Hedge of Thorns: Canes

“That’s good, Tumble. Try bending your knee.”

His face contorts, but he manages to swing his foot a few inches.

“It hurts like…” Rather than continue speaking, he shakes his head and bends the injured joint repeatedly. “Thanks for waking me, can’t let this stiffen up.”

I make a mental estimate of his height. “You can sit again, if you want to. Do you think you could get around with a couple of canes?”

“Indoors, sure, they’d help.” He hops away from the chair.

“Whoa, mister. There’s nothing in the closet but my grandpa’s clothes. If anything fits, you’re welcome to it, but I’ll make you canes.”

He’s keeping his balance, and groping behind him for some support. I step forward and offer my elbow, so he can turn to the chair and settle in again. He scoots the chair to an angle that will let him reach the bedpost.

“Thanks.”

“I’ll go out now and start on those. By the way, have you done much cooking for yourself?”

“I can cook.”

Tumble’s eyes are already shut. I slip out of the room, close the door, pull on a high-necked long sleeved leather shirt I made myself, and go out to the woodpile for the hatchet. If there’s one thing I’m well supplied with, it’s hawthorn suckers, and a couple of inch-thick ones will do well.

Outside my gate, I turn left, suck in my breath, close my eyes, and gingerly duck between the hawthorn planted there, and the wall. I feel the thorns catch at my shirt, but none rake my skin, not yet. I slither below the branches, looking for suitable straight-growing suckers. The first two shrubs have nothing long enough. Farther downslope a shrub looks promising.

I slither and slide, but a low-hanging branch snags my hair and draws blood from my scalp that drips into the leaf litter. I break the thorns free, and toss them into a larger gap to take in to Tumble.

Blood wet in my eyebrows, wounds stinging, I hack the seven-foot-long sucker free and let it topple. Extracting it from the tangle of thorny branches is sweat-raising work. At least it’s long enough to serve for two canes, and leave enough left to fashion handles.

I choose a grip between the menacing thorns, and reach with the other hand for the snag that got me. Slow, dripping progress brings me to the deer trail again, and leaving my blood spoor with each step, I climb. Let it rain again tonight… rinse my path clean.

A moment’s pause, to hook the gate with the sucker, and so pull it shut to latch behind me, doesn’t really ease my dread of what might find and follow my tell-tale blood. When I move around to the front of the house, the door swings open. Tumble has left grandpa’s bedroom, and scooted the rocker into the kitchen.

“I heard the gate close,” he says.

“Thank you.” I lean the cut sucker in an angle of the wall. “Would you bring me that bucket?”

Hedge of Thorns: Canes is an episode of a serialized short story that posts on Friday.

Check the menu on this blog for other, previously posted serialized stories, here.