Wolf Hollow Read Free Page B

than fear or shell shock that makes a man like he is,” my grandmother said to me one day soon after Toby had first come to our hills. “He wouldn’t have been much more than a boy when he fought in that terrible war. But he must have seen and done things that would lay a strong man low.”
    We’d heard that Toby was squatting in an old smokehouse in Cobb Hollow down below the Glengarry place, along where we grew potatoes and corn. Nobody owned that smokehouse anymore, not since Silas Cobb had died and his old house burned up from a lightning strike. The smokehouse was set back away from the burned-out foundation of the house, mostly hidden in the trees and brush that had grown up around it. It was a snug little place made of stone and wood with a metal roof. I’d come across it once when one of our cows went missing and we all scattered through the woods to bring her home.
    I knew better than to go inside the old shacks beyond the borders of our farm, some of them built up around oil well pumps, some of them for curing meat, some for fowl, all of them apt to attract snakes. But I’d explored the old smokehouse before Toby took it for his own. Except for the smell of meat and smoke that was still strong inside, it seemed a nice enough place for a man like Toby to live. And the old well at the nearby Cobb place—though nothing more now than a hole in the earth, like the Cobb house itself—still meant water worth drinking when the nearby crick froze up.
    I could imagine Toby warm inside the smokehouse, a fire in the spot where fires had once burned steadily. Perhaps he used the meat hooks dangling from the rafters overhead to hang his coat when he wasn’t in it, his guns when they weren’t slung across his back. On one, his black hat. On another, his camera.
    We’d all been surprised when Toby had asked to borrow our camera, which was now his, more or less. It was amazing that he had spoken at all, that he had come close enough to any of us to make such a request, that he had suddenly seemed excited about something, especially something like photographs. But he had, and the whole thing had been an accident.
    When I was seven and Henry five, James three, my mother had taken us to Horne’s, the big department store in Pittsburgh, to have our portrait done. My mother had one picture of herself, taken with her whole family shortly before her mother died. It was pressed in the family Bible, brown as summer dust. My father had many portraits of his forebears, a furious bunch of Scots: beetle-browed, mash-mouthed, goat-eyed. But nowhere in our house was there a simple picture of any of us smiling, arm in arm. My mother wanted such a thing, of her children, so she took the three of us to Horne’s and had us sit together for our portrait. The photographer told her that all portraits taken that month would be entered into a contest for a Kodak camera and a lifetime supply of film and processing.
    â€œAnd when would I have time to take pictures of anything?” she said, smiling, as she paid the man.
    Three weeks later, when a package arrived for my mother, we were astonished to find that it contained both our portrait, in which we all looked sweeter than we really were, and the news that we had won the camera. It was also enclosed, along with a dozen spools of film to get us started and some special envelopes for sending them in to be developed.
    It was as if we had received a tiny spaceship or a time machine, so astounding was this gift.
    Word soon spread, and before long our neighbors were dropping in on Sunday afternoons, still in their church clothes, angling for pictures. My mother was too busy to oblige them. Aunt Lily was willing to take the pictures, but she was so bossy and critical of her subjects that they always looked as if they’d had the flu in their pictures. When people saw the results, they asked for another round with another photographer, which was a waste