True Blue Page 15

  Neither Mom nor I said anything, so he smiled and said, “One time when your grandpa was gone out of town, your grandma just lined us boys up outside her room, and we went in one by one and got our whipping. Your uncle Luke was first, and he came out bawling and crying and then winked at us, so we knew it was nothing—wouldn’t hurt at all. But we wanted her to think we felt it, so we all made a big fuss.” He laughed.

  Mom smiled. Then stopped smiling.

  What I couldn’t figure out was why she was saying nothing at all. Daddy said, “You do agree with me, Sarah, don’t you?”

  She coughed. Finally, she said, “What does it matter, Mark? Our kids are grown.”

  “It’s a principle. It’s about what it takes to understand God’s word and embrace it. Sometimes it takes submission and humility. If the devil is in there, you have to drive him out.”

  Finally, I could hold it in no longer. I said, and I really was wondering, “Do you think the devil is in Brad Greeley? He’s only three.”

  Before Daddy could answer, Mom turned around, put her arm over the seat, and said, “What do you think, Abby? You’ve been minding him for a year, off and on.”

  Daddy said, “I think—”

  But Mom interrupted him. “I want to know what Abby thinks. I really do.”

  I said the first thing that came into my mind, which was, “I don’t think whipping him is going to make him stay still. I think it’s only going to make him run away.”

  Daddy said, “Those children don’t know how to mind.”

  I said, “I don’t think they even think about minding. They think about running.”

  I had another thought.

  “I think they’re like Jack, not like Jefferson. If we whipped Jack, it wouldn’t make him stop running. It would make him run faster. If we whipped Jefferson, he might not run at all. He might just stop and buck.”

  Mom reached over and smoothed my hair. Daddy didn’t say anything, and we drove the rest of the way home. When we got there, we discovered a couple of interesting things. The first of these was that it hadn’t rained nearly as much at home as it had in town—there was only half an inch in the rain gauge and you could see some sky to the east and south by the last bit of sunlight. The second of these was a note tacked beside the barn door, which read, I rode Happy, Foxy, and Blue. I put out all the hay, and I left Blue in the pasture with the other geldings. When I left, he was getting along fine, but you might check them. Love, Danny. Sure enough, Blue was out in the pasture. He was standing by the fence, hidden by the barn from the gate, which was why we hadn’t seen him as we drove in. He looked beautiful—his gray coat shone a little in the twilight. His ears were pricked and his neck was arched. As I was watching him, Jack and Lincoln trotted across the pasture together, and Blue turned and trotted after them. They squealed and kicked up, and all three took off at a gallop, bucking a few times, but mostly running. They looked like they were having fun—that was one thing (no kicking or pinned ears). And Jack won. That was the other thing.

  Inside, Mom was sitting with Spooky, petting him a little with one finger while the kitten gobbled down his supper, oatmeal and milk mixed with some cat food. This was the first day we’d left him for this long, and he was hungry. Mom said, “Oh, he was crying when we came in. I should have come home at noon and fed him, but it seemed like such a long drive in the rain.”

  “We could take him with us.”

  “Maybe next weekend we will.”

  Then she said, “You understand what Daddy’s talking about when he talks about the Greeley kids, don’t you?”

  “Mom, I know I should have been more careful that day. It was a nightmare. I was looking at him, and then I looked at something else, and then I looked back at him, and he was gone. We ran all over the store. It was like he had disappeared into thin air. I thought I was going to die when that lady came in with him. I mean, it was like everywhere we looked was exactly the wrong place, and then because of that he went to the very place that was the worst place for him to go.”

  Spooky finished his food and burped. Mom picked him up and took him over to the cat box, where she set him down and kept petting him with her finger. I went on, “But if I had paid attention, he wouldn’t have run off, and none of this would have happened!”

  “None of what?”

  “With Daddy and the elders.”

  “We all know it was a difficult situation, Abby. Rhoda Greeley never blamed you for a second, because once last fall, she found him down in the basement at her mother’s house, standing on a box, looking into that washing machine her mother has, just a big old-fashioned tub without a lid. It was full of clothes soaking in bleach. She told me she nearly fainted. The only reason she’d gone to look in the basement was that the cellar door was pushed slightly open. She said to me, ‘It was so dark and damp, I can’t imagine why any child would go down there, but he did.’ ”

  “Did she spank him?”

  Spooky scratched sand over the tiny little pile he had made, and Mom picked him up and set him on the living room rug. He raced out to the middle of the floor and leapt into the air. Mom said, “No, she put a latch on the door.”

  After we’d watched Spooky for another minute (he hopped over to the couch and reached under the flap, and then fought with the flap for a few seconds before running away), Mom said, “Your dad has been upset about Brad and Bart for a long time. Long before the drugstore thing. He’s thought they were disruptive and distracting ever since Brad could walk and Bart could crawl. It was the drugstore thing that made him feel like he could say something. He thought everyone would agree with him, so he’s a little surprised that so few do.”

  “Do you?”

  She leaned toward me and whispered in my ear. “I agree with you.” She sat up. “But your dad isn’t really talking about Brad and Bart. He’s talking about Danny. You understand that, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  Mom picked Spooky up and held him in her lap. I could hear Rusty come onto the porch, and then she looked through the window at us. She sat down as if to say, “Oh, there you are. I’ve found you.”

  “You know, your dad and Luke and Matthew have been talking for years about those weekly beatings they got from your grandfather, and not just because the girls didn’t get them. They can never decide whether they needed them or they didn’t need them. You could say they got used to them, but you could also say that those beatings made those boys mad, and they misbehaved in spite of them, or even, I think, because of them. There was a ‘try and stop me’ sort of thing, or even ‘okay, if you’re going to beat me anyway, then I’ll do whatever I want to.’ And the beatings stopped. Do you know why?”

  I shook my head.

  “They stopped one day when your uncle Luke was fourteen, and he just grabbed the belt out of your grandfather’s hand and he went after your grandfather, and he said, ‘If you ever lay a hand on me or my brothers again, I will kill you.’ Your grandfather backed off after that. And then when Luke and Hannah and Ruth and your dad had kids of their own, they did not whip them. I think he spanked Danny once and switched him once, and he did spank you that time about running into the road, but his heart wasn’t in it.”

  Now Spooky climbed onto Mom’s knee, and then stepped very carefully over to my knee. He fell into my lap. We laughed. Mom sighed. She said, “I think he wonders if maybe he had spanked Danny more, Danny would be less prideful.”

  I picked Spooky up and held him next to my chest with my good hand, and then petted him with my casted hand. It wasn’t very easy. But my wrist didn’t hurt at all. It hadn’t hurt all day, I realized. I said, “Danny is Danny.”

  “That’s what I tell him.”

  I said, “I don’t think the devil is in Danny.”

  “I don’t, either.”

  “Does Daddy?”

  She shrugged

  I said, “Really?”

  She said, “Really.”

  “Why would he think that?”

 
“Well, it’s not exactly that the devil is in Danny, it’s that Danny is doing lots of things that are temptations—movies, dances, listening to all kinds of music, having his own car and driving wherever and whenever he wants. Consorting with all sorts of people who might not have Danny’s best interests at heart.”

  “But has he gotten into trouble?”

  “Not that we’ve heard. Jake would tell us if the police didn’t, I’m sure. But your dad would say that you don’t have to break the law to be lost.”

  I set Spooky on the rug and then moved my finger. He pounced on it. I made my finger absolutely quiet, and Spooky turned away, then I moved it again, and he pounced again. I said, “I think he’s having fun. I think his girlfriend is Leah Marx, and she reads books and makes animals out of napkins and goes for walks. I don’t think the devil is tempting him with those sorts of things.”

  Mom said, “Maybe not. But your dad didn’t get to have that sort of fun. For one thing, that sort of fun really didn’t exist in Oklahoma when we were kids—no kid had his own car. There was no rock and roll, we weren’t allowed to go to the movies, and there wasn’t a nearby movie theater anyway. If we went to a dance, it was a square dance, with about six adults there for every kid. If you danced too close to your partner, a grown-up walked by and gave you a poke on the arm, and you backed away. I mean, I don’t know what your dad thought Danny was going to get from Jake for working for him, but Jake actually pays him a pretty good wage, and he also works as a ranch hand, so he has some money. We didn’t have any money, so fun was a pretty abstract idea.”

  “And you were married by the time you were eighteen.”

  “Well, your dad was nineteen, but yes. That was pretty normal then and there, but I would be shocked if Danny did the same thing.”

  “Leah Marx is going to college and has lots of plans.”

  “I’m sure she does. Anyway, what I mean is, lots of times the devil is in the things you don’t know about, or that’s the way it seems—”

  Daddy appeared at the top of the stairs in his robe. I could see that he had been taking a shower. He said, “What are you two talking about?”

  Mom looked up at him. She said, “This and that.”

  “Well, I feel a little, I don’t know, like I’m coming down with something. Can you check the horses before bed? I’m turning in right now.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Mom. She stood up and handed Spooky to me; she went up the stairs and put her hand on Daddy’s forehead, then the back of her hand on his cheeks. “Did you take an aspirin? You go to bed and I’ll get you a couple.” Daddy went into their room. Normally, he would have argued with her, but since he didn’t, I thought maybe he was feeling pretty sick.

  Boot Hooks

  Braided Rope Reins

  Chapter 17

  I SET SPOOKY IN HIS BOX AND FOUND A COUPLE OF TOYS FOR HIM to play with—a ball of yarn and a wooden spool. What I did was, I nested the ball of yarn in his old sweater bed, and then perched the spool on top of it so that it would fall and roll as soon as he touched it. Then I went into the kitchen. Mom or Daddy had brought the dishes in from the car, and they were sitting by the sink. I knew that I could wash them, but instead I went over and looked out the window.

  Except for footsteps, probably Mom’s because they were quick and light, walking from one room to another upstairs, the house was quiet. The rain had completely stopped. I thought it was amazing in a way that Uncle Luke had threatened my grandfather, who always seemed to me to be pretty much fun, full of jokes and things, but he did have a temper, and so did Uncle Luke, so if someone was going to threaten him, it would be Uncle Luke.

  But what I wondered about more was the idea of the devil being in Danny. I would have thought that the devil was in a person who would be mean for no reason, like some of the kids at school. When I was in fourth grade, we had a boy with some sort of heart problem. He was little and pale, and one day, two of the bigger boys walked up to him in the hall and took his pants down. That was the sort of thing I would think that the devil would do. I had also noticed that some kids got in trouble at school, and they were sorry about it, but other kids, a few at least, truly didn’t care—they didn’t care about hurting others and they didn’t care about being punished because the punishment didn’t seem to hurt. I would have thought that there was the devil in that, because it was superhuman, and the devil was superhuman. And we all knew people who liked to hurt others. When those boys pulled down Marty Gorman’s pants, not everyone laughed, but some kids did—at Marty.

  It did not seem to me that the devil was in things that were just fun, like going to dances or listening to music. What I decided that Mom had been trying to tell me was that Daddy didn’t actually know what the devil was in, given all the things that Danny was doing that he himself had never done, but better safe than sorry. However, I thought that if the devil was in Danny, Danny would not think to write a note to us that had Love, Danny at the end. The devil wouldn’t think of that sort of thing.

  When Mom came down and saw the dishes on the kitchen counter, she said, “Why don’t you go check on the horses while I clean this up, and then maybe we all need to go to bed a little early, if there’s something going around.”

  My jacket was hanging by the back door. I put it on. Rusty was there to accompany me as soon as I stepped out onto the porch. She sat down and watched me as I slipped into my boots.

  Sometimes the rain we get is from Hawaii—in that case, there is plenty of it, but it is warm, and the air after it is warm, too. You hardly need a sweater, even though your boots are sinking into the mud. Other times the rain is from Alaska. In that case, the wind that comes after it is dry and cold and the temperature drops almost to freezing, even when it’s March, not December. Daddy always says that where we live, it can be “four seasons a day.” When I stepped off the porch, I knew we were back in winter, even though the day before I had given Barbie her lesson in shirtsleeves.

  The clouds were completely gone now—the winds had blown them off, and I could just barely see the moon, which was not even a crescent, but a tiny bright sliver. Stars were everywhere. In the fall, the hillsides all around our house were pale, so that the valley seemed full of light even at night, but now they were so thick with grass that everything was dark—the fence lines and the trees against the hillsides, the coats of the horses, the wet side of the barn, the dark water in the dark troughs, the mud in the areas of the pasture where the horses spent most of their time. Damp yellowness poured out of Daddy’s bedroom window, and also from the porch light, which I left on, but it didn’t get far. Within a few steps, I was making my way more by scent and sound than by sight.

  I had my head down because of the chill, and mostly I was watching Rusty, who was just ahead of me, her nose lifted and her ears pricked. After cold rains, I didn’t think there would be many fragrances on the wind, but Rusty seemed to think otherwise. I would have gone into the barn and turned on the light, but I decided instead to let my eyes adjust. I stood by the gate, and pretty soon I could see Blue, pale against the trees, and then I saw Jefferson by his white front feet, and then Lincoln turned his head and I saw his blaze. After that, it was as if the horses’ bodies formed around their white markings, and I could see them standing under the trees. Only Jack was missing, and then there he was, on the far side of the pasture by the slope, rubbing his shoulder against a fence post, either scratching an itch or simply making trouble—a yearling is like one of the Greeley kids. He spent a lot of time exploring, and if there was something strange, say, a wobbly fence post, he would play with it until he did something to it. I whistled, to see if I could distract him from the fence post, and he looked up. When he saw me, he turned around.

  In the meantime, closer at hand, Blue also was staring at me, and I suddenly remembered that thing Jane Slater had done, so I called out, “Blue, Blue, how are you?” and he at once answered back with a loud whinny. And this whinny was in turn answered by Jack as he trotted over from that fe
nce post to see what was going on. The two of them met me at the gate. Fortunately, I had exactly two little pieces of carrot in my jacket pocket, and they were good enough even though they were at least a day old. Blue wasn’t even all that pushy about getting his before Jack. As they chomped their morsels, I smoothed their forelocks and petted their faces. When their carrots were gone, they twisted their noses toward one another and started sniffing. I think each one wanted to see whether the other one had gotten anything that he himself had not gotten. But they were easygoing about it. I wished I had more carrots, but then I started walking along the fence line and picking handfuls of long green grass with my good hand. I would pick a good thick bunch, which was no problem because the ground was soft from the rain, and then give Blue half and Jack half. Rusty found this boring and wandered away into the dark. I could hear her for a moment, and then not—for a big dog, she was very quiet.

  Jefferson and Lincoln allowed this to go on for a few minutes before they decided that something was happening that required their attention. They came over and chased Jack and Blue away from the gate, and stuck their own noses over for the grass. I gave them each a little bit, then walked over to the mare pasture.

  Amazon, Foxy, Happy, and Sprinkles were already at the gate when I got there. No doubt they thought something better than grass was coming their way, too. But they were pleased with the shocks of grass. Happy got hers first, then Amazon, then Foxy, then Sprinkles. We had had Sprinkles for a long time, a year, and it now looked like Daddy had found a buyer for her—a local hotel that did trail rides had lost one of their string, and she would go there to fill the spot. I thought she was a little grumpy for a trail horse, because she didn’t like other horses to come up behind her. But I supposed that they would put a red ribbon on her tail and put her in the back of the line, then teach her not to try to get to the front of the line. I hoped she would work out, since she had no talent for ranch work and she wasn’t pretty enough to go in parades. Not every horse is a star, but Daddy always said that a horse has to eat and so a horse has to work. Trail rides at a hotel were not hard work. I patted Sprinkles down her neck.