Putting Up Roots

Chapter Two

Like the outside of Burnt Willow Farm, the inside seemed to Josh’s eye both changed and unchanged. The sitting room that the woman led him to was the old familiar shape, but it had somehow become smaller. The furniture and drapes were surely new. He never noticed colors much, but it seemed to him that the room was both lighter and brighter.

“Sit down there.” Acting like she owned the place, the golden-haired woman pointed to an uncomfortable-looking chair with a cane seat and straight cane back. “I’ll go and get Ryan.”

She was heading out, but Josh couldn’t wait any longer. He blurted out, “Where’s Aunt Maria?”

For the first time, the woman’s frowning expression was replaced by something like surprise. “You don’t know?” she said. “I guess Lucy Kerrigan didn’t bother to tell you much, any more than she told us. Or maybe she didn’t know herself. Ryan hadn’t heard a word from her until a week ago. She certainly wasn’t one to call or write, judging from the past year and a half. Her sister—your aunt—died near that long back. You didn’t know?” She had picked up on Josh’s look of sudden astonishment. “Maria is dead. I’m your Aunt Stacy, Uncle Ryan’s wife. We were married two months ago. I’m still trying to get this place in shape. Believe me, it isn’t easy.”

As she went out toward the back of the farmhouse, Dawn peered in from the other door. She nodded her head and said, “Josh—u—a.”

“I’m really sorry,” he blurted out. “I mean, about your mother—I didn’t know. I’m sure Mother didn’t know about Aunt Maria, either, or she would have told me.”

Dawn came forward and perched on the chair opposite Josh. It had a transparent plastic cover that squeaked as she leaned back on it. He noticed for the first time that Dawn was barefoot. She looked through him again as though he was not there. He waited, but after that single statement of his name, she said nothing.

“If Mother had known, I don’t think she’d have sent me here to Burnt Willow Farm.” With Dawn silent, Josh felt forced to fill the gap. “It may have been hard for Uncle Ryan and—and—” He could not think of what to call the woman he had just met. Not Aunt Stacy, not yet, even if she was Uncle Ryan’s wife. What did Dawn call her? Mother? Dawn was just sitting there, wiggling her bare toes. “It must have been hard for you to reach us,” he went on. “You see, with Mother having the job she did, we were on the move a lot. We were all over the place, from New York to Atlanta to Boston. Sometimes we’d have to leave a place in a real hurry, and Mother wouldn’t leave a forwarding address.”

“Ryan will be here in a minute.” Stacy had come back in while Josh was floundering along with his explanations. “He was out back and he has to wash up. You’re wasting your time with her, you know. Dawn doesn’t understand more than two words in a row. I thought you’d been to the farm and you’d met her before.”

Wondering if he had missed something, Josh glanced from Aunt Stacy to Dawn. His cousin was not looking at her stepmother. Her eyes remained fixed on something far away, with an intense, unwinking stare that he remembered from when he was six years old. She was smiling.

“I was here eight years ago,” he said at last.

“Then you must know that she doesn’t talk, not that anybody can understand.” Aunt Stacy spoke as though the girl were not in the room with them. “Dawn is retarded. Badly retarded. She’s fourteen, but witless. Quite hopeless around the house, too, though Lord knows I’ve tried. There’s no more sense to her than to a fence post.”

Josh, looking again at his cousin, was not so sure. She had stopped smiling. There was a strange expression of misery in those distant brown eyes. And then, before he could say or do anything, she had moved off her chair and was on her knees in front of him. She lifted his left foot and gently removed his shoe.

“Well, there’s a first!” Aunt Stacy said. “Maybe with you here she’ll learn a bit of sense. She has it right, nobody wears outside shoes in my house. Its slippers, or clean bare feet. I won’t have people traipsing dirt in all over my polished floors. ’Specially her, always round the animals. It took forever to drum that into her thick head, but it looks like she’s finally learned.”

Dawn had taken off Josh’s other shoe. She gazed up for a moment, then suddenly she was on her feet and turning toward the back door in a single fluid movement. Someone was coming into the room.

Josh knew that it must be Uncle Ryan, but he could hardly believe what he saw. If Dawn hadn’t changed at all, Uncle Ryan had changed enormously. Josh remembered a big-framed, pudgily fat man, tall enough that he had to stoop when he came into a room. He had always been casually dressed, jeans and tartan shirt or leather jacket, and he had clumped around in huge black studded boots that told you by their sound exactly where he was in the house at any time.

Now the stoop seemed permanent. Uncle Ryan had lost sixty or seventy pounds, which made his face careworn and a lot older. The clothes were more formal, a well-fitting dark blue shirt with black string tie and dark-gray pants of pleated corduroy. No boots. He was in his stockinged feet, padding softly—it seemed to Josh, apologetically—over the polished hardwood floor.

“Now, here’s the man,” he said. “Hello, Joshua my boy, how are you?” But instead of approaching where Josh was sitting, he went across to Aunt Stacy and leaned over to give her a hug. “Now,” he continued to Josh, “isn’t she just the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen in your whole life?”

The sincerity in his voice was obvious. Josh thought that her nose was big and she was too thin, but he wasn’t about to say that. He was relieved when Dawn went over to her father’s side. Ryan put his other arm around her. “You’ve grown a lot, Josh,” he said. “It’s nice to see you again.”

“Didn’t Mother call you, and talk about my coming here?” Josh had to ask it. He felt totally unwelcome. The problem wasn’t Uncle Ryan or the silent Dawn, it was Aunt Stacy, staring at him with a cool and evaluating eye. He might not have recognized the look, except that he had seen Mother rehearsing for a thousand parts and portraying a hundred different emotions. She would say, “Here we are: Betrayed! By the very man who promised me everything!” And she would put on a certain forlorn expression and stance. Or it was, “Guilty secret,” and she showed by the downcast gaze and the swiveling of one foot on the floor that she had something to hide.

The look on Aunt Stacy’s face was in Lucy Kerrigan’s lexicon on expressions. It said, “I don’t like this, but maybe if I play my cards right it can become an opportunity.”

An opportunity for what?

Well, Josh could play that game, too. He would lie low, be nice to everyone, and wait and see.

His aunt was standing up and brushing off Uncle Ryan’s embrace. “Another mouth to feed, so I’d best get to it,” she said tartly. “It’s not going to be easy, Ryan, I’ll tell you that. I’ll leave you to explain why.”

She nodded to Josh as she headed for the kitchen. Dawn was ignored.

“Isn’t she the most beautiful thing you ever saw in your whole life?” Uncle Ryan said again. He was not talking about the daughter at his side. He stared raptly after Stacy until she was out of sight.

“I’ve never seen anyone with hair like that,” Josh said. “It’s like gold.” That at least was true enough. He cleared his throat. “Uncle Ryan, didn’t my mother call and discuss my coming here to stay with you?”

“In a manner of speaking.” Ryan’s eyes strayed now and again after the vanished Stacy, but he actually seemed a little more relaxed when she was gone. “Lucy sent an electronic message to the farm’s facsimile and recording center. She just said you would be arriving sometime in the next week or two.”

“You didn’t talk to each other about it—to plan for my being here?”

“We couldn’t. There was no return address. No way to know how to reach you.” Uncle Ryan smiled, ruefully, trying to set up a bond between the two of them. “Just like your mom, eh?”

It was, all too like her. Fly by night, and vanish, as they had vanished from the people they owed money to; and now she had flown from him. Suddenly Josh had a new worry. He remembered Burnt Willow Farm as a place of infinite food, food that appeared at every hour of the day or night whether you wanted it or not, more than you could ever eat—soups and roasts and stews, pies and puddings and sorbets, fruitcake and brandied plums, cheese and biscuits and candied fruit. Aunt Maria said a body could never have too much food, provided it was nourishing and well cooked.

“What did Aunt Stacy”—he forced himself to say the hard word—“mean, that it won’t be easy to feed another person? Am I going to be a problem for you?”

“No, no, no.” But Uncle Ryan’s tone said, yes, yes, yes. “Look, dinner won’t be ready for another hour. Let’s me and you go on up the hill. And you’ll see for yourself.” And, as an afterthought, “Don’t put your shoes on ’til we’re at the door.”

When they came to the farmhouse entrance Josh had new proof that Dawn understood more than Aunt Stacy gave her credit for. His cousin was putting on her own shoes, before he and Uncle Ryan started to put on theirs.

“Will Dawn come with us?”

“Sure she will.” Uncle Ryan sounded uncomfortable as he fastened his boots, still liberally coated with yellow powdery dust from the farm’s dry soil. “Better if we all go. Stacy doesn’t like Dawn around the kitchen. She says she spooks her and gets in the way.”

He led them up the hill, along the same path that Josh had followed to reach the farm. Dawn stayed at Joshua’s side, always looking at and through him but hardly saying a word. It made him feel really uncomfortable. Whenever he glanced across at her, she smiled and said, “Joshua.”

“She remembers you,” Uncle Ryan said. “And it’s been eight years. I’ve tried to explain to Stacy, there’s some things that Dawn remembers perfectly. Don’t you, love? For some things she’s a perfect walking recorder, better at exact remembering than anyone.

But for most things…” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Autistic, that’s what the doctors say.”

“Artistic?”

“No. Autistic. Dawn is autistic. It’s not the same as being retarded. I don’t think people know quite what it is. Seems like it’s one of them words they use for something they don’t really understand. They say they understand, but they can’t do anything about it. Maybe that will change. You know how scientists are. They tell you something is impossible, like space travel. Then they discover the node network, and suddenly it’s not impossible at all. I just wish they’d do something like that here on Earth. I wish they’d find a way to help Dawn.” Uncle Ryan peered up at the cloudless sky. “At the very least, I wish they’d find a way to make it rain where it’s needed.”

On his earlier walk downhill, Josh had been too interested in the farmhouse and farmyard below to take much notice of the land on either side of the path. Now, walking back the same way, the parched, water-starved quality of the slope jumped out at him more strongly. The wheat was stunted, no more than half a meter tall, with yellow-brown and brittle stems. The leaves of the root crops were wan and wilted, all the way up the hill. Only off to the right and left, in the irrigated fields beyond Burnt Willow Farm, could he see healthy green plants. They extended as far as the horizon.

“Why don’t you irrigate your fields, the way that the others do?” he said, as they came to the brow of the hill.

“The wells ran dry.” Uncle Ryan halted, breathing heavily. “You say, ‘others,’ but there are no ‘others.’ There’s just one other, singular. Every independent farm in this area, except for Burnt Willow, went out of business. What you see is all Foodlines. One big conglomerate farm all the way from here to the Pacific. FoodLines owns everything—including the rights to tap into the aquifers around Burnt Willow.”

“But weren’t you here before them?” Josh remembered his mother saying that Uncle Ryan’s family had farmed in eastern Oregon “forever.”

“We were here first, true enough. But that turns out to mean nothing. What matters is who you know, and the arrangements you’ve made in the state capitol. It’s all politics, every bit of it.” Uncle Ryan pointed to the west. “Take a big enough wad of cash with you to Salem, and water rights are for sale along with everything else. I learned that, but I learned it too late. The past couple of years, with Maria sick and all, I guess I wasn’t watching things close enough. By the time I woke up, the water supply was all locked up. Did you notice, coming in, that Burnt Willow Creek is dry? That never happened when I was young. I’ve done what I can, with drought-resistant and salt-tolerant plants. They help some. But when all’s said and done, you still need water.”

“What about rain?” Josh remembered many rainy days, too many, when he had been confined to the farmhouse and chafed to get out into the yard. “If you have rain, you don’t need irrigation.”

“Quite right.” Uncle Ryan pointed to the well-worn track that they had come up. “See that? Dawn and I made it, walking up and down. I’ve stood here ’bout every day this whole season, looking north for rain clouds.”

Josh’s formal education had been spotty and random, with all the jumping around from town to town wherever Mother’s jobs took them. But he had always had a terminal, and he had learned early to tap the public databases. Eight years had produced a big change in him and in Uncle Ryan, but he knew that it wasn’t nearly long enough to make the climate change around Burnt Willow Farm.

“True enough,” Uncle Ryan said when Josh made that point. “But Dawn and I haven’t seen a rain cloud in two months. See, the moisture is carried this way mostly from the north. Foodlines finagled the rights to seed the southbound clouds north of here, and make the rain fall twenty or thirty miles away. By the time the air reaches us it’s pretty well dried out. All we need is one good soaking from a southerly wind and we’d be fine. But we haven’t managed that.”

While they were talking Dawn had taken off her shoes. She was carrying them under her arm, wandering barefoot along the brow of the hill toward a patch of wild filbert bushes that seemed to thrive on the dry yellow clay. An hour ago, Josh would have sworn that he didn’t know those bushes existed. Seeing them now, he realized that they had gathered nuts in that very place on his previous visit to Burnt Willow Farm.

The bushes looked the same, but most other things had changed. The long ridge of the hill was quite bare of even the drought-ridden crops. With no one else around, Josh had a chance to say what had been on his mind since they left the farmhouse. He turned to face Uncle Ryan. “If I’d known things were so bad for you here, with Dawn and the farm and everything, I never would have come. I can leave tomorrow. I can go back east, and find Mother.”

He was testing his uncle’s feelings rather than looking for agreement, but it was a risky suggestion.

“Do you have money?” Uncle Ryan said. “Do you have any idea where Lucy might have gone?”

“We-ell—”

“I thought not. Don’t worry about it. We’ll manage somehow.” Uncle Ryan nodded along the ridge, to where Dawn was deep in the thicket. “You were too young to notice when you were here. But didn’t your mother ever mention Dawn’s problems?”

“Not one word. Did she know?”

“Maria told her everything, when the two of you were out here eight years ago, and then later. I can’t think why your mother didn’t say anything to you. Maybe she was just hoping for the best. Dawn was better for a few years, like when you were here last time. I thought for a while that she was making real headway. But then Maria got sick, and died, and I wasn’t much help with anything. I guess I was too messed up myself. It was a godsend that Stacy came along when she did. Without her, I’d have gone downhill all the way.” Uncle Ryan’s face brightened. “Isn’t she the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen?”

Josh couldn’t tell the truth: that he’d give Stacy up anytime for Aunt Maria, fat and cheerful and comforting. He nodded, but he couldn’t bring himself to speak.

Uncle Ryan said, “I’d better be getting back down. Stacy likes me to set the table for her. You stay here with Dawn, bring her back with you. No rush.” He started down the hill, then turned and added, “Make sure you’re home within half an hour, though. Stacy’s a great cook, but she gets real riled up when the food is ready and people aren’t.”

Dawn was still crouched in the middle of the bushes. Josh went along the ridge toward her, wondering what she could be doing. The last time he had been to Burnt Willow Farm it had been fall. It was months too early now for ripe nuts.

As he came closer, he saw that Dawn was not alone. A little wild rabbit sat crouched in front of her. She was gently stroking its gray back with her left hand. At Josh’s approach it darted off into the grass and straggly weeds at the base of the bushes.

Dawn stood up. Her knees were marked yellow by the dust. She took his hand, turned it palm up, and poured into it what she was holding in her right hand.

Josh looked at his open palm. The nuts were tiny, green, and immature.

“You can’t eat these, Dawn. They’re not ready.”

She showed no emotion, no sign that she understood what he was saying.

Retarded. Aunt Stacy was right, and Uncle Ryan was kidding himself with his science talk. Dawn must be a real drag on everybody if she was always like this.

“Not ready,” he repeated. “You’ll have to come back in another couple of months.”

She smiled at him. “I had a great time here, Aunt Maria,” she said in a child’s high-pitched voice. “I wish I didn’t have to go, but Mother thinks she has a shot at a part in Philadelphia. Not a big one, but better than the Seattle job. Maybe I can come back next year. I hope I can.”

He stared at her. The first real words that she had spoken—and they sounded an echo inside his skull. She was waiting expectantly.

“That was me,” he said at last. “Wasn’t it? When I was little, when I left Burnt Willow Farm last time. I said those things. But that was nearly eight years ago! Were those the very words that I used, when I was saying good-bye?”

Dawn nodded. She reached down for her shoes and put them on. Then she slipped her arm through Josh’s and turned down the hill toward the farmhouse.

“Maybe I can come back next year. I hope I can,” she said again. Then in a changed voice, deeper and more adult, “Joshua, it’s dinnertime.”