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“Now, get away with ya,” Fiona said, as she
turned and returned Declan’s kiss.

Sarah waited until Declan had jumped down
from the porch, flinging one last air kiss at his bride and giving
Sarah a wink as he bounded away.

Fiona turned from Sarah
and clapped her hands at the gathering of camp women who were
approaching her deck. “All right, ladies,” she said. “Let’s get set
up, shall we now? They’ll come in the back entrance to the camp and
we’ll need every empty box, jar, jug or basket you have in your
homes, so if you could collect those we’ll be ready for when they
come.”

The women turned as one to
head back to their cottages and tents but Sarah didn’t move. Fiona
watched the women leave and then, without a glance at Sarah, turned
to go into her cottage, saying over her shoulder, “Come on then.
I’ll put the tea on.”

The work was hard but the
sense of fellowship was something Sarah had never experienced
before. Because she and David had lived outside the community
during the last harvest, she missed this feeling of family, of
working together for the good of the whole.

When the first cartful of corn ears arrived,
Fiona had the women create a triage. Two women lifted the crates of
just-picked ears from the cart and passed them down the line of
woman leading to two long picnic tables.

On either side of the
tables, the camp women stood ready to strip the corn and wrap or
package depending on its final, intended use. Corn stunted or too
badly damaged by insects was tossed in the baskets for the
livestock feed. The rest were tediously combed of their fine silks
and stored in solutions of salty brine or kept in their husks for
eating that week or the next.

“Cor, what I wouldn’t give for a working
refrigerator,” Fiona said, wiping the perspiration from her
forehead. “I think it’s the one thing I miss the most. It like to
kills me the food we waste because we can’t preserve it.”

Sarah stood next to her
friend. Their tea taken together had focused on simple things:
Papin’s recent sassiness, the pleasures of sleeping next to a
loving warm body, and the luxuriant bliss of the summer weather.
They had studiously stayed away from any talk or hint of the
future, talking only as far as the coming harvest festival and the
plans for it.

Fiona was no doubt sorry
for some of the things she’d said, Sarah knew, but apologies
wouldn’t be forthcoming. It was enough that the fight appeared to
be behind them now.

“I know,” Sarah said. She
chose her words carefully since a refrigerator would likely be in
her future before the end of next month. “How long do you think the
corn will last?”

Fiona frowned and looked
over her shoulder at the sound of another cart loaded with corn
heading into camp. “Half will probably rot in the root cellar. The
other half should take us through Christmas, I reckon.
Mebbe.”

And then?
Sarah felt a heavy weight of guilt for the fast
food and easy, cheap groceries in her future. Here, there would be
potatoes for awhile—always the vegetable that lasted the longest in
the cellars—and then long months of only meat and whatever
preserved vegetables in the salt brine was still edible.

“Did I ever tell you about the cheese man
what came around last January?”

“Cheese man?”

“It wasn’t half bad. Made
from goats milk and a nice break midwinter. Only problem was, the
last thing we needed at that point were more things to bind us up.
We needed something green.”

Sarah remembered last winter as a cocoon of
indoor living—bread baking and eating preserves and whatever David
could pull out of their rabbit traps for the three of them. It had
been cozy, if largely uncomfortable. For some reason, she had
assumed that the community was faring better than they were.

“Is there any way to keep what we harvest
through next February?”

Sarah knew the answer to her question before
Fiona answered.

“That’s seven months sitting in a root
cellar or a jug of vinegar. Whatever good you were hoping for from
the green had long since disintegrated, I’ll wager. If there is
anything left at all.”

Sarah knew the rest of
summer would be a sumptuous time of plentiful food and delicious,
succulent seasonal foods. The fresh corn, roasted and slathered
with churned butter, the tomatoes with crisp bacon on baked bread
for a BLT that would make you weep with pleasure, and omelets with
heaping side dishes of boiled cabbage, leeks, and wild garlic. Even
now, the omnipresent scent of berry pies, cobblers and tarts wafted
deliciously over Donovan’s Lot.

Come fall, the larders still full, the camp
would pick the apple orchard bare and add fried apples, apple
fritters and apple dump cakes to the daily menus. The fruit was so
sweet, nobody seemed to notice they’d run out of sugar six months
earlier.

Then, bit by bit, up to
then their comfort assured, their bellies continually full, the
camp would be jolted back to reality. Come November, the game would
leave, the chickens would wilt and stop producing, the hay would
grow mold and the root cellars would be scraped clean.

Thanksgiving would feel a
long way off, Sarah thought.
And will I be
sitting in front of a bronzed roasted turkey with dressing and
mashed potatoes and real gravy? And wondering if this is the day
Fiona and Mike go to bed hungry again, or maybe the children,
because they’re trying to make their stores last?

The thought of
Thanksgiving made her cringe in spite of the pleasure she wanted to
feel at being with her parents again, John and Papin at the table.
The picture just wouldn’t gel into anything that felt good, she
thought with surprise.

And Christmas will be even worse.

A squeal of laugher erupted from behind the
line of huts out of sight. Sarah recognized that squeal and she
frowned. She dropped the shears on the table that she had been
using to cut the toughest stems that held the husk in place.

“I’ll go,” Fiona said, a
light hand on Sarah’s arm. It was so much better for Fi to deal
with it, Sarah thought. Papin still found reason to force herself
to be polite or mind her tongue with Fi—something she was failing
to do more and more with Sarah, and Mike too, she
noticed.

“Thanks,” Sarah said. “Sounds like a boy’s
in the picture.”

“Just what I was thinking,” Fiona said as
she wiped her hands on a rag and left the work area, disappearing
between two of the closely constructed huts.

Perhaps Papin was just
at
that age
. Or
maybe it was the thought of leaving to go to America. In the seven
months since Papin had come to live at Donovan’s Lot, she
experienced the first real stability of her life. She had been
treated as a daughter by Mike nearly from the moment Mike carried
her out of that whorehouse in Wales. In those months of being loved
and tucked seamlessly into a family, Papin had appeared
strengthened and been restored.

Or so Sarah had thought.

Maybe the idea of being
uprooted yet again—even for a place as wonderful as a home with hot
and cold running water—was too much for a child used to abandonment
and inconsistency. Even paradise, if there wasn’t a boundary to
hold all the goodness in and keep the evil out, was just another
place to live.

Should she have asked
Papin if she wanted to come to the States? Sarah had assumed that
Papin would want to. She assumed that, as part of Sarah’s family,
she would simply comply, as all younger members of every family
must do.

While she had always known
it, it occurred to her that Mike had stepped into the role of
father to both Papin and John. And because that had been such a
help, and because the children needed what he had to give, Sarah
had just accepted the situation.

Only now, without asking
anyone’s opinion—not the kids, not Mike’s—she was splitting up the
family.

No wonder everyone was so
pissed off.

She eased a kink out of
the small of her back and massaged it with a free hand. The corn
was piling up to her left and it filled her with relief and
pleasure to see it. Even if there wasn’t enough corn to last the
camp through the winter, it would serve as many months of
sustenance. Better than last year, and for some of these families,
she knew, better even than life before the bomb went off over the
Irish Sea.

As she picked up another ear of corn, she
saw Fiona step back through the huts, her hand firmly clamped to
the arm of a recalcitrant and belligerent Papin.

Sarah’s shoulders sagged.
If Papin didn’t care to behave even for Fiona, they really were
coming to the end of their days. For the first time since the girl
had come to live with her, Sarah found herself wondering if she was
going to be able to handle her.

“I can walk by meself Auntie Fi!” Papin
said, trying to twist out of Fiona’s grip. “And we wasn’t doing
nothing.”

“That’s just the point,
Papin,” Fiona said, giving the girl a push toward the corn-shucking
table. “You were supposed to be minding the bairns and the wee
ones, not snogging with Bobby McClure.”

“We wasn’t snogging!” Papin said, brushing
off the touch of Fiona’s hand on her shoulder with much drama and
exaggeration.

“Well, now you can shuck
corn with us so we can mind
you
,” Fiona said tartly. “Lyndie,
darling, I’m sorry to have to ask…” Fiona gave a helpless shrug to
the young mother standing beside Sarah, who quickly took off her
apron and headed in the direction behind the huts to take Papin’s
place watching over the children.

“Papin, what the hell is the matter with
you?” Sarah said with exasperation. “You can see we’re all working
here. You were carrying on with Bobby McClure?”

“A foul lie, Sarah, as sure as I’m standing
here,” Papin said, glaring in turns at Sarah and Fiona.

Sarah knew the fact that Papin was
addressing her by her first name instead of “Mum” was not a good
sign.

“A liar, is it you’re calling me then?”
Fiona said, her hands clapping onto her waist and facing Papin.
“Would you care to have your uncle Mike define what it means to
call your elders liars—at the end of his leather strap?”

“Da won’t whip me,” Papin
said haughtily. “Go ahead and call him. Bet you he tells me to go
pick berries and to think about what I’ve done.” Papin smirked,
then turned on her heel and flounced off toward Sarah’s
cabin.

“Let her go, Fi,” Sarah said when she could
see Fiona was inclined to go after her. “I’ll deal with her
later.”

“You’ve got your hands
full there, Sarah,” Fi said, coming back to the table and shaking
her head. “She’s wild deep down no matter how tame she sometimes
acts.”

“I know.” Sarah had a
memory glimpse of the first time she saw Papin. Dressed in colorful
gypsy rags, sitting on the back stairs of a boarding house in
Wales, munching on a fried meat pie that she’d earned by selling
her body. She had bright eyes, a fast mind, and a quick tongue. A
week after knowing Sarah, Papin had sacrificed her body, and nearly
her life, so Sarah could find her way home again to her
boy.

Is it true we don’t always
know what our children really need?
she
thought with a sinking heart as she looked in the direction the
girl had gone.

***

He was sorry now that he
had promised Sarah he’d come for dinner. He was too old for these
long harvest days, even if he was doing more problem solving than
actual picking, himself. He still dragged back into camp, tired and
hurting in every joint he had to bend. If a hot bath could be
possible, and an early night, he’d even skip the meal.

When he got back to camp,
most of the other men had already quit for the day and were back
with their families. The gypsy contingency was already in place by
the main campfire. The women stirred a set of three large tri-pod
black pots that hung in the campfire while the men lounged about
the perimeter smoking and talking. The smell coming off the pots
reawakened Mike’s nascent hunger.

As the leader of the
camp—and because he had no real family himself—he and Gavin tended
to rotate turns as dinner guests at the other community members’
hearths. Gavin had recently been spending all his dinner hours at
the family of young Jenna McGurthy. To address the balance, Mike
had increased the communal store of foods for the McGurthies. Gavin
ate like most young men—ravenously and constantly.

Squinting as he neared his
cottage, he could see wee Papin waited for him on his deck. It
wasn’t the first time he’d found her waiting for him, but lately it
was less about greeting her foster da and more about bracing him to
hear her side of some disagreement between her and Sarah. The
closer he got, he could see she was standing near a steaming pail.
His mood brightened. The lass had prepared a bath for
him.

“Papin, me darlin’,” Mike
said as he mounted the steps. “Sure you’re a sight for sore
eyes,
leanbha
.”

“Sarah thought you’d be wanting to clean up
before dinner.”

“
Sarah
, is it?” Mike said, tossing
down his saddlebag and vest onto the porch. “You and yer mum into
it again, are ya?”

“Not at all,” she said, rising on tiptoe to
kiss him on the cheek. “I just know she’s a little wobbly these
days, what with Auntie Fi being mad at her and all.”