The Ghosts of Stone Hollow (2 page)

“I don’t know what would have happened,” the boy said, “if you hadn’t called the teacher.” He ran his finger carefully over his split and swollen lip.

“That stupid Gordie,” Amy said. “He’s always fighting. But you should have hit him back. He usually quits if the person fights back.”

“I couldn’t,” the boy said. “I was too frightened.”

Amy stared in amazement. For a moment she was too embarrassed to think of anything to say. She’d heard boys admit easily, even proudly, to all sorts of things—things like being dumb or mean or bad but, in Taylor Springs in 1938, boys never admitted to being afraid, not even when they very plainly were. At last she decided the Christian thing to do would be to say something comforting.

“But you weren’t afraid in the tree,” she said. “You could have been hurt a lot worse in the tree than Gordie could have hurt you.”

“Being hurt wasn’t what I was afraid of,” the boy said.

Feeling uncomfortably like a character from a dream where nothing that happens makes any sense, Amy decided to change the subject.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“In the brown house at the end of Bradley Lane.”

She remembered, then, overhearing people talking at church just the day before, about some city folks who had rented the old Bradley house.

“Where’d you come from?” she asked.

“Do you mean originally,” the boy asked, “or most recently?”

Amy looked at him sharply, wondering if he were being smarty—with his big words and funny foreign way of talking. Maybe he thought she didn’t know what “originally” meant, or “recently.” She knew all right, but she knew something else he probably didn’t. She knew it was better to talk like the other kids talked, in Taylor Springs.

“Last!” she said, firmly. “I mean, where did you come from last before here.”

“Well, from Berkeley last,” he said. “But previously we lived in Athens—that’s in Greece—and before that in Barcelona. But I was born in England.”

Amy shook her head in amazement. She had known liars before, but not with such good imaginations. She wondered if this Jason had been to any of those places—even one. He lied so convincingly, without any trace of guilty hesitation, that she could almost have believed him, except that no one lived all over the world that way. No one except, perhaps, very rich people. And what would very rich people be doing living in an old worn-out house in Taylor Springs?

“Where do you live, then?” Jason asked.

“Huh?” With an effort Amy brought herself back from wondering about such skillful lying, and realized that she had been asked a question.

“Down that way,” she said, pointing, “on the Hunter farm—the big white house with all the porches and the row of pepper trees out front. Mrs. Hunter is my aunt.”

“Why do you live with your aunt?” he asked. “Are your parents dead?”

Again the strangeness—as if he didn’t realize that “dead” was not a word you used about your own people. People in books or in faraway places could “die” and “be dead” but friends and relatives “passed away” or “crossed over” or even “went to their just reward.”

Amy made what she thought of as an Aunt Abigail mouth—a thing that you did with your lips that would make it plain, even to a foreigner, that they had made a foolish mistake. “No,” she said, “My parents are not—my parents are alive. They live at my aunt’s house, too. We used to live in San Francisco ’til my father broke his back and couldn’t work anymore. Then we came back to live in Taylor Springs.”

“Came back? You had lived here before, then?”

“No. I hadn’t. My mother was born here though. You know the big church right downtown? The Fairchild Community Church? My grandfather was the minister there for thirty-seven years. His name was Reverend Jeremiah Fairchild, and the church is named after him.”

“Is that your name—Fairchild?”

“Not my last name. My last name is Polonski. But Fairchild is one of my middle names.” Even as she explained about her name, Amy didn’t know why she bothered. It was obvious that this new boy didn’t know enough about Taylor Springs to know that it was important to have a name like Fairchild. If he stayed very long, though, he would certainly find out.

Suddenly Amy jumped to her feet and dusted off her skirt. “I have to go now,” she said. “I promised my aunt I’d hurry home and help her hoe tomatoes.”

Jason jumped up, too. “Don’t go,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

“What?”

“A place. A place I found. It’s up that way—in the Hills.”

Amy guessed almost at once, from the direction the boy was pointing, but she asked anyway. “What kind of place? Is it like a little deep valley on the other side of the first ridge, with an old shack in it?”

“Yes,” Jason said. “Like a hidden valley with an old deserted cottage with no windows or doors and some old broken furniture in it and an iron—”

“Furniture?” Amy interrupted. “You didn’t go in it, did you?”

“Yes, I went in. I didn’t think anyone would mind. There wasn’t a door, and it was quite obvious that no one had been there for a long time.”

“I’ll say no one’s been there. No one ever goes there because it’s haunted. That’s Stone Hollow, and everyone around here knows it’s haunted. Did you really go down there? Clear into the house and everything?”

He nodded.

“All by yourself?” Amy asked. When he nodded again, she said, “Gosh! What’s it like? What happened? I’ve been almost there—to where the road starts going down into the hollow. Alice Harris and I went there one time, but we saw something under the big tree near the house, and we got out of there as fast as we could.”

“What did you see?”

“I’m not sure,” Amy said. “But it was something—” She paused to think. The slight shivery movement that had flickered in the deep shade of the oak trees had grown a little each time she had told about it, and now she let it grow a little more. Letting stories grow a little bit past the absolute truth had been a temptation for as long as she could remember.

“It was something kind of whitish,” she said, “with long floppy skinny arms, and eyes like dark holes, like in a skull, and it was swaying back and forth. But what did
you
see? What happened when you went in the house?”

“It was just an old cabin, like a woodcutter’s hut. There was a wet moldy smell from all the rain that’s leaked in. There are three little rooms, two in front and a long narrow one across the back with a broken table and a rusted iron stove.”

“But didn’t you see anything scary? Didn’t anything happen?”

“No,” Jason said, but he looked uncertain. “Nothing actually happened. Not that you can explain about. But I felt—something. There’s a difference you can feel right away. That’s why I thought you might like to go there—”

“I told you,” Amy said, “it’s haunted, and nobody goes there. Not even people who don’t believe in places being haunted. Nobody I know has been there. Not even people who aren’t afraid of anything, like Gordie Parks.”

Weirdly, for no reason, Jason began to laugh, and Amy backed away in case he was getting ready to do something even crazier.

“What are you laughing about?” she demanded.

He stopped, then, and after a moment he said, “I was just laughing at what you said—about Gordie. I thought maybe it was a joke.”

Amy backed farther. “I have to go now,” she said. “I promised my aunt I’d hurry right home from school.”

She walked quickly, looking back now and then over her shoulder until the crazy boy was out of sight, and then she began to run.

O
N THAT DAY AMY
ran all the way home because she was late, but on other days she ran for other reasons. It wasn’t just that she liked to run, because she really didn’t. There were always other reasons. Just a few days before, she had tried to explain it to her mother.

Shaking her head and sighing as she bandaged Amy’s bloody knee, Helen Polonski had asked, “Why were you running? Why do you always run? Do you like having your poor knees all skinned up?”

“No, Mama,” Amy had said. “I don’t like skinned knees. I don’t even like running really. I never used to run much before we came to Taylor Springs. But running is important in Taylor Springs. Everybody likes Betsey Rayburn just because she can beat everybody but Bert Miller at running.”

Amy’s mother had pushed a strand of pale hair back from her face and smiled sadly. “And being liked by everybody is more important than having scars and infections and worrying your mother, and—”

“No,” Amy had interrupted. “That’s not why I run—being liked, I mean. I run because—well, because sometimes I just have to. I don’t know why.”

But today she knew why. She had promised Aunt Abigail she would be home early and instead she was very late. When she reached the Hunter farm, she flung open the garden gate, raced up the path between Aunt Abigail’s roses, and vaulted three steps at a time up the veranda stairs, landing lightly on her toes so no one would hear. But someone did hear, because just as she reached the door a voice said, “Amy,” and she started guiltily before she realized that it was only her father. He was sitting in his wheelchair on the north veranda.

“Amy,” Daniel Polonski called, “what’s the big rush?” He took her hand and pulled her toward him, turning his dark whiskery cheek for a kiss. Around his eyes and forehead his skin had the purplish look that dark skin has when it fades from too little sunshine.

“I’m late,” Amy said. “I promised Aunt Abigail I’d hurry home to help hoe the tomatoes.”

“The tomatoes can wait a minute,” her father said. “Sit down and talk a minute. What’ve you been up to today?” He was grinning, raising one bushy black eyebrow, making his thin stubbly face look cheerfully devilish, like a playful pirate.

Amy grinned back, tucking in her lips to make her dimple show. Her father liked dimples, and he liked to hear about things that made him laugh. Things like the system she had worked out for eating a licorice stick during arithmetic without anybody knowing, or the way she had hidden a puncture vine thorn in her hair, tucking it into the braid that Gordie Parks always yanked when he walked past her desk. Things like that made her father laugh and start telling about things he had done in school, and how he had been a holy terror when he was a boy, back in Chicago.

Hurriedly Amy tried to think of something her father would laugh about, but she couldn’t think of anything. So she told him about Gordie and the new boy. She told him all about it except that she had done the tattling, because she knew that that was not the kind of thing he liked to hear. But she did say some things about Gordie Parks—what a stupid disgusting bully he was, and how much she hated him.

“Well now, Baby,” her father said. “Don’t be too hard on poor old Gordie. I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman, myself, but he sounds to me pretty much like an ordinary, red-blooded American boy. In my day a new kid had to expect a few lickings, unless he was pretty good with his fists, or else pretty damn lucky. I remember one time when I—”

“Amy Abigail, I’ve been waiting for you for over an hour.” Aunt Abigail was standing on the path below the veranda, holding a hoe and dressed for gardening. “You’re very late,” she said.

Amy knew how late she was, but her guilty start was not so much for her lateness as for the “damn” her father had just said. If Aunt Abigail had arrived below the veranda in time to hear the damn, she would probably mention it and there would be another discussion about cursing.

“I’m coming, Aunt Abigail, right this minute. Just as soon as I change my clothes.” Amy lunged for the door and got away before they could trap her in the middle of a discussion. She never liked hearing their discussions, because Aunt Abigail always won.

At one time, back in San Francisco, Amy’s father had been very good at discussions. Amy could remember hearing him tell about discussions he had had, and won, with his friends at work, or even in the middle of big union meetings with dozens of people listening. Amy could remember sitting in the kitchen of their apartment on Franklin Street and listening to her father tell about discussions he had won, and jokes he had told with funny foreign accents that made everyone laugh. But no one could do very well in an argument with Aunt Abigail. And even when Amy knew that Aunt Abigail was right—with the Reverend Dawson, and the Bible, and probably even God on her side—she always felt sorry when her father lost.

But if there was a discussion that day it wasn’t a very long one; because Aunt Abigail was already in the tomato patch when Amy dashed out the back door, still hooking the straps of her overalls. Aunt Abigail in the vegetable garden was a sight that took getting used to. Abigail Hunter gardened because of the Depression and because during hard times everyone had to make sacrifices, and also because hard work never hurt anybody. But no one seeing her in the garden would ever make the mistake of thinking she really belonged there.

Aunt Abigail had an old voile dress that she wore for gardening because it was cool and loose and didn’t bind, and the long, flowing sleeves protected her arms from the sun. She wore gloves, too, old dress gloves that came up almost to the elbow, and a huge old motoring hat that she tied down with a long chiffon scarf. Her glasses were the pinch-on kind, and they quivered on the bridge of her nose with every stroke of the hoe, or bounced on her bosom on their silver chain. Except for her bosom, which was large and pigeon-shaped, Aunt Abigail was long and narrow and elegant-looking and she always managed to look her most elegant when she hoed weeds in the vegetable garden.

Luther Hunter, who had been Aunt Abigail’s husband until he passed away, had owned the biggest farm in Taylor Valley; and back in the good times before the Depression, there had been several hired hands who lived and worked on the Hunter place all year-round—and many more who came for a while during the summer and harvest time. But now with bad times making it impossible to make a profit, most of the Hunter land was leased to cattle ranchers, and Aunt Abigail kept for herself only as much as she and Old Ike could take care of.

Old Ike, who had worked for the Hunters for a long, long time, was old and slow and nearly crippled in one leg, but he still milked the cows and tended the chickens and kept up the yard, so that the Hunter place always looked as neat and spruced up as ever, in spite of the hard times. Aunt Abigail insisted on that. But because hoeing was hard for Old Ike, she helped out in the vegetable garden.