I have dozed off. My wife comes to wake me for yet another feast. I grumble and turn on my side. “You’re tired,” she says kindly “Go back to sleep.”
Would that I could.
A LETTER FROM THE CLEARYS
Of all the joys of reading, the best is the surprise. The awful moment when you realize who really killed Gatsby, the almost funny moment in Murder on the Orient Express when, having announced, “They can’t all have done it!” you think, Good Lord, and then sit back to try and figure out exactly how you were set up, the silly-grin moments when heroines from Jane Austen’s to Mary Stewart’s finally recognize their true loves, and all the unlooked-for moments when you realize suddenly who the villain is or what the mysterious woman was trying to tell you.
I could not wait to become a writer and learn to do that-trick and mislead and hold back information and make one thing look like another and hide the clues and leave the red herrings out in plain sight and feed out the line little by little till the reader’s hooked, and then land him! And I did learn all those things, with the inevitable result that I rendered myself incapable of ever being surprised again. But I can still do the surprising. I can still be the one who makes the reader lean back and try to figure out how he was set up.
There was a letter from the Clearys at the post office. I put it in my backpack along with Mrs. Talbot’s magazine and went outside to untie Stitch.
He had pulled his leash out as far as it would go and was sitting around the corner, half strangled, watching a robin. Stitch never barks, not even at birds. He didn’t even yip when Dad stitched up his paw. He just sat there the way we found him on the front porch, shivering a little and holding his paw up for Dad to look at. Mrs. Talbot says he’s a terrible watchdog, but I’m glad he doesn’t bark. Rusty barked all the time and look where it got him.
I had to pull Stitch back around the corner to where I could get enough slack to untie him. That took some doing because he really liked that robin. “It’s a sign of spring, isn’t it, fella?” I said, trying to get at the knot with my fingernails. I didn’t loosen the knot, but I managed to break one of my fingernails off to the quick. Great. Mom will demand to know if I’ve noticed any other fingernails breaking.
My hands are a real mess. This winter I’ve gotten about a hundred burns on the back of my hands from that stupid wood stove of ours. One spot, just above my wrist, I keep burning over and over so it never has a chance to heal. The stove isn’t big enough and when I try to jam a log in that’s too long the same spot hits the inside of the stove every time. My stupid brother David won’t saw them off to the right length. I’ve asked him and asked him to please cut them shorter, but he doesn’t pay any attention to me.
I asked Mom if she would please tell him not to saw the logs so long, but she didn’t. She never criticizes David. As far as she’s concerned he can’t do anything wrong just because he’s twenty-three and was married.
“He does it on purpose,” I told her. “He’s hoping I’ll burn to death.”
“Paranoia is the number one killer of fourteen-year-old girls,” Mom said. She always says that. It makes me so mad I feel like killing her. “He doesn’t do it on purpose. You need to be more careful with the stove, that’s all,” but all the time she was holding my hand and looking at the big burn that won’t heal like it was a time bomb set to go off.
“We need a bigger stove,” I said, and yanked my hand away. We do need a bigger one. Dad closed up the fireplace and put the woodstove in when the gas bill was getting out of sight, but it’s just a little one because Mom didn’t want one that would stick way out in the living room. Anyway we were only going to use it in the evenings.
We won’t get a new one. They are all too busy working on the stupid greenhouse. Maybe spring will come early, and my hand will have half a chance to heal. I know better. Last winter the snow kept up till the middle of June and this is only March. Stitch’s robin is going to freeze his little tail if he doesn’t head back south. Dad says that last year was unusual, that the weather will be back to normal this year, but he doesn’t believe it either or he wouldn’t be building the greenhouse.
As soon as I let go of Stitch’s leash, he backed around the corner like a good boy and sat there waiting for me to stop sucking my finger and untie him. “We’d better get a move on,” I told him. “Mom’ll have a fit.” I was supposed to go by the general store to try and get some tomato seeds, but the sun was already pretty far west, and I had at least a half hour’s walk home. If I got home after dark I’d get sent to bed without supper and then I wouldn’t get to read the letter. Besides, if I didn’t go to the general store today they would have to let me go tomorrow and I wouldn’t have to work on the stupid greenhouse.
Sometimes I feel like blowing it up. There’s sawdust and mud on everything, and David dropped one of the pieces of plastic on the stove while they were cutting it and it melted onto the stove and stinks to high heaven. But nobody else even notices the mess, they’re so busy talking about how wonderful it’s going to be to have homegrown watermelon and corn and tomatoes next summer.
I don’t see how it’s going to be any different from last summer. The only things that came up at all were the lettuce and the potatoes. The lettuce was about as tall as my broken fingernail and the potatoes were as hard as rocks. Mrs. Talbot said it was the altitude, but Dad said it was the funny weather and this crummy Pike’s Peak granite that passes for soil around here and he went up to the little library in the back of the general store and got a do-it-yourself book on greenhouses and started tearing everything up and now even Mrs. Talbot is crazy about the idea.
The other day I told them, “Paranoia is the number one killer of people at this
Stitch walked along ahead of me, straining at his leash, and as soon as we were across the highway, I took it off. He never runs away like Rusty used to. Anyway, it’s impossible to keep him out of the road, and the times I’ve tried keeping him on his leash, he dragged me out into the middle and I got in trouble with Dad over leaving footprints. So I keep to the frozen edges of the road, and he moseys along, stopping to sniff at potholes, and when he gets behind I whistle at him and he comes running right up.
I walked pretty fast. It was getting chilly out, and I’d only worn my sweater. I stopped at the top of the hill and whistled at Stitch. We still had a mile to go. I could see the Peak from where I was standing. Maybe Dad is right about spring coming. There was hardly any snow on the Peak, and the burned part didn’t look quite as dark as it did last fall, like maybe the trees are coming back.
Last year at this time the whole Peak was solid white. I remember because that was when Dad and David and Mr. Talbot went hunting and it snowed every day and they didn’t get back for almost a month. Mom just about went crazy before they got back. She kept going up to the road to watch for them even though the snow was five feet deep and she was leaving footprints as big as the Abominable Snowmans. She took Rusty with her even though he hated the snow about as much as Stitch hates the dark. And she took a gun. One time she tripped over a branch and fell down in the snow. She sprained her ankle and was frozen stiff by the time she made it back to the house. I felt like saying, “Paranoia is the number one killer of mother’s,” but Mrs. Talbot butted in and said the next time I had to go with her and how this was what happened when people were allowed to go places by themselves, which meant me going to the post office. And I said I could take care of myself and Mom told me not to be rude to Mrs. Talbot and Mrs. Talbot was right, I should go with her the next time.
She wouldn’t wait till her ankle was better. She bandaged it up and we went the very next day. She wouldn’t say a word the whole trip, just limped through the snow. She never even looked up till we got to the road. The snow had stopped for a little while and the clouds had lifted enough so you could see the Peak. It was really neat, like a black-and-white photograph, the gray sky and the black trees and the white mountain. The Peak was completely covered with snow. You couldn’t make out the toll road at all. We were supposed to hike up the Peak with the Clearys.
When we got back to the house, I said, “The summer before last the Clearys never came.”
Mom took off her mittens and stood by the stove, pulling off chunks of frozen snow. “Of course they didn’t
