The Well-Wishers (2 page)

Today she was amusing us by doing caricatures of each one. The ones she did of Laura and Kip were awfully funny, but she didn't get me right at all. My chin doesn't stick out like that, at least not that far.

When we'd finished arguing about my chin, she started a portrait of herself, all long tangled blond hair with a scowl peeking through. Then she made a face at it and tore it up. "If you ask me," she said, "it's time something started happening around here. I'm used to school again. The sameness has set in."

"Halloween next month," Kip reminded her. "There's the party in the gym."

"Bobbing for apples!" Lydia was scornful. "And that old decoration committee. Black crepe paper cats on the walls; you'd think they could at least think up something original. Why didn't they put
me
on it;
I
'd freeze their marrow for them!" And she drew a truly horrendous witch on the next page of her sketch pad.

"If you ask me," said Laura, "I think the trouble with us is we miss the magic."

Everybody groaned, because we were all secretly trying not to think about that. But Laura is a great one for bringing hidden thoughts out into the open.

"We said this was going to be our secret witches' den where we'd have midnight meetings and plan our secret spells," she went on now. "We were going

to do good turns to the whole town. But not a single magic thing's happened, and pretty soon it'll be too cold to come here anymore."

"It'll be warm again in the spring," I said. "Maybe the magic goes to sleep in the winter, like woodchucks. "

"In books it's almost always summer when the magic starts working," put in Kip. "It's almost always summer vacation."

"So we won't be distracted from our lessons, I suppose," said Lydia bitterly. "As if being distracted weren't just what we need!"

"Has anybody said anything to the well lately?" I wondered. "Maybe it's just sitting there waiting for a friendly word." After all, if we were going to believe in the magic (and everyone was talking suddenly as if we were), we might as well be efficient about it.

"No, and I don't think we ought to," said Laura. "I think we're supposed to wait, no matter how long it takes."

"Then let's not talk about it," I said. Because there is nothing so maddening as talking about something when you can't do a single thing about it.

"I think we
ought
to talk," said Laura. "I think we've been silent about it, and each going his own way, long enough." She turned to Lydia. "You didn't say a thing when James asked if anybody'd been talking to the well lately, and neither did Kip. Have you been wishing on the sly?"

"I did think of giving it a look and a few words the other day," Lydia admitted. "Just sort of generally about getting a move on. But I thought better of it."

"I almost asked it to help with my history test," said Kip. "And that would have been unselfish, because think how my parents would feel if I flunked. I didn't do it, though. Maybe I should have. I only got a seventy-one."

"No," said Laura. "I think it's a good thing you didn't. I think if we start pestering it, it might get cross and take longer waking up than it would have, even. Or go all wrong when it does. I think we ought to swear a secret oath in blood not to go
near
the well until we're absolutely sure it's time."

Everybody was willing, probably because even merely swearing a secret oath is
sort
of a secret adventure. Kip had his scout knife handy, pricks were made, and the fatal oath duly sworn.

"There," said Laura, sucking a finger. "That's settled. Now when the well's ready, it'll tell us so. There'll be a sign."

"What kind of a sign?" Kip wondered. "Will it go guggle guggle guggle? Or shoot up like a geyser?"

"Something'll happen," said Laura. "We'll know."

There was a sound in the woods.

Everybody jumped. But it wasn't the kind of sound magic would make starting up at all. It was a crackling and a swishing and a thudding that could add up to only one thing: Gordy.

When Gordy runs through the woods, branches don't mean a thing to him, or noise either. As a Commando, his name would be mud. He does get where he's going, though. And he does not seem to mind the scratches.

We could hear his voice now, high and kind of bleating the way it always is, and mingled with a childish prattle. At the sound of the prattle, the words "Oh help" rose to the lips of many.

Because fond as we are of my little sister Deborah, at a secret meeting she can be a menace. But Gordy has no sense of the fitness of things. And he indulges Deborah in her whims, and this is bad for her character.

Sure enough, when he came trotting into the clearing, we saw that he was giving Deborah a piggyback ride, a thing no one must ever do, because once you give in to her, she wants to do it all the time. They came up onto the stoop, Gordy breathing hard and forgetting to close his mouth. But I must not make personal remarks. We all have our bad habits. Lydia used to bite her nails and I drum with my fingers.

"Hi," he said, putting Deborah down and beaming round at us. "What are you all doing? Huh?"

And right away we all got the feeling we always do when we've run away from Gordy and then he follows us and finds us.

It's partly a guilty feeling, and part embarrassed and part really sorry, too. Because we like Gordy. We honestly do. Nobody could help it. It's just that there is something about him that makes people want to pick on him. You have heard of people who are accident prone. Gordy is picking-on prone.

"Gordy rode me all the way here on his handlebars and then piggybacked me through the woods. Wasn't that
kind?
" said Deborah.

And of course it was. Gordy is just as kind as he can be. And he and Deborah get along like all get out, maybe because their childish minds meet and mingle. "Gordy said maybe you'd rather be by yourselves without him for a change, but I told him that was silly," Deborah was saying now.

Everybody stirred uncomfortably.

"I just love Gordy," she went on. "Don't you?" Sometimes I think she says the things she does on purpose.

"Sure, he's a good kid," Kip muttered.

Gordy hung his head and said, "Aw."

In another second I think the guilty feeling would have exploded and we might have started pushing Gordy around, just in a friendly way, and probably all joined in some childish scuffle, which is the best way to get rid of feelings.

If only Deborah had kept her mouth shut. But that is a thing she finds it impossible to do, apparently, now she is in the first grade and has learned to read. Last summer we could hardly get a word out of her.

"We're going to have magic wishes all the time from now on," she babbled happily. "Gordy's fixed the well."

There was a sound of a breath being caught and held and everyone looked at Laura. She had gone perfectly white. "What?" she said. But it did not sound like her voice talking.

"Gordy's fixed the well," repeated Deborah. "He went right up to it and told it what."

"Oh," said Laura.

Maybe I should explain right here that usually my sister Laura is the most decent and reasonable of all of us, but on the subject of the well she is different. Sometimes you would think it was her own special private property. Maybe that is because she is the one who started the wishes working in the first place.

She turned to Gordy. "All right, Gordy Witherspoon," she said. "What have you done
now?
"

Personally I consider "What have you done
now?"
" a perfectly awful question. If anybody said, "What have you done
now
?" to me, it would make me think of all the things I had done before and I would know they had all been bad and this new thing was the worst, and that everybody hated me and I might as well go out in the garden and eat worms. But Gordy did not seem to mind.

"Oh nothing," he said. "I just tossed a wish down."

"He wrote it all out," said Deborah proudly, "on the back of my spelling paper. I got a hundred. And a gold star." Only nobody was listening because we were all watching Laura.

But "What did the wish say?" was all she asked. It was the way she said it that counted.

"Oh, nothing," Gordy said again. "I don't remember. Yes I do, too. I told it, 'Get going, or else. This means you.'"

For a minute I thought Laura was going to hit him.

I decided it was time to speak up. "Let's not get excited," I started to say. "Maybe that was a little crude."

"Crude?" Laura interrupted. "Crude? It just doesn't show even the first ruminants of good taste, that's all!"

"OK," I said. "Maybe it doesn't. But that's still not a crime or anything. Gordy didn't know about the oath. He was just trying to please Deborah. And we've all been ruder than that to the well in our day."

"That's different," said Laura. "The magic
belongs
to us. It doesn't to him." She turned on Gordy again. "You've just ruined everything utterly and completely, Gordy Witherspoon, and I hope you're satisfied." And then she said words I never expected to hear from a sister of mine. "You always were a buttinski and a pest and we never wanted you around in the first place, and now you can just go on home and never come back!"

This was too much for me. "Here, wait a minute," I said, getting up and coming between them.

And even Kip, who is usually too lazy and easy-going to move, uncurled himself from the floor and went and put an arm round Gordy's shoulder, though we all hate sloppiness and what the books call "demonstrations of affection."

Because while it is perfectly true that we have roughed Gordy, up once in a while when he needed it, and Kip
did
give him a bloody nose one day (though he got a black eye for it), and one other time when Gordy was really awful I
may
have put him across my knee and spanked him, just once or twice to help him grow up; still, neither of us would ever have spoken to a fellow human being like that. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names and plain truths and meanness can go much deeper and cut you to the quick. We know this, and Laura knows it, too, when she is in her right mind.

But sometimes I think that Gordy does not have any quick. For he went right on smiling. Though maybe his voice did sound a little higher and more bleating than usual.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to butt in. I just thought it was time somebody did something, and you were afraid to. And Deborah wanted the wishes to start over, so I thought why not try?"

There's one thing you can say for Gordy, he is spunky. I was sure that word "afraid" would be the last straw that would send Laura through the needle's eye into utter frenzy. But maybe she thought she had said enough already. For she didn't answer a word, but turned and went into the cold, dark, empty house, as if she wanted to be by herself. Gordy hesitated a minute, and then he went in after her. He certainly has spunk, all right.

Of course it would have been tactful, and better manners, to have left them to settle it on their own. But manners have never stopped Deborah. She followed Gordy right in. After that, the rest of us were too curious to be behindhand.

And besides, I wasn't sure it was safe for Gordy to be alone with Laura, in the mood she was in.

But when we came into the secret house's tiny parlor, Laura wasn't doing a thing, just standing with her back to the room, looking down at the desk in one corner (the desk that was such a big part of our adventure the summer before) and fiddling with the key, moving it back and forth in the lock. Gordy went right up to her and took her by the shoulders and turned her round. He held out his hand.

"I'm sorry, honest," he said. "I guess I just don't know any better."

Nobody could have said it straighter. When I thought of what Laura had just said to
him
, I thought it was pretty big. And Deborah ran right up to Gordy and put her arm around his waist, which is as high up on him as she can reach.

Laura was looking at the floor. But what we could see of her face wasn't white anymore. It was red. She hesitated. And then I'm glad to say she took Gordy's hand, kind of grabbing at it and dropping it right away, but not as if she didn't like him. More as if she didn't like herself.

"I'm sorry, too," she said.

"Oh, that's all right," Gordy said.

"I didn't really mean all that," she said.

"Sure. Of course you didn't," Gordy said.

"It'd be awful if I did. The magic's supposed to be for doing good turns. It'd be awful if just thinking about it could make me say a thing like that and mean it."

"But you
didn't
mean it," Gordy said.

"That's right, I didn't. It's just that..." Her voice trailed off and I thought it was time for me to step in again.

"What Laura means," I said, "is that she was forgetting you don't know about magic, much, yet. She was forgetting you just came in at the end of it, last summer. You see, magic has rules, the same as anything else. If you talk to it the way you did and begin ordering it around, there's no telling what it might do. If the well starts up again now, and if it's angry and goes wrong, it'll be your fault and you'll just have to bear the brunt and take the consequences."