Putting Up Roots
by Charles Sheffield
To Nancy
Chapter One
The apartment was deserted. Josh somehow knew it, the moment that he opened the door. The place also, in a way that he could not describe, felt strangely empty. “Mom?”
He did not really expect a reply: His mother was hardly ever home in the afternoon. So why did this feel different from any other day?
He walked into the living room, and knew why. The rented couch was gone. So were the sideboard, and the computer and entertainment centers. The place was practically empty of furniture.
He found the note on a solitary end table, in the tiny kitchen-dinette that formed one corner of the living room.
My dearest Josh,
This is the hardest letter I have ever had to write. By the time that you read it, I will be gone.
I have known for a long time that this was no way to raise a child, dragging you from one city to another wherever my job took me. There was always the dream, you see, that the next part would be the big breakthrough. After that, you and I would have the absolute best of everything.
Well, it is going to happen—someday. You know me, and I’ll never stop trying. But that’s not good enough for you. You need to put down some roots.
In the envelope you will find an air ticket to Portland and plenty of money to take you the rest of the way to Burnt Willow Farm. Uncle Ryan and Aunt Maria can provide what I cannot, a solid, safe upbringing and schooling. Maybe you wish that your mother had been the steady one, with her life under total control. Sometimes I wish it, too. But Maria told me, whenever we used to call each other, that she wished she were like me and had a son of her own.
It’s been a long time since you last met them—nearly eight years, I guess, when I had that summer rep job in Seattle—and Maria and I have been badly out of touch for a while. But I know that you two will get on just fine. And Uncle Ryan, too. And you and Dawn will be really good company for each other.
Don’t worry about the things that are left in the apartment. Just take whatever you want. Someone will come in and handle the rest after you have gone.
P.S. It’s not forever, Josh, and I don’t even think it will be for very long. I’m overdue for a change in luck. And my name in lights!
Josh felt that first pang of misery again, as the bus jolted and rumbled its way west. He had the letter sitting on his knee, but he didn’t need to look at it. In the past four days he had read it a hundred times. He knew it by heart.
“Just take whatever you want…” That was so typical of his mother. It made him want to laugh and cry at the same time. The apartment had been pretty much cleaned out of everything except his clothes and the kitchen table. No wonder it had seemed echoing and empty… an air ticket to Portland…” Sure. The ticket had been in the envelope, exactly as promised. But when he had taken it to the airport, he found that it was no good. It was for an excursion tour that had happened over a year before.
As for “plenty of money to take you the rest of the way to Burnt Willow Farm,” that might be true enough—if you first flew to Portland, and had to go only a couple of hundred kilometers east across Oregon. Starting from New York City and heading west was another matter. There had been enough money for the trip—just. You could do it, provided that you slept on buses the entire way, washed and changed clothes at rest stops, and ate the smallest and cheapest meals you could find.
Josh leaned his head on the seat back. In four days and nights he had learned a lot about sleeping sitting upright. He couldn’t wait to drop into a proper bed at Burnt Willow Farm.
Another hour or two, and he would be there. He wondered if this whole trip was worthwhile. But what were the alternatives? Come out here, or take your chances on streets already crowded with school dropouts and snapheads—he had seen that at first hand, wandering the city rather than sit alone in the apartment waiting for his mother to come home. He didn’t want any part of it. But even that was better than handing yourself over to the crooks and bumbling clowns in the city welfare agency. You’d be better off dead.
He had only the vaguest memories of the place he was going. An old wooden house, smelling of cooking fruit and furniture polish, complicated enough with its two staircases and double loft for a six-year-old to become lost inside. It was different in every way from the cramped apartments that he had lived in. Outside he remembered a big flat yard of hard mud, with animals and farm equipment everywhere, and beyond it the open fields.
His memories of the people were not much better. Aunt Maria was sharp enough in his mind, a little like his mother in looks, but red-faced and fat and cheerful, and always trying to feed him. He had liked her, although she had sometimes embarrassed him by picking him off his feet and swinging him around in a big hug.
None of Mother’s friends would dream of doing that. They knew he didn’t like to be touched, not by anyone. They were always hugging and kissing each other, but those embraces never seemed genuine. He had seen a few men kissing his mother, too, but that was in private and they did it quite differently.
He remembered Uncle Ryan as a tall, easygoing man, who said little to Josh when the others were around and a lot when they were not. At the end of the first week he took Josh off after dinner to the brightly lit basement, where the works of an old grandfather clock lay strewn on a wooden table. Josh was given the job of cleaning the gears. He did it out of sheer boredom, slowly and methodically and meticulously, making sure that every cog was free of oil and any speck of grime.
“Good job, Joshua Kerrigan,” Uncle Ryan said, when Josh laid the last of the gears carefully down on a sheet of wax paper. “I’m surprised. I couldn’t have done that better myself. Now where did she ever get one like you?”
It wasn’t a question that Josh knew how to answer, though he knew that “she” must be Mother. Apparently no response was required, because Uncle Ryan went on at once, “Come on. You can leave those where they sit for the moment. I’m going to pull the old tractor motor and do a rebore. I think you’ll enjoy watching—and maybe helping.”
Josh had decided in those first few days that Uncle Ryan knew and could do everything. He had trusted him totally. Now he realized that had just been the way of a six-year-old, before he learned that people did things for their own selfish reasons. Nowadays he didn’t trust anyone as much as he had trusted Uncle Ryan.
Then there was Dawn. She was Uncle Ryan and Aunt Maria’s only child, and here Josh’s memories were most confusing of all. She had been as tall as he was, and he guessed that she was the same age. But he couldn’t, to save his life, remember any conversation between them. What he did recall, very clearly, was Dawn following him around everywhere that he went. She didn’t actually look at him, she looked through him, with round, unwinking brown eyes that made him think of the cows in the neatly fenced fields around the farm.
Would she still be living there? Let’s hope that if she did, she wouldn’t still trail along behind him.
Josh opened his eyes and stared out of the bus window. Fenced fields. That was why his old memories of Burnt Willow seemed so artificial. He was only an hour or so away from the farm, but the countryside through which he was traveling was all wrong. If there were fields, they had to be enormous ones. He could see across rolling hills to the far horizon, and there was not one fence or field boundary in sight. It was one gigantic spread of green, with a continuous silver network of irrigation pipes above it and machines dotted here and there below them, apparently at random. Those machines were on the same giant scale, nothing like the little multipurpose tractors used on Burnt Willow Farm.