A Way Through the Sea (2 page)

“Yeah,” said Henrik. “But what are we going to call them now?”

“How about the name Thor for one of them?” suggested Peter. He had been studying myths in school, which is how he thought of the name. He picked up a broom to sweep the floor a little, waiting for somebody to react to his suggestion. Elise held the end of a board for Grandfather at the workbench, looking thoughtful.

“Nah,” said Henrik. “It should fit with the other two names, like the Three Musketeers or something. And besides, that sounds too much like a Norse myth.”

“It’s supposed to,” replied Peter. “So how about Trusty?”

“Dog’s name,” said Henrik, giving a thumbs down sign.

“Checkers?”

“Uh uh.”

“Lightning?”

“Forget it.”

“Tic, Tac, and Toe?”

Henrik just groaned while Elise and Grandfather kept working.

“Those are my suggestions,” said Peter, shrugging. “I can’t think of anything else.”

No one said anything for a couple of minutes, and the only sound was Grandfather’s steady sawing.

“Um... how about if we call them Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego?” Henrik said finally.

Peter thought he hadn’t heard that right. “Huh?” he said. “What language is that?”

“You know, from the Bible story?” Henrik looked amazed that his friend didn’t know. “The one where they get thrown into a furnace, but they don’t burn up? Didn’t they teach you that one at your church?”

Peter’s family didn’t go to the Lutheran church much, except on holidays like Christmas and Easter, the same as everyone else. Henrik seemed to know a lot more Bible stories than either Peter or Elise did.

“I must have missed that week,” said Peter quickly, a little embarrassed. “Anyway, there’s no way I can pronounce those names.”

Henrik sighed and went back to looking out at the harbor through the little window.

“I have an idea,” announced Elise. Grandfather picked up his board, and she clapped the sawdust from her hands. “Henrik’s bird was born—I mean hatched—first, right?”

“Right,” said Henrik, turning around. “And he’s still the best looking one.”

“What do you mean?” interrupted Peter. “Yours hardly has its eyes open, and it can’t hold its head up, and it looks all deformed—"

“Deformed? Yours is the one that’s deformed, with all that blubber!”

Elise raised her hands, like a soccer referee. She was in the same grade as Henrik and Peter and probably smarter than both of them. They wouldn’t admit it, though, at least not yet. She knew all the capitals of Europe by heart, and she often had to help Peter with his math. Her teachers at school said she was “gifted.” That was okay, Peter thought, as long as she didn’t get bossy about it. Mostly he and Henrik listened to her ideas. Mostly. After all, she
was
the brain of the family.

“Okay,” she said. “We can hardly tell them apart just now. But since you two can’t agree on a name, why don’t we give them numbers?”

Henrik and Peter both looked at her as if maybe this was not one of her genius ideas. Grandfather Andersen started sawing on a new board, and Peter could tell he was listening, too.

“But they already are going to have numbers,” Peter said to her. “Grandfather has the little rings ready.” He was talking about three little aluminum rings his grandfather had out on the shelf, ready to slip around each bird’s right leg. Grandfather had pulled the bands out of one of the drawers, the ones that were filled with bronze screws, bolts, small tools, and a whole collection of little orphaned things.

Elise still sounded sure of herself. “I know that, silly. Henrik’s bird is going to be number 3341, yours is 3342, and mine is 3343. But I don’t mean we should call them by their full numbers. We’ll just call the first one Number One, the second one Number Two, and mine Number Three.”

Henrik and Peter just looked at each other, this time without their annoyed looks.

“What do you think?” asked Grandfather, who had picked up the rings. “Do you boys have any better ideas?”

Peter shrugged. “I guess not. Sounds good to me, even if it is a little different.”

“I like different names,” said Henrik, looking over at Elise. “They’re better than Trusty or Spot.”

She smiled back, the way she did when the boys finally came around to her ideas. Not “I told you so” but more like “What took you so long to figure it out?”

So with Grandfather’s help, Peter held the helpless little birds as Elise and Henrik gently pulled the toes of their tiny feet backward and slipped the rings over their legs.

“Looks too big,” observed Henrik when the rings were in place.

“They’ll grow faster than you think,” said Grandfather.

Later, they gave Number One, Number Two, and Number Three a special feed dish all their own. Then over the next year, they worked at training them to be real homing pigeons. They kept busy with the birds every day after school and on the weekends.

It took them a while to get the birds used to going through the bars, though. Even before the little pigeons learned how to fly well, Henrik climbed up on the roof of the shed and pushed them gently through the little hole with one way bars, one at a time, until they had figured out how to do it themselves. It was kind of like a miniature jailhouse window, except that the bars swung in from the top. After a few weeks, they started learning how to get right back to the shed, where Elise would be waiting with their favorite treat, dried peas, in her hand. Gradually, the training flights got longer and longer until the three birds knew exactly how to come back home and go right into the shed, without standing around on the roof, making messes.

Grandfather told Peter once that before the war he used to have a lot more messes, with twenty birds—all of them racing champions at one time or another. He had neatly pinned blue ribbons in a row on the wall inside his shed, proof of his stories. He had a lot of stories. But that was before—before Peter had a story of his own. Thinking back to that year, it all seemed like a long, long time ago.

The First Race

3

Peter slept in a little. When he finally woke up, it wasn’t to his alarm clock but to something else. Out at the entrance to the harbor, the foghorn blasted every nineteen seconds. He lay awake, counting the same way he had since he was a little boy. Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, blast. One, two, three, four... crack!

He jumped out of bed, snapped up the shade, and threw open the window. Everything seemed drippy and clammy outside.

“Hey, are you trying to break the window or something?” he yelled down at Henrik.

Henrik was standing in the middle of the foggy street, with his hands on his hips and a grin on his face. He was taller than Peter, maybe as tall as Elise, and he looked like a professional soccer player as he juggled a pebble between his feet. He was always grinning like that, and when he came to wake Peter up, he usually pretended not to know anything about the pebbles he threw up at the window to get Peter’s attention. Peter scratched his head, looking down at the street.
One of these days he’s going to break the windowpane, and then he’ll be sorry.

“You’re just sleeping the day away,” Henrik shouted back. “It’s late!”

Peter popped his head back inside, followed by a patch of cool fog. His alarm clock said seven. He pulled yesterday’s slightly wrinkled shirt on before he leaned out again.

“What do you mean
late
?” he shouted once more. “You call seven late?”

“I don’t call seven on a Saturday morning late at all,” said Mr. Andersen from the hallway. “You can stop shouting out the window before you wake all the neighbors.”

From the sound of it, he wasn’t kidding. Peter turned around and lowered his voice. “Sorry,” he said to the door.

“And now that we’re all awake,” added Peter’s mother, “you can come for breakfast.”

“But we’re going to take the birds out this morning on a race.” Peter opened up his door to the hallway. Both his parents were standing there, looking half asleep.

“How are you going to fly the birds, anyway, in this fog?” asked his father. He was still in his pajamas.

Peter went back over to the window again to check if there was any blue sky showing yet. There was, just a little. At least, it didn’t look totally foggy.

“It’ll burn off in an hour or so,” Peter told his dad. “That will give us just enough time to bike out to the Marienlyst.”

The Marienlyst—Mary’s Resort—was the grand old hotel north of the city, the one that looked out on the Sound and Sweden. To get there, Peter and Henrik would have to ride up the coast, past the famous Kronborg Castle. It was a ride they had made several times before with Elise.

“Hmm,” said Mr. Andersen, scratching his morning beard. He still wasn’t fully awake. “Well, you better get something to eat before you leave. And stay away from any soldiers out there.”

Peter nodded, barely paying attention. “We have to hurry, though,” he said. “Henrik is waiting outside with the birds.”

The boys had decided to take their two birds in the basket, let them go at the seaside resort, and see which of the birds made it back to the coop first. Elise, who was reading a big book for school over the weekend, had said she didn’t want to come this time, but she would judge the finish. It would cost Peter, though.

“Okay, but what will you give me if I do it?” she had asked him the day before, when they were trying to figure out how to do the race.

“I thought you would do it out of the goodness of your little sister’s heart,” he said, getting on his knees.

“Maybe...” She crossed her arms and grinned down at him. “But if I did it, it would be out of the goodness of my
big
sister’s heart.”

“Whatever,” said Peter, clutching her ankles and untying her shoelaces. She yanked her foot out of the way. “So how about it, sweet, lovable, tall, little sister?”

Peter ended up doing the dishes an extra day for Elise, which both of them thought was a pretty good trade.

“I still wish she would have volunteered, though,” Peter mumbled to himself as he shoveled down a piece of bread with cheese and downed a glass of milk. There was a tapping on the door downstairs at the street, and he ran to his bedroom window again to tell Henrik to wait. His window was almost straight above the outside door.

“Come on, hurry up!” Henrik hissed from the street below. He had the wicker fishing basket they used for hauling the pigeons strapped to the back of his bike. One of the birds was poking its little head out of the small square hole in the top. Henrik was jumping up and down now, bouncing on his bicycle seat.

“Okay, okay, I’ll be right down.”

Peter hurried down the hallway to the small washroom, splashed some water in his face, then sprinted back to his room. Elise still wasn’t awake. Or at least she hadn’t moved yet from her bed when he peeked into her room.
Sleepyhead.
Just in case she hadn’t awakened, Peter slammed his bedroom door for effect. That worked; she started to roll over and make a noise. Pulling on a pair of pants and a gray sweater that his mother had knitted, he listened for her.

“Hey, Elise, are you awake?” Peter hollered through the wall.

No answer.

“Elise, wake up. You’ve got to be ready for the race, and we’re leaving now.”

He thought she must have been pretending not to hear.
She has to be awake by now.

“Come on, Elise. I’m not going to do your dishes for you if you don’t come through for the race.” He poked his head into her little closet of a room. At that, she sat up, looking very sleepy.

“When are you going to let them go?” she asked, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. Elise was usually a morning person, but not today.

“It’s going to take us about an hour to get up to the Marienlyst Hotel,” he said, feeling more impatient every minute. Henrik was waiting. “Maybe less if we go by the water. Henrik is outside with the birds right now.”

“So what time again?” she asked.

“Okay, listen. It’s quarter to seven now, so we’ll let them go around eight or eight fifteen, or as soon as it’s all clear. Then it will only take Number One and Number Two a few minutes to fly back.”

“What if they take longer?” she asked.

“What if they do? I don’t know. Just be ready down at the boathouse to see which one makes it through the trap door first. Take a clock down with you, too, and write down what time the birds make it back.”

“Okay, Peter,” she grumbled, “but you’re making it too complicated for yourself.”

“But not for your genius brain. Don’t forget, I’m doing your dishes. Just be sure to get it right, okay? The second they poke their little heads into the trap door...”

“Okay, okay, Mr. General. I get the message.”

Peter started for the door.

“Peter, is your friend still outside?” asked his mother. Everybody was up by then, including Elise. “You go tell Henrik to come in for something to eat, if he hasn’t already had breakfast.”

“But, Mom, we’ve got to get riding,” he said, knowing he would not win the argument. Besides, she was heating up a little oatmeal on the stove, and it actually smelled pretty good. Maybe just a bite.

“Ride, nothing. You’re going to get something into your stomach besides a piece of bread. Now go get Henrik.”

A minute later they were all wolfing down bowls of steaming oatmeal topped with a shot of milk. There was no butter to melt over it, but oatmeal was one thing the Andersen family seemed to have plenty of. No one had ever known Henrik to turn down a meal, even though, as he said between mouthfuls, “We really ought to be going.” Mrs. Andersen answered with another spoonful of oatmeal in their bowls. She didn’t need to ask.