Then There Were Five (3 page)

Cuffy had all Father's favorite things for supper, beginning with leek and potato soup and building up to a grand finale of strawberry pie.

Afterward they went out again. The birds were carrying on all over the place, and a little crowd of swallows flew high overhead chattering like children out of school. The grass and leaves smelled of evening and there was a coolness around one's ankles. Rush wanted to start a game of Prisoner's Base, but Father said no, that he couldn't run because he was pie-bound.

He sat on the front steps smoking his pipe. Already the pale, strained city look was beginning to leave him. Rush and Mona and Randy sat beside him, but Oliver walked about by himself, watching the dusk creep out of the woods. Everything was changing. The two iron deer now looked like proud, pausing, live animals, and when he went into the summer house it was filled with such a mysterious green twilight that he felt very lonely suddenly, and walked out slowly, his neck prickling, and everything about him hurrying except his feet. He would not let them hurry, nor would he let his head turn to look back.

High in the sky the first star came out like a flower. Still walking, Oliver looked up and spoke to it.

“Star light, star bright,

First star I see tonight

Wish I may, wish I might

Have the wish I wish tonight.”

Oliver wished that someone would give him a little helicopter for his birthday. Then he walked the rest of the way with his head bowed, staring at his shoes. If he glimpsed the star again his wish would be lost.

Father was beginning to yawn.

“I thi—oh, I think I'd be—oh, I'd better go—oh—oh—to bed.”

“Fresh air. Can't take it, eh?” said Rush.

“No. Too strong for me. You should see how brilliant and alert I am on carbon monoxide fumes and ci—oh—oh—ah—cigar smoke.”

“He's so tired,” Mona said when he had gone. “It's awful he has to work so hard.”

“Digging worms for us,” said Rush. “And trying to do his bit besides. I wish I could do something to help. I wish I could be of some use.”

“Oh, Rush, you are a help,” Randy cried. “You earn every bit of your own spending money giving those piano lessons. Mona earns all of her own living acting on the radio twice a week in
The Penfold People.
What do I do? I don't do anything, that's what. It seems as if I'm the only really dependent one in the place besides the dogs. And Oliver, of course, but he's so young he couldn't—”

“I could take ticks off dogs for people,” said Oliver sternly. “I'm good at it. I could go around to people's houses with a bottle and some tweezers, and maybe they'd pay me a penny apiece—”

“That's not what I mean exactly,” interrupted Rush. “Not just money. If we keep somebody from going to war by being dependents, then it seems as if we ought to do extra things about helping generally.”

“Would they take any people as young as me in the army?” cried Oliver, his eyes shining. “I could clean out the insides of cannons, for instance. I'm a good size for it.”

“Oh,
no,
Oliver. Don't be silly. The best thing you can do is keep after the weeds in the vegetable garden.”

Weeds. Oliver's face clouded. He knew plenty about them by now. There was one called purslane, with a lot of fat, pink tentacles, that grew up overnight in countless numbers. There was quack grass, coarse and hardy, its roots stretching under the earth in endless nets. There were yellow dock, and lamb's-quarters, and velvetleaf … such stubborn boring little enemies. Oliver would have liked to be up in the sky shooting down Zeros, instead of down on the earth pulling up weeds.

“Mona knits and she's done first aid, of course … Not that she remembers any of it.”

“Artificial respiration!” cried Mona. “I remember artificial respiration perfectly. Get down on your stomach and I'll show—”

“No, thank you. I won't let you demonstrate it on me until you remember what kind of bandage to put on cracked ribs.”

“I think you're mean. I was the best in the class at artificial respiration. Miss McCarthy said so.”

“All right. You can be the one who resuscitates drowning persons from now on. But since the opportunities for this type of work are few and far between, and since you are off the radio for the summer, I suggest you do something else. Help Cuffy, for instance. People are supposed to can a lot of food, aren't they?”

That sounded pleasant and rather simple, as well as comfortably far in the future, since practically nothing was ripe yet. Mona agreed graciously.

“Randy and I will go out and collect scrap. We'll have a scrap drive. And I mean a
drive.
We'll hitch Lorna Doone to the surrey, and we'll go to all the backwoods farms up in the hills and see what we can dig up. I think it's a swell idea. We'll drive the buggy, see, and on the back of it we'll have a sign saying Scrap Drive. Get it?”

“Too subtle for me,” said Mona sarcastically. But Randy and Oliver thought it was a brilliant idea.

“It sounds nicer than weeds,” Oliver commented wistfully, and Randy promised to let him take her place part of the time.

“We'll start Monday after Father's gone,” Rush decided. “I'm bushed. All that work on the dam, I guess. And, Oliver, you should have been in bed ages ago. Cuffy only let you stay up because Father was here. Scram!”

“Ooh, how my muscles hurt,” groaned Mona, getting up from the steps. “All kinds of little ones that I didn't know I had. It even hurts me to sigh.”

Tired as they were, however, the Melendys didn't fall asleep immediately that night. Their usual lullaby had been removed for the time being, and they missed it. Instead of the soft, rushing, varying harmonies of the waterfall there was the dark silence of a country night. This silence was woven of many small sounds: of soft, long owl calls, of tree frogs' voices, of invisible wings fluttering past a window, and above all the delicate, ceaseless breathing of the woods.

CHAPTER II

A Talent for Trash

On Monday afternoon Rush harnessed Lorna Doone to the surrey. Cuffy gave them an old bedspread to protect the back seat, and he and Randy sat up in front. It was a wonderful hot afternoon. There had been no rain for a long time, and the dust lifted in clouds from the road. Beside the road the draperies of clematis and wild honeysuckle, the ditch armies of milkweed and bouncing bet, were white with an ashy powdering of dust. Beyond them rose the woods, full of new leaves; full of green light and shade. The surrey smelled of dust and hot leather and Lorna Doone; but from the woods came faintly a cool, mysterious scent of moss and ancient earth.

Sunlight glittered on the whip.

“Oh, Rush, isn't it fun,” cried Randy. “Just you and me off exploring like this.”

“On a mission for our government, you mean,” Rush said rather stiffly, but a second later he turned and grinned at her. “It's nifty,” he agreed.

“Let's try this one,” suggested Randy. A road turned off to the right. Beside it stood a mailbox on a post. The post was planted firmly in a large milk can filled with earth, and around its foot a frill of timothy and a daisy had also planted themselves in a sort of little garden.

“Addison,” Randy read on the mailbox. “That sounds like a good sensible name.”

He pulled a rein and Lorna Doone turned in. She walked slowly, for the road wound upward. Her hindquarters moved up and down, up and down, like two rocking, shining hills, and her tail switched at the flies.

“What do you think they'll be like, the Addisons?” Rush wondered lazily. “Or maybe it's only one, a single Addison. I seem to see them as tall people with square jaws. Kind of serious and industrious and not laughing much.”

“Oh,
I
don't,” Randy said. “I think they're two old, jolly people. Fat, you know, with morning-glories, and baby chickens, and calves, and maybe some cookies—”

“A confused description, but I get the general picture,” Rush said. “Whichever one is wrong has to wash the supper dishes tonight.”

The road sloped gently upward. It was flanked on either side by Austrian pines whose branches were longer on one side than the other as if the wind blew always from the same quarter. Beyond the trees the pastures sloped up on the right and down on the left. Small Swiss cattle dotted the hillside. They were cream-colored darkening to mushroom brown.

“They're much prettier than the usual cow,” Randy said. “They look more like real animals. Deer or antelope or something.”

Mourning doves cooed softly everywhere and a pair of truant white hens picked their foolish way along the road.

They rounded the bend, and there, nestled in a curve of hillside, lay the farmhouse, like an egg in a nest. It was white, the way all good farmhouses should be, and it was shaded by two huge soft maple trees; two tall fountains of green leaves. Flowers grew along the fence, and not only along the fence but in unexpected, haphazard clusters in the grass. In one place there were frail pink poppies dropping their petals in the slightest breeze; in another there was a steeple of hollyhocks. There was a swing hanging from one of the maples, and near the house in a little pen stood a baby with a fluff of yellow hair.

The house was smothered in vines and shrubs; and its breath came out of it sweet and warm, smelling of gingerbread.

“Hello, baby,” said Rush. “Folks home?”

“Ba,” replied the baby, drooling.

“He's cute, Rush. He looks the way Oliver used to. His hair kind of grows sideways like his did.”

“But they don't really get faces till they're around four years old,” said Rush, losing interest.

They knocked on the screen door and looked in. They could see a big black coal stove and not much else. There was a soft padding of bare feet. A little girl about ten years old looked out at them. She wore a faded blue calico dress, her cheeks and nose were pink with sunburn, and her blond hair fell straight to her shoulders.

“Hello,” she said. “Who are you?”

“We're the Melendys,” Rush told her. “At least we're some of them. We came to see if you people had any scrap for the government.”

“Scrap? You mean used metal for the soldiers?”

“That's it.”

“Well, wait; I'll ask Mom. You can come in.” She held the door open. “I'm baking some gingerbread.”

“You are?” Randy was impressed. “Do you know
how?
”

“Yes. It's in the oven now. You can smell it. Smell it?”

“M-m-m.” Rush lifted his nose rapturously, and looked as if he were going to bay like a wolfhound.

“Well, you folks sit down. I'll get Mom.”

The girl went out of the room. They heard her bare feet flipping upstairs.

“Nice,” Randy said, looking around the big country kitchen with its table already set for supper; its red linoleum floor; its green vine-covered windows like windows under a waterfall.

“Swell,” agreed Rush. They sat there not saying anything else; shy of their own voices in this stranger's house.

The bare footsteps came down the stairs again, followed by grown-up ones in shoes. A tall lady in a lavender dress followed the little girl into the kitchen.

“Hello,” said the lady. “So you're the Melendys. We are the Addisons. I am Mrs. Addison and this is my daughter Daphne.”

“And I'm Rush and this is my sister Miranda.”

“Randy!” corrected Randy indignantly.

“I understand you've come to collect scrap, and I'm very glad to see you because we have lots of it. I hope you have some way of carrying it?”

“Our carriage,” said Rush elegantly.

“Daphne, run get Dave. He can round up the stuff. Or better still take Rush and Randy with you, and show them our barn.” She turned to them. “Dave's been helping his father get the hay in before it rains again.”

They went out the door behind Daphne. She had almost stopped being shy, and as they passed the baby she said, “That's my brother Alexander. He's getting another tooth. That's why he looks at you folks like that.”

The baby was scowling at them.

“Alexander Addison,” said Rush. “With that name he's going to have to amount to something. Maybe he'll grow up to be a famous inventor. Or—or a news commentator.”

“Alexander Addison,” repeated Randy. “He sounds like somebody who ought to have signed the Declaration of Independence. Maybe he'll be a governor or an ambassador or something.”

“Pop says he'll prob'ly be a champion hog caller when he grows up,” Daphne said. “On account of the way he can holler when he's mad. Here's our barn.”

The barn was splendid. That was the only word for it. It was huge and crimson, and its ridgepole was ornamented with lightning rods, weather vanes, dovecots, and ventilators shaped like medieval pavilions.