Dragonfly Secret (2 page)

“Here we are,” Gramps said suddenly, turning in at a broken-down gate between sagging wooden fence posts. The car rumbled across a rusty cattle guard of iron railings set in the ground, and we stopped in front of a small farmhouse with flaking white paint and a blue-gray roof that was turning green with moss. Gramps shut off the ignition and we sat there in the silence for a minute.

“Well,” he said after a while, “aren't you going to get out and look around?”

Mother and Gramps went up to look at the house. Jessie and I got out and walked toward the barn, our feet squishing a little in the thin layer of mud that covered the path. There was an old pump in the center of the yard, and I stopped to give the handle a few pulls, up and down, up and down. On the third pull I could hear water, and on the fourth it gushed out, rusty at first, but then clear and clean and cold as ice.

Jessie held out her hands, cupped to catch enough to drink. The water splashed on her shoes, but she caught another handful before she stepped back so I could drink, too.

“It's better than lemonade,” I said, wiping my mouth across the sleeve of my shirt.

Jessie giggled. “Maybe it's the fountain of youth and you'll turn into a baby.”

“You drank, too,” I reminded her. “Mother's going to have her hands full taking care of two babies.”

We walked through the barn, breathing the smell of dust and old hay and the scent of animals that had lived here long before we were born. It was dark and cool inside, and a little spooky. The door at the back was nailed shut, but there was a big hole in the bottom, like a dog door. We scrambled through on our hands and knees and found ourselves in an old chicken yard. The wire fence had been pushed down where someone or something had climbed over it, and the gate sagged open.

Across the pasture, we could see a clump of willow trees and a line of dark green marsh plants leading away. “That's where the old spring is,” I told Jessie. “Gramps used to catch frogs out there, and fish, too.” I wondered if the man who rented the farm now to pasture milk cows ever came down here to fish.

I traced the line of reeds and coarse grass that zigzagged through the center of the meadow and on down toward the fence line, where it ran into the ditch beside the road.

“Let's go see if we can catch a frog.”

Jessie followed me out to the spring. The frogs must have spotted us before we spotted them. All we saw were splashes as they dived into the deeper water. The spring was bigger than I remembered, as big as a baseball diamond. There were cattails in clumps along the banks, their furry brown tails beginning to shed sand-colored fluff in the breeze. Here and there I could see big dragonflies, blue and green and as big as my fingers, resting on leaves or hovering over the water like helicopters.

“Let's catch a dragonfly instead of a frog!” Jessie called to me.

I laughed. “Go ahead and try. They're the fastest things you'll ever see when they decide to move.”

She didn't believe me, and tried to sneak up on one that was sitting motionless, its four glass-clear wings outspread and glittering in the sunshine. She was inches away when it moved off as sudden and silent as a puff of wind.

I laughed again. “Don't be scared. They don't bite or sting or anything. They'd rather get away than fight.”

Jessie came over and sat on the grass beside me. I plucked a blade of grass and showed her how to hold it between her thumbs and blow a loud shriek of sound you could hear for a mile. We both jumped when another whistle answered from right behind us.

“Got you good that time, didn't I?” Gramps said with a grin. “I was going to show you how to make a grass whistle, but I guess I did that before, didn't I?”

I grinned back. “A time or two. This seems like a good place to try it out. No neighbors to bother.” I thought of the last time I'd done it at home. Mrs. Pruitt next door had stuck her head out the window and yelled at me for waking up her baby. Gramps had yelled back at her until she slammed the window shut.

“No neighbors at all,” Gramps agreed. “At least not the bothersome kind.”

Mother came up and put her hand on one of his, like a little girl. “I thought I might find you all out here. I used to love this spot when I was a kid. I always thought it felt like a magical place.”

She sighed, and I wondered if she was thinking the same thing I was, that the magic seemed to be working on Gramps. I hadn't seen him so mellow for a long time. I hoped the mood would last after we got back home. It seemed a shame the way he went around angry at the world all the time.

I wished we could stay forever, just sitting there in the sunshine and listening to the drone of the dragonflies and the song of grasshoppers in the lush grass of the meadow.

Gramps tossed his blade of grass aside and looked up at the sky. “Getting late. We've got to be going.”

None of us said anything as we walked back to the car. I guess we were all thinking pretty much the same thing, wishing the magic of that moment would never end. We didn't know it then, but the magic hadn't even started.

G
ramps's mood grew darker as we left the farm. He was already frowning when he turned out of the yard onto the narrow road, charging off in a shower of gravel. He was scowling by the time we reached the highway. So much for magic, I thought.

“Slow down, Dad,” Mother cautioned. “You don't want to get a ticket.”

“I was driving before you were born,” he retorted. “You don't need to go lecturing me now.”

Mother pressed her lips into a hard white line. She didn't say anything after that, even when he turned the corner a few blocks from our house so fast the tires squealed.

As we pulled into the driveway, Mrs. Pruitt's big gray cat slunk across our yard and dived into Mother's flower bed. Gramps yanked the car door open, grabbed a handful of gravel from the edge of the driveway, and threw it at the cat.

“Git out of here, you mangy critter! Go piss on your own porch!”

Mrs. Pruitt was standing on her front step, talking to somebody who looked to me like she was selling lipstick or something. They stared at us, and Mrs. Pruitt looked angry as her dish-mop of a cat came running and jumped into her arms.

Mother's face flushed red. “Go change your clothes and help Dad unload the car, Nathan,” she told me as I climbed out.

“I ain't helpless, Kate,” Gramps growled. “I can take care of the car by myself.”

Mother looked at me and I nodded without a word. It wasn't that Gramps couldn't do it himself. It was just the polite thing for me to help him, even if he didn't act as if he wanted me to.

“He always acts like this on his birthday,” Mother said when we were in the house and out of earshot of Gramps. “He doesn't like to be reminded that he's getting old.”

I thought of what I'd heard Aunt Louise say that afternoon. I wouldn't want to be reminded of that, either. I'm still a kid, so I have to do what grown-ups tell me to do, but I don't have to like it. I thought it would be twice as bad to be a grown-up and have people make decisions for you, as if you couldn't think straight anymore.

“I'll go help him right away,” I said, and hurried to my room to change out of the good clothes I had put on for our visit to Aunt Louise.

We have an old house, with scruffy wood siding that needs paint and a roof that leaks a little over the living room, but it's big enough so we can each have our own room. My room has a window right by the driveway, so I could hear

Gramps bang open the hood to check the oil and radiator the way he always does before he puts the car away.

He started swearing the way he had at Aunt Louise's lawn mower, and it took me a minute to figure out that the car needed oil. It was quiet while he went into the storage shed to get it, and then he started in again, yelling that some so-and-so had stolen the can opener off its hook by the door. I hurried.

Mother shook her head as I went back through the kitchen. “Maybe Louise is right. He's not happy here.”

I skidded to a stop. “You know that's not true. He cusses the way some people whistle. It doesn't mean anything.”

Mother smiled. “For a twelve-year-old, you're pretty smart.”

The angry muttering from the driveway paused, and I heard the sound of running water. “He's going to wash the bugs off the windshield. I can help with that.” I ran out the back door, closing the screen behind me.

I could see Gramps standing in front of the car, with the hose in one hand. He wasn't washing the car, though. The water was running down the driveway. He had stopped swearing, and I heard a funny sound. I got almost up to him before I figured out what it was. He was moaning, the way people do when they get real bad news, like they have some horrible disease, or somebody they know died. When I got to where I could see his face, there were tears streaming down his cheeks.

“Gramps! What's the matter?” All I could think of was what Aunt Louise had said to Mother. I didn't think she could make Gramps move away, but maybe she could. Maybe Gramps knew it was going to happen.

He turned toward me, still holding the hose in one hand, not even noticing that he was squirting water all over me. I ducked out of the way behind the car. Mrs. Pruitt and the strange lady were still standing next door. They probably thought he did it on purpose.

“I killed her,” Gramps said, moaning again. “If I hadn't been going so fast she might have gotten away, but she couldn't fly that fast. I killed her.”

I glanced next door. Thank goodness they were too far away to make out what he was saying. Mrs. Pruitt would have told half the neighborhood Gramps was a murderer if she had heard that.

“Don't be silly, Gramps,” I said, turning off the water. “You didn't kill anybody.” I'd never seen him like this before. He never apologized, even when everyone else figured he was in the wrong, which was part of why he had so few friends. Now he was acting like the sorriest person on earth. “What are you talking about?”

He didn't answer. Instead, he held out his hand, and I caught a glimpse of crumpled crystal wings and a dark head. A dragonfly, I thought. All this over a stupid bug.

“It's all right, Gramps,” I told him, wondering why he thought it mattered so much. “You couldn't have known. It wasn't your fault.”

He dropped the hose and cupped his other hand close over the bent wings. “She's dead,” he cried, with such anguish that I suddenly wondered if Aunt Louise was right after all.

Then I got a glimpse of what he was holding in his hand. It wasn't a dragonfly at all. The wings were dragonfly wings, dark-veined and clear as window glass. The head was wrong, though. The huge eyes that bulge out and cover most of a dragonfly's head looked more like intricate coils of tiny braids. The front feet, much bigger than those of any insect I'd ever seen, clutched something close to the body.

And the body—

“It looks human!” I blurted.

Gramps nodded, then shook his head. “Not exactly human, Nathan.”

I bent over his hands, peering down at the creature. It was certainly no ordinary bug. The body was almost the size of one of Gramps's bony fingers, but it—she—was definitely shaped like a person.

Gramps started to tremble. “I killed her. If only . . .”

I didn't interrupt him this time. I knew how he felt. It was awful to find something so strange and wonderful only because it was crushed on your car. It made me feel as sad as he sounded.

“What did you find, Gramps?” I had been so involved with the strange thing that I hadn't noticed Jessie coming up behind us. I tried to block her so she wouldn't see it, but she pushed between us and peered into his hands. “A fairy!”

Gramps shook his head and opened his mouth to say something, but I never found out what it was, because right then the tiny creature twitched and tried to sit up.

“M
other! Come see what we found!” Jessie called.

Mother appeared at the back door, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “What's up?”

“We found . . .” Jessie started.

“Better just come see, Kate,” Gramps interrupted.

She started toward us but stopped as the lady who had been talking to Mrs. Pruitt walked across the yard toward us. “Oh, no. Not now,” Mom muttered.

The lady wore a brown skirt and jacket with a red blouse. It wasn't a suit, exactly, but it looked businesslike, somehow, and she had a clipboard with papers on it in one hand.

“Gol-durned salesmen,” Gramps grumbled. “Can't never leave a body a minute's peace.”

Mom turned to me. “Nathan, have you been playing with the hose again? Put it away, please.”

I stared at her. I opened my mouth to say that Gramps had been using it to wash off the car, but she knew that. She looked worried, and I wondered why. It was just somebody trying to sell her perfume and stuff. Why didn't she just say she wasn't interested the way she usually does?

I closed my mouth and put the hose away while she went out to meet the lady. They talked a minute and then went in the house.

Jessie was still standing beside Gramps, who had his hands cupped nearly closed one over the other. “We'd best take this critter somewhere less public,” he said in a low voice. “I'd hate to see her treated like some sideshow freak for everybody to gawk at.”

Jessie nodded, her eyes wide. “How about my room? She can live in my dollhouse.”

Gramps's face softened with the look that usually meant he was about to ruffle your hair with his fingers, but his hands were busy with their fragile captive. “I don't think so, honey. This is a wild thing. It's not used to houses. And it's hurt. We need to put it somewhere it can't move around too much.”

“How about my lizard cage?” I suggested. “It's clean and dry and about the right size.”