The Sister's Tale by Beth Powning (e reader for manga .txt) 📕

“I’m scared for her.”

“Just askin’ for trouble.”

“I’ll pay twice what I paid yesterday.”

He worried his hair with one hand.

“Could you be at the inn at 5:30 tomorrow morning?” She spoke calmly, as if he had already agreed.

His eyes touched hers. Reluctant.

“On your head if he gets riled up.”

“On my head, then.”

—

Just at sunrise, the hired man knocked over a hoe propped against the side of the parsonage barn. He picked it up and carried it inside.

Started, stepped back.

A body, under grain sacks. On the new hay. He clutched the hoe, tiptoed close. Female, neither child nor woman. Dirt-encrusted fingernails. A rash of fly bites and sores. Arms bloody with scratches. Flakes of skin on her lips, hair caught up in a knotted rag.

He jogged to the house and burst into the kitchen. The minister’s wife was spooning tea into a pot. Oatmeal bubbled on the wood stove.

“Miz Wallace, there’s a girl asleep in the barn.”

She, too, started, tea leaves spilling from the spoon.

“Is she anyone you know?”

“Never seen her before.”

The door from the back stairway cracked open. The minister appeared, crooked spectacles, half-awake. Seeing the hired man, he stepped down into the kitchen.

“Harold, Cullen tells me there’s a girl in our barn.”

“What do you mean, Cullen?” the minister asked, adjusting his spectacles.

“Sleeping. She’s some filthy. Skin and bones. Arms all scratched, like she was picking raspberries.”

“Oh, my heavens, Harold. The lost sister?”

“Most probably.”

“Cullen, rush right over to the Pictou Inn and get them to wake up that girl. Flora is her name. Flora. Bring that Flora back here straight away.”

Cullen hurried from the kitchen.

“Harold, I’m going out to the barn.”

She pushed the oatmeal to the side of the stove. She took molasses cookies from a crock, wrapped them in a cloth, hurried out the door and down the path.

The girl was sitting up. She froze as Mrs. Wallace came into the barn, pulling the sacking up over her shoulders.

Mrs. Wallace knelt beside her.

“Molasses cookies. I baked them yesterday.” She held one out to Enid. “I had a girl like you but she’s all grown up and has two children. My husband is the minister, you know, and he’s the nicest man. I have oatmeal making on the stove. Now you get onto your feet and we’ll go up to the house and I’ll make you some tea.”

A hand slipped from beneath the sacking, accepted the cookie.

“Thank you,” the girl whispered.

English?

“You know, dear, your sister is looking for you.”

“My…”

“Your sister. Her name is Flora? Is that right? Are you Enid?”

The sacking slipped from her shoulders. Collarbones, like a chicken carcass. Hay clung to her dress, made of flour bags.

“I seen her,” the girl said. Her voice was hoarse, as if it had not been used for a long time. “She ain’t my sister.”

Mrs. Wallace pulled Enid to her feet, put an arm around her, led her to the house. Reverend Wallace, watching in the window, was ready with the blanket that Mrs. Wallace wore over her lap on winter nights.

Enid sat in the rocking chair. Mrs. Wallace eased a cup of tea into her hands. They set a spoon and a bowl of oatmeal sprinkled with fresh blackberries on the table next to her. Mrs. Wallace fussed at the sink, postponing her own breakfast. Mr. Wallace took a cup of tea to his study.

Cullen opened the back door and stepped into the kitchen.

“She isn’t there,” he said, glancing at Enid, who had taken the bowl of oatmeal into her lap and was hungrily eating. “Flora. She and Perley are on their way to the Mallorys.”

Enid set down the oatmeal and stood. The blanket fell from her shoulders. “You got to stop her.”

“Why, Enid?”

“Fred…they’ll think I told. He’ll hurt her.”

She was seized with a fit of trembling.

“I run from him. I run.”

—

Perley Hayes stopped the horse just before the curve in the road, where it led out of the trees and into the clearing.

“I got to water the horse. There’s a stream here. You kin walk. It’s just around the corner and down.”

Flora felt a beat of fear.

“You don’t want him to see you.”

“Horse needs water, is all.”

He climbed down from the wagon, not meeting her eyes. She hesitated, wondering if her instinct was a product of desire or the adjunct of disappointment, a foolishness she would regret.

Flora left the thought unfinished, unheeded, and slipped down onto the road. The sun had risen—spruce needles caused the light to quiver.

“I shouldn’t be long,” she said. “And if I am, you going to come looking for me?”

He was unbuckling the harness, seemed not to hear.

—

The homestead lay below, an opening in the trees surrounded by a split-rail fence. She heard the broken crow of a young rooster; smelled the smoke that spiralled from the chimney. Dampness rose from the soil as she walked down the hill. Her heart quickened. He was only like Mr. Tuck, she reasoned. Coarse, rough. He was only like the men in the workhouse. Or the hired hands on the farm where she had lived with the Quigleys. Perhaps he had been abandoned as she had been herself. And there was a woman. She had seen her, peering over the man’s shoulder; surely she would be a softening influence should Mr. Mallory be angry. The rooster crowed again. Close, now, she could make out the waking farm’s details—a cow belly-deep in weeds, disconsolate with bursting udder; the rooster on the fence stretching his neck. She wondered if Enid might be in the barn, or a shed. She felt sudden misgiving. Perhaps there was nothing sinister about this. Perhaps they only wanted to keep her for the help she gave them. Or perhaps Enid herself was afraid to leave this place. Perhaps she did not want to return to the world where a sister could abandon her; where a child could be bundled onto a ship and shipped across an ocean. Perhaps she thought that whatever came next might be worse than this