The Ghosts of Stone Hollow (6 page)

By afternoon everyone was talking about what Gordie was going to do to the new boy after school. Gordie was telling everyone that he was going to wait in the bushes until the sissy came by on his way home from school. By three o’clock everyone in the room knew about it, except Miss McMillan and Jason himself.

When the dismissal bell rang in Miss McMillan’s class, you cleaned up your desk and then raised your hand for the desk monitor to come around and inspect. If your desk was clean enough, you were dismissed. Watching Jason stacking a pile of books and papers on the corner of his desk so he could wipe it out with a paper towel, Amy suddenly wadded up a scrap of something and started with it to the wastepaper basket. On the way she brushed against Jason’s desk and shoved his things off onto the floor. Everyone who saw it grinned, knowing she’d done it on purpose. Then she went back to her desk and carefully arranged and rearranged her own books. By the time Jason had picked up his books and all the scattered pieces of paper, they were the only ones left in the room. Then Amy went to the cloakroom and stayed there, waiting.

He came at last and seeing her he started to smile, but she grabbed his arm and whispered at him fiercely.

“Stay here for a minute,” she hissed. “Then look out the door. I’ll be out by the swings. If I’m swinging, go back in and wait a while longer, but if I’m just standing there, come on out and run down and wait behind the janitor’s shed. Okay?”

Jason stared blankly for just a moment before his face convulsed into his babyishly eager smile. “All right,” he said. “I’ll wait for your signal, and then I’ll advance to the next rendezvous.” And then as Amy turned to go, he whispered, “What are we playing?”

“Playing?” Amy said. “We’re not playing anything. Gordie’s laying for you, that’s all.”

She ran out quickly, before his smile had time to disappear.

The schoolyard seemed to be empty, but Amy checked the driveway and the front steps to see if Gordie had posted any spies before she made her way to the swings. Waiting there, she saw the door to Miss McMillan’s room open. Jason came out, looked in her direction, and then ran toward the shed. Amy followed slowly, looking carefully around for any sign of spies or watchers. She was taking a risk. Not only Gordie, but also a lot of the others, would give her trouble if they found out. She didn’t really know why she was doing it. Except that she hated Gordie, and the new boy was so—helpless. She pictured him cowering behind the shed, waiting for her to come and tell him what to do.

Only he wasn’t. When she reached the shed, he bounded out at her and said, “Advance and give the password.”

Amy frowned. “Look. I told you, it’s no game. Gordie and some other guys are waiting for you somewhere along the road. But I know a way you may get past them. It’s kind of a long-cut down the riverbed and then up across the Paulsens’ orchard. It comes out halfway down Bradley Lane. You ought to be all right if you get that far without getting caught.”

She started off fast not looking at him or speaking. It was strange; he didn’t seem grateful that she was helping him, or even too scared. It was as if he were just too dumb to realize what would have happened if she hadn’t. As if he didn’t realize, too, what would happen to
her
if anybody found out. Most of the kids wouldn’t hit her, the way Gordie might, but they had other ways of letting you know when you had done something you were not supposed to do. And one of those things was siding with a stranger against your friends. Amy walked quickly, looking back from time to time and frowning, so Jason wouldn’t try to walk beside her and talk. By the time they reached the riverbed, and were picking their way among the rocks between the cliff and the edge of the water, he had stopped trying to talk to her. He was walking several yards behind, and before long he began to act very strangely. Glancing back over her shoulder, Amy saw him walking on tiptoe, and then dropping to his knees from time to time and staring at the ground. She walked more slowly and at last stopped.

“What were you doing?” she asked when he caught up.

“Doing?” he said. “Oh, back there? That was an Indian. Sometimes I’m an Indian guide.”

“Oh?” Thinking she understood, Amy nodded, relieved that that was all, but puzzled and amused that he didn’t seem at all embarrassed to admit it. It had been years since she had admitted to anyone about things like that, things she still did—like Gold Rush Pioneers or Camel Caravan. If she still played pretending games in the sixth grade she, at least, had enough sense not to let anyone know. “Oh,” she said again, making a teasing smile. “You were playing Indian. Do you play cowboy sometimes, too?”

“It’s not playing, exactly.” Jason said. He sounded serious, not teased or angry, but thoughtful “Not playing. I really become an Indian, sometimes. It’s something a friend of mine in Greece taught me how to do.”

Amy could only stare, bewildered and then angry. “You were
playing!”
she said. “Look! You don’t have to lie to me. I do it, too. All the time.” She hadn’t meant to tell, but it had slipped out because she was angry. He kept doing that—making her get angry and do things she hadn’t planned or meant to do.

At least he didn’t tease back. He only looked interested and asked her how she did it. And somehow, there they were, walking along the riverbed, side by side, while Amy told him about the Pioneer game—how she usually played it, and how it was based on a book she read once about a girl whose father had gone west with the gold rush and had never been heard from since, and how the girl was on her way west with a pioneer train to see if she could find him.

At a spot where the cliff was low, a narrow path led up from the riverbed to a part of the Paulsen ranch. They climbed the cliff together, still talking. It turned out that Jason had read a lot about the pioneers, too. He knew about the Jumping-Off Place and the Santa Fe Trail and the Donner party and even things that Amy wasn’t too sure about, like which Indian tribes were friendly and which were not. They were discussing whether horses or mules or oxen were best to pull covered wagons when they reached the top of the low hill on which the Paulsens’ orchard had been planted. From that vantage point, the part of the Old Road that curved west around the Paulsen land could be seen. At the end of the curve, the intersection of the Old Road and Bradley Lane were just visible.

“Shh!” Amy said. “Look.”

Standing where a thick row of eucalyptus trees hid them from the road, three boys were in plain sight from the top of the orchard hill. They were peering out, occasionally, to see if anyone was coming up the road. It was funny—spying down on the spies, as they laid in wait. Amy couldn’t help laughing; and Jason laughed, too, so noisily that it scared Amy for a minute, for fear Gordie and his friends might hear.

Two girls appeared then, walking along the road toward the crossroads. By squinting her eyes a little, Amy could see that it was Alice and Shirley—coming, no doubt, to see what happened when Gordie caught the new boy away from school. Alice and Shirley knew more—and talked more—about other people and their business than anyone else in Taylor Springs. Suddenly Amy could just imagine what they would say if they glanced up the hill and saw her there—way out in the orchard with the crazy new boy. She grabbed Jason’s arm and pulled him back out of sight.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here before they see us.”

She didn’t feel like talking after that, so they walked in silence until they reached Bradley Lane, only a short way from where Jason lived.

“Good-bye,” she said. “I have to go back now all the way, because if they see me coming out of Bradley Lane they’ll get suspicious. I’m going to be very late getting home, and I’ll probably get in trouble.”

“Thank you,” he said, “for showing me the way. If you can come over on Saturday or Sunday, I’ll show
you
the way somewhere.”

“Where?” Amy asked quickly.

“Up there.” Jason motioned toward the Hills. “Up there where the old house is—in the stony valley.”

“Stone Hollow?” Amy said angrily. “Look. I don’t want to go to Stone Hollow. I already know how to get there, but I’m not going to go there. Not ever. I’m not crazy.”

She started home then. Back along the long-cut and all the long way home, her mind kept returning to Stone Hollow and what might, or might not, happen if she should decide to go there someday. As she walked down the Old Road, she kept looking up, over her left shoulder to where the Hills began, in a rolling tumble of foothills, piling upward into the steep slopes beyond.

After a while she began, to run, and she did not stop until she reached the front gate at the Hunter farm.

T
HERE WAS ONLY THE
one church in Taylor Springs. There had been another once, a Catholic church, but it had burned down. Since that time a visiting priest held masses now and then in the Grange Hall for the Catholics of the valley—mostly Mexican or Basque families who worked on farms and ranches in the outlying areas. But when most of the people of Taylor Springs spoke of church, they meant the Fairchild Community Church, an old brown shingled structure on Grant Street, not far from the center of town.

Everybody in Taylor Springs went to church. Some of them went more often than others, of course, but nearly everyone went at least now and then. Besides Grandpa Simmons, who wasn’t allowed anymore because he forgot where he was and talked out loud about embarrassing things, Amy knew of only two others who never went to church at all. One of them was Old Ike, Aunt Abigail’s hired man, and the other was Daniel Polonski, Amy’s father. Nobody knew why Old Ike didn’t go to church, but Amy’s father said he didn’t go because he felt the Polonski family put in plenty of church hours without him wheeling himself down the aisle every Sunday. He was referring to the fact that Amy’s mother went to church a lot—probably more than anyone else in the whole valley, except perhaps the Reverend Dawson himself.

On Sunday mornings Helen Polonski went to Sunday School and the worship service that followed, and then on Sunday evenings she went to the youth meeting as a sponsor and stayed on for the evening service. During the week she went to prayer meeting and Bible study and missionary sewing circle and twice to choir practice. Amy would probably have gone to everything, too, if it hadn’t been for Aunt Abigail.

Abigail Hunter usually went to Sunday morning service, unless a noisy visiting revivalist was speaking, and she also went every Thursday afternoon to sew for the missionaries. But that was all. And she insisted that Sunday morning was enough time for Amy to spend in church. It was the one subject on which Amy’s aunt and father agreed. Not that they would have thought of it as an agreement—but the results were the same. Aunt Abigail said, “Too much church can be as bad as too little, Helen. Remember what happened to that pious Paulsen boy.” And Amy’s father said, “Stay home with me, Baby. We got enough saints in the family already.” But it was enough like an agreement to keep Amy from going to church as much as she might otherwise have had to.

Actually, Amy knew of one other subject on which her aunt and father agreed, and that was the town of Taylor Springs. According to Aunt Abigail, Taylor Springs was a typical backwoods town full of narrow-minded superstitions, and besides that it was a trap.

“Yes, a trap, Amy Abigail,” she said. “Oh, it’s fine for some people, but it’s not the place for someone with energy and ability. I want you to promise me that you’ll get away from here as soon as you’re old enough to be on your own.”

“But I like it here,” Amy had said. “And besides I’ll be leaving pretty soon anyway. Just as soon as Daddy gets an office job and—”

“Well, perhaps. But don’t wait for that to happen. Don’t wait too long, the way I did.”

It was plain that Aunt Abigail felt that she had been trapped in Taylor Springs. And although Amy’s father didn’t talk about it, Amy knew he felt the same way. But no one else that Amy knew felt that way about Taylor Springs. Just about everyone else agreed that Taylor Springs was a great place to live. And it was also pretty much agreed upon that you could tell how good a person was by the amount of time he spent in church. Sometimes Amy resolved to start going more often, but usually she only went when she had to, on Sunday mornings.

It was during church on the Sunday morning after she had met Jason Fitzmaurice that Amy made an important decision. It was not the kind of decision one might expect to make in church, involving as it did deception and disobedience and perhaps some other sins as well. And it might not have happened at all if the Reverend Dawson hadn’t chosen that morning to preach one of his sermons on alcohol.

As soon as he began on the text for the day—Proverbs 23:21: “For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty—” Amy knew most of what he was going to say in the next forty minutes. She knew because she had heard the Reverend’s alcohol sermons many times before, although she always tried very hard not to listen to them. She had tried various ways of not listening, and had discovered that to simply concentrate on not listening didn’t work at all. The best way not to listen she had found was to do what Aunt Abigail called “wool-gathering.”

Wool-gathering was simply letting your mind get involved with a subject interesting and complicated enough to keep you from thinking about what you were supposed to be hearing. Amy did it quite a bit without even trying. One of her favorite subjects to wool-gather about was the Lilliputians. Since she had finished reading
Gulliver’s Travels,
she had invented her own colony of Lilliputians, who lived in various places around the Hunter farm, where she could protect and care for them and rescue them from all kinds of dangers. There were five families of them and she knew all about each of them, their names and ages and special characteristics.

Thinking about the Lilliputians was usually interesting enough to hold Amy’s attention no matter what the circumstances, but the Reverend Dawson’s alcohol sermon made even the best wool-gathering difficult to maintain. The Reverend tended to become, not only very dramatic, but also very loud when he talked about the evils of drink, and words and phrases kept breaking through. Bits and pieces of terrible tragic stories about the victims of alcohol kept creeping through into Amy’s consciousness, and along with them, as she had known it would, came the memory of a long succession of brown paper bags.