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Her hair might turn white overnight.
If this was his father’s present way of ordering or arranging things, it was a great deal more drastic than anything he would have thought of in the days when he was alive.
And operating in this pitiless or haphazard fashion, would his father even care that Jamie got the blame?
Also, his mother might see that he had something to do with it, something that he wasn’t telling. She could do that sometimes, though she had easily swallowed the lie about Becky Johnson. If she knew, or even suspected anything like the truth, she would hate him forever.
He could pray, if a liar’s prayers had any value. He could pray that the baby was taken by an Indian, though not Becky Johnson, and that she would grow up in an Indian camp, and one day come to the door trying to sell some Indian trinkets and would be very beautiful and be recognized at once by his mother who would cry out with joy and look the way she used to look before his father died.
Stop that. How could he think of anything so stupid?
Andrew walked into the barn’s shadow and stood there urinating. While he did so he heard a strange thin sound of distress. He thought it was some night animal, maybe a mouse in a trap. When he had buttoned himself up he heard it again, and now it was clear enough that he could follow it. Around the barn, across the barnyard, to an outbuilding which had a regular door, not a door for livestock. The sound was louder now and Andrew, the father of several children, recognized it for what it was.
He knocked on the door, twice, and when there was no answer he tried the latch. There was no bolt on, the door swung inwards. The moon shone in through a window and showed a baby. Sure enough, a baby. Lying there on a narrow cot made up with a rough blanket and a flat pillow that must be someone’s bed. Hooks on the wall held a few articles of clothing and a lantern. This must be where the stable boy slept. But he wasn’t home, he was still out-probably at the other, shabbier hotel, which sold beer and whisky. Or mooning around with some girl.
In his place, on his bed, was this hungry baby.
Andrew picked it up, not noticing the bit of paper which fell away from its clothing. He had never paid a lot of attention to what Mary’s baby looked like and he did not do so now. There was not much chance of there being two babies missing in the same night. He didn’t fuss over it, but carried it confidently back to the hotel. It had stopped crying anyway, when it was picked up.
Nobody stirred on the porch when he mounted the steps, and he proceeded up the stairs to Mary’s room. She opened the door before he could knock, as if she had heard the child’s snuffling breathing, and he spoke at once, quietly, to stop her crying out.
“Is this the one you’re missing?”
The stable boy found the paper on the floor when he got back. He could read it, too.
A PRESENT from one of your SWEETHEARTS.
But no present, not even a joke of a present, that he could see, anywhere around.
Jamie had heard his uncle come up on the porch, then enter the i
“I just took your sister upstairs to your mother,” his uncle said matter-of-factly. “I thought I’d put your mind to rest.” And he turned around to go to his own sleeping spot.
So there was no need to turn back, and they continued their journey on in the morning. Andrew thought it just as well not to interfere with the story of the Indian woman, and gave it as his opinion that she had got scared and left the baby in the stable boy’s bed. He did not believe that the stable boy was in any way involved, and he did believe that James was, but he left the matter uninvestigated. The lad was sly and troublesome, but by the look of him in the night he might have learned a lesson.
Mary had been so glad to have the baby back that she didn’t much question what had happened. Did she still blame Becky? Or did she have more of an inkling than she wanted to let on about the tendencies of her eldest son?
Oxen are long-suffering and reliable beasts and the only real problem with them is that once they get an idea of where they want to go it is very hard to make them change their minds. If they spot a pond that reminds them of how thirsty they are and how pleasant water is, you might as well let them go to it. And that is what happened around midday after they had left the i
A sharp-faced red fox watched them for a while from the edge of the woods. Andrew saw it but did not mention it, feeling that there had been enough excitement on this trip already.
He knew, better than they did, what lay ahead of them. Roads that were worse and i
He had seen enough of the Yankee people by now to know what had tempted Will to live among them. The push and noise and rawness of them, the need to get on the bandwagon. Though some were decent enough and some, and maybe some of the worst, were Scots. Will had had something in him drawing him to such a life.
It had proved a mistake.
Andrew knew, of course, that a man was as likely to die of cholera in Upper Canada as in the state of Illinois, and that it was foolish to blame Will’s death on his choice of nationality. He did not do so. And yet. And yet-there was something about all this rushing away, loosing oneself entirely from family and past, there was something rash and self-trusting about it that might not help a man, that might put him more in the way of such an accident, such a fate. Poor Will.
And that became the way the surviving brothers spoke of him until the day they died, and the way their children spoke of him. Poor Will. His own sons, naturally, did not call him anything but Father, though they too, in time, may have felt a pall, of sadness and fatedness, that hung around any mention of his name. Mary almost never spoke of him, and how she felt about him became nobody’s business but her own.