The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg (5 page)

T
HE HOUSE ON THE HILL
gets bigger and bigger the closer I get. There are puffy white clouds reflected in the windows and the clouds are moving against the sky, and that makes it look like the whole house is moving, too. It’s like I can feel the earth turning and have to be careful where to put my feet. The whole thing makes me so dizzy that the gentle green hill seems to get steeper and steeper and finally it tips up and I’m facedown in the grass.

Fainted from lack of food. All that talk about biscuits and butter and honey, it must have reminded my stomach that it hasn’t had food since I wolfed down the slops intended for Squint’s hogs, and started the whole terrible business of Harold getting sold to the army.

Soft, soft grass. Better than a pillow. Makes me forget I’m hungry, makes me forget everything.

Next thing I’m floating. No, not floating, I’m being carried, and there are gentle murmuring voices that sound like running water, and then I’m in a warm place and somebody is holding a cup to my lips and telling me to drink.

“Just a small sip,” the voice says, and for a moment I think it’s our Dear Mother and then I wake up and see big gray eyes studying me. Big gray eyes and rosy red cheeks and a helmet of fine white hair. “Turkey broth,” she says. “Good for what ails you.”

The lady with the gray eyes helps me sit up. She holds the cup while I sip the broth. Nothing ever tasted so good or made me feel so warm and safe and alive.

“Do you know where you are?” she asks.

“Big house,” I say.

“The Brewster house,” she explains. “I’m Mrs. Bean.”

“Brewster bean,” my tongue says.

“I’m the cook hereabouts,” she gently explains, “and when they find a starving boy in the front yard, it’s only natural they bring him to me.”

Mrs. Bean takes the empty cup and says there’s more where that came from, when I’m ready. She folds her plump arms and looks at me kind of sideways, as if trying to see inside my head. “Are you simple, dear? Or is it hunger makes you ramble?”

I take a deep breath and try to clear my head. Then I tell her who I am, like Smelt suggested, and that I’m looking for my brother, and that my horse got stolen, and leave out where I come from exactly, so nobody can send for Squinton Leach.

Seems like Mrs. Bean believes most of it because she starts nodding and saying, “Oh dear, oh dear,” and I decide it’s time to shed a tear or two for my lost brother, to really make her believe me, and the next thing I know she’s hugging me and patting my head and promising that Mr. Brewster will find Harold.

“When Jebediah Brewster sets his mind to a thing, watch out!” she declares, dusting at her white apron. “Mr. Brewster will be back later, and you’ll tell him what you told me. Orphan boy searching for his brother. That will get his attention.”

Meantime Mrs. Bean makes it her mission to fill my belly. She asks would I rather have a plate of meat and gravy, or pancakes and bacon, and I go for the pancakes. While the bacon is sizzling in the big iron fry pan, the kind our Dear Mother called a “spider,” I sit next to the stove and watch, because Mrs. Bean, she’s something to see, the way her plump hands fly around the room like pale white birds, bringing things out of cupboards and jars and larder boxes.

“Can’t help notice you lack shoes,” she says, stirring flour into a blue mixing bowl. “Did you lose them along the way?”

Figure there’s been enough truth for one day, so I say, “Yes, ma’am. Lovely pair of boots, made from the skin of a timber rattler.”

“A rattlesnake! Oh my!”

“Yes, ma’am. Snake had me cornered when Harold wrassled it to death. Snake tried to spit in his eyes and blind him, but Harold was too quick. Broke its neck with one flick of his wrist.”

“Amazing,” she says. “A snake with a neck.”

“Must have been thirty foot long.”

Mrs. Bean nods. A little puff of flour comes up from the bowl. “And then your brother skinned the snake and made you boots, is that what you’re telling me?”

I thought about that, and decided modification was in order. “Not exactly. Fact is, Harold did skin the beast, but I made the boots myself. Had a matching belt, too. They took everything.”

“The thieves who stole your horse. What did you call that horse, now? King something or other.”

“Prince Bob. Bob’s a thoroughbred racehorse. Three years old and faster than a bee sting.”

“Remarkable,” says Mrs. Bean. “And where was it you said you came from?”

“Oh, up in the north,” I say vaguely. “Little no-account place.”

“Yes, but it must have a name, mustn’t it? Every place has a name, no matter how small.”

“Smelt,” I tell her in a moment of inspiration.

“Excuse me?”

“Smelt. That’s what they call it. On account of the swamp nearby.”

I’m congratulating myself for not calling it Stink. Stink would be too much to believe, but Smelt is subtle. Smelt is rarified.

“Never heard of Smelt,” Mrs. Bean allows, fixing her calm gray eyes on me. “Thought I knew every village in the state of Maine, at least by name. But I’ve never heard of Smelt.”

I almost say that Smelt had never heard of her, either, but think better of it. Nothing like the prospect of pancakes to make me smart-mouthed and sassy.

Mouth shut, I take the time to survey Mrs. Bean’s magnificent kitchen. The room is bigger than Squint’s whole house, with a fry stove and a bake stove and a full fireplace with a Dutch oven. Pantry has more canned goods than the general store in Pine Swamp, and there are three different slate sinks, one for washing dishes and one for rinsing vegetables, and one just for the heck of it, I guess. Loads of cupboards with glass fronts, copper pots of every size, rock-maple countertops, a butter urn Mrs. Bean says belongs in a museum. And drawers. There are big drawers and little drawers and bread drawers and knife drawers, and linen drawers, and drawers for extra things left over.

Mrs. Bean suggests I stop opening and closing the drawers and sit down to pancakes and bacon. She pulls out a chair and scoots me up to the kitchen table. There on a big white china plate is a pile of pancakes I only ever dreamed about, because Squint never gave us more than stale bread and sour molasses. Pancakes slathered in yellow butter. Steaming pancakes drowned in warm maple syrup.

Figure Smelt must have killed me for sure, and I’ve woke up in Heaven. Or maybe I’m still so hungry I can’t think straight. Then I decide that good as the pancakes taste, this can’t be Heaven because there aren’t any clouds or golden harps or angels with whispery wings. And God would be there, too, wouldn’t He, if this was really Heaven?

That’s when he comes in from the parlor, dressed all in black. God Himself.

T
HE MAN WHO LOOKS LIKE
God Himself is Jebediah Brewster, owner of the house. He’s got a long, flowing white beard, piercing blue eyes, and a booming voice that rattles the china when he bellows, “Hello!” A voice that freezes my brain and makes it hard to answer simple questions like, “What be thy name, son?” and “Where be thy home?”

Quaker talk.

“The young scallywag calls himself Homer and says he’s from a place called Smelt,” says Mrs. Bean, weighing in. “The only truthful part of him is the part that’s hungry.”

“Smelt, hey? Very interesting,” Mr. Brewster responds in his kindly way. “All God’s children are from somewhere. The precise location matters not. Thee be welcome in this house, Homer, whoever thee be and whatever has brought thee here.”

Mr. Brewster sits down at the table, adjusts his black water sleeves, and announces that he will have a glass of cold water, if Mrs. Bean will be so kind as to oblige. He thanks her, takes the glass in both hands, and drinks it in three long gulps. His big throat moves under his beard and you can hear the water going down, like it was leaking out of an old hand pump.

“The finest spring water,” he announces, dabbing delicately at his beard with a linen napkin. “That’s what drew me to this particular location. Clear, cold spring water, steeped in the best minerals. It keeps the guts healthy and purifies the blood. I intended to bottle it as an elixir, and sell it by the drop, but in digging out the spring we encountered gemstones, and that became my business. Just one of the Lord’s many surprises.”

Mr. Brewster then folds his long-fingered hands like he’s praying, and studies me for a while. As if he’s looking at my soul, if I got one, and finds it wanting. Makes me fit to fidget, being studied like that, but I manage to hold still. Because both of ’em are waiting for me to tell a lie, I can sense that much.

“Does thee know much about gemstones, Homer?” Mr. Brewster asks, sweet as can be.

Something in me wants to say my third cousin Curtis McTavit has been trading gems for his whole life, and recently come into possession of the world’s largest ruby that he got off the widow of Blackbeard the pirate, but that the ruby is cursed. Ever since he got the ruby, poor McTavit lives in fear. He’s barricaded himself inside his own dungeon and believes that the ruby speaks to him in the ghostly voices of all it has cursed. Course I don’t have a cousin named Curtis McTavit, or any cousin I’m aware of, and I clamp my jaw shut until the urge passes.

“He’s gone quiet,” Mrs. Bean observes suspiciously. “Maybe it was starving made him talk so.”

Mr. Brewster takes a deep breath and nods to himself, as if satisfied. “Homer Figg,” he announces. “Thee may be an innocent stranger or thee may be a spy sent by those who oppose us, but one thing is clear to me. God has a hand in this, and He would not have us turn away a hungry child.”

Mrs. Bean smiles at me and shrugs. I get the idea that nothing Mr. Brewster does surprises her.

“Come along, son,” he says, standing up, “and thee will be shown the secret of Brewster Mines.”

“The boy needs a bath,” Mrs. Bean points out. “I doubt he’s had a bath this year. And maybe last year, too.”

“After he surveys the mine,” says Mr. Brewster, clamping his hand on my shoulder. “After he’s seen our amazing mine thee can scrub him until he bleeds.”

I’m hoping that’s just more Quaker talk, but Mrs. Bean has a soapy kind of gleam in her eye. Before I have time to make plans for escape, Mr. Brewster is marching me out the door and into the long grass. We’re going uphill, away from the big house, away from the warm kitchen, and the sky is so thin and cool and blue it makes me feel a little out of breath somehow.

Pretty soon we come to a path, worn into ruts by wagon wheels, and then to a set of rusty iron rails hammered into the hillside. We follow the rails. From around the bend comes the gentle murmur of flowing water, but sound must be tricky in these hills because I never do see the water.

All the while Mr. Brewster’s big voice never stops booming and it comes to me that he couldn’t keep a secret even if it killed him, because secrets are related to lies, and I doubt Mr. Brewster ever lied in his whole life. Which reminds me of my brother, Harold, who is probably halfway to the war by now, and worrying about that makes it hard to concentrate on all the things Mr. Brewster is saying about gemstones and mines, and why God has put us on earth, and how He tests us.

“So I searched for healing water and instead found the rainbow,” he’s saying. “Not a pot of gold exactly, but a vast deposit of tourmaline, which comes in all the colors of the rainbow.”

Tourmaline. Sounds like a pirate name to me. Must be I got pirates on the brain for some reason. But Mr. Brewster explains that tourmaline is a gemstone used in costume jewelry. When polished it shines like diamonds or rubies or emeralds, depending on how it’s cut.

“Tourmaline brought me great wealth,” he says. “It did not bring me wisdom or show me the path. It was God who provided wisdom, and Frederick Douglass who showed me the path.”

Before he can explain, we come upon the mine itself. I’ve been expecting a proper tunnel cut into the side of the mountain, like I’ve seen in storybooks, but Mr. Brewster’s mine is more like a big pit in the ground. We’re looking down on some rusty tin roofs and a bunch of rickety-looking shacks where the miners work, prying hunks of rock from the ground and cutting out the raw gemstone. Except there are no miners working, there’s no one at all.

Mr. Brewster guides me down a narrow little pathway into the empty pit.

“This is the secret of Brewster Mines,” he announces, quite happily. “We ceased production two years ago, when the war started.”

“But why is that a secret?” I ask.

“Because the mine remains active,” he says mysteriously. “It is convenient if the world assumes that the activity is related to mining. Folks think we provide lead and copper to the Union Army. That is not true, and I pray for forgiveness for letting it stand without correction. Because my untruthfulness is in the service of a greater good.”

For once in my life I keep my mouth shut and wait for him to tell me whatever it is he wants to say. I assume he’s going to confess there are fugitive slaves hid in the mines somewhere, like Smelt said, but I’m not supposed to know that, so I got to be ready to act surprised when it comes out.

Only it don’t come out, not exactly.