The Cats of Tanglewood Forest by Charles De Lint Page B

smiled brightened. “I know you do, hon. You’ll turn out to be the smartest young lady in the county. Just you wait and see.”

    True to his word, Earl taught Lillian to look for weaknesses in structures and fences, and how to mend them. As the summer wound on, she became adept with a hammer and saw and learned all the basic skills needed to keep Aunt’s farm running and in good repair.
    She took pride in what she was learning, but she couldn’t exactly say she was happy. She didn’t talk about it, but she supposed they could see it on her face.
    “A body can’t depend on anybody else for their happiness,” Earl told her one day while they were repairing the roof of the house. “The only way you can ever find any peace is to find it in
yourself
—in what you do and what you stand for.”
    Lillian wasn’t sure what she stood for, but it didn’t include getting prissied up and going to school.Only when she was away from the Welches’ farm did she breathe easier. The woods seemed to open up and her footsteps were lighter. Even missing Aunt as much as she did couldn’t stop the lift in her spirit.
    Like the cats who watched and waited, she was waiting, too, only she wasn’t quite sure for what.

    Eventually, the days got shorter, dusk fell a little earlier every day, and that first day of attending classes was no longer a distant prospect.
    Harlene remained fixed on the notion that there’d be some magical transformation when Lillian stepped across the threshold of the one-room school down the road. That Lillian would enter as a tomboy, but the moment she took her seat she’d be a proper young lady.
    Lillian thought she might be able to stand wearing shoes all day, but she wasn’t sure she could sit still for all that time. She liked learning. She enjoyed reading, knowing how to write was a good thing, and math was sort of interesting. She wouldn’t mind being better at all of them.
    But if she was in school all day, who would look afterAunt’s farm? No one. It would only become one more abandoned homestead. And if it fell to ruin there’d be nothing of Aunt or the Kindred farm left in the world. No one would remember. No one would care.
    Lillian couldn’t let that happen. And that’s when she understood what she had been waiting to do all this time.
    The night before Harlene was to take her into town to buy a new dress, shoes, and school supplies, Lillian packed up her few belongings, left a note for Harlene and Earl, and walked back up into the hills. When she got to Aunt’s farm, she stowed her bundle under the porch and then kept on going. The path she took now led east, deeper into the Tanglewood Forest.

CHAPTER NINE
Creek Boys
    F orty minutes later she reached her destination. From the tree line she could see the scattering of cabins in the hollow below. There were no lights on. Everybody was asleep, just as she should be.
    She stepped off the path and found herself a nook in some tree roots. She planned to wait there until dawn, when the Creeks would be awake. But no sooner had she settled down than a voice called softly from the branches above.
    “Hey, Lillian. What are you doing here?”
    She started. For a moment she thought she wasback in her dream, where birds and animals talked to her from out of the trees. But then she recognized the voice. She peered up into the branches and could make out the dark shape of John Creek sitting on a bough.
    “Hello hello,” she said. “I could ask you the same thing.”
    John swung down from the branch and dropped lightly onto the ground.

    “I’m just fooling around with Davy,” he said. “We’re having a contest to see who can—”
    He broke off when a stick hit his shoulder.
    “Gotcha!” Davy cried.
    He stepped out from the underbrush on the other side of the path, tall and dark-haired like all the Creek boys.
    “No fair,” John said. “I’m having a time-out talking to Lillian.”
    “You didn’t call time-out! Hello,