The Lost Mother Read online

  “Now Roddy’s alone with the six young ones,” Reverend Tillotson said, pursing his lips for a sip of tea. Mrs. Tillotson fidgeted with the button on her faded needlepoint purse. Mr. and Mrs. Farley stared straight ahead at nothing at all. Mr. Farley’s face was puffed and red as if he’d just swallowed the wrong way. “He’s having a real rough time of it,” Reverend Tillotson said, pausing as if to let this sink in. “Even with relief there’s never enough food, all those many mouths to feed.”

  “He might try working!” Mr. Farley said testily. “That’d sure help, don’t you think?”

  “If there were any jobs around, especially for someone like poor Roddy, being so slow and with the six little ones to look after.”

  Now, no one spoke. There was only the squeal of Jesse-boy’s chair as he wheeled closer to the table. He took two cookies. He offered one to Margaret.

  Her face soured. “I don’t want it,” she said.

  “How about some fudge, dear?” Mrs. Farley reached for the plate. “Margaret has quite the sweet tooth,” she told Mrs. Tillotson.

  “No thanks,” Margaret said sullenly. She plucked a feather from her sleeve.

  “Oh, dear. You’re not sick, I hope.” Mrs. Farley got up and felt her brow. “See, Thomas, that’s why you shouldn’t be down here. We can’t risk everyone catching what you have. He’s been sick almost two weeks now,” she informed Mrs. Tillotson with raised eyebrows, then sat back down with a sigh.

  “What’s he got?”

  “Influenza,” Mrs. Farley said and Mrs. Tillotson shrank back in her chair.

  “But I’m all better now,” Thomas said, and Margaret looked at him. “I feel good.”

  “You’ve done a fine thing taking in these children,” the Reverend said.

  “How could we not?” Mrs. Farley smiled at Margaret. “Especially Margaret. Such a dear little thing. And not the least bit shy. She’ll talk to anyone, just march right up and tell you right off what she thinks.”

  The Reverend glanced at Margaret, uneasily, as if she might be getting ready to tell him a thing or two. She certainly had that kind of nasty look, Thomas thought. Talk returned to the Sunday school’s pageant. One of the wise men had shot up over the summer, almost a foot taller, Mrs. Tillotson fretted. Last year’s robe would be up to his knees. Mrs. Farley said she’d be glad to make a new one for him.

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” Mrs. Tillotson said, relieved. “It’s hard now, asking for extras when there’s so little around.”

  “My pleasure. More than glad to do it.” Beaming, Mrs. Farley poured another round of tea from her blue and white Spode teapot.

  “You’re such a good seamstress.” Mrs. Tillotson glanced at her husband. “Phyllis sews all her own clothes. Every year at the fair she wins the blue ribbon for tailoring.”

  “Well, not every year.” Mrs. Farley blushed.

  “Just about though,” Mr. Farley added, beaming.

  Bored, Jesse-boy rolled his chair back and forth, bumping the side of Margaret’s chair. She glared at him. Her legs were crossed and her foot swung up and down. He hit her chair again. This time she shoved his wheelchair and he rolled back against the piano.

  “Margaret!” Mrs. Farley scolded with a shocked look.

  Thomas laughed. Jesse-boy gave a menacing giggle. He was embarrassed and angry. Margaret’s stare dared him to do it again.

  “I think we’re boring the children with all our talk,” Mrs. Tillotson told her husband.

  “Oh no,” Mrs. Farley protested. “It’s good discipline for children to sit through an adult conversation.”

  “We shouldn’t overdo it though.” With a look at her husband Mrs. Tillotson put her hands on the arms of her chair.

  “Just one more thing then, Fred,” Reverend Tillotson said. “If there was some work, just some kind of chores here Roddy could do. That’s really what I came to say. Part time. Just a couple hours here and there, it’d sure help.”

  Fred Farley’s eyes had gone dead.

  “Cleaning out stalls even. Roddy’s got that kinda mind, you know. Don’t matter what, just tell him where and he’ll go right to it, not look up once ’til he’s done.”

  “Sorry, Reverend, but I’m not hiring just now. And especially not Roddy Pfeiffer.”

  “But if you could just make an exception. Some men’re even stealing they’re so desperate. If you could just see it in your heart—”

  “My heart!” Mr. Farley interrupted. “And these two here, what do you think they are?”

  “Now, Fred,” Mrs. Farley warned.

  “Yes, of course,” Reverend Tillotson said uneasily.

  “I didn’t cause any man his troubles. That one, he went looking for them. If you know what I’m saying.”

  Thomas looked between the two men. The women stared at their knees.

  “I know what you’re saying,” Reverend Tillotson allowed with bowed head, almost ashamedly.

  “I don’t think you do,” Mr. Farley said. “Because I work hard, always have and I never once asked anything from anybody, much less trespassed another man’s property and stole from him, besides. I don’t expect handouts, no sir, never did. So don’t be expecting them from me.” With that Mr. Farley got up and left the parlor.

  “Oh dear,” Mrs. Tillotson said. “I’m sorry we came, that we upset him like that.”

  “He’s a little sensitive on the subject,” Mrs. Farley said. Her eyebrows raised in the Talcott children’s direction. “All the criticism he’s been getting. As if he was the one broke into his own barn.”

  “I never would’ve brought that up,” the Reverend said. “Tell Fred that. Tell him it’s Roddy I meant.”

  “Well, anyway, we’re managing,” Mrs. Farley continued sweetly. She absently stroked the back of Jesse-boy’s hair. “Aren’t we, dear?”

  “Yes, Mummy. We are,” he said as sweetly while making a goofy face at Margaret. He bobbed his head as if to bump her again.

  “It does seem a little harsh though.” Reverend Tillotson looked at Mrs. Farley as if the intensity of his stare might override the children’s presence. “Considering.”

  9

  Thomas sat on a stump, watching the big man split firewood, then stack it behind the house. Otis had already been yelled at once when Mr. Farley caught him talking with Thomas while he stopped to smoke. Otis worked double time now. He rumbled up in the tractor pulling another load of logs in the cart. He climbed down and emptied the logs onto the ground.

  “I never saw so much wood! How many trees’s that now?” Thomas asked.

  “This? This is just part. Last spring we cut thirty-eight all told. Cut more tomorrow.” He looked up at the heavy, lowering sky. “If it don’t snow, that is.”

  “Where’s it from?”

  “Down Post Road. Straight in by the pond.” He kicked a stray log, rolling it back to the pile. “Mostly all maple. Some ash and birch though.”

  “That’s where I used to live. You must’ve seen my house. Up the hill some, it’s white. There’s a green door and it’s got a tin roof. And a barn. Not big as these,” he said, gesturing around. He was talking about their old house, before the tent, before the move to town, their old life, before their mother just disappeared into thin air. He walked back and forth alongside Otis, who dragged the logs into a neater pile. “But still, we had two cows. Two pigs and a goat. And the chicken coop, it was down back of the house. We used to play in the back part, Margaret and me, in the little room back of the chicken coop. It was our playhouse.” Thomas laughed and held his nose. “Pee-you, but we put all kindsa junk in there.”

  “Junk?” Otis grunted pulling a knobby log straight.

  “Secret things. Like our spears, ones we made. Snake skins and lime for potions. And rope. We were always looking for rope.”

  “How come rope?”

  “Case we ever needed to tie a prisoner up or something.”

  “You ever do that, tie someone up?”

  “No. Well, Margaret. But
just for practice. And that was easy. She’s strong, but she’s not very big.”

  “You make your own fish poles?”

  “Yeah, we did.”

  “With bent hat pins for hooks?”

  “Yeah! But they were my mother’s so we had to hide them. How’d you know?”

  “Found ’em.”

  “You did? Where?”

  “The little room back of the coop.” The big man’s face clouded and he closed the back of the cart. He dropped the long metal peg through the latch and Thomas felt its clunk in his chest. “That’s where I live. Me and my wife. In your old house. Farley takes it outta my pay.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t wanna make you feel bad.” Otis lit a cigarette. “Want one?”

  “No thanks.” He followed Otis to the side of the tractor.

  “For later then.”

  “No, Jesse-boy took the other one. He got so sick he took a spell, then all hell broke loose.”

  “You didn’t tell them I give it to you, did you?” Otis looked sick.

  “No! I said I found it. Out by the road.”

  “That’s good.” He climbed onto the tractor. “Wanna go for a ride?”

  “Sure!” He climbed up and perched on the edge of the seat next to Otis. Otis drove down the wide, rutted cow path to the shortcut to the back road. He stopped suddenly; maybe Thomas better go ask Mrs. Farley first.

  “She doesn’t care,” Thomas shouted over the engine.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. And besides she’s sewing. And when she’s sewing she doesn’t want anyone bothering her.” They passed the Farley burying ground, a cluster of thin, blackened headstones encircled by a wrought-iron fence. Thomas let his jaw hang loose, laughing as his teeth rattled with the rumbling tractor. Now came a grove of birch, the silvery limbs flashing by. Ahead was a farmhouse. The shutters had been nailed shut over the windows. In the front yard a wheelless wagon sagged into bittersweet that twined over it.

  “That’s Creedons’. Billy, he was in my school! Yeah! We were both the same! Fifth grade. I didn’t know they lived so close. To Farley’s, I mean. Maybe I could walk there and see him sometime.”

  “Creedons’re gone!” Otis shouted. “They went on up to Burlington, live with his family or hers, I don’t know. But it’s the bank’s now. Like everything else. Probably Farley’s someday if he wants it.”

  They drove the rest of the way in silence. At the edge of a clearing where raw stumps posted the frozen ground, the cut wood lay piled in four-foot lengths. This side of the pond had always been thickly wooded. Thomas glanced up the hill. A thin drift of smoke rose from the wide center chimney.

  Otis turned off the engine. “Up there’s your house.” He jumped down and so did Thomas. Otis tossed a log into the cart.

  “Yours now.” Thomas got the end of a smaller log and tried to heave it into the cart. It hit the edge and bounced back, banging into Otis’s ankle.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” the big man hollered, jumping on one foot.

  “I’m sorry!”

  Otis closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “That’s okay,” he groaned, then limped toward the pile. “I guess I had it coming, huh, for living in your house.” He tossed two logs into the cart.

  “I didn’t do that on purpose! You think I did? I didn’t! Swear to God I didn’t! It wasn’t your fault, us losing the house. It wasn’t, right?” His voice rose dangerously high and cracking. He wiped his nose with the back of his hand.

  “No. ’Course not.” Otis worked for a few more minutes, then paused. “Maybe someday things’ll get better and your father maybe can buy it back.”

  “He’s in jail, you know,” Thomas said, and Otis nodded. “For stealing. From Mr. Farley.”

  Otis paused with an armload of short lengths. “I’m gonna tell you something. But you gotta keep it to yourself. Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “I’m just telling you so you won’t feel so bad. About your father, I mean.” There was a clatter as he dumped in the logs. He brushed dirt and bits of sawdust and leaves off his sleeves while he spoke. “But I ain’t never gonna say it again—even in a courta law. I can’t, you understand?” He waited until Thomas nodded. “That time, your tent got pulled down, and all the rest? Well, that was your father’s spare that got taken. And his butchering saw too.”

  “I know.”

  “What you don’t know is, it wasn’t no mistake. Farley, he knew what he was doing. A man like Henry Talcott. Any man, ’course he’d come back for what was his. For what he needed to keep his family going. So then Farley, he was just waiting for him to come. Every night, I had to sit out there. ‘You see anything, you shoot first, ask questions later,’ he says. But acourse, I wouldn’t. I never would. ’Specially not him.”

  “Will you tell the sheriff?”

  “No! I said. I told you I’m just telling you, so you won’t think bad of your father.”

  “But the sheriff, he’d—”

  “He knows. ’Course he knows, everybody does.”

  “But—”

  “But the thing’s the breaking and entering. That, he did do. It’s the reason that ain’t fair.”

  Thomas picked up a log and ran at the front of the tractor. With the bang Otis lunged at him. “What the hell’re you doing?” he shouted and grabbed the log. Thomas ran back and picked up another. This time he drew the log back higher, bringing it down, crashing into the engine casing with all his strength and outrage and pain. And tears. Otis grabbed that log and threw it down. “That’s enough! That’s enough!” he shouted as Thomas scrambled to get it again. “Ain’t gonna do no good.” He held out his arm to keep Thomas from the log. “Just gonna get me fired, that’s all.”

  Thomas ran into the woods a few feet, gave a deep shuddering moan of a sob, then blew his nose in his shirttail. He was peeing into a leafless, viny thicket when Otis came up from behind.

  “Thought that’s what you were doing,” Otis said as he unbuttoned his pants and began to pee alongside the boy. The yellow stream gave off faint musky steam, a hiss onto the frozen ground. “I was in school with your mother. ’Til seventh grade anyhow. That’s when I left. You see her, tell her Otie Johnson says hello. Prettiest girl in school. In the whole town, I always said so. Where’s she at now?” he asked on their way back to the dented tractor.

  “Massachusetts. Working someplace, a factory.”

  “Well, good for her! So there! She’ll get you all together settled, and you’ll forget all this mess. ’Course she will. Irene, she was a real lady. Not like her sister. That Lena! Woo-wee!”

  Thomas laughed. “Sorry about the tractor! The dents,” he called as they rumbled onto the road.

  “Don’t be. Damn tree fell the wrong way, that’s all.” Otis laughed.

  10

  Outside, a light snow had begun to fall. Thomas was in the parlor doing long division problems in his tablet before school started. Mr. Wentworth claimed that he had fallen behind during his illness. It seemed to Thomas that Mr. Wentworth gave him extra work probably at Mrs. Farley’s request, just to keep him busy all the time. The door flew open and Margaret burst in.

  “I been all over. I been looking for you!” As usual she was dressed as if she were going to church or a party, with a pink dress and ribbons in her hair.

  “Here I am,” he muttered, crossing out and carrying a one. It was the last problem.

  “I hate Jesse-boy! I hate him so damn much!”

  “Don’t swear.”

  “Look! Look what he gave me!” She laid a sheet of paper on his tablet. “He said it’s me. When I get big.” She began to cry.

  The drawing was of a woman’s fat, hanging breasts and the same scrawl of hair between her legs.

  “Good morning!” Mr. Wentworth called as the front door opened. “Something smells good today.”

  Thomas balled up the drawing and shoved it into his pocket.

  “I said I was going to tell his mother if he di
dn’t stop, and he said she’d send us to the home then.”

  “Send us home?”

  “The home. The orphanage! Because no one else’ll take us, he said.”

  Thomas jumped up. “He still upstairs?” he asked at the door.

  “He’s in the kitchen. Having cake,” she said with disgust, though she too had eaten cake this morning.

  The long hallway amplified Mrs. Farley’s screechy laughter. Whatever she said next made Mr. Wentworth roar laughing. Thomas told his sister to wait here; he’d be right back. Keeping close to the wall he tiptoed up the front stairs. They were right below him. The step creaked and Mrs. Farley’s head shot up. “Thomas! Where are you going? What’re you doing, sneaking up the stairs like that? I told you about that, about being so furtive all the time.”

  “I didn’t want to make noise and bother you. I have to get my book. I’ll be right down.”

  “Don’t make Mr. Wentworth wait now.”

  “I won’t.” He bounded along the hallway, then down the back staircase, into the kitchen.

  “Wentworth’s here.” Jesse-boy didn’t look up. He was pouring milk into his glass.

  Thomas pulled open the balled paper. “You’re a creep. You’re such a creep, giving this dirty thing to my sister. She’s just a little girl!”

  “What’re you talking about?” Jesse-boy laughed and brushed the paper away. “She thinks it’s funny. Like you did.” He cut off a forkful of cake. “You thought it was funny, right?”

  “No I didn’t.” In his pocket his hand closed over the jackknife.

  “Yes you did. You laughed, remember? Just like Margaret does.” He stuffed cake into his mouth until both sallow cheeks bulged.

  “That’s a lie! That’s a dirty lie, and you know it, you no-good, dirty liar, you, talking about my sister like that!”