Mother seemed more amused than anything, once she saw that Lynn was perfectly fine, minus a bruised ego. Lynn stamped across the floor of the basement, her fuming anger more than sufficient to heat the room.
“At least it was someone nice enough to fire a warning shot,” Mother said.
“Doesn’t matter,” Lynn snapped. “That’s the farthest out you’re going to let me go. I won’t be able to see the house much past that and I didn’t see anything else that was down and big enough to be worth cutting.”
Lynn went to the pantry for an apple, her anger not enough to quell her appetite. “You hungry?”
“Oh, pretty much always,” Mother said, and Lynn grabbed her an apple as well. When she handed it to her, Mother grabbed her wrist.
“What’s that?” She pointed to a cut across the palm of Lynn’s hand, bruised and red from a slight infection.
“Nothing,” Lynn said. “I got scraped the other day moving wood over for the canning fire and forgot to clean it out right away.”
“Always clean,” Mother said stiffly. “Always. You know what to look for?”
“Red streaks for blood poisoning, going up toward my elbow.”
“And gangrene?”
Lynn snorted. “I’m sure if I develop gangrene you would notice the smell pretty quick.”
“I won’t always be here to double-check you,” Mother said.
“Don’t say things like that.” To even hint at a future time when Mother wouldn’t be around sent her heart soaring into her throat, a worried pulse of adrenaline shooting through her veins.
“How do you know what gangrene smells like anyway?” Mother changed the subject.
Lynn pulled the stem from her apple before answering. “Because of Stebbs,” she said quietly. “Because of his leg.”
Mother looked down quickly and cleared her throat. “I didn’t know you remembered that.”
“Kind of tough to forget.”
When Mother didn’t offer anything else to the conversation, Lynn barreled on. “How old was I? I’m guessing seven?”
“Six,” she was corrected. “You were six.” But nothing further.
It seemed young, Lynn thought, to have been sent to get the tomatoes from the garden alone. But at the time the coyotes had not been so numerous or so desperate as they were now.
The smell was distinctive. Even in her youth she had known that what she smelled meant danger. She had stopped, sniffing the air like an unsure fawn in the spring. The hand had come as a shock, starkly white against the new green grass of the tromped path. White and flecked with freckles, something she’d looked at curiously for a moment; neither she nor Mother—the only people in the world, for all she knew—had them.
“Hey there, little one.” His voice had been thin and weak. But still it set her back and she’d tripped in alarm, landing on her bottom. “It’s all right,” he said. “I need help. Get Lauren.”
The last word had meant nothing to her, a foreign mixture of two syllables she’d never heard before.
“Your mother,” he added patiently. “Get your mother.”
That word she knew, and she had bolted home, a panicked message on her lips that Mother had deciphered after a few moments. Lynn remembered the shock that had passed over Mother’s face; it was the first time she’d ever seen that Mother could feel fear. And then she had turned and run, leaving Lynn to follow as best she could. The strange man was propped on his good leg and leaning against Mother by the time she caught up. The sight of a metal trap, its jaws embedded firmly into swollen, stinking flesh just above the man’s ankle, had brought Lynn to a screaming halt.
The two adults had shuffled awkwardly back to the house, Lynn carrying both their weapons and following behind. The man’s foot had banged against the cinder-block wall of the cellar as they clumsily helped him down the stairs, and he’d howled so loudly that Lynn had run back to the landing, peering down into the basement as Mother eased him onto her own cot and looked critically at his ruined foot.
Mother had ordered Lynn back downstairs, and she had been put to work ripping a rag into shreds for binding, boiling water, and then to the upstairs kitchen for their sharpest knife. After that, she’d been banished to the upstairs bedrooms, somewhere she’d hardly ever been before. A thick coat of dust covered the room that Mother called “Lynn’s room,” even though she’d spent most of her life on the roof or in the basement, where the only windows were inches above ground level and easy to defend. She’d sat on the dusty frame of her unused bed and tried not to listen to the screams coming up through the vents.
The memory still had the power to chill her. The stranger had passed out under Mother’s ministrations, and a shaken, pale version of her mother had come upstairs and sat next to her on the bed for a few moments before speaking.