Roland disapproved of the nursing, too. But Emma argued it was cheaper than evaporated milk, and this was true, so she got her way, and soon enough Roland fell for Lucy, too, stopping to watch her suck, tickling the bottoms of her feet. At first Emma’s breasts, having weaned Jeffrey three months before, gave only a watery trickle, but then milk began to flow, and Lucy drank steadily, with that strange, almost unnerving calm. Even her fussing was gentle, more coo than cry.
Emma wondered if Lucy was dumb because then keeping Lucy could pass for a kind of selflessness. But Lucy turned out not to be at all dumb, only even-tempered and kind. She had the steady energy of a woman by the time she was eight, along with a boy’s knack for physical work, for pieces and parts and how they fit together, how things worked. Now almost ten, she had become a leader among the children. She led them now, pointing with a hammer to show her sisters how to measure straight despite the board’s knots. Emma sat on a stump trying to read a pamphlet she’d sent away for—blandly titled PEAR VARIETIES, though its real subject was perry—but Lucy’s voice kept distracting her. “Like that. No, a little to the right. Yes, there. Good. But now you have to check the angle. . . .” Emma looked to see Janie’s reaction—always she watched to see if her other girls would grow tired of Lucy’s bossing. But she had her way about her. And Janie, while not a pushover, liked clear direction. She did as Lucy said, then tucked her pencil proudly behind her ear. Emma smiled. She was glad for the distraction. Perry was more complicated than she had thought. It was not simply cider made with pears. Pears had to stand longer than apples before you crushed them, and then the pulp had to stand before you crushed it. There were tannins to clear and possible “hazes” that could ruin it and “gravity” to check and other things Emma didn’t understand. She had little memory or patience for such details, or any details at all, really—though the neighbors might have guessed otherwise, Emma had tunneled through the years of boiling potatoes in time for supper and captaining the transfer of clothing from larger to smaller children and overseeing the basic hygiene and nail clipping of nine children perpetually on the verge of chaos. There was little grace involved. And now the perry seemed to require particular perry pears, not eating pears, but they would have to use eating pears because that’s all that was grown on Cape Ann, so perhaps the instructions would have to be adjusted—but how? She could not ask the perry maker she had boasted to Josiah Story about. She knew the man because she had been selling him their stolen pears over the years, but now she would be competing with him. He would not give her a recipe or help her solve yet another problem: their timing was off. The fermentation process was much longer than Emma had realized. The perry would not be ready this fall—not even close. What had she been thinking? Of money, of course. She had not understood.
“You look worried.”
Lucy came without warning, swinging her hammer silently against her palm.
Emma removed her teeth from her lower lip, attempted another smile. “No,” she said, “not worried.”
Lucy knelt down next to Emma’s stump. “Josiah Story’s not coming, is he.”
“He’ll come,” Emma said. She reached to ruffle Lucy’s hair as if to comfort her, though it was Emma who took comfort in this gesture, the dark mass of Lucy’s curls surrounding her hand like a nest. Josiah Story was the other problem. A week had passed but he had not delivered the money, as he had said he would. They had the boards, but everything else they needed his money to buy. And not only the press and the jugs and barrels and paper for a roof but something the pamphlet called a scratcher, to pulp the pears. Emma had not known to mention a scratcher in his office. She had known almost nothing. They had only ever taken pears from the Eastern Point orchard—some for eating, most to sell to the perry maker. Yet here they were, planning to hit four fields in West Parish, three in Essex, and one as far as Ipswich. Emma and Lucy had consulted maps. They even had a Schedule of Ripeness drawn up, based on the exposures of the fields. “We intend to wet the cape in it,” she had said. It made her queasy now, the ignorance of her ambition.
Lucy set down her hammer. She took the pamphlet from Emma’s lap and began to page through it. “What’re tannins?”
“I don’t know,” Emma admitted. “I haven’t gotten that far. And they likely don’t explain it.”
“What about bacteria?”
Emma shrugged. “We’ll figure it out.”
They were quiet as Lucy read. Joshua whined. Maggie laughed. The boys’ shovels scraped in rhythm. Emma watched a male cardinal—the first of the season—flit into the fading tangle of a forsythia bush, poke around, and fly off again.
“If you look at this, it seems like they’re saying it won’t be ready until next year.”
“I know.”
“You know?”
“I know now. I didn’t know before.”