A Clearing in the forest (14 page)

It suddenly occurred to Wilson that Frances might have had something to do with his acceptance at Northern. But Professor Hogue was hurrying on between marshmallows.

“I got a letter from Mrs. Crawford yesterday.” He fumbled amidst the clutter on his desk and held up a sheet of paper with Frances's familiar writing. When he put it down, it stuck to the bits of marshmallow on his hands and he had to push it onto his desk with his elbow. “She thought you might like a job.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How would you like to take care of the rats?”

“Rats?”

“Yes, we keep several hundred rats for our experiments. Run them through mazes and such like. Of course most of the work is done in the psychology department, but since the rats are animals and zoology is our subject, they fall under our protection, so to speak. What do you say?”

Wilson said, “Yes.”

The rats were kept in a large room. Their cages, stacked from floor to ceiling, covered all four walls. Each time you entered the room, hundreds of white shapes skittered back and forth and hundreds of pink eyes stared. The room smelled of disinfectant and the pellets of grain that were fed to the rats. It was Wilson's job to come in once a day, feed the animals, and fill their water bottles. On Saturdays he cleaned the cages, carefully removing the rats by their tails. Occasionally one developed a middle-ear disease, and when he picked it up by its tail, it twirled around like a mechanical toy and had to be disposed of. Often there would be babies in the cages, their pink hairless bodies and pug faces looking more like miniature pigs than rats. His new job gave Wilson a place to study at night; his grades, which had been unspectacular, began to improve.

And there was Melissa, who shared the job with him. At first they had come at different times. Then, finding they enjoyed each other's company, they worked together. On Saturdays when they cleaned the cages, Melissa arrived in grubby jeans with her waist-length red hair done up in a scarf and went at the cages like a pile of dirty dishes. She was going to be a veterinarian and was fascinated by the rats, fussing over the sick ones and counting the number of new babies each week.

Evenings they sat together in the lab doing their homework—pink rats' eyes watching their every move, soft, throaty squeaks of encouragement issuing out of cages.

Like Wilson, Melissa had been raised in the country and loved the outdoors. They rented cross-country skis, and when they finished on Saturdays, headed for the gently rolling hills that ringed the small college town, following deer and raccoon tracks and stopping under the shelter of pine trees to watch the thick flakes of snow fall around them.

One day, Wilson thought, Melissa would come and visit him in Oclair and he would take her to Frances Crawford's. He knew they would get along. He didn't care if his parents approved of Melissa; it was Frances's opinion that counted. He wanted to take Melissa there because he always brought Frances the rare things he found.

22

Day after day the melting snow and ice from the roof dripped down until a narrow trough formed like a miniature moat around Frances's cabin. Snow disappeared from the bases of the trees, leaving rings of exposed ground. A gray meadow vole tunneled out and sat blinking in the sun. Brown paper packets of seed arrived in the mail.

Frances ticked off the order of returning birds: red-winged blackbird, phoebe, robin, wood duck, cowbird, mourning dove, kingfisher, swallow, white-throated sparrow, grackle, and then a yellow explosion of spring warblers.

Plants pushed up through the earth. Much of the first foliage emerging from the ground was red, as if the leaves were bruised and bloody from their struggle with stones and cold ground. She knew better of course; it was simply the presence of anthocyanin pigments in the plants without the masking effect of chlorophyll. So much for her romantic speculations.

Warm days came, but they were followed by cold, rainy days with nights that dipped down into the twenties, too cold to set out the vegetables she had started indoors. Her seedlings wavered tremulously in coffee cans and milk cartons. They were a pale green, and too leggy.

Although she had received only two letters from Wilson, she thought of him often, pleased that his second letter had been so much more enthusiastic than the first one. When she had gone to college, only a few women took science courses and she was not one of them. She took a vicarious pleasure in Wilson's description of his work. Professor Hogue had written her that after a shaky beginning Wilson was one of the best students. For some reason she couldn't understand, Hogue's letters were always sticky, the pages adhering stubbornly to one another and to her fingers. Perhaps it was some paste he used in his research?

Each morning when she went down to see the river, Frances looked over at the clearing where the well had been, but she had not been able to make herself walk over and inspect it. She thought of it as a battlefield and half expected to look over one day and see a monument looming over the empty acres.

Wilson came to see her at the end of June. The dog exploded into a frenzy of recognition, prancing and bucking and springing up to lick Wilson's face. Frances and Wilson were shy with each other. Wilson no longer looked like a boy. He had grown a shaggy blond beard; since his blue eyes were about all you could see of him now, they appeared larger and more arresting. Frances thought there might be things he could tell her that she did not know.

Wilson found Frances more fragile. The fine cross-hatch of lines on her face had deepened, and when she walked into the kitchen to fetch him some raspberry juice, she walked with less assurance.

“How is school, Wilson?” Frances asked rather formally when she returned with the juice.

“Well, it's funny. You learn a lot of technical stuff, the kind of things you have to memorize, like the parts of plants and their Latin names. But I think I learned a lot more just walking through the woods with you.” It was painfully embarrassing to Wilson to bring this out, but it was true and, seeing how frail Frances was, he was determined to tell her.

Frances was pleased. “I'm not sure but what you're right, Wilson. It was the great naturalists who tramped through the countryside and kept their eyes open, men like Thoreau and Muir and Burroughs, who taught us the most about nature.”

Wilson began to feel more at home. No one had quoted at him for a long time. “I've got a friend, a girl friend, I'd like to have you meet some time. When she comes to visit me, I'll bring her over.”

Frances smiled. Secretly she had sometimes thought Wilson was ashamed of their friendship, that he would be afraid his friends would think she was old and strange and the cabin slovenly.

Wilson had brought his fishing gear and together they walked toward the river. It was still high from the spring runoff and had a rushed, exuberant sound. The river had its own special smell that was like nothing else. It was a musty odor of wet grasses and pine and the slightly bitter smell of bracken. It made Wilson anxious to get into his waders and slip into the stream, but his eyes kept returning to the clearing. He hesitated. Frances followed the direction of his glance, recalling the white ghostly shape of the derrick that had appeared in her dream. Wilson thought of his last night on the rig, of the block dropping toward the ground. He knew he would never get over what had happened unless he could bring himself to return to the site and stare his demon down.

Reluctantly, Frances followed him. The oil company had plowed over the clearing and sown grass in the furrows. Deer had come to graze on the tender new shoots; their tracks were everywhere. Wilson and Frances found several patches of clover on the site, a few sorrel plants, plantain, and a creeping cinquefoil. Wilson spotted some woolly mullein leaves, and Frances found a wild strawberry plant.

By the end of the summer their list had grown to include bracken, wild honeysuckle, blackberries, two species of violets, dandelions, ragweed, pearly everlastings, and a chokecherry seedling.

The following spring, when Wilson brought Melissa to meet Frances, the three of them discovered a three-foot-high poplar, wild raspberries, eight kinds of grasses and spurge. The trees that had stood marshaled into rows at the edge of the clearing had begun to march; oak and maple seedlings were coming up. The birds had spread Juneberries from the bushes along the riverbank. On the side of the clearing nearest the river, they discovered two spikes of wide-leaved ladies'-tresses. The blooms of the tiny wild orchid were no larger than a half-inch across. They were a buff color, with a lip of pale yellow threaded with delicate green lines.

In all her years of looking, Frances had never before found the plant on her property. She decided there was no end to the miracles the land could produce.

About the Author

Gloria Whelan is a poet, short story writer, and novelist best known for her children's and young adult fiction. Whelan has been writing since childhood and was the editor of her high school newspaper. Many of her books are set in Michigan, but she also writes about faraway places based on her travels abroad. In 2000 she won the National Book Award for her young adult novel
Homeless Bird
. Her other works have earned places among the American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults, the International Reading Association's Teachers' Choices and Children's Choices, Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People, and Los Angeles' 100 Best Books. Whelan has also received the Mark Twain Award and the O. Henry Award. She lives in Detroit, Michigan.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1978 by Gloria Whelan

Cover design by Mimi Bark

ISBN: 978-1-4976-7390-8

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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