During his lunch break shift, Gale was coming back from Allyah who examined his dietary guidelines. Allyah was far more nuanced and sophisticated as a dietician than a neighboring province doctor who can’t even read or write, no joke. She estimated that he might have fainted that one time could be related to his failure to take certain food such as dark spinach that makes up for the red meat he has tried to avoid for the past six months. His episode of fainting due to overwork and exhaustion caused people around him, including Michaela and Theodore immense distress, he found.
As he ambled through the street that led to a different side of Fullgreens, he began to think about his relationship to Michaela. Honestly, he never really thought that there was any emotional bond between themselves until that ‘accident’ that killed the old butcher. He knew that he became someone she depended on to adjust to the human world but he, out of reasonable speculation, believed she only saw him in a brutally efficient, pragmatic light. And he respected her much for her practicality and was in awe of her seemingly inherent lack of emotional baggage. But the alarming length to which she tried to revive him and their overnight conversation in his study proved him wrong. Those events demonstrated, better than any words, how important he was to her. Maybe his importance in her life was based on her self-interest and her son’s, but he didn’t mind being somewhat used for her personal agenda.
Not to say that he is being completely altruistic. Despite her immutable expression and unreadable beady eyes, she was exquisitely, exquisitely sensitive to both his vocational needs whether he is aware of it or not. And the people of Fullgreens, especially the elderly who suffer if not immediately treated, were beginning to warm up to the quiet Oriental woman who hand them a cup of water along with a parchment enveloped sachets of medicine. A girl with unruly strands poking from her cap…impossibly small hands that manage more than enough work that should be allotted to someone of her stature. But somehow her nails always remain clean and they grow too fast and the fine bone structure of her hands refuse to harden themselves in preparation for the toil. And her torso was too slight to bear the weight of many things that are needed to run the apothecary. For some reason, seeing her work sometimes brought a feeling of melancholy that slid sneakily, like softly propelled cold air from an air pipe, that scattered the pieces that form a picture of a sweet, radiant life of two strangers and a child. He began to find himself thinking in terms of possibilities, punctuated by “ifs”–“if I wasn’t a a hulder,” “if I wasn’t some peddler but part of the gentry,” “if I wasn’t a single immigrant,” “if I didn’t have so many enemies.”
After he turned a corner and nodded a polite greeting to a neighbor, he released a deep, heavy sigh. He had already been a suspected insurrectionist once. And it didn’t take any longer than two days for the new butcher boy to make clear his intentions to Gale, through his murderous glares and glinting edge of his knife. Also the fact that the butcher boy has no difficulty reviving his father’s business gave him a fair reason to suspect the boy having a friend of higher power and wealth. His friend Abram who would have offered some protection against a local magistrate’s abuse of power in the name of the King has left Fullgreens to fulfill his duties in another part of the Pennsylvania colony. He already had two new enemies–one living few blocks away in the same village and another who is invisible but powerful. And he was on his own, with a rabbit family he felt oddly compelled to take care of. A single slip of word or misplaced action could topple the life he has worked so hard for his ten years in the American colony. And now it was not just his lot that was going to be cast. Michaela’s would be too.
The better part of his mind tried to impede the surge of secretive pleasure he felt as he reflected the latter realization of his added responsibility. Such responsibility should be onerous–a heavy burden that would accelerate his decline into peril. Especially considering his past, having survived the “Betiding” with nothing but his life and his sister. But the responsibility didn’t feel like a burden; rather, it felt like he was onto something “new” and he hasn’t felt that way for a really really long time. However, it was weird even for him that he would be fine with piggybacking Michaela and Theodore because he was just thirsting for a change in scenery.
But all it took to crush his swelling happiness and pride was a single sight, an unfortunate coincidence that often occurs when one just happens to casually glance sideways, and what poor Gale saw promptly rooted out his pre-existing ideas that he was perfectly content to dwell in.
While he could have just quickly hid himself behind one of the stalls that lined up in the path, just a few yards in front of the butcher shop, he was so flustered that he decided to ran off to his right. Thankfully he was swifter than most average people, so Michaela didn’t see him and went on to enter the cabin-like shed behind the butcher stall.
He was staring at the shed so hard that it took him a while to see the new butcher boy, a curly haired brunette lad, emerge next to the butcher stall, give him a contemptuous smirk.
Hulder Tales 