Chapter 9
A rain of tears

Part three

Everybody called her Madam and her house was the oldest, grayest one in District 12. If you walked beyond her back garden you reached the woodland cemetery. People never went that path though. Not if they could help it. People still held a great respect for the old woman but it was more than that.

"She's bad luck," Mrs. Thornley said and pressed her lips together whenever she saw Madam in town.

But bad luck or not it didn't stop people from buying her liquor. She made it herself from the potatoes she grew in her back garden and from dandelions.

Year after year her house had withstood the forces of nature. Weather and wind, sun and rain had left it slant and ramshackle, as if about to collapse in on itself.

Haymitch peered at it from behind the honeysuckle bush where all three of them stood hidden. He felt Leonore's nervous breaths against his neck.

"Don't do it, Haymitch," she whispered.

"Yeah, if you don't dare that's OK," Maysilee teased and Haymitch's eyebrows knitted together. The wind rustled through the trees and bushes and their hair. Thunder clouds lay overhead, thick and dark. The rain would be here at any moment.

Haymitch's eyes were fixed on Madam's house.

"Let's go to Ollie and help him feed the bunnies," Leonore said but it was like he didn't hear her.

Just like the old woman herself, the house didn't seem to belong anywhere. Not the Seam. Not town. If anything it was neighbor with the Victor's Village. If you could call twelve empty houses neighbors. You could see one of the roof tops far on the right, behind the trees.

Sometimes they hid in the bushes as close as they could get, peering inside the Village. But they never went any further because if the groundskeeper or anyone else on the Capitol's payroll saw them in there, they'd really be in trouble and so would their families.

Not that they wanted to get closer. The Victor's Village was a spooky place with all its empty houses and every rose and tree, every blade of grass so in order it didn't seem natural. The shut windows stared at you, like blind eyes. Waiting for the victors that never came.

"She'll kill you," Leonore whispered. "She'll eat you." Haymitch's arms prickled but he remained just as determined. He'd never been able to back down from a challenge.

He would have to run straight out in to the open to reach the house. Where Madam might lurch inside. He tried to count the distance, to see how long it would take him to get to her door. Just to her door and touch the handle.

"Well?" Maysilee said. "You afraid or not?"

Haymitch pressed his lips together.

"I'm not afraid of anything."

And he ran.

"She killed her own granddaughter," Leonore gasped after him but Haymitch sprinted, quick and silent as a rabbit. He dove under the window just as the first thunder clap cracked over their heads, like a giant slamming two rocks together.

The Donner twins gasped and Haymitch put his hand over his mouth so his quick breaths wouldn't give him away.

He listened over the beating of his heart, ready for flight. If Madam was hiding inside. If Madam stood there on the other side of the door, just waiting to grab him.

"I want to go home."

"Hush, Lea."

Very very slowly Haymitch poked his nose above the window frame. The thunder rumbled again and he shivered all over. The window was so dirty he hardly saw anything. He could make out the shapes of a floor lamp but no movements.

Emboldened he got up from his hunched position. It was an old wooden door, crooked. Didn't look like it shut properly.

He looked back at the Donner twins. Even Maysilee looked impressed now. Haymitch flashed them a grin and he reached out and touched the handle.

"Now you try and behave, Haymitch," his mother used to say, often, before she set him loose in the morning.

Because even if Maysilee was the one who ran the fastest, climbed the highest, found the best hiding places and Leonore always came up with the funniest games there was one thing Haymitch managed better than anyone else and that was getting in trouble. He never meant to. He just seemed to end up there anyway.

Like now. Right now. When all he meant to do was touch the handle, he found himself push the door open and step inside.

With eyes big and round Haymitch gazed into the one room that was Madam's house. Not a single kid in school had ever been in here.

It didn't look like a witch's den, even if it wasn't as clean as ma kept their house.

Drowsy flies buzzed against the windows. The sink was loaded with dirty dishes. There was a bed. The lamp. No carpets on the floor. A filled bookcase that listed to the right.

And something else. Haymitch's eyes had been drawn to it almost as soon as he entered. It was piled over with more books and more stacks of old papers but Haymitch knew what it was the moment he saw it.

A piano.

"Go back to your seat, Haymitch. That is not for children," Mr Branch had once told him in music assembly and closed the fallboard with finality when Haymitch had had the audacity to try and look at the ivories.

'That is not for children'. What an obvious lie. Everybody knew the Branch gave private lessons. It wasn't even a secret.

'The piano is not for

you'. That's what he meant to say.

To spend money on piano lessons was an insanity only town's people like the Undersee's could afford. But Haymitch bet that even if he'd had a bag full of money his teacher wouldn't let him touch the piano. Not after what he said in class. The Branch had pressed Leonore to tears one day after she failed to answer one of his questions and Haymitch had shouted "You're a bully!" right in his face.

When Haymitch got older he'd learn to keep a low profile. To hold his tongue, for everyone's sake. But back then, when he was still little he couldn't keep quiet if someone was being unfair. And since District 12 didn't exactly lack injustice it was a big reason why he got into trouble so often.

He gazed down at Madam's piano. The ivories seemed to be the only things in the house that weren't covered in dust. It was the oldest, most beat down, poor-man's-piano he'd ever seen. Nothing like the grand piano they played during the president's birthday and days like that.

It probably didn't even work anymore. And still he itched to try it. To see if he could make a sound, to play even though he didn't know how to play.

And it was then, right then, that the door handle rattled.

Haymitch whipped around. He saw the door push inwards, the wood creaked. He looked around in panic and fast as a rat he darted under the bed.

He lay there covered in dust and his heart beat so hard he thought she would hear it. The dark sky made it hard to make out any details. All he saw was a large form in the doorway.

The bedspread hung halfway down the floor, poorly hiding him and he watched Madam through the fringes as she walked into the room.

In a seven year old's eyes she was enormous. A wall of a woman who seemed to take up the whole house. She wasn't fat or heavy. Just large. Everything about her was large.

She muttered something to herself and the floor creaked as she walked straight towards him and he only just managed to hold back a gasp. But all she did was sit down on the bed which sank from her weight.

The seconds ticked by. Rain began to fall, tapping down the windows, thrummed against the roof. Haymitch had Madam's broad feet just an inch away from his face. With bated breath he listened to one deep sigh after another coming from the old woman.

And then just when it felt like he couldn't take another moment of it Madam pulled herself up. She stood there and he wished, wished with all that he had that she'd just realized she had to be someplace else, rain or no rain.

And then, out of all things, she walked over to the piano. She sat down, the stool creaked under her weight.

And she played a melody Haymitch had never heard before.

The Capitol decided which music was being played in Twelve, just as they decided which books you were allowed to read. So most of it was grandiose propaganda of some sort.

But this was something else. Something the Branch wouldn't play during music assembly, he was sure of it.

He couldn't see Madam from where he was hiding but the music, those quick and joyful sounds, every high note, every low tune, they seemed to resonate within his very soul.

It mesmerized him in a way nothing had ever done.

Like she was playing together with the rain. Like it was rain.

Without even realizing he did it Haymitch pulled himself up slightly and peered over the bed to try and see how she moved her hands. Her back swayed back and forth in time with the music. He listened with his mouth open, eyes unblinking, spellbound, until the very last note died out and there was just the rain. Madam's hands fell down from the ivories.

And she turned her head and saw him.

A gasp escaped Haymitch, he tried to hide back in but it was too late. With a speed that shouldn't be possible for such an old lady Madam jumped from her chair and pulled him out so violently Haymitch thought his head might fall from its neck.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!"

"What the hell is this!?" Her hoarse, deep voice almost scared the life out of Haymitch. "What are you doing in my house!?" The woman shook him until his teeth clattered. "You little beast! I ought to strike you down!"

"I didn't do nuthin!"

"Who are you!?"

"Haymitch!" Haymitch cried. "Haymitch Abernathy!"

Madam's teeth were bared like a mad dog. Their faces were just inches apart and he saw her closer than he'd ever wanted to see her. Her brow and jaws and nose all seemed to jut out from her face in odd angles. Coarse graying black hair. Eyes like crevices as if she'd been stung by trackerjackers. Haymitch's chest rose and fell with each breath he took and he didn't dare move, or look away. He could've been a ragdoll in her clawlike hand.

Then she released her hold on his arm, but only to grab him by the shirt collar.

And she threw him out in the rain and slammed the door.

xXx

The master craftsman didn't want any children running around the woodshop but luckily he wasn't in when Haymitch slipped through the doors.

It was always loud in here. The sounds from the machines, the fires going, men shouting. It was essentially a woodshop, stone masonry and blacksmithery all in one. The men working here, because they were essentially men, built houses and furniture, blew glass, fixed leaking roofs, fixed the plumbing, forged crosses, made gravestones. More than one had lost fingers in here or worse. But despite its poor work conditions it was a very sought after place to make a living. An alternative to the mines.

Harold was just piecing together a bed and Haymitch climbed up on a stool next to him.

Usually when he visited his grandpa Haymitch would talk all the time but now he just sat there, deep in thought. He watched his grandfather work and over the din all around, he could still hear it.

The music. The rain music.

"Grandpa."

"Yes, Haymitch?"

"Why does Madam live away from everyone else?"

Harold hammered a nail into the wood with one expert strike.

"Why're you asking?"

Haymitch shrugged. The old man walked around the bed to take the other side.

"Was her father's house," he said as he hammered. "He was a gravedigger. Looked after the cemetery."

"Madam's a gravedigger too?"

"She was a teacher."

"All teachers are merchants."

"She was different. She was gifted."

The old man reached for another nail and hammered it into the wood. Haymitch hesitated.

"She found her on the graveyard, didn't she? When she was a baby." Harold's eyebrows creased together. "Leonore says Madam killed…"

"Haymitch." There lay a warning in his grandfather's voice. "You'll show her respect."

Haymitch bit his lip.

"I'm sorry, grandpa," he said and after that Harold only concentrated on his work.

Haymitch climbed down from the stool. It was time for him to go home anyway.

"Haymitch," Harold said before he could leave and Haymitch turned around. "You shouldn't bother Madam," the old man said. "She deserves to be left alone after all she's been through."

to be continued…

Author's note: You beginning to put the clues together yet? ;) What do you think? Three more parts to go and then we'll go back to Effie and the present timeline.