One Came Home by Amy Timberlake Page A

The railroad had come through Dog Hollow about five years previous, and people say rail transforms a town. Consider Dog Hollow transformed. Dog Hollow was a full-fledged community as big as Placid. The Smoke River—a tributary of the Wisconsin—ran straight through its center.
    As we crossed an ample wooden bridge, I noted thetown’s amenities. I saw two inns—the American House and the Ellwood House. We passed a flour mill, a foundry, a sawmill, and a brewery. This was beyond the usual townlike accoutrements—the blacksmith, the general store, the churches (Methodist and Lutheran), and the harness shop. The water-powered sawmill did look aged, but it had been painted a bold red, and from within its walls came the ear-piercing buzz of board-making productivity. Pigeon lime streaked several porches, but that was the same everywhere.
    We tied up at a watering trough in front of the Dog Hollow General Store. Long Ears and Storm plunged their snouts into the trough and began to drink.
    “Don’t mind if you do,” I mumbled, feeling that some sort of etiquette had been breached when they started drinking before I’d dismounted.
    Billy gave me twenty cents for some bread and hard cheese from the store, mentioning the inedibility of my biscuits. He said he planned to see about repairing a buckle on one of his saddlebags, and then to stop at the butcher. He had a taste for sausage roasted over a fire.
    A cowbell clanked when I opened the door to the general store. The sound reminded me of home. But all similarity to our store stopped with the cowbell.
    Two women took up space on the floorboards—one behind the counter and one in front. The woman behind the counter frowned, looking at me with pin eyes in a facethat was as hard and as expressionless as a plank. She was the width of a door frame, she’d yanked her salt-and-pepper hair into a bun, and she wore a red blouse with girlish ruffles. She leaned on that counter like she hadn’t the strength to stand upright.
    The second woman, spectacled and wasp-waisted, turned to take a lengthy look at me.
    “I’d like a loaf of bread and some hard cheese, please,” I said. I used my best Sunday-school articulation.
    With good customer service you expect a little huphup, one, two, three. Old Pin Eyes, though? She didn’t even straighten up out of her lean. In fact, she leaned farther forward, and her rather significant ruffled chest nudged a jar of butterscotch candies to a precarious position at the counter’s precipice. “Let me see your money,” she said. She held out a hand.
    Asking for money first? I sent her a flinty look in reply.
    “I don’t know you from a darn hole in the wall,” she said.
    That burned me up. I could feel those five gold dollar coins stitched into the waist of my skirt. I sure would have liked to show her a couple. I settled on dangling my two dimes in front of her face.
    She made to take one.
    I jerked both hands back. “I need to
see
your cheese and bread first,” I said.
    “I’ll come by tomorrow,” said the spectacled woman to the woman behind the counter. As she left, she cinched upher purse and her face at the same time. She made sure I saw it too.
    The unpleasantness went on like that. There were heaves and sighs, eyes rolling like marbles, and much trundling back and forth. Pin Eyes brought out farm cheese and two-day-old bread. I took it anyway, along with two licorice sticks for me and a box of sugar cubes for Long Ears. (I planned on working on the mule’s affections.) At the end of our transaction, I had to
tell
Pin Eyes to wrap it up. When she asked for twenty cents, I pointed out I’d only bought
fifteen
cents’ worth of goods. She replied that if I didn’t care for the price, there was another store in Owatonia—only thirteen miles out of my way.
    As I gathered my parcels in my arms, I paused to consider whether I should ask Pin Eyes about Agatha. Ask the rudest woman in Wisconsin? Why? I wanted to wash my hands of