and for the life of them they can’t understand why they didn’t spot the situation as it was happening. Why didn’t Hollis stop running? Why didn’t he stay by her side? He waited for March for what seemed like forever, on the rutted back road which led from the Farm to Fox Hill. As the afternoon went on the wind died down, but the blood rushing in Hollis’s own head had replaced the sound. His head was pounding, and the more time that passed, the worse his headache became. Finally, the sky turned inky. The peepers were calling and the moon was climbing into the sky by the time March appeared.
She was holding a handful of roses cut from Annabeth Cooper’s own garden; Unity and Double Delight and Peace were all clutched to her chest as she ran toward him. That’s what Hollis saw first, pink roses in the dark night. All at once he felt like crying, and he might have done so, if March hadn’t started talking right away. It wasn’t that he was listening to what she said-certainty he didn’t want to hear how smart Richard Cooper was, or that his sister, Belinda, was so kindhearted she kept an opossum as a pet, feeding it bread softened in warm milk. allowing it to sleep on the quilt at the foot of her bed, even though Mrs. Cooper had forbade any animals but her poodles in the house. No, he didn’t need to hear those details, because he knew what had happened from the look on March’s face. In a single afternoon, all because of a stupid dog and a stone wall, it had happened. He had lost her.
As soon as Guardian Farm legally became his, Hollis cut down all of Annabeth Cooper’s roses. They used to grow by the split-rail fence, and they’re a lot more stubborn than Hollis would have imagined. Every year or so he has to take a sickle and hack away at the branches which insist on growing back. This past spring he found a red rose on the ground beneath the fence, and it was just as startling to him as a pool of blood would have been. He kicked the flower beneath a hedge of evergreens, and yet he continued to see it from the comer of his eye. He saw that rose long after it had already wilted, and died.
Tonight, however, it’s not roses he’s thinking of. It’s revenge. Once you get a taste of getting back at someone, it sticks with you. It makes you count up all your assets and your enemy’s losses, again and again, even though the figures have remained the same for years. Of course, it’s hardest to calculate the worth of a human being. Hollis’s adopted nephew, Hank, for instance, is usually an asset, but tonight he’s a total loss. He was supposed to make certain Coop’s pony stayed on its feet, but he’s fallen asleep in a rocking chair, and the pony is down on its knees, moaning in a pile of hay.
“Good nap?” Hollis says.
Hank immediately gets up, stumbling over one of his own boots. He’s grown more than six inches in the past year; he’s six three and still growing and he always feels clumsy and much too tall. His coloring is fair, like his father, Alan’s, with hair the color of straw and a ruddiness that rises into his face whenever he’s embarrassed.
“Shit,” Hank says, although there’s no need for him to curse himself. Hollis will do that for him.
“What the hell were you thinking?” Hollis asks. “Or have you given up thinking?”
“Sorry,” Hank says, for all the good it will do. He never does anything right, at least not in Hollis’s eyes.
Hank has been thrown off all day; he’s been thinking, all right, but what’s on his mind is Judith Dale, who used to take care of him and Coop. She used to cook dinner every evening after Belinda died; she fixed corn fritters and curried turkey soup, pumpkin custard and wild grape pie. You simply couldn’t stop eating when Mrs. Dale made you something; you wished for a triple stomach, like that of a cow, so you could keep on shoveling it in and asking for more. Now, Hank and Hollis mostly have bologna-and-cheese sandwiches and things out of cans-soups and chilies that don’t taste like much unless you add half a shaker of salt. Mrs. Dale wouldn’t have tolerated a diet like that. She believed in homemade things. Every year, on Hank’s birthday, she would bake a chocolate cake. Even after Coop died, when Hollis told her they didn’t need her anymore and she went back to live in the house on Fox Hill, she sent Hank a chocolate cake once a year, and he always ate every bit.
In the past few years, Hank has made certain to stop by Fox Hill every few weeks and check on Mrs. Dale. Just ten days ago, he’d gone over and cleaned out her gutters, even though she insisted she could easily hire Ken Helm from the village to do the job. Afterward, she’d given Hank a piece of cranberry-orange pie at her kitchen table. No one could turn down one of Mrs. Dale’s desserts, and she often brought pies out to the old house in the Marshes, the one people said was built by the town founder, Aaron Jenkins. She carted bags of groceries out to the Marshes as well, and heavy woolen blankets and clean gloves and socks. She brought out matches and soap, and sweaters she found at the rummage sale held once a month at Town Hall.
She saw to just about every item a person might need to exist in this world, at least when it came to physical matters. But she never trod on emotional territory, and wouldn’t think to give counsel unless directly asked. She never, for instance, suggested that Hank go out to the Marshes himself. She never said, “Go see your father.” She may have thought about it, she may have even been convinced that unless Hank went out to that ramshackle place, where the reeds were taller than a full-grown man, his life would forever be lacking, but she never said more than “Lemon or milk?” after she’d poured his tea, and she always hugged him close when it came time for him to leave.
Hank didn’t even know Judith Dale had passed on until this afternoon. He had stopped at the hardware store on Main Street and was standing in the pet department, looking for mineral oil for Coop’s ailing pony, when he overheard someone in the next aisle discussing Judith Dale’s funeral. Immediately, Hank felt something behind his eyes go all hot, but he didn’t cry. He stood there in the pet department until he didn’t feel dizzy anymore; then he went to the register, paid, and left.
Tonight. while he should have been taking care of the pony, he was thinking instead of the look on Judith Dale’s face when she told him that Coop had died. It was a winter night, cold and filled with ashy starlight. Hank was out feeding the dogs; as he walked back to the house he could hear his own footsteps on the frozen earth. Judith Dale was waiting for him, holding the screen door open, and a stream of yellow light swept across the ground. She put her hand on Hank’s shoulder, and to his great surprise he saw that she had to reach up to do so. “We’ve lost him,” Mrs. Dale said, and in that instant Hank realized he had never before seen real grief.
This is the reason he’s forgotten his chores now, all these years later-an oversight not usually in his nature. He’s been too preoccupied with wondering what happens when you lose someone. His mother, for instance, who died when he was so young he doesn’t even remember her. His father, as well, whom he d prefer not to remember. Hollis and Belinda’s son, Coop, who died at the age of twelve, and never found out what happened at the end of Treasure
Hollis is slipping a rope around the pony’s neck, doing Hank’s job himself, and although the pony is stubborn and rolls its eyes, it gets to its feet when the rope is tugged. Hollis spills out some salt into the palm of his hand, then blows it into the pony’s nostrils. The single character trait shared by father and son was their dislike of horses. Coop was allergic to animals and broke out in hives if he got close to anything with a tail. It was Belinda who insisted the boy needed a pony, and it’s Hank who’s set on keeping this pathetic creature in memory of the boy.
“Sorry about falling asleep,” Hank says. “It won’t happen again.”
“Give me one good reason, and I’ll get rid of this thing,” Hollis says of the pony.
Hank nods. He knows Hollis means what he says. Hank keeps his mouth shut and his thoughts to himself, as he always has. He’s used to Hollis’s ways, just as Hollis is used to him, after all these years.
“You heard about Mrs. Dale?” Hollis asks now.
Hank nods again. You’ve got to tread carefully with Hollis. You’ve got to watch what you say.
They’ve walked outside together, into a starry night that’s unusually clear and cold for this time of year. All that rain which fell earlier will freeze tonight, so that the ground will give them some trouble tomorrow when they go to bury Judith Dale. Mrs. Dale was a good woman, Hollis will grant her that. A busybody and a pain in the neck, but she never judged what she didn’t understand and that, Hollis knows, is rare. Unlike Alan and the boys in the village, she treated him fairly, but that doesn’t mean he has to moan and bellyache down at the funeral parlor. Ashes to ashes, that’s all there is. If you can’t change a fact of life, then be smart enough to walk away from it, that’s always been Hollis’s motto. Walk away fast.
“If you want to go to the funeral, that’s your business,” Hollis tells his nephew.
“Thanks,” Hank says. “I might.”
If Hollis did go to the service it would be for one reason alone. March Murray. Instead, he’s going to wait for her to come to him. It will happen, he knows that much. He’s gotten everything else that was ever denied him, all that’s left now is March. He has never loved anyone else, and he never will. He thought he couldn’t live without
