Then There Were Five (8 page)

“Arithmetic,” said Randy, like a shot. “And cucumbers, and taking ticks off dogs, and washing dishes, and having snarls combed out of my hair, and being sick at my stomach, and starch in the collars of my dresses, and—shall I go on?”

“No, it's Mark's turn. Quick, Mark, don't think first, just say 'em.”

“Well—uh. Weeds like quack grass and pussley. Spreading manure. Getting up before it's light on winter mornings. Hens. Mosquitoes. Oren.”

There was a little silence. Mark looked embarrassed. “Well, I just did like you said: said 'em without thinking.”

“Is he so awful to you?” asked Randy at last.

“Meaner'n a rattlesnake,” said Mark, and then laughed. He didn't want to talk about it anymore. “What do you say we go to the quarry now? A swim might be nice.”

“Yes, and then lunch,” Randy said, rejoicing that they had brought such a big one.

They plowed along the ridge another mile and then down the other side through a shoulder-high jungle of hazel bushes; up another hillside and there they were.

The quarry had steep walls of rough marble, and held within them was a pool, a little pond, deep, brimming with pure spring water. It was dark and smooth and clear, like a shield made of obsidian, and it held upon its surface a distinct picture of all that surrounded and framed it: sky with a cloud in it, the black juniper clusters, arched spears of birch, three children looking down.

“Deep,” Rush said.

“You bet. Thirty feet, they say. Cold, too.”

“Boy, I can hardly wait to get in it!”

The boys disappeared behind a rock, and Randy found some juniper bushes for a dressing room: very scratchy.

“It seems a shame to mess it up,” Randy remarked, looking at the motionless pool, when they had emerged in their bathing suits.

Rush took the first dive. For a split second he could see himself, reflected in the flawless surface, arched in space; blue sky behind him. Not a bad dive, Rush complimented himself before he struck. In that instant all thought was gone. Nothing remained but the breathless upward struggle through liquid ice. He came out like the cork of a champagne bottle and clawed himself onto the bank.

“Ho-ly cat!”

“Cold?” inquired Randy.

“Cold! Holy cat!” was all Rush could say.

“Spring water, that's why,” Mark explained. “When you go in the second time it won't feel so bad, and the third time is always swell.”

Randy belonged to the toe-dipping, squealing school. She went through this performance for quite a long time, and only the disgusted comments of her brother Rush forced her to go in at all.

“You're acting like one of those old-time bathing beauties,” he said. “You ought to be wearing stockings and carrying a parasol.”

“Rush, you're a beast. I'm not like that at all!” With this Randy plunged inelegantly; holding onto her nose and stepping out into space as desperately as a man walking the plank.

The third time, as Mark had prophesied, was the best. They no longer felt paralyzed. They felt warm, exhilarated, endowed with superhuman strength. They yelped, splashed, tumbled, and ducked.

Randy had never been so far beyond her depth before. She swam straight across the pool full of power and daring. As she swam she encountered an occasional floating leaf; an occasional struggling fly or beetle. Each fly or beetle she rescued and set upon a leaf boat to dry his soaked wings and legs. It gave her a feeling of virtue to do this. She could imagine all heaven looking down upon her and approving. Notice Miranda Melendy; she is a kind, generous girl. The smallest insect is not too unimportant to receive her charitable attention. She ought to be rewarded. Randy thought of the arrowhead complacently, probably that in itself was a reward. She swam back again with a smile of sweet unselfishness; a misty radiance about her bathing-capped head.

“Why do you swim with your head way out like that?” inquired Rush, who was sitting on a ledge. “You're even
swimming
like an old-time bathing beauty. And why are you grinning that goonish way?”

Randy grabbed her brother's ankle and yanked him in again. Naturally Rush ducked her. Naturally she ducked Rush. Naturally Rush—and so on and so on. Heaven ceased to contemplate Miranda Melendy and went about its business, and Randy's halo fell off and was lost in thirty feet of water.

They sat side by side on a ledge with only their feet in the water and watched their goose flesh subside.

“I feel as if there's ginger ale instead of blood in my veins,” said Rush. “And, oh, brother, am I hungry.”

Mark looked away absentmindedly as if he felt it would be wrong to admit that he was hungry when he had nothing to contribute. Nevertheless, they had little difficulty in coaxing him to eat three of Rush's noble sandwiches, two stuffed eggs, an orange, and numberless cookies.

Afterward they just sat and scorched in the sun for a while. Then they swam again. It was even colder now, for the pool's surface was in shadow. Without the sunlight it looked deeper, more somber, more dangerous.

Mark took them home by a different route. It was just as tangled as the last, and just as interesting. He introduced them to the taste of sassafras and black birch twigs; and to the various fragrances of pennyroyal, and bee balm, and prickly ash.

“My nose feels very well exercised,” Randy said. “It's learned a lot in the last half hour.”

They came to a clearing.

“Here,” said Mark, “this is what I wanted to show you.”

Square blocks of stone lay cluttered on the ground, half buried in weeds, and from their midst rose a stout brick chimney with a fireplace in it, and close by, leaning toward the chimney, grew a lilac bush, almost a tree, tall, unkempt, with dead branches showing among its heart-shaped leaves.

“A house,” said Randy wonderingly. “Here in this wild place, a house, or the shell of one.”

“Whose was it?” Rush wanted to know.

“Who can tell? It fell to pieces, or burned up, years and years ago. Maybe fifty, maybe a hundred.”

Maybe fifty, maybe a hundred.

There were flowers in the tangle of undergrowth and scattered stones: small patches of white and faded pink.

“Look,” cried Randy. “Phlox! All gone small and puny because of weeds, but still growing!”

“Yes, and the lilac bush comes out in spring,” Mark told her. “You can smell it way down at the foot of the hill; and the lilies of the valley have spread all back through the woods. You can see their leaves.… And look, those are apple trees, see? Mostly dead wood, and the apples are kind of small, but they sure taste good.”

He showed them a mourning dove's nest in the lilac bush, and swifts' nests, made of mud, inside the chimney. He showed them the two deep doorways, one for entrance, one for escape, belonging to the woodchuck who was the present tenant of the house. He showed them the well, and they leaned over the stone rim and looked down into it and saw the still water far below, like black ink in a bottle, and the dark reflection of their three heads, and the thick fur of green moss clinging to the stones. Rush dropped a pebble in, and they waited, without breathing, for the splash, the little, hollow, echoing, empty plop.

“It has a special sound,” Randy said. “As if it was saying that this is the first pebble anyone has dropped into it in a hundred years!”

Mark did not tell her that he himself had dropped dozens of pebbles into that well and that they always made the same sound.

“I love this place,” said Randy. “Let's all come up here for a picnic sometime. Maybe when the apples are ripe.”

After that they went home. Mark had to hurry because it was almost milking time, and he had other neglected chores to take care of before Oren came home.

“It's been a perfect day,” Randy said, pressing her hand against the arrowhead in her pocket. “Can we come again next Wednesday?”

“You bet your life,” said Mark wholeheartedly, and looking very happy.

As they coasted down the road to home Rush said, “I think he's a swell guy, don't you?”

And Randy replied, “Next to you and Oliver he's the nicest boy I ever saw. And he's the
only
one I ever saw that could walk on his hands and knew the names of toadstools.”

It was good to be home again; they felt as if they had been gone for days. Mona looked beautiful, and knew it. Her freshly washed hair lay in a cloud about her shoulders, and in honor of this she had put on her only long dress; the one she had worn to her first dance in the spring, and in her hair, of all things, she had fastened a whole strawberry plant, leaves, fruit, blossoms.

“Why not the roots, too?” Oliver wanted to know, when they all sat down to supper. And Rush said, “This year the Sub Deb or Junior Miss will wear fruit in her hair. Next year she will wear vegetables: kohlrabi, a wreath of Brussels sprouts, or a single full-blown parsnip. The year after that—”

But Mona wouldn't rise to the bait. She just laughed. She knew exactly how becoming the strawberries were, and shook her head a little to make them dangle against her cheek.

Randy just stared at her, forgetting to wipe the milk from her upper lip, and earnestly hoping with all her heart that someday when she was old like Mona she would be half as pretty. That would be a nice wish to have granted, thought Randy, remembering heaven. But after supper, playing Any Over with Rush and Oliver and Willy, she decided that she would rather be granted the ability to throw a ball like a boy.

When she went to her room that night the first thing she saw was the arrowhead shining under the lamp on her bedside table. She took it up in her hand and thought of the day, the wonderful day with Mark and Rush: the woods, the lost house, the marble quarry pool, the cliff swallows. She knew that she would always remember it.

She got into bed feeling a little uncomfortable about the way she'd been instructing heaven how to reward her. Why, it had been giving her the best it had to give the whole day long.

And an arrowhead thrown in.

CHAPTER V

Oliver's Other World

“Fish and caterpillars. Caterpillars and fish. They're the things that Oliver lives for,” said Rush wearily, one Saturday at lunch. “This is the third time we've eaten chub this week, and all because Oliver's learned how to fish.”

“Free and unrationed,” said Cuffy severely. “
And
nourishing.”

“Be glad it's the fish we have to eat and not the caterpillars,” suggested Mona.

Oliver looked up dreamily. “You
can
eat caterpillars, you know. African savages do; I read about it in a book. Big white grubs they eat. I wonder if—”

“Well, you can just stop wondering, my friend,” Father interrupted. “We're not savages, at least not authorized ones; we're the softened products of civilization, thank heaven, and our diet doesn't include the larvae of Lepidopterae. At least not yet. Probably the day will come when they'll be found a most valuable source of vitamin Q, and we'll eat them every day as a matter of course along with our green, leafy vegetables.”

“Ugh,” said Mona, shuddering fastidiously but going right on eating.

“Chub!” said Rush, taking a bone out of his mouth. He made the word sound like a swear. “Chub, chub, chub, chub, chub! All summer long nothing but chub. Baked, grilled, fried in meal. Oliver, couldn't you please, just once, catch a trout, or even an eel?”

But Oliver wasn't listening. He was thinking about something else. There was mashed potato on his chin, and a dash of jelly on his cheek, but his eyes looked into a distance of their own and saw something which made them shine with a grave contentment.

It was true that during the past month he had been making an exhaustive study of the two subjects, caterpillars and fish. They were the twin enthusiasms of his scientific nature. Just now the insects were a little in the lead.

Oliver wondered how he had lived so long without paying any real attention to caterpillars. It seemed a terrible oversight. Perhaps it was because he had never before lived in a place where caterpillars were so abundant. Here, in the gardens and woods, they were everywhere. Small and green, they swung themselves down from the trees on threads, and got caught in your hair, or were discovered hours later inching themselves along your collar. “Measuring you for a new suit of clothes,” Willy said. And then, of course, there were the tent caterpillars in their ugly pavilions of soiled gossamer; and the furry kind, red or black, such as there are everywhere, always ruffling busily along the roads, or up and down stalks. Oliver, like any other child, had patted the furry ones, stepped on the tent ones, and felt a cold flicker of repulsion when he picked one of the thread-swingers off his collar. Otherwise they had never occupied his thoughts.