Asia forgives him. “Nothing.” She leans over and kisses him on the top of his head. His hair smells of smoke and tobacco. “I’m just glad you’re home is all. Everything is so quiet and lonely with only Rosalie around.”
Johnny’s return marks the beginning of a period of great intimacy between these two siblings. For the next few years, no one will be closer to Asia. He closes his eyes, speaks in a drowsy voice. “We did some target shooting out in the woods. Turns out I’m quite a decent shot,” he says, his tone affecting a modesty the words themselves don’t convey.
* * *
—
Now that Johnny is fifteen, he says that he’s too old to be Johnny. He asks, in future, for the simple dignity of John. The family remembers this for about a week and then reverts back, but Johnny never tires of correcting them and eventually the change is made.
John and Joe have both been removed from St. Timothy’s Hall and are currently gentlemen of leisure. But then one morning, soon after their return, while the family is gathered at the breakfast table, Mother says that the time has come for the boys to start running the farm. Starting today, she wants them to follow Joe Hall around, helping him out when they can, but mostly learning what tasks need doing and how and when. “You have such a beautiful day on which to begin.” Mother’s tone is falsely cheerful. She is not the actor Father was. “A perfect day to be outdoors.”
It is a beautiful day. The sun is rising, turning the clouds pink and yellow. The birds are loud, the cows sociable, the horses high-spirited. John and Joe don’t refuse. They don’t say much of anything. They sponge up the rest of their eggs with soft pieces of bread and leave the house together. In short order, they’re back, bright with excitement. They’ve decided that the very first thing they must do is build a boys-only shelter where they can rest and recover from their vigorous farming.
Because Father isn’t there to stop it, they cut some trees to clear the ground where their shelter will go. All morning, Asia hears the forbidden sounds of an axe.
The boys return for dinner, tired, but happy and full of plans. They’ll move the enormous antlers that currently grace their bedroom wall to the new shelter. They’ll need chairs and maybe a table, which John will make. Maybe Asia could make them a quilt. “We’ve started the foundation,” John says. “But we don’t know where to put the door.” John wants it facing the main road so they can keep an eye on the comings and goings. He likes the thought of passersby seeing them there, kings of their own domain. Joe wants it on the opposite side, facing the sunset so they’ll know when to come home for supper. Mother says that she can see the merit in both proposals.
Midafternoon, and the boys are back again. Asia gasps when she sees them from the window, limping their way up the lawn to the porch. She calls for Mother and Rosalie, her voice so shrill, it brings them at once and Ann Hall, too. John is leading Joe by the arm. The boys’ faces are mottled, misshapen, black with bruising. Joe’s eyes are swollen into slits.
“There was a nest of hornets,” John says. He’s breathing hard, bent over, hands on his knees. “Like a plague in the Bible. They came right for our eyes.”
“Hornets,” Joe repeats with difficulty. His face is still swelling.
Ann Hall mixes dirt with water from the pump to make a poultice. She puts this on John’s face, Rosalie daubs it on Joe’s. Mother forces castor oil into both boys and sends them to bed. “Hornets,” she says to Rosalie, and Asia can tell that information has passed between them but she herself doesn’t know what was said. This happens often.
Around this same time, Joe is afflicted with the first visitation of what will become a recurring malady. For six days, he’s sunk into a misery so deep, he’s unable to eat or to speak. The diagnosis is melancholic insanity. Then the fit passes, leaving Asia unsure how much of it was merely performance.
The shelter is never finished. Soon after, despite the expense, Joe is sent off to a boarding school in Elkton, where he’ll be enrolled for the next four years.
Months will pass before John confesses that, unable to agree as to the orientation of the door, he and his brother had argued furiously and then fallen on each other with their fists. When they’d finally exhausted themselves and calmed enough to see the damage, they knew they’d be in trouble. The hornets were a story they’d concocted together.
John’s forthright if tardy confession is disarming. Asia writes to Edwin: “Those wicked boys! Of course, Mother knew. Knew from the moment she saw them. I’m just glad they didn’t escape completely. I’m just glad about the castor oil.”
John was quite impressed with Joe and says so repeatedly. Despite the difference in size, despite John’s years of Bully Boy brawls, his little brother fought him to a draw.
“Nobody won in the end,” John says, but it’s hard to see it that way. After all, Joe was the one Mother sent away. This is a thing worth remembering when, years later, Joe disappears into the ether without a word to anyone, causing his mother no end of worry and heartache.
v
In good weather, Asia goes riding nearly every day, mostly in the morning before the heat comes on. She rides in the neighborhood lanes, between the cabins, into the cool of the woods. She jumps Fanny over streams and logs. She rides into Bel Air to pick up the mail rather than wait for the postboy to deliver it. She is getting to know the neighborhood. She is getting to know the neighbors.
She doesn’t like them.
Miss Woolsey flags her down one morning. The Woolseys own the blacksmith and wheelwright shop on the road to Bel Air as well as the farm abutting the Booths’， a tauntingly prosperous piece of property. As rich as they are, no one will marry them and they all live together, two sisters, three brothers, their parents long dead. The oldest, William Woolsey, is a local philanthropist, who’s paid for Harford’s good opinion by funding many improvements to the county roads. Simultaneously, inch by inch, he’s been moving his property line. In this way, he’s quietly purloined a piece of the Booth fields.
They could take him to court, but he owns all the judges.
The sister who stops Asia is slightly older than Rosalie. On this morning, she’s wearing a gray silk dress with a tatted snowdrop shawl over her shoulders. Her hair spreads like great wings at the sides of her face. Pleasantries are exchanged on the subject of the weather, the pleasing aspect of Tudor Hall, the sad fact that Father was never able to live there. “How well we remember your father!” Miss Woolsey says and Asia dismounts, expecting to hear something of Father’s career, his celebrity, his genius.
Instead Miss Woolsey recounts a story about the death of Father’s pony Peacock. How Mother was made to wrap herself in a white sheet like a toga, and to sit between the dead pony’s legs as Father marched about them in a circle, shooting his rifle into the air. “Your poor mother!” Miss Woolsey says. “She was that terrified! And no one ever able to do a thing to stop him when he took one of his queer turns.” Throughout this account, the smile never leaves her powdered face. Asia thinks that Miss Woolsey is surely too young to have seen any of this. She thinks that Miss Woolsey’s teeth are too large for her mouth. Miss Woolsey has teeth like a rabbit.