“Goslants!” Ricky confirmed, brightening.
Though clearly not pleased with the duty, Will agreed to drive us, and we went around the car. I had planned to get in the front seat next to Will, but when I opened the rear door for Ricky, he looked frightened again. I got the sense that Will made him uncomfortable. “You sit in the back seat too,” he said. He stayed hunched in the door frame, looking up at me, until I joined him. Will’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror.
“My name is Ann,” I told Ricky as we drove up the hill. “I forgot to tell you.”
“Hi, Ann,” he said politely. He offered his hand, and we shook.
“And this is my friend Will.”
“Hi, Will.” Less certainly.
Will smiled vaguely and dipped his head hello.
“You kind of look like Johnnie,” Ricky said.
“Nope. Not Johnnie,” Will said.
The drive to the Goslants’ place took only a few minutes, but I could feel Ricky’s anxiety rise as we got closer. His blunt head turned uneasily as he took in the landscape. His lips worked; he reached for my hand tentatively, but when I took it his stubby fingers clenched mine hard. This young man was suspended in an agonizing state of relief that he’d soon be on familiar turf, and fear of what would happen there.
As we drove, I began to wonder about that myself—how I’d deal with Johnnie, how far a confrontation might go. My shoulders tightened and I became uncertain of my self-control.
We got to the Goslants’ just as a beige pickup swung into the drive. It had a State of Vermont Highway Department logo on the door, and when we came alongside, I could see that the driver was a man in his sixties, gray haired, wearing a checked shirt and horn-rimmed glasses. He looked over at us with concern and suspicion. My first impression: a face conveying great resignation, as if this man had witnessed and endured many hard things and did not expect any end to seeing and enduring them. When he spotted Ricky sitting beside me, his eyes closed and his head dipped forward in weary relief.
I knew this had to be Homer, the Goslants’ patriarch and the solid foundation of their world. He got out of his truck, and when I got out—Will stayed at the wheel—Ricky ran to him and hugged him hard.
“I got lost,” he apologized to Homer’s shirt.
Homer held Ricky’s head against his chest and looked over at me. “I was just out lookin for him. Where’d you find him? Where did you go, Ricky?”
“He was way down the hill there, in the woods.”
“Johnnie hit me. So I went away.”
Homer’s face received this injury but didn’t explain Johnnie or apologize for him; he held himself with dignity, defying shame, refusing to air dirty laundry in front of strangers.
“Johnnie’s not here now,” he told Ricky. To me: “Thank you for bringin him back. We were worried. He’s my grand-nephew.” To Ricky again: “Go see Gramma now, okay? Johnnie isn’t here. She’ll make you something to eat. Grampa has to go back to work.”
Ricky reluctantly let go of his grand-uncle, went staunchly up the steps, waved to me, and vanished into the house. Homer turned to me, a man weary to the marrow. “He won’t bother you again. He’s just here for a while, got problems at home. I’ll see he doesn’t bother you again.”
“It wasn’t a bother,” I said. “He’s a sweet person.”
“I’ll have a talk with Johnnie,” Homer concluded. The gray of his hair seemed to make an aura of that desolate color around him. His weariness seemed boundless, his burden of worry beyond weighing, his resignation absolute. He climbed back into the truck and waited for us to back out first.
Will was running late, so he sped back to the farm.
“He was so scared when I found him,” I told Will. “Kind of scared to get back home, too, though.” I was relieved to have arranged a happy ending for the adventure, but Johnnie hovered in my thoughts. I’d seen him only that once, and yet I’d conceived a fear and something like hatred of him.
“I’d be careful about drawing too many lines between yourself and the Goslants,” Will said stiffly.
“Well, I didn’t know who he was. I couldn’t leave him running around the woods! He seems like a perfectly nice person. Homer, too.”
Will didn’t answer. In another few minutes, he pulled a U-turn and stopped his car in my parking spot opposite the farm’s driveway. “Sorry to be in such a rush,” he said.
“No, I appreciate your taking the time.”
“Annie. Just … think twice about getting connected up there, okay? Lots of things to feel pity or sympathy for, the instinct to take them under your wing, I know you’re that kind of person. But don’t ever let them think they’re … in with you somehow. I’m just saying.”
He sped up the hill, dust swirling behind his car.
I began the hike back up to my camp, thinking about Ricky and Homer and Johnnie. And Will: How many times had he heard that same warning from Diz? She must have instilled a deep aversion in him from infancy, one that wasn’t entirely rational and so couldn’t be articulated. I wondered whether it was based on some real experience or was just Diz’s shame—or, rather, her pride in the distance she had so rigorously maintained from these kin.
Chapter 51
Spring ripened into longer, benevolent days, lush with the scent of growing things. Brassard’s fields hazed green; flowers burst into bloom in Diz’s untended gardens. The hop yard needed endless work. Once the plants had climbed a few feet, Erik—we—had to go along the rows, snip about half the strands, and pull them off the training strings. This would spur the roots to put more energy into the remaining bines and would assure the mature plants of enough sun when they filled out and began producing cones.
But again, the sheer number of plants made it impossible to complete
