A Northern Light(14)

Royal watched Tommy eat his piece. "Hubbards is always hungry, ain't they? Can't never seem to fill 'em up," he said. "Why you here, Tom?"

Tommy looked at his johnnycake, crumbly and yellow in his dirty hands. "Like to help Mattie, I guess. Like to help her pa."

"Whyn't you help your own mamma plow her field?"

"We ain't got a plow," Tommy mumbled, a red flush creeping up his neck.

"Guess you don't need one, do you? She's always got someone plowing her field, ain't she, Tom?"

"Cripes, Royal, what's Emmie's field to you?" I said, not liking the hard look in his eyes or the miserable, cornered one in Tommy's. The Loomis boys were always agitating with the Hubbards, like a pack of hounds after possums. Lawton had gotten between the younger ones and Tommy on many occasions.

Royal shrugged, then took a bite of his own cake. "This is good," he said. I was about to tell him that Abby made it, but then his honey-colored eyes were on me, not the johnnycake, and the hardness in them was gone and I didn't.

He looked at me closely, his head on an angle, and for a second I had the funniest feeling that he was going to open my jaws and look at my teeth or pick up my foot and rap the bottom of it. I heard a shout and saw Pa waving from the barn. He walked up to us and sat down. I gave him my glass of switchel. "Daisy had a bull calf," he said wearily, and then he smiled.

My pa was so handsome when he smiled, with his eyes as blue as cornflowers and his beautiful white teeth. He hardly did anymore, and it felt like a hard rain letting up. Like Mamma might come up from hanging wash and join us. Like Lawton might come out of the woods any second, his fishing pole over his shoulder.

Beth, Lou, and Tommy chased off to see the new calf. Pa finished the switchel and I poured him some more. Switchel is easier to drink than plain water when you are hot and thirsty. Mixing a little vinegar, ginger, and maple syrup into the water helps it to digest.

Pa looked at Royal, his shirt soaked with sweat, and my hands, dirty from the stones, and Pleasant unhitched, and put it all together. "I'm obliged to you," he said. "It's a son's work, planting. Not a daughter's. Thought I had a son to do it."

"Pa," I said quietly.

"Don't understand why he left. Couldn't tear me away from land like this," Royal said.

I bristled at that. I was angry at Lawton for leaving, too. But Royal was not family and therefore had no right to speak against him. Thing of it was, I didn't understand why my brother had left, either. I knew they'd had a fight, he and Pa. I saw them going at one another in the barn. First fists and then Pa had gone for his peavey. Then Lawton had run into the house, thrown his things into an old flour sack, and marched out again. I'd run after him. Me and Lou both, but Pa stopped us.

"Let him go," he'd said, blocking our way down the porch steps.

"But, Pa, you can't just let him walk out. It's the dead of winter," I pleaded. "Where's he going to go?"

"I said let him go! Go back in the house, go on!" He pushed us inside, slammed the door, and locked it, as if he were afraid we would leave, too. And afterward, he was so changed, it was as if we'd lost our father as well as our mother and brother. Some days later I asked him what the fight was about. But he wouldn't tell me, and from the anger in his eyes, I knew better than to press.

Royal and Pa talked farming for a bit and milk prices and who was building yet another camp on Fourth Lake or up the hill at Big Moose Lake and how many guests it would hold and how the market for cream and butter ought to go through the roof this season and why would anyone buy the slop that came up on the trains from Remsen when they could now get fresh milk right here.

Then Royal picked up his wagon wheel and said he had to get along to Burnap's. The iron tread was loose and George Burnap was the only one nearby with a forge. After he left, I thought I might get a talking-to for sitting and drinking switchel with him, but I didn't. Pa just gathered Pleasant's traces and walked him back to the barn, asking the mule if he had any idea why Frank Loomis had four good sons and he didn't have one.





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"In the pantheon of great writers, of profound voices, Milton stands second only to Shakespeare," Miss Wilcox said, her boot heels making pok pok noises on the bare wood floor as she crossed and recrossed the room. "Now, of course one may argue that Donne deserves..."

"Pssst, Mattie! Mattie, look!"

I slid my eyes off the book I was sharing with Weaver, toward the desk to my left. Jim and Will Loomis had a spider on a piece of thread. They were letting it crawl back and forth on its leash, giggling like idiots. Bug taming was a Loomis specialty. First, Jim would pull a piece of thread from his shirt hem and painstakingly fashion it into a tiny noose. Then Will would snatch up a spider or a fly when Miss Wilcox's back was turned. He was quicker than Renfield in Bram Stoker's Dracula, though mercifully, he did not eat what he caught. He would hold his victim in cupped hands and shake it until it was stunned. Then as Will held the bug, Jim would slip the noose over its head. When the bug regained its senses, it became the star attraction in the Loomis Brothers Circus, which, depending on the time of year, might also feature a three-legged bullfrog, a half-dead crayfish, an orphaned blue jay, or a crippled squirrel.