Chapter 31
Today Maeve and I spent all day long sewing little hats for the chickens, our ladies. It’s the most fun I’ve had in who knows how long. Truly a very good day.
The morning started simply enough: Maeve, posing a question to my back while I picked out my outfit for the day. “Do you think the ladies get cold in the winter, Mama?”
Ever since the first snowfall, she’s been asking this question.
She noticed how the cow and the horse are protected in their stalls at night, insulated by hay, and then she asked why the chickens don’t sleep inside their coop.
I told her quite plainly that the chickens are stupid, they should be keeping warm inside the coop, and if they die, they have no one to blame but themselves.
But still, she kept asking and worrying and fretting over their comfort, and so finally I said, “Why don’t we ask them what they want? ”
And so we trudged through the snow to the chicken coop and asked the little brainless animals what they thought. Maeve, an adept translator of chicken-speak, confirmed soberly to me that the ladies were a bit chilly in the cold weather.
“Well,” I said, just as seriously. “It looks like we have a mission to accomplish.”
Half an hour later, at breakfast, Mary said she would be gone for a few hours collecting saffron in the woods, and I told her about our very important plans for the chickens.
“You’ll do this after your chores are done, right?” She looked sternly between the two of us. “Don’t take forever on this, and don’t be wasteful.”
And so Maeve and I stood on the porch, her little hand held tightly in mine, while we watched Mary walk down the road and disappear around the bend, leaving behind a clean trail of footsteps in the snow.
For a moment my throat felt painfully tight.
Why does she get to walk away from the ranch so easily?
And then I remembered the Lord, and the divine right of His planning, and I bowed my head in apology.
I squeezed Maeve’s hand, raised my eyebrows. “What do you say we front-load the fun today, Maevie?”
Coats proved too difficult. The birds hated when Maeve tried to extend their wings to measure for the armholes, so hats it was, and now we are here, sitting at the kitchen table in the late afternoon, putting the finishing touches on these winter caps, which look like a drab combination of a fedora and a beret, when Mary walks back in through the front door, kicking snow off her boots, and says, “Oh, please tell me you haven’t been working on those all day. ”
“Okay!” I say. “We haven’t been working on these all day.” I wink at Maeve, and she laughs and laughs.
Mary sighs, seems on the verge of saying something sharp, and then: nothing.
“Almost done with this one, Mama,” Maeve says cheerily. She holds up a mess of destroyed fabric.
I glance over my shoulder at Mary, who is standing strangely by the counter. Staring out the kitchen window at nothing. How long has she been gone? Much longer than a few hours. The whole day, practically. “Have you been collecting saffron this whole time, Mary?”
For a moment, it sounds like she doesn’t hear me. She just keeps staring out the window, like she’s in a trance. “I found mushrooms, too,” she says finally. She turns for her bag, then pauses, noticing something by her foot. A scrap of fabric. She picks it up. “Is this one of your sweaters, Maeve?”
“It’s one of mine,” I say quickly. “One I never wear.”
“She never wears it!” Maeve echoes. “Really, Mary, we swear!”
Mary nods slowly, then tucks the scrap in with the folded pile of clean rags in the kitchen corner.
I know what she wants to say—This is wasteful, how careless of you to cut it up into scraps for a farm animal—which is why it’s so strange when she says to Maeve, “It’s okay, little chicken.
I’ll get dinner ready, and you can finish your work on these hats. Very important.”
Then she turns away from us to busy herself with dinner work. From where I sit, I can see just the shape of her hands. They’re shaking. She curls them into fists and presses them hard against the counter.
Something is wrong.
I turn to Maeve. “I’m going to help Mary with the mushrooms for a few minutes.” I leave Maeve at the table and approach Mary. “So,” I say. “How was your walk?”
“Fine.” She’s pulling mushrooms out of her bag, sending little clumps of dirt flying.
“Your face, Mary,” I say quietly. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“And you’ve been sewing hats for chickens,” she spits back. “Looks like we’ve both had a strange day.”
“I’m just trying to—”
“Maeve,” she calls over her shoulder, “will you go get a pail of water? We need to scrub these mushrooms clean.”
Maeve hops off her chair and trots away on her errand, and soon Mary and I are alone. She turns to face me. She’s breathing hard, unable to look me in the face. “I came across an animal, okay? In a trap. A mink, I think. It was—struggling. In pain.”
“Did you save it?”
“Of course not,” she mutters. “It was practically dead. If the trap doesn’t kill it, the temperature will.” A tear rolls down her cheek, and she wipes it roughly away. “It was upsetting. That’s all.”
She looks the picture of an overwhelmed, tired, teenage girl. I feel the dim flicker of a maternal urge. I should hold her. I should pull her head beneath my own chin and stroke her hair and say, There, there.
Then I remember: Mary is the one who stitched my leg back together. The girl has an iron stomach. Nerves of steel. And I’m to believe she would become a puddle of tears over some mangled woodland creature?
I say carefully, almost experimentally: “I don’t believe you.”
Mary’s breathing grows still.
“You’re lying to me. Aren’t you?”
She says nothing.
“Mary. What happened in those woods?”
At that moment, Maeve walks through the door, carrying a full pail of water to us, sloshing a little on the floor in the process. “Thank you, Maevie,” Mary says. She takes the pail and sets it on the counter. Begins to wash the mushrooms.
“Mary,” I try again, but she shrugs me away and snaps, “Can you please get out of my way, Natalie?”
I step back, and then back again. She’s never called me Natalie before. For a moment, we look at each other, a mirror of fear.
Then the boys barrel through the front door and a commotion ensues—Noah shouting about imaginary battles, pow pow pow, Abel telling him the grip on his imaginary shotgun is all off, Old Caleb setting his hat onto the hook and asking what’s for dinner—and Mary slips away into the chaos.
She doesn’t look at me for the rest of the night.