Chapter 17
Word of the boy began to drift back across the valley, the way such word does.
It came in scraps, carried on the wind of small talk.
The hands brought it in from town. The storekeeper let it fall.
It surfaced in the Sunday gossip after church, between the weather and the price of beef.
The Shawshank boy was worked dark to dark, folk said.
They shook their heads, then moved on to other things.
He was thin already, and growing thinner.
He slept in a lean-to off the barn with the stock.
He went to no school. He wore the same ragged coat against the coming winter.
The folk who carried these scraps meant little by them.
It was only talk. They could not have known what each scrap did to the man who heard it.
For each report was a page torn straight out of Otis's own boyhood. It was read aloud to him by strangers who did not know they held the book.
The lean-to. The ragged coat. The labor without end.
He had lived every word of it himself thirty years gone, and buried it deep.
Now it came back to him secondhand over the supper table.
Told flat and careless by people who thought it no great matter.
A hard boy on a hard farm. The country was full of them. What was one more?
Otis took every word of it like a blow and said nothing.
He had told Cara the whole of his own story now, that night in the kitchen.
And the telling had changed something between them.
It had not made him a warm man overnight.
A wall thirty years high does not come down in a night.
But a door had opened in it, just a crack, and a little light came through.
He spoke to her differently now. He let her see, here and there, the things that worked in him.
And so when the talk turned to the Shawshank boy, he did not go gray and silent, shut up tight, as he once would have.
He went still. He set down his fork. And he let his wife see the grief in his face.
It was a thing he had never once let any living soul see before.
But Cara saw what it did to him.
She had learned to read him now, since the night in the kitchen.
She saw him grow still and gray at the supper table when the boy's name came up.
She saw the muscle work in the hinge of his jaw, the small, hard sign of a man holding himself in.
The man who had buried his own past for thirty years could not bury it now.
It would not stay down. It was living and breathing on a mean farm five miles off, hauling water and taking the strap, wearing his own young face.
Then he began to ride out of his way.
She noticed it first in small things, the way a wife notices.
There was the long road home he took now from the north pasture, past the Shawshank place.
The near road would have carried him home a good deal sooner.
He came in late from his rides, with no account of where he had been, and she did not ask for one.
She did not press him. She thought she knew well enough where he had been and why.
One evening, she asked him gently over the fire.
They sat together now of an evening, which they had not done before. It was a small change and a new one. Two chairs drawn near the same hearth. She chose her moment, and her voice was soft.
"You've been riding past their farm," she said.
He was quiet for a moment, his eyes on the flames. "I have."
"To see him."
"I tell myself I won't." He stared into the fire as though the answer lay in it.
"Then I find my horse has carried me that way again, without my telling it to.
I can't seem to help it, Cara. I see that small figure out in the yard, hauling a pail too heavy for him, and I'm ten years old again.
I can't look at him. And I can't make myself stay away.
I just sit my horse on the road and watch, like a fool. "
"What does he do when he sees you?"
A grim, crooked almost-smile crossed Otis's hard face.
"Once, he caught me at it. Watching from the road.
He stared right back at me, flat and hard, not a flicker in him.
Like he was daring me to say a word or be gone.
It was my own face, thirty years back, staring at me across a rail fence.
" He shook his head slowly. "I had to turn my horse and ride off.
I couldn't bear it. A grown man, run off by the look of a boy. "
Cara reached across the small space between their chairs and laid her hand over his. He did not pull away from the touch now, as he once would have. That was a new thing too, and she marked it and was glad.
"You're not a fool," she said quietly. "A fool feels nothing. It's the other way with you. You feel too much, and have spent your whole life pretending you don't."
He said nothing to that. But his hand turned, slow, beneath hers, and held it.
She did not mock him for the rides, nor call them foolish, nor tell him to put the boy from his mind. She knew now what that cost him. Instead, she began quietly to do what little she could.
When the boy's errands brought him into town, she found reasons of her own to be there.
She would happen to be at the store when he came for the Shawshanks' flour.
She would happen to be passing when he watered the team at the trough.
And each time, she slipped him something.
A hard-boiled egg, still warm in her glove.
A wedge of pie wrapped carefully in a clean cloth.
An apple. She pressed them into his thin, chapped hands quickly, before he could think to refuse.
Then she moved on, before anyone could mark it.
Once, when the first real cold came down off the mountains, she gave him a warm wool muffler.
She told him, low, to keep it under his coat where Silas would not see it and take it from him.
The boy took these things warily, saying little, trusting nothing. His flat eyes watched her face for the trick in it. But he took them. He was too hungry and too cold not to.
The first time, he had nearly refused. He had drawn back from the wrapped pie as though it might bite him. "What's it for?" he had asked, low and suspicious. "What do you want?"
Cara had understood the question better than he knew. A boy used hard learns that nothing comes free. That every kindness is a hook with a barb in it.
"Nothing," she had told him gently. "I want nothing at all. Eat it where they won't see." He had looked at her for a long moment. Then he had taken the pie and bolted it down fast, the way a stray dog eats, with one eye on the door. It had nearly broken her heart to watch.
After that, he watched for her in his guarded way.
He never thanked her. He never smiled. But his flat eyes found her face in a crowd now, and held it a moment, and that was thanks enough.
She did not press him for more. She knew, from her husband, the long, slow patience such a boy required.
She only kept on. An egg here. An apple there.
A warm word asking nothing back. Stone by small stone, she set herself to wearing down a wall thirty years in the building.
It was the same wall she lived beside at home.
Each small contact she carried home to Otis like a gift.
She told him every time. How the boy had looked.
Whether his face was thinner. Whether he seemed fed at all.
Whether the cough she had heard in him was better or worse.
And Otis listened to every word with a hunger he could not hide, and did not try to.
He leaned toward her in the firelight, as though she were bringing him news of his own child.
He asked her to tell it twice. He asked what the boy had said, and how he had said it, and whether he had smiled. He knew already that he would not have.
Bent together over their worry for the boy, the two of them began to change.
The cold space between them that had stretched so wide on the bitter ride home, narrowed now, evening by evening.
They had a cause that was theirs alone, the two of them.
A shared and aching purpose, and it drew them to the same hearth night after night.
They spoke of the boy. And then, by degrees, they spoke of other things.
The small things a husband and wife speak of that they had never spoken of before.
Almost without noticing the change in themselves, they had stopped being a master and his bargain.
They had become, in the low lamplight of those evenings, something far more like partners.
And underneath the worry, so quiet that neither yet dared to name it, a slow change was working.
The cold contract of their marriage was warming into something with a beating heart.