Читать книгу Ann Alma Children's Library 2-Book Bundle - Ann Alma - Страница 13

John and the sled had rounded the next bend before Lee and Alex got up, scratching their mosquito bites.

“Let’s look around while they’re gone.” Alex pointed up the hill.

After following the road for a short while, Lee heard whacking sounds, as if someone was chopping wood. She pulled Alex’s sleeve and put her finger to her lips. He nodded. They moved carefully from tree to tree, making sure not to step on twigs.

Lee and Alex froze in their tracks. In a large clearing stood the homestead shacks, but the walls no longer had holes. The creepers and shrubs were gone. Grass and weeds grew around the shacks. The small window frame in the larger shack held a pane of glass. A black stove pipe stuck out of a wall.

They crept a few steps closer to the fire pit in front of the shacks. Crouching behind a shrub, they looked at the thin wisps of smoke coming from the pit.

“Like Emily Carr’s,” Lee whispered, pointing to the grill with a kettle.

Some blackened pots and dishes lay by the small creek that ran beside the fire pit. A tall, wooden fence protected one area. When Lee crept closer, she saw it was a garden with corn, carrots, lettuce and other plants in rows. There were even some new, small apple trees across the creek, where the big, older ones used to be. They were fenced off as well.

Farther back stood an outhouse. Someone had strung a clothes line between the smaller shack and the outhouse. On it hung two rags and an old, faded blouse.

The people that moved into the homestead had worked fast. Lee and Alex were here only two weekends ago, picking green apples off the old trees and telling ghost stories.

Two children, looking so much alike they had to be twins, slowly pulled a huge saw with a wooden handle on each end through a felled tree, back and forth, back and forth. To be high enough to reach the saw handles, the children stood on wooden boxes. Even though they had only cut a short way through the trunk, they looked tired, or bored.

The boy wore pants that came to just below his knees. Two patches were sown onto the seat. The girl had on a dress that hung down to her calves. Both children wore long stockings.

Farther along on the same felled tree stood a small woman. She swung a double-bladed axe above her head and down on a branch with a thud.

Alex nudged Lee. “Let’s explore,” he whispered, pointing to the shacks, their doors wide open.

“I don’t know. It’s too buggy. No wonder they’re wearing all those clothes.”

“We might find evidence.” Alex crawled through the bush along the edge of the clearing.

Evidence of what? Lee wanted to ask. She hadn’t seen any tire marks coming up here. But she didn’t say anything and followed Alex into the bigger shack.

In one corner stood a metal barrel on a stand, with a door in the front and a stove pipe in the back, connected to the wall. In another corner stood a bed with a pile of sheets on the mattress. By the wall lay two more small mattresses with blankets. In the middle of the shack, on a table made of planks and logs, stood an old-fashioned lantern, the kind that used gas or oil. Apparently, there was no electricity. Five rough chairs, made from blocks and strips of wood, stood around the table. From the ceiling hung a skinny, yellow strip of paper with a small roll dangling at the bottom of it. Dozens of flies were stuck to the strip, but hundreds more flew around the room.

A set of shelves, built from logs and planks, stood along a wall. Lee walked over to look at the books and newspapers. She picked up a book that said Holy Bible, then put it back and flipped through a photo album.

Many pictures were of babies, by themselves or two together. They wore the same knitted bonnets and sweaters, one blue, the other pink. One photo showed a man and a woman in old-fashioned clothing, holding the two tiny babies. They stood proudly in front of a house and flat farm lands that reached far back to the horizon.

Lee wandered to another shelf. It held jars of beans, dried apples, flour, salt or sugar and tea. There were some cooking utensils and candles. Beside it stood a wooden box made into a doll house. Some paper dolls and clothes lay in it. Lee saw a small box of paints and a brush as well. She thought again about painting with Emily Carr. Part of her wanted to go back down the hill to talk to the painter. She felt excited about having met her, felt almost as if she’d somehow known her before.

Lee looked around the room. She didn’t want to touch anything else on the shelves. Two weeks ago this place had been empty, old and creaky. Were these people ghosts come alive, the ghosts she and Alex had made up in their stories? She shivered.

“What are we looking for anyway?” she whispered. “None of our stuff is up here. Let’s go to the beach.”

“How could everything change like this?” Alex frowned.

They sneaked out of the shack. The woman and the twins were still hard at work, so Alex convinced Lee to come and peek into the smaller shack. It was empty except for some bedding, a pair of pants and a shirt hanging on nails, a lantern hanging from a nail in a ceiling beam, a big wooden tub standing in a corner and an accordion lying on a box in another corner.

Lee felt more uncomfortable. They were snooping. People really lived here.

She froze. A noise came through the back wall of the small shack- a scraping noise. They rushed outside and lay down in the tall weeds by the side wall.

“Check it out.” Alex pointed, his mouth right beside Lee’s ear.

Lee shrugged, crawling ahead on her elbows and knees. She giggled. “A goat.”

A white nanny rubbed her head back and forth on the wall of a small lean-to built onto the back of the shack. The rope she was tied to had wound around a stake so often that the goat could only just reach the wall of the lean-to with her head. She looked at the children and bleated. A fluffed-up mother hen strutted from the lean-to, leading a string of five chicks.

Lee crawled around the corner and stood up. From here the twins and their mother could not see her. She petted the animal and untangled the rope.

“I don’t know about goats, but my friend Roy’s horse could never eat this much grass in two weeks.” Alex shook his head, looking at the large, almost bare patches. The hen clucked her chicks away from him toward the tall trees. “These people couldn’t have such a big pile of compost in two weeks either.” He scratched a mosquito bite on his neck. “Not if they’re normal people!”

“Let’s talk to them,” Lee said. “Maybe they can explain.” She looked around the corner of the shack.

Just at that moment the woman’s boot slipped on the log. The axe she had swung high over her head came down with a thud on her leg. She screamed and fell off the trunk. The twins screamed as well. “Ma! Ma!” the girl yelled.

Lee gasped. She ran through the clearing, jumped over the creek and crouched beside the woman’s head.

“Who are you?” the girl asked, obviously surprised but distracted by her mother’s cries. The boy was already bent over her leg.

The woman lay moaning, her eyes closed.

“Ma!” The girl pulled the heavy pant leg up to the knee. The boy started untying the string that was used as a boot lace.

“She’s bleeding a lot,” the girl said.

“We’ll have to stop the blood.” The boy pulled the string from the boot and tied it around his mother’s leg, above the cut. “I’ll hold it. Get a tourniquet.” He swatted the flies away.

The girl rushed to the shack. A few minutes later she returned with a strip of cloth and a stick. While the boy unwound the string, the girl wrapped the cloth around the leg, again above the cut. Putting the stick through the cloth, she twisted. The flow of blood stopped to a trickle.

How had the twins known what to do? Lee wondered. They couldn’t be any older than she or Alex, but they seemed so sure. They needed water now, to clean the cut. Getting up, Lee saw Alex standing by the creek. He was never very good with injuries and he hated the sight of blood.

“Bring some water,” she called to him.

“Sterilize it first,” the boy said.

“Sterilize?” Lee wasn’t sure what he meant.

“Boil it,” the girl said.

“How?” Lee asked.

“On the fire.” The boy looked at her curiously, taking his dirty checkered cap off. He wiped his forehead with his shirt sleeve, showing a tanned wrist and hand, but white skin where his sleeve normally covered his arm.

“Who are you?” the girl repeated.

Everyone said their names before the boy, Willard, helped Lee rekindle the fire. Alex filled the kettle with water. The girl, Clare, stayed with her mother, who cried out in pain.

When they had cleaned the leg and put an old, folded blanket under the mother’s head, Willard said, “We’ll have to put iodine on it. It’ll sting, Ma.” The woman nodded.

He ran to the larger shack and returned with a small bottle of rusty-coloured liquid. Carefully he poured some on the cut, staining the leg. The mother’s eyes were closed, but Lee saw her mouth grimace in pain for a moment. Beads of sweat formed on her face.

“We need an ambulance. Phone 911,” Alex called, standing back by the creek again.

“Do you have a phone?” Lee looked at the questioning faces of the twins.

“911?” Clare said, her eyebrows raised.

“I guess not,” Lee said. Looking at the woman on the ground, she said, “Your mother needs to go to a hospital.”

Willard stood between his mother and Lee. “She’s staying here.” He looked at his sister.

“She needs help.” Lee felt a bubble of unease creeping up from her stomach. “She can’t stay here. We need a doctor, or someone from a rescue team.”

When the woman made a sound, everyone turned back to her.

“We’re here, Ma.” Clare kneeled by her mother’s head. She wiped the pale face with a wet handkerchief before loosening the tourniquet. She tightened it again when blood started to flow heavily.

“Ma, d’you need a doctor?” Clare asked.

“No.” The woman shook her head slightly. “We can’t pay. I’ll be fine.” Pain flashed across her face while she talked.

“We can give him corn for coming up here,” Willard said. “Or the hen. The chicks, they’re old enough now. He can come up with Pa. I can run down ’nd tell him.”

“No.” The woman shook her head more firmly.

“You’d better go,” Clare said, getting up. “We don’t want to upset Ma. Don’t make trouble.”

“Trouble? She needs stitches.” Lee looked at the cut in the leg. It was at least twice as big as the cut on her friend Janet’s arm when she tripped on the bicycle rack at school, and Janet had needed a dozen stitches. The principal had taken her to the doctor in his car. “She needs help.” Lee was determined. She walked over to the woman.

But Clare stopped her. “Leave Ma alone.”

Lee felt the girl’s strong hands pushing on her arms. She looked at the flashing brown eyes in the tanned face. Clare was worried.

“If we help you, we can get her to the shack,” Lee said. Maybe she could show these kids that she and Alex were only trying to help.

“They’re cabins, not shacks,” Willard said, glaring at Lee, his hands on his hips.

The woman grimaced as she tried to sit up. She fell back onto the blanket.

The twins agreed that their mother couldn’t stay where she was. They decided to bring a mattress over and carry her back on it.

“Get Uncle John’s,” Willard said, starting toward the smaller cabin.

“That man, John, is your uncle?” Alex asked.

“You saw him?” Willard glanced at his sister.

When Alex told the twins about the two men and the log, Clare said, “The other man’s our pa. D’you think we can get him to come back?” she asked Willard.

The boy shook his head. “They started late. They’ve to get everything afloat ’nd chained down before the tide’s out. It’ll be dark before they get their haul to the city.”

“What haul?” Lee’s hands tightened into fists. She wanted to ask a million questions. Did the twins know where Mom, Uncle Brooke and Pat were? Why didn’t they want someone to come up here to help their mother? It couldn’t just be because they were poor.

Lee didn’t get an answer to her questions, because Clare and Willard ran off to the smaller cabin. She and Alex followed.

In the tiny, dark room they pulled a mattress out from under the heap of bedding. The four of them struggled to hold the mattress up high while they crossed the creek. Both Lee and Alex got their shoes wet. Lee wished she had bigger arm muscles. She could tell that the twins carried their burden more easily.

Willard lowered the mattress. “I’m gonna get a drink,” he said, wiping his forehead.

Laying the mattress down, both Willard and Clare crouched by the creek to scoop water in their cupped hands.

“You’ll get sick,” Alex said. “Beaver fever.”

“What?” Willard frowned, then slurped up another handful.

“We drink it all the time,” Clare said.

Lee was parched. Her tongue felt as dry as a blackboard brush. But Uncle Brooke always warned against drinking water straight from creeks. He said it had diseases. Clare slurped again before splashing water on her face. “Ah,” she sighed.

Scooping up a handful, Lee looked closely at the clear, cool water. She splashed her face and slurped up a little to wet the inside of her dry mouth. It was icy cold and tasted different from bottled water. She scooped up another handful, spilling most of it down her shirt before she got it to her mouth.

They picked up the mattress and continued. When they got closer to where the twins’ mother had been lying behind the log, they gasped in horror. The mattress fell to the ground.

“Oh no. Ma!” Willard cried.