Scarecrow (23 page)

The eyes gazed up at me, full of knowledge that turned me cold.

“Girlie—” I tried again, but she rolled over and buried her face in the pillow.

“Poor Micah,” she mumbled. “He doesn’t want to be dead.”

My hand froze over her hair, her words humming into my brain, my skin suddenly wet with icy fire. “Oh, Girlie,” I whispered. “Oh, no…”

I stood up as if I’d received an electric shock. I could still hear the voices indistinctly from the room next door, and I chafed my arms roughly to get my circulation going again. It couldn’t be—
it couldn’t be.
Yet my mind whirled with horrible imaginings and I moved down the hall again like a lost player in somebody else’s nightmare. When I finally reentered my room, I’d managed to compose myself, my face a mask of sympathetic concern.

“She’s asleep,” I said. “I told her everything was all right.”

“And it’s time you went back to sleep, too.” Rachel smiled wearily, one hand beneath Franny’s elbow as she steered her toward the door. “All of us need some sleep after that scare, I think.”

“Thanks,” Franny mumbled as she passed me, and I nodded. Seth’s eyes swept me briefly as he followed them out.

I sat on my bed, listening to the house settle around me, the soft whisper of doors shutting, the rustle of mattresses. I sat alone in the darkness, listening to them all falling back to sleep around me, knowing that sleep would not come that easily for me.

I will bring something back…

It couldn’t be!
Just the fact that I was even
considering
the possibility made it somehow all the more horrible…that I could even
suspect
such a thing from a child…that my logic could be
swayed
by this superstitious bunch of people with their centuries-old beliefs and family rituals. The whole thing was ludicrous, and I had fallen prey to it, let it take hold of my mind and my reason. I had been here too long. Now I could understand how myths were so easily fabricated, why tall tales were so readily accepted and believed. Without the normal, functioning world out there to serve as some sort of rational center, it took no effort at all to brainwash and be brainwashed in return. Don’t understand something? Make it up! Need an explanation? Invent one! Without television or radio or newspapers to give the current state of the universe, it can be whatever you want it to be! New sounds are scary when there are so few sounds to begin with; the unknown is even worse when there are no lights to flick on to dispel the darkness. The darkness of the mind, I thought bitterly—and I’m being dragged into it, made a part of it, as helpless a victim to these crazy terrors as this whole family is to nature and her stringent, unforgiving ways.

No betrayal here…

Betrayal.
Seth’s words came back to me, like a fatal prophecy, and I bit down on my fist, tasting blood. Franny hadn’t burned the scarecrow…and Seth had punished her…
no betrayal…nothing out of order here
…and Franny had told on Micah…and now Micah was dead…
everything as it’s always been
…and now Micah was coming back…

“Stop it!” I moaned, limp and exhausted. “Stop it! You’re as bad as the rest of them! It’s ridiculous what you’re thinking—it’s impossible—” Of course Micah hadn’t really come back. Micah was dead. Dead and resting in peace six feet under the muddy earth in the cemetery with all the other Whittakers who had gone on before him…
the other Whittakers he killed
…“No!” Franny was just distraught. Girlie couldn’t raise the dead, but Girlie
could
call Franny’s bluff, especially when Franny was feeling so guilty.
Micah was dead.
And the shuffling in the yard was only leaves and autumn’s night tricks. It had nothing to do with betrayal—it had nothing to do with anything.

Because, dear God, I was with Rachel’s husband while she told me what a comfort I was to her
—

And what would that betrayal bring
me?

S
OMETIME IN THE LAST
hours before dawn, the rain began to freeze.

I heard it pelting the house, then sliding thickly down the eaves, and when the gray light of morning crept over the hillsides, the house was an island in a sloshy, cold sea. The ground was too warm yet for the ice to stick. Instead the already saturated earth began to flood, the ice melting and inching its way higher up the steps of both porches.

I gladly accepted one of Seth’s cast-off jackets and sloshed with Franny to the barn to help with the chores. Since Micah’s death my extra pair of hands had been put to use and were much appreciated. Our breath hung frosty in the crystal air as I patted the horses’ flanks soothingly and watched steam rise as their warm noses snuffled at the troughs of dusty grain.

“Did you hear any more noises last night?” I asked Franny. She had black circles under her eyes, as if she hadn’t slept.

“No, but I was so nervous, just about everything spooked me,” she said glumly.

“See? I’m sure it was nothing.”

“I reckon you’re right.” Franny shrugged beneath a heavy woolen shawl. “Only…”

“Only what?”

She hesitated for so long that I thought she’d changed her mind and wasn’t going to tell me. She swatted her palms briskly against her thighs. “You still don’t believe what Girlie can do, do you?” Franny said at last.

I took my time answering, rubbing my mittened hands in gentle circles along the corncrib.

“You don’t believe,” Franny went on, “even though you saw her heal up my burns.”

“But I didn’t see her. Rachel only told me she’d done it. I saw the fire and I heard you screaming. That’s all.”

“Hmmph,” Franny sniffed. “I don’t know why it’s so hard for you to believe, ’specially after Girlie saving you the way she did.”

“I believe she’s extremely bright,” I nodded slowly. “And extremely perceptive. I believe she picks up on things you’re not even aware of.”
But how did she know about Brad and Kerry?…
I forced that thought away.

“She knows what’s in your mind,” Franny said flatly.

“She knows what scares you,” I said. “She’s very sharp. She could be quite a little manipulator if she were spoiled, which she doesn’t seem to be.”

“I reckon not,” Franny agreed. “Seth makes her mind most of the time. Rachel, too, though she gives in where Seth won’t.”

“Are you afraid of her?” I asked bluntly. “If you are, she’ll sense that, you know, and use it against you. Children are like that. It’s part of their nature. They have instincts that adults lose along the way.”

She gave a halfhearted nod, still loath to accept my logical explanation. “You don’t know her,” she finally accused.

“No, I guess I don’t really.”

“One time—” She glanced up sharply toward the barn door as if expecting Girlie to appear there suddenly, listening. My eyes followed hers, a curious relief welling up inside me at the sight of the empty threshold. Franny glanced back at me, her voice lowering. “One time…she…brought a bird back to life.”

“What?” I gave a small chuckle, felt it die in my throat almost instantly as I saw the fearful look creeping over Franny’s face. “No,” I said softly, “there must have been a spark of life still in it…it only
seemed
dead.”

“No.” Franny’s head shook vehemently, her hands clenched in the air in front of her. “The bird was dead. Stiff as a board, I tell you. It fell out of a nest in our maple tree around front last summer. We’d been watching them, all the babies, wondering when they’d all be big enough to fly off.” Her voice grew taut. “One morning we found this bird lying there all stiff on the ground. Girlie, she was real upset, and so Micah said we’d have a funeral for it, and he went off to find a shovel. Girlie, she just stood there and held that bird, and kept staring at it so sad…and then”—she wet her lips, her words dry and choked—“and then she held up that bird to her mouth…and…kind of breathed into it…like this…”

I felt the walls close in around me; I leaned across the bin, unable to tear my eyes from Franny’s slow, deliberate movements.

“…and…then…that bird…it kind of jerked a little…all at once…like this”—her eyes grew dim with tears—“and then—”

“Franny, Rachel’s calling you. Are you done?” Seth’s voice boomed into the silence and we both cried out as we jumped.

I pressed my hand against my heart to stop its racing, and glared at Seth as he swung the pitchfork up onto his shoulder.

“What?” he demanded, as we both looked at him. Franny, slightly pale, wiped her hands nervously on her apron and started forward. “Come on, there’s lots to do,” Seth reminded her, and strode back outside.

“It must have been a coincidence,” I murmured, my mind struggling to grasp it all. Franny looked at me solemnly.

“You believe that?” she asked softly, and swung the barn door behind us.

I spent most of that day in the kitchen, heating flatirons, helping with the ironing and cooking—anything to keep near the heat of the stove. The house wore a perpetual chill, the rooms damp and stale, and though we closed off the upstairs and all the windows and outside doors, there was a draftiness that numbed my feet and reddened my hands as I worked. Seth kept the fire going in the parlor. By midafternoon the rain finally slacked off to another fine drizzle, the wind dying down to a mournful whine.

Rachel seemed even more weary and depressed at supper. More than once I caught her staring out the window at the darkening sky, her fingers absently kneading her apron. Seth was delivering a lamb out in the barn and hadn’t been in to eat. No one said much at the table. The huge pot of stew hadn’t made me feel any warmth; it was as if there were some other kind of chill in the air that had nothing to do with the weather. As I scraped leftovers into a pan for the chickens, I saw Rachel pause again at the window, her stare vacant and sad.

“Rachel?” I said, sliding my hand onto her arm.

She turned slowly, her smile tremulous. “I keep thinking of him out there, so cold and all…”

Pressing my lips together, I bowed my head, and she touched my hand lightly with her own.

“’Course, I know he really isn’t there. I know he can’t really
feel
the cold…only…” Her dark eyes grew troubled. “Only that’s where Seth put him. That’s where Seth put him—down there—in that dark, wet ground…”

Her voice trailed off, and I turned around as the back door opened and Franny appeared.

“I surely could use some help out here. Lamb’s all twisted around, Seth says.”

“I’ll come,” I spoke up quickly, and Rachel rewarded me with that same ghostly smile.

“I’ll boil water,” she said quietly.

When we got to the barn, Seth was still hard at work, his jacket tossed aside, the shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows. The ewe was having a hard time of it, and though she struggled valiantly, I could see the suffering and despair in her eyes.
I know that feeling…the loss in spite of all the efforts…
As the hours went by and it grew more and more apparent that she was losing the fight, it was all I could do to stay on my feet. I was bone tired and nearly frozen through. And when Seth finally looked down at the pitiful newborn lamb lying lifelessly in his arms, I bent my head to the wall and cried. There had been enough dying. There had been too much.

“You’d better come in,” Seth said to me. “There’s nothing more we can do.”

Yet for some reason I just wanted to stay, to be close to the bereaved mother, to let her know I was there.

“It’s just a sheep,” Franny reminded me, not unkindly. “It happens.”

“She can stay,” Seth cut in, holding the door for her. “I’ll leave a lantern. You can come when you’re ready.”

I nodded, sensing that he must have understood somehow. I was glad to have the barn to myself.
Kerry would have loved this place…the animals…the hayloft…learning to milk a cow…
How terribly romantic it always seemed to those who’d never lived on a farm, I thought coldly. No one had any idea of the backbreaking work, the sacrifice, the suffering…I eased myself down into a corner and closed my eyes.

And that’s when I heard it.

The shuffling noise. Somewhere outside the barn, right on the other side of the wall where I was leaning.

Gasping, my head jerked up, my eyes straining in their sockets. Maybe it had been the wind, sweeping leaves, sifting dirt along the cracks and crevices…

But it’s raining. The leaves aren’t dry. There is no dust.

It came again.

Inching its way along the side of the building, a soft scuffling sound, something having trouble walking, dragging its feet…

It stopped.

And turned the corner.

And pulled itself toward the door.

My hands clutched at the wall. I tried to get up, to run, but my legs folded uselessly beneath me. Nightmare images roared through my brain—a decaying face with mud-clotted hair…sightless, staring eyes…blue lips pleading silently for help—

The latch moved.

A thousand screams resounded in my head, but no one ever heard them. The animals, in a sudden panic, began to cry and shriek as the door creaked slowly inward.

I felt the blast of wind, cold as death…

Saw the lantern flare once before plunging into darkness…

Heard the sliding, jerky movement across the floor as I plunged into a darkness of my own.

“P
AMELA? OPEN YOUR EYES
, honey—it’s Rachel.”

I stared at her without really seeing at first, then little by little the kindly features of her face came into focus, and with them, Seth’s and Franny’s faces hovering near her shoulder, and the dim outline of my room.

“Thank God. She must have just fainted.” Rachel’s smile welcomed me back, and I noticed the glow of tears in her eyes. “We just couldn’t figure—when you didn’t come in—”

Seth gave a mute nod, but I could read a peculiar relief in his eyes as he turned away.

“And I didn’t know what to think,” Franny went on, shaking her head in mild reproach. “Why, when I went back in that barn and you weren’t even there—”

My eyes widened and fixed themselves on her face. “What…did you say?”

“The barn,” Franny repeated patiently, obviously convinced that my lapse of consciousness had affected the quickness of my brain. “When I went in, you weren’t there. The lantern was out and not a soul around.”