Usually he stayed home with Beth and Ma. Beth always liked Elliot better than me. I was too independent for her tastes. He worshipped her, trailed her around, and obeyed her. He loved the paper dolls she made for him and played with them by the hour. He never in his life sassed her or wished to heaven she'd never been born first.
Letty, when she came along, fit right in with the two of them. They made a great pet of her, and she adored them both. Sometimes Ma would rope me in to watch Letty, but usually I could slip out of the noose. I was the freest member of the family.
It's hard to see the cabin from any distance away. It has sort of folded itself into its surroundings. Only the chimney half is still upright. It's like a great toadstool with a chimney attached, which some giant has come along and stomped, crushing one end. I sometimes wonder if the smashed-in part of the roof might not just come crashing down on us someday, but I guess I'm not too worried about it, or I would have quit going there a long time ago.
I never fail to wonder what became of those folks who built our cabin. It dates back to the days when Revolutionary War veterans who had passed through this beautiful Vermont wilderness during the war came back, bringing their families up from the crowded lands of Connecticut and Massachusetts. Our soldier had come and chopped out a clearing and built his log house, full of hope as anyone who builds a house, I guess, and this is what it had all come to in hardly more than a hundred years.
I was standing still for a minute, thinking and quieting myself, listening to the birds and a couple of quarreling squirrels, when I heard a sound that made my heart collide with my Adam's apple.
At first it seemed like the angry snort of a large animal—a bear, or a moose, or a mountain lion (which was strictly my imagination, as none has been seen in these parts for years). When my heart settled down a bit lower than my wishbone, I realized that what I was hearing was a snore.
The growl of a mountain lion would have been less surprising. Was it man or beast? It couldn't be woman or child. Neither would be capable of that prodigious sound. I stopped being afraid. There's something near comical about a snore. How can you be shaking in your boots in the face of something that's producing a sound like that while locked, as my grandma used to say, in the arms of Morpheus?
So I started in, not stomping or anything, just sort of tippy-toe. I was really annoyed that something or someone would dare set up its bed in what was by all squatters' rights my cabin. Oh, all right, Willie's and my cabin, but he wasn't there to help me protest and run the varmint out.
The door, which was once in the center of the cabin, is now at the end of the side that has fallen in on itself. Fireplace and big chimney are to your left as you come in. I could see at once that the source of the noise was a huddled figure on the hearth—a figure under what had once been a bed quilt, so it was not any animal that runs wild in our mountains.
"Hey, you!" I yelled, stepping toward it, gripping my fishing pole like a baseball bat, just in case I'd need to swat whoever was lying there. I didn't get more than two feet or so into the room when splat! I was flat on my nose on the dirt floor, dry leaves stuck in my still-open mouth.
Pushing myself up to my knees, I looked about, a little dazed, to see what might have tripped me. It wasn't the snorer. He hadn't moved. He was just sawing away
as carefree as before. Blinking the stars out of my head and accustoming my eyes to the dark, I saw behind me to my right a small, skinny form. The light from the door caught the shape of a raggedy skirt, so I knew it to be female before I heard the giggle.
"Guess I gotcha," she said when she saw I was looking straight at her.
"What are you doing trespassing in my cabin?" I asked the question with as much dignity as I could muster while spitting out leaves, brushing off my clothes, and getting to my feet.
"Your cabin? It ain't been nobody's cabin for a coon's age until me and Paw took possession." Scrawny as her body was, her mouth was as sassy as an overfed cat.
"Me and Willie claimed it years ago," I countered. Two makes "years." I wasn't lying. Besides, the tres-passers couldn't have been here more than a few days at most.
"If it's yourn, why ain't you living in it?" she asked. "You left, and me and Paw come in and took over." She eyed me belligerently. "And don't think for one minute we're planning on leaving"—she paused and looked over at the snorer—"until we is good and ready."
"I ain't never seen you around these parts," I said. It seemed fit to match my language to hers.
"Yeah?" she said, meaning So what?
"That one your pa?" I asked, pointing to the snorer.
"Jest what business is that of yourn?"
"I told you," I said. "It's my cabin—me and Willie's. We come on it first."
"Prove it."
"Wal, it's got our stuff in it," I said.
"Yeah?"
I realized then that any apples or butternuts the animals had left would have been consumed by this pair of tramps. Likewise the corn silks. Extra fishing poles were, likely as not, part of that gray ash in the old fireplace by now. Our old shirts, dime novels, and pipes were nowhere in sight. There was no evidence I could point out, even if she'd allowed some of it to link Willie or me to this claim.
I sighed. "Wal, it is ours."
The snoring in front of the hearth turned into a series of snorts, a raspy cough, the loud clearing of catarrh from a clogged throat. The bundle sat up and shuddered. "Vile!" it bellowed. "Whar's my medsin?"
Neither the girl nor I moved. The bundle turned itself around with some difficulty and stared, taking in me and the girl at the same moment. "Whozat?"
"Git up, Paw," she said quietly. "Viztor come calling."