Outcast (12 page)

The cabin door scratched open. Arch's mother stood in the shadows, talking to her son. Arch shook his head but then nodded. He had lost the argument. He stood and walked toward Standish, stopping to thrust his hands in his pockets.

“S'pose you want dinner.”

“That a question or an invitation?”

“Ma says I should ask you to come to dinner”

“What do you think about that?”

“Seems like a waste of food to me”

“I s'pose.”

“Better come anyhow”

“Why?”

“Ma says”

Standish nodded. “We'd better put the harrow away and get Hortenzia taken care of”

“Ma says it's time to eat”

“You want to leave Hortenzia standing in the sun?”

Arch sighed as he looked up at Standish. “Nope.”

“How about I put the harrow away. You pump a bucket of water for her”

“Don't see why I should?”

Standish bristled. “Don't see why you should give her water, or you don't know why you should have to pump it?”

“Yup” Arch said.

“Yup to which?” Standish asked. “You don't give a damn about the horse, or you're too lazy to pump water?”

“Neither”

“Has to be one or the other, Arch”

“Don't see why. Don't see why we should pump water when she can drink out of that spring same as Sally and the cows do”

Standish shut his eyes. “Why didn't you tell me that?”

“Didn't ask me”

Standish slapped his hat against one pant leg, a puff of dust marking the impact. “How about I take the harrow back where it was and unharness Hortenzia and wash up at the pump and join you an your mother for dinner?”

“Suits me” Arch twisted his neck to look up at Standish. “You ain't going to eat it all, are you?”

“No, Arch, I won't eat it all”

Arch nodded. Fair enough.

Standish stood back from the pump, drying his hands on his pants and wiping his face as well as he could with his shirt sleeves. Dinner had been strained yesterday. Arch stood guard, the shotgun leaning on the wall behind him, and his mother appearing only occasionally as a serving wraith. Yesterday, Arch had let slip how precious food was to the Belshaws. Standish couldn't tolerate that, so he had sent food to them, but to eat with them would be depriving them of that food. Still, refusing dinner would be a slap in the face for Mrs. Belshaw. Standish couldn't tolerate hurting the woman more than she had already been hurt.

Standish sighed and walked toward the house. He would play this by ear, the way he always did. He knocked, and Arch let him in. The table was set, three plates shining from its surface. That was a good sign. At least Mrs. Belshaw wouldn't be hiding in the kitchen. Might be they would talk. Might be he could probe the mystery surrounding these two.

“Sit” Arch said.

“Where do you want me to sit, Arch, on the floor?”

“If that's what you want”

“So you want me to sit wherever I want to?”

“Nope”

“So where do you want me to sit?”

Arch sighed. Standish had to be led around by the hand. “Maybe you could sit in the same place you sat yesterday”

“Maybe I could”

Standish sat down, just as Mrs. Belshaw stepped from the kitchen. He rose, startling Mrs. Belshaw. She staggered back a few steps, almost losing the platter she was carrying. Arch had the shotgun in his hands, his thumb on a hammer.

Tension in the room was palpable, thick enough to hinder breathing. Standish's words tiptoed into the room as softly as a mother checking on her sleeping child. “Sorry, I startled you ma'am, but where I come from, a man stands when a lady enters the room”

Standish had meant to ease the situation, but he only made it worse. Tears spewed from Mrs. Belshaw's eyes as water from a broken dam. Sobs shuddered through her body. She seemed on the verge of spilling the food but the need for nourishment was greater than the pain she felt. She set the plates on the table and fled into the kitchen, slamming the door behind her.

Arch's face twisted into a knot. He dropped the shotgun on the table with a force that would have unleashed its blast if the hammer had been pulled back to full cock. He ran into the kitchen after his mother.

Standish sighed. Some of the ham and potatoes had slipped from the dishes to the table. The scent and sight of them would usually trigger an acute hunger in Standish, but now he couldn't eat. He didn't know what he could do. These two were more fragile than the eggs they harvested. A simple courtesy had cracked their shells.

Standish knew the pain of isolation, of knowing that any person he met might be the agent of his death, but that was nothing compared to these two. He stepped back from the table and left the room, careful where he placed each foot. Perhaps the room was as fragile as its occupants. Any noise, and it might fall apart.

Maybe they knew! Maybe somebody had told them.… No, they were too isolated. Still, if they knew, Standish was in great danger, and.… He drove the thought from his mind.

The day was bright with the spring sun, welcoming him with open arms, but Standish stepped into it hesitantly, as though it might fracture, sending shards of green and yellow and blue and browns into the depths of the Earth.

Standish's eyes skipped across the yard. He had to do something. He couldn't tolerate being alone with his thoughts. The garden. The soft, tilled soil pulled his attention toward it. He had seen the bucket of corn in the Belshaw's barn that morning. He could plant corn. He could do that.

Standish walked to the barn, head down, thoughts swirling. The bucket was where he had seen it, standing against the barn door. Sweet corn, it would be and enough of it for corn-on-the-cob feasts and jars of canned corn for the winter. He picked up the bucket and walked to the corral, going through the saddlebags he had left hanging on the top rail. He had a ball of string in the bags. He knew he had a ball of string. Yes, there it was.

Standish walked to the north side of the garden. Plant corn there so it wouldn't shade the other plants. He didn't know what other seeds the Belshaw's had, but he could plant the corn. He could do that.

The garden lay north and south with a slight incline to the west. Standish had done a good job. The soil looked soft enough to sleep on, rich enough to produce a fine garden. Still it evoked nothing in him strong enough to overcome the sense of hopelessness he felt. Somehow, he had hurt Arch's mother. He looked at the garden and saw nothing but the pain in her face.

Standish sighed. He had best get to work, work being a remedy for most ills. He shook the bucket of corn. It is difficult to gauge the number of corn kernels in a bucket, harder still to determine how much space they would occupy in the garden. Well, the best place to start is at the beginning. He had corn and string. What else did he need…stakes.

Standish's eyes drifted around the yard. The slim remains of winter wood lay scattered on the south side of the house near the splitting stump. Standish left the corn and string on the north side of the garden and walked to the stump. The axe was rusted, the edge long gone. Arch shouldn't have left the axe outside. Standish shook his head. He had to stop thinking of Arch as an 80-year-old man. He was just a boy, not versed yet in the tools for survival. Still, he kept that shotgun gleaming under a coat of oil. Workers took care of the tools they needed most.

Not much to choose from in the wood pile, but there were still a few pieces of straight-grained wood. Standish picked up one piece of Lodge Pole Pine and clubbed it into suitable garden stakes. Arch and his mother could use the wood for kindling after the planting was done.

Stakes, string and seed. He could leapfrog the stakes across the garden, starting at the north side moving south, each line being a guide for the next. He would put the first row, he thought, on the edge of the tilled soil. He knelt in the grass, poking holes into the earth with his fingers and dropping two seeds in. How far apart? What was it that his father had told him. A smile crept on Standish's face. “A span and a width of your hand” his father had said. “When you grow up, a span of your hand will do” Standish spread his fingers, and put two more seeds in. He moved down the row like that, enjoying the coolness of the soil on his fingers, the warmth of the sun on his back. He halted, picking up a rock to mark the end of the first row. He walked back to the beginning, brushing the dust from his hands as he went. The rows should be the length of my feet apart, his father had said.

Standish scratched his cheek. He couldn't remember his father's feet…except the shoes. He always wore black lace-up shoes, whether to church on Sundays or kneeling over the garden. Weddings or baptisms or Easter or Christmas would pull a blue serge suit with a white shirt and a dark tie from the closet. But the foundation for any ensemble was black lace-up shoes. That's what he was wearing when he fell to the earth that day in the garden, and that was what he was wearing when they buried him.

Standish tapped one of the stakes into the ground, and tied one end of the string around it. He took a stake and walked to the other end of the garden, string trailing behind him as the walked. He pounded the stake in with a handy rock and tied the string to it. He broke the string then and returned. He could kneel on the grass at the edge of the garden, plant this second row without stepping on the soil, leaving it tilled and smooth.

Standish's thoughts fluttered back to his father, a great aficionado of poetry. He had stood that day in the garden and recited a verse from
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
. Sometimes Standish thought that was what set his own compass west, away from the comfort of his childhood family and home. Sometimes he thought he was searching for the wilderness that was “paradise enow” He had found wilderness, he thought. Paradise was another matter.

Standish knelt, putting two kernels of corn into the soil under the string. He measured another hand span and planted two more seeds. He fell into a routine: a hand span and two seeds his thoughts lost in the rhythm, the silence and the spring sun. Occasionally a scent would tease his nose, and he would wonder what flower had blessed the air. He stopped only occasionally, once when a butterfly fluttered by, winking yellow and black at him, and another time when he heard the call of a bird he hadn't heard before. The garden had become his own Eden, shedding him of his constant vigilance.

The rustle of grass, pulled him from his reverie. Arch and his mother were only a few steps away. One was carrying a hoe and the other a shovel. Standish jerked back. They meant to kill him! They must know. They must know who he was. Standish scrabbled backward, spilling the bucket of corn.

Mrs. Belshaw laid the shovel on the ground, leaning over to pull the bucket upright and began refilling it with spilled kernels. Arch leaned back on one hip. One eyebrow crawled up his forehead, and he shook his head. “Long as you're down there, maybe you can seed. Ma can make the trench, and I'll cover the seeds.”

Standish blushed. He could feel the heat spreading across his face. He wanted to say something not suitable for the company of a lady, but he gritted his teeth and nodded. They started down the row, Mrs. Belshaw cutting a furrow with the hoe, Standish seeding and Arch following, covering the seeds with the fine loamy soil. They worked silently, finding a rhythm in their labor. The corn rows marched out across the garden.

Next came the pumpkins, another fall crop with their promise of spicy pies. The planting was marked by the briefest of comments.

“Keep them along the edges so the vines trail off the garden.”

“About five-feet apart, no, closer to six.”

“How about five and a half?”

“Left my measuring stick in the house.”

The work and the bantering left the faintest of grins on Mrs. Belshaw's face. She labored under a wide-brimmed straw hat nearly as wide as her shoulders, but wherever her skin was open to the sun it blushed red. She had the prison pallor of some men he had known. What would make her home a prison?

After the pumpkins came the cucumbers and rutabagas and carrots and potatoes and beets and radishes and cabbage and lettuce. Only one patch lay vacant in the southeast corner of the garden.

Mrs. Belshaw rose. “Arch, if you would give me a hand?”

“Give you a hand? Don't know what I've been doing all day if I haven't been giving you a hand, and my knees and my back and about everything else I have.”

“Seems like you have some sass left.”

Arch looked at his mother and grinned. She grinned back. Her face cracked and the shell crashed to the ground, revealing a very pretty woman. Standish felt as though he were in the presence of wizardry. The two walked off, a little bounce in their steps and Standish was surprised they didn't take each other's hands. Into the house they went to emerge a moment later carrying pots of…tomatoes. Little yellow flowers winked from a redolent rich green. Standish salivated, remembering the days of his youth when he roamed through his family's garden with a saltshaker, choosing bright red tomatoes, peeling a bit of the skin with his teeth and shaking salt on the wound. Tomatoes are rare among fruit. They explode under the pressure of teeth, spewing flavor-drenched juice into the mouth. Standish's mouth watered at the thought, and he remembered that he hadn't had lunch.

Arch and his mother carried the tomatoes ceremoniously to the open corner of the garden, stopping there to wait for Standish. That corner would be first touched by the morning sun and open to its rays until dusk fell over the land. The plant's place at the lower edge of the garden ensured that any moisture would carry nutrients to the plant's roots.

Standish frowned. Irrigation. There had been no mention of any means of irrigation. To carry water from the pump for a garden of this size would occupy both of the Belshaws 24 hours a day. That later. Now, he would help them reset their precious tomatoes into the garden. He picked up the shovel and joined the pair.