Keech threw open the front door to find their brother Patrick waiting for them by the rumbling fireplace. The moment the small boy saw them, he jumped to his feet, bounded over to Keech, and squeezed his right leg in a bear hug.
“Keech! Sam! I’ve been waitin’ all morning!” the boy yelled. His legs were uncovered, since he often forgot to wear any sort of trousers. In fact, his bare bottom was a common sight around the Home. At four years old, Patrick was the youngest of the five orphans. His blazing red hair stood straight out like a lion’s mane, and smears of blackberry jelly stained his lips.
“Hey, flapjack,” said Keech.
“I ate your biscuit while you was gone. Every last crumb.”
“You better not have.” Keech scooped up the half-naked boy in one arm and spun him around.
“Not yours. Sam’s.”
Sam gasped, and Keech snickered. “That’s a good boy.” He set Patrick back down on the rug. “Now where’s your undershorts? Your derriere’s hanging out.”
Patrick noticed his naked lower half. “Whoops.”
“Scurry on upstairs and get dressed.”
Patrick darted to the stairway and stopped. “Oh, I almost forgot. Granny Nell says she’s gonna whip the both of ya for skippin’ breakfast and mornin’ chores.” With a loud cackle, he then scrambled up the Home’s spindle balusters.
Keech called after the boy, “You know you’re not supposed to climb like that! Pa said you ain’t no squirrel.”
“I know I’m not!” Patrick hollered down. “I’m a monkey!”
As Keech hung his bowler hat on the front door rack, Sam frowned at the entrance to the kitchen. “If Granny’s in a foul way, maybe we should head back out.”
“And put an extra nail in our coffin? Best we just take our punishment.”
No sooner did the words come out of his mouth than a voice rang out from the kitchen. “If you two so much as think about running off again, you’ll be whitewashing shutters all the way to next Christmas! Now get your skinny hinds in here!”
Granny Nell was sitting at the kitchen table, sharpening a butcher’s knife on a long whetstone. Stacked behind her on the counter, dirty breakfast plates awaited the daily chore of wash-down and rinse-off. When she turned to inspect the boys, the blue ribbon holding back her silver hair came untied, dropping ringlets around her wrinkled face. Granny huffed a breath to move the hair out of her eyes. “First things first,” she said. “Who is the culprit who left his Holy Bible sitting in the stairwell?”
Sam’s eyes widened.
Granny Nell adjusted the black wool shawl around her shoulders. “Samuel, we may live in a home built square in the center of nowhere, but that does not mean you can act like a heathen. You are twelve years old and can use a bookshelf like the rest of us civilized folk.”
“Yes’m.”
She pointed to the bookshelf in the sitting room. “I placed your Bible there. Take care not to leave it underfoot. It’d be a terrible thing to murder an old woman with the Good Book.”
Keech snickered—a dangerous mistake. Granny Nell turned her sharp, owl-like gaze upon him. “Do I hear laughter, Mr. Blackwood? From the boy who dragged poor Sam all over the countryside without his breakfast?”
Keech dropped his head. “We were tracking rabbits is all.”
“Oh, tracking, were ya? Then tell me, Lewis and Clark, what do your keen eyes see when you gaze at yonder empty table?”
“That we missed a fine breakfast,” lamented Sam.
“And what else do you gather when you see that barnload of dirty dishes?”
Both boys groaned.
* * *
Granny Nell finished sharpening her butcher’s knife as Keech and Sam soaped and dried the plates. She stood to replace the cutlery. Although the shoulders beneath her black shawl were frail and her back slightly bent, she moved with an energy that rivaled young Patrick. One time Keech had seen her pick up two unruly shoats under each arm and haul them, squealing and kicking, back to the pigpen from where they’d escaped.
“I want that table wiped down to a perfect shine,” Granny said. She cracked her old knuckles, a sound that sent the shivers through Keech. “I wrapped up some biscuits and placed them in the crock by the back door. When your chores are done, you may eat them. I wouldn’t delay, though. I suspect Little Eugena will be prowling about any moment.”
“Yes’m,” Sam said, clearly worried. Their orphan sister Eugena—always referred to as Little Eugena for her size—tended to harvest up any seconds that might be available after a meal. But Keech figured they were safe for now. After breakfast and chores, Little Eugena usually disappeared into the woods for an hour to play her brass bugle, an instrument that Pa Abner had given the girl for her eighth birthday. Little Eugena resolutely believed that her dreadful-sounding contraption had once belonged to the 41st Regiment of Redcoats at the Battle of the Oakwoods in 1812. She played the bugle the way she ate her meals, with the fervor of a lunatic.
Granny Nell planted kisses on their cheeks, and all at once Keech’s shivers were gone. “I want to see your smiling faces at breakfast tomorrow,” she said. “If you behave till then, I’ll make sausage links.”
“That sounds nice,” Keech said, hating that he and Sam had hurt her feelings. Granny had lived a difficult life, the worst of it many years ago when her husband had died over in Big Timber, the town a few miles east of the orphanage. The man’s death had apparently been awful; he had been a slow victim of the disease everyone in the region called the Withers.
Keech remembered all the campfire stories about the Withers, the dreadful outbreak in the winter of 1832, the disease that took half the people in the county. If you died of the Withers, it was told, you got buried in Bone Ridge, the massive graveyard located somewhere out in the western wilderness. Most of the people in these parts knew the spook stories about Bone Ridge, and the old saying that went along with it:
Beware the high ridge made of bone.
All those who enter turn to stone.
Should you be there in deepest night,
in moon as dim as candlelight,
you’ll stand alone as ready prey,
until your soul withers away.
As Pa Abner had once told it, Granny Nell’s husband—a blacksmith named Abraham—had died in her arms, whispering her name as he had taken his last breath. He was buried out there in the west, in the vast expanse of Bone Ridge alongside the others, the unspeakable number of lost souls, taken by the Withers.
“Mr. Blackwood!” Granny barked. Her severe tone gave him a jolt, and he almost dropped a plate on the floor.
“Yes’m?”
“I’ve never known you to be so untidy at dishes. What’s got into you?”
Keech hesitated. He was unsure if he should keep the morning’s events down by the river a secret or come right out and spill every detail. As the oldest of the orphans, he had long taken upon himself the role of guardian for the others, which meant facing things they could not yet handle. Sam was twelve, and had practiced all the same training as Keech, had excelled at the forest lessons and games with Pa, but his own confidence sometimes misguided him. Little Eugena was nine but weighed barely fifty pounds after a hearty meal. Patrick had just turned four a month ago. Robby was eleven but had a crooked hand that sometimes slowed him down. Keech felt like most of his duty at the Home was to keep the others safe. The last thing he wanted was to scare anyone with tales of one-eyed strangers.
Then again, keeping secrets was a surefire way to upset the whole house.
Keech said to Granny, “This morning, out by the river, Sam and I met a traveler.”
“Oh?”
“Yes’m. He rode a chestnut horse and had a long goatee.”
“Was it a farmer up from Big Timber?”
“No, ma’am. He wore a long black coat and smelled worse than any farmer by a long sight.”
“Lord, child, he got close enough to smell?”
“That ain’t the curious part,” added Sam. “This fella had a bad eye, like a pirate only without a patch. And he wanted to know the where’bouts of a man named Raines.”
Granny Nell staggered as if she had been pushed. “Boys, tell me, who was this man?”
“He said his name was Whiskey, like the drink,” Keech said. “He asked if we knew of any Isaiah Raines, because they had business. When we told him we didn’t know the name, he wanted to know where he could find Pa instead.”
“But on no counts would Pa have any dealing with such a fella,” Sam said. “So we sent him down a false trail. Told him we’d heard the name all right, but that he’d headed out west in search of the Fountain of Youth.”
Granny Nell lowered her silver eyebrows. “You lied to this man?”
“It was Keech’s fib!” Sam said, quickly passing any blame.
Keech recognized his imminent danger. Of all the terrible things a kid could do, Granny Nell despised a lie the most.
“I didn’t lie to be spiteful,” he said. “The man didn’t seem right, is all.”
Granny pondered and then said, “You boys should have told me this before I made you wash the dishes. I want you to run to Pa right this minute and tell him everything you heard.”
The boys turned to go.
“And Keech?”
He stopped, his boots skidding on the hardwood floor.
“Tell Abner every word. Leave out nothing.”
“Yes’m,” he said.
He stepped out the back door, and Sam followed.