After Sylvia Read online

  “It’s very close,” Andy said, and he looked at her in exasperation. “Keep going. You can’t just give up!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because people who give up never get to Mars or the South Pole or the bottom of the ocean.”

  Owen watched the two of them. Eleanor and Andy were nearly the same height, but at the moment Andy looked smaller. And usually when he gave a command to his younger brothers they did it. But not Eleanor.

  “I think we should go home,” Eleanor said.

  “Just a little farther!” Andy pleaded. It didn’t sound like his voice at all. He turned to go on and Owen followed, but he wasn’t sure anyone else was coming. Finally he sneaked a look behind him. Some distance away, but walking in the right direction at least, Sadie was clutched onto Leonard’s arm while Eleanor trudged grimly behind.

  They walked and walked. Owen kept his eyes peeled. He was hoping that something, anything, would begin to look familiar. These were the woods they could ride their bikes through at top speed at night in the summer and never lose their way. They knew at all times exactly where the river was, where the train tracks crossed, how far to the highway. But the woods seemed much deeper now, and today was Christmas so there was no noise. The river was frozen, the trains weren’t running, the road was deserted. It all might as well have been a hundred miles away.

  Then Sadie fell into a drift up to her neck and almost disappeared. She crawled out kicking and sputtering with snow in her eyes and boots and down the collar of her coat.

  “I don’t care how haunted the house is,” she declared. “I’m going home!”

  She stomped off crying, and Eleanor went with her while the three boys watched, uncertain what to do.

  “Well, that’s torn it!” Andy said finally and ran off after them. He was right, of course. It would be awful to have the girls return to tell Margaret they’d been abandoned in the woods by their cousins on Christmas day.

  Leonard followed Andy and so did Owen. Now Eleanor was leading the way but at least they had their old tracks to stay in.

  “I can’t believe it!” Andy muttered. “Our one big chance and we can’t even find the haunted house!”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t be scaring people on Christmas,” Leonard said.

  “It was a gift!” Andy muttered. “And we’ve wasted it.”

  They walked and they walked. They walked so far that the trail began to get firmer, as if people had been treading on it for weeks. Already the light was beginning to fade and the air felt colder with every passing minute.

  “You’ve gotten us lost!” Andy announced at last, with the first glimmer of joy in his voice.

  “I’m just following your big fat tracks home again,” Eleanor responded.

  “Yes!” Andy exulted. “That’s all you had to do, follow my tracks. But we’ve been going around and around. Don’t you see?” He pointed at the snow, where there were traffic jams of footprints, some going one direction, others going the opposite. “This is at least the third time we’ve passed over this ground,” he said with undisguised satis­faction.

  “I can’t help it if your trail was flawed in the first place,” Eleanor said. “You were so lost you crossed over your own tracks, too.”

  “I did not!”

  They argued about it as darkness descended. Owen felt the chill of the forest reach inside his jacket and pull the heat from the center of his bones. The trees looked like dark skeletons standing silent watch.

  But not that silent. Owen was suddenly aware of the creaking of timbers, of the awful tension surrounding them, as if the whole land was holding its breath.

  “Let’s just get home!” Owen said.

  “That’s fine, but which way is it?” Eleanor countered.

  “Help!” Sadie screamed suddenly, in a voice so piercing that Leonard tripped over a fallen branch hiding behind him in the snow. He floundered for a moment and finally stood sneezing with snow up his nose.

  “Let’s be calm,” Andy said in his old voice again, the steady one that relished these sorts of predicaments. “Let’s think our way out.”

  “It’s almost dinner time,” Eleanor said, squinting at her watch. “Which means that Lorne and your father are going to be coming for us any moment.” She started screaming as well. “We’re over here! Help! Hello!”

  Andy took two strides across to her and fit a mitted hand over her mouth.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” he said. “We’re only lost. What glory would there be in having someone come and get us?”

  She pushed his mitt off her face. “Glory?” she said. “Who cares about that?”

  But she didn’t scream again. So everyone looked at Andy.

  “You have to think your way out,” he repeated. “That’s the most glorious way.” He thought for another moment. “Captain Volatile never screams for help.” And he puffed out his chest and looked as if he might leap over the trees any moment to impress her.

  “Our lives are in danger and all you can think about is comic books!” Eleanor muttered.

  They all stood silently. Owen tried to open his eyes as wide as possible to take in what little light there was. The snow helped. It didn’t really seem so dark after all. The trees emerged from the shad­ows and took form. He could see everyone’s breath in vapor clouds that rose and disappeared above their faces. Even Sylvester stayed quiet for a time. And there seemed a heaviness to everything, like the snow weighing down all these limbs, and the way sound was muffled in the forest, swallowed by the cold air and the sad carpet of winter.

  And then, slowly, surprisingly, the outline of the haunted house made itself known to him.

  They were standing quite close, in fact. Suddenly it seemed so obvious that it was hard to imagine they had missed it. Owen looked at the faces of the others, but they didn’t, see it, even though they were looking straight at the tired, snow-draped frame, the crumbling walls and vacant windows.

  “There it is,” he said quietly and pointed exactly where they were all looking. Then, as if he were conjuring it, they saw it for themselves.

  “It was right here all the time,” Andy said.

  “Is that it?” Eleanor said. “Is that what we’ve been walking all day to see? I froze my face for this crummy little wreck of a house that’s more trees than anything else?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Andy said in disgust. “You wouldn’t appreciate it anyway. Let’s go home. At least now we know the way.”

  “No, we came this far,” Eleanor said stubbornly. “Let’s see what’s so special about this stupid place.” And she marched off the trampled trail and waded through the hip-deep snow.

  The old house looked desolate and lonely to Owen, as if time had been leaning heavily on it. Part of the roof at one end had fallen in, and trees that Owen hadn’t noticed before were now growing out of several of the windows. It didn’t look safe to enter.

  “The door’s locked,” Andy called out to Eleanor. They were all following now. “You have to go through the window.”

  Eleanor put her hand on the doorknob anyway and pushed hard. The door opened and she stepped inside.

  “Watch out for the hole in the floor!” Andy yelled, running after her into the house.

  “I don’t want to go!” Sadie said suddenly.

  “It’s all right,” Leonard said, and he took her arm. “She’s very nice — for a ghost.”

  Inside, the light was eerie. Everything was covered in snow and shadows. Eleanor and Andy had both managed to walk around the hole in the floor. Owen and Leonard and Sadie walked around it, too, and approached the red couch, which was where it always was, in the middle of the room. Eleanor and Andy were sitting on it now, quite close together, as if drawn there magnetically. It, too, was full of snow. Owen dusted off a section and sat down carefully, and then all five of them were on it. Owen gazed up at th
e snowbound forest through the rafters above his head.

  He looked around to see where the Bog Man’s wife might be. Maybe in the winter the house got so cold and lonely that she went somewhere else.

  Owen heard a low whistling in the trees and a rubbing of branches against something.

  A voice came then, soft as falling snow. It was hard to make out. Owen had been shivering but now he felt like he was sitting beside a fire. He couldn’t follow the words exactly. They sounded normal and yet not usual at all, as if spoken in a foreign language or a dream.

  There was the voice, and the silence of the air sifting through the forest — which was in itself a sound, Owen realized. And the sound of snow being quiet, and of the haunted house bearing the slow weight of time. The more he listened, the more he heard — a slight scratching, a tree perhaps giving in, finally, to a dreadful itch, and then the sudden staccato of something, maybe a mad woodpecker knocking after frozen insects. And he heard his own breath sliding in and out, a little furnace of heat and activity in the midst of all this cold and stillness.

  Owen let go his loon call then. It started low and soft and warbly, and slowly took over his throat and chest and shook the flimsy walls of the haunted house until it felt like loose snow was being shivered free. The others stayed where they were and just listened.

  Later they walked home together in silence. Andy was apparently not interested anymore in scaring Eleanor and Sadie, and Eleanor said nothing about the house being boring or ordinary or somehow not worth the hours of cold marching.

  At Christmas dinner Horace muttered over how the little paper skirts Margaret had made for the turkey legs were interfering with his carving, and Leonard spilled cranberry sauce on the pure white tablecloth. The silver of the cutlery shone in the candlelight and turkey gravy pooled in the mashed potatoes and buttered squash, and little bits of cork floated in the adults’ wine glasses. Uncle Lorne drank three glassfuls and agreed to whistle for them all. He filled the house for a time with so many birds that Owen felt like he might have been back in the woods. Margaret wore a red dress that Owen had never seen before, and she kept her apron on during dinner. She never seemed to settle in her seat, but was constantly moving back and forth between the dining-room and the kitchen.

  So many things were the same as every other Christmas, and yet so much was new as well. Even after everyone else was finished, Owen’s plate remained nearly full. Not because he wasn’t hungry, but because he was so busy just looking at all that was new and old. They had never had Eleanor and Sadie and Lorraine for Christmas before, yet now it seemed perfectly natural that they would be there. Lorraine seemed so happy, even though she was fatter than Owen had ever seen her. She wore a purple velvet dress that might as well have been a bed sheet, it was so floppy.

  “I remember when Eleanor was a baby,” Lorraine said, helping herself to more mashed potatoes. “She wouldn’t sit still for anyone, and at Christmas dinner I had to march up and down the hallway singing nursery rhymes while all my guests served themselves.”

  Owen looked from the belly of Lorraine to Eleanor’s blushing face, from the face to the belly, and the belly to the face. It was just like looking at the snow on the trees until the trees had turned into the haunted house. Right before his eyes Lorraine and her fat belly turned into something else.

  Something else indeed.

  Finally Owen began to laugh. The more he looked, the funnier it got, until he was sobbing up against Leonard and clutching to keep his head above the table.

  “What’s so funny?” Margaret asked, but Owen couldn’t say it. His eyes were full of tears.

  He writhed and wriggled at people’s feet like some animal possessed by a giddy fever. And the more he fought, the harder it was to gain control. His body became a shuddering mass of gasping laughter. Leonard, too, succumbed, and Sadie, and it spread through the room until Owen wondered if the table would be overturned.

  “Whh..hh..at are we... l.ll…llaughing about?” Margaret sputtered, but Owen couldn’t trust himself to speak. Lorne had collapsed on the sofa and Andy and Eleanor were puddled together by the television set and even Lorraine was clutching herself and leaning against the doorframe as if she might fall over.

  “It’s...it’s...nothing,” Owen said finally. And through the teary slits of his eyes he watched his aunt Lorraine holding herself — herself and her secret baby — and felt as if the whole world was jiggling in their joy.

  Calendars

  MICHAEL Baylor came back from Christmas holidays looking nervous. At a Junior Achievers meeting in front of the class he announced that everyone had to sell calendars to raise money for the trip to Japan. The calendars came from Michael Baylor’s father’s company and showed different classic tractors from years gone by January featured a delicate 1940 John Deere Model H painted green and yel­low. A girl in a straw hat and clothing unsuitable for farm work sat on the metal driver s seat trying to look comfortable. February was a 1929 McCormick-Deering perched like a bull on a hill, the front wheels spread wide and dark body sil­houetted in the sun. March was a yellow 1939 Farmall A with bright red wheels.

  Michael Baylor said that if they sold the calendars for five dollars each, then only four dollars would go to his father to cover his costs and that would leave one dollar per calendar for Japan. “If we all pledge to sell a hundred calendars,” Michael Baylor said, “then we would raise two thousand six hundred dollars for the trip.” He also said that his rather was president of the Good Neighbors Club, and they would donate fifty cents for every dollar raised on the calendar sale. He made a quick calculation and then announced a final fundraising figure that seemed so large, Owen thought they would be able to go around the world several times on it.

  The class was silent for a while. Finally Dan Ruck said he didn’t even know a hundred people.

  “You don’t have to know them to sell them calendars!” Michael Baylor said. “Just go door to door. It won’t be hard. These calendars will sell themselves. In fact, you don’t need to limit the sale to one per household. These are collectors’ items and some people will want to buy several.”

  Miss Glendon said she wanted to get on with her lesson. “Why don’t you call a vote, Michael, to see if people agree to sell these calendars?”

  “We have to sell them,” Michael Baylor said, “if we want to get to Japan!” He looked around the room like he was daring anyone to vote against the calendars.

  The vote was called. No one put up a hand except Michael Baylor. Owen fingered the sample calendar nervously. Beauties of the Ages it said on the cover.

  Owen raised his hand.

  Soon others raised theirs, and then almost everyone was voting to sell the calendars.

  Each student took a hundred home in a box. Owen hid his in the bedroom closet and tried to work up the courage to ask his rather for help in selling them. But that evening he found Horace sitting in his favorite chair, his face hidden behind the newspaper. Owen could tell from the snapping sound of the turning pages that his father had had a bad day.

  So Owen waited until Friday when Horace was usually in a better mood. When Horace got home late in the afternoon he threw his tie on the chesterfield and ruffed up Sylvester’s fur in a happy way. Then when he was reading the paper he joked about an article about a chicken with two heads and no feet. “Sure would have trouble crossing the road!” he said. Then he looked at Owen.

  “How was your day?” he asked. “You look like the prison bars are closing in all around.”

  Owen screwed up his courage.

  “I was wondering,” he said, “if you could drive me into Elgin.”

  “What for?”

  “I have to sell calendars. It’s to go to Japan on the class trip,” Owen said.

  “I thought you lost that election,” Horace replied. His voice was suddenly sharp as wire, and Owen wished he hadn’t brought it up.

&nbs
p; “Yes, but —”

  “Show me these calendars.”

  Owen brought the box down from the bed­room and opened it for his father.

  “Tractor calendars!” he said with that special note of delight that Owen knew to dread. “You’d be lucky to sell two of these. You’ll just be wasting your time.”

  Owen went to Margaret to ask if she would drive him into Elgin. But Horace followed him into the kitchen.

  “You’d do better if you sold the tractors door-to-door!” he said.

  “What’s all this about?” Margaret asked.

  “His class thinks they’re going to Japan!” Horace said sharply.

  “Didn’t you plant some idea like that in Owen’s head?” Margaret asked.

  “But he wasn’t even elected,” Horace said.

  It was strange for Owen to see his father whirling like this, saying something one day and then the opposite another.

  “These are just young kids!” Horace said. “How do they think they’re ever going to get to Japan?” Horace looked at Margaret straight over Owen’s head. “Do you know what he wants? He wants me to drive him all the way to Elgin. After I’ve been working all day! Do you know I’ve been to Elgin twice already this week? People in Elgin don’t buy anything! I can tell you that for a fact. And these ridiculous calendars...”

  Owen retreated to the bedroom and closed the door. He felt like he was caught so tight under a giant s foot that he could hardly breathe.

  Before dinner his mother took him aside. “You know that your rather has to sell things every day,” Margaret said. “It’s a difficult life and some days don’t go right. He didn’t mean what he said.” Owen could hardly look up at her. “I called Lorne,” she said finally. “He’ll take you to Elgin.”

  Lorne arrived in the truck after dinner. Owen snuck out the back with his box of calendars so that Horace wouldn’t ask him where he was going.