“I have been tearing the country apart looking for you, boy. You should not have run away from me!” Will shouted. “Callie, get your hair out of his face so he can hear me. Talis! Do you know how much trouble you have caused all of us?”
Meg knew her husband well, and she could feel how frightened he was at the possibility of losing the boy he’d come to love so much. She knew he planned to punish Talis for running away, but she was not going to allow it.
Coming out of the darkness of the trees, Meg stepped forward. “Will,” she said sternly, her back to the children. “I think Talis has had enough for one day. He is hurt and we are all hungry.” Her eyes said more than her words. She was a good wife and a mild-mannered woman. She agreed with Will when he said he had to punish Talis when he left the henhouse door open, but he could see that she was going to fight him over this.
When Meg put her back up, she was stronger than anyone, a fact that Will did not like to look into too closely. He was too relieved at seeing Talis safe to want more trouble. Best to put this day behind them.
“Yes,” he said, “I can see that the boy needs care.” He said no more but bent and swooped the big boy into his arms, and when Talis protested, saying in his best grown-up voice that he could walk, Will ignored him and carried him to the wagon.
Once the children and she were in the back of the wagon, Meg sat to one side and in a moment it was as though they turned back into children. Blinking as though they had awakened from a dream, they fell upon her, burying their dirty faces in her soft bosom, both wanting her motherly comfort.
Neither Meg nor Will ever discussed what had happened that day, but never again did they try to separate the children.
18
Meg!” Will said for the fourth time, snapping her out of her reverie. “Is there any supper for a hungry man?”
“Yes, of course,” she answered, stepping away from the children’s laughing and clutching. “Come inside and tell me of your day. Was the market good today? What did you see?”
Later, after supper, when she and Will were in bed together, Meg asked him, as she often did, what the children had been talking about while he drove home. Will said he had no idea and turned away to get some sleep. But Meg kept pestering him. “When we’re near it’s Talis who talks. He’s not got a shy bone in his body; never met a stranger. But Callie rarely says a word.”
“At least one woman knows how to keep her mouth shut,” he muttered, glancing at her over his shoulder.
Meg didn’t take the hint. “But when the children are alone together, it’s Callie who talks and Talis who listens. She’ll talk for hours at a time and he’ll never say a word. When I arrive, she stops talking.”
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sp; Will could hear the hurt in Meg’s voice and knew how it upset her that there could be anything going on with “her” children that she was not a part of. Reaching behind him, he squeezed her hand. “You’ll find out. I’ve no doubt that you will find out soon.”
“I mean to,” she said and turned over, snuggling her backside into the comfortable and very familiar position against him.
It had been raining for three days now and Will hadn’t been able to get much work done. It was winter so he didn’t mind. He said that a man worked all summer and needed to rest in the winter, which for him meant sitting before the fire, harness in his lap so he looked as though he were working, and sleeping.
Meg sat across from him, her knitting in her lap; the children were sitting on the floor, staring into the flames and saying nothing. Meg, industrious as ever, noticed that Talis was whispering to Callie, but she kept shaking her head and glancing meaningfully over her shoulder at Meg.
Curious, Meg thought perhaps there was a way for her to find out what the children talked about. Slowly, so she wouldn’t look too suspicious, she let her knitting fall slack in her lap and her eyelids gradually close.
Within minutes, she was rewarded with a loud whisper from Talis. “She is asleep. Go on, look at her.”
Meg could hear Callie tiptoe across the brick floor, her soft leather shoes making a shushing noise. When she was very close, Meg let her knitting drop to the floor, her head fall back and her mouth open as she emitted a short, loud snore. She was rewarded for her acting with a giggle from Callie.
“See,” Talis said in a normal voice. “I told you she was asleep. And you know how nothing can wake them once they’re asleep. We’ve proven that often enough.”
Meg almost opened her eyes and asked him just what he had done to “prove” that she and Will could not be wakened once they were asleep. But now she was after bigger fish. Opening her eyes just the tiniest crack, she could see the children in the bright light of the fire.
“I shall give you something hard,” Talis said, his face screwed up in a way that made him look about thirty years old.
Callie’s eyes sparkled. “Yes, please,” she said. “Make it very hard.”
Talis’s eyes lit up with his idea. “Make him a yellow butterfly.”
“And her?”
“Ugly and mean. Long thin face. Long, thin body. And she has a horrible character.”
Meg almost laughed aloud at that. The children had been bickering all day because Talis had said his chores were much more difficult than hers, so Callie had offered to trade with him. Talis had an inflated opinion of what he did and he was so very sure of himself that he never exerted his full effort. But Callie had a plain girl’s knowledge that she was always going to have to work for what she had, so she’d scurried around and done all Talis’s chores in half the time it took him to do them. So now his reference to “long, thin body” and “horrible character” had to refer to the way Callie had taunted him after she’d beaten him in the chores.
“And what else?” Callie asked, smiling knowingly at him.