The Fox Sisters

Maggie’s father, John Fox, summed it up: “A houseful of women is like a sack of cats.”

Mother Ann didn’t like it any better and she was relieved when they got rid of Leah. Her stepdaughter provoked her, sneaky and deliberate. That superior smile of hers held not a drop of Christian joy, so when she married that slack-jawed farmhand, Mother Ann stood up in church and simpered right back at her, thinking, “I hope he beats her.”

Maggie, the middle sister, aged eleven, liked Leah. She often had to watch Maggie and her younger sister Kate, but she never complained about tending her little sisters. No, she held their faces, round as apples, cradled in her two hands, her brown eyes so like theirs, and said, “You’re mine.”

It was true, Maggie and Kate would do anything Leah asked, even if it got them in trouble. She still laughed when she thought of the time that they set the pigs free. When she was little, Maggie had been frightened of pigs—she hated the way their mean little eyes always seemed to be sizing her up—but Leah had dared her to slip the rope over the fence post and she had done it, barricading herself behind the gate as they burst out of the pen. Lordy, she had no idea pigs could run so fast! It took John Fox and his men all day to get them back in, and this was during harvest, when they had scarcely ten minutes to spare.

Oh, he was mad all right, and the house seemed small from the shouting. The neighbors could hear them from across the road and Mrs. Dietrich dropped her sewing in her lap and said to her husband, “It’s just not a happy house.”

“Never was,” he replied, and he didn’t have to tell his wife that he was thinking of their former neighbor, old Sam Kincaid, and the sudden way he had run off. Middle of the night, never seen again, and they didn’t even have a story to show for it. It was better to have a story, you can see where folks turned wrong, just like in the Bible.

Now Leah was back. All unannounced, her farmhand drove his wagon back to the Foxes and dumped her trunk in the dirt, looking like he had a mind to drop Leah if he could. “I can’t do a thing with her, Mr. Fox. Heart like a damn stone, that one.”

He flicked his whip over his mule’s back with soothfast anger and left the Fox family alone after that. Leah wasn’t mad, it was never her doing the shouting. Other people got terribly angry with her, but she never reacted. She just stood there with that cold smile and let them tire themselves out.

There was one thing the farmhand managed to do with Leah. She started to show at the end of winter and Mother Ann could not contain her bitterness. “John Fox, you need to saddle up and go talk to that fool. He’s got a baby on the way, and he has to take her back.”

“He doesn’t want her back and she doesn’t want to go. What am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t care what they want! They are a family, whether they like it or not. There are laws for this sort of thing.”

“Oh, Ann, I’m so tired.”

“You think you’re tired now, John Fox? How do you suppose you’ll feel when we still have Leah, plus our own two girls, and a baby howling all night? Let me be clear: I am not raising that baby. I won’t have it.”

Leah and Maggie and Kate lay on the bare wood floor of the girls’ bedroom and listened to Mother Ann’s barrage.

“Are you going to have a baby?” Kate whispered.

“Yes,” Leah smiled and gently touched the end of Kate’s freckled nose. Just ten, the baby, Kate was still child-like most of the time. “And I hope it’s a girl.”

“Mother is so angry,” Maggie said.

“She’s been very unkind. And I’m in such a delicate condition.”

The girls nodded, taken in by Leah’s lowered eyelashes and quavering voice. But then the old, sharp Leah came back, the one with a gleam in her eye, the one they knew best.

“Would you like to help me get back at her?”

The next day, the girls went on a picnic, even though it was only March and there was still snow on the ground. Leah packed them sandwiches and stole some cakes Mother Ann had made for the church supper. It seemed to Maggie and Kate that they walked for an awfully long time, tramping deep into the woods until they reached a broad stump. Leah swept the snow off with one mittened hand and the girls sat down. She drew a buttonhook out of her pocket, slender metal gleaming in the sun like the blade of a knife.

“Take off your shoes,” she said and they did, taking off their mittens to finagle the tiny side buttons. Maggie and Kate had such trust in Leah, they didn’t even ask why.

“And your stockings.” Thick wool stockings that Leah and Mother Ann had knitted themselves, stuffed into the pockets of their winter coats, dangling over the top like the tails of hidden animals.

Nothing looks more naked than an exposed foot, white skin turning red from the cold. There were four girls’ feet dangling over the edge of the stump, their toenails grown long over the winter and not exactly clean. Then there were six as Leah joined them. She didn’t seem to feel the cold and put her bare feet in the snow like she did it every day.

“Now,” she said with a wicked smile. “Can you do this?”

Crack! It sounded like a gun had been fired. The little girls shrieked and then giggled when they realized they weren’t hurt. Crack! There it was again, and Kate fell into the snow, she was so surprised.

“Leah, how are you doing that?”

“Watch,” she said, and pointed at her toes. Maggie caught it this time. The fourth toe on her left foot twitched ever so slightly, and crack! Then she waggled all her toes, and it sounded like fireworks on the Fourth of July. The girls laughed and laughed, the last time they were all so happy at once ever again.

“Leah, will you teach me?” Kate’s voice was shrill with excitement.

“I’ll teach both of you. Now watch, and do what I do.” Crack! Crows flew away from the trees. Maggie and Kate tried and tried but couldn’t make a sound.

“I’m getting cold,” Maggie complained.

Leah lost her temper. “You cannot put your stockings back on until you’ve learned to crack. Try again!”

“I’m hungry,” Kate whimpered.

Leah grabbed Kate’s little foot and wrestled her toes until they made a small sound, more like a crunch or a croak than a crack. “You’ll eat when you’ve learned.”

It took hours, until the sun was setting behind the bare trees and the girls were sore from shivering. Kate got it first, surprising herself with success. “Oh! It’s easy,” and she smiled and did it again.

Leah stood over them both with her arms crossed over her chest to keep warm. “Maggie, how about you?”

“I can’t. I’m too cold.”

Leah’s mouth was a thin, angry line. “You’d better not tell Mother Ann.”

“I won’t!”

“You’d better not, that’s all. Swear!”

 “I swear!”

Finally, a definite crack and when Maggie proved she could do it twice, Leah was all smiles again. “Now here’s what we’re going to do,” she said, her voice a hot whisper in their ears, a hand on each of their shoulders, drawn close even though there was no one else around for miles. That’s how it is with secrets, the real ones that you don’t just want to keep, but need to hold close with never a word. Leah laid out her bold plans.