The Thanksgiving Treasure (3 page)

“Who says we can't go in?” I asked, and went over the fence. “There's a little stream down there behind that barn, and I bet the cattails are great. I could see them from the road.”

“Are you nuts? He'll come out and blast us to smithereens with his shotgun!”

“We'll jump on our bikes and beat it with the cattails if he comes out with his gun.”

“If he comes out with a gun,” said Carla Mae, “you can forget the darn cattails—I'll be running so fast you won't even see me.”

“Chicken.”

“Yeah? I bet you'll run even faster.”

“We'll see,” I said, pretending to be brave.

We quickly sneaked to a spot behind the barn where we couldn't be seen from the house. We were planning our next move when suddenly there was a noise from around the corner. We both flattened ourselves against the barn wall. I knew a shotgun would poke around the corner any second, and it would be all over. We waited a moment and nothing happened. I could feel my heart beating all the way through to my back.

I cautiously crept up to the corner of the barn and peeked around. Then I saw what the noise had been. There was a pinto horse there, eating some hay out of an open stall and bumping the door as she put her head in and out. I stepped softly toward her, and motioned Carla Mae to come along. When I got closer, I saw it was a mare with the prettiest face I had ever seen on a horse. She backed off when we approached, and I held out some hay to her. She looked at us for a moment, and then came slowly forward and nibbled the hay out of my hand.

“Addie, come on!” hissed Carla Mae.

“Wait a minute—I just want to get a good look at this horse. She's beautiful!”

“Oh, for gosh sakes! Horses aren't beautiful!”

Carla Mae was not much interested in horses, and she had no patience with my love for them. I would have happily given up any member of my family or any friend, including Carla Mae, to have a horse, but the mere mention of the word was enough to guarantee an argument from my father. He had grown up on a farm, and he saw nothing thrilling about a horse. He simply did not respond to my fantasies of riding at a gallop across the plains beside Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.

“Addie!” said Carla Mae. “Are we here to get cattails or not?”

“OK, OK. Just a minute!” I searched around in my pockets and finally found the wax paper-covered lump of oatmeal-raisin cookies. I took one and held it out to the horse. She gave it a delicate sniff and then chomped it down whole. I laughed and rubbed her nose. She looked very interested in the rest of the cookies, but I put them back in my pocket.

“Watch out, she might bite you!” said Carla Mae.

“Never,” I said. “Look at her, she's so gentle. She's pretty too. I wonder what her name is? You know what she looks like? Marble cake, like my grandmother makes.”

“Yeah,” said Carla Mae. “She does, sorta. Will you come on!”

“OK. Good-bye, Marble Cake—oh, she's so dirty! She really needs grooming, and she's too fat.”

“Addie!”

“All right, all right, I'm coming! Don't be so nervous!”

I reluctantly left the horse, and we sneaked up beyond the barn to the field where the cattails were waiting for us. I was thinking about the horse and wondering why the old man even kept her. He obviously didn't ride her, and I felt sorry for her, standing around alone all day with no exercise. I vowed I would come back and see her again somehow, and get to know her, even if Rehnquist was our archenemy.

When we got to the edge of the stream, we knew we had to work fast. The little marshy spot where the cattails grew was easily visible from Rehnquist's house, and we would have to get what we needed before he spotted us and came out and blasted us to Kingdom Come with his shotgun.

We worked in a hastily planned assembly line. I cut cattails with the old scissors, and as soon as I had a handful, I passed them quickly to Carla Mae. She wrapped newspaper around them for protection and tied them in a bundle. We worked frantically, and just as we were finishing up the second bundle, we heard the door of the house slam, and there he was.

His scraggly white hair was flying out from under his old cap with the ear flaps, and he was moving the best he could in his heavy wool jacket. His pants were tucked into the tops of high rubber boots. He had his shotgun in hand and was shouting something unintelligible at us.

“Addie!” screamed Carla Mae.

“He can't get us from that range with a shotgun,” I shouted. “Do one more bunch!” I slashed clumsily at another clump of cattails and nearly threw them at Carla Mae. She fumbled with the string.

“Hurry!” I shouted at her, putting the scissors carefully back into my jacket pocket.

“Oh, I can't tie it!” she shrieked, and got up and started running back toward the fence and our bikes. I grabbed the other bundles of cattails and followed close on her heels. Marble Cake stopped chewing her hay for a moment and stared curiously at us as we streaked by her. We leaped over the fence, and when we got to our bikes, we threw the cattails into our baskets without waiting to lash them down.

Rehnquist was coming down off the porch toward us and leveling the gun in our direction.

“Git outta here!” he shouted in his raspy old voice. “Git offa my property, or I'll shoot ya!” He was so furious I was sure I could see foam at the corners of his mouth even from that distance.

“Go on, or I'll git the law on ya!” he bellowed, and shambled toward us as fast as he could on his gimpy old legs.

“Git!” he shouted again, and sighted through the gun and squinted at us, twisting up his grizzly old face.

We strained and grunted, pushing our bikes over the rutted road, and took off as fast as we could go. We pedaled standing up, pumping with such force that our bikes lurched back and forth under our hands and we could hardly steer. The loose cattails went flying out of my basket with every bump. As we rode away, I looked back, and Rehnquist was still standing out in his front yard, shouting into the wind and waving the gun.

About a half-mile down the road, we stopped to catch our breath and giggle with fear.

“Holy Moley,” said Carla Mae breathlessly, hand over her heart. “That was close!”

“Oh, I wasn't scared,” I bragged. “He probably can't even shoot straight.”

“I don't want to find out,” she said.

“Nuts, we lost half our cattails. Why didn't you tie up that last bunch?”

“I didn't feel like getting killed,” she replied.

“Aw, we're practically bulletproof with all these clothes on,” I said.

“Yeah?” said Carla Mae sarcastically. “Then how come you were riding even faster than I was, getting out of there?”

“I can't help it if my bike goes fast,” I said, irritated. “It's these dumb, skinny tires.”

“Ha!” she said, giving me a knowing look. For a best friend, Carla Mae could sometimes be very annoying.

Chapter Four

Carla Mae And I Located the rest of the things we wanted, spotted both poison oak and poison sumac and successfully avoided them, and got home in time for a lunch of hot soup at my house.

Grandma was admiring all the things we had collected.

“My, where did you get those big cattails?”

“Oh, we know a place,” I said.

“I hope you didn't go too far out,” said Grandma, looking carefully at me.

Carla Mae and I became very interested in our soup, and in a few moments we were finished and went in to work on the living room floor making our three artistic arrangements. We were careful not to discuss any of the morning's adventure, because Grandma was very sharp, and I knew she'd catch on quickly that we had been up to something.

Grandma was seventy-three, and hard to fool. Whenever I forgot that and tried to put something over on her, I was sure to get caught.

Grandma always wore faded old house dresses and Indian moccasins and stockings with runs in them. With a dustcap on her hair and thick glasses sliding down her nose, she appeared to some people to be just a disheveled little old lady. Those who knew her knew better. She could be tender and loving, but she was also stubborn and domineering, and full of fire. And that fire had been applied to the seat of my pants more than once when I was younger.

Now that I was eleven and getting very tall, I was too big to spank. Grandma, after all, was only a shade over five feet. I had no doubt that she could have spanked me if she wanted to, because she was enormously strong, but she and Dad knew that at my age, the loss of my allowance caused me a lot more pain than a swat on the bottom.

So Carla Mae and I breathed not a word about Rehnquist or Marble Cake or the Platte River bridge or anything else that might give us away. Instead we busied ourselves stuffing various combinations of cattails, thistles, milkweed pods, leaves and bittersweet into three decorated glass jars.

“I want more bittersweet in this one,” said Carla Mae. “My mother loves red.”

“If you make it too red, it's going to look like a Christmas bouquet, not a fall bouquet.” I considered myself the expert on artistic matters, since I planned to be an artist and live in a garret in Paris when I grew up.

“Well, then she can get double use out of it,” replied Carla Mae. “She'll save it until Christmas.” Carla Mae had a practical streak that sometimes clashed annoyingly with my romantic streak.

“The point is to make it look like fall … with lots of browns and golds, and just a bit of red for an accent.”

“Well,” Carla Mae said haughtily, “I don't have an accent.”

“Oh, all right. Ruin yours if you want to, but we're going to make Miss Thompson's genuinely artistic. She has very good taste, and she'll know whether it's done right.”

Carla Mae rolled her eyes in exasperation and jammed another big hunk of bittersweet into her bouquet.

The next morning, we carried the most artistic of our arrangements to school and presented it to Miss Thompson.

We all adored Miss Thompson. She was young and beautiful, and it was obvious to us that she was the best teacher in the school. She had also been our teacher the previous year in fifth grade. That had been her first teaching job, and she had liked us so much she had requested to move to the sixth grade with us the next year. Though it was unusual, the principal approved. This had won her our loyalty for life, but it didn't really make us behave a whole lot better.

She was most appreciative when Carla Mae and I took her our arrangement. I had designed a particularly artistic card with a turkey on it, and it read, “To Miss Thompson for Thanksgiving, from Adelaide Mills and Carla Mae Carter.” Miss Thompson showed it to the whole class and announced that Carla Mae and I were both obviously very artistic, which is just what we wanted to hear. Creepy Billy Wild called me a teacher's pet, and I made the ugliest face I knew at him.

That morning in school we were going to get started on one of our class Thanksgiving projects. We had gone to the grocery store on Main Street and bought a big roll of white butcher paper, which we taped all along one side of the wall, covering the blackboard. Miss Thompson had selected the four best artists in the class—Billy, Carla Mae, Tanya Smithers and me—and we would draw a huge cornucopia with all kinds of food spilling out of it, and a scene of Pilgrims and Indians eating the first Thanksgiving dinner. Then the whole class would participate in painting the mural with watercolors.

While the rest of the class worked on other art assignments, Carla Mae, Billy, Tanya and I set to work drawing the cornucopia. Billy had brought a Burpee's seed catalogue from home, and he suggested we use it to get ideas for drawing the fruits and vegetables.

“That's cheating!” said Tanya.

“Oh, it is not,” I replied. “All great artists use models to draw from.”

“Well, I think we should freehand everything,” sniffed Tanya.

“Well, what do
you
know?” asked Carla Mae. “Addie is the best artist in the class.”

“Come on,” said Billy impatiently. “Tanya can draw freehand, and the rest of us will use the catalogue.”

Carla Mae and I set ourselves the task of drawing some bumpy squash out of the Burpee's catalogue, and Billy was doing a pineapple from a picture he had clipped out of the
Saturday Evening Post.

Tanya came over and looked at our squash drawings.

“Ugly,” she pronounced, in her best snobbish style.

“Well, squash are part of nature's bounty too,” I said coldly.

“Oh, Tanya,” said Carla Mae. “You're just jealous because all you can draw freehand are autumn leaves and apples. Admit it and draw from the catalogue like the rest of us.”

Tanya stuck her nose in the air and went down to the other end of the mural and freehanded a few autumn leaves drifting around the side of the cornucopia.

None of us liked Tanya very well. She was always taking dancing lessons, and showing off about how talented she was. She was very snobbish because her father had a lot of money. He owned the big gravel pits at the edge of town and my father worked for Mr. Smithers, loading the gravel trucks with his big crane. When Tanya wanted to be really snobbish, she would hint about how her father was my father's boss and made a lot more money. We still were pals though, because Clear River was such a small town that you had to be more or less friends with everyone, otherwise there weren't enough people to go around. But I definitely considered Tanya my worst friend in the sixth grade.

We worked on our drawing for a while, then Miss Thompson called us all back to our seats for English period. In history period we had been studying the first Thanksgiving, and we had all been assigned to write essays on what we thought the Pilgrims had meant Thanksgiving to symbolize.

Miss Thompson called on Tanya first. “It symbolizes giving thanks,” Tanya answered.

Everybody snickered at that, and Miss Thompson smiled.