The Returning by Christine Hinwood

the next, until all of them lay smashed in the dirt. Then she went, very good and quiet, to help Mam all afternoon.
    The lamp was lit and supper laid on the table. Da’s heavy tread sounded on the porch, making Pin jump.
    â€œRot those Coverlasts.” Da was so angry he stamped into the house in his boots. “I should have seen him off the holding.”
    â€œWhat do you do with that!” Mam was looking at the flax wraps, hanging in Da’s hand, all crusty with dried egg. “That’s all our eggs for market.”
    â€œThe Coverlasts! I gave one of the lads short shrift and this is his thanks, I do daresay. I found them all laid in the dirt. Pulled off and smashed, every one and all of them.”
    â€œPin’s red as a radish,” said Hughar.
    Mam turned a shocked look upon her. “Pin?”
    â€œPin?” Da’s tone made Pin feel sick. “Tell me my Pin-little didn’t do this.”
    That was something that Pin could not do.
    â€œOh!” Mam sat down. “Why would you?”
    Da took her out into the yard, cut a switch from the bare, hanging boughs of the willow, and switched her hands, one for each wrap of eggs she had broken.
    In bed afterward, Pin lay with her throbbing palms turned up to the cool air. For all they stung, she didn’t cry.
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    THE MORNINGS WERE still frosty, and the winds as wild, but they were beginning to swing around, bringing warmer gusts from the east and the north, and every day the sun showed its face. Pin was out in the yard early, running from the far fence to leap as high as she could and land splash in the puddles by the well, the fragile skin of ice that covered them shattering under her feet. There were more, and bigger, puddles filling the wheel ruts on the road. Pin bounced and splattered her way down the terraces, along the Highway.
    A stone’s throw from the road, the ground dipped to a line of trees, and running at the feet of them was the creek. The water-babble nagged at her. She pushed through the fringe of trees. The creek jumped and splashed, shouting, now that she was close to it. The water was clear, but with a brown tint to it, like weak tea. There were stones, patches of moss, trout. Pin looked and looked, but she could not see a merrow. Maybe they were shy, and would not let themselves be seen.
    She closed her eyes tight, but she was not thinking of merrows now; she was thinking of Cam. Cam on that last night. Just as they had sat to supper without him, he had come laughing through the door, and it was not just shy she had been with Cam—she had been cross, and he had known it and now he was gone.
    He’d made to swing Pin up, as he always did. But Pin had swatted at him and run away.
    â€œWhat’s this, then? My little Pin-sister being a stranger to me?”
    â€œDo you blame her when you’re never about?” Da had said.
    â€œI’m about now.”
    Pin had put her tongue out at him. “You do only come home to fight with Da.”
    Gone, and it was her fault.
    Pin wanted him home: wanted it like it was when he’d first returned from the war. She crouched there on the stony bank, rocking a little with the weight of her wish, and nothing at all happened. At length her eyes would not stay shut and her mind would not stay fixed.
    â€œPuh.” She stood up. What was the creek but a puddle, a big puddle and no merrows in it. Pin jumped in, up to her knees in brown, icy water.
    And heard a laugh.
    â€œAah!” Carefully, she looked through her fingers.
    She saw feet first, bare and very brown; then the muddy hem of trousers, so bright a red it hurt the eyes; a jacket of the same color. A girl. Older than Pin, older even than the twins, dark as her own shadow. Silent as a shadow she had slipped from the trees, all in her strange red clothes, no pinny, no hat, no shoes. She crouched, and hooked the cuffs of her trousers over her toes.
    Pin fled. She didn’t stop for