Chapter Ten Mini
TEN MINI
The sweet molasses smell of the corn cakes filled the kitchen.
Mama was at the stove, flipping them in the big cast-iron pan.
Papa and Finn were out back raking leaves.
Monday through Friday, they worked at the factory, leaving each morning before Mini left for school, and coming home when the whistle blew.
But weekends were for chores and church.
“Why, Mama?” Mini asked. “Why tonight? Why these four full moons?”
She was called Mini because she was so small; even at nine years old, she looked more like a six-year-old.
She was tiny and thin, and could fit into small spaces and always won at hide-and-seek.
Her given name was Mary, after her grandmother, but no one called her that.
Not since she’d been born and Finn held her and said, “She’s such a mini little thing. Hardly there at all.”
Mini was what her classmates would call odd.
Always full of questions, never satisfied with the answers.
The world, people in particular, was a mystery to her.
There was plenty she understood: the way the earth spun on its axis and turned day into night and how the tilt of it made the seasons.
It made her dizzy sometimes, knowing the whole world was spinning.
She knew about animals and birds, had studied books and drawn careful pictures of wings and skeletons.
She knew bird bones were hollow and that crickets sang by rubbing their wings together and it was called stridulation.
What a wonderful word. Some words made her mouth feel full when she spoke them, like they carried weight.
Some of the girls at school, girls like Addison Knapp or Sophia Beaudry, just talked and talked and didn’t ever seem to stop, never saying anything with substance or weight, like their words were little dandelion seeds that floated up and away, carried off by the wind.
People called Mini shy, but that wasn’t it.
She wasn’t quiet and watchful because she was timid or afraid of what people might think of her.
She was just too busy watching, trying to make sense of the strange ways people acted.
Mini noticed everything. She knew, for instance, that Daphne Novotny had almost no eyebrows because when she was nervous, she’d reach up and pull out the little hairs one at a time when she thought no one was looking.
And Andy Osbourne, he was the one who kept stealing the milk money, even though no one suspected him because he was the most popular boy in their class and got the best grades.
It was Joey Ruderman who got blamed because he got dropped on his head when he was little and walked around with his clothes inside out and dirt so thick on his neck that kids swore he had worms living there.
Mini was at the kitchen table, arranging piles of silver dollars on the plate (three piles of three) and thinking about everything those coins could buy at Pops’ General Store: licorice whips, bubble gum, a chocolate bar.
She looked down at the plate she was putting the coins on.
It held striped peppermints, a jar of apple jam, a little bottle of rum.
Once the corn cakes were golden brown on each side, Mama would add those, drizzled with some of the maple syrup her family made each spring.
When Papa came back inside, he’d add a pouch of tobacco to the plate.
Finn would put on a drawing he’d made: a careful pencil sketch of a white mare in the Hollands’ pasture.
Finn was the best artist in the whole town, better than Lorelei Prentice even, so good that when Mini looked at that horse drawing, she swore she could see it breathe.
Mini had given the knackerman a little clay horse last spring for the Pink Moon. It was the best piece she’d ever made in art class, and it broke her heart a little to give it away, to know she’d never see it again.
Her mother sighed. “Because that’s when he comes.
You know that.” Mama’s voice was tired. Tired of answering Mini’s questions, the same questions, month after month, year after year.
Mini knew full well the knackerman came four times a year: on the Wolf Moon, the Pink Moon, the Buck Moon, and tonight, on the Hunter’s Moon.
But what she didn’t understand, not truly, was why.
And if there was one thing she hated, it was not understanding a thing.
The world was full of patterns, and patterns made sense.
The world turning made sense. Birds migrating, bees finding their way back to the hive after flying for miles to get pollen, bears hibernating—all of that she understood.
But the things she didn’t understand, the things that didn’t make sense, they got under Mini’s skin like a sliver and stung and festered.
Nothing about the knackerman made sense to Mini.
It unsettled her when he came through Boone’s Ferry, going house to house.
She didn’t like how excited, how nervous the whole town got in the days leading up to his visits.
There was constant anxious chatter, like buzzing bees everywhere she went.
On the playground at school, the boys took turns being the knackerman, riding a stick horse while everyone left him a pile of stones, then hid.
She didn’t like that they all had to go to bed early, even the grown-ups, close the blinds, turn out all the lights. They were supposed to stay inside. To go to bed and stay there, to not peek.
All the adults in town, her own parents even, seemed a little afraid when the knackerman was coming.
“But why do we leave him gifts?”
Mama was using the spatula to take the corn cakes out of the big cast-iron pan now. “So he’ll spare us.”
“From what?”
Mama’s face got tight. “You know the stories. About what happened before. How he made the whole town sick.”
“But he wouldn’t do that again, would he, Mama? Not to us?”
Mama frowned at her, set down the spatula. “He’s a trickster, that old knackerman. He can bring terrible things to you—bad luck, sickness, even death.” Mama lowered her voice as she spoke, eyes looking small, frightened.
Mini swallowed hard. She knew the stories: ruined crops, accidents, fires, the people who disappeared. She thought of what had happened to Sad Willy’s wife two years ago, and her legs went wobbly.
“But not us, right?” Mini asked. “He’d never do that to us?”
Mama shook her head. “Not if we follow the rules.”
Mini knew the rules. She’d learned them back when she’d learned to talk and walk and eat with a spoon. Before all that maybe even. Everyone in Boone’s Ferry knew the rules. And one of the most important rules was never to look at the knackerman, never try to see him.
And this was the rule she intended to break tonight.
She knew she shouldn’t, but she had to.
She was determined to see that old knackerman once and for all.
To see if he really existed or if it was just her father taking the treats away, or one of the men in town.
Sad Willy, maybe, who got so drunk on bourbon at Loon’s Call each night that it was a game the children played to see who could find him first each morning, sleeping under a tree, on a bench, or down by the old millpond.
Mini had been planning to see the knackerman forever, but always lost her nerve. But tonight was the night, she’d promised herself. No more chickening out.
But still, the closer it got to dark, the more nervous she became.
“Is he good or is he evil?” she asked, her throat feeling tight as she got the words out.
Mama frowned, thought a minute. “He’s the knackerman, that’s all.
” She brought the corn cakes over and arranged them carefully on the plate with the candy and coins.
“Now, be a good girl and go out back and pick the last of the black-eyed Susans. We can decorate the plate with them. He likes pretty things.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Mini said, dancing out the door.
HOURS LATER, THE Hunter’s Moon was watching over Boone’s Ferry, its faint orange glow looking for creatures who should be sleeping in their burrows.
Mini was shivering in the bushes, wishing she’d worn a coat.
She’d thrown Finn’s heavy red sweater over her T-shirt and old jeans, but she was still cold.
She was curled up inside the tall clump of lilac bushes that grew along the edge of the yard.
The flowers were long gone, and most of the leaves were dead too, only the tangle of scratchy branches remaining.
She had the perfect view of her little blue house with the white front door and matching shutters, and the freshly swept and washed front steps where a single candle burned.
The candle stood beside the plate piled high with gifts for the knackerman.
It was the same, she knew, at the front of every house in town.
The candle was half burned down. Mini didn’t know what time it was.
She didn’t own a watch. And the bell at the factory that they all used to mark time during the daylight hours (it rang at eight a.m., noon, and five p.m., when the men could shut down the machines, sweep the floors, and come home) did not ring at night or on weekends.
The night was for the owls, the coyotes, and, on four full moons a year, the knackerman.
She was starting to wonder if he would come at all.
She held still as a rock and waited, keeping her mind busy so as not to fall asleep, reciting the times tables she’d been learning in school: two times eight is sixteen, three times eight is twenty-four.
Mini loved math, found that numbers calmed her.
Numbers made sense. They followed a pattern, unlike people.
She heard him before she saw him. Felt the thunder of hoofbeats on the ground, making her own heart race like it was trying to keep time with the horse.
He moved down the street, turned into the driveway—a man in a long patchwork coat, riding a pale white horse with saddlebags.
Mini held her breath as he dismounted, his back to her, his head and face obscured by the hood of his coat. She could hear the horse breathing.
The knackerman walked up to the front steps, leaned down, picked up the plate. He looked impossibly tall. His shoulders broad. And he wore heavy black boots that clopped much like the horse’s hooves.
Who are you really? she wondered.
Turn around so I can see your face, she willed.
And, as if he heard her, as if her thoughts had sound or wings that carried them over to him, he turned.
Her breath caught in her throat. She might have made a sound then, a small, strangled sound. The sound of a frightened rabbit, maybe. That small. That quiet.
But he heard.
He heard and looked right at her.
His face was glowing white bone, the stripped-down skull of a horse with two black hollows for eyes, large yellow-white teeth grinning hideously.
And she realized then that it hadn’t been the horse she’d heard breathing earlier. It was him. His breathing was loud and hard, like a roaring fire, like a train.
He looked right at her and she knew she’d been seen. Mini the odd, Mini the tiny, Mini the invisible girl who shaped her body into the smallest spaces, a girl who was hardly there at all.
He let out a whinnying roar, threw the plate piled with gifts to the ground. The plate smashed, the corn cakes and peppermint candies scattered, the bottle of rum exploded on the ground, soaking Finn’s drawing.
Then he stepped toward her, the ground shaking with his footsteps. Mini rose, thinking she would turn and run. She was fast. Could outrun anyone.
He walked to his horse, but did not mount. He opened a saddlebag, pulled something out, and carried it back to her house. He walked up the three front steps, reached out a gloved hand, and used a brush to paint a red mark on her front door.
She knew the mark.
She knew what it meant.
“No!” she cried, straining to keep from waking anyone. “Please!”
But it was too late.
He mounted the horse and was gone, not back out to the street to visit the rest of the houses in the village, but into the woods, away from town, the white glow of the horse lost in the shadows of the forest in seconds.
She looked at the mark on the door in horror, the broken plate and all their offerings strewn across the front steps, and Mini realized that it was all true. She never should have been here.
Something glinted in the grass where his horse had been standing, catching her eye. Slowly, carefully, Mini crawled out from the bare bush toward it. She leaned down, wiping the tears from her eyes, and picked up the circular object that gleamed in the moonlight.
It was a gold pocket watch.