Page 25 of Keepsake
“God, really?”
“Really. I’m sure their mothers would have liked to talk to them, but they were afraid to be punished.”
“But you talked to them?”
“Hell no. They’d never let me near a phone. But the same extension rings in the pastor’s office and in the garage. There’s only one phone line to the whole compound. The next day I snuck a look at the caller ID. I didn’t get the number, but I saw ‘Tuxbury, Vermont.’”
“Smart boy!”
He shrugged. “I knew I needed a backup plan. Half the young men get thrown out eventually. I never thought I’d be one of them. Or maybe I knew I would. I dunno.” He shook his head.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. These four years have been good to me. I wish they’d tossed me out sooner.”
“So…what happened? You got thrown out pretty young, right? You said they usually waited until they got some more years of your labor.”
He laughed. “You noticed that, huh? Yeah, I was a prodigy.”
“How do people get the boot?” I asked.
“It can be for any reason. Some guys steal from the till or break a rule. And some get tossed on a trumped-up charge. It doesn’t even have to be rational. They just have to drum up a little rage, and make the offense justifiable. Otherwise the mothers of all these boys would stage an uprising. When my number came up, they threw me off a moving flatbed truck.”
“Jesus. They invented your crime and dumped you by the side of the road?”
He chuckled. “In my case, I made it easy for them. I committed the crime—or I tried to. Four hours later I was hitchhiking toward Reno with nothing but twenty dollars and the clothes on my back. I’d never seen a city. Didn’t know how to hitchhike. Didn’t know what a homeless shelter was. I learned a lot in a hurry.”
That’s when I stopped asking questions. I wasn’t the only one who’d come looking for salvation in Vermont.
When we madeit back to the farm, the place was a madhouse. There were a dozen cars parked all along the road and families wandering around with half-bushel baskets. Audrey was selling apples, sweet cider and Griffin’s hard stuff in front of the cider house. The rest of the guys were picking and moving apples around and shooing people away from the varietals that weren’t ripe.
“What can I do?” I asked Zach after we offloaded the small amount of merchandise that hadn’t sold.
“Take a break,” he suggested. “I’m going to do the afternoon milking.”
I spotted May striding toward the farmhouse. “What can I do?” I asked her.
“Have a glass of iced tea with me,” she suggested. “I need a break.”
“That’s what Zach told me to do. But he’s still working.”
“That dude never sits down,” May said, opening the kitchen door. “Grab us each a cookie, will you?”
We settled onto the front porch and watched tourists struggle under the weight of the apples they’d picked. And every couple of minutes Dylan Shipley would swing into view at the wheel of a tractor that was hitched to a wagon. Tourists rode the wagon out to the early-bearing trees at the far end of the orchard.
“How’s the bunkhouse treating you?” May asked me suddenly. “If you’re not comfortable out there Ireallyhope you’ll tell me.”
“The bunkhouse is awesome. I have my own room. What’s not to love?”
“The company, duh,” May said. “It’s a sausagefest out there. Kyle can be a smartass. Kieran is a little easier, though. And Zach won’t give you any trouble.”
“He’s a really interesting guy.”
“Zach? He grew up in a cult, basically. All the men had four or five wives. Everything I know about it I heard from Leah, because Zach never says a word about it. I mean—Griffin had it in his head that this place was in Texas, and for a year Zach didn’t even correct him. And when Griff asked why, he just said, ‘There’s no point in talking about that place, no matter what state it’s in.’”
“Yikes.”
“Griff says he has a lot of scarring on his backside, too. They whipped him.”
