Unfortunately for me, Gryffin was such an excellent student that occasionally Mr. Shelby called on him for help tutoring the younger children. Those sessions usually took place during lunch or recess, leaving me alone during breaks in the school day. Most of the time I got along all right, sometimes joining the running games. Once in a while some of the middle-grade boys would corner me and pick a fight, despite the fact that I made sure I was never the only one injured in such encounters.
In fact, I had just slammed Carlon’s best friend to the ground one afternoon when a firm voice interrupted our quarrel. “Stop it! Both of you! Carlon, I’m going to tell your father how you’ve been behaving.”
“She’s the one who started it,” Carlon said, panting a little as he shoved me in the arm. I slapped at his hand, but without much force. I was eyeing the young woman who had interrupted us.
Her name was Sarah Parmer, and she was probably seventeen. She was as tall as any of the boys and generously built, and for a moment I was hopeful that she would punch Carlon on my behalf, because she could surely do some damage. But it really just took one good look at her gentle face and serene demeanor to conclude that Sarah Parmer was not the kind of girl who engaged in brawls on the school grounds—or anywhere else, for that matter.
“Don’t bother lying,” she said to Carlon. “You started it. She was defending herself. Why don’t you just leave her alone?”
Carlon hunched a shoulder. His friend had by this time climbed to his feet and was investigating a long tear in his sleeve. “I don’t like her. Acts strange and dresses funny,” he said.
“At least I’m not stupid and ugly like you are,” I shot back.
Sarah gave me a reproving look from dark eyes. “Kellen, you just make it worse.”
“Some days it couldn’t be worse,” I retorted.
“You boys go off now,” she said. “I want to talk to Kellen.”
Carlon sneered, but sauntered away, followed by his companion. I looked with some wariness up at Sarah Parmer. “What do you want to talk to me about?”
She looked suddenly shy and uncertain. “I thought you might do me a favor.”
This was unique in my experience. “Me? What kind of favor?”
“I’m not learning my numbers, and I need to know them. Can your friend Gryffin help me, do you think?”
I stared. “He only teaches the little kids.”
“Well, do you think he could teach me, too?”
I examined my forearm, which was bleeding. “I guess he could. I’ll ask him.” I looked at Sarah Parmer again. “Do you want to stay in at recess?”
“No,” she said quickly, and I was sure she didn’t want any of the girls in her own grade to know that she was seeking assistance from a younger student. “Maybe he could come to my house after school a couple days a week.”
I knew that her parents ran a little freighting company located at the edge of town. “It’s pretty far for him to walk,” I said.
“My father could send a cart.”
I thought Gryffin would like that. “And take him home again?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll ask him,” I said.
“I would pay him something, of course.”
“Really?” It hadn’t occurred to me this could be a money-making proposition. “I wonder if I know anything you need to learn.”
Sarah Parmer actually laughed. She was not an especially pretty girl; her dark brown hair was wrapped in a braid around her head, and her face was broad and plain. But she had an appealing laugh, and I smiled in response. “What do you know how to do?”
“I can cook. I can sew. I can work in the garden. I can fix a broken chair if it only needs a few nails in it.”
“Know anything about horses?”
I was disappointed. “No.”
“Well, there’s always other work to do. Why don’t you come out with Gryffin tomorrow and we’ll see if my mother or father can find some odd jobs for you?”
“Sure, I can do that,” I said, as if I were doing her a kindness.
She nodded, as if she thought so, too. “Thanks. Tomorrow after school, then?”
“I guess so.”
Gryffin wasn’t quite as dazzled at the invitation as I was, though he was curious to see what life was like at the Parmer house and happy to do what he could to explain the mysteries of math to Sarah. We didn’t really have gentry in Thrush Hollow, where pretty much everyone was working poor, but there were a few families who possessed a little more money and ran somewhat more successful enterprises than the rest. The Parmers were among them. The freighting company did steady business through all seasons; Josh Parmer employed two drivers as well as his three sons. Their house, situated in the northern part of town, had always appeared large and comfortable from the outside. We were pleased to have a chance to see inside.
My mother was also delighted at the thought that I might be developing a relationship with the Parmers. “You could be a driver for them someday,” she suggested. “Tell Josh Parmer you’re good with horses.”
“I’ve never even ridden one.”
“Show him what a strong young man you are,” she said. “Act responsibly. If you impress him, he’ll remember you when he’s hiring, no matter what the job is.”
It sounded like reasonable advice to me.
The following day, Gryffin and I enjoyed our short ride from the schoolhouse to the Parmer home in the back of a well-sprung wagon. The driver, a cheerful fellow with a bristling red beard, came around to the back of the cart once we’d stopped. We were in front of the whitewashed, two-story house where the Parmers lived. There was a sprawl of barns and other outbuildings behind the house, and several pastures filled with horses grazing.
“You need a hand out of there, buddy?” the driver asked in a genial voice, and before Gryffin could answer a polite “no,” the man had lifted the boy from the bench to the street. I could tell that Gryffin was a little ruffled and trying hard not to be angry.
“You didn’t need to do that,” he said in a quiet voice. “I can manage on my own.”
“Oh, well, thought this was easier,” the driver said so cheerfully that it was hard to dislike him. “What about those canes? You need those, too?”
Sarah, who had ridden in front with the driver, led us into the house. “All my brothers are on the road, so it ought to be quiet for a change,” she told us over her shoulder. “When they’re here—well, let’s just say it gets a little noisy.”
I stared around me as we entered the front door, taking in as many details as I could. All the rooms were bigger and grander than the rooms in my mother’s house. Nonetheless, the furniture looked a little worn and much-used, and the colors of the curtains and the sofas were warm and welcoming. It was the sort of house a person would love to come home to, I thought. Nothing at all like my own.
“Sarah, is that you and your friends?” a voice called, and then Betsy Parmer came from the back of the house and joined us in the parlor. She looked just like Sarah—big and broad and gentle—except twenty years older and a little heavier. “Is anybody hungry?”
“Yes,” Gryffin and I said together.
Sarah introduced us, and Betsy Parmer shook our hands as if we were important townsfolk, not schoolchildren. “Kellen Carmichael?” she repeated, looking me over a little uncertainly. “You’re one of the boys Sarah knows from school?”
“That’s right,” I said, but Sarah corrected her.
“One of the girls.”
Betsy Parmer raised her eyebrows at me.
“One of the girls,” I admitted.
“And you’ve come to help Sarah with her numbers?”
“No, I’m not very good at math,” I said breezily. “But I thought—if you had chores to do around the house—I’m pretty good at things. I could work while Gryffin gives lessons to Sarah.”
I saw Betsy exchange looks with her daughter. “Always plenty to do around here,” she said with a laugh. “Why don’t you
come back to the kitchen with me and we’ll see what kind of work we can find.”
Chapter Four
The next two months were among the best of my life so far. Autumn was slowly spinning into winter, so the air was crisp and delicious, and the world was drenched in color. My mother, who disliked winter, always grew quieter during this time of year, less unreasonable; it was as if she saved all her strength just for surviving the dark, still season. I had finally settled into school, not just learning key subjects but forming true friendships and learning to avoid the malcontents.
And there was the Parmer house to go to two or three times a week. Betsy always had food ready for us—yellow cheese, fresh bread, fruit pie, or the occasional more substantial dish. While Sarah and Gryffin studied in the parlor, I worked around the kitchen with the matriarch of the house. She was rather impressed with my range of skills and would put me to work at any task I was willing to undertake. I sewed curtains, darned socks, chopped firewood, weeded the garden, scrubbed the oven, fed the chickens, plucked them if they’d been slaughtered for an evening meal, and did any other chore that presented itself.
When Sarah’s brothers were home, they filled the house with big bodies and loud laughs and constant conversation, and I found them a little intimidating at first. But, as you might imagine, neither Betsy nor Sarah was the type to tolerate teasing or abuse, so there was nothing to fear from them. They treated me like a younger brother and would ruffle my hair or call me by various nicknames. They treated Gryffin like a rather exotic pet, gingerly but with a certain respect. Josh Parmer was rarely around, for the business took most of his attention, but the few times I saw him I thought him one of the most likable men I’d ever met, genial and honest. In fact, what I really thought was that he deserved to have such a good-hearted wife, such agreeable offspring, such a happy life.
I had to wonder what kind of person I would have been now if I had been born into this house and raised among these people. Would I have been full of laughter myself? Would I have been friendlier with the world, less suspicious, filled with an unconscious optimism? Would I be generous, more willing to hazard myself, secure in the knowledge that love awaited me no matter how dark my day?
Or would I still have been just me?
Gryffin and I had been working at the Parmer house for about a month when I became convinced I was going to die. I had woken up with a small amount of blood on my sheets, which puzzled me because I couldn’t remember a wound or find a cut, but I cleaned myself up and went to school. Twice that day I found more blood in my underwear, and as the day progressed, I felt a thick, dull pain build up in the region of my stomach. What could this be? I was panicked and afraid, seized by the notion that I had contracted some disease of the internal organs that would be impossible to cure. Sitting in the classroom, unable to concentrate on Mr. Shelby’s lecture, I was overtaken by a great feeling of sadness as I pictured my mother’s lonely life—husband missing, only child dead so young. My stomach knotted with pain, and I thought some of it might be coming from the tears I was trying to hold back.
“You’re quiet today,” Gryffin commented later as we rode in the cart to the Parmer house.
“Just—tired, I suppose,” I said in a subdued voice. What a loss to Gryffin, too, if his best friend should die so unexpectedly! I couldn’t bear to tell him.
“Well, maybe we’ll go home early,” he replied.
As usual, once we were at the house, we separated, Gryffin following Sarah to the parlor while I went to the kitchen to see what Betsy needed. Fortunately it was a day of tasks that were not too strenuous—sewing, mostly—and I sat quietly with my hands busy and my thoughts dark.
When I got up once to use the chamber pot, it seemed I filled it instantly with blood.
I pulled my trousers up and stood there, shivering, my arms folded tightly across my chest. How quickly would the disease progress? How many days did I have left? How—how—how—could I tell my mother what had happened to me? Or had the same disease infected her already? Maybe it was a plague that would take the whole town. Maybe we were all just a week or two away from a painful and lingering death.
“Kellen! What’s wrong?” Betsy had come to look for me and now stood in the doorway of the back room, her face a study in concern. “You look so pale. Do you have a fever?”
“Betsy,” I whispered. “I think I’m dying.”
She made an inarticulate noise and hurried over to check my forehead with a cool hand. “You don’t feel hot. Does your stomach hurt? What’s wrong?”
I could hardly get the words out. “I’m bleeding. From the inside.”
I gestured toward the chamber pot and then put a hand on my stomach. Her eyes followed the motion of my hand and then fixed on my face. I will never forget the range of expressions she showed then—surprise, comprehension, compassion, and anger. “Kellen,” she said very quietly, “has your mother never told you about the monthly bleeding that women experience?”
My mother had never told me about anything that women experienced. I shook my head, feeling a slight tendril of hope. Betsy didn’t appear as alarmed as I thought she would have if she believed my situation was grave.
“Oh, you poor child,” Betsy said, drawing me into a quick hug. “Let me give you some blood rags and some clean clothes—and explain some things to you. Nothing is wrong with you. Everything is just fine. You’re just—you’re just a young girl, that’s all, and this is one of the things that happens to young girls. It’s a good thing, really it is. Oh, I’m so glad you were here and I could take care of you.”
I was glad of that, too, so relieved to not be facing the prospect of death that I could forgive my mother for not warning me about this most curious fact of life. Betsy didn’t forgive her, though; I could tell. Betsy never said a word against my mother—or, indeed, against anyone else—in my hearing. But I could tell she thought my mother unnatural, even cruel. It gave me some comfort to know that, if there was an odd creature living in my house, Betsy did not think I was the strange one. Betsy thought I was an ordinary girl.
Up until Wintermoon, there were only three times Gryffin and I missed our twice-weekly visit to the Parmer homestead. Once was when the whole Parmer house was down with influenza and Sarah warned us not to come over. Once was when my mother caught the very same infection, and I had to stay home to nurse her.
Once was when Gryffin was in too much pain to go.
I hadn’t thought much about it that morning when I stopped at his uncle’s tavern on my way to school. Usually Gryffin was waiting for me outside, or just inside the door on cold days. This morning he was nowhere in sight, and it was a good ten minutes before someone answered my pounding at the back door. Taverns tended to be open late at night, so those who staffed it were not traditionally early risers. I knew it, but I kept knocking anyway. Eventually the door was opened by Gryffin’s aunt, a thin, hollow-eyed woman with stringy hair. She was wearing a nightdress and looked ill-tempered.
“What do you want?” she snapped.
“Gryffin. I walk to school with him.”
Her face softened a bit; she actually looked sad. “Oh. I’m afraid he won’t be going to school today.”
“Why not? Is he sick?”
She hesitated a moment before answering. “His legs are bothering him, that’s what,” she said. “He can’t walk that far.”
I hitched my book bag on my shoulder. “Well—should I come by tonight? And see how he’s doing? I can bring his assignments so he won’t fall behind.”
“I don’t know if he’ll be much better tonight,” she said doubtfully.
“I’ll come by anyway,” I said. “Just to see.”
“If you want to,” she said, and shut the door in my face.
At school, I told Sarah that Gryffin was unavailable for the evening tutoring session but that I hoped he’d be well in a couple of days. At lunch and during the play periods, I lurked in the shadows of the schoolhouse, hoping to escape attention. Two o
f the little girls whom Gryffin tutored came and sat with me, and that was all right. Carlon and his friends didn’t usually bother me if I had any audience at all. But the girls insisted on playing some elaborate imaginary game that involved them meeting a prince at some Summermoon ball. This required them to describe in great detail the fabulous dresses they would wear at the event, and I was really quite bored. At the afternoon break, I spent the entire period teaching them how to throw a rock with enough accuracy that they could actually hit something ten yards away, and I, at least, enjoyed that much more.
After school, I gathered up my books, accepted Gryffin’s assignment from Mr. Shelby, and headed back to the tavern. No one answered my knock this time, either, but I knew the household was up. It was early afternoon, but people were already coming into the tavern for an afternoon drink or an early dinner. No doubt Gryffin’s aunt and uncle were too busy to even hear me.
I pushed experimentally at the door and found it unlocked, so I opened it and stepped inside. I was instantly in a dark hallway that led in several directions—down to a cellar, up to the second story, and out to what had to be the kitchens. The smells were strong and appealing, of onions sizzling and meat baking and beer brewing. I could hear a range of voices, near enough to be in the kitchen, far enough to be coming from the taproom. Everyone sounded quite jolly.
I slipped around the newel post and crept upstairs. Here another hallway, longer than the first, offered three doors for me to choose from. Surely one of them opened into Gryffin’s room, but which one? I knew that he liked to watch the town square from an upper-story window, so I paused to try to correlate the interior geography of the house with the layout of the streets below. The second room on the right seemed the most likely candidate, so I tiptoed down the hall and quietly knocked.
The silence from within seemed startled for a moment, then Gryffin’s voice said, “You can come in.” I pushed the door open and went inside.