The Wooden Shepherdess by Richard Hughes

city-folk.... That seemed the likeliest background for Ree. Down in the valleys the much more prosperous farms had thriving fields of tobacco and slatted tobacco-barns, herds of black-and-white Holsteins in huge metal byres, towering tubular silos and clanking wind-pumps raised on legs taller even than silos; but most of these nowadays seemed to be owned by Swedes—and she certainly wasn’t a Swede!
    But anyway here the mysterious creature was, dancing about on his porch and agog with a plan she had formed....
9
    Ree hadn’t been consciously secret about her home: it was just that with so much else to be talked about “home” seemed a waste of her precious time with Augustine. For nowadays parents and even sibs had shriveled away in her eyes to the veriest “things,” like the dull old tables and chairs. Even her father, to whom she had once been so close, was now little more than a weekly lingering smell of five-cent cigars.
    Poor Bramber! For Bramber Woodcock adored his children, and yet all summer he hardly saw them at all. He worked the whole week in New York, arrived each Saturday worn to a frazzle, slept half Sunday, woke to face bills and overdue handyman jobs—and late that night worn anew to a frazzle was back in the steam of New York: while even those precious weekends his darling Ree, the daughter he mostest adored—all day and half the night too the girl would be out.
    Jess Woodcock also got little good from her daughter. Stuck at the farm from June till Labor Day, driven half-crazy by ants (let alone by children and chores, for none of these summer folk had the money to modernise), Ree was her great disappointment: the eldest, yet nowadays no help at all.
    The Woodcocks of course were by no means alone in their woes. In these last few years (whether due to the War or the I.C. Engine or Freud) from ocean to ocean thousands of half-grown young had suddenly all like that burst out of their families, cut themselves loose and advanced on this dangerous rudderless post-war world in packs of their own: self-sufficient as eagles, unarmoured as lambs—like some latter-day Children’s Crusade, though without any Cross on their banners or very much else and indeed little thought in their heads but their youth and themselves. You’d have thought they’d been found and reared under gooseberry bushes for all it apparently meant nowadays having mothers.
    The holiday teenage young from all over the township had formed their own pack and lived in it wholly all summer, ignoring their homes except when hungry or sleepy or needing money. Their oldest ultimate Nestor (and only local among them) was Sadie: the pack had allowed that “kinda his niece” of the blacksmith to keep her place in their ranks however long-in-the-tooth, because of the glamour attached to a girl believed to have paid her way through Law School driving occasional liquor-trucks only to get a machine-gun burst through her shoulder just before sitting her finals. And down at the younger end little Anne-Marie Woodcock had just scraped in before quite reaching her teens by acting hard-boiled. She was game for adventure as any and everyone liked her; but what had undoubtedly turned the scales was the name she had earned as a bit of a biscuit already if given the chance—and young as she was, the males in the pack gave her plenty.... Maybe she simply reckoned this intimate fingering part of her price of admission, or maybe she found herself missing her father’s erstwhile fondling: in earlier happier times he had fondled her more than a lot, and his loving fingers had left very little untouched.
    For Ree, it was only this new-found life-in-the-pack which had meant very much before she took up with Augustine; and granted the essence of life in a pack is forty-feeling-like-one this wasn’t so very much changed even now, for she felt “like one” with Augustine. His company kept her blissfully