A Difficult Boy (20 page)

“Y-yessir.”

Pa's hat brim cast a band of shadow across his face. “And I don't want to hear any more about Mr. Lyman having to discipline you, understand?” The band of shadow divided Pa's features like a mask, the light touching only his angular jaw, lined hard and deep around nose and mouth.

“Discipline?” Ethan repeated, adjusting his hat. “N-no, sir.”

Ethan's bare feet padded a silent and solitary path across the darkened kitchen toward the cellar. He eased the door open and peered down the stairs. The tiny circle of light from the candle seemed a feeble defense against the yawning blackness below. The cellar's silent darkness seemed alive, waiting to swallow him up, just as it had swallowed Daniel.

Ethan quelled his fear and padded down the stairs, concentrating on the small charmed circle within the candle's light. He held the candle high, sending the dark retreating behind barrels and crocks and boxes and bins. The smells of vinegar, rotting cabbage and apples, and damp earth stung his nostrils.

Daniel sat on one of the boxes of sand that held last fall's root vegetables. His knees were drawn up to his chest, his arms wrapped around his legs. His head was bowed against his knees, and he rocked back and forth, murmuring in his secret language.

“D-Daniel?” Ethan said softly, then again, louder, when Daniel didn't reply. “Daniel!”

Daniel's head jerked up. He blinked twice, hard, at the light and took in a gulping breath. He turned away, rubbing his face with the heels of his hands. “Ah, lad, I must'a been dreaming,” he said. His voice sounded as though it stuck in his throat. The dark shadows and red rims around his eyes looked like something different from rubbed-out sleep.

“Are you all right?” Ethan asked.

Daniel coughed. “Aye . . . Aye,” he said hoarsely. “A bit damp and dusty is all.” His cough turned into a rough laugh with a hiccup at the end. “Least I'm too big for him to shut up in the potato bin.” His eyes fixed on the light the way a dog's eyes might fix on a scrap of food. “You still fancy knowing what it's like on a ship, lad, just pinch out your candle.”

Ethan suppressed a shiver. He wove his way between a pair of barrels and hoisted himself onto the box next to Daniel. He set the candle between them. “Why are you being punished?”

Daniel shifted to sit cross-legged, facing Ethan. “Can't you guess, now?” His fingers plucked at the puddle of tallow at the candle's base.

“We had to sit in the parlor 'til bedtime, listening to Mrs. Lyman read from Scripture,” Ethan said. “It was all about stealing.”

“Aye. Zeloda saw me going down to the root cellar after some carrots. Himself was standing at the top of the stairs when I come back up.”

“Did you tell him they were for Ivy?”

Daniel's shoulders rustled his shirt. The shirt was untucked and ballooned around him like a skin that he'd never grow into. “Don't you think he knew that? He said—” His eyes drifted toward the candle. “He said if I was that mad for carrots, I could stay down here and have me fill of 'em.”

“Oh. Did he thrash you very bad?”

A shudder worked its way down Daniel's back. “It wasn't the thrashing I was minding so much as missing me ride.” There was something else, Ethan guessed, that Daniel had minded more than either, but he couldn't figure out what it was.

Ethan dug into his pocket for something wrapped in his handkerchief. “Ma gave me some cake to take back with me. You can have it if you like. I had plenty to eat at tea.” He unwrapped it and laid it on the box. “Oh,” he sighed. The cake had dissolved into a pile of crumbs. “It's broken.”

Daniel moistened his fingertips, pinched some crumbs together into a lump, and stuck it in his mouth. “It's fine, lad.” He licked his fingers noisily and took another lump of crumbs. “How was your visit?”

Ethan stuck his thumb in the warm tallow. “It was all right, I s'pose.” It wasn't entirely a lie, nor entirely the truth. Some of it had been fine: working like a man alongside Pa to put in the potatoes, start Ma's kitchen garden, fix fences, mend the shed roof. Doing three days' work in a day and a half. Feeling a happy sort of exhaustion that his work made up somehow for not being there while Ma had been sick, for not knowing they'd needed him. Curling up on his old bed in the attic with the marmalade cat warm and purring at his back. Teasing Maria and Chloe and not even getting scolded for it. Catching Ma watching him across the table, wearing a smile that looked as if she'd been saving it up ever since he'd left.

But then he'd noticed the lines around Ma's eyes, how she seemed to get tired so quickly. He'd noticed, too, that there'd been no singing in the evenings, less noise in the house altogether. Even the secret glances that Ma and Pa exchanged—the ones that used to warm Ethan inside like a swallow of good sweet tea—even those had changed. Something new about the tilt of an eyebrow or the curve of a lip that Ethan
had caught passing between them had made his insides go still and dull.

Daniel's hand stopped halfway to the cake. “As good as all that, eh? Something wrong to home?”

“No. Not really. I mean, Ma was sick, but she's all better now. Mostly.” Ethan watched the wick curl, blacken, crumble inside the flame, the tallow oozing down in thick, slow drops.

Something that was not candlelight flickered across Daniel's face and was gone. “Is she, now? Are you sure?”

“I—well, that's what Pa says.” Ethan pinched a bit of soft tallow from the top of the candle. It seared his fingertips.

“And what else did your da say that has you looking as if you just felt the end of herself's spoon on your knuckles?”

“Pa says—he says I'm not to keep company with you anymore.” Ethan peeked at Daniel's face.

Daniel seemed to be concentrating on a pair of shriveled cabbage heads hanging from the ceiling in knobby brown fists. “Oh, aye? And how're you s'posed to be getting your chores done, then?”

“I mean, after chores—in the evenings and on the Sabbath. He says you make trouble for me.”

Daniel folded the ends of Ethan's handkerchief over the remains of the cake. “Your da's right. You oughtn't to be spending time with liars and thieves.” He set the little bundle in Ethan's lap.

“But—but you're not!”

Daniel hopped off the box and paced the cellar, tethered within the circle of yellow light. “Ain't you heard me with your own ears and seen me with your own eyes? Ain't that what I been locked up for all afternoon and evening?” The flame bent and twisted with the breeze from Daniel's passage, turning his shadow into a dark, dancing ghoul against walls and ceiling, around barrels and boxes and bottles.

“But that's different! That don't count!”

Daniel stopped in front of Ethan. The flame straightened and stilled. “You ain't but nine, lad. Who're you to be saying what counts and what don't? You'd best listen to your da.”

“But if I do, then you won't have anybody.” Worse, though, Ethan thought, was imagining life at the Lymans' without Daniel's company to ease the time between work and sleep.

Daniel's body moved carelessly inside his shirt. His face twisted before he turned away. “I got Ivy. She's been enough for me this long.”

“He wants me to make friends with the Wards.”

“Oh . . . well, he don't know them, now, does he?”

“He don't know you, either.”

Daniel slowly turned back, shaking his head. “Neither do you, lad.”

Ethan frowned at the cake in his lap. He fumbled in his pocket. “I brought you something else.”

Daniel's little horse stood in Ethan's palm. The flame made its sides seem to heave in and out, its nostrils quiver with breath, its mane bob along its proudly arched neck.

Daniel stood frozen for a moment, a muscle trembling below one eye. He pressed his lips together and drew in a slow, steady breath. In one long stride, he was in front of Ethan, his hand closing gently around the horse. “Ta, lad,” he murmured.

“Ta?” Ethan asked.

“It means thanks.”

“Is that Irish?”

Daniel shook his head. “But it's how—it's how me da would'a said it.”

“She'll go bald if you keep brushing her like that,” Ethan said. Ankle-deep tufts of copper hair carpeted Ivy's stall. But the hair kept coming, and there was still no sign of her bare skin.

“You can help if you like,” Daniel suggested. He'd already brushed out most of Ivy's loose winter hair and burnished the mare's coat so that even in the shadowy stall she glowed softly. Now he gently brushed out the tangles in her mane. The mare arched her neck and crooned at his shoulder.

“Why should I spend my Sunday working?” Ethan's lower lip jutted out.

Rain thudded on the barn roof. The relentless downpour had made the Lymans decide to stay home instead of going to the meetinghouse for afternoon services.

“You can do her tail,” Daniel said.

Ethan gave the thick chestnut hair a halfhearted swipe with his brush.

Daniel rubbed his thumb up and down the inside of Ivy's ear. The mare closed her eyes and leaned toward him, her upper lip quivering. A delighted grunt rumbled deep within her throat. He responded with a secret word that sounded like the happy whicker Ivy made when she greeted him.

“That means horse, doesn't it?” Ethan asked. He tried to repeat the word, but it sounded more like he was clearing his throat. “It means horse, or mare, or something like that. It must, because it's what you always call her.”

Ethan thought he saw a splash of pink color Daniel's cheek. “Umm—no—that ain't it. You say it like this: ‘
a mhuirnín
.' And it don't mean horse.”

Ethan tried again, but he still couldn't get his mouth to shape the word. “Well, what does it mean?”

Daniel retreated to the mare's forelock and mumbled something.

“What?”

Daniel took an audible breath. “Sweetheart, or darling, or some such.”

Ethan lowered his head and grinned at the mare's tail, giving it three hard sweeps with his brush. “Can you teach me? Teach me to talk Irish, I mean?”

Daniel's “no” was brisk and definite. “I don't fancy having a great spoonful of cayenne jammed down me throat. Nor do you, I'll wager.”

Ethan swallowed, his imagination already stinging his mouth and nose. “B-but you talk it—”

Daniel stepped out from the mare's shadow and waved his brush at Ethan. “Only out here, see? Never in the house, and never when himself is around. Nor herself neither.”

“Mr. Lyman did that? With the cayenne, I mean?”

Daniel nodded. “That was me first day here. The day she come. And she and me—” He rubbed the mare's forehead. “We both slept our first night in the barn.” He twisted her forelock into a rough rope, then untwisted it and smoothed it out again. “It's a pity,” he said softly.

“What's a pity?”

“A pity I can't be taking her when I leave.”

“Why not?”

Daniel rolled his eyes. “I ain't daft as all that, lad. I'd go to prison for sure now, wouldn't I?” His hands cupped the mare's chin, his forehead pressed against hers. “To be shut up forever,
away from the light . . . It'd be worse than death.” A tiny shudder quivered along Daniel's shoulders. Ivy nuzzled his fingers. He stroked the mare's cheek. “Sorry, lass. I couldn't do that for nobody. Not even you.”

“You could buy her.”

Daniel let out a horselike snort. “Oh, aye.”

“You told me you'll get your wages when you're twenty-one. Why couldn't you buy her? Even if it's not enough all at once, maybe you could pay for her a little at a time. Maybe . . .”

“Oh, and Lyman'll sure want to be selling her to me.” Daniel gave Ethan a skeptical grimace. “He'd not let me have her just for spite.”

“You won't know unless you ask.”

Daniel harumphed and returned to his brushing. “Some things you can know without asking.”

Ethan perched on the edge of the upper haymow and spread his arms. If he closed his eyes, the drop to the lower mow seemed to last longer, and in that final second before he landed in a cloud of hay dust, it would feel like flying. He pretended that the rain thudding on the roof was the flapping of a thousand eagles' wings all around him, and he was the biggest one, the king of the eagles. He stayed an eagle until the dust from his landing made him sneeze. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and picked himself up to fly again.

“Hey! What the bloody hell you playing at?”

“Just—just playing, that's all.” Ethan flopped down on the hay as Daniel came up the ladder.

“Playing at breaking your bloody neck is what you're at.” Daniel's head appeared at the edge of the lower mow.

“I'm bored.” After grooming Ivy had lost its appeal, Ethan had remembered how he and his friends Massey and Ira used to play at flying on rainy afternoons.

“Well, play at something else.”

“What?” Ethan rolled over onto his stomach and thumped at the hay, stirring up swirls of dust.

Daniel hauled himself the rest of the way into the mow and flopped down next to Ethan. He pulled out the fat little book Mr. Stocking had given him. The corners were already frayed and the pages dog-eared. “We could read some of this Shakespeare that peddler gave me. There's one I thought might be about Ireland, 'cause there's a lot of Macs in it.”

Ethan yawned. “Is it?” One toe squirmed in the hay, working a round hole through the dried grass.

“Nah. They're all Scottish. But there's witches and kings and murders and ghosts and such. In between all the speeches.” Daniel shook his head. “I can't see why they take so long to say a thing. Nobody can say ‘good day' without making a bloody speech out of it.”