it up and put it in her pocket with another scrap of paper.
It took her a while to find the tree in the dark. She cleared a space on the ground to set the lantern, hoisted herself onto the lowest branch, and began climbing like Mourning had. When the Hawken was at eye level, she steadied
her right foot on a thick branch and hugged the trunk with her knees while she
rolled up the note and slipped it into the barrel of the rifle. Then she crumpled up
the other scrap of paper and shoved it in, like a stopper. Her message should be
safe in there, even from the rain.
Back at the cabin, she looked at her wicker baskets, doubtful that she could manage to hoist them onto the wagon alone. She emptied their contents into piles
on the bed and lifted the empty baskets into the bed of the wagon. Then she made endless trips back and forth to repack them. When she went into the barn
to look for a piece of rope, she tripped over Mourning’s toolbox. She intended to
take the shovel, rake, and plow – and the hoe that was still out in the farm – to
Detroit to sell, but what would she do with Mourning’s collection of hand tools?
She stood and stared at the box for a long time, unable to decide. Selling it
and its contents in Detroit made the most sense, but she knew how proud Mourning was of those tools. He’d been accumulating them since he was nine
years old. What if he came back looking for them? Penniless in Michigan, he would need those tools, which he referred to as his Most Precious Belongings.
But if she just left them sitting there they would be stolen in no time. She decided to hide them. She opened the box and smiled sadly at how clean and neatly arranged everything was. Then she removed one item – Mourning’s
compass. She might need it.
A small haystack stood in the back corner of the barn. She cleared part of it
aside and dug a hole just deep enough to hold the box. She wrapped it in canvas,
lowered it into the ground, smoothed the dirt over it, and covered it with hay.
She returned to the cabin and wrote a second note – “Your MPBs are deep in D&D’s house under their food” – and hurried back to the rifle tree. She retrieved
her first note and rolled the second up with it, before reinserting the paper stopper in the barrel.
Then she resumed packing the wagon, trying to create a level surface on
which she would be able to lay her mattress. As she gathered up miscellaneous
utensils and wares, she began to understand why they had gotten everything so
cheaply in Detroit. The seller must have been someone like her – too worn out
and despairing to care about a few dollars more or less. Just looking at the big
sacks of feed and seed in the barn made her want to sit down and cry. There were
some empty sacks, so she could have done as she had with the baskets – put an
empty sack in the wagon and fill it up bucket by bucket – but she shook her head
and turned away. She needed her strength for things more important than trying
to salvage a few dollars. She would take only enough feed to get her to Detroit;
the raccoons were welcome to the rest.
More wearing than the physical exertion was the fatigue of being alone, a tiny
figure under an ink-black sky, huddling in a halo of lantern light, no one to talk
to, no one to care what happened to her, no one to pour her a cup of coffee. With
each hour that passed her conviction grew. There was no choice. She had to go
back to Five Rocks. Let the biddies cluck their tongues. She craved familiar faces. Tobey. Mrs. Hardaway. She even missed Avis and Mabel Mears. Mr.
Carmichael’s long white features. Maybe something as simple as a smile would
help her feel human again.
She punched down the bread dough, put it in the bake kettle, and set it at the
