Chapter 3
Whole and entire, the Craw farm swallowed the boy down.
There was no easing into it. There was no first gentle day. The work took him the morning after he arrived. It did not let him go again for years.
Before light each morning, a fist pounded the barn door.
That was his waking, every day of every season.
No voice called him kindly. No hand shook his shoulder.
There was only the fist on the rough plank.
There was the black dark beyond it. There was the long list of chores that did not care whether a boy had slept.
He learned to be on his feet before the pounding stopped.
A slow rising earned hard words, and worse.
Then came the work itself, in the same order, day upon day.
The mucking of the stalls first, the heavy fork and the steaming muck.
Then the hauling of water from the well, two buckets at a time.
The icy handles bit his fingers. The feeding of the hogs, who shoved and squealed and tried to knock him down.
The gathering of the eggs from under the cross hens.
Wood split and carried until his thin arms shook.
By the time the sun cleared the trees, a grown man's half-day already lay behind him. And the day was only beginning.
A stall in the barn was his bed.
He had straw for a mattress and an old horse blanket against the cold.
It was stiff and smelled of the animal. In summer, it was bearable.
In winter, the cold rose up through the packed earth and into his bones.
It settled there and would not be driven out.
So he learned the tricks of the stray and the orphan.
He learned to burrow deep down into the straw, where his own breath could warm a little hollow.
He learned to sleep curled small and tight, the way a dog sleeps in a doorway.
Nothing of himself was left out to the frost.
Whatever the Craws left when they had finished was his to eat.
Scraps, mostly. Cold boiled potatoes with the salt gone off them.
The dry heel of a loaf. A rind of bacon when the luck was running.
In the corner of the kitchen, he ate it standing, or out on the step in the cold.
He ate it fast, the way a boy eats who has known the food to be taken back.
Never once in all his years beneath that roof was he told to sit at the table.
The table was for the family. He was not that.
Esra Craw's belt taught faster than his tongue.
A spilled pail of milk earned a stripe across the back.
A gate left unlatched earned two. A tool left out in the weather, a chore done slow, a word answered wrong.
Each had its price. The price was paid in leather.
The man did not shout much. He did not need to.
He had a flat, deliberate way of reaching for his belt that said more than shouting.
The boy learned the rules of that farm the way an animal learns a hot stove.
He learned them quick. He carried the lessons in welts beneath his shirt.
Greer Craw never once struck him.
A colder cruelty than the belt was her way.
She looked through him when she looked at all.
He might have been a tool somebody had propped in the corner.
A tool that happened inconveniently to need feeding.
Chores she set him in a flat, tired voice, and turned away before he could answer.
His answer was of no more interest to her than the lowing of a cow.
In all his years beneath her roof, he could not call up a single time she had touched him with her hand.
The one exception was to take him by the shoulder and push him toward some task not yet done.
Yet the hope did not die in the boy. Not at first.
Harder than he was bidden, he worked. He rose earlier than the fist required.
He sought out the chores no one had thought to ask of him, and did those too.
A fence sagging on its post, he mended before he was told.
A well rope gone frayed, he spliced fresh.
Surely, he thought, if he were useful enough, the cold would in time begin to melt.
Love, in his child's heart, was a thing a boy could earn.
It was a wage, like a crust of bread. A boy had only to work hard enough and be good. One day it would be paid.
So the farm he learned down to its very bones.
The animals he came to know, each of them, and all their tempers.
Which cow would lash out with a hind foot.
Which would stand sweet and patient for the milking.
Which horse spooked at shadows. Which hog would bite.
The weather he learned to read in the smell and the feel of the wind.
A scythe he learned to swing without cutting his own leg.
A snare he learned to set. The sky he learned to study for the coming of rain.
Lean and quick and strong past his years, he grew.
Good, he grew too, truly good at all the work of the place.
And still the love did not come.
The one mercy of those hard years went by the name of Proutt.
He was the hired hand, old and bent, with a face like a strip of cracked harness leather.
A white stubble he never quite managed to shave clean.
He had worked the Craw place longer than anyone could rightly say.
Longer than Esra had owned it, some said.
In the stall beside the boy's he slept. Through the long nights, he snored like a saw working its slow way through green wood.
It was Proutt who first spoke to the boy as a person and not as a plow.
"Pull that calf wrong, you'll break its leg and your own back," the old man said one morning. He took the rope from the boy's raw and fumbling hands. "Here, now. You work with the creature. Not against it. You feel which way it wants to come, and you help it that way. Gentle, see. Slow. There."
He showed him how, his old hands sure and patient on the rope.
And in the showing, something passed between the man and the boy.
The boy had not felt it since the warm, low voice in the dark.
That was so long ago now that he half believed he had dreamed it.
It was a small thing. It was only a man troubling to teach a boy his work properly, for the boy's own sake.
But the boy had gone so long without it that it near undid him.
After that, the old man taught him a great many things.
To gentle a frightened horse with a low word and a flat, still palm.
To read a steer's mood by the set of its ears before ever it kicked.
To whittle a rough whistle from a green stick and coax a tune from it.
One slow gray Sunday, when the work was light, Proutt sat on an upturned pail.
He carved the boy a small horse out of a block of pine.
He handed it over without a word and went back to his pipe.
That pine horse the boy kept hidden deep in the straw of his stall.
At night he drew it out and held it in the dark.
He ran his thumb over the smooth-carved back of it.
In all the wide world, it was the only gift ever given to him freely.
It asked nothing back. It was not a wage, nor a trade, nor a thing earned by being good.
It was simply his, because an old man had wished him to have it.
He could not have said why that made his throat go tight. But it did, every time.
Tobacco smell and dry jokes, the old man shared with him. Now and again, half of his own meager supper.
A soft word was never among the gifts. That was not Proutt's way, and the boy did not look for it.
But kind he was, in the gruff manner of hard old men, in deeds far more than words.
The boy drank that small, rough kindness down the way a thirsty man drinks water.
He took it with his whole parched self, grateful past saying.
"Why do they hate me?" the boy asked him once, late, in the dark of the barn. "I do everything right. I work harder than anyone. Why won't they ever just... like me?"
A long while the old man was quiet. The boy thought he had fallen asleep and was sorry he had asked.
"They don't hate you, son," Proutt said at last, his voice rough and low. "Hating takes more feeling than they've got to spare on the likes of us. You're a good back to them. A pair of hands. That's all they ever sent away for. That's all they'll ever trouble to see."
"But if I'm good enough..." the boy began.
"You already are good enough." The old man's voice was almost gentle now.
"You hear me? That was never the question, boy.
It was never that. Some folks just haven't got it in them to give.
Not to a child that isn't their own. There's no working hard enough to squeeze it out of a dry stone.
Now hush, and sleep. Morning comes early in this house, same as always. "
Long after the snores started up again, the boy lay awake in the straw.
Over and over he turned the little pine horse in his fingers, feeling the shape of it in the dark. The old man's words sat heavy in him. He turned those over too, and could not make them lie easy.
Proutt he did not believe. Not yet. He was not ready to.
To believe the old man was to give up the one bright thing that had kept him warm.
It had warmed him through every cold barn night.
Through every cuff and every cold supper eaten alone on the step.
It was the hope. The hope that one day, if he only tried hard enough, he would be loved.
He could not let it go. It was nearly all he had.
So for a while longer, he held to it.
Before light, he rose. Till dark, he worked.
Each small scrap of kindness he saved up like a miser saving coins.
The half-supper, the pine horse, the patient lessons.
He hoarded them against the long cold of the place.
And he told himself, against all the plain evidence of his days, that his patience would be rewarded in the end.
It had to be. A thing earned so dearly had to be paid at last.
Year upon year, the boy worked and waited to be loved.
And year upon year, the love did not come. So slowly that he scarcely marked the change, a hard question took shape in him. It was the same hard truth the old man had tried to hand him in the dark of the barn. It had come now to take root on its own, in its own bitter time.
Perhaps being useful and being wanted were not the same thing at all.