The Things I Know(10)
Hitch had made a couple of suggestions, which had only raised a laugh of dismissal, if not a titter. ‘We could do posh camping – glamping! I’ve read about it: people pay a lot to sleep in a fancy tent, and we have the space!’ She recalled how her mum and dad had exchanged a look that translated as Oh, bless her! and it made her want to spit.
‘Where’s my cake?’ Emery stuck out his bottom lip like a grotesque toddler.
‘I have absolutely no bloody idea,’ she whispered, as she cut him a much smaller slice and handed it to him before pouring two mugs of tea, remembering his biting comments of earlier.
Emery eyed his uncle’s plate and laughed softly through his nose as he almost swallowed his piece of cake whole.
‘Ooh, I got a card from Jonathan!’ As if just now remembering it was there, her dad reached into his cardigan pocket, producing a postcard with a picture of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on the front. He held it up so she could see the rugged snow-capped mountains set against the vast blue sky.
‘Ain’t that something?’ he beamed, as if being in receipt of such a picture was as good as beholding the sight for himself, and maybe, for him, it was.
But not for her.
She wanted to climb those mountains, drink in the sweet, clean air. She wanted to saddle up and canter the paths, walk among the rocky outcrops looking at the trees and the wide-wing-spanned, hooked-beaked eagles that hunted there. She wanted to meet a cowboy and eat beans with him by an open fire where flames flickered against the night sky. There were lots of things she wanted to do, like going to New York and ordering cworfee for her dawtah . . .
‘It says he’s got a new job on the ranch; he’s going to be a loper.’ He held the card close to his face. ‘L-O-P-E-R,’ he spelled out. ‘I think that’s how you say it. I don’t rightly know what it is, but I know it means he’s with the horses morning, noon and night, just the way he likes it.’
‘Lucky boy,’ Emery snapped, with an air of sarcasm entirely lost on her lovely dad, who only ever wanted to see the best in people, even her.
‘He is that, but you know, Emery,’ he said with a smile, his big, dirt-encrusted hands now breaking his wedge of cake in two and handing half to his nephew, ‘you make your own luck. I do believe that. He works hard, I’m sure – different work to us, yes, and I admit it must be nice to toil with the warmth of that sunshine on your back, instead of frost creeping up your limbs, and living on a fancy ranch sounds lovely, but I know our Jonathan and I know he’s a worker.’
Hitch chose not to comment, employing the old adage, ignored by her cousin, that if you had nothing nice to say, then best say nothing at all. She still found it hard to fathom how her younger brother, the ink barely dried on his degree certificate from the fancy Cirencester Agricultural College – their mum and dad had dug deep to make sure he didn’t go without while he was there – had then just jumped on a plane to go and work on some stranger’s farm for no more than board and lodging, while his family nearly ran themselves into the ground trying to run their own, in the vain hope that one day they might be able to pass the deeds on to him. It was unquestioned, his inheritance, as the boy of the family, the one with the farming know-how that came by way of a fancy scroll and the simple fact that this was how it had always been. Waycott Farm – handed down from father to son.
Hitch didn’t care much about that, knowing with certainty that, whether it was Pops or Jonathan who sat at the head of the table, she would always have a place at it too. Whether or not it was a place she wanted to occupy was a whole other story. The simple truth was that she missed her brother. She missed him so much her stomach ached with it.
Her mum, and Pops in particular, still held fast to the notion that he would be home any day to dump his duffel bag in his old room, neck a mug of tea, don his wellington boots, grab the tractor keys and claim what was rightfully his, carrying on as if he’d never been away. Hitch hoped they were right, but to her it was obvious that her little brother was making a life, making memories, becoming one with that breathtaking landscape of the Wild West and planning a future that had no place in it for their muddy little farm on the banks of the Severn. And her biggest fear was that her cousin Emery might just swoop in and take over, and if that happened, she knew her place at the table was far from certain.
She still felt a little let down by her brother, but in recent months and after giving it much thought she knew her feelings were largely rooted in disappointment. She was the eldest, and while she yearned to travel, she had never thought to bolt. Hitch had grown up with the belief that they were all in it together, that she was safest working and living within the walls of Waycott Farm and that it was only by working and living as a unit, sharing the load, that they all survived. Recently, however, she’d been feeling the heartbreak of lament, fearing that, as she approached her late twenties, she was well and truly stuck here. This place was her provider, her haven and her jailer.
It was complicated.
Her conflicted feelings over the farm and her place in it had only intensified when her parents saw fit to bring cousin Emery into their home.
The day he had arrived, without fair warning, she’d gone into Big Barn and lain on the battered dog sofa, shivering under Buddy’s blanket, despite the warmth of that sunny June day. It was the way he lorded it over her and, in some ways, her parents too – there was no respect, as if he were doing them a favour, when she knew for a fact he was paid a good wage, the only one among them who was. And his board and lodging were free. It was now late October and she had got no more used to having him around than on that first day. He’d always been mean to her, his nastiness wrapped in jokes she found far from funny, and when, as a child, she had complained to her parents, they would tut and tell her he meant nothing by it, he was just a kid! And at the end of the day, he was kin.