The Thicket Read Free Page A

your distance. I think he has a head full of lice.”
    Grandpa clucked up the mules and started guiding the wagon toward the ferry. While he had been sitting there, contemplating, a big man on a sorrel horse had ridden up and got on the ferry. We could hear him discussing the fee with the ferryman. He seemed to come to the conclusion it was worth it a lot sooner than Grandpa had, and by the time we got down there, I could see that across the field, coming down the trail where there were still trees on either side, were two men on horses. Rain-cloud shadows lay over them like dirty moss. It looked like the ferry was going to be filled tight with folks and horses and our wagon.
    Grandpa’s mules were tied to a railing up front, and the wagon wheels at the back were scotched with blocks so they wouldn’t roll. My old riding mule, Bessie, stayed tied to the rear of the wagon, and me and Lula stood near her—but not too near, as she had a habit of kicking out sideways like a cow, trying to clip you a good one if she felt you were too close to her rear end. I’m not sure what she thought might be going on back there, what plan we might have, but I want to note quickly that we were not Bessie’s first owners.
    The big man on the horse had dismounted, and he took his sorrel up front and tied it alongside one of our wagon mules. He came by us and looked at Lula, said, “Aren’t you the prettiest thing?”
    I haven’t spoken on how Lula looked, really, and I guess I should now. She was tall and lean and redheaded, with her hair streaming out from under a pretty blue travel bonnet with a false yellow flower sewn on one side of it. She had a silver star on a chain around her neck. I had bought that for her in town in the General Store. There were other gewgaws there, but they were silver flowers and little hearts, and I reckon they would have suited her fine, but just the year before she had pulled me outside the house and pointed up at the night sky and said, “See that star there, Jack? I’m claiming that as mine.” That made about as much sense as polka music to me, maybe less, but I remembered it, and when I was in town one day and had a bit of money, I bought it for her. She never took it off. I was proud to have given it to her, and I liked the way the light caught it and made it wink around her neck. She had on a light blue dress with yellow trim to match that flower, and she wore high-topped laced boots, black and shiny as axle grease. It was clothes that Grandpa had taken out of the house early on, before they got tainted with the pox. Dressed like she was, she looked like both a young woman and a child. She was pretty as a picture, but the way that man said it bothered me. Maybe it was the way he smiled and the way his eyes ran up and down her; nothing you could lay a hand on or put a word to, but something that made me keep an eye on him nonetheless.
    Lula just said, “Thank you,” and ducked her head modest-like.
    The man said, “That ain’t a bad looking set of mules, neither,” which to my mind sort of put some dirt in his earlier remarks.
    I don’t think Grandpa heard all this. He was still fussy and talking to the ferryman, seeing if he could get back part of his money.
    When that didn’t happen, Grandpa said, “Well, then, what are we waiting for?”
    “On those two men on horseback,” the ferryman said.
    “How about you take us across, then come back for them?”
    “It’s work for nothing,” said the ferryman, scratching his red head, then looking at his fingernail to see if he had captured anything of interest.
    “We paid our two bits,” Grandpa said. “We should go across. Besides, two more, that would be a tight load on this craft.”
    The big man said, “Those are friends of mine, and we can all wait.”
    “We don’t have to,” Grandpa said.
    “No,” said the man. “But we will.”
    “I think we should,” said the ferryman. “I think we should.”
    Now, let me explain something.