Wolf Hollow Read Free

path away from me. “And don’t tell nobody about it or I’ll use a rock on the little one.” James. She meant James. The little one.
    I waited until she was out of sight and then I got my breath back and thought about what it would feel like to be hit with a stick.
    A year earlier Henry had thrown a toadstool the size of a dinner plate at me and I’d stepped back out of the way and tripped over a dog and broken my arm. I’d burned myself a couple of times, stepped on a hoe blade and snapped the handle back into my forehead, sprained my ankle in a groundhog hole. Nothing much else had done me bodily harm in my eleven years on earth, but I’d been hurt enough to know that a whack with a branch wouldn’t kill me.
    Still, as I passed it, I heaved the particular stick she had chosen as far as I could into the woods. There were plenty of other sticks around, but I felt a little better as I cast this one beyond her reach.
    I decided, as I plodded slowly up the path, that Betty wouldn’t go after Henry or James until she tried me, so I’d wait to see if she was a barker or a biter before telling my parents anything that might make Betty a whole lot angrier than she already was. But I confessed to myself that I was afraid in a way I hadn’t known before.

    I hadn’t felt very much true fear in my life, except about the war . . . that it might still be raging when my brothers grew old enough to fight the Nazis . . . even though farm boys were often spared. Even though by that time someone would surely have won. And I was afraid of that, too—who would win, who would lose.
    We girls in the 4-H club had made a flag to hang in the church, adding a blue star every time someone from the township went off to fight. When one of them died, we changed the blue star to a gold one. Just two, so far, but I had been to their funerals, and I knew that there was no “just” about it.
    I sometimes sat with the grown-ups and listened to the radio in the evenings after the supper dishes were done. Nobody said anything when the news came on. My mother listened with her head bowed, her hands nested and still in her mending. The talk was of concentration camps, which I thought at first meant places where people went to think hard thoughts.
    â€œI do wish they were that,” my father said. “But they’re not, Annabelle. They’re prisons for people Hitler doesn’t like.”
    I had a hard time imagining why Hitler disliked so many people.
    â€œWho
does
he like?” I asked.
    My father thought about his answer. “People with blond hair and blue eyes,” he said.
    Which made me glad to have hair that was brown. Eyes, too.
    We listened to news of bombs and submarines, smiled at the announcement that the Allies were close to retaking Italy, worried about everything else.
    â€œNo need to be afraid, Annabelle,” my mother said, running her hand down my back.
    But I was.
    I wasn’t afraid of my mother, though, despite how hard she could sometimes be. She had forgotten what it felt like to ride a swing up into the sky, to stop hoeing at the first sign of a blister, to expect anything to be easier than it was. She had been seventeen when she’d had me, was only twenty-eight the year I learned how to lie, not much more than a girl herself, in charge of three generations and a good bit of farmwork, too. But even when she was most impatient with me, I did not fear her.
    Nor was I really afraid of my aunt Lily, though she could be alarming. A tall, thin, ugly woman who might have been handsome as a man, Aunt Lily spent her days working as a postmistress and her nights praying and reading from her Bible and practicing dance steps in the small patch of floor at the foot of her bed. She sometimes invited me into her bedroom to listen to
Peter and the Wolf
on the phonograph, and now and then she put a penny into the china pig she’d given me, but