Wanted

Chapter 40

Walls checked on John in the morning before he went downstairs to feed and milk his cows. He found him slumped over Jeremiah's and Numees' blankets that were scrunched up in a ball on his bed. The boy's own blanket had fallen from his shoulders. Half sitting up in his bed with his cheek resting on his forearms on the windowsill above the bed, he must have fallen asleep watching out for one of them to return.

Walls sighed. Whatever about Numees and Enkoodabooaoo, they needed to make use of as much of the daylight as they could, but Jeremiah could have waited until the boy was awake. He didn't tell him that though, it didn't seem his place to say, they had come to make an agreement about interfering in each other's parenting styles, and for good reason. Jeremiah had been upset over Carl getting his hiding for having lied and eavesdropped on them. Jeremiah told him in no uncertain terms that he thought it cruel and wrong, and that he wouldn't beat John for it, to which Walls had replied "if you don't, I sure will!" Had it not been for the two women who calmed them both down, the row could have gotten out of hand. They both were upset for the same reason. Terrified John was going to die, and feeling responsible for it, as adults do when they have promised themselves to keep a child safe.

Walls walked over to the bed and gently moved John and the surplus bedding to make him lie comfortable in his bed. He wasn't surprised that the child was cold to touch. The fire in the little fireplace in the corner of the room had of course long died down. The nights had always been cool out here but now that the seasons were changing even more so.

John moaned a little in pain. Starting to wake slowly, he blinked the sleep out of his eyes, and stretched the stiffness out of his arms and legs. As soon as he realised Walls was standing beside him however, he was awake in an instant, frozen stiff and his eyes wide open in alarm.

"It's cold," Walls went as he pulled the bedding back up under the boy's chin and then turned his attention to the fireplace where he built a new fire to heat the little bedroom.

"I'll bring you your breakfast when I come back in," Walls said, when he was finished and then left the room with the bucket of cold ashes in his hand, closing the door behind him.

Walls sighed. He was tired. He hadn't been able to sleep well either. Ever since Jeremiah had brought the boy into his house his mind forced him to think back in time, something he had avoided for years.

His father would not have been seen dead milking the cows and starting the breakfast at this hour of the morning. 'Women's work,' he'd have said with contempt in his voice. Not in this house though, Walls mused, not since Carl was born who kept his wife up all night wailing for months. Carl was frail as a baby, always hungry, always bringing most of the milk she gave him back up. Sally had been distraught, thinking there was something wrong with her milk or worried she was not doing it right. She spent more time in bed with that boy than any other child of theirs and she still was always exhausted. That's when their morning routine changed. She had told him, that coming down into a warmth kitchen made her feel loved. With tears in her eyes, she had told him that she thought she didn't deserve it because she wasn't even able to feed her own baby. So he kept doing it, even when Carl suddenly decided to settle down for her. "Women," Walls said out loud to himself, shaking his head, as he poked the fire in the stove of the kitchen, his mind wandering back in time to his poor mother. He never wanted his wife to feel like that and hated how the memory of her sometimes haunted him.

"Hoer uff zu blaere," she had told him in her thick accent, "stop crying," she said, when, as a four-year-old, a few months after their father had died, his mother brought him and his baby sister to the orphanage and left them there, keeping only the older brother with her at the time. When he closed his eyes in an attempt to shake the memory of her hard words, he often could nevertheless see her face in front of him, her distraught eyes that bore no tears. She wasn't able to keep the little farm going by herself. There was not enough food for them all, they would have starved, she later explained when he was old enough to understand. She was forever apologising for not having been able to feed them. They'd all been told to give up and he almost had but then a year later she came back for them, accompanied by a man they were expected to call 'Vatter' henceforth. Her new husband was a strict and pious man, a widower who had as little affection for his own children as he had for his new wife and hers. His mother had to remind him to love his new father and be grateful. He was good enough to let her bring them home, she kept telling him. He didn't have to agree to her terms. Being a Schwarzwaldbauer, who owned his own sizeable farm, meant he didn't have to take a widow with children. They had to be grateful that out of all the eligible girls whose families tried to arrange a marriage with him, he chose her, a woman not that much younger than himself. He didn't, but his family let her know it often enough though and reminded her that he even let her children take his good name. But unlike the man's own children, who hated their father as much as they feared him, Walls was grateful and did learn to respect, if not love, his new father, who raised him right and didn't treat him any different than he treated his own sons. It never stopped him longing for his own father though.