Thimble Summer (4 page)

“‘Oh, yes, yes!' I cried and I took the knotted handkerchief out of my pocket and gave it to him. ‘There's fifty cents there,' I said, ‘and you can keep it all.' Then I pulled my arm free and ran like the wind. I didn't dare look back, but it seemed to me as if I could hear that man laughing at me all the way home.

“I stumbled up the path to our door and burst into the house gasping for breath and red in the face.

“‘Fanny!' cried my mother, ‘where is Thomas?'

“‘Thomas!' I said. ‘Isn't he home?'

“‘Indeed he's not,' answered my mother. ‘I've been sick with worry about you both; the boys were just going out to search for you. Where is Thomas? Where did you lose him?'

“‘Oh, mother,' I said, ‘I left him getting blackberries all by himself.' Then I broke down and told her the whole story.

“My big brothers, Jonathan and Charles, went hunting for Thomas with a couple of lanterns. Charles took his shot-gun too.

“I went outside and sat on the gatepost looking out over the valley. By and by the moon came up. It was full, I remember, a real harvest moon; and the mists began to rise from the river and all the little ponds like smoke. An owl called and called somewhere in the woods and I heard a fox bark. I don't suppose there was a more miserable child in all the world than I was at that minute. Oh, Thomas, I thought, why did I leave you alone in the woods? And all for a silly bracelet that I never got.

“It seemed to me as if I sat there for hours. By the time I saw my brothers' lanterns glittering among the trees my clothes were drenched with dew and my teeth were chattering.

“My mother came out of the house and called to them: ‘Is Thomas with you?'

“And he was, thank goodness! They'd found him wandering around and crying in that boggy place over near where Craddock's farm is now. All the time that he was lost and frightened he had been careful not to spill the blackberries out of the buckets!

“Well, I crept indoors and got undressed and into the trundle bed beside Matty who was fast asleep. A long while later I heard Duchess's hoofs on the wooden bridge over the slough and knew that my father was coming home from Hodgeville. That bridge always made a noise like thunder.

“When he came in I listened to my mother telling him about how I had behaved.

“‘Well, poor Fanny,' he said. ‘I won't say anything further to her. She seems to have been punishing herself all day long.'

“And it was true. I felt just as if I'd had a whipping.

“So that's the story of what happened to me on my tenth birthday.”

Garnet stood up and hopped on one foot. It was all pins and needles and she hadn't even noticed.

“Oh, I
wish
you'd gotten the bracelet,” she said. “It's the worst birthday I ever heard of; I think your father was mean not to keep his promise.”

“No, he was never mean,” said Mrs. Eberhardt. “On the Christmas after that he gave me a little box, and what do you suppose was in it?”

“
I
know,” gloated Citronella. “A coral bracelet was in it!” said her great-grandmother triumphantly. “The very twin of the one Elly had sold to Minetta Harvey. I could hardly believe my eyes. ‘Father,' I shouted. ‘where did you ever get it?' And, do you know, my father had bought that bracelet in Hodgeville on my birthday so many weeks before. It had caught his eye in a shop window, and he'd thought to himself ‘There's a bracelet just like the one that Fanny wants so much. I'll get her this and she can keep her fifty cents for something else.' But of course when he got home and heard about all the trouble I'd caused he decided he'd better wait until Christmas.”

“Have you got the bracelet still?” asked Garnet.

“No, not now,” replied Mrs. Eberhardt. “I wore it till I was quite a big girl and then one day when I was drawing water from the well I reached out to take the bucket from the windlass and my bracelet broke apart. All the beads and the little red heart went tumbling into the water far below. I could hear them splash as they went in.”

She gave a long sigh that ended in a yawn.

“Run along, children,” she said, “I think I need a little nap now. It makes me sleepy to think so far back; more than seventy years ago, think of that. Was I the same person? Sometimes it seems as if it had all happened to somebody else.”

Garnet and Citronella tiptoed down the stairs.

“I wish I had a great-grandmother,” said Garnet enviously. “I've only got a grandmother, and she lives way off in Duluth so I never see her.”

“Grant-grandma's nice,” said Citronella complacently. “She tells me lots of stories. Only she
sleeps
all the time. Old people always do, I wonder why. When I grow up I'm going to stay up all night long every night until I die.”

The two girls went into the kitchen for something to eat. They found a chocolate cake in the cakebox and some hermits in a crockery jar. That was the wonderful thing about Citronella's house; there was always a cake in the kitchen at the right time. Often there was a dish of vinegar candy, too; and the cooky jar was never quite empty. Probably that was why most of the Hausers were so fat.

When Garnet said good-bye and went outdoors again she found that the rain had stopped and the afternoon sun was shining through a yellow mist. Clear drops of water hung from every leaf and petal, and mourning doves cried softly from all the woods in the valley. Garnet saw a snake move like a drawn ribbon through wet ferns; she saw a caterpillar with dewy fur climbing a mullein stalk, and a snail with his horns out enjoying the damp.

Once on days like this, thought Garnet, only the Indians had been here to see the snake, the caterpillar and the snail. On moccasined feet they had moved softly among the grasses and jostled down the rain drops from the elder flowers.

It would have been fun to be an Indian girl wearing a fringed deerskin dress. Garnet saw a long, rather bedraggled crow's feather in the grass and picked it up and stuck it in her hair. Then she crouched down and walked tiptoe in the way she imagined an Indian would walk.

A loud laugh startled her, and she looked up to see Jay leaning over the pasture fence.

“What are you walking all bent over like that for? And why have you got that old feather in your hair?” he asked. “You look like a hen with a stomach ache.”

Garnet felt silly. She took the feather out of her hair and decided not to give Jay the postal card till later.

Then she went on to the barn where her father was and gave him the important looking letter. She wanted to know what was in it and leaned against a convenient cow while he opened it. He tore off the end of the envelope in a hurry, and she watched his eyes move swiftly back and forth over the printed lines of the letter. He smiled.

“Garnet,” he said. “We won't have to worry any longer about having this old barn collapse over our heads. We're going to build a new one. The government's going to loan us some money!”

III. The Lime Kiln

GARNET yawned and slapped the lid on the last ham sandwich and put it with the others in a damp towel. She closed her mouth abruptly, remembering that this was no time to be yawning if she was going to stay up all night. She looked out of the window; already the swallows were high in the sky, always a sign of late afternoon; and she saw Jay in the pasture, carrying milk buckets.

Garnet stretched her arms above her head; up and up till all her muscles felt like pulled elastic. Then she took down the coffeepot; the big agate one with the chipped lid. It took plenty of coffee to keep her father awake on kiln nights.

At last the lime kiln was being fired; for three days and three nights it had burned steadily to make the lime needed in building a fine new barn — lime for cement, for plaster and for whitewash. The kiln was two miles away in a thick wood; it was a big cone-shaped oven, backed against a hill. Two of the Hausers' oldest boys stayed there all day pushing logs into the blazing fire, and in the evening — Garnet's father and Mr. Freebody relieved them. The fire had to be fed every ten or fifteen minutes, without fail, and the huge logs must be pushed in gently, so as not to jar the piled limestone structure within. Each night Garnet had begged to be taken along, and now at last her father had consented.

She put the big coffeepot on the table beside the other things, where it dominated the group like a brigadier general. Most kitchen articles had characters for Garnet. The teapot smiled all around its lid and purred like a kitten; the alarm clock stood with feet apart and wore its little gong like a cap on top; and Garnet often felt that the stove was a huge old woman waiting for her to make mistakes, and hissing scornfully when things boiled over.

She hummed softly and her voice sounded strange to her; the house was very quiet. Her father was asleep upstairs, and had been since this morning when he had returned, tired and grimy from the kiln. Her mother and Donald had gone down to the river for a cool breath of air and Jay was milking in the pasture since there was no longer any barn for the cows.

Garnet took an apple pie out of the cakebox and wrapped it in waxed paper: it was going to be fun to stay up all night. She didn't intend to sleep for a minute, even though her mother insisted on her taking some blankets along, just in case. At midnight she would heat the coffee, and they would all have a picnic.

Jay came into the kitchen whistling. “I'm going to feed the hogs,” said he, and picked up the covered bucket and swung out again. A moment later Garnet heard the pigs screaming like banshees in eagerness and greed.

Garnet had a special little dish filled with all the best scraps for Timmy; she picked it up and ran out-of-doors toward the pigpen. Timmy had grown wise and was waiting for her by the railing instead of fighting for food with his rude family. He was a much better looking pig now, since Garnet's care, and grunted with pleasure when he saw her; Garnet hoped he was glad to see her, too, as well as his dinner. She watched him gobble up the scraps, his ears trembling with enthusiasm, and one delicate hoof planted in the middle of the dish.

“When winter comes I'm going to give you cod-liver oil every day,” she told him, “and by next summer I bet you'll be a very handsome hog. Maybe you'll win a ribbon at the fair.”

Timmy turned away from the empty dish and lay down in a cool mud puddle with a snore of satisfaction, and Garnet went back to the house.

It seemed queer not to see the old, lopsided barn in its place. Last week her father and Jay and Mr. Freebody had torn it apart, and when nothing was left but the framework of the building her father had tied a strong rope to one of the posts and attached the other end to the tractor. Then he had driven the tractor hard till the framework collapsed with a tremendous crash, and the dust lifted in a yellow cloud.

Where the barn's red walls had risen, one now could see across the orchard and pastures to the river; piles of lumber and limestone from the quarry stood where it had been. As soon as the lime was ready they would start to build.

Garnet glanced at the clock; it was nearly six, and time to begin supper. She put more wood in the stove and filled the fat kettle with water. Then she went down to the garden with a basket to get some lettuce and cucumbers.

After the frequent rains the garden was fresh and flourishing. The watermelons in their patch were little green whales in a sea of frothy leaves, and the corn on the hillside was like a parade advancing with plumes and banners.

Garnet privately thought that vegetables in flower were as pretty as any garden plants. Okra had a creamy blossom with a dark red center like a hollyhock, the eggplants were starred with purple; gone-to-seed onions were topped with globes of lacy bloom, and each squash vine, vivid as a jungle growth, spread dark leaves above enormous orange flowers.

Garnet knelt to cut lettuces with a knife and laughed when a big toad hopped sulkily away. She got cucumbers, too, and as she started up the hill she met her mother and Donald returning from the river.