Silver in the Hacky Sack

Chapter 8: Counted On

Counted On

The night was most of the way gone and Darlene had not cooled.

Bobbie sat with her back to the wall, the bucket between her knees. Cloth in the water, cloth wrung out, cloth laid flat across their mother's forehead. It came back warm every time. The water had stopped being cold sometime in the last hour, and neither of them said anything about that.

Frankie slept against Bobbie's leg with her mouth open and one fist closed on the hem of Bobbie's shirt.

Bobbie was twelve. She could wring a chicken's neck and carry a feed bucket on her hip, and nobody had ever had to show her a thing twice.

The lantern was turned down to save the oil, so there was more dark in the shed than there needed to be. The tarp over the machinery at the back lifted a little when the wind got under the door, and lay back down, and lifted again.

Nell had been over all of it since dark, and it had not changed.

The pot. Two beds, a trunk, a chair, what was in the cupboard. Not one of those was money. The seed in this shed belonged to somebody else. So did the diesel. So did the shed. What a doctor wanted for a shoulder like that, she did not know, and nobody in that family had ever gone for a thing and come back with its price. Roy had nothing and would have said the same if his pockets were full. The people down the lane had done the lifting and gone home.

Which left the Hobbs place, up the road the other way. They would give Darlene what they had. Getting it loose would take a day of standing in that kitchen while it was talked over, and Darlene did not have a day.

The doorway had gone gray.

Nell put her coat on.

"It's not light yet," Bobbie said.

"It's close."

"I'll come with you."

"You'll stay."

"Frankie can sit with her. She's asleep. I stayed up the whole night—"

"It can't be Frankie."

Bobbie looked at the wall with her hands still in the bucket. She had chapped them raw on both sides, from the water and the cold, and she had not said one word about it.

"I'm going over to the Hobbs place," Nell said. "I'll ask them for it and I'll be back."

"They don't have it."

"They've got what they've got."

"Then let me come."

"No."

"You need somebody."

"I need that cloth kept wet and the fire kept going and Frankie kept inside this door." Nell had her hand on the door. "That's the job. It's the one I need done."

Frankie sat up and blinked at the gray in the door.

"Where?"

"Up the road," Nell said. "Go back to sleep."

"Grandma Hobbs's?"

"Grandma Hobbs's."

Frankie lay back down on Bobbie's leg and was gone again.

Nell went out. Behind her, Bobbie got up and went out to the fire.

The lane was wet and the fence posts went by one at a time, and past them the house sat dark with its door shut, and she did not look at it.

She had the hacky sack out of her coat pocket before she got to the end of the fence. She had told herself she would wait until she was out on the road with nobody in sight either way, and then she did not wait.

It was a little leather ball about the size of a plum, and it had been kicked around that yard as long as there had been a yard. Everybody had kicked it. It had gone in the mud and been rained on and sat out whole winters, and it never did sit still. Put it down on a table and it rolled to the heavy side. The same heavy side, every time.

She had watched it happen, years back, in that house with the door shut on it: the sewing box out, the lamp lit, Grandma working the needle through the leather with her tongue between her teeth. She had never said a word about it to anybody.

She had nothing on her to cut with. She got her thumbnail into the seam at the bottom and worked it back and forth until the thread let go, and the coin came out into her fingers.

It was a silver dollar. Gray-black at the rim and gray across the face of it, a woman's head on one side, a bird with its wings out on the other. Heavy, and heavier than it looked.

Where the Vances had come by a silver dollar, nobody said. She had heard it asked once, when she was small, and she had seen what came after, and she never asked about money in that house again.

That was the money in the family. Whatever a silver dollar went for, it went for more than anything else the Vances owned, and now it was in her hand, and the doctor could be paid.

She put it into her right hand and closed her fingers on it.

Nothing.

The right hand had done it before, more than once. It came up out of whatever it came up out of, quick, hot the way a stove lid is hot through a rag, and it quit the second she let go. She had learned to keep her face still while it happened. There was not a person alive she could have told about it.

She opened her hand and looked at the coin, and closed her fingers on it again. She turned it over with her thumb and shut her fingers and waited some more.

Nothing came up.

Which left two ways to read it. Either the dollar was no good — heavy gray metal with a face stamped on it — or the hand had gone out on her.

She put the dollar in her coat pocket with the empty ball and kept her hand in there with them, closed.

Then she walked out to the blacktop and turned toward town.

The dollar stayed cold in her hand the whole way.