The Ghosts of Stone Hollow
Read The Ghosts of Stone Hollow Online
Authors: Zilpha Keatley Snyder
Zilpha Keatley Snyder
to Jean
A Biography of Zilpha Keatley Snyder
S
TRANGERS SOMETIMES CALLED
them mountains, but to Taylor Valley people they were always just the Hills. They rose in ranks on each side of the valley floor, from low, rolling foothills, up and up to the farthest crest, steep and jagged, and dark against the thin blue air. Wooded, rocky, and crevassed by canyons, they shut the valley off from highways and railroads, and many other things which, by the year 1938, were not so very far away.
In that year, a narrow potholed strip of warped blacktop known as the Old Road was still the only way to get to the Hunter farm from the town of Taylor Springs, and it was along that road that Amy walked, or more often ran, on her way to school.
One Monday in late September, Amy trotted around the corner of the schoolhouse and right into a clump of children who were watching Gordie Parks shove someone against the schoolhouse wall. Above the heads of smaller children, Amy could see Gordie’s face, wild and red with bully-anger. Eyes set and bulgy and cheeks jiggling, Gordie was slamming a new boy against the wall again and again.
From the edge of the crowd, Amy pushed past Alice Harris and Shirley Anderson, ducked around Jed Lewis, and stopped where she could get a good look at the new boy, who was almost hidden by the bulk of Gordie. He was ugly, she decided, as stringy and scrawny as a half-grown chicken. His face, as white as Gordie’s was red, was winced into a grimace that stretched his lips into pale ribbons and hid his eyes in tight, drawn wrinkles. But he would have been strange-looking even if he hadn’t been making a face.
For one thing, his clothes were wrong—a Sunday kind of suit, tweedy and short-legged, instead of real school clothes, and old-fashioned shoes, high and shiny. His hair was thick and shaggy and of the streaky blond color that turns greenish when it needs a washing. But the difference about him was more than you could point to—more strange and foreign-looking than things like clothes, shoes, and haircuts could explain.
As Amy inched closer, Gordie slammed the boy again, so hard that his head bounced on the school wall, and his teeth snapped together like a beetle-clicker. Amy’s hand twitched toward the back of her own head, and she caught her breath as her stomach tightened with excitement. She moved up again, into the front row of the crowd.
Gordie looked around then and, encouraged by the size of his audience, he forced out more and fiercer fury. “You stinking sissy,” he growled. “Why don’t you fight, you Goddamned stinking sissy?” Balling up his fat fist he swung it hard, right at the new boy’s mouth.
The boy jolted backward and then stood still with his hands covering his face. When he let them drop, the grimace was gone. His face had gone limp and quiet. There was blood on his lip and his eyes were wide and white-rimmed like the eyes of a frightened horse. When they turned toward Amy, she saw that they were blue and bewildered-looking, and suddenly the greedy excitement in her stomach curdled into a sick feeling and she shrank backward through the crowd. Once she was safely outside the circle, she ran.
She dashed across the school grounds and pounded with forbidden speed down the hallway to the door of Room 6. Flinging it open, she burst into words before there was time to remember about Miss McMillan and tattling.
Miss McMillan, who was so tiny and weak that sixth-grade boys had to open jar lids and lift boxes for her, believed in being strong. She believed in strength and individualism and “standing on your own two feet” and in her classroom tattlers often found themselves in more trouble than the people who got tattled on. Her frown reminded Amy before she was good and started, but by then it was too late to stop.
“—and Gordie socked him in the mouth and his lip’s bleeding and he’s way littler, Miss McMillan, and skinny, too.”
Miss McMillan’s frown had changed to a mocking smile. “Well, Amy. Tattling already? So early on a Monday morning?”
“But Miss McMillan, his lip—”
“Amy, my dear. Calm down. This is just something that has been going on since boys were first invented, and will keep on happening as long as boys are boys. It’s best, you’ll find, to let them work it out between—”
“But Miss McMillan,” Amy interrupted desperately, “Gordie is swearing. He said Goddamn right out loud—in front of first-graders, too.”
Miss McMillan’s mocking smile faded, and she stood up. Straightening her skirt with a jerk, she headed for the door. Amy followed at a safe distance until they reached the corner, and then she turned and ran the other way. She hid out in the girls’ rest room and stayed there until the bell rang, and then came out pretending not to know what all the excitement was about.
Surprisingly, it worked. Nobody found out that Amy had been the one who tattled. The fight watchers had been so hypnotized by Gordie’s raging that they had not noticed when Amy turned and ran. And for once Miss McMillan did not mention the tattling, shaming the tattler and urging everyone to fight his own battles and stand on his own two feet. Amy couldn’t guess why she’d been so lucky—unless Miss McMillan had finally noticed that some people’s feet were bigger and stronger than others and that Amy would have needed a lot more help than her two feet if Gordie found out she was the one who had told on him. But, for whatever lucky reason, nobody seemed to know what she had done. It wasn’t until after school that she found out that someone else did know—and that someone was the new boy himself.
His name was Jason Ulysses Fitzmaurice, and he came running out at Amy from behind a clump of eucalyptus trees on the way home from school that afternoon. She heard a voice call, “Look!” and then there he was running toward her, looking down into his cupped hands so intently that he tumbled over the rough ground as if he were running in the dark. He staggered to a stop and, still looking down into his hands, he said, “Look. Look what I found,” in a strange, breathless voice.
Amy felt uneasy. If she had not already heard people saying so, she would have guessed right at that moment that he was crazy. “Mad as a March Hare,” Aunt Abigail would have said. It was mad to run up to a person you didn’t know at all and start to talk to them as if you’d known them all your life—especially if that person had seen you beaten and shamed that very morning before half the people in the Taylor Springs School.
“Look,” the mad boy said again, “it’s alive.” His eyes were huge and strangely far apart, like the eyes of an animal. They gleamed up at her, dark blue and shiny, through the curling strands of greenish hair. His nose was short and smallish, his cheeks dented under his eyes instead of bulging, and his upper lip was fat and cracked from Gordie’s fist. But even with the fat lip, he didn’t look ugly, now that he wasn’t making faces. Not ugly, but certainly strange and outlandish—like a person from a different country, or from an old-timey oil painting.
Keeping her distance, Amy leaned over and peered between the boy’s thin fingers. It was only a baby bird.
“It’s only a baby bird,” she said. “Some kind of swallow, most likely. You’d best put it back in its nest or it will die.”
“Die?” the boy said. “Will it really?”
The word “really” went up at the end in a foreign-sounding way, and the boy’s excited smile faded into a worried frown. More like a three-year-old than a sixth-grade boy, Amy thought.
“Don’t you think I could raise it, if I fed it and kept it very warm?” the boy said.
Gingerly, Amy pulled his fingers apart enough to reveal the little head and beak. “See,” she said. “It’s an insect eater. You can tell by the beak. It would be easier if it were a seed eater. It’s hard to find enough insects. They usually die, ’specially when they’re that young. It’s better to put them back in the nest if you can find it.”
“I’ll find it,” the boy said, and he glanced around as if he expected to see the nest sitting there on the ground near his feet. Then turning back to Amy he asked hopefully, “Do you know where it is?”
Speaking slowly and distinctly as one might to a first-grader, Amy explained that since the bird was too young to fly, or even to hop, the nest was sure to be very close to where he had found the bird.
Beyond the clump of eucalyptus there was a lone tall sycamore. The boy led the way to a spot not far from its trunk, and Amy showed him what to do next. She showed him how, if the baby bird were put back on the ground and watched from a distance, its calling would bring the parent birds. And by watching the coming and going of the parents, it was sometimes possible to find the place where they had hidden their nest.
Hiding behind a large rock, they watched the parent birds come, just as Amy had said they would, but when the nest was spotted at last, it was in a bad place, far out at the end of a long limber branch.
“Too bad,” Amy said. “There’s no way to climb clear up there—no way at all.”
But the boy was already sitting on the ground taking off his strange-looking, high-topped shoes. His coat came off next, and he buttoned the little bird into the pocket of his shirt. It took a boost from Amy to get him started up the tall trunk to the first limb, but from there he was on his own.
He was not a good tree climber—not strong and surefooted like Bert Miller, or even delicately balanced like Shirley Anderson, but he was limber and clingy as a monkey, and frighteningly daring. Watching him teeter and dangle, Amy caught her breath a dozen times, and at least three times she yelled at him to give up and come down before he got himself killed. But he kept right on climbing, and at last he reached the nest and got the baby bird into it, and then slithered slowly backward like a strange awkward lizard, until he reached the ground.
Back in the watching spot behind the rock, Amy was still shaky from only watching, but the boy, with blood oozing from the twig scratches on his face and arms, seemed to have forgotten the climb entirely. He peered intently up at the nest, not even noticing Amy’s curious stare.
“Do you think they’ll accept him?” he asked. “I’ve read that some birds will reject their own offspring if they’ve been handled by humans. Do you think they’ll reject him?”
“I don’t know,” Amy said. “Sometimes they won’t have a baby somebody’s touched, and sometimes they will. I don’t know what they’ll do.”
The mother bird returned then, and after a few moments she settled contentedly back on the nest, but the boy went on watching her tensely for several minutes longer. When he finally relaxed and stopped bird-watching, Amy was forced to stop watching him. She had been staring, up until then, trying to decide if he was all-the-way crazy, or maybe only a little. It wasn’t easy to tell. She’d heard about lots of crazy people and even had known a couple, but they had been grown-ups—an old lady in San Francisco and Grandpa Simmons in Taylor Springs. She had never met a crazy boy before. Some of the “mad as a March Hare” people who figured in Aunt Abigail’s stories were dangerous, but the new boy had, so far, done nothing that seemed in any way threatening.
But just at that moment he turned to Amy and, smiling his strange, eager smile, he said, “Thank you for notifying the teacher this morning when I was getting beaten.”
Amy was so surprised that she stammered, “How did you—what makes you think—who told you I did it?”
“Nobody told me. I saw you decide to go.”
Something tingled at the back of Amy’s neck, and she gathered herself together to be ready to leave quickly if it seemed necessary, but there was nothing fiendish or sinister in the boy’s smile.