The Thanksgiving Treasure (2 page)

By this time in November, the Nebraska weather was getting snapping cold. The leaves were down off the trees, the sky was bright, fall blue, and the wind came whipping across the plains, carrying hints of snow from the tops of the Rockies to the West. It was no time to go out biking unprepared.

I had struggled into almost everything when Carla Mae arrived. She was so bundled up that my Grandmother hardly recognized her when she came in the front door.

“Zattie rettie?” Carla Mae asked.

“My land, Carla Mae,” Grandma laughed. “Can't understand a word you're saying. Take off that muffler.”

Grandma helped Carla Mae unwind part of the long, wool scarf that covered her chin and mouth.

“Is Addie ready?” Carla Mae repeated.

“I'm coming!” I screamed from the bedroom, and waddled out to the living room, dragging my boots and jacket with me.

Carla Mae and I giggled at the sight of each other.

“You look like a penguin,” she snorted.

“Well, you look like a fat pig,” I laughed back at her.

We both hopped and staggered around the living room, making horrible animal noises, while Grandma stood by shaking her head in amusement.

Carla Mae and I were best friends. She was eleven years old too, and lived in the house next door to me. Her family had moved there three years ago, in 1944, and we had been pals ever since. We were always at each other's houses, having lunch or dinner together and playing cards or building snowmen or just sitting around and giggling a lot. I loved going to Carla Mae's house because she had six younger brothers and sisters, and the place was always in a happy uproar.

My house was just the opposite: very quiet and orderly, with just Dad, Grandma and me. I think Carla Mae kind of liked the contrast at my house too. It was small, only a little four-room bungalow, but at our house we could play Monopoly without having a couple of babies crawling across the board upsetting the hotels and trying to eat all the money.

Our house seemed almost threadbare, compared to some others, but I knew it wasn't because we were poor. It was just that Dad believed in getting his money's worth out of everything. We had had the same kitchen linoleum and the old maple table and chairs since I could remember. And Grandma still cooked on an old, black, wood-burning range, while most other people in town had modern gas stoves. Our kitchen hadn't been modernized in any way. We still kept dishes in an old, brown hutch and had the kind of refrigerator with a motor chugging away on top.

The living room was spare too, with just one prickly brown horsehair sofa, Grandma's rocker, Dad's big easy chair and a little writing desk where we each had private drawers of belongings. A braided rag rug covered the living room linoleum, and lace curtains hung at the windows. Grandma was in charge of the “decorating,” which consisted of a fancy cake plate propped up on the mantel, a cut-glass vase and a conch shell brought from Florida by a well-traveled aunt of mine. There were a few pictures on the wall: some New England snow scenes, a print of “The Angelus,” and a fat baby picture of me which I found very embarrassing.

Our house was always neat as a pin, because Dad couldn't stand disorder, and no one was allowed to leave any personal belonging lying about out of place. I was glad no one was allowed to look in my private drawers in the writing desk, because they were a real jumble. That was how I did my part in keeping the rest of the house neat.

Carla Mae and I went over our check list one more time before we prepared for departure. We had newspapers and string for wrapping all the things up and tying them to the baskets of our bikes. My grandmother loaned us an old pair of scissors to cut with, and I took along my Girl Scout camping knife just in case. We would be gone most of the morning, so Grandma gave us oatmeal-raisin cookies tied up in wax paper for an energy snack.

I could always depend on Grandma to come up with something like cookies at the right time. She may have been a good sixty years older than I, but she understood me very well, and seemed to take pleasure in a lot of the things I found exciting. Since she was home all day, I actually spent more time with her than with Dad, and she influenced me in ways that I never realized until years later. She would sometimes disagree with me, but I never fought with her the way I did with Dad, and she was always there to help me over the rough spots. It was much easier for her to show affection than it was for Dad, and when she knew I was having a hard time getting through to him, she was always there to make up for it. Of course, that didn't mean that she let me get away with much. On the contrary.

“Now don't go riding too far out of town,” said Grandma. “And stay off the highway. You remember what your dad told you.”

“Yes, Grandma.” I had heard it all before, and knew it by heart.

“And don't get into any poison ivy or poison sumac,” she said.

“Yes, Grandma.”

“And be sure and stay bundled up good.”

“Yes, Grandma.”

I knew very well I wasn't supposed to ride too far out of town, but Carla Mae and I always did it anyway when there was something really important at stake, and our fall bouquets were really important. This was an annual adventure for us, and we would bring back cattails, milkweed pods, bittersweet, thistles and red and gold leaves to make our special artistic arrangements. The most artistic bouquet would go to our sixth grade teacher, Miss Thompson, and the other two we would keep—one for my grandmother and one for Carla Mae's mother.

We took one last look at page 253 in our Girl Scout handbooks to make sure we could spot poison ivy, poison oak and poison sumac, and we were ready.

We pulled on our wool gloves, buttoned up our jackets, wrapped our mufflers around our faces and mumbled unintelligible good-byes to Grandma. I pulled a wool stocking cap down over my pigtails, made sure my glasses were on snugly, and we were off, clattering down the road toward the edge of town on our bicycles.

Carla Mae had been given a new bike the previous Christmas. Since she was the oldest, it would later be handed down to each of her six brothers and sisters in turn. Her bike was shiny green and had a headlight as well as a basket. We both had colored plastic streamers on our handlebars and planned to get fancy mud flaps as soon as we could save enough money. We already had them picked out and circled in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue. They were “fabulous white,” with red reflectors. The crowning glory on both our bikes, though, was the raccoon tail we each had flying from our rear fender. We had saved for weeks to buy them and took extra good care of them, even brushing and combing them now and then.

But I was ashamed of my bike. I had wanted a bike for a long time, but my father didn't believe in just handing out that kind of money to people for no reason, so he advised me to save my allowance if I wanted one. I figured at that rate I would be thirty-five before I had a bike.

Meanwhile, my uncle in Omaha took pity on me and gave me an old bike that had been sitting in his garage. It hadn't been used for about fifteen years, but it worked very well. I was ashamed of it because it had skinny tires. Nobody had heard of “English” bikes or racing bikes in Clear River, Nebraska, in 1947, and everyone made fun of my weird bike. I had always noticed that it went faster than anyone else's with the same amount of effort, but that did not make up for the fact that it had embarrassing skinny tires. Besides, it was an ugly, dusty maroon color which Carla Mae and I called “icky brick.” I hated it.

We set off in a northwest direction. Clear River was so small, a town of just 1500 people, that we only had to ride three blocks in any direction to get out of town. We soon came to the forbidden highway and wheeled out onto it without a second thought. If we were ever caught riding out here, we'd be in trouble at home, but we did it all the time anyway. We knew perfectly well how to ride on the left and watch for traffic, and there were certain times when we just knew that we were old enough and smart enough to go ahead and do things that our parents thought we shouldn't do.

Nebraska was probably one of the best places in the world to ride a bike. It was absolutely flat. That always irritated us in the winter when we wanted to go sledding—there was hardly even a slope around Clear River, let alone a hill, and the only shot you had on a sled was to run like crazy and belly-flop down on it. That hurt your stomach, and you didn't go very far anyway. But those flat plains were great for bike riding.

We loved speeding along the back roads on our bikes, and being out in the countryside gave us a great sense of freedom. There were few houses outside of town, just acres and acres of cornfields and wheatfields and grazing cattle. There were hardly any trees, except those that farmers had planted around their houses and for windbreaks along the sides of fields, so you could see for miles. Sound seemed to carry farther out in the country too. You could hear a dog barking a mile away, or a distant train whistle or the hum of big truck tires on another highway far to the North, and if you were lucky enough to ride past a meadow-lark in the summer wheat, he would fling sweet notes right in your ear. The larks had gone South by this time of the year though, and the cold wind stung our faces as we pedaled past the brown stubble of harvested corn.

One mile out on the highway was the Platte River, which was even more forbidden than the highway, and across the Platte River bridge was certainly the most forbidden place of all—old Walter Rehnquist's farm. I had an idea that we would find some big, fat cattails there, because they always grew in the marshy areas on riverside property like his. I headed straight for it, not telling Carla Mae where we were going.

Crossing the long, high bridge was scary, because it was old and narrow and full of holes, any one of which could send you sprawling off a bike. You had to get across quickly, because if cars came from both sides at once, there was just no room for a bike to get out of the way. There was a curve at the far end, so you couldn't see if cars were coming or not, and we got off our bikes and put our ears to the deck of the bridge to see if we could hear anything coming from up the road. We heard nothing, and we jumped on our bikes and rode across as fast as we could, lurching in and out of holes and hanging on for our lives. We tried not to look over the side of the bridge at the chunks of ice floating far below in the muddy water.

When we had gotten safely across, we stopped, panting with excitement and exertion. While we were standing there catching our breath, we heard a clopping noise on the bridge and looked back to see a classmate of ours, Billy Wild, coming toward us on his horse. Carla Mae was always teasing me about liking Billy. Sometimes he was OK, but a lot of the time he was disgusting, showing off his cowboy boots and his horse and yanking my pigtails and being a real pain.

“Hi there!” he called out.

“Here comes creepy Billy Wild—showing off,” I whispered to Carla Mae.

“His horse looks like Roy Rogers' horse, doesn't it?” asked Carla Mae.

“No!” I said, impatiently. Carla Mae did not know a thing about horses. “Billy's horse is gray, and Trigger is a palomino.”

“I mean its hair looks like Trigger's hair.”

“That's not hair, dodo, that's a mane.”

“Hi, what are you doing?” Billy asked as he rode up to us.

“That's for us to know and you to find out,” I said in my coolest tone.

“Wanna ride, Carla Mae?” he asked.

“No, thanks,” said Carla Mae.

“Why not?” asked Billy.

“I'm afraid of horses,” she said.

“Afraid?” I said, disgusted with her, and stroked Cloudy's nose.

“C'mon, Carla Mae,” he said. “I'll hold on to you.”

“Not me,” she said.

“You wanna ride, Addie?” Billy asked.

“Will you get off and let me ride by myself?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“You're a girl—you might fall off,” he said, giving me a smug grin.

“Oh, drop dead!” I said, angrily. “Come on, Carla Mae, let's get out of here!”

We jumped on our bikes and started down the road.

“He's really cute,” Carla Mae said, looking over at me to see my reaction.

“Cute!” I snorted. “He's a dodo and always will be!”

“He offered us a ride!”

“Sure,” I said. “Because he wants to hang on to us and squeeze us. Yuck!”

Carla Mae laughed, and we rode on toward Rehnquist's.

Grandma had told me that Rehnquist had lived on his old farm alone for nearly fifteen years, since his wife had died, and that he never spoke to anyone and had no friends. The Rehnquists had never had any children, so he was still farming his place all alone. He had been selling off his land bit by bit, and had sold all his milk cows. He still had a few acres for growing vegetables, and in the summer he would come into town in his battered old car and sell corn and tomatoes and cucumbers and a few eggs to the grocery store.

As we rounded a bend in the road I saw the farm, and I knew it must be his place because his old Model T was in the yard. The big, old barn stood empty, with a broken hayrake rusting in the barnyard. Near the barn was his house, a boxy, white farmhouse with peeling paint and a big porch across the front with a creaky old porch swing.

I knew we shouldn't be there, but my curiosity had been aroused, and I wasn't going to be deterred by the mere threat of a horrible death.

Chapter Three

I stopped and got off my bike, leaning it up against the fence a few yards down the road from his house.

“Why are we stopping here?” asked Carla Mae.

“Come with me,” I said, starting to climb the fence.

“Why? Whose house is that?”

“Old Man Rehnquist's.”

“Old Man Rehnquist's!” she gasped. “We can't go in there!” Carla Mae knew about Rehnquist's feud with my father, and being a loyal friend, she was perfectly willing to consider him her personal archenemy too.