Wolf Hollow Read Free Page A

her big, square teeth and her feverish devotion to God frightened me.
    And there were times when I was afraid of my grandmother’s ailing heart that forced her to go up the stairs backward, sitting down . . . how weak and gray she became sometimes, no longer the strong and able woman she’d once been. When we could, she and I sat on the porch swing, playing I Spy, remarking on the butterflies in the front garden, hoping for a pheasant to come hopping out of the woods to poach the seed that she scattered for the songbirds. She loved those birds. Loved them. Even the drab little ones. Especially the drab little ones. There was nothing about my grandmother that frightened me, except the thought that she’d be gone soon.
    But I shared that fear with everyone in our house.
    Betty was mine to fear, and I decided that she was mine to disarm. If I could. On my own.
    But for now I was simply happy that she was gone, and I followed so slowly that Betty was nowhere to be seen by the time I cleared the trees and made my way onto the field that was empty but for her footprints, which were deep and sharp and suggested that she was more freighted than she could possibly be.

CHAPTER THREE
    Lots of people crossed our farm to get from down the hollow to the houses on the other side of our fields instead of following the road from the school all the way around the hill. I’d never minded—we knew everyone for miles around—but I was sometimes startled by the vagabonds who passed through from time to time.
    In those days, not so very long after the Great Depression, there were people who had taken up wander-ing and didn’t know how to stop—cut loose from their roots and their people—never stopping anywhere for very long. And then there were those who had come home from the first big war so shaken, so silent, that they didn’t seem to know who they were any longer or where they belonged.
    One of them, a man named Toby, had stayed.
    He wasn’t like the others.
    He didn’t ask for food or money. He didn’t ask for anything at all. But instead of drifting through on his way to somewhere else like the others, he circled the hills endlessly, and I confess that I had been nervous about him in the beginning.
    But that’s before I had come to know him.
    I looked for him as I walked home that day, scanning the field that wrapped itself around the long, low hill like a nubby shawl. I often saw him away in the distance as I made my way to school and home again. He liked to stand at the edge of the woods, still as a tree. Or on the very top of the hill, clear against the sky.
    We didn’t know where Toby had come from or much about him, except that he had been a foot soldier, fighting the Germans in France. Decades earlier. That much we’d heard, in passing, at church, at the market, and took it to be true.
    His left hand, terribly scarred, seemed to confirm the story. But nobody knew for sure where he came from except that he might have stopped in these hills because they reminded him of home. Or maybe they were simply like a place where he’d always wanted to be.
    A lot of people worried about Toby as he walked the woods and valleys in his long, black oilcloth coat and his black boots, long black hair and beard, and always three long guns slung across his back. They didn’t know what to make of this largely silent man who never seemed to stop walking, morning to night, his head down, plodding along neither faster nor slower than he had the day before.
    I sometimes pictured him huddled in a trench while a thousand Germans ran around topside with bayonets fixed and spikes on their helmets and bloodlust in their eyes. Even though I was only eleven, I knew enough about fear to conclude that being completely afraid, body and soul, was probably enough to make a person strange forever after. And that’s what Toby was. Strange.
    â€œHard to know, but sometimes it’s more