Chapter 7: A Family Matter

“Stop it.”

The old man said it from the gate, loud, and the stick stopped where it was, up over Bobbie’s head. Vern stood with it up there a second longer than he had to before he turned around.

“It’s a family thing,” he said. “You know that. Go on back down the road.”

Nobody went back down the road. The men off the truck came in through the gate and spread out across the yard, hands loose at their sides, and the woman with the notebook came in last and left the gate standing open behind her. Out on the county road the truck sat where it had stopped.

The neighbors had come to the fence. There had been three or four of them when Nell came down the lane; there were better than a dozen now, standing with their elbows on the wire.

Grant walked over to Darlene and stood above her.

She was on her side where she had gone down, with one arm out in front of her at an angle that was wrong, and the dirt under her dark with blood out past her hip. He looked at that a while. Then he came back across the yard.

“You do that?” he said.

“I did it,” Vern said. “I’ll say it out loud, in front of all of you. She let my mother fall. My mother’s laying over there by that fence in the wet where she left her—“

Grant had Vern on his face in the dirt before he finished the sentence.

It didn’t take long. He had a knee across the back of Vern’s legs and both his wrists behind him, and one of the men went out to the truck and came back with a rope, and they had him tied before the old man got his mouth open. Vern lay with his cheek in the dirt, breathing.

“Now, Mr. Grant,” the old man said.

“He rides up the road with us.”

Roy came off the porch. “Hold on. He’s my brother.”

“He is,” Grant said.

“He’s my brother, and this—“ Roy put a hand out toward his wife in the dirt and let it drop. “You know him. That’s all I’m saying. Everybody knows Vern.”

The old man had his hat in his two hands, and Roy got no answer out of him. After a while it was plain there wasn’t going to be one. Two of the men walked Vern out through the gate and put him in the back of the truck, and one of them climbed up in there with him.

The woman had the book open on her arm.

“Vern Vance,” she said.

She wrote it down, slow, and Nell watched the pen go and take the letters. It was the same page her own name was on.

Roy was standing there with his mouth a little open, and Nell knew what was coming before he finished turning around.

“You,” he said. “You went out on that road and called the county down on your own uncle.”

She could have said no. She had gone out for a doctor, and the county had been walking down the hill when she got there, and that was all there was to it. But he had asked her in front of all of them, and she was only going to get to answer it once.

“That’s right,” she said.

“You turned on your own blood.” He came at her a step at a time. “Your own blood, for what?”

“You never stood on our side,” Nell said. “Somebody had to.”

Roy’s hand came up.

The old man caught it at the top and held it, and the two of them stood there squared off while the fence got a look at it.

“You want to ride up the road with your brother?” the old man said.

Roy pulled his arm free and rubbed it where the fingers had been, and looked along the wire to see who had watched that.

“She’s mine,” he said. “If I wanted her dead, I’d do it, and every man on that fence would stand there and watch.”

“Mr. Vance,” the county woman said, not looking up off the page, “I’ll write that down too, if it’s a thing you want written.”

Roy looked at the book. He didn’t say anything else.

Nell took Bobbie’s hand and walked her out into the middle of the yard, in front of all of them, and said it to the old man, because he was the one who would have to do it.

“Split us off this place,” she said.

The old man turned his hat over in his hands.

“Four of us,” Nell said. “Whatever’s ours goes with us, and we don’t come back.”

“You’re fifteen,” the old man said. “You’re a girl and you’ve got two little ones. I turn you off this place, I’ve turned you out on the road, and that’s on me till I die.”

“It’s not the road we’re scared of,” Bobbie said.

She let go of Nell’s hand and went up to the old man herself, which she had not been told to do, and pushed her sleeve up to the shoulder and held the arm out.

There wasn’t a place on it bigger than a thumbnail that wasn’t purple or green or yellow going out. It was a child’s arm. It looked like something that had been dropped and picked up a lot.

The old man looked at it longer than Roy had, and his jaw worked. His men looked. The county woman looked with the pen still in her hand and wrote nothing for a while.

Not one of them was surprised. That was the part Nell couldn’t get past, standing in her own yard with the fence full of faces on it. Not the arm — the faces. Every one of them lived inside a mile of this house, and every one of them had known.

“It’s not only him,” Bobbie said. “Grandma’s worse. She does it with the flat of her hand and then she tells you it was your fault for making her.”

Up by the fence, two of the men had their grandmother up off the ground and were carrying her in. She had one shoe on and one shoe off, and her eyes were shut.

Roy had gone back to the door. “Take them,” he said. “Go on. All of you, out. Three girls is money out the door and nothing coming back in, and I’ve paid it long enough.”

The girls he’d hand off any morning of the week. It was the wife he hung on to, and it wasn’t love — it was that somebody got up in the dark and had his plate on the table in front of him before he had his boots on.

“Nobody’s running me off,” Darlene said.

She got up.

It took a while. Nobody moved to help her. She got her good hand on the fence post and pulled, and stood, and the sweat stood on her face in the cold.

“You want us gone, we’ll go,” she said. “But first you’re going to stand in your own door and let these people hear it. Say what this place has been running on. It’s my hands. I’ve had my hands in that house every day since I came into it, from before light till the lamp was out, and every meal off that stove had my hands under it. The eggs and the butter and the money they brought came out of these hands. I’ve nursed your mother in that bed and I’ve put up for every winter that’s been in this house, and I want to hear you say it out loud, so every one of them on that fence hears you — who’s been keeping you.”

The old man was studying the dirt at his feet.

“A family can work a thing out,” he said.

The woman shut the book and put her arm over it.

“I write the names down,” she said. “That’s the whole of what I do. You’re on the page already. Stay in that house, and next week you’re on it again, all four of you, with that shoulder and nowhere to lay your heads, and then it’s mine to carry. I would rather not write it.” She opened the book again. “She’s put her hands into this place every day she’s had in it. The pot goes with her. The chairs and the bedding go with her, and what she cooked in goes with her, and whatever’s in that cupboard that she put up out of her own garden.”

“And money,” Nell said. “She needs a doctor.”

“There’s no money,” Roy said from the door.

“The pot won’t pay a doctor.”

“Then come up here and go through my pockets.”

The county woman wrote again, slow, and did not say what she was writing. Roy watched the pen the whole time. When she was done she shut the book and stood there, because there was nothing in it that would make money come out of a man who said he had none. Then she went out through the gate and the men went with her, and the truck took them back up the lane the way it had come, with Vern in the back of it and Grant up in the cab.

The old man stood there another minute. Then he said it to the fence and not to Roy.

“Get what’s yours, then.”

Nell went in the house.

She came back out with the pot in both hands — the old blue one off the table, chipped at the spout, the lid glued where it had been broken, the potter’s stamp still in the bottom of it under the glaze — and carried it out to the gate and set it down in the dirt where the whole fence could see it.

“That’s mine,” Roy said.

“Come take it,” Nell said.

Somebody at the fence laughed, and then somebody else did, and after that it went along the wire from one end to the other, and Roy Vance stood in his own door and took it.

The moving took the rest of the afternoon.

There wasn’t much. The trunk of clothes, and the bedding off the beds, and the chairs, and what was in the cupboard that was Darlene’s, and the pot. The neighbors carried it down the lane in two trips without any talk about it. When the last of it was in, two of them stood at the end of the lane with their hands on their hips a minute, and then went home.

“You’ll be back in two days,” Roy said from the door before he shut it. “All of you.”

He watched the lane until it was empty, and then he went in, and Nell figured he would be in there the rest of the evening, counting what was left.

The shed at the head of the lane was where the seed came in every spring and where the fuel was kept. It had a dirt floor and a tarp over a piece of machinery at the back of it, and it smelled like fuel, and there was nowhere in it to lie down but the bedding on the ground.

There was nowhere in it to build a fire, either. Darlene said that before anybody else could.

“You don’t light anything in here,” she said. “You hear me? Not in here.”

So the girls built the fire outside in the dirt in front of the door and cooked on it, and that was supper. Darlene ate two bites and lay back down.

The doctor came at dark and had them hold the lantern while he undid what he had put on that morning and did what he could and put it back on. Then he said it out by the door of the shed.

“She’s got to get through the night,” he said. “The bone in her shoulder is broken and I can’t set it. If she gets through it and the fever drops, she’ll mend, and it’ll take her the winter. If it doesn’t drop, she’s got to be somewhere that can set it.”

Frankie went to sleep with her head on Bobbie’s arm. Bobbie stayed sitting up with her back against the wall and her eyes on their mother.

Their mother was hot. She had been hot since the yard, and the heat had not come down any.

Nell sat by the door with her back against the seed sacks and worked it out, and it came out the same every time.

At first light she would go.