Where did Peter go?
Their brother Peter had gone to Canada the year before. He was ten years Lucy’s senior, an outwardly tough boy, almost a man now. Lucy trusted him. She imagined living with him, in Canada, imagined that he would be like a brother-father to her. In Canada, apparently, they had turned the schools into breweries, the grass into moonshine; they had laid tracks straight from the distilleries to the border. Everyone was getting rich.
Quebec. Juliet said it Kebeck, as if she were French.
To make the trip, Lucy calculated that she needed thirty for the ticket, ten for food, and ten extra to get by until she found Peter. The perry, their mother had explained matter-of-factly and too late, oblivious to the panic rising in Lucy’s throat, wouldn’t be ready until next year. So when the quarry jobs came along, Lucy thought, Why not? If she kept up the work at the quarry, she might be gone before the pears even hit the press. Maybe, if a storm came up or the fish were scarce, before Roland even returned from his trip.
? ? ?
In the yard, their three sisters—with help from the youngest boy, Joshua—were working on the shack that would hold the press. Three walls were up, the fourth in progress, a pine door resting on its side against the cedar tree. Beneath where the floor would be, she and Liam and Jeffrey had been digging a secret cellar. The way down to the cellar would be through a “turnip bin,” which would be just like the potato bin beside it except that its bottom would drop out. Voilà! Lucy’s latest idea was to put the scratcher in the shack above and the press in the cellar below and devise a detachable chute that would carry the pulp straight down into the press. They would press the juice, let it ferment into perry in wooden barrels, then funnel off the perry into jugs. The jugs and barrels had already been ordered—like everything else—with funds from Josiah Story.
“Hello, boys!” Janie sang in greeting, and Lucy was seized by an urge to jump into her sister’s arms. Instead she took off her cap, let her hair swing down, and said, “Hulloh,” in a deep voice, which made them laugh, Janie and Anne and Maggie and Joshua, too, though he didn’t understand what was funny. She missed them all already. Her continued devotion to the perry—despite her understanding that she wouldn’t profit from it—was her way of apologizing to them, in advance. She hoped that next year, when the jugs were ready to sell, they would see that all her bossing—the lists she made for them each morning, her inspections at the end of the day—had been for them.
Lucy knew—Lucy was not blind—that she was not a Murphy by blood. There was the fact that she was barely older than Janie. (She’d been told that her middle name came from her having been born right around that year’s pears, but Janie’s birthday was barely nine months after that.) There was Lucy Pear herself. She was dark where they were light, round where they were straight. At her nape there was a fur, very soft but very dark, which spread out on either side of her spine like the wings of a skate. In school, children used to taunt her, ask where her parents had bought her, or what monkey her mother had fucked. Fucking Catholics, they would say, even some of the ones who were Catholic. Fucking Catholic rabbits. Then Peter had come to school one day. He was seventeen, already working the Jones Creek clam flats, but he walked into the school yard, grabbed the worst of the bullies by the collar, knocked his nose to the right, and blew his wind out in one punch. What’s it to you? he said tenderly, showing that he had the stamina to inflict far worse. And no one had bothered Lucy since.