Wish You Well

CHAPTER TWENTY

Lou rose early one morning, even before Louisa and Eugene, she believed, for she heard no stirring below. She had grown used to dressing in the dark now and her fingers moved swiftly, arranging her clothes and lacing her boots. She stepped to the window and looked out. It was so dark she had a vague feeling of being deep underwater. She flinched, for Lou thought she had seen something slip out from the barn. And then, like a frame of spent lightning, it was gone. She opened the window for a better look, but whatever it was wasn’t there anymore. It must have been her imagination.

She went down the stairs as quietly as she could, started toward Oz’s room to wake him, but stopped at the door of her mother’s instead. It was partially open, and Lou just stood there for a moment, as though something blocked her passage. She leaned against the wall, squirmed a bit, slid her hands along the door frame, pushed herself away, and then leaned back. Finally, Lou edged her head into the bedroom.

Lou was surprised to see two figures on the bed. Oz was lying next to their mother. He was dressed in his long johns, a bit of his thin calves visible where the bottoms had inched up, his feet in thick wool socks he had brought with him to the mountain. His tiny rear end was stuck up in the air, his face turned to the side so Lou could see it. A tender smile was on his lips, and he was clenching his new bear.

Lou crept forward and laid a hand on his back. He never stirred, and Lou let her hand slide down and gently touch her mother’s arm. When she exercised her mother’s limbs, a part of Lou would always be feeling for her mother to be pushing back just a little. But it was always just dead weight. And Amanda had been so strong during the accident, keeping her and Oz from being hurt. Maybe in saving her children, Lou thought, she had used up all she had. Lou left the two and went to the kitchen.

She loaded the coal in the front-room fireplace, got the flame going, then sat in front of the fire for a time, letting the heat melt the chill from her bones. At dawn she opened the door and felt the cool air on her face. There were corpulent gray clouds loitering about from a passed storm, their underbellies outlined in flaming reddish-pink. Right below this was the broad sweep of mountainous green forest that stepped right to the sky. It was one of the most glorious breakups of night she could ever recall. Lou certainly had never seen dawns like this in the city.

Though it had not been that long ago, it seemed like many years since Lou had walked the concrete pavement of New York City, ridden the subway, raced for a cab with her father and mother, pushed through the crowds of shoppers at Macy’s the day after Thanksgiving, or gone to Yankee Stadium to lunge for white leather balls and gobble hot dogs. Several months ago all of that had been replaced by steep land, dirt and trees, and animals that smelled and made you earn your place. Corner grocers had been exchanged for crackling bread and strained milk, tap water for water pumped or in bucket hauled, grand public libraries for a pretty cabinet of few books, tall buildings for taller mountains. And for a reason she couldn’t quite get at, Lou did not know if she could stay here for long. Maybe there was a good reason her father had never come back.

She went to the barn and milked the cows, carrying a full bucket into the kitchen and the rest to the springhouse, where she laid it in the cool stream of water. The air was already growing warmer.

Lou had the cookstove hot and the pan with lard fired up when her great-grandmother walked in. Louisa was fretting that she and Eugene had slept late. Then Louisa eyed the full buckets on the sink, and Lou told her she had already milked the cows. When she saw the rest of the work Lou had done, Louisa smiled appreciatively. “Next thing I know you’ll be running this place without me.”

“I doubt that will ever happen,” said the girl in a way that made Louisa stop smiling.

Cotton showed up unannounced a half hour later dressed in patched work pants, an old shirt, and worn brogans. He didn’t wear his wire-rim glasses, and his fedora had been replaced with a straw hat, which, Louisa said, was foresight on his part because it looked like the sun would burn a bright one today.

They all said their hellos to the man, though Lou had mumbled hers. He had come to read to her mother regularly, as promised, and Lou was resenting it more each time. However, Lou appreciated his gentle ways and courtly manners. It was a conflicted, troubling situation for the girl.

The temperature, though cold the night before, had not come close to freezing. Louisa didn’t have a thermometer, but, as she said, her bones were just as accurate as bottled mercury. The crops were going in, she declared to all. Late to plant often meant never to harvest.

They trucked over to the first field to be sown, a sloped rectangle of ten acres. The vigilant wind had chased the malingering gray clouds over the ridgeline, leaving the sky clear. The mountains, though, looked markedly flat this morning, as if they were props only. Louisa carefully passed out bags of seed corn from the season before, shelled and then kept in the corncrib over the winter. She instructed the troops carefully as to their usage. “Thirty bushels of corn an acre is what we want,” she said. “More, if we can.”

For a while things went all right. Oz walked his rows, meticulously counting out three seeds per hill as Louisa had told them. Lou, though, was letting herself become sloppy, dropping two at some places, four at others.

“Lou,” Louisa said sharply. “Three seeds per hill, girl!”

Lou stared at her. “Like it really makes a difference.”

Louisa rested fists on her haunches. “Difference twixt eating and not!”

Lou stood there for a moment and then started up again, at a clip of three seeds per hill about nine inches apart. Two hours later, with the five of them working steadily, only about half the field had been laid. Louisa had them spend another hour using hoes to hill the planted corn. Oz and Lou soon had purple blood blisters in the crooks of their hands, despite the gloves they wore. And Cotton too had done the same to his.

“Lawyering is poor preparation for honest work,” he explained, showing off his twin sore prizes.

Louisa’s and Eugene’s hands were so heavily callused that they wore no gloves at all, hilled twice as much as the others, and came away with palms barely reddened by the tools’ coarse handles.

With the last dropped seed hilled, Lou, far more bored than tired, sat on the ground, slapping her gloves against her leg. “Well, that was fun. What now?”

A curved stick appeared in front of her. “Before you get on to school, you and Oz gonna find some wayward cows.”

Lou looked up into Louisa’s face.

Lou and Oz tramped through the woods. Eugene had let the cows and the calf out to graze in the open field, and, as cows, like people, were wont to do, they were wandering the countryside looking for better prospects.

Lou smacked a lilac bush with the stick Louisa had given her to scare off snakes. She had not mentioned the threat of serpents to Oz, because she figured if he knew, she’d end up carrying her brother on her back. “I can’t believe we have to find some stupid cows,” she said angrily. “If they’re dumb enough to get lost, they should stay lost.”

They pushed through tangles of dogwood and mountain laurel. Oz swung on the lower branch of a scraggly pine, and then gave out a whistle as a cardinal flitted by, though most folks from the mountain would have certainly called it a redbird.

“Look, Lou, a cardinal, like us.”

Keeping an eye out more for birds than cows, they quickly saw many varieties, most of which they did not know. Hummingbirds twitted over beds of morning glories and wood violets; the children scared up a mess of field larks from thick ground-cover. A sparrow hawk let them know it was around, while a pack of nasty blue jays bothered everybody and everything. Wild, bushy rhododendrons were beginning to bloom in pink and red, as were the lavender-tipped white flowers of Virginia thyme. On the sides of steep slopes they could see trailing arbutus and wolfsbane among the stacked slate and other protrusions of rocks. The trees were in full, showy form, and the sky a cap of blue to finish it off. And here they were, hunting aimless bovines, thought Lou.

A cowbell clunked to the east of them.

Oz looked excited. “Louisa said to follow the bell the cows wear.”

Lou chased Oz through groves of beech, poplar, and basswood, the strong vines of wisteria clutching at them like irksome hands, their feet tripping over bumps of shallow roots clinging to uneven, shifting ground. They came to a small clearing ringed with hemlock and gum and heard the bell again, but saw no cows. A gold-finch darted past, startling them.

“Moo. Moooo!” came the voice, and the bell clunked.

The pair looked around in bewilderment until Lou glanced up in the crook of a maple and saw Diamond swinging the bell and speaking cow. He was barefoot, same clothes as always, cigarette behind his ear, hair reaching to the sky, as though a mischievous angel was tugging at the boy’s red mop.

“What are you doing?” Lou demanded angrily.

Diamond gracefully swung from branch to branch, dropped to the ground, and clunked the bell once more. Lou noted that he had used a piece of twine to tie the pocketknife she had given him to a loop on his overalls.

“Believing I were a cow.”

“That’s not funny,” Lou said. “We have to find them.”

“Shoot, that’s easy. Cows ain’t never really lost, they just mosey round till somebody come get ’em.” He whistled and Jeb broke through the tangle of brush to join them.

Diamond led them through a swath of hickory and ash; on the trunk of the latter a pair of squirrels were having an argument, apparently over some division of spoils. They all stopped and stared in reverence at a golden eagle perched on a limb of a ruler-straight eighty-foot poplar. In the next clearing, they saw the cows grazing in a natural pen of fallen trees.

“I knowed they was Miss Louisa’s right off. Figger you’d probably come traipsing through after ’em.”

With Diamond’s and Jeb’s help, they drove the cows back to their farm pen. Along the way, Diamond showed them how to hold on to the animals’ tails, let the cows pull them uphill, to make them pay back a little, he said, for wandering off. When they shut the corral gate, Lou said, “Diamond, tell me why you put horse manure in that man’s car.”

“Can’t tell you, ’cause I ain’t do it.”

“Diamond, come on. You as good as admitted you did to Cotton.”

“Got me oak ears, can’t hear nuthin’ you saying.”

A frustrated Lou drew circles in the dirt with her shoe. “Look, we have to get to school, Diamond. You want to come with us?”

“Don’t go to no school,” he said, slipping the unlit cigarette between his lips and becoming an instant adult.

“How come your parents don’t make you go?”

In response to this Diamond whistled for Jeb and the pair took off running.

“Hey, Diamond,” Lou called after him.

Boy and dog only ran faster.