kept the boy corralled, herded him toward the others when his curiosity stretched past the boundaries of safety. He didn’t speak—they had begun to worry about this—but made noises to keep himself company: the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire, the growls and snarls of wild animals, a tuneless humming that resembled singing but was not. They wondered if he was deaf, so inattentive was he to their directives.
He was not deaf. When Melody shouted across the field, “Johnny Appleseed! Got anything good to eat?” the boy swiveled his head first toward Melody, taller than the others and lanky and so casual in her movements as to appear almost clumsy—watched her with eyebrows raised, extreme interest—and then turned to the compact man they called Johnny Appleseed and watched him dig in the pockets of his pants.
“Some nuts,” he called back. “Half a dozen dried figs. What’s left of this chocolate bar and a couple of cubes of cheese.”
Wrecker made a beeline for him and the others gathered, too. Johnny Appleseed had the sun behind his head. Wrecker squinted up. “Chocolate,” he said.
Johnny Appleseed raised his eyebrows in comic surprise. “So you do talk?”
“I want chocolate.”
Ruth laughed with something like triumph and relief. “Give him that chocolate, man!”
Johnny Appleseed knelt so his face was even with Wrecker’s and looked into his eyes. The boy stood stout, his chest high and his face unmoving. Blond hair lay in a tousled mat over his scalp and his bad haircut showed signs of resistance. Pug nose, red lips, blue eyes steady as steel and behind them a whisper of gray Johnny Appleseed locked in on. He knew the language of trees and of wild things and he watched that gray like a deer watches the leaves of the trees for what moves behind them.
Melody flinched for him. Ruth watched, silent, helpless, and her eyes shone with tears. But Wrecker stood stock-still, eyes open.
Johnny Appleseed reached for the hem of the sweatshirt Wrecker wore. He lifted it gently to make a pocket that he had the boy hold. Then he reached into the pockets of his own pants and emptied each into the fold. Cheese, chocolate, figs and nuts, and a piece of polished sea-glass, blue, and a stone in the shape of a heart, and two pieces of gum still in their wrappers and a folded photo of a dog, the creases gone white, and some lint.
“What’s mine is yours, kid,” he said, and stood.
It was for the night; and then it was until Tuesday, until Thursday, until the next social worker hired to replace the absent Miss Hanson could review the case and there was quite a stack of folders before Wrecker’s and would Mr.—Mr.—would Len, all right, please be patient with the department, there were children in far more dire need than his son (not my son, he shouted over the phone, driven to distraction)—Very well! Very well then, Mr. Len, but he’d have to be patient, they’d get to it as soon as they could.
Which he gradually understood to mean never.
At Bow Farm they took turns sleeping in the chair beside Wrecker and during the day they traded off spending time with him. What took three of them that first day later required only two, and when they became more adept—more wily, faster, developed more stamina (which is to say when Wrecker grew comfortable enough on the farm to agree to stay, when he began to prefer their company to that of his own, solitary)—one alone could spend the day with Wrecker in relative peace and safety. It’s true that his feats acquired the status of legends. The day Wrecker jumped from the barn roof (two stories!) to bounce from the hay bales below. The day Wrecker was lost and they scoured the pond bottom for his body. The day Wrecker climbed into the pickup and released the brake, took it out of gear, and rode it all the way downslope into the field, where a big rock slowed it down by lodging itself in the oil pan. He seemed to need to feel his body collide with the physical world to know he existed. He threw his food, sometimes; he ignored them, he drowned out the sound of their voices by plugging his ears with his fingers and singing nonsense songs; he sometimes refused to put away the toys they gathered for him; he demanded bedtime stories at breakfast and pancakes at dinner. They couldn’t control him and so they gave