“You mustn’t keep getting away from me, Missus Harriet.” Her anxious little face was stern. “You’ll get me in Dutch.”
The dram of water she measured out mercifully hadn’t reduced the bucket by much—there was still enough to cover the bottom of the ladle, enough for a small drink, perhaps for everyone, perhaps even Nora herself.
“How much is there left in the springhouse?”
“I hardly know, ma’am.”
“Well don’t be giving her any more until you find out!”
Josie hurried into her hat. She was “that sorry, ma’am”—she was always that sorry, and there were countless transgressions to be that sorry for. Josie had the hazel eyes and broad forehead of Emmett’s far-flung Scots kin. Her cheeks and throat were scattershot with freckles that flared an obscene pink after half a second in the sun. A triad of clefts fissured the bridge of her nose whenever she was under duress, and Nora was beginning to feel sorry for these hardworking lines. They might as well stake up for keeps for all the rest they got between admonitions.
Passing Toby in the corridor, the girl grazed a hand over his bristly head. He seized at her and said in what he thought was a whisper: “Mama don’t think the tracks are cloven. They don’t strike her as tracks at all.”
Josie stooped down to him. Dark lines laddered the back of her dress—a rare sign of mortality, Josie sweating. Born of woman after all. “How do they strike you?” she said. She, too, thought she was whispering. She thought Nora couldn’t see the small shrug of Toby’s shoulders, or the way Josie’s hair met his stubbled little forehead.
“They’re tracks,” said Toby.
“Well, then, that’s so. What we see with our hearts is often far truer than what we see with our eyes.”
Having wafted this profundity, Josie took her leave. Her ridiculous hat, crowned with turgid burlap sunflowers, presented almost too great a temptation when it came bobbing by the window moments later. It could be dislodged with the mere flinging of a shutter. But then the hat’s occupant might be knocked down or, given Nora’s luck, knocked out. And the day would fall to waste: confusion, reproach, water wasted on cleaning her up, hours wasted on summoning the doctor, tears wasted on patching up that pale forehead. And hadn’t they all had their fill of stitches last night?
Nora resumed her calculations. There were two, perhaps two and a half cups of water left in here. Filling at least one bladder in town and boiling a little more from the rainbarrel would restore the bucket to almost half-depth. They had gotten by on less all day. For now, she had only to go on resisting thirst herself—a feat more easily managed when she was not watching others drink.
Perhaps inevitably, Toby came in frowning. “I’m thirsty.”
“Want some water?”
“No, Mama. I know you’re awful worried.”
“There’s a drop of coffee left.”
He made a face. “It’s two days old!”
He stood on tiptoe anyway and peered into the kettle.
“Are we square about those tracks, Tobe?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Toby.”
“Well, Pa would believe me.”
Of this, she had no doubt. “Why not show him when he gets back?”
“Dolan says he ain’t ever coming back.”
He clapped the coffeepot shut and began thumbing hunks of corncake apart, one for himself, one for Gramma. Whatever nascent glimmer of forgiveness Nora had been brooding since the previous night dissipated. No amount of entreaty or admonition could make the boys understand that careless talk could not be had around Toby. Nothing escaped him. He was always listening, always mulling—especially when he appeared not to be. A perceptive child, she’d told them, casting about for a diplomatic way to put it—perceptive. Yes, more perceptive than any of them: more perceptive than Papa; more than Josie; more even than Dolan, who by his own esteem was the very paragon of perceptiveness, declared himself perceptive in the way of Greek poets, really, capable of perceiving for the county, and happy to tell you all about it. Well here was the harvest of their ongoing underestimation of their little brother: he had overheard last night’s racket. In frightening him, it had naturally resurrected all the other things he found frightening, with cloven hooves, and all the devilry they bespoke, right in the vanguard.
“Missus Lark!” She was in such froth she almost failed to notice the premature return of Josie’s hat, which shot past the window again and reappeared moments later in the doorway—with Josie wilding under it. “Missus