All the Way Home (3 page)

Already Loretta was picking pieces of the plates up and dropping them into the garbage can. “Don’t worry, Mariel. I can bake potatoes in the oven if I have to.” She began to smile. “If we ever get a husband in here, we’ll have to make sure he can cook.” She looked around. “We’d have to clean the place up, too.”

“I like the way it looks.” Mariel glanced at the countertop under the windowsill. Loretta had plants everywhere, stuck in jelly glasses and cups that were missing their handles. Hanks of wool cascaded out of a cabinet: fire-engine red, electric blue, sunshine yellow. Loretta spent her spare time knitting. She made mittens, scarves, and snoods, and even argyle socks for her only relative, old Uncle Frank who lived in Butte, Montana.

And the walls! They were covered with pictures, most of Mariel. Some of the others were old and curled on the edges, Loretta’s parents, when they were young, the father with a mustache as big as a brush. It was strange to think of Loretta young with parents. Loretta was there in her white uniform, and even in the picture her cap was on crooked. In an almost straight row over the table were pictures of Loretta’s best friend, Mimi, from nursing school, her cap just as crooked. Pictures of Mimi with her hair long, and then short, Mimi with her husband and her baby boy.

In back of them the radio was tuned to WOR. Mariel could hear the announcer Red Barber’s soft voice and the sound of the crowd.

“Dixie Walker’s up,” Loretta said, slicing a piece of meat into uneven chunks. “Love that boy.” She stopped to pop a piece of meat into her mouth, then pointed up to the magazine pictures of the Dodgers they had taped up over the table.

Mariel moved the
Good Housekeeping
magazine aside and looked down at the plate that Loretta slid onto the oilcloth mat in front of her, a slab of pot roast—“a little dry again,” Loretta said—and a pile of carrots, cold and crunchy. For dessert there’d be a Drake’s cake with white icing that would peel off and melt in her mouth.

Mariel waited for Loretta to sit as Dixie Walker cracked the ball and rounded the bases. She looked up at the calendar: blue letters, a page for every day. She felt her fingers begin to flutter and gripped the fork harder.

Loretta tugged gently at Mariel’s hair. “School won’t be so bad this year, honey. Wait and see. And just think about that picnic tomorrow.”

Mariel
was
thinking about that picnic. Mrs. Warnicki, her new teacher, had sent notes to everyone in the class:
Lemonade, cookies, and games to celebrate our new and wonderful school year
.

Mariel marched a slice of meat around her plate. A schoolyard picnic on the last Tuesday of summer.

“Besides,” Loretta said. “We’re having company.”

Mariel looked up.

“A surprise.” Loretta peeled a strip of icing off the cake for Mariel. “Don’t ask me more than that.” She leaned forward, touching the tip of Mariel’s nose with one finger. “Going to be a whole new year, kiddo.”

A whole new year … like the Dodgers maybe winning the pennant. Outside Geraldine Ginty was screaming about some
razy cray
thing. Mariel tried not to listen. Instead she thought about the Drake’s cake icing melting on her tongue, and the surprise company that was coming.

4

A
strange smell drifted in through the kitchen window even a week after the fire, but the smell was different now; it was almost like licorice. He’d never eat licorice again, Brick thought, as he sat at the table finishing his cereal. He could see Pop outside, standing near the fence, his head down, his hands loose at his sides.

“Go after him,” Mom said, one freckled hand reaching out to brush his shoulder. “I hate to see him like that.”

She stood at the stove, her dark hair curling over her forehead from the heat in the kitchen, her eyes still red from the smoke, or maybe from crying. His mother was an easy crier. She cried at everything, the sun shining on the stream in back of the farm, or a good report card;
she was teary when Pop threw his arms around her to dance to music on the radio.

Brick set his glass in the sink. He went out the back door, going slowly, not knowing what to say to his father, not wanting to look at the orchard any more than he had to. The fire had been much worse here than at Claude’s. Everything was black: poor little trees, nothing but stumps without leaves and branches. And even the earth itself was scorched.

“Pop,” he called.

His father turned, his hair darker than Brick’s, tall, lanky like a baseball player. He almost looked like Pete Reiser. He smiled at Brick, reaching out the way Mom had to touch his shoulder.

Brick opened his mouth to say something he’d been thinking all week, something that he thought of last thing at night, first thing in the morning when he opened his eyes. “I should have come home. If I had been here with you we might have saved our trees.”

Pop looked down at him, blue eyes squinting against the sun. “Is that what you’ve been thinking?”

Brick looked at the oddly shaped tree stumps in front of them. He didn’t answer.

“Do you think,” Pop said, “I’d have been proud of you for walking away from that old man and woman? They’ve been like grandparents to you.”

“I could have helped you,” Brick said, trying to keep his words steady.

Pop put both hands on his shoulders. “You did the
right thing,” he said. “You did what I would have done.”

Brick could feel something easing in his chest, the pain backing away from him.

“There’s something hard I have to tell you.” Pop glanced up toward the kitchen window. Mom was at the sink, looking out at them. He waved at her. “Something I don’t know how to tell your mother.”

Brick looked beyond the orchard to the fields, corn gone, vegetables gone. Last week birds had perched on the feathery plumes, and he’d had to chase the rabbits away from the tight lettuce leaves. But the birds had disappeared, and the rabbits, too, with nothing for them to eat. Everything was quiet and still.

He knew what Pop was going to say. It wouldn’t be the first time they had farmed a piece of land that hadn’t worked. He remembered when they’d tried a place thirty miles away. Brick shivered as he thought of the river, swollen in the rain, that had edged up over its bank just enough to flood the fields and leave soggy land with the spring seed floating in puddles. And before that …

Pop tightened his grip on Brick’s shoulders. “There’s no help for it,” he said. “We’ll have to leave again.”

“Give up the farm?”

“There’s plenty of work off the farm now,” Pop said. “Shipbuilding. Planes. We’re sending them to England, to Russia, as fast as we can. Maybe if they have enough to fight the Nazis we won’t have to go to war.”

“But where will we go? When?”

Pop dropped his hands to his sides. “Soon,” he said. “Just as soon as I can figure it all out.”

Brick wanted to say it wasn’t fair. He wanted to say his father had promised this would be the last move. That was what he had said the last time, though, and the look on his father’s face, that sad terrible look, made him close his mouth over the words.

5

E
ven from the gravel path Brick could hear the rumble of Claude’s voice. Sometimes he spoke French to Julia, who answered in a high rat-tat-tat of a voice, or to Brick, who couldn’t understand a word but would nod anyway.

Brick trudged around to the side of Claude’s house and knocked on the screen. Regal, the dog, waved his tail like a plume and nuzzled Brick’s hand.

Last time
.

Claude and Julia looked up at him and motioned him inside. It was hot in the kitchen, steamy from pots of this and that on the stove: blackberry jam simmering gently in back, corn bubbling hard in front.

Claude sat in his rocker next to the window, wide
hands up, both bandaged from the fire. He kicked at the chair next to him, pushing it out, but Brick shook his head. “I don’t have time.” He could hardly get the words out.

“Going now?” Claude said, not looking at him, looking out instead at the rows of trees. Brick could tell that Claude was having trouble with his words, too. And Julia, shaking her head, turned to the stove, lowering the flame under the corn.

“I wanted to tell you I’m coming back someday.” Brick glanced out the window, seeing what Claude was seeing: the orchard stretching across the hills on both sides and all the way to the fence that separated it from their own farm. Claude’s trees showed the marks of the fire. The trunks were blackened and the leaves sparse, but there were still apples on the branches, red and almost ready to harvest. One thing. They had saved Claude’s trees.

“It’s a hard-luck place,” Claude was saying, “this town of Windy Hill. When we came from Normandy four years ago, we thought things would be better away from Europe and its wars.”

Julia answered with a rattle of French, and then, remembering Brick, said, “We don’t have to hear that now.”

Claude moved heavily in the rocker. “Joseph from over the hill told me that years ago orchards lined the hillside here. Every fall the trucks came with workers to pick apples. Workers singing …”

“Claude, we know all that,” Julia said over her shoulder.

“I’m telling Brick.”

Julia rolled her eyes. “There’s no stopping him.”

Brick knew Claude was trying to fill up the silence, talking in that loud voice of his so they wouldn’t think about his leaving.

“No one comes to pick,” Claude said, a deep crease in his forehead. “Julia can’t climb anymore. There’s only Joseph, who’s mostly useless.” He shook his head. “And who knows if he’ll come?”

“Shhh,” Julia said again.

Claude’s voice trailed off. None of them said anything; none of them could think of anything to say. The sound of the bubbling water on the stove was loud in his ears. Then Brick heard Pop’s whistle. It was time to go back, time to close up the farm and leave.

Julia turned, tears running down her cheeks. “Dear child,” she said, patting Brick’s face.

He reached for her. Julia was so tiny his hands rested easily on her shoulders. Claude got to his feet as if it was an effort and walked around them to take a book off his shelf. His bandaged hands made him awkward and he almost dropped it before he handed it to Brick. “My book on the apple trees,” he said. “It’s marked. Underlined. I know you’ll use it someday.”