The Wanton Troopers by Alden Nowlan

little glance at Kevin.
    â€œLittle pitchers have big ears,” she warned.
    Kevin sat at the table, pretending to study his Sunday School lessons. Something wicked shaped his face.
    â€œAll I said was that I saw you-know-who the other night in Larchmont,” June giggled. “You remember that certain person in Larchmont, don’t you?”
    Mary exhaled and screwed her face into an expression of melodramatic disbelief.
    â€œOh, no! Not him again!”
    â€œYou bet!” June’s voice lowered. “And he was asking about you.”
    â€œHe wasn’t!”
    â€œHe was!”
    â€œI don’t believe it!”
    â€œAll right, don’t you believe it, then. But it’s true. ‘How’s Mary-Mary-Quite-Contrary-How-Does-Your-Garden-Grow?’ he said.”
    Mary giggled. “That must have been him, all right. It couldn’t have been anybody else.”
    â€œDidn’t I tell you? Why don’t you believe me when I tell you things?”
    Kevin thought these conversations, with their groans, sighs, giggles, and head-shakings, unutterably pretentious and silly.
    â€œWell, I’m an old married woman now,” Mary said.
    â€œWoe is me!” June snickered.
    Mary smiled and shrugged. “Little pitchers have big ears,” she said again.
    â€œI’ve got somethin’ else I want to tell you later.”
    â€œOh, yes.” Mary turned to Kevin. “Isn’t it time you started to Sunday School, sweetikins?”
    He stood up sulkily. He knew she wanted him to go so that she could be alone with June.
    â€œYeah,” he muttered.
    â€œThat’s a good boy, Scampi,” June said, winking at him.
    He hated the smug, teasing insolence in her grin. He hoped she would die in agony and burn forever in the deepest pit of hell.

Seven
    The Minard farm covered a hillside on the northern side of the creek. The Minard brothers, reputed to be among the richest men in Connaught County, were old, and their wizened wind-burned faces were rendered forbidding by the blue-black and sallow blotches of great age. Zuriel, the elder, ruled his younger brother like a father. Watching them Kevin thought of the patriarch Abraham and his nephew, Lot, whose stories he had read in the Bible. The brothers were known as “old bachelors” and their sister, Sarah, who kept house for them, was called an “old maid.” Sarah’s hands were wrinkled and red, like the claws of a chicken, and her hair had thinned until she possessed only a scattering of stark-white wisps.
    The previous summer, Judd had helped the Minard brothers with their haying. The mill usually closed down during the haying season, to allow the mill hands to help out on neighbouring farms. In afternoons when heat waves vibrated in the air like live electric wires, Kevin had galloped across the spike-sharp hay stubble, carrying a rum bottle full of cold buttermilk to quench his father’s thirst. He loved the sensation of standing by the clattering hay rake to pass the bottle to his father. It thrilled him to see how his father teamed the great, pungent-smelling Clydesdales with one hand and levered the rake up and down with the other. His nostrils tingled to the hot, sweet smell of the curing hay. And he had made friends with Zuriel, Reuben, and Sarah. He liked the gentle formality of the men, the little, excited-hen movements of Sarah. He had kept going back to the Minard farm long after his father had ceased to work there. Through the winter and spring he had paid many visits to the whitewashed old three-storey farm house with is maze of sheds and porches.
    Zuriel and Reuben seldom uttered a complete sentence. They spoke in grunts and gestures and monosyllables. But they seemed strangely flattered by his interest in their hens, cows, pigs, horses, and sheep. When he reached out to pat old Bess, the leader of the Clydesdale team, and murmured into her huge, comically expectant ears, the