Ghost Boy by Iain Lawrence Page B

nothing,” said the Gypsy Magda. “Nothing.”
    â€œIt was the world to me.”
    â€œThe child we helped, not you,” said the Gypsy Magda. “We know what it is to suffer.”
    The farmer turned the hat upside down and balanced the crown on his knee. “And you,” he said to Harold. “You put yourself right before the tractor. I could have squashed you; I nearly did. Yet there you stood, like Gabriel himself, all bright and shiny, white as goodness. Is it true? Are you not an angel?”
    Harold shook his head. “No, sir.”
    â€œThen you are a saint. Or you ought to be.” The farmer tipped the Stetson up against his chest. “You saved my daughter’s life, and I’m forever in your debt. How can I repay you?”
    Harold eyed the Stetson and wondered: Could he ask for that?
    â€œAnything,” the farmer said. “Only name it.”
    He almost did. It was on his lips to ask for that big, tall hat. But he saw the Gypsy Magda watching him as the lights of the farmhouse came swimming out of the rain. She had asked for nothing, and it was she who had really saved the child.
    â€œMoney?” asked the farmer. “I haven’t much, but every penny that I own I’ll gladly give to you.”
    â€œNo,” said Harold. He remembered the cook in his battered hat, the pride in the Gypsy’s voice. And he said again, as grandly as he could, “I only wish I was a little bit darker.”
    The farmer laughed. “I sow the ground, but God grows the plants. I leave the miracles to Him.”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    T HE HOUSE WAS SMALL and tidy, with scrolls of woodwork above the doors and windows. It looked like an overgrown birdhouse, a square little building with only one room. Water poured from the roof in a dreary black gurgling, into barrels that overflowed. But if a house could be cheerful, this one was. It seemed as safe and inviting as the Liberty church.
    The Gypsy Magda parked the truck below it, beside a whitewashed shed where chickens squawked. A curtain cracked open in the farmhouse window, and a woman peered out, black against the light.
    â€œCan you give me a moment,” the farmer asked, “to tell the wife I have brought some … some company?” He fidgeted with his Stetson. His voice had a nervous crack. “She’s not used to company. She—she might be alarmed. At company coming.”
    â€œWe understand,” said the Gypsy Magda.
    He took his daughter and carried her up to the house. The door closed behind him, then opened soon after. And he waved, and they followed him in.
    The farmer’s wife was big and husky. Her face was brown and smoothly lumped, like a potato fresh from the ground. The farmer had prepared her well; she smiled at her visitors as though circus freaks called every day at her tumbledown home on the prairie.
    â€œSit,” she said. “Please. I will bring you some food.”
    Harold saw that the floor had been quickly swept. A little pile of wood chips and bark and grass was pushed to the corner, behind a broom that stood on its tattered straws. Above it, on a loft that was reached by a ladder, two children stared down, as small as bats up there in the heat of the woodstove. A cloth had been thrown over the table, and an odd assortment of chairs placed around it—a rocker and a milking stool, a bench still wet from rain.
    â€œGee, this is swell,” said Tina.
    On their loft, the children giggled. The farmer’s wife glared at them. “Those are the twins,” she said. “They’re supposed to be
sleeping
.” Then she picked up the broom and bashed its handle at the side of the loft. “So, what do you think of this weather?” she asked, smiling, as she put the broom back in the corner.
    They ate soup and chunks of fresh bread. The girl who had died sat beside Harold, squeezed with him into the rocker. When he leaned forward