Authors: Kathleen Van Cleve
Drizzle (31 page)
I skim the pages. Piles of ancestors—female relatives with crooked fingers—heap on top of one another in my crowded, messy brain. Besides Enid’s sister, Lucretia, there’s someone named Charlotte, and Katherine, and Olivia. My history, my heritage—all on these pages.
The bugs flip up another page. This one has a sheet of paper stapled to it. It looks like a science worksheet, with a grid.
POLARIZATION PROCESS1.
Cloud formation occurs during evening hours. Preferably before ten o’clock p.m.2.
Return to Silo at approximately 12:45 p.m. the following day.3.
Confirm that cloud is in precise raining position.4.
Activate polarization in finger with cloud, inciting rainfall.
“Precise raining position?” My mind is whirling; I look at the bugs, who are all watching me. “I have a lot to learn.”
Spark flutters over to me, hovering.
“You could have given me this earlier,” I say, glaring at them. But I’m not a very good actor—I start to smile almost immediately. I guess it’s better I learned it all myself. The crickets jump and Spark flies and the ivy dances and the bugs turn more and more pages as I learn more and more secrets.
I must sit in one of the black iron chairs for hours, as puzzle pieces fall into place. The reason it didn’t rain on the day Freddy was born? Grandmom went to the hospital with Mom on Sunday, and stayed there until Freddy was born on Monday afternoon.Who keeps the Silo clean? The Peabody woman in charge of the rain. When does the Peabody woman discover this genetic trait? When she turns eighteen. (This one, obviously, didn’t apply to me.) Why doesn’t it rain anywhere else but on our farm? No one knows. The pain in my finger? It will go away. Or rather, I’ll get used to it as I get older. Why did it only drizzle today? Full rainstorms don’t come until the female is fully matured. That’s why my rainstorm was kind of feeble.
It turns out that if I want the rain to occur exactly at a certain time, I’ll need to trigger it with my finger. Today, I just got lucky. I made the cloud late enough that I think the polarization lasted long enough to make it rain.
Or something like that. Actually, I don’t really believe that. I still believe in something much more basic.
Magic.
The dragonflies turn to more pages, filled with photos and rhubarb research. Everyone who has the crooked finger seems to write in this, keeping their history and keeping their secrets in one place.
Before I go back downstairs, Spark flies over one more time. He picks up the final page of the book. I swallow when I recognize the handwriting. It’s from Aunt Edith.
I’m tired of being here. I’m restricted. It was all easier in New York, without any of this, this hardship, this banal reality. The only bright spot is the children, those glorious nieces and nephew. They remind me that the life of the mind, the child’s imagination, is not just important, it is absolutely essential in order to live life fully. I worry though——I see Polly’s finger and I wonder about her future. What if she wants to leave? What if she wants to truly be all that she can be? Can she do it on a farm? Is this fair, this tie to her heritage, this worthy but perhaps-individual-destroying tether to the past?Honestly, I don’t know.Edith Peabody Stillwater
I close the book and look up at my friends. Carefully, I place it back on the table; I have the key. I’ll read more in the days ahead.
“Now what?”
I stand in the middle of the room as the ivy moves over to me, picking up my right hand, the one with the emerald ring, and holds it. Like we’re friends. The Monster cricket jumps in my left hand. More and more stinkbugs fly in, plopping down and joining their brothers and sisters in a circle. Bumblebees fly over my head, and the dragonflies, led by Spark, fill the air before me.
It’s a little silly. A lot silly. And very, very weird.
But we dance. We all dance—silly dances, wild dances, disco dances—everything. It’s the best party I’ve been to in a long, long time.
Finally, though, I have to stop. I’m really tired.
“Keep up the party,” I tell them. “I’m going to sleep.”
Right before I walk out the door, Lester jumps in front of me, startling me yet again.
“What is it?” I ask him.
He puts his leg straight up to his mouth, the same as when a teacher tells you to be quiet.
“I know,” I say. “It’s a secret.”
epilogue
Harry’s
growing.
growing.
His spindly root has thickened and a crown is developing. I think, I really, really think, that a leaf has begun to sprout.
I do such a crazy dance that I’m sure Basford thinks that the whole farm thing has made me permanently affected. He’s right.
Since the rain—the drizzle—started a month ago, we’ve been able to rejuvenate a bunch of our crops. For about two straight weeks, I made it rain every day. Well, “rain” is too strong a word. But it did drizzle at one o’clock daily until I could get the farm back into shape. The truth is, I’ve messed up the timing so much that the news reporters are going insane; it gets harder and harder to sneak out of the castle at night because there are so many of them trying to hide all over our property. All of them are trying to be the person to figure it all out. But they won’t. I’ve learned something else during this process. No one, absolutely no one, suspects that an eleven-year-old girl is capable of anything. Especially not reporters. I think I could tell them the truth and none of them would do more than tap me on the head and ask me to find my father.
For the last two weeks, I’ve resumed the weekly rain, only I have to do it on Saturday night and Sunday because of school. Of course, the media would never figure this one out.There are all kinds of theories, some of them just silly, and many of them outright mean. Mrs. Jong wrote that she thinks our farm has undergone some kind of violent transfer of power from one evil spirit to another. It’s okay. Especially since I now know for sure that there aren’t any evil spirits, even in the Dark House.
The regular rhubarb crop is still pretty dismal, but the Juice Company “is open” to resuming our business. Patricia and I told Dad he should tell them no way, and change all the regular rhubarb to chocolate rhubarb.
But really, Dad is too focused on his medicinal rhubarb project for Freddy to think about anything else. Dr. Noble and Dr. Roman have become our friends, along with Dr. Jackson. They’re over our farm all the time, working with Dad in his cottage and then coming over for dinner. Freddy came out of his coma about a week after they started injecting him with some of Dad’s medicine. The only person in the room then was Basford, and the nurses say that he screamed so loud he woke up another person who had been in a coma for twenty years. (I’m pretty sure they were joking.) Freddy’s still really weak, but he’s much better. He told me that when he was in his coma, he had a dream that he was walking down a long hall toward a light seeping out from under a door. He did what Ophelia said—he followed the light and swung open the door.
“And Pol? There were like five thousand televisions with all the sporting events
in the universe
going on. Plus all the chicken wings I could eat. It was
heaven
.”
in the universe
going on. Plus all the chicken wings I could eat. It was
heaven
.”
I check my watch. It’s 4:00 and my class should be arriving soon to help with the preparation for the Transplanting party. This was my idea since (a) the last trip was a little bit of a disaster and (b) we need help. Mom’s been pulled between the hospital and the farm, so Patricia and I have had to step in to arrange everything. We’re not having the big blow-out party we usually have. No news cameras. Not one. A couple of reporters from major newspapers and websites, but Mrs. Jong is not on the invitation list, obviously. Neither is her husband.
We decided to take it back to Grandmom’s original idea—a Halloween party where people had fun and got to do some work too. We were all allowed to invite as many friends as we wanted. Ophelia is planning a mass séance to talk to the Ghosts of Rhubarb Past. Mom made us invite Girard, but luckily he’s moved to Maryland to irritate other people.
The day is bright and sunny. I squint when I see my classmates step out of the yellow bus.
“I want to wrestle a Giant Rhubarb!” yells Joe Joseph.
“You are such a loser,” Charlie Lafayette tells him.
Jennifer Jong holds her pink cell phone to her ear as she walks off the bus. I think we are in a kind of cold war. (That’s what it is called when two people don’t like each other but don’t do anything to hurt each other either.) On my first day back to school after it rained, Jennifer strolled over to me and sneered.
“Finally got lucky?” she said.
“No,” I told her, smiling. “Actually, the witch doctors came and did their rain dance. You should come next time. You can burn some sacrifices and howl at the moon too.”
“You’re not funny, Polly. I’m still going to find out how it rains.”
I smirked. “You don’t have to look far. It’s kind of what we’ve been studying all semester.”
She glared at me and stomped off. I’ve spent the rest of my class days actually meeting some of my other classmates. It turns out that Margaret Hess and Billy Mills and Will Skalley and Christopher Taylor and Charlie Lafayette are all pretty cool. Chirpy Dawn is still annoying, but that’s okay. I’m nice to her anyway.
Patricia comes out of the shed and starts to bark orders. She’s made for that kind of thing.
“Okay, the boys start with the candles. If there’s a raging inferno tonight, I’ll know who to blame.” She points to two big boxes behind her.
“The girls are going to help organizing all the shovels and light stands. We need them for later, when we actually get the barrels outside and replant the Giant Rhubarb in the ground.
“You, over there, with the pink cell phone. Take this.” Patricia holds up a brown broom.
Jennifer puts her phone down. “What’s that for?”
“You have to clean up the slugs,” Patricia says with a big smile on her face. I look back at her. She winks.
Basford comes over with the wheelbarrow. He’s begun to talk a lot more, especially once Freddy came out of the coma.
“I checked on Harry,” he tells me.
“So did I,” I say. “He’s looking good, isn’t he?”
In fact, I go out there every morning, telling him everything, just like I used to. Today, I was explaining how my friends Margaret and Charlie were coming, and how the Giant Rhubarb looked healthier than ever. Then I told him that Freddy’s coming home in a week.
I’m pretty sure Harry’s almost-leaf almost smiled.
Mom and Beatrice and Chico are all the same. They like to act like nothing happened—that the farm wasn’t in jeopardy, that Freddy didn’t almost die. Instead, they’re working and cooking and harvesting as much as they can, squeezing out every second of the day in the pursuit of healthy, delicious, ozone-protecting rhubarb.
I’ve read the Book of Secrets about one hundred times, in between
The Railway Children
and my third time through
Self-Reliance
. I’m excited to write something there myself, when I’m older. But as much as I like that it explains many of my questions, I still have the sense that the answers are really bigger than all of it, the book—the farm—everything. It’s some combination of nature and God and science and, of course, magic. Maybe this is what I’ll write about, when I get old enough.
The Railway Children
and my third time through
Self-Reliance
. I’m excited to write something there myself, when I’m older. But as much as I like that it explains many of my questions, I still have the sense that the answers are really bigger than all of it, the book—the farm—everything. It’s some combination of nature and God and science and, of course, magic. Maybe this is what I’ll write about, when I get old enough.
I wish I could talk about this to Aunt Edith. But she’s gone. It’s weird to think that she knows that I figured it out. I think of her all the time, every single day. I make lists and lists of all the things I am going to talk to her about when I see her again. I want her to be proud of me—more proud than she’s ever been of anyone. How can I grow up without being able to tell her what I’m doing, what I’m learning, what my life is like? Sometimes, in the dark of the night, I have an awful feeling that I really won’t see her again—that, like Basford said, sometimes things can’t be fixed.
But I can’t accept that. It makes no sense. So every day I just wait for her to contact me. I know she will. I just have to wait.
She was right, of course. When she told me about how good it feels to do something all by yourself.
There’s a feeling you get when you achieve something all by yourself that will bring you more peace and contentment than anything money or love can provide. It is that moment when you can look around and say “I did it”—and know no one can take it away from you.
That’s exactly how I felt that first day it rained. I felt as if all the rips and holes in me had been sewn up, like some invisible hand was busy sewing all the time I was distraught over Aunt Edith or crying over Freddy. But when I was there, in the Silo, pulling the clouds together, it all made sense. Even with all the other things going on, I kept just saying one thing over and over to myself. I still say it, almost every night before I go to sleep. They are the most hopeful words I know.
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