Scarecrow

I was banned from the kitchen.

I found this out at a quarter past five, when I came down the stairs after the filter woke and found Garnet standing in the kitchen doorway in her nightgown with her arms spread wide, like someone guarding a bridge.

”No,” she said.

”I need to make breakfast.”

”I made breakfast.”

”For Mother—”

”I made Mama’s breakfast. It’s strawberries. And eggs.” She paused. ”The eggs are a little blue.”

Behind her, the kitchen door was shut. From the other side of it came a scraping noise, and then a thump, and then Genny’s voice, low and furious, saying a word I was fairly sure she’d learned from me.

”What’s going on in there?”

”Nothing,” said Garnet. ”Go and talk to your scarecrow.”

”I don’t—”

”For an hour,” said Garnet, and pointed at the front door with tremendous dignity.

I looked past her at the front room. Mother was awake in the bed by the stove, propped on three pillows, with a plate of strawberries and very blue eggs on her lap. She caught my eye and gave the smallest shrug.

I went and talked to my scarecrow.

It was a fine morning. The sky over the ridge was clear for once, a pale washed blue, and the wheat was still. Down on the east side, the strip Genny had fixed was the greenest part of the whole field.

I straightened the scarecrow’s coat. It hadn’t actually needed it. I did it anyway.

”I’m seventeen,” I told it.

It received this news with its usual faint disappointment.

Father used to make birthdays into something. Not presents, exactly. We didn’t have shops, or money, or anyone to trade with but the ridge settlement twice a year. What Father gave you on your birthday was something that couldn’t possibly happen.

When I turned six, I woke up and the whole field was full of snow. In July. He’d taken the water out of the air over the valley and made it fall, slow and fat and silent, for exactly one hour, and then it melted into the wheat and the wheat grew a foot that week.

When I turned seven, there was a tree made of glass in the yard, every leaf thin enough to see through, and when the wind blew they rang against each other like a thousand small bells. It stood for a year until a storm took it. I cried for a day. So did Mother, though she said it was the wind.

When I turned eight, he took me up the ridge at night and turned the air above us, for a few seconds, into something that glowed. Green and violet curtains of light, rippling across the sky from one horizon to the other. Aurora, he called it. He said people used to travel to the far north of the world to see them, before the war.

When I turned nine, he was already coughing.

When I turned ten, he gave me notebook number one, Water, and told me it was mine now. Five weeks later, he died.

I hadn’t wanted a birthday since. Mother knew that. She’d let them be quiet, small things: a good dinner, the twins singing. I’d liked it that way.

I didn’t know what was going on in the kitchen. I had a bad feeling it was not going to be quiet.

I sat down in the wheat with my back against the scarecrow’s post and waited out my hour.

Garnet came to fetch me at exactly an hour. She’d been counting. She took my hand and walked me up the porch steps and through the front room, where Mother was smiling the way she smiled when she knew a secret and was trying not to give it away, and stopped me at the kitchen door.

”Close your eyes,” she said.

I closed my eyes.

The door opened. Something scraped. Genny said, ”Careful, it’s—” and Garnet said, ”I know,” and then something set down on the table with a sound like someone dropping a paving stone.

The floor shook slightly.

”Open them.”

I opened them.

It was a cake.

It sat in the middle of the kitchen table under Father’s wall, on the big tin tray we used for drying herbs. It was round and tall, three layers, golden-brown at the edges and covered all over in thick white frosting that someone had spread with more love than skill. On top, in pink, in Garnet’s enormous wobbling letters, it said LUCAS 17. The 7 was backward. Seventeen candles stood in a ring around the edge, all of them lit, made from the wax Genny scraped off the filter’s seals every spring.

It smelled like cake. It looked like cake. It was the most cake-like thing I had ever seen in my life.

It had also, very clearly, bent the tray.

”Garnet,” I said.

”Do you like it?”

”I love it. What is it made of?”

Garnet looked at Genny. Genny looked at the ceiling.

”It’s made of cake,” said Garnet.

”What was it made of before it was cake?”

There was a pause.

”A rock,” Garnet admitted.

I looked at the cake. I looked at the tray, bowed under it like a hammock. I looked at Genny, who had clearly been the one carrying it.

”A big rock,” Genny said. ”From the riverbed. She picked it out a week ago.”

”A week?”

”I convinced it,” Garnet said. She said it with great seriousness, as if it were a technical term. ”You said the inside was the hardest part. So I didn’t just try once. I held it every night before bed and told it about cake. About how cakes are soft, and sweet, and they have air in them, and they’re for birthdays. Every night. I didn’t change it until this morning. I wanted it to be ready.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t, quite.

”Blow out the candles,” said Genny, ”before the wax gets in the frosting.”

I blew out the candles. Garnet sang. Mother sang too, from the front room, very softly, and Genny didn’t sing at all but mouthed the words when she thought nobody was looking.

Then Garnet handed me a knife.

I cut into it.

The outside was cake. Real cake, or near enough that I couldn’t tell the difference: soft and yellow and full of tiny holes, sweet, with a faint taste of something like vanilla that Garnet could not possibly have known how to make, and somehow had. The frosting was too thick and too sweet and perfect. The first slice came away clean, and the second.

The knife hit something on the third and stopped with a clunk.

I looked down. About two inches into the cake, in the very center, there was a smooth gray lump the size of a fist.

The rock.

”Oh,” said Garnet. Her face fell. ”I ran out of convincing.”

Genny started to laugh. She tried very hard not to. It came out of her nose.

I put the knife down, picked up a slice of the outside, and ate it.

”It’s the best cake I’ve ever had,” I said.

”It’s the only cake you’ve ever had,” said Genny.

”It’s still the best.”

Garnet looked at me for a long moment, to see whether I meant it. Then she beamed so hard it seemed to light the kitchen. We ate around the rock, all three of us, standing at the table with our fingers. Then Garnet took a plate to Mother, who ate four whole bites and said it was even better than the strawberry, which was the highest praise in the house.

The rock stayed in the middle of the cake tray all day like the stone in a peach. Nobody moved it.

Genny gave me hers after lunch.

She didn’t make a thing of it. She came out to the porch where I was sitting and dropped something into my lap and sat down two steps below me, facing the field, as if she’d just happened to stop there.

It was wrapped in an old shirt. I unwrapped it.

It was Father’s knife.

Not a kitchen knife. His field knife. The one he’d carried on his belt my whole childhood, the one he’d used to cut wire and strip bark and pry the lids off the cellar jars. The blade was about the length of my hand, plain gray steel, sharp enough to shave with. I hadn’t seen it since the week he died. I’d thought Mother had buried it with him.

The handle was new.

The old handle had been wood, and it had rotted; I remembered that, the way it had gone soft and dark at the end. This handle was something else. Pale gold, hard and smooth as polished stone, but warm in the hand, with a faint grain running through it.

”Wheat,” Genny said, without turning around. ”From the field. The stalks. I turned them into, um. Resin. Sort of. And then I made it hard.”

”You did this?”

”A bit at a time. It has to be within a foot. So I kept it in my pocket.” She shrugged, still facing the wheat. ”Since winter.”

Since winter. Eight months. A square inch at a time, a few minutes a night, in her pocket, so nobody would see.

I turned it over.

On the base of the handle, very small and very neat, two letters had been set into the gold in dark steel. T.D.

And under them, newer, slightly less neat, as though her hand had shaken: L.D.

”Mother had it,” Genny said. ”In a drawer. She gave it to me at Christmas and said to fix it for you. She said Father would want you to have it.” She paused. ”Happy birthday.”

I couldn’t say anything for a while.

Genny sat on the step below me, her back very straight, not looking at me, giving me time. She’d learned that from me, I think. I’d learned it from Father.

”Thank you,” I said at last.

”It’s just a knife.”

”It’s not just a knife.”

She didn’t answer. But after a minute she leaned back, just a little, until her shoulder was against my knee. We stayed like that for a long time, looking out at the field.

Mother didn’t give me anything.

She told me so at dusk, when the twins were out on the porch arguing about whether the rock from the cake could be planted. I’d brought her tea. She held the cup in both hands, against her chest, the way she did now, and looked at the knife on my belt for a long time.

”She did beautiful work,” she said.

”She did it in her pocket. For eight months.”

”I know. I watched her.” A small smile. ”She thought I didn’t notice. She’d sit at the end of my bed at night with her hand in her pocket and her jaw set like her father’s, and I’d pretend to be asleep.”

She was quiet a moment.

”I meant to make you something,” she said. ”A scarf. I had the wool. I got as far as casting on.” She lifted one hand off the cup, a little, and let it fall back. ”I couldn’t hold the needles. I tried to hold them the other way.”

The other way meant with her mind. The way she used to hang the washing and pour the tea.

”They kept falling,” she said.

”It doesn’t matter.”

”It does a little. But not very much.” She looked up at me. ”I’m sorry, love. There’s nothing from me this year.”

”You’re here,” I said. ”That’s enough.”

I meant it. I think she knew I meant it. It was the wrong thing to say, all the same. Something went across her face and was gone again, too quick to catch.

She set the cup down on the side table. It took her a while.

”Sit down,” she said.

I sat in the chair by the bed.

She didn’t say anything at first. She looked out of the window at the field, at the twins on the porch, at the scarecrow going dark against the sky. The filter hummed in the walls. The stove ticked.

”There’s a box,” she said.

I waited.

”In your father’s study. The bottom drawer of his desk, the one that’s locked. I have the key.” She touched the collar of her nightgown, where a thin chain disappeared under the cloth. I’d seen the chain my whole life and never wondered what was on it. ”There are things in it that are yours. Things you should have had a long time ago. Your father wanted to give them to you himself, when you were older. Then there wasn’t time. And I—”

She stopped.

”And I kept waiting,” she said. ”For the right day. And there’s never a right day for something like this. So I’m going to give it to you soon.”

”What’s in it?”

”Not tonight.”

”Mother—”

”Not tonight, Lucas.” She said it gently. She didn’t say it as if it were open to argument. ”Let me have your birthday first. Let me have one more day where you’re seventeen and you’ve got cake on your shirt and your sisters are fighting about planting a rock. Let me have that, and then I’ll give it to you. Soon. I promise.”

She wasn’t smiling.

She had smiled all day. At the blue eggs, at the cake, at the twins singing, at Genny’s knife. She’d smiled when she told me about the scarf she couldn’t finish.

She wasn’t smiling now. She was looking at me the way she’d looked at me on the porch two nights ago, as if she were trying to memorize me. And under that, something else I’d never seen in her face before. I didn’t have a word for it then.

Later, I’d know it was fear.

”Okay,” I said.

”Thank you, love.”

She closed her eyes. After a while her breathing evened out, careful and shallow, and I knew she was asleep.

I sat with her until the twins came in.

I went into Father’s study that night.

I didn’t mean to. I was going to get notebook fifteen, to write down the vanilla and the wheat resin before I forgot how they’d looked. And then I was standing in front of his desk, looking at the bottom drawer.

It was an ordinary drawer. Dark wood, a brass keyhole, a little worn around the edges where his thumb used to rest. I’d opened every other drawer in this room a thousand times. I’d never tried that one. It had always been locked, and it had always been his, and I’d never wondered.

I wondered now.

I looked at the lock.

It was brass, and iron, and a little steel in the spring. Simple. I could see every part of it. I could have turned it to dust in a glance, or to water, or just told the pins to move. The drawer would have slid open in my hand, and whatever was in it would have been mine, tonight, the way Mother said it was meant to be.

I stood there for a long time.

Then I picked up notebook fifteen and went back up to bed, and left the drawer exactly as it was.

She’d asked me to wait. It was the only thing she’d asked me for all day.

I lay awake and listened to the filter hum in the walls, and turned Father’s knife over and over in my hands in the dark, feeling for the two small sets of letters on the handle. T.D.L.D. One above the other.

I didn’t know yet that it was the last birthday any of us would ever have in that house.