“You’re no going to tell him what Fanny said to me, are ye? I didna mean to get her in bother!”
“She’s not in trouble,” I assured him. Not the sort he meant, at least. “I just want your grandfather’s opinion about something. Now cut along”—I made a shooing gesture at him—“I have a hog to deal with.”
By contrast with what he’d just told me, three hundred pounds of pork chops, lard, and rotting intestines seemed trivial.
26
In the Scuppernongs
BRIANNA PULLED A HANDFUL of grapes off their stems and rolled them with one finger, flicking away any that were split, withered, or badly gnawed by insects. Speaking of insects—she hastily blew several ants that had crawled out of her grapes off the palm of her hand. They were tiny, but fierce biters.
“Ow!” She’d missed one of the little buggers, and it had just bitten her in the web between her middle and ring fingers. She tossed the grapes into her bucket and rubbed her hand hard on her breeches, momentarily easing the burn.
“Gu sealladh sealbh orm!” Amy said at the same moment, dropping a handful of grapes and shaking her hand. “There’s hundreds o’ the wee a phlàigh bhalgair in these scuppernongs!”
“They weren’t nearly as bad yesterday,” Bree said, trying to rasp the ant bite between her fingers with her front teeth. The itch was maddening. “What’s brought them out, I wonder?”
“Och, it’s the rain,” Amy said. “It always brings them up from the—Jesus, Mary, and Bride!” She backed away from the vine, shaking her skirts and stamping her feet. “Get off me, ye wicked wee blatherskites!”
“Let’s move,” Brianna suggested. “There are a ton of grapes out here; the ants can’t be in all of them.”
“I dinna ken so much about that,” Amy muttered darkly, but she picked up her bucket and followed Brianna a little farther into the small gorge. Bree hadn’t been exaggerating: the rocky wall was thick with muscular vines that clung and writhed up into the sun, heavy with pearly-bronze fruit that gleamed under the dark leaves and perfumed the air with the scent of new wine.
“Jem!” she shouted. “We’re moving! Keep track of Mandy!”
A faint “Okay!” came from above; the kids were playing at the top of the rocky cleft where a stream had split the stones and left small outcrops studded with vines and saplings that made fine castles and forts.
“Watch for snakes!” she shouted. “Don’t get under the vines up there!”
“I know!” A redheaded form appeared briefly above, brandished a stick at her, and disappeared. She smiled and bent to pick up her buckets, one satisfyingly heavy, the other half filled.
Amy made a sudden hoof! of startlement, and Brianna turned.
Amy wasn’t there. The grapevines swayed against the cliff face and she saw a dark splash on the rock.
“What …” she said, registering the sharp smell of blood and reaching blindly for the first thing to hand, the half-filled bucket.
A flash of white, Amy’s petticoat. She lay on the ground ten feet away; there was blood on her clothes and a bear had her head in its mouth, making a low gargling noise as it worried at her.
Brianna flung the bucket in reflex. It hit the cliff face and fell, scattering bronze grapes over Amy and the ground. The bear looked up, blood on its teeth, and growled, and Brianna was scrambling up through the vines, shrieking at the children to get back, get away, run, branches cracking beneath her weight, giving way, one broke and she slipped and fell, hit the ground on her knees, scrabbled back, away, away … God, God … staggered to her feet and leapt for the vines again, sheer terror for the kids driving her up the rock in a shower of leaves and crushed grapes and bits of earth and rock and ants.
“Mam! Mam!” Jem and Germain were leaning far out from the edge, trying to catch hold of her, to help.
“Get back!” she gasped, clinging to the rock. She risked a glance below and wished she hadn’t. “Jem, get back! Get Mandy, get the others back! Now!”
Too late to stop them seeing; there was a chorus of screams and a crowd of small, horror-stricken faces at the top of the cliff face.
“Mama! MAMA!”
It was that word that got her the rest of the way, torn and bleeding. At the top of the cliff, she crawled, grabbing wailing children, pulling them back, gathering them into her arms. Counting. How many, how many should there be? Jem, Mandy, Germain, Orrie, little Rob …
“Aidan,” she gasped. “Where’s Aidan?” Jem looked at her, white-faced and wordless, turned his head to look. Aidan was at the top of the cliff, starting to let himself down into the vines, to get to his mother.
“Aidan!” Germain shouted. “Don’t!”
Bree shoved the other children at Jem.
“Keep them,” she said, breathless, and lunged after Aidan, catching him by the arm just as he vanished over the edge. She hauled him up by main force and clutched him hard against her, struggling and weeping.
“I got to go, I gotta get Mam, let go, let me go …!” His tears were hot on her skin and his skinny body writhed like a snake, like the rusty grapevines, like the biting ants.
“No,” she said, hearing her own voice only faintly through the roaring in her ears. “No.” And held him tight.
I WAS SHOWING Fanny how to use the microscope, reveling in her shocked delight at the worlds within—though in some instances, it was plain shock, as when she discovered what was swimming in our drinking water.
“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “Most of them are quite harmless, and your stomach acid will dissolve them. Mind, there are nasty things in water sometimes, particularly if it’s had excrement in it—shit, I mean,” I added, seeing her lips silently frame “excrement.” Then the rest of what I’d said struck her and her eyes went round.
“Acid?” she said, and looked down, clutching her midsection. “In my stomach?”
“Well, yes,” I said, careful not to laugh. She had a sense of humor but was still very tentative in this new life, and feared being laughed at or made fun of. “It’s how you digest your food.”
“But it’s …” She stopped, frowning. “It’s … thr—strong. Acid. It eats right through … things.” She’d gone pale under the light tan the mountain sun had given her.
“Yes,” I said, eyeing her. “Your stomach has very thick walls, though, and they’re covered in mucus, so—”
“My stomach is full of snot?” She sounded so horrified that I had to bite my tongue and turn away for a moment, under the pretext of fetching a clean slide.
“Well, you find mucus pretty much all over the insides of your body,” I said, having got control of my face. “You have what are called mucous membranes and serous membranes; those secrete mucus wherever you need a bit of slipperiness.”
“Oh.” Her face went blank, and then she looked down below her clutching hands. “Is it—is that what you have between your legs? To make you … slippery when …”
“Yes,” I said hastily. “And when you’re pregnant, the slipperiness helps the baby come out. Here, let me show you …”