“If you do, you ought to join us for supper sometime. Cooking over a campfire for too long can be rough on a young man. There’s also a tavern in town—run by Calvin Buhrman—good food, good company. Stop in one night. I guarantee you’ll have customers if your pelts are good quality and your prices are right.”
“I do love cutting a deal,” he said with a laugh. “I’ll make sure to stop by the tavern. And I appreciate your kind offer. I certainly hope honey cake will be on the menu? I truly have heard talk of them up and down the mountainsides.”
“I’m sure my wife could be persuaded,” Papa said, and offered his hand once more, putting an end to their conversation. “Welcome to the Falls, Price.”
“Thank you, sir,” he said, shaking Papa’s hand with a firm grasp.
“Ellerie? You’ve got laundry to finish?”
He knew I did.
“Why don’t I help pull the sheets off the lines? Get you home earlier.”
It was a strange offer for him to make. He never helped with the wash, always leaving it to us girls. Price took his cue from it, though, and waded across the river to put his boots back on.
“See you around, Downings,” he said, raising a hand in farewell before throwing on his pack and slipping back into the pines.
We paused in silence, watching until it was impossible to discern him from the trees. Only then did I turn to the scrubbing tub, its bubbles long gone. It felt strange to have Papa here, watching me work, and I think he felt it too. His hands hung awkwardly at his side, clearly wanting a task to fill them.
“I’ll rebuild the fire,” he offered, kneeling next to the circle. The flames had died to ash in my absence. Papa picked up a piece of flint but made no motion to strike it. He tapped his thumb against it instead, the yellow stain on his skin as bright as the day he’d pressed it into the Deciding book. His face was cloudy and unreadable. I couldn’t begin to guess at the words he was measuring out in his mind.
“Back out east, when my grandfather was not much older than you are now, his father decided to harvest a few extra bottles. It had been a tough year. The spring rains had swollen the river near their cabin, and it rose up, overwhelming everything. They lost so much in that flood. Great-Grandpa saw the harvest as a chance to recoup their losses. He took an extra frame, then another. There’d been an early spring that year; it was expected the next would be too. But it wasn’t. Snow plagued the plains well into May. The hive didn’t have enough honey to survive on their own and the bees starved. They lost every single bee that winter. All so Great-Grandpa could sell those bottles.”
“What happened next?” I’d never heard this story before and was horrified to be so enthralled by it.
He shrugged. “Great-Grandpa knew that the only way they could ever hope to dig themselves out of the mess was to start over. They’d heard tales of free land up in the north and joined a wagon train heading west. Grandpa met Granny in that caravan, and when she wanted to stay put in Amity Falls, he did too.” He rubbed at his mouth. “They settled the land, started the town, and built up our hives. Grandpa repeated that story to my pa every year at harvest. When I wanted to pull out an extra frame one year, Pa told it to me….Sometimes we have to overlook our own desires for the betterment of the hive as a whole.” His eyes fell to my hidden hand.
I could see what Papa meant. We were all striving to build our town from the wilderness. If one area failed, it could jeopardize everything else. Every individual action had a direct effect on the community at large. My hand felt hot with shame.
“We’ll be okay for just this winter, won’t we, Papa?” My voice quavered, and I felt as though I were all of five years old again, creeping into my parents’ room during a storm, scared of the dark and seeking comfort. Protection. A story to hold back the terrors of the night.
“We might be,” he said, sounding unconvinced. I supposed if I was old enough to cast my voice at Decidings, I was old enough to not be coddled with wishful thinking. “With the late summer there’ll be a rush to get the harvest in—for everyone. If we can set aside enough food and ration out every bit of it, we’ll be just fine.”
I leaned in, resting against his shoulder.
Papa pointed to the basket of dirty clothes. “Is any of that absolutely necessary to clean today?”
“I…I don’t guess so.” I ran my eyes down the lines. “Just some of Sam’s wool socks, but he’s not been wearing them with the splint.”
Papa waved off my worry and pushed himself up. “What say we get Merry and Sadie to come down and fold up all these lines while you and I check the hives?”
“Truly?”
He offered out his right hand, the one stained yellow, and I placed mine in it. The sunlight painted the world in such rich bronze highlights that when I glanced at my empty hand, I couldn’t even see the red.
“Have you heard about the strangers?” Prudence Latheton asked, snipping off a length of thread. Without skipping a beat, she had it through the eye of her needle.
Mama had marched us to the parsonage bright and early that morning, where Letitia Briard was hosting a sewing bee in honor of Alice Hazelman’s impending nuptials to Gran Fowler.
Alice had taught at Amity Falls’s schoolhouse for twenty-eight years. Well past forty, everyone had assumed she’d never marry, but one Sunday morning—just as Parson Briard had asked for joys or concerns to pray over—the chicken farmer had stood up and declared his undying devotion to Alice. Their wedding was set for the end of the month, and all the women in the Falls were scrambling to help fill the schoolmarm’s hope chest.
For the first time in my life, my stitches had been deemed worthy enough for me to work with the older women, taking up a small section of the brightly colored log cabin quilt. But after listening to a litany of Old Widow Mullins’s ailments and a slew of marital advice for Alice that made my cheeks burn, I found myself watching my sisters’ group of girls with envy. They were pressed together on a long bench, hunched over sets of pillowcases, and stifling fits of giggles as Wilhelmina Jenkins told a story in hushed whispers.
“Strangers?” Letitia Briard repeated from her position of honor at the head of the quilt. Despite the warmth of the parlor, her calico dress was still crisp and neat, its pleats pressed with a precise care I couldn’t ever seem to muster with mine. I’d never seen the parson’s wife with so much as a hair out of place.
“A pair of men stopped in at the store yesterday, wanting to see if my Edmund could take a look at a busted wagon wheel. I’ve never seen a cart worn so hard. It near split at the seams, rolling up to the shop.”
“Strangers in Amity Falls?” Charlotte Dodson asked. “Matthias never mentioned anything about it. Pass the scissors, won’t you?”