The narrow front door of their house swung open as Mother brought the wagon to a lurching halt. Lee came out and walked down to meet them, rubbing old Aaron affectionately on his sweat-sheened neck. He was the tallest in the family and nearly as strong as Father, although much leaner. He was also the quietest, seeing to his chores methodically and efficiently, while Jason and James wasted a portion of each morning joking or quibbling before Father would have to clear his throat or cough and the pair would quickly get back to work. Father rarely lost his temper, but the few times he did kept everyone well behaved.
‘How is Jason faring?’ Mother asked Lee with some concern.
‘He’ll live,’ Samuel’s brother replied bluntly as he drew a great flour sack down from the wagon into his arms. His mother seemed worried for a moment, then rubbed her brow with her sleeve and turned to her younger son.
‘Perhaps you could do some chores for me today, Samuel,’ she suggested as she gathered up the string of fish and stepped down to the ground.
Samuel hopped from the cart. ‘Yes, Mother,’ he answered, nodding. He did sometimes do chores, but with his brothers and sister to do all the real work, he knew he was not really needed. Besides, he was far too small to do anything very useful.
Watching Lee carry the great sack of flour into the house, Samuel wondered what it would be like to be grown. He wanted to be as strong as his brothers-as strong as Lee-but he also noticed how they had considerably less time to play. Perhaps this was not entirely a fair trade. When he was grown, Samuel was sure he would still play games and wander through the woods and spend as many afternoons as possible lying on his back by the river, bathing in the sun, then running and splashing in the water as he pleased. There was something wrong for grown-ups to take matters so seriously and leave such little time for adventures. It just didn’t seem to make sense.
Dragging the apple basket from the seat, the daydreaming boy waddled inside. The wooden floor creaked as he stepped through the doorway. Their house squeaked a lot and made all kinds of other noises, especially at night and especially when it was stormy. Father was forever fixing one part of it or another and Samuel supposed it was just the way of old things to be so noisy and easily broken.
Mother was putting all the bought things onto the shelves and into the cupboards, while Lee could be heard grunting out the back, carting the sacks of dried corn they would give to the chickens through the winter. Mother turned from her chore and sighed as she looked towards the bedroom, where Jason lay soundly sleeping. She walked over to his side, brushing Samuel’s hair absently as she passed, and placed a palm to Jason’s brow, thoughtfully. After a moment, she sat on the very edge of the bed and took Jason’s limp hand in hers with a gentle squeeze.
Jason looked ever so dull next to Mother’s healthy shine. That’s what Mother had called it a few days ago when Samuel had asked why Jason looked so dim, while she was so bright. A ‘healthy shine’, she had said. Samuel remembered people saying that quite often, especially Tom’s father. He had told Samuel that he was a glowing lad several times, and once he had told Tom’s mother that she looked as radiant as the sun itself. Samuel did not think she was that bright. She was as bright as a star or a distant candle perhaps, but not like the sun at all.
Jason slept peacefully as Mother bent and whispered in his ear, then kissed him softly on the forehead. Then she turned her attention to Samuel, still standing in the living room with the basket in his arms.
‘Why don’t you go and feed the chickens then, while I finish putting these things away?’ she asked. ‘And then help Lee in the barn. Did you hear that Lee?’ she called out a little louder through the window. ‘Samuel is going to help you in the barn.’
Lee’s response was an audible moan of disappointment.
Mother gave a stern look at Samuel. ‘Don’t leave your brother to do everything, as usual. It’s about time you learned to be responsible.’
He nodded and pushed the apple basket up onto the table, then trotted outside, rubbing his nose on his sleeve. His mother watched him leave and smiled. After a few long moments of staring into empty space, she lowered Jason’s hand back to his side and came out of the bedroom to return to her task. As she passed the table, she absent-mindedly plucked up an apple from Samuel’s basket and was surprised to feel something soft and wet underneath. She turned the shiny red fruit over in her hands and smiled knowingly as she spied the ugly-looking bruises that had been hidden skilfully underneath.
Lee was still unhitching Aaron from the cart, so Samuel grabbed up a heavy bucket of scraps from beside the water trough and set off towards the barn. He had to grasp the vessel tightly in both hands and lean right over towards one side just to keep from tipping over and it thumped his leg with each step as he walked, making it all the more difficult. Being big must be one reason why the grown-ups did all the work. Everything was much harder for small hands and small legs.
The chickens snapped up the scraps eagerly before the pieces had even hit the ground. They clucked and flapped their wings with great excitement, frantic to peck up the tiny morsels. The geese were far less excitable, instead carefully picking up the scraps that almost landed on top of them, raising their long necks to the sky as they swallowed. When the chickens came too near, however, the geese would hiss and stretch out their wings until the chickens darted away again. They were funny birds, the geese, but Samuel liked to feed them the most.
When the bucket was empty, Samuel set it down and watched the birds peck up the last pieces and then begin scratching at the ground. His gaze moved slowly from the dark brown soil to the sunlit treetops up on Miller’s Hill where so many of his adventures had been born. There, the trees made stairways with their trunks and bridges with their branches. Leaves became walls and gaps became windows. Outstretching roots formed cells for prisoners or mysterious caverns where adventures were waiting to be had. Only scant moments passed before any thoughts of chores were long gone and Samuel’s legs had carried him beyond the edge of the woods, where he vanished amongst the trees and shrubs.
Over by the emptied cart, Lee scratched his head quizzically, surveying the empty space where his little brother had been standing only some few moments before.
Deep in the woods, each and every narrow and crooked path had its own destination that Samuel knew as well as Mother knew her kitchen cupboards. On his right, he passed the dark, almost-hidden tunnel that he had forged through the thorny blackberries, which led to the deer glade. He wandered past the wide, stony path that wound its way up to the lookout on the rocks where he could survey the barren gully. He even went past the rain-scoured path that led to the wild orchard, which only he and Tom knew about, where they could sit and eat their pick of fruits all day long, even if many of them were bird-pecked and wormy.
Today, however, he had just one destination on his mind. He continued ever on, inwards and upwards and deeper into the woods, taking the long, narrow and difficult path on which he had to scale rocks as high as himself and duck under the mossy, fallen trunks of giant trees and then push through masses of cool and shady ferns. It was the most difficult path of all, but by far the most rewarding.
At last, panting and tired, he stepped up onto the great shattered stump, ten times as wide as he was tall. A giant of a tree must have stood there at one time, but now its shattered stump was all that remained. The forest had very few such trees remaining, but Father said that further into the mountains, in the hard-to-reach valleys where tigers and bears still made their homes, such trees grew abundantly.