest damn thing Agnes ever did. Good and well she knows Sally’s scared to death of them chickens.’

  We scurried back to the table and tried to pour more tomatoes into the jars before Agnes came back. But we soon realized that the pot and its contents, off the stove, had cooled somewhat while we were looking out the door and we knew it would be easier to just scoop up the tomatoes with our bare hands and cram them in the jars.

  By the time we heard Agnes on the path outside, the pot was light enough to lift and tilt and, grinning at our inventiveness, we filled the remaining jars.

  Even though it was so hot outside that the grass had turned brown and crunched when we walked on it, it was cooler than in the kitchen and Cathy and I were so happy to be outside and away from Agnes and her cruel fists, we were practically dancing.

  We’d finished ‘canning’ – a term that always mystified me since glass jars were used, not cans – and were on our way to bring the cows in for milking.

  ‘Milkin’ Suzy’s gonna be downright fun after bein’ around Agnes the live long day!’ Cathy giggled.

  First, though, we had to let Sally out of the hen house. We entered the run and Cathy slid back the bolt on the door and we both yelled at Sally to come on out and get busy pickin’. Hot, stinking air hit us in the face and we reeled backwards.

  ‘Je-sus!’ Cathy gasped. ‘It’s hotter in there than the inside of Agnes’ oven. Get on out here, Sally.’

  Sally didn’t answer and she didn’t come out. Cathy took a deep breath, pinched her nostrils closed and stuck her head inside.

  ‘Jesus! Will you look at that!’ she exclaimed. ‘She’s layin’ face down sleepin’ on top of all that chicken shit. Maybe Agnes is right. Maybe she ain’t but a animal.’ Louder, she said, ‘Wake up, Sally. You got to get pickin’.’

  Sally didn’t even lift her head and after we yelled some more, alternating dire threats with unrealistic promises of candy, and she still hadn’t budged, Cathy said, ‘Looks like we’re gonna have to go in and haul her out.’

  It took us a while to get ourselves in a position where we could get hold of her, a leg each, and pull because as Cathy said, ‘That door was made for chickens, not people, and we ain’t goin’ in there, no sir. Too hot! Stinks too bad!’

  We got Sally out a leg at a time, an arm at a time, then the rest of her, but we couldn’t make her stand up. Maybe she couldn’t? She was limp and damp, her face had a greenish tinge to it, even her lips, and her eyes were closed. Head to toe she was caked in chicken droppings and feathers.

  ‘Sally you got to stand up!’ Cathy hollered, trying to shake her by her limp shoulders. ‘You got to clean yourself up! You stink! And you need to get pickin’.’

  Sally’s head lolled from side to side with the shaking, her mouth hung slack, and it was hard to tell if she even heard.

  ‘She ain’t actin’ right,’ Cathy said. ‘Agnes sees her like this, she’ll … dunno. Ain’t much more she can do, is there? We got to clean her up.’

  ‘We can’t!’ I gasped. ‘Agnes is waitin’ on the milk.’

  ‘Let’s just get her in the barn then. Look! Her tongue’s hangin’ out! Shut your mouth, Sally!’

  We thought she might need a drink of water but where to get her one? Couldn’t go in the house…. Well was too far…. We remembered the cows had water in their buckets and if they hadn’t knocked them over – the dumb things did that all the time – we’d give her some of that, even if it would be boiling hot.

  We pulled Sally’s limp body into the barn and sat her down leaning against the wall and tried to get her to drink some cow water by cupping it in our hands. Sally wouldn’t, or couldn’t, swallow any at all and, seething with frustration, not knowing what else to do, we gave up on her and had just started to milk when we heard Agnes coming our way.

  Leaping to her feet, Cathy said, ‘C’mon. We got to squat down in front of Sally so’s Agnes won’t start in on her again.’

  ‘She’ll start in on us if we ain’t milkin’, though,’ I argued, but did what Cathy said, like always.

  Agnes was too happy to notice anything. ‘Them nice police officers just called!’ she preened. ‘They found them lyin’, thievin’ brothers of yours not a mile from the bus station in town eatin’ ice cream! I’ll give ’em ice cream!’ she snarled. ‘That’s my money they was eatin’! They slep’ in a park last night!’ she went on. ‘I’ll give ’em sleepin’ in a park in their good clothes. Time I get done with them they ain’t gonna be able to sleep no place.

  ‘I told them nice officers, bein’ it’s late in the day to just go on ahead and keep ’em overnight, give ’em a taste of jail…. Bring ’em out in the mornin’.’

  She looked directly at me then and her smile widened. ‘All ’cepting that no-good Limey brother of yours!’ she jeered. ‘I told ’em, “Him, I ain’t fixin’ on takin’ back. No, sir! He’s the one started all this – stealin’ my money… leadin’ them others astray.” I called Bennings on the telephone just now and she said the same on account of she knows there never was any kind of trouble out here before he come.’

  She stopped smiling and leaned towards me. ‘Know what a reform school is, girl?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Same thing as a jail!’ Agnes rejoiced. ‘A jail for real bad kids! It ain’t just me, see. Ain’t a family in the state wants a thief in the house. They tried every place.’

  She looked at me as though expecting me to cry. Or look ashamed. Or at least beg her to please, please let him come back. But I was too happy to give her the satisfaction of either my tears or my pleas. I was glad he wasn’t coming back. It meant he could tell people what a cruel, wicked woman Agnes was and if they didn’t believe him, he’d just have to find a way to come and rescue me. He had to. It was, after all, his job.

  We were sent out to pick tomatoes again first thing nex
t morning, but we didn’t. Instead, we squatted down behind the cabin watching and waiting for the police car that was bringing Danny and Andy back.

  The cabin perched a little higher than the dirt road so it was easy to look down on it. We saw the car’s dust over the treetops long before the car itself rounded the last bend and came into view. By the time it stopped at the fence there was such a cloud of it we could hardly see it at all but we heard the motor stop and doors slamming. As the dust slowly settled we were able to make out Danny and Andy and just one cop making their way, single file, to the front door.

  They were filthy dirty, those boys, and walked in an odd, limping kind of way. ‘Look at that, will you,’ Cathy muttered. ‘Betcha the dumb jerks ain’t wearing socks. Must’ve forgot ’em. Don’t you just know they’ve got big, bloody blisters all over their feet?’

  Agnes opened the door and we heard the cop say something, her say something back, and then the cop turned and went back to his car and drove away.

  Agnes must have gone to watch from an upstairs window because the moment the cop’s dust trail got as far away as you could see from the house was the moment the screams started. Awful screams. Heartbreaking screams. Worse than anything we’d ever heard before. So awful we clung to one another trembling and flinching as if we were the ones being whipped.

  After a while, a long, long while, the screams stopped, the back door opened, and the boys were thrown out bodily. Their shirts hung in ribbons and their faces and upper bodies were slick with blood. Like some grotesque species of deformed humanity, they lay where they landed. Cathy stopped her whimpering and got mad instead. ‘I told ’em,’ she said. ‘Only way out of here is to shut up and grow up. Maybe now they’ll listen when I tell ’em stuff.’

  I said I wasn’t staying till I grew up! ‘James got away and I will, too!’ I said, ‘Even if the stupid war goes on forever and ever.’

  Sally hadn’t said a word since we pulled her out of the chicken house the day before, just sat staring blank-eyed at nothing, her mouth open and drooling, but she agreed with us then. At least we thought she did. She nodded her head.

  ‘That just goes to show you’re both still babies,’ Cathy sneered.

  ‘Call me anything you want,’ I said. ‘It don’t make me no never mind ’cause I’m going to think up something real, real bad to do so I’ll get sent away to reform school like James.’

  ‘You might just as soon think up something real good to do on account of Agnes don’t know the difference no more,’ Cathy said.

  I opened my mouth to say something back but nothing came out because I suddenly knew Cathy was right. Agnes didn’t know the difference. And that was just about the scariest thing I ever had to think about and I hated Miss Know-it-all-Cathy for making me think it.

  TWELVE

  With James, from this point on, no longer a part of the Slater household, and each of us having led divergent lives ever since, I expected him to lose all interest in our long-overdue quest for joint memories and veer off into lengthy descriptions of his life elsewhere, something about which I had always been curious and anxious to hear.

  But this didn’t happen. Instead he insisted on hearing every remaining detail of all that had transpired at the Slater home after his departure, so I had no choice but to keep on going.

  I told him that once I knew he was safe in a reform school, and thinking my own troubles would quickly come to an end through his expected intercession, I spent as much time as I dared hanging around the various paths in the woods, expecting that at any moment he would appear on one of them and smuggle me away to a wonderful new life.

  Once Cathy figured out what I was up to and why, she put a swift end to it, saying, ‘Don’t you get it? He’s in jail. A kids’ jail! That means he’s locked up, dummy. And you oughta know by now there ain’t a grown-up alive that’ll believe a word he tells ’em. Alls they’ll do is call him a liar. That’s how come you got to keep your own mouth shut and lie when you have to.’

  As if to back up Cathy’s position, a letter for Agnes arrived from my father, the first he had ever written, having previously preferred to leave such matters to my mother. There were a lot of big words in that letter that no one, least of all Agnes, understood, but the gist of it was that he was deeply saddened and shocked by his son’s behaviour and it was fortunate for James they were not on the same continent and there was a war in progress because otherwise, rest assured, the punishment for what he had done would be swift and severe. Meanwhile, he begged Mr and Mrs Slater to accept his most sincere apologies and his assurances that, as soon as this terrible war ended, full restitution would be made.

  That letter was sweeter than a love letter to Agnes. After reading it to the Old Man and us kids so many times we knew it by heart, she called Bennings and, as if the woman barely understood English, read it very slowly and deliberately to her. Finally, she carried it down to the store and read it to Bill.

  ‘Too bad your dad didn’t send her a halo to go along with that letter,’ Cathy sneered. ‘That way everybody’d get to see her the way she sees herself – like some kind of a saint. You know, good old Saint Agnes.’

  With Daddy’s betrayal as final proof, I took Cathy’s advice and stopped looking for James.

  And now at last, Agnes was satisfied by the new, silent behaviour of all us kids. ‘Whoever it was said spare the rod and spoil the child must’ve been some sharp cookie,’ she commented, ‘’cause take a look at what one good lickin’ and that hen house done to you all.

  ‘It maybe took me awhile,’ she went on, ‘but now I got you acting the way foster kids that’re lucky to have a roof over their heads is supposed to act, with never a word out of none of you and no time wasted lollygaggin’ around. ’Bout time, too, with school starting up in a couple weeks’ time, Godammit!’

  ‘School?’ I questioned Cathy the first time I caught her alone after Agnes’ announcement. ‘She actually lets us go to school?’

  ‘There you go again with your dumb questions,’ Cathy groaned. ‘’Course she lets us go to school. She flat out has to. There’s laws about it.’

  ‘You mean she ain’t figured a way to trick the folks that make the laws?’

  ‘Not yet, she ain’t.’

  Still I could not believe it. Whole days away from Agnes instead of just a few minutes a week when our turns came around to go to the store? ‘But …’ I persisted, ‘who’s gonna do all the chores while we’re at school?’

  ‘Take a guess.’

  Agnes spelled it out so I didn’t have to. ‘Don’t think for one minute I’m lettin’ you all sneak off to school and leave me with all the work,’ she announced one night at supper. ‘No, sir-ee! Didn’t sign up for all the trouble of you, the work, the worry, to get stuck doin’ the chores, as well. And seein’ how it’s comin’ soon, might as well get caught up on what-all I got in mind right now.’

  She had a lot in mind. She started all five of us in the vegetable field where, under the blistering sun, we picked or dug up every vegetable still out there. From there she moved us to the orchard where we stripped the trees of all their fruit, ripe or not.

  Then it was into the suffocating, steam-fogged kitchen for us girls where, for over a week, the harvest was canned and hauled away to the cellar.

  With field and orchard stripped bare, Agnes moved us to the woods where she had the boys, using the chicken axe, cut down dead trees and the girls haul them to the saw horse back of the barn where the boys sawed them into logs.

  They had to be very careful to cut the logs to Agnes’ exact specifications, those boys, or, as Cathy warned, ‘Count on her going after you with that axe, maybe lopping off a couple of your fingers while she’s at it.’

  Agnes wanted the logs small enough to fit easily through the opening on the top of the range, but not so small they’d burn too fast.

  ‘Why don’t you go tell her bring us out a ruler,’ Danny sneered to Cathy, ‘and some chalk to mark ’em?’

  ‘I
had a ruler, I’d break it,’ Cathy said. ‘And if you ever get hold of one, you better too, else have her beatin’ you upside the head with it.’

  ‘She don’t need no ruler for that,’ Danny said, fingering the lumps on his head. ‘She’s doing just fine with the logs.’

  When the logs were all the right size it fell to Cathy, Sally and me to stack them in rows, one on top of the other, alongside all the outbuildings as high as we could reach.

  ‘How come we got to stack ’em out here?’ I asked Cathy, pulling splinters out of my scratched and bleeding hands and forearms. ‘Why not nearer the house?’

  ‘So’s they won’t blow down we get a big storm … come winter.’

  ‘How can logs blow down when the trees already done that?’

  ‘Not the logs, dumbo! The buildin’s!’

  After supper was cleared away the night before school started, Agnes said, ‘Want you girls upstairs trying on them raggedy old clothes Sarah brought with her from England. Need to see what-all does for who.’

  I pulled on the first dress Agnes handed me.

  ‘You done outgrowed it,’ she said. ‘Give it to Cathy.’

  The second one went to Sally, then another to Cathy, then Sally again. When we got down to the last one, the frilly one I wore to Knitting Bee, I tried to trick Agnes. ‘Look!’ I exclaimed. ‘It still fits! I can wear it!’

  She shook her head, ‘You done outgrowed that one, too. Give it to Cathy.’

  ‘Oh, but…. Please let me keep it, else—’

  Agnes stood firm. ‘Ain’t nothing worse to look at than a great big girl like you with her backside hanging down b’neath her skirt. Give it to Cathy and count yourself lucky I thought to hold on to them dresses I made up for my Betty back when she was a kid, else you’d be going to school naked, girl.’

  Pulling down a cardboard box from the top of the hall closet, Agnes dumped it out on the bed. Everything in it smelled musty and disgusting. Digging around in the pile, she pulled out two faded plaid dresses with deep sweat stains under the arms. ‘Try ’em on,’ she ordered.