Wolf Hollow by Wolk Lauren

Author:Wolk, Lauren [Wolk, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2016-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

While my mother returned to her chores, I helped myself to some rolls from the bread box, filled a mug with coffee from a pot on the stove, and headed for the cellar.

It was a big cellar with stone walls and floors and four rooms. One was for laundry, perpetually damp but clean, the wringer washer in one corner, lines strung from wall to wall, a wicker basket on a long table, in it a cloth sack of wooden pins, tin buckets for hauling wash water from the well, a one-burner stove for heating the water, and a drain in the floor.

In another room, shelves lined with newspaper held jars of jam, pickles, peppers, beans, tomatoes, peaches, peas, and corn.

The coal room had a chute set up close to the ceiling so my father could shovel the coal in from the lane above. It was a filthy, sooty place where nobody went until winter came and the furnace wanted to be fed.

The fourth room was for everything else that didn’t belong above stairs. Buckets that needed to be patched. Empty canning jars. Gardening tools. Bulbs dug up and stored in bushels of peat.

There was a door leading from the back of the cellar to the outside, lower on the hill than the rest of the house. Just outside was a separate entrance to the root cellar where we stored potatoes, onions, beets, carrots: anything that needed to last as long into the winter as possible.

I took a tin bucket that was still sound but had seen better days and filled it with provisions: the rolls, a pot of strawberry jam, some carrots, a couple of empty Mason jars and lids; I filled one with the mug of coffee. The others I would fill at the barn cistern.

I left the bucket outside the cellar door and climbed the stairs.

I found my mother stripping the sheets from my grandparents’ bed while my grandmother sat in her rocker, darning a sock.

“I’m going back for more milkweed,” I said.

And that’s when I felt the first wave of sorrow that came from keeping a new secret. Perhaps, by the end of this day, Betty would be found and Toby could return to his smokehouse, no harm done.

If not, I would tell my mother. I could not keep this secret forever. Nor could I hide Toby for long, cloistered in the hayloft like a stray cat.

“Don’t forget to take a bag this time,” my mother said as she stuffed the soiled linens in a pillowcase.

“I won’t.” I watched the two of them at their work for another moment. So different. So much the same. The room filled with things they’d made. All of it worn to softness.

The second wave of sorrow, now, was for Toby, too long deprived of such things, if he’d ever had them at all.

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