Light to the Hills: A Novel (3)
“Books?” Sass wasn’t sure she’d heard right. “What for?” A sudden memory popped into her head: a rare day sitting by the woodstove in the schoolhouse while the teacher read the class a story. It had been about some old clock and a girl who solved puzzles. Nancy something. The teacher had stopped after a few chapters and promised to finish the story the following week, but Sass hadn’t gone back. She’d never found out how the Nancy girl figured out the mystery.
“How ’bout we get along to a nice dry place, and I’ll show you? I can help your mama get supper. I brought along some sugar and apples, enough for a pie.”
Sass’s brows lifted. A birthday pie did sound nice, and Mama was always on about needing an extra pair of hands. Maybe her daddy wouldn’t mind so much if this lady had something real to bring instead of a list of I’m-a-needings.
She shrugged. “It’s a free country.”
Sass quickened her feet, eager to be out of the wet, and the mile home down the creek bed slipped by beneath her in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. She kept glancing behind her, and sure enough, the woman and mule trailed, stepping over the ruts and roots in the road without trouble or stumbling. Now and then, the mule snorted, spraying the dripping rain off his muzzle with the force of his breath.
Shaded by the hardwoods surrounding it, Sass’s house appeared in the distance, the tentative reach of its crooked split-rail fence marking the yard’s perimeter. Woodsmoke wisped from the stacked-stone chimney and hung in a blue fog just under the damp trees, smelling of welcome and warmth. The house was made of mostly hand-hewn logs and a simple plank porch that ringed the square dwelling like starched crinoline. The yard was tidy and sparse, with no adornment besides volunteer wildflowers, yellow ironweed, and witch hazel. In a few places, worn pathways snaked between house and road, house and privy, house and garden. Out back stood a smattering of smaller outbuildings—smokehouse, corncrib, small chicken pen. Two skinny hounds with mottled gray hides and lolling tongues lay draped on the porch beneath one of the small front windows. Immediately, the dogs leaped to their feet, the hair bristling down their backs, baying and hollering a warning to the cabin’s inmates. Now that Sass was soaked to the bone, the rain had let off to a sprinkle.
Like twinkling stars in a night sky, a trio of faces appeared at the windows, which were nothing more than shuttered cutouts in the logs to let in air and light. Strips of overused muslin hung on either side and passed for curtains. Sass counted her older sister, fourteen-year-old Fern; her younger brother, ten-year-old Cricket; and the youngest sister, four-year-old Hiccup, her head bobbing up and down as she tried to see over the sill. No sign of Finn or Daddy.
“Hush your racket,” Sass yelled to the hounds. “Go on, shush now.” At her voice, they stopped baying, and their long tails thumped the porch railings, their hind ends wriggling with delight. Sass glanced back at the woman, still astride her mule. Sass had tried to sound mean, but she couldn’t resist the way they nosed her palms while their paws danced all over the tops of her boots.
“This ’un’s Digger,” she said, pointing to the larger of the two, his gray head broken by a streak of black that ran from the tip of his nose to either ear, like he’d gone snout-first into a mudhole. “And that ’un’s Tuck.” The smaller dog, gray with four brown-freckled feet, stood with his eyes half-closed in pleasure while Sass absently rubbed his ears. “Once they know you, they ain’t mean. Don’t pay ’em no nevermind. They might slobber you to death is all.”
Sass’s mama stepped out onto the porch, and a towheaded wisp of a girl squealed at the sight of Sass and pushed out the door and down the steps. Sass handed her mama the sassafras sapling and absorbed the blow of her sister’s embrace.
“This here’s Hiccup,” she said, laughing. “And now you’re wet as I am, silly.” Sass busied herself with unsticking her dress from her skin. “And Mama.”
The other two children poked their heads around the doorframe and stared, but Sass didn’t bother introducing them. The woman stood up in her stirrups, cocked her weight to her left foot, and swung out of the saddle, landing lightly on the muddy ground and shaking out her oil-slicker cloak. Junebug crooked his neck around to her, his ears swiveling. Mama stood with her thin lips pressed together, her hands fingering the root of the plant Sass had given her. She cut her eyes at Sass. Mama could say more with her side-eye in a quick minute than a whole passel of ladies at a quilting bee.
Sass swallowed, and the words tumbled out. “Mama, this here’s a lady I met with on the trail. She says she’s come visiting and could help you with supper and maybe a pie.”
“Pleased to meet you,” the woman said, holding out her hand. “Name’s Amanda Rye. I don’t mean to put you to any trouble, ma’am. I ran into your daughter on my route, and then the rain hit.”
Sass tidied Hiccup’s damp dress and whispered to her, to avoid her mama’s pointed glances.
Mama stepped down to the second porch step, and Sass measured the two of them, now eye to eye. The woman was unusually tall, old as Finn or thereabouts.
“Rai MacInteer,” Mama said, offering her hand, her chin tilted up. “Short for Rainelle, but only my mama ever called me that, God rest her. We don’t get many visitors up here. Not unless you’re kin or coming for tax money.”