I used old newspapers and a screwdriver to chink the drafty open places between the cabin logs. I swept the floor and porch down to bare wood, and cleared out the cobwebs and dead bugs hanging from the rafters. I lugged the trailer seat cushions, pillows, and bedding out to an old clothesline and gave everything a good beating to free the dirt and rodent droppings, coughing and sneezing my head off as I did. My old T-shirts made good cleaning rags, and I borrowed one of Henry’s paintbrushes to dust the delicate treasures on the wall shelves. I put the small carved animals from the cigar box on a shelf with the photograph of whoever’s mama beside them, so she’d have company, though she seemed lonely still. Who was she? I wondered. What had her life been like, and whose mama had she been? Sad as she looked, she had a tender way about her, and I imagined her full of kind words and motherly attentions. Had she collected all the treasures for a child like me? Whittled the carvings herself? What had become of her and her child, and why had they left their treasures behind?
I wondered about these things as I cleaned and nailed and made the cabin my own. I’d never had a home that was mine before. Sure, I knew a drafty, one-room shack without even a toilet wasn’t really a home, but the cabin made me happy. It was my home, however humble. My home, my way.
I dumped the old fireplace ashes onto the weedy garden, thinking I might try to grow vegetables or flowers in the spring. After making sure I could see a rectangle of sky at the top of the chimney, I laid a test fire in the fireplace. When the smoke went up and out like it should, I added wood from the woodpile to warm up the room. I’d found an old window screen at Henry’s and used it to keep the sparks where they belonged. I filled the hurricane lamps with lamp oil I found under Henry’s kitchen sink, and cleaned the colored window glass with rags and soapy well water I heated over the fire in an old pot. The glass sparkled in all its multicolored glory, and the oil lamps created fair light for reading and writing in my brand-new journal, a present from Ms. Avery.
After the snow, Ms. Avery decided to give me an independent study project, so I could work on my writing. Each week, she said, I’d find a new assignment on my desk with books she wanted me to read. She even moved my desk to the back of the room by the windows, so I could write during lessons I already knew. Now Hargrove had to contort himself if he wanted to stare.
Turned out Ms. Avery had wanted to be a writer too, but she didn’t have the discipline for it. “You have to spend so much time alone,” she told me, “and then you have to keep going over and over what you’ve written, revising. I always wanted my first drafts to be brilliant, but it doesn’t work like that. I didn’t like writing so much as having written.”
I liked the way she said this and other things, and the way our talks seemed a meeting of like minds. Once I almost told her about the cabin in the north woods, about the treasures on the shelves and the sad woman in the picture, but I wasn’t ready to talk about them yet, and Ms. Avery didn’t pry. Maybe she had some of Bessie’s mind-reading ability, though, because some things she just seemed to understand.
“How’d you know I’d like that book you gave me?” I asked her.
“I didn’t. I gave you one I liked and hoped you’d like it too,” she said.
“I did, a lot. I like orphan stories.”
“Orphan stories?”
“You know, books where kids are on their own and their parents don’t get in the way of their adventures.”
I told her about books I loved, and not just books about orphans in the strict sense—kids with no parents, like Mary Lennox or Mowgli—but orphans of all kinds: kids with one parent, like Huck Finn or Jem and Scout Finch or Opal Buloni; kids with missing parents, like Charles Wallace and Meg; lost or stolen kids, like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys; kids like Lyra Silvertongue, whose parents might as well be dead for all the good they were; and even orphaned animals like Rascal, and grown-up orphans like Robin Hood—abandoned by King Richard, who was always off on a crusade.
“You have the instincts of a writer,” she whispered in a conspiratorial voice.
She handed me a fat notebook with a red leather cover and the word Journal written in gold script on the front. Part of my independent study was to keep a journal. No one was to read it without my permission, including Ms. Avery, but I was on the honor system to write in it every day. My old spiral notebook was almost full, and I was grateful to have a second, nicer notebook to write in. Ms. Avery said I could keep the journal safe in the locked drawer of her desk while I was at school. She also gave me my first independent-study assignment: to put together a class presentation about what it was like to live with Henry and his sculptures.
“The kids will love it,” she said, “and get to know Henry, and especially you.”
That was when I was tempted to tell her about the cabin; I was so proud of it I was about to bust. Instead I wrote about it in my brand-new journal. Down deep I believed that the minute you talked about
