~A Wild Heart~
Chapter Ten
~~~ooooo~~~
There were days when he would take her into the forest.
Most days, however, saw them out in the fields watching the sheep with the dogs. She never knew how long he would stay and while Aeris understood that he had responsibilities in the fairy world, she still felt bereft whenever he had to leave and always thought that their time together was too short.
There were also days when no flower appeared in the morning and her sadness would linger throughout the day and she could only be grateful that it was seldom he was not able to come at all. Alone on those days, she would search for edible plants to bring home and then sit and read a book. Her thoughts would inevitably drift to him, and she would replay in her mind everything he had shown or told her about his world and all the things they'd done together as she relived the joy of being with him.
On one such beautiful afternoon when they were settled in a field far out of the sight of any farm, Aeris was content and happy to watch him play with the dogs. To her delight, she'd discovered early on in their acquaintance that although not often seen, he did indeed have a rather mischievous side to him, and it usually came in the form of teasing the dogs. As was his habit, he'd dropped down onto his haunches and had slowly crept forward, sending the dogs into a state of near frenzied panic as he drew closer and closer to the herd. Daisy was snarling and Lucy was growling, and they were both looking back and forth between the fairy who seemed intent on devouring their sheep and her, their guide, clearly asking if they should bite him. Unfortunately for them, Aeris was preoccupied with rolling on the ground with laughter, hands clutching her waist and gasping for air, and was no help to them whatsoever. Left without any other recourse, they launched themselves at the fairy and in a flash, had Cloud on the ground and were determinedly licking their wayward friend into submission, ignoring his struggles and yelps of surrender while Aeris dissolved into more helpless laughter.
It took some time before she was able to stop laughing enough to pull her herself together and took her seat again on a large jagged rock sticking partway out of the grassy slope. There she sat, fixing her hair and clothes and watching as he finally fought the dogs off of him.
"When are you going to learn?" she chortled gleefully, still wiping tears of mirth from her eyes as he came toward her, smelling like the air on a cool spring morning despite just having been given a tongue bath from two overly adoring dogs.
"Never," the fairy declared. "Just you watch, give it a few more weeks and I'll be carrying off the whole flock from right under their noses."
"All of them at once?" she teased. "That I have to see."
"You don't think I can do it?" His face was completely serious.
Her laughter subsided. She knew he wasn't given to boasting, particularly not of feats he couldn't accomplish. "No," she said honestly. "I know you can do it."
"I can't."
She swallowed a stunned laugh. "Cloud!" Biting her inner cheek to keep from bursting into another fit of giggles, she scolded him, "You're terrible."
The corner of his lips quirked up but he made no further reply as he joined her on the rock. Aeris studied him from beneath her eyelashes, marveling at his profile and at how every moment with him seemed to be filled with beauty and magic even when they were simply sitting side-by-side, watching the world in silence as the sun rose or sank back down over the hills.
"You're staring," he said, without taking his eyes off a sheep showing her lamb the best plants to eat.
Her face flamed at having been caught gawking at him again but she also felt a rush of pleasure at seeing the light blush on his cheekbones. "It's just that…" she began haltingly, "It's still a little hard to believe. Cloud."
He turned his face to hers and she was struck with a sudden sense of shyness as that bright, piercing gaze focused solely on her.
"Are you real? Is this real?"
A hint of a smile appeared on his lips again. Her heart missed a beat.
"Haven't we been through this before?" he asked.
"I guess I'm still afraid you might not be real."
He took her hand and tugged her forward. She forgot to breathe as his eyes roved over her face in a manner almost like he was searching for something. A hand lifted, hard knuckles brushing a stray curl off her cheek as he lowered his head and she lifted her face to meet his.
~~~ooooo~~~
"The well's going dry," Zack said that night while they were sitting at the table after dinner. "Tifa says she has to bring the pail up half a dozen times just to fill up the bucket now. I don't know what's going to happen to us when the pump out front goes too. And we've got two more families that need new wells!"
"You had no luck with the well at Ben's?" she asked even though it was painfully obvious what the answer was going to be. It was getting worse by the day, and it was the same story with most of the wells on the other farms.
Zack let out a sigh and shook his head. Aeris watched a large hand, tanned by the sun and rough from working in the fields, rake through the thick black hair that he used to wear slicked back but had taken on a shaggy, messier look the past year with the way he'd been combing his hands through it whenever he was worried. It gave him a more virile, manly appearance, and the local farmers' daughters gathered around him like bees buzzing around a honeycomb. "No," he said with another small shake of his head. "We can't get anything down there."
"Oh." She bit her lip, uncertain. "What about Ian's farm?"
"The boys there say it'll be another day or so then they can begin putting down the foundations."
"Well, there's that at least," she said with an encouraging smile.
"I haven't been able to do more than muck around a bit on the far side of the garden. I thought we'd have more time before we'd be back to work on another farm." It seemed like every other week, another well ran dry and another family was left without access to one of the most basic needs for survival. The wells were going too fast when they were supposed to last for decades, not simply a few years.
"There's a chance we might not need a new well if the old one goes," Aeris said, trying to find a bright side to their situation. She knew that their water well was on its last legs and would eventually have to be boarded up and sealed off as nearly half of the farm wells had been thus far. "None of us have had a problem with our pumps. As long as we have that, we may not need a new well."
"Some of the men are talking about digging through the bedrock and water table instead of finding another spot to dig again."
Aeris felt the color drain from her face. "No." She shook her head and said adamantly, "No. Absolutely not. You've gotten too far down there in that hole. It's too dangerous—we can't risk it. Not again."
Two previous attempts had been beyond catastrophic when all the vibrations from the men chipping away at the rock had sent the walls crumbling, burying the workers inside the wells. They just didn't have the proper tools out in the hills for drilling through such unstable rock.
She stared at his hard face. "Zack, you musn't! You can't let them!"
"I know that," he said in frustration. "We all know. But we're desperate. Even Ned thinks it's better than the alternative. He offered to trade spots with one of us if we decide to do it. Liam stays, though." Farmer Ned's eldest boy had been one of the men lost when the second well had collapsed but apparently he was in favor of trying again. But in addition to Liam, who had taken his brother's place working with their father, he and his wife did have four more young mouths to feed and it couldn't be easy waiting for their turn.
"We are not going to die of hunger or thirst," Aeris said, trying to hide her own concern. "There has to be another way."
"I don't know," Zack sighed. "I said I'd take care of you both. I promised I would but…" he opened his hands on the table, palms faced up in a sign of helplessness. "I can't. Water is in short supply and I just don't know what to do. What would Father and Mother say?"
"It's not your fault," Aeris said sternly. "The three of us are in this together. All of us, all the farms."
"But I promised them I'd take care of you girls and the farm—"
"We all made the same promise. We're together and we're looking out for each other. We're doing our best and that's all we can do."
"But it's not enough, Aeris," Zack said, unconvinced. "I'm the man of the family. I should know what to do. I should be able to find an answer."
"Zack, your mother and father never meant for you to shoulder all the responsibility. They wanted us to take care of each other and we are. Don't be so hard on yourself. Good things do happen. Think about that and dwell less on the bad. We know that there's water—that's all that matters. And slowly but surely, we're getting our wells dug."
"I don't want to lose any more families to the cities. These hills are our home. We belong here."
"We'll find a way," she said. "We'll find something." Aeris reached across the table and covered his hands with hers. "Something will happen. Something will come. I know it. We are not going to be forced to move away from here. Whatever it takes, we will not leave the hills."
"Zack? Aeris?"
Tifa was standing in the doorway behind them, the same worried look on her face as Zack that told them she'd been listening to their conversation.
"Tifa…" Zack glanced uneasily at Aeris. "Sorry, we were talking."
"I heard." Tifa smiled, but the smile didn't quite reach her eyes. "One of you gonna be helping me tonight?"
~~~ooooo~~~
"How are Aeris and Zack?"
Tifa squinted at the dark-haired girl standing in the morning sunlight as she finished wiping her flour-covered hands on her apron. She'd been heading outside to check on the animals when she saw Fanny and her cousins, Elias and Jana, climbing the hill toward the house.
"They're fine," she replied, stepping out of the house. "Zack's at work on Ben's farm with the other men and Aeris is out with the sheep," she said for the second time that day, knowing full well that Francesca, or Fanny as everyone called her, already knew that little tidbit of information herself, as had her earlier visitor, Anna. Tifa turned to the young girl at Fanny's side with a big smile. "Goodness, Jana, you're getting so tall!" she exclaimed to Jana who grinned hugely. "I can hardly recognize you! You're going to be taller than everybody here soon if you don't stop growing!"
"Aeris is out with the sheep?" Fanny sounded puzzled. "That's strange… We passed by your sheep on the way here and didn't see her."
Tifa swiveled back around to face her. "What did you say?"
"It might not have been your sheep," Jana said, giving her older cousin a look that did not slip by Tifa. "You know you always get everybody's animals mixed up. It might've even been the O'Riley's herd we saw."
Tifa looked skeptically at the bright-eyed young child gazing innocently up at her. Everyone knew everyone else's farm animals in the hills. And unless Fanny had mistaken a herd of cows for a flock of sheep, it was very unlikely she would've thought the O'Riley herd was their sheep.
"She thought your sheep were our goats last week!" Jana said, eyes twinkling as though she'd read Tifa's thoughts. "Isn't that right, Fanny? We had a good laugh about it with Aeris."
"Um, y-yeah," Fanny stammered, her pretty face pink. "Aunt Tabitha says we should see about gettin' spectacles for me when we go to town… B-but I don't really think I need them," she added hastily. "They'd only get in my way."
Her cousin rolled her eyes. "Fanny ran ahead of me and Elias when she saw some of your sheep at the top of a hill and thought they were our goats that had got away. The dogs were barking like mad before we even got close and Aeris ran up to us, wondering why we were trying to bring home your sheep." Jana shook her head and said with a giggle, "And Fanny wonders why Ma's always frettin' that she'll chop off her own hand one of these days. But Fanny just won't listen. I tell Ma Fanny'll just have to learn her lesson the hard way. I don't think she'll care so much about looking pretty anymore when she's only got one hand. Unless she sees Zack, o' course."
"Jana!"
"Did you see Lucy or Daisy around?" Tifa asked anxiously. "Maybe something happened to Aeris, and the dogs are out there, not knowing what to do."
"Yeah, we saw both of them," Elias spoke up, coming to stand between his little sister and their cousin with the basket of eggs he'd collected from the chicken coop. Looking at them standing side-by-side, Tifa thought it was almost uncanny how the three of them had the exact same brown hair and gray eyes as well as the same nose. It was no wonder strangers often thought Fanny's aunt was her mother when the two of them went into town for supplies. "Lucy and Daisy would've been howlin', I'll bet, if anything had happened to Aeris. You know better than us how loyal they are to her." Elias gave Tifa a reassuring smile. "I'm sure the sheep are safe, Tifa."
That was true enough, Tifa supposed. With Daisy and Lucy around, the only potential danger the sheep faced was wandering away from the rest of the flock and getting lost. "She was probably on the ground and we just didn't see her," Elias went on. "When we're out with the goats, we like to dig for roots and whatever we can find… Aeris seems to enjoy that too. A lot of the time, we don't see her until we're about to trip over her."
"She just pops out of nowhere," Jana said. "Fanny almost jumped out of her skin the first time it happened."
"Gave me a fright, she did," Fanny admitted. "I swear I was looking right where she was standing. Only she wasn't there, and then suddenly she was. "
Tifa gave her a funny look. "That's…odd."
"Oh, no, no, it wasn't anything bad," the other girl said with a little laugh of embarrassment. "She laughed. I mean, like Aeris always does, in that cheerful way of hers. She wasn't laughing at me. She's too nice. We all laughed."
"Maybe we can stop by and visit with her. She's on our way back," Jana said. "I like Aeris. She's so friendly and happy all the time."
"Aunt Tabitha didn't say for us to hurry."
"No, Ma didn't." Jana looked hopefully at her brother.
"I don't see why not," he agreed. "She really does seem to be glowing these days, doesn't she? Whenever we see her, she has the biggest smile on her face."
"Sometimes, when she doesn't know she's being watched, I almost think she looks sad. Like she's lonely or something." Jana's eyebrows were furrowed in thought, a look of intense concentration on her small face. "But as soon as she sees you, she's smiling. She's the happiest person I know."
A fresh wave of doubt rose in the back of Tifa's mind. "That's Aeris for you," she said slowly. "She always has a smile for everyone."
"So," Fanny said brightly. "About Zack… You said he's at Tim's farm?"
Tifa had to fight the urge to roll her eyes like Jana was doing again. That was the real question Fanny had been working around to from the beginning even though she'd already known the answer. But she was hoping Tifa would offer more information, not necessarily about the job but the man himself. Like Ivan and Letty's daughter with the squash she'd departed with earlier that morning, Fanny had simply used the eggs as an excuse to visit the farm with her cousins. Still, she was a very nice, likable girl and Tifa felt a special kinship with the girl who had been orphaned when her entire family had been struck down by the same illness that had taken both of Tifa and Aeris' parents.
"No. They're at Old Ben's. Ned's group is at the Whitleys'."
"Oh, is it Ben's turn already?" Fanny exclaimed, cheeks flushed with excitement. "That's good to hear."
"Fanny, they've been there for a while now. Don't you remember I told you that already?" Jana asked in a tone of exasperation. "That's all Philip keeps talkin' about—he got to help them out a bit when they were working at the well on his family's farm and now he's been bitten by the bug. He thinks he'll be big enough to join them next year."
"Oh, that's right," Fanny said. "I did forget. How is he—How are they coming along?"
Wonderful, Tifa thought with a silent groan. Thanks a lot, Zack.
It was always the same: from the moment she and Aeris had arrived on the farm, they'd seen the effect the older boy had on their neighbors' daughters. In fact, it had become somewhat of a running joke in the hills shortly after Zack had seemingly shot up overnight and every female between the ages of one and one hundred had sat up and taken notice that a young girl's rite of passage into adulthood was not complete until she had been through the experience of having a crush on the handsome black-haired, blue-eyed boy who lived on a neighboring farm. Once the running of the farm had been turned over to them, they'd been besieged by young girls with stars in their eyes, running errands to the farm for their family in the hope of running into him and catching his eye.
Unfortunately for them and for Fanny and Anna, Zack had eyes for only one girl.
And Tifa was beginning to suspect that the girl in question had set her sights elsewhere.