Little Red Lies (8 page)

My mouth drops.

“How barbaric!” Mother says. She folds her tea towels, hem to hem, with mathematical precision, trying not to look at him as he talks.

“And then we devoured it, just pulled off gobs of meat with our filthy grease-soaked hands.”

I’m making gagging sounds.

Mother says, “Obviously, there was nothing wrong with your appetite back then. You probably got food poisoning. That’s what the problem is.”

Jamie brushes toast crumbs from his mouth with the back of his hand and sips at his now-cold coffee. “My only problem is, I need a job. Also, I need to go away for a bit. There are a few people I should visit. My buddy Leeson’s widow, for one. She lives in Toronto. And I’d like to go back to the Coopers’, except that I don’t have anything to talk about besides the war. That’s the problem—I have only one thing on my mind. I need a job more than anything, that’s what I need.”

I take the paper from him and study the want ads. “ ‘Farm laborer wanted,’ it says here. Maybe you could work for Granny.”

“Now, there’s an idea!” He takes the paper back.

“I don’t think you have any idea how hard farmwork is,” Mother says. “Ask your father. Ask Granny. She worked that farm right along with your grandfather. She used to say she helped the Allies win the Great War by keeping them fed. ‘Napoleon was right,’ I’ve heard her say, ‘an army marches on its stomach.’ ”

“So what if it’s hard work? I’m just growing soft, hanging around here. I need to get back in shape.”

Mother nods sadly.

“Sorry for being so difficult,” he says.

She pulls the plug on the iron and leaves it on its end to cool. Coming over to stand near him, she pushes hair back from his forehead. I watch him clench his jaw as if it’s all he can do to keep from jerking away.

“I guess it must be pretty hard to adjust to civilian life again,” she says.

“I’m working on it.”

Jamie doesn’t object to me going along for the ride in Dad’s car out to Granny’s farm. He’s going to see if she’ll hire him for the spring and summer. We roll down our windows to feel the breeze on our faces. At full volume, we sing, “ ‘How’ ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm, after they’ve seen Paree?’ ” We have to hum the rest because we don’t know all the words. But who cares?

“I’ll have to get a car of my own, if my plans work out.”

“Can you afford one?”

“Sure, a little secondhand coupe, if I can find one. I have my army pay. I wasn’t a big spender overseas.”

“Granny will pay you,” I say.

“I don’t want her to pay me. I’ll work for room and board.”

“You mean, you would actually move out there?”

“Of course.”

“No! You’re not allowed. We need you at home.”

He laughs. “Not half as much as I need to get away.”

That takes a little of the joy out of my day, and I sulk
as we drive up the lane, rutted from a spring rain, and park beside Granny’s truck. Bounder, the old farm dog, lies in the sun, soaking up the warmth. He barely raises his head but wags his tail enthusiastically when I give him a good tummy rub. Jamie bends over to pat him and staggers a little when he stands up, as if the effort makes him dizzy.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Why does everybody keep assuming there’s something wrong with me?”

He knocks on the kitchen door and opens it. “Hi, Granny,” he shouts. A muffled shout answers from below the floor. He opens the cellar door to see Granny on her way up the ladder-like steps, with a bowl of last fall’s apples.

“Well, this is a nice surprise,” she says. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I’m looking for work.”

Granny raises her eyebrows at me. “Have those parents of yours put you out to work, too?”

“Why would they do that when they can use me for slave labor at home?”

“True enough,” Granny says. “And what about you, young buster, what kind of work do you have in mind? Not farmwork, surely.”

“Why not?”

She eyes him with her shrewd seeing-through-disguises look. “I’d have pegged you as more of a city boy.”

“A man can change.” He stresses
man
.

She purses her lips “Touché. However,” she adds, “I’ve already hired a man to help me this spring. He’s just back from overseas, too. By midsummer, though, I’ll need more help, if you can afford to wait a few months.” Jamie’s shoulders slump. “But since you’re here, and since I’ve had a great hankering for pickerel lately, and since I hear they’re running, how about taking a couple of Grandpa’s rods and trying your luck?”

Jamie shrugs, I grin, and soon we’re trudging through the pasture, with rods and tackle box, to where the river separates the farm from the forest.

“I’m feeling lucky,” I say.

“Bully for you.” He shifts the tackle box to his other hand.

“This is just what you need, a good day’s fishing. Back to nature and all that.”

“No, what I need is a job.”

We squelch through the ruts in the pasture. Not far away, cattle bend their necks over the new hay. Some raise their heads to scowl at us.

“To think I used to be afraid of those stinkers when I was a kid,” Jamie says.

“I wasn’t. Only thing I was afraid of was stepping in a fresh cow pie. Yikes! I just did.” I scrape my heel through the grass trying to get rid of the mess. “What a staunch!”

“I gather you mean stench.”

“Remember coming down here when the whole herd would come right for us?” I say.

“Not really.”

“You used to stop dead. You couldn’t move.”

“I don’t remember.”

Looking up now, the cattle take it into their heads to investigate at closer range and plod toward us. Jamie sticks out his chest, waves his fishing rod, and says, “Out of my way, cows, I’m coming through!” They back right up, and he grins.

“They’re steers,” I say.

Our favorite place on the riverbank is an outcropping of rock, a shelf of limestone slabs overlooking the widest part of the river. From the hunk of unsliced bacon Granny gave us for bait, Jamie cuts us each a couple of pieces with the fish-skinning knife. We bait our hooks and cast our lines.

“Give your wrist more of a flick when you cast,” he says, showing me how.

Reeling in, I think I feel a nibble, but I’m mistaken. It’s a perfect morning—sun for warmth, clouds for shade, swallows flitting and diving. A breeze blows off the river, keeping the blackflies at bay.

“This is like old times,” I say.

“This is like heaven,” Jamie says. “Maybe I could get a job selling fresh fish to people in town.”

“First, you have to catch some.”

I sit on the rock, dangling my feet above the water, reeling in slowly, thinking about the way the river has about six shades of color in it.

Jamie’s the first to get a bite. He pulls in a small fellow, not quite big enough to keep. Then I do the same. Probably the same fish. About fifteen minutes later, Jamie’s line bends almost double.

“Maybe you’re caught on a log,” I say.

“No, there’s something there, all right. It feels like a whale.”

Once it surfaces, we see that he has a good-sized pickerel on his line—a keeper for sure—and it’s putting up a pretty good fight. I get ready to scoop it up in the net as soon as Jamie reels it in close enough. In it comes, tail flipping, body writhing in a last battle against the inevitable.

“Granny’s going to love this,” Jamie says. He gets the hook out, bonks the fish on the head with the small club Grandpa used to use, and cuts off its head and tail.

“Maybe she’ll invite us to stay.”

Jamie’s busy gutting the fish and doesn’t answer, but then he yelps. He’s cut himself on the fish knife and is bleeding more than the fish. I whip a handkerchief from my pocket and offer to bandage the gash.

He pulls away as blood runs up his wrist and arm. “Is it clean?”

“Of course it’s clean.” Quickly, I wrap up his hand as
best I can. Once the makeshift bandage is in place, I add, “At least it was clean last week. It may have been used once or twice since.”

Granny just shakes her head when she catches sight of Jamie dripping blood through the handkerchief onto her freshly scrubbed kitchen floor. “Well, I never in all my born days,” she says.

“At least we caught a fish,” I say, plunking the scaly thing down on the table.

With enough pressure, she gets the bleeding to stop, cleans the cut, and bandages it properly.

“It’s not that deep a slice,” she says. “I wouldn’t think it was worth that amount of blood. How do you feel?”

“Fine.” Jamie doesn’t look fine.

“Well, your face is as white as that fish’s belly. Maybe you should lie down.”

Surprisingly, he does what he’s told and goes into the parlor to lie on the settee.

Granny puts the fish on a cutting board and wipes blood off the table.

“What do you think is wrong with him?” I whisper. “Do you think he got blood poisoning from my hankie?”

Granny shakes her head, her lips tight with concern.

Eventually Jamie gets up and dutifully drinks some sweet hot tea at the kitchen table. Bounder is inside now, in his usual spot under the table, hoping for crumbs to fall. Jamie looks a little better. He nibbles on a bite of the
fish that Granny has just cooked and served, along with homemade bread slathered in butter.

“I guess I’m more of a liability than a help around here,” he says.

“You’ll be fine once you get your steam back,” Granny says. “If I were your mother, I’d have you at the doctor’s so fast, you wouldn’t know what hit you. Now, I’m telling you straight out, son. You’re old enough to look after yourself. You make an appointment with old Doctor Melvin, and he’ll prescribe a tonic for you, or pills, or
something
. It’s no good ignoring your health, lad. Look what happened to your grandfather. Caught cold, took pneumonia, and died. Just like that.”

Hesitantly, Jamie says, “I think I’d just be wasting Doctor Melvin’s time.”

“It’s not a waste of time to find out if there’s something wrong, lad.”

“But maybe it’s only that I need to settle down and get married. I don’t need a doctor to tell me that.”

“Oh, Lord!” Granny says, slapping her hand to her head. “And support a wife how?”

Jamie flushes. He stands up, arms folded, glowering at the green fields he can see through the window and the sky with its darkening clouds.

“Sit,” Granny orders him, and Bounder, his head in her lap, looks up to see if she means
him
.

Jamie continues to stand. He leans against the kitchen
sink, looking like the god of war. He’s left a few bites on his plate, and I fork them down before Granny can bawl him out for not eating.

“Does your hand still hurt?” she asks him.

“No.”

The way he’s cradling it, I know it does.

After several moments of listening to the clock tick, Granny breaks the silence. “Much as I’d love to have you around on a permanent basis,” she says, “I really wonder if farmwork is right for you. I don’t know if you have the heart for it, love. I’m not talking about cutting yourself, now. I mean, generally. The land either captivates you or it doesn’t. And then it kills you, the way it did your grandfather.

“He wouldn’t quit, even when Death was staring him in the face. It was as though he’d said, ‘I’m going, but not before I’m good and ready.’ He got the hay in, sold off most of the livestock, all the while hacking up his lungs. It was what he did that was important to him. His job was to provide food for others, and that’s what needed to be done before his illness got the better of him. When he finally did lie down, he kept looking at the bedside clock, waiting, it seemed, for the train to heaven and it was late. I could almost hear Death say, ‘
Ha!
Now you have to wait for me.’ ”

Thunder rumbles in the distance. I hope it will rain, storm, keep us here for hours so the talk can continue. I wish I’d brought a notebook to scribble down the conversations.

“I never thought Gramps liked me very much,” Jamie says.

“He did, though he had trouble showing it. He was a hard man to please, hard on your poor father, too. At the end,” Granny says, “he reached out and squeezed my hand with the little bit of strength he had left. That was always his way of saying
thank you
. His final gesture. That’s when I knew the safety net was in place.”

“What do you mean?”

“Safe for him to go. Safe for me to stay, I guess.”

“Are you afraid of death, Granny?” I ask. She’s the only old person in the world you could say this to without fear of being told not to be so rude.

“It’s not death I’m afraid of, love, it’s redundancy. The day I discover everybody can get along better without me and would prefer to is the day I’ll cheerfully croak.” She grins at us. “I don’t want to be relegated to the rocking chair while the work of the day goes on around me.”

“No chance that will happen!” I say.

“As I see it, you young people are at a disadvantage. You see just the suddenness of death. You can’t accommodate yourselves to the shock. Whereas, at my age, you see life getting a little frayed around the edges. The cracks in your ability to do the things you used to do start to show. You slow down, you stiffen up. You have time to accept that you can no longer walk a tightrope carrying all your baggage and still keep your balance. The idea of
death creeps through the cracks little by little, and you see it as not such a terror, really, just more of the same. The ultimate slowing and stiffening, you might say. And then you fall off.”

“Is there really a safety net?” Jamie asks.

“Of course. And it’s exactly what your needs or beliefs want it to be.”

Jamie goes over to look out the window again. Black clouds roll by, but there’s still no rain. “How about giving me some good advice? You always say you know me better than I know myself. What do I want to do with my life?”

“Not waste it.”

“Too easy.”

She waits a moment before she speaks. “You have to be part of the world, not just an innocent bystander, love. When—notice I’m not saying if—the Martians land, you need to be able to answer this one question, because you can rest assured they’re going to ask it. ‘What’s it like,’ they’ll ask, ‘what’s it like to be a human?’ And you’ll have to tell them what it’s like to suffer and what it’s like to rejoice.”