“We learned a good time ago,” said Ram Odin, “that if Rigg’s the one as picks up whatever was lost, then folks will whisper that he had it all along, that he stole it in the first place. So he won’t come near it. You’ll find it.”
“I won’t.”
“But not for lack of trying,” said Bak softly. “You will try, because it’s very important to find that button. I paid good money for it in town. Because my wife should have brass buttons instead of common wooden ones.”
“I should never have nagged you for those foolish buttons.”
“They were the desire of your heart. And you were proud of them,” said Bak. “I try to get you your heart’s desire, when it’s within my reach.”
And in those words Rigg heard a lifetime’s tragedy. He didn’t know what it was, not without looking. But there was something Jobo had longed for that Bak could not obtain for her. More children than two, perhaps? Or something else unguessed. Rigg could follow the paths back and see the whole story, but he’d found out enough of their secrets for now.
The moment they came out of the house together, the four of them, other people came out of their houses. They were quiet in this hamlet—Rigg didn’t hear anyone shouting, though he did see children scampering a bit in the back way behind the houses. But it was pretty much the whole town following them, he could see by the paths. Only a few stay-at-homes—mothers with babies, old people sleeping in the middle of the day. The fieldwork of this place was over for the year, but it was not yet winter. They had been working at the preparatory tasks—cheesing, smoking meat, sausaging, repairing harnesses, making rope, remaking loose chairs, rehanging doors with a catch in them. Whatever work there was, that they could do for themselves, they had been doing. But they set it aside for this. For Jobo’s missing button. And Rigg wondered how many of them were coming along just for curiosity, to see if Rigg and Ram Odin were fakes, and how many because they knew perfectly well, or guessed rightly enough, where that button had been lost, and wanted to see if there’d be a housefire today.
Rigg made a show of groping through the air with his eyes closed, though of course he could see his own path from the night before and knew exactly where the button was. He also knew that no other path led near the place since he had put it there, so no one had found it or moved it since then.
Suddenly his eyes popped open, and he whirled and pointed to the exact point where he could see his own path bending over the stone. “There,” he said. “It bounced and lodged itself under a stone about this big.”
“Oh, really,” said Jobo.
“Will you look, or should I?” asked Bak softly. “I think the boy is telling the truth, or he thinks he is. Don’t you hope he’s right? Wouldn’t it be good to find that button here in the road?”
Jobo set her lips and marched to the place. She saw the rock—it was the only one “about this big” at that spot. Instead of bending, she only nudged it over with her foot.
Then she cried out and bent over, reaching for the button.
And then, because sometimes the universe conspired to make things work out perfectly, the wooden button she had sewn into the place of the missing brass one popped right off the blouse. Because she had bent over so far. Popped right off.
Jobo cried out and held up the button for all to see. Bak, though, moved behind his wife and carefully gathered the edges of the blouse together so no skin showed. Rigg had never seen a man so relieved and happy.
“I must have—I thought it was a dream,” said Jobo. “Like you said, I thought I was only dreaming that I came to see if you were coming back, only you weren’t, and then I felt very faint and I bent over all the way, to hang my head and get blood back into it, and that’s when it must have popped off. Oh, how could I have thought it was only a dream, when here’s the button to prove that it was real!”
Everyone was listening to her in her rapture, watching Bak in his joy. But Rigg had already seen how Ram Odin had moved over to stand beside the mayor and murmur something softly that no one else could hear.
The mayor heard, and gave a short sharp nod, and then moved away to join the crowd. Ram Odin came back to Rigg.
“You said to him . . .” Rigg prompted.
“I said, ‘We saved you this time, but if you ever do it again, I promise you that two houses will burn.’”
“Which would happen how?”
“That’s for him to worry about. To watch his own wife and maybe be a little more attentive to her. Or maybe he fears the second house would be some other mistress he’s taken in this village. I have no idea. But it sounded very menacing and fine, didn’t it?”
“So what have we learned here? Burning up adulterous women in their own house? This children’s news service? The way the best man in town is not the mayor, but everyone knows which one is best and the mayor can’t touch him?”
“All of that,” said Ram Odin, “and we still have supper tonight, and a bed to sleep in. Though I imagine we’ll be downstairs now in the boy’s and girl’s bedrooms, because I think that Bak will be in Jobo’s bed again.”
“How did you know?”
“I saw that the boy’s bed had been slept in, and the girl’s not, and Jobo’s bed in the room with us was the only one big enough for two. It isn’t calculus. It’s barely arithmetic.”
“So you see paths too.”
“Of a kind. In my way.”
And now the attention turned back to them, and suddenly people were crowding around them. But oddly enough, nobody had anything to find, except a child who had buried a favorite doll, and Rigg easily pointed to the place under a shade tree where the child had knelt for a time a year ago. The doll was there, half-rotted away, but now the children had far more reason to rejoice than over a brass button. Finder of Lost Toys! How his fame would spread.
CHAPTER 6