Defective

enough shit his drawers. The Constable sat right down in front of him and had a little chat.

  "I couldn’t hear what he said, but your guy looked pretty scared," the barkeep had told the Landlord. "Haven’t had a problem with ‘em since."

  "So I heard," the Landlord now said with a smile. "Thank you Pierre."

  ___

  The rain stopped and the sun emerged in the late afternoon. Marvellous had already explored the press house and now she went outside to look for Hap. She checked the barn and the smaller shed beside it; she called his name as she walked the rows of trees, up and down. Finally, she came to the furthest edge of the orchard. To her left she could just make out a trail coming out of the woods. She spotted the bicycle. But where was her brother?

  She began to lope across the perimeter between the cliff's edge and the orchard. The land sloped upwards slightly as she got closer and closer to the edge. At a pine tree, its branches hanging out over the valley below and its roots clinging to the side of the cliff, she saw first a boot then a shin then a thigh.

  She crouched down beside him on the ground. Hap's eyes were red and his face was streaked with dirt. His soaking wet clothes clung to his body.

  "Hap, what happened? Are you all right?"

  When he didn't respond, Marvellous slapped him once, hard, across his face. Hap didn’t seem to notice.

  "This is it," he said. "Home."

  "Home?"

  "It all came back to me, Marvellous. This is where I live. I have a wife and children Marvellous and I don't know where they are!"

  Hap began to sob and leaned heavily against Marvellous. She shifted her weight to keep from toppling over. A distant crack of thunder made her look up. Clouds were beginning to thicken up again; more rain was on the way.

  "Come on," she said, standing up and hauling her brother to his feet. "Let's get you home."

  ___

  Bull and Jones had suspended hunting for three days to help with the planting. With the hard work done, and Forest and Jelly minding the crops, the brothers now sat under heavy forest cover waiting for game. Bull had followed his nose, pointing out rabbit and pheasant runs that ran to a small pool of spring water, fed by the same underground river that fed the creek.

  "Gathering spot, see? Just have to wait a while."

  The brothers sat on the moss-covered remains of a concrete foundation. Jones crouched on one side of it and picked dirt from his fingernails with his smaller knife. Bull sat on a piece of birch bark to keep out the damp. The tops of three of the foundation's walls were just barely visible through the mulch and forest debris. Bull could see that the house had been a large one. He stood and walked into the middle of the structure, crouched down and used a stick to dig down into the earth.

  "You ever think of the orchard?" Jones asked.

  "Sure," said Bull, not looking up.

  "Santa's sure seems happier. She never used to sing at the orchard and her cooking is a lot better than it used to be. Funny that. I don't ever remember her cooking tasting this good. Wonder what happened?"

  "No more Ma."

  Without Ma looming over her, telling her what to do all the time, Santa had relaxed and become more confident, humming to herself or to Mixer as she did her chores. At the farm, she was able to experiment and was always consulting Jelly on the best herbs to use. Bull was usually pragmatic when it came to food. He had to eat but he didn’t think about what he was eating or whether he enjoyed it or not. Now he looked forward to meal times.

  "Do you miss it?"

  "The orchard? Sure, I guess."

  "You guess?"

  "Well," Bull said slowly, standing back up "I like hunting but I miss the apples. But here, it's our work, not someone else's. What we do is for us, not for him."

  Jones nodded. His brother, he knew, had no fond memories of the Landlord. None of them did but Bull's anger towards him was palpable. He was getting red in the face just talking about him.

  "Did something happen with you and him?"

  "No."

  Bull had never told Jones or anyone else what he knew about the Landlord. The stink of it had been all over him. The first time it had happened Ma had seen Bull wrinkle his nose when he came in for supper that night. Over dinner she'd caught his eye and almost imperceptibly shaken her head at him. He'd never told his father. What could Pa do against the Landlord? The orchard and everything on it, including them, was his.

  A tendril of a smell reached Bull's nostril and he held up a finger to his lips to alert Jones. As the odour coalesced in his brain, he raised his index and middle fingers above either side of his head to indicate two rabbits. He pointed.

  No matter how often Bull and Jones went hunting together, Bull could never pinpoint the exact moment when Jones moved. He was there one second then gone and back all within moments, two dead hares, necks broken, dangling from his hands.

  ___

  There wasn’t much Forest and Jelly could do so soon after planting. It was a waiting game. They harvested the edible weeds that came up in the field and some, like the purslane, dandelions and widow’s weed, Jelly dug out and transplanted into the herb garden, which she’d set up at the back of the barn.

  In the heat of the afternoon Forest and Jelly would read in the barn. They’d found several thread-bound booklets of varying sizes in a small box. The booklets were filled with lists of plants and numbers: Hay 75B / Corn: 163/B/ac. Onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, pumpkins, half a dozen other squash varieties and a dozen other vegetables and legumes all had numbers listed beside them. Fruits were listed in separate booklets: pearl apples, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, frews and choke cherries. The far column listed the weather for the day. August 5: 98C, humid. Heavy rain (+5"). If the records were accurate there was even more potential on this farm than they’d originally thought.

  While Jelly was engrossed in the booklets, Forest found one with a hard cover and thick, cream-coloured pages. He sounded out the title in his head: The Complete Deloran County Law. He flipped through the pages and stopped randomly.

  It shall be the Law of the Deloran County, he read, that if any Property owner, upon his or her death, has not designated said Property to an Heir or Heirs, in Writing or in the Company of an Authorized Witness, whomsoever of the persons currently residing on said Property and who has reached the Legal Age, shall be given all rights and privileges to said Property.

  He brought the book with him to the dinner table that night. After they’d eaten, he read it out loud.

  "What does it mean?" Narrow asked.

  "It means," said Forest, "that if Porkchop is twenty or older when Pater dies and we’re still here, she’ll get the farm."

  "Nothing’s going to happen to Pater. He’s a tough old man," she said.

  "But what if Pater died tomorrow?" Jelly asked. "He’s been sick once already."

  "We’d be right back where we started," said Jones.

  "It’s not the same this time," Porkchop said. "No one knows we’re here."

  "The Constable knows," said Titania. She studied her sister closely; Porkchop hadn’t told them about PC Pierre inheriting the farm.

  Porkchop looked up at her sharply. Had she overheard her and the Constable that night?

  "He won’t say anything."

  "How can you be so sure?"

  Titania saw her sister blush.

  ___

  Marvellous said little as Hap told her all about his children and his wife, how he had first come to the orchard and what he knew of the Landlord. What he told her didn’t change her own plans but, she realized, she now had something more than herself to fight for. If she reunited Hap with his children then she would have a real family; something she’d never had before.

  Her mother had been kicked out of Mrs. Nibbs’s bawdy house once it was obvious that she was too far along in her pregnancy to abort; Marvellous was born in a shack near the Andrastyne wharf. There her mother had made a living for the two of them, entertaining th
e sailors and less affluent businessmen who couldn’t afford Mrs. Nibbs.

  Her mother was not a stupid woman but had never been trained to do anything other than to be a whore. She made up for it in so many ways. She taught her daughter to read using the Deloran County Law book she had stolen from Mrs. Nibbs and whatever other reading material she could find. She taught her what she knew of plants and how to use them; how to fix things and how to fish. She taught her to gamble and, when Marvellous was nine and got her first period, what herbs would lessen menstrual pain and which would prevent pregnancy.

  Her mother talked often about her son, Hap, and about Marvellous’ father, whom she'd said was a wealthy landowner from Battery. Marvellous remembered the love she heard in her mother’s voice for one; the hatred for the other. When she died of pneumonia, Marvellous was sent to a labour camp in the south to pick lemons and limes.

  When she turned twenty and left the camp Marvellous travelled up and down the coast, always managing to find work on farms and in lumber camps. She saved her money and made her plans: how she would travel to Battery and trick her father into giving her his land. Kill him if necessary.

  "The best way to survive this world," her mother had told her, "is to own property. If you have property you have a future."

  The moment she’d seen the Landlord at the docks she knew it was the man her mother had told her about. He hadn’t recognized her; there was no reason why he should have. He’d never seen Marvellous; didn’t even know her name. He knew of her, in a vague way, but had never for a