THE BROTHERS AND SISTERS cannot sleep, with Mother outside in the yard and still angry.Thunk, thunk beneath their window, quickening like a heartbeat, while the children lie stiff in their beds, fearing that, in her excitement, Mother might send fruit hurtling through the glass. Pitched with enough force, an underripe pear could leave a small person unconscious.
Claude thinks it would be wise to slip off and make himself scarce. Down the ladder he goes, into the larder, filling his pockets, feeling the floor grave-cold beneath his feet, dreaming of what he will find inside the barn. Not a proper cowshed like their own, with a pony cart and six cows and a collection of deadly tools, hung in descending order against the wall; but a forgotten barn, a skeletal barn, where he is not allowed to go. That is where the half-wit once slept, the moon coming through the rafters and casting him in white stripes. But tonight, the boy dreams, the barn is thick with an apple smell and small rustling noises, the titters and sighs of girls settling into sleep: three of them, he now believes, most definitely three. Three girls flickering through the branches, roosting inside the forbidden barn and he, Claude, the only one to know of them.
They must be hungry, he thinks as he touches his swollen pockets. And then his heart stops; for that other heartbeat, thick and wet, has stopped too. I'm through, he thinks, his hands crammed in his pockets. But then it resumes—thunk, thunk— and the boy steps out into the night.