Wolf Hollow: Prologue–Chapter 4

It was whispered that Betty had been sent to the country because she was incorrigible, a word I had to look up in the big dictionary at the schoolhouse.

I didn’t know if living in the country with her grandparents was meant to be a punishment or a cure, but either way I didn’t think it was fair to inflict her on us who had not done anything so terribly wrong.

She arrived at our school one morning without any fanfare or much in the way of explanation.

I wasn’t happy about the situation, but I was glad that Betty had chosen to devil me instead of Ruth, who was smaller than I was and dainty.

For the first week after Betty arrived, I decided to weather her minor attacks, expecting them to wane over time.

When they woke up for their lessons at the chalkboard, they were so openly contemptuous of Mrs. Taylor that I believe the lessons she taught them were shorter than they might have been.

They were all big boys who were useful on their farms and didn’t see the point of going to a school that wouldn’t teach them to sow or reap or herd anything.

They were all big boys who were useful on their farms and didn’t see the point of going to a school that wouldn’t teach them to sow or reap or herd anything.

Still, in the coldest months, the work they might be asked to do at home was tedious and difficult: mending fences and barn roofs and wagon wheels.

I thought about a pit full of wolves.
“Did they kill them after they got them in the pit?” My grandfather sighed. “Shot ’em. Turned in their ears for the bounty. Three dollars a pair.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose up, and I felt a distant kinship with the wolves that had died here.

It was a history book that was so old it didn’t even count Arizona as a state, but it had some good heft to it and I thought maybe I could throw it at her if she got too close.

My ancestors lay beneath the finest headstones in the graveyard, and our house was, in fact, big enough for the three generations that now lived there, albeit cheek by jowl.

A couple of years earlier, Mr. Roosevelt had sent us the electric, and we’d had the wherewithal to wire up the house.

But most amazing of all was the indoor privy, which my parents had recently installed, now that my grandparents were old enough to deserve it.

I didn’t know what she was talking about until I remembered the lilac glass in our front hall window, one of the things I loved best about our house. That and the gables and the slate roof that looked like silver feathers.

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.

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 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.

Betty was mine to fear, and I decided that she was mine to disarm. If I could. On my own.

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.

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.

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.

My father had many portraits of his forebears, a furious bunch of Scots: beetle-browed, mash-mouthed, goat-eyed.

It was as if we had received a tiny spaceship or a time machine, so astounding was this gift.

My mother was too busy to oblige them.

When people saw the results, they asked for another round with another photographer, which was a waste of film and time. I tried my hand at it, but I tended to lop off their heads.

I’d thought it through: If I told her, she’d have to go to her friends, the Glengarrys, and tell them that their granddaughter was a hooligan, something they surely already knew but would not want to hear from a neighbor.

Up the lane and across the spent field at the top of the hill I walked alone—all the crops here plowed under—watching for arrowheads on the crests of the furrows.

Up the lane and across the spent field at the top of the hill I walked alone—all the crops here plowed under—watching for arrowheads on the crests of the furrows.

“I don’t want two pieces of hard candy,” she said. She tossed the penny into the undergrowth. “Tomorrow you bring me something better than a penny.”

“I don’t have anything else to bring you, Betty. And I think it’s just mean of you to be like this. We could be friends, you know,” I said, quite aware that I sounded pretty dubious as I said it.

“There’s plenty of culls in the orchard,” I said, “and potatoes and beets not too far from his shack. I don’t know why he’s so thin.”