“I’ll keep this for now,” she whispered, tucking the blanket beneath his chin.
“Present.”
“But I’m going to give it back to you.”
To this he shut his eyes.
“Okay? Before we leave. Please promise me.”
But the boy pinched his eyes tighter, and then slipped beneath the covers, making his wafer of a body disappear in the well of the cot.
THE REST OF THAT DAY was the coldest of the year yet. At most forty degrees Fahrenheit. Despite the open skies and the clarifying brilliance of the unimpeded sunlight it seemed only to grow colder as the hours progressed, winds from the north racing intermittently through the compound. In danger of dispersal were the fallen leaves and pine needles all the children had gathered just yesterday into several large piles that were to be collected and composted for the gardening next spring. Reverend Kim, who had arrived mid-morning and given the lunch prayer with Sylvie standing tall beside him with a new woolen scarf banding her throat, idly paged through a newspaper inside the main classroom while everyone else tried to sweep and rake them now into a central, mountainous pile. There were no classes this Saturday, with Reverend Tanner gone.
But as if the winds had some deep objection to their efforts, each time they came close to clearing the ground once again a fierce gust would shoot across and instantly erode the top third of the new pile. The winds died down and they raked quickly, but another hard gust blew through and made a sail of the thin canvas tarp with which they were trying to blanket the pile, the muslin-colored sheet kiting wildly up in the air. It ended up festooning the peak of a short, lone pine at the far edge of the field. In frustration one of the boys gave a feral, guttural shout and ran and dove headfirst into the still-huge pile. He went in practically to his calves. Hector, who had been directing the work silently and joylessly, stepped forward to pull him out, but perhaps on seeing the boy’s feet waving comically, and the children cheering him on, he relented and dropped his rake and let himself fall as stiffly and heavily as a dead man, hands at his sides. The children shouted with joy. A boy followed, next two of the girls, and soon the rest of them were jumping in, paddling and writhing in the crinkly mass of leaves.
Soon even June wanted to take a turn and after waiting for the others to clear out set her feet for the run. There was no cheering as with the others. But Sylvie clapped for her and June sprinted, sliding headfirst into the dispersed pile, which at that point was barely knee-high. When she got up, the knees of her trousers were scuffed reddish from the ground. Her face was tight with a strained smile, and as the others began collecting the scattered leaves to rebuild the pile she drifted away with her arms crossed, her hands tucked tightly in her armpits. Hector tried to see if she was okay but she kept them hidden and walked off. Sylvie caught up with her as she headed toward the dormitory.
“June? Are you all right? Look at your poor trousers.” There were dirt-smudged rips in the fabric and Sylvie knelt and brushed them off. “Are you hurt?”
Sylvie lifted her pant cuff but June drew her leg away, and it was then that Sylvie saw the condition of her hands. They were torn and bleeding, tiny black pebbles embedded in the fat part of one of her palms, a triangular flap of skin on the other roughly peeled back, exposing raw tissue.
“Oh goodness, June! We have to wash and bandage you.”
“I am okay.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I will take care of myself,” June said, pulling back her hands. She sounded not so righteous as strangely overexcited, as though she had eaten an entire box of sweets or been given the wrong medicine. “Please, Mrs. Tanner, I do not want to bother you!”
“You’re not bothering me, June. You never have.”
“Please, I am fine,” she said, and before Sylvie could do anything else she ran off, sprinting behind the dormitory. Sylvie followed her but by the time she rounded the far end of the building the girl had disappeared. At the head of the path that led through the thick underbrush of the foothills Sylvie stopped to listen for movement. There were no sounds except for the threshing by the breeze of the tall, dry grasses and spiky weeds. And yet she suspected that June was still there, just as earlier, when she was with Min in the dormitory vestibule.
Back in the yard, the children and Hector were beginning to re-gather the leaves onto the tarps so they could be dragged to the compost pile near the gardens. Sylvie felt strong enough to help them, and once she began sweeping she was glad for the exertion and the closeness to the children. Her heart suddenly heaved with the realization of the time she had wasted: four days spent inside the cottage, and now there were only ten more before they would depart. Min worked near her, gathering errant leaves with a rustic hand broom made of bound twigs. He was obviously pleased to see that she was wearing his scarf but didn’t point it out or say anything. He was a mindful boy. His small stature was painfully obvious now that he stood among others his age, and when they momentarily crossed paths she couldn’t help but quickly press his oversized head to her coat. A broad smile lighted his face. Several girls then joined them and they worked together and soon the rest of them spanned the width of the makeshift field, everyone sweeping and raking in a single row, making one another brush faster, if mostly in the spirit of play.
Hector worked at the far end of the line, his back to her. If he had been in a good humor when they were all jumping in the pile he had all but shed it now. His wide shoulders pivoted powerfully as he raked, the reddish dust kicking up in low billows about him, the sound of his tines rasping loudly against the hard ground. His strong, steady rhythm was easily distinguishable from the rest. She could almost feel his scouring through her feet. He hadn’t spoken a word to her yet and although she was thankful he was keeping his distance she wondered if he could sense her attention. She was trying not to look at him but the sight of even his heavily clothed form after nearly a week of not seeing him kept drawing her eye. It was not so much a desire to be with him or to touch him that made her glance but her own wonder at how willfully she had forgotten his shape, which was so unlike Ames’s, and frankly her own, his body completely un-angular, blockish, as if he were made of sections of trunks cut from various-sized trees. Even his fingers about the rake handle had the property of a certain primary thickness, while all her life she felt herself as being composed of only the thinnest reaching branches, third- and fourth-order limbs.
She knew with Hector her feelings were base and wrong and in every way contemptible, but there was the truth that she desired his form, the magnificence of which he was completely unaware. She hadn’t ceased to feel its density, the uniform heft of his flesh when she drew him into her and she rowed them, he the heaviest oar. She had always tried to make herself invulnerable to beauty, her parents acclaiming only the sublimity of deeds, of selfless effort. The beautiful work. The last person who had so arrested her breath was Benjamin Li, whose outward beauty had been completely unlike Hector’s but had infiltrated her all the same, this beauty that was disrupted beneath the surface, veiling some errancy or even wreckage.