“Thank you,” I said.
“I suppose you’re going to start dating soon, now that you’re seventeen?” he said.
I choked back a laugh. “Not bloody likely,” I said. That was a British phrase I’d picked up in a book somewhere and used whenever I could. You could get away with stuff like that with Frankie. He just smiled and nodded, doing his best to act like a normal adult man talking to a woman. It just about broke your heart sometimes. I think he was twenty-seven or twenty-eight that year. You could tell he wanted to hang out with people, that he was hungry for human contact. Only problem was, he had no idea how to talk to folks. Poor guy probably wanted to start dating, too. Not me, I mean. Just dating in general. It was lonely being crazy.
“I see,” said Frankie. “Not bloody likely, eh?”
“No, Frankie,” I said. “Not bloody likely at all.”
“Hmm. Very interesting,” he said. He looked at his bare wrist as though there was a watch on it—which there was not—and stood up. “Well, it’s been a real pleasure chatting with you,” he said, with excessive formality. “I’ve got to get going now.”
“Okay, Franks,” I said, trying not to smile. “By the way, did you happen to get a look at my underwear while I was passed out in the barn?”
He was so startled that for a minute I was afraid I’d traumatized him.
“What?” he asked.
“Oh, never mind,” I said. “I just hope it was clean, that’s all.”
“Hee-hee,” Frankie said.
“You did, you little sneak, didn’t you,” I said.
“Hee-hee,” Frankie said.
“Get out of here,” I said. “Thanks for the frog.”
“Bye, now,” said Frankie. “Stay off the barn for a while, hear?”
When a person is trapped indoors for too long, the mind starts playing around with things. Frankie telling me to stay “off the barn” stuck in my head until it started sounding like one of those phrases such as “on the wagon,” like people say to mean when they stop drinking. After only a day of sitting inside and watching that miserable little pond frog do nothing but breathe, “off the barn” seemed like a good way to express what it was like to be a lady. “I’m off the barn,” I could hear myself saying to people, and they would know I meant that I’d given up my errant ways and settled down to a life of sewing lace doilies and drinking tea. The opposite, of course, was “on the barn,” which would mean that I was behaving exactly like my usual self. I would go racing down the road on Brother, my braids flying out behind me, and folks would shake their heads and say, “There goes Haley. Been ‘on the barn’ for weeks now, and no telling when she’s coming off again.” It was a good metaphor, and it pleased me that I’d thought of it.
Then my thoughts turned to poor Brother. I didn’t know what I was going to do about him. He had to be fed and watered at least twice a day, and there was no way I would be able to carry the hay to his stall—Mother had been doing it since my accident, and she would have to keep on doing it, too. As soon as I was able to get around on crutches, I tried to make my way down to the shed. But the ground there was muddy and soft and covered in manure. My crutches sank into it and made me nearly lose my balance several times, and once I got to his stall all I could do was pet him and give him a little bit of a currying before my leg started to ache something awful.
Riding him was out of the question. He knew something was wrong with me, and he shied away from my cast at first, thinking in his horsey way that I was not the same Haley he’d always known, just because I had this new white thing on my leg. Horses are smart, but not that smart, and it took me a little while to talk him out of it.
“It’s just a cast, old buddy,” I said. “Nothing to be afraid of.”
He flattened his ears and stretched out his neck like he was going to bite it.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Bite it right off me. Just leave those pins in, or there’s no telling what all will happen. I could come apart like a Chinese puzzle.”
He didn’t bite it, though. He just sniffed it once, like a dog, which I do believe he sometimes thinks he is, and then once he realized it was only me he calmed down.
Brother was a gift from my father, who bought him as a foal from some neighbors of ours, the Shumachers. I named him Brother because a brother was what I wanted most in those days. Really, I think I wanted to be a brother, and have a little sister—life as an only child is a curse I wouldn’t wish on anyone, especially if you happen to be a girl. Life as a girl is pretty bad, all things considered. Seems like you can’t just do what you want—you have to do what other folks want you to do, or they might think ill of you. Those are my mother’s words, “think ill.” The worst thing that could happen in her world is that someone would think ill of her. God forbid. Myself, I don’t give two craps in the woods what anyone thinks of me, whether it’s ill or good or whatever.
Brother was mostly chestnut, with white stockings on his front feet and a white blaze on his forehead. I never found out exactly what kind of horse he was, though he looked kind of like a quarter horse. I am very proud of the fact that I broke him with only a little help from my father, and rode him almost every day after that. Brother was used to a lot of attention. But I couldn’t take care of him as well I could before, and Mother was afraid of him, just as she was afraid of all large animals.
“Brother,” I told him, “we’ve got tough times ahead. I’m going to be off the barn for a long while. Not by choice, you understand. By necessity.”
He swiveled his ears around like radar dishes.
“If we lived in a more civilized world, I’d turn you loose and let you be your own horse,” I said. “You could get married and have babies, and you could bring your family back to visit whenever you were in the neighborhood. But as it is, that’s out of the question, because the world has not yet attained that level of perfection in which horses can walk around and do as they please. Someone would steal you. Or worse.”
Brother whickered at me. I let him rub his soft mouth on my neck, smelling the hay on his breath.
“I’m not sure what we’re going to do, old pal,” I said. “You understand?”
He understood. He looked depressed and resigned.
“That’s right,” I said. “No more midnight rides to warn folks the British are coming. No more racing our shadows down the road. Just a long, boring summer. A very long summer.”
Hickety whickety, said Brother with his lips. And plibbity slibbet.
“My sentiments exactly,” I told him. Sometimes that horse was downright eloquent.
By then all the blood had rushed down to my leg, and it was pounding like a bass drum in an oompah band. I let Brother out into the corral so he wouldn’t have to be cooped up in his stall all day, and I crutched back on up to the house. Then I collapsed on my bed and squinched my eyes shut tight.
I was mighty near to tears at that moment. I hadn’t cried once so far, not even when I woke up in the hospital feeling all scared and confused, nor when the pain became so bad that I wanted to holler. But now, when I realized that I couldn’t even so much as go for a ride on my beloved horse, it seemed like almost more than a guy could be expected to take. I snuffled and snorfed as quietly as I could, not wanting Mother to hear me and come in all fluttery and cooing. I hadn’t cried in front of her since I was a little kid. Instead I popped a pain pill down my throat, and soon it started to ease the leg, and then, since that stuff makes you drowsy, I fell asleep.
I must have slept the whole afternoon away. When I woke up it was almost dark out, and Mother was standing over me in the gloom like a ghost. She was saying something I couldn’t understand. Your Norse is grout, she said. Your course is doubt.
“What are you talking about?” I grumbled.
“Your horse is out!” she said.
I sat up fast, but I had to lay back down again. I was hot and feverish, and my head was swimming.
“Call Frankie,” I said. “He’ll know what to do.”
Frankie and Brother had sort of an understanding, you might say. They had known each other as long as Brother and I had, and Frankie was the one other human that Brother didn’t resent. I knew Brother would do what he said.
But Mother said, “There’s no need. Somebody already caught him for you.”
“Who?”
“A neighbor. Miss Powell.”
“I don’t know any Miss Powell,” I said. My heart was racing, and I knew a fever had spread from my bones through my blood and was working its way up to my brain. Maybe that’s not the correct medical explanation, but that’s what it felt like—all those breaks had created bad energy in me, and my body was heating up to fight it off. I have a natural understanding of the workings of the human system, you see. It’s inherited from my grandmother.
“She’s a new neighbor,” said Mother. “And she already put him back in the shed for you.”
Ordinarily this kind of news would have shocked me outright. Brother didn’t hardly listen to anybody. For a total stranger not only to have caught him but to have put him up in his shed without getting her front teeth kicked out was incredible. He was that temperamental. To tell you the truth, it made me a little jealous. But, as low as I was, I took it all in stride.
“Ma,” I said. “I don’t feel so good.”
She reached down and felt my forehead.
“You have a fever,” she said.
“I’m sorry for every rotten thing I’ve ever done and said.”
“Oh, my, you are sick. I better go for your grandmother,” she said.
“I’ve been a lousy daughter,” I said.
“I’ll go get her right away.”
I must have been as delirious as a drunk on the Fourth of July to say things like that. And I didn’t even flinch when she said she was going for the old bag. Normally that news was enough to send me off into the trees until the coast was clear again. Call me crazy, but I had an aversion to old ladies whose faces are hairier than some men’s, even if she was my own flesh and blood. Besides, I could barely understood a word my grandmother said, so there wasn’t much point in me talking to her. She didn’t have any teeth left, and she spoke half in some weird kind of German and half in English. But at that moment I didn’t care how scary or ugly she was, because I knew she could make me better. She always did.
“I’ll wear a dress every day from now on if you want me to. I’ll stop climbing trees. I’ll be good,” I said.
“You’re a good girl, Haley,” said Mother. “You’re not that bad. You’re just willful.”
“I don’t wanna have a broken leg anymore,” I said. “It hurts. I hate it.”
Mother brought me a glass of water and tried to give me another pill, but I didn’t want it. I was confused enough already, what with having lost six or so hours of the day. Even though everything on me hurt now, I wanted to feel it. I wanted to let the fever burn me clean.
“I’ll be back in a couple of hours or so,” she said. “It’ll take her that long to get her things together.”
“Can’t we just have a regular doctor for once?” I mumbled.
But I didn’t really mean it. That was just the “willful” me talking, the me that didn’t care who thought ill and who didn’t. I knew that when it came right down to it, there was nobody in the world as good at curing illness as my mother’s mother, the old lady who everybody thought was a witch, even in this day and age.
Here’s the story about my old Grandma. She was a Mennonite, which is a kind of religion, in case you hadn’t heard. People tend to get Mennonites confused with the Amish, which I guess is understandable, considering they’re both Anabaptists. The Amish are a lot more old-fashioned, though. Somewhere back in time, the Amish and the Mennonites split off from each other—I don’t know exactly when, history not being one of my strong points. It seems some folks felt they weren’t being hard enough on themselves, so they stuck with the horses and buggies, and got rid of all the electricity, et cetera. I guess they decided that would bring them closer to God. Only thing I’ve never been able to figure out is, when the Amish separated from the rest of us, electricity hadn’t been invented yet, and everybody was riding in horses and buggies, because there weren’t any cars and wouldn’t be for another couple of centuries. Kind of makes you wonder that maybe if the whole thing happened today folks’d be saying, We’re sticking with our old-fashioned VCRs and cassette tapes—none of those newfangled CDs for us! Anyway, we have the same beginnings, but our kind of Mennonites have less restrictions than the Amish do. We can ride in cars if we feel like it, or have electricity, or any dang old thing we want.
I don’t go to church anymore, and never got much out of it when I did, but my grandmother was the opposite of me—she was what you’d call Old Order Mennonite, and was about as religious as a person could get without floating straight up to heaven. She wore long, plain dresses with a shawl, and a kind of starched lace handkerchief on her head, and she lived in a tiny shack in the woods, without electricity or a telephone, or anything that might be considered a distraction from a life of Godly goodness—whatever that might consist of.
Now, you may have already realized that my mother and I were not Old Order. The reason for that is a long story, and I suppose I’ll get around to telling it soon enough, but for now it’s enough to say that Mother and I lived at the end of the twentieth century, and Grandma lived somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth. That’s considerably bigger than your average generation gap, I believe.
And my grandmother was odd even for Old Order. I may not be the churchgoing type, but one thing I do like about Mennonites is that they believe in the importance of a community—everyone sticks together and helps each other out, which is a way of life that a lot of the world has lost now. You don’t usually find Mennonites living off by themselves. But my grandmother did, kind of like a lady hermit—a witch, in other words. Now, even though she gave me the creeps, here is one point I get a little touchy on. It’s a case of antiwomanism, plain and simple. It’s always been fine and dandy with everyone if a man wants to take off by himself and live in the woods or something. That seems to make him automatically smarter, or wiser, or more holy, or something—people assume he must know something the rest of us don’t, and sooner or later they trek out to his tree or to the top of his mountain or wherever to ask him some deep and important question, such as What the hell’s wrong with the Buffalo Bills these days, anyway? But when a woman does the same thing, she’s suspected of witchcraft. Folks think she’s up to no good out there all by herself, cooking up evil potions and eating any children who might happen to wander into her strawberry patch. Oh, the world is a stupid place sometimes. I heard no end of cruel comments from folks about my grandmother, the same folks who thought old Frankie should be locked up somewhere, the same folks who made fun of me for not acting like a girl. People love to romanticize small-town life, how folks sit around the general store and chew tobacco and talk on and on about things, just taking life easy. They seem to forget that what those folks do mostly is gossip—and there never was a bit of gossip that did anyone any good.
To fetch my grandmother, Mother had to drive our old pickup about fifteen miles down County Road, due south, and park next to a big old birch tree that had been standing there since God was in short pants. There were no towns for many miles in any direction from that point—you were smack in the middle of nowhere, and praying you didn’t spring a leak in one of your tires or run out of gas. Then she had to strike out along a path through the woods. It was a path my mother knew well, since she’d grown up at the other end of it. After about a mile, she would come to the little clearing where my grandmother had her shack. Likely as not she wouldn’t be home right then—even though Grandma was old, she was in pretty good shape, and she spent a lot of time wandering around in the forest gathering herbs and berries and roots, and grubs and snakes too, if you believed the stories people told about her—which I didn’t. She used these things in making her homemade medicines, whi
ch could cure just about anything: fever, ague, flu, the vapors, colds, menstrual cramps, menopause, skin rashes, snakebite, cross-eyedness, you name it. Grandma lived off what she grew in her garden, which was considerable in size, and also whatever supplies my mother or others would bring her every once in a while. She used her own waste as fertilizer (don’t get me going on the specifics of that—it was quite an involved process, and not very pleasant to talk about, even for me) and got her water from a stream that ran nearby. In short, she preferred to do things her own way.
You might be wondering to yourself, now, why didn’t that foolish girl see what an interesting grandmother she had, and why didn’t she go out there and spend more time with her? There are two answers to that. One, it was a god-awful pain in the ass to get to my grandmother’s place, and that was the way she liked it. She wasn’t crazy about having visitors, not even her own relations. Two, my grandmother and I never did have much to say to each other. She didn’t approve of girls who wore shorts, for example. In her opinion, a woman ought to wear a long plain dress, and not let any part of her show except for her hands and face. Ankles were out of the question. So you can imagine her reaction whenever she saw me in cutoffs and a halter top. There are other examples I could give, but you get the picture.
Once in a while, some curious soul would go out there to see if they could strike up an acquaintance with my grandmother. This was usually a graduate student, or some religious type, or somebody like that. I have read a bit of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and I see how folks living a modern life could be interested in someone who was living “deliberately,” as Mr. Thoreau said—which I took to mean living like you meant it, doing everything for yourself and not relying on anybody else to help you. Grandma was nothing if not deliberate, and she never wanted anything to do with anybody from the outside world. It was hard enough just to get her to talk to my mother and to me.