The Well-Wishers (3 page)

Laura stamped her foot. "No, silly! That's not what I meant at all!"

"Isn't it?" I said. But I was pleased.

"No, it isn't." And now she sounded like the old Laura again. "We can't blame Gordy. He didn't know. If it goes wrong, we're all in it together, naturally. But if everything's all right and it turns out to be a
good
adventure, I think he ought to be in charge of the whole thing. Because he had the courage to really speak up to the well and get it going."

That shows you what kind of girl my sister is. Particularly when everyone knew she had had dibs on the first wish right along.

It was Gordy's face that was red now. "Aw no, you ought to be the one. Honest, I'd rather."

Laura shook her head. "This is the only way it'd be fair."

"How do you mean, be in charge?" Gordy said cautiously. "You'd all be along, wouldn't you? You'd be in the adventure, too? It wouldn't be any fun, otherwise."

"Oh sure, we'd all be along," Laura told him. "If the magic starts, we'll be there and help out any way we can. But you'll be the one to make the decisions."

Everybody else nodded. Personally I thought it was giving Gordy a lot of rope. Still, maybe it would turn out to be just what he needed to make a man of him. So I nodded, too.

Gordy looked awed. "Gee," he said. "I don't know if I'm up to it."

"Sure you are," said Laura.

"Sure you are," repeated Deborah.

Gordy looked down at her. They smiled at each other. Then he grinned at the rest of us. "All right." he said. "I'll try."

There was a silence.

And then, in the silence, we all heard a knock at the front door.

Everybody looked at everybody else. And there wasn't a doubt in anybody's mind that the magic was beginning again right now.

Because nobody ever knocks at the door of the secret house.

Our parents and our friends and relations know that it
is
secret, and that is its charm, and they wouldn't dream of ever coming near it and disturbing us. And besides it's too hard a walk for most parents, through the woods and all uphill. Or downhill, if you come from behind. If we're at the secret house and a friend or a relation wants us, he stays at the foot of the hill, by the road, and rings. We have a system, made of wires and pulleys and an old cowbell.

So if somebody had come knocking at our front door on this cold September afternoon, with the sun going down and everything getting dark, it stood to reason that only the magic could have sent him.

The knock came again.

Laura grinned at Gordy. "It's all yours," she said.

Gordy gulped. "Gee," he said. Then he went into the hall and opened the front door.

And now it's his turn to tell what happened next.

This is Gordy telling the story now.

I went into the hall and opened the front door, but I was not as calm as that makes me sound. I was scared.

I am really scared a lot of the time. Not just of spooky, mysterious knockings on doors, but of ordinary things like meeting people and wondering what they will think of me. That's why I say loud dumb things sometimes, to cover up how scared I am. I can hear exactly how loud and dumb they are, right while I'm saying them. But it is too late then.

I try never to let James and Kip and Laura and Lydia see how scared I am, though. They would despise me if they knew. They aren't scared of anything. So I went into the hall and opened the front door.

But when I saw the figure that was standing there, I almost shut it again. And Deborah, who was following me, took one look at the figure, and screamed out "Witches!" and ran back into the parlor.

"Eh?" said the figure in the doorway, leaning forward and cupping its ear with one hand. "What was that?"

"Oh, nothing," I said. "How do you do?" I added. That was all I could think of. And then I probably just stood there with my mouth hanging open. I know I do that sometimes.

The figure was female, but that's about all you could say for it. I have heard some people claim that Lydia's grandmother, old Mrs. Green the artist, goes around looking like a witch. All I can say is, compared with this old lady, Lydia's grandmother is Marlene Dietrich.

This old lady was all huddled into a long black cloak, and her straggly white hair was coming half down and blowing in the wind. To make her all the more witchlike, her gnarly knotty hands were full of leafy branches and plant stalks and long pieces of vine that trailed down to the ground. She wore big horn-rimmed spectacles and her nose was long and thin and her fingers were long and thin, and when she grinned, it was exactly like a crocodile.

She grinned now. And she pointed one of her long thin fingers straight at me.

"Young man," she said in a cracked voice, "I seem to have lost my way. Can you direct me to Hopeful Hill?"

At these words my heart sank. And I was sure I had started the magic and it was cross as two sticks about it, and I was doomed.

To know why, you would have to know about Hopeful Hill.

It is on our road, and some people say it is a crazy house and call it Hopeless Hill. This is not true. Not exactly.

It is a place where unhappy people come for the experts to make them hopeful again. The way they make them hopeful is mainly by sending them walking up and down the road all day long, and getting in the way of the traffic. Sometimes crude kids yell at them from car windows, "Get outa the way, loonies," and things like that. Once long ago I used to do this. But that is one of the things about me that I hope James and Laura and the others will never know.

I would not do a thing like that now, of course. I know now that the people at Hopeful Hill are not loonies, but just people who need hopeful talking to. And exercise, apparently.

So just because this old lady wanted to go there was no reason for me to be scared of her, any more than I should be scared because she looked like a witch. There are no such things as witches, and there is nobody dangerous at Hopeful Hill, either. Or so they
say.

All the same, if the well were insulted, and furious, it could easily send a witch after me, or an escaped maniac, or both. Couldn't it?

All this was going through my mind when the old lady suddenly dug me in the ribs with her bony finger. I jumped.

But "Cat got your tongue, boy?" was all she said.

Of course I could perfectly well have given her directions for Hopeful Hill and gone in and shut the door. That is what I started to do.

But then I remembered that the magic is supposed to be made up of doing good turns, and that this was supposed to be my adventure and the others were counting on me.

I knew they hadn't wanted me along in the first place that day. I knew Lydia didn't have to go to the dentist. And that was really why I'd made the wish on the well, because I was feeling left out. And when Laura was so nice about that, and forgave me, I couldn't let her down now. If the magic had gone wrong, I'd just have to bear whatever brunt there was.

So I said, "I'll come with you and show you."

"Don't let me disturb your party of pleasure," said the old lady. I guess she could see the others peeking from the parlor window.

But I said, "I was just leaving. It's right on my way home. Just a second till I get us a light." And I reached for the pocket flashlight I always carry, for it was really twilight now.

"Lead on, Diogenes," said the old lady. I do not know why she called me that. "I can see in the dark, myself," she added. Somehow this did not make me feel any better about her.

But I just said, "Take my arm, ma'am," and she took it with her skinny claw. If I were good with words, like James, I would probably say that her icy grasp seared my flesh. But it didn't. It just felt like a skinny claw.

As we started down the slope, I looked back and saw the others in a huddle in the doorway, looking out after us. And when we'd gone a little farther, I could hear them coming along stealthily behind. That made me feel better. So long as they were there, nothing could go very wrong. If anything happened, they'd know what to do about it. They always do. That's what's so wonderful about them.

I would not want them to read some of the things I have written about them in this chapter so far. I admire them so much, things keep slipping out.

I would not want them to read some of the things I have said about myself, either. I'll have to come back and take those parts out, later, but I can't stop now. It's going to be hard enough to tell this story, and worry about sentence errors and errors of taste and getting all the way to the end, without stopping to make changes. Stories are not a thing I am good at. Miss Wilson says I just don't have the gift. She says I should learn to stick to the point. I'll try to do that from now on.

It turned out the old lady didn't need my arm going down the hill at all. She was spry. Most of the time she was hustling me along. Except that she kept stopping, and I guess she
could
see in the dark, because what she stopped for was to pull up more plants and pieces of vine.

Every time she did this she would talk to herself. What she said didn't sound like English, and at first I thought she was speaking mumbo-jumbo spells and gathering evil herbs for her witch's brew. Either that, or she was really crazy and was muttering insane gibberish. But when I stopped being scared long enough to listen, I decided she was just saying the names of plants.

This was interesting. Because you can't grow up in the country without knowing a lot of plants, but you don't always know their names. We got into conversation about this and she pointed out the different ones. Prince's pine I knew, but I didn't know pokeweed or pipsissewa. But this old lady knew just about every plant in that woods.

By the time we got down the hill to the road I was pretty sure she wasn't a witch. Just a poor slightly touched old lady, probably, who had wandered astray. But it did seem too bad that such an active, cheerful old lady should be touched, even slightly.

So I said, "Would you like to talk about your problem?" Just wanting to be friendly, and make small talk.

"My problem?" She sounded surprised.

"Yes. What it is that you're hopeless about. Or have they got you feeling hopeful again by now?"

She began to laugh. But not in a bloodcurdling way at all. And then she told me that she wasn't at Hopeful Hill as a patient. She was one of the doctors, a psychologist she called it. (I had to stop writing this story and go ask James how to spell that word.)

Her job was being a psychologist, but her hobby was nature; so one of the things she did to make people hopeful again was teach them all about plants. And about birds, too.

And then we really began to get along. Because birds have always interested me a lot, for some reason. Only I don't have much chance to talk about them, because most kids seem to think caring about birds is queer. At that last boarding school I went to, that I hated, they called me Birdland, and broke all my Audubon Society records. After that I learned to keep birds to myself. I have never once mentioned them to James and Kip and the others, for fear of what they might think.

But this old lady did not seem to think being interested in birds was queer at all. She hadn't seen a winter wren yet that fall, but I had. And she couldn't imitate the black-throated green warbler worth a darn. I can. But she showed me where there was a pileated woodpecker's nest, just a few yards off my own road.

By the time we came to the private drive that leads to Hopeful Hill, I was really sorry to be saying good-bye. And I almost think maybe she was, too, because she kept her hand on my arm.

"I wonder," she said. "You were asking about my problem. It happens that I do have one. Her name is Sylvia. It occurs to me that you might be able to help me with her."

And she went on to tell me about a little girl patient of hers who was a tragic case.

"You see," she said, "Sylvia lost both her parents, suddenly, in an accident. And it was a terrible shock."

"I know," I said. Because something like that happened to me once, a long time ago.

"The thing is," said the old lady, "Sylvia is sort of frozen in her mind. She won't talk to me or anybody."

"Doesn't she have
any
family left?" I said. Because I only lost a father.

"She has an aunt." The old lady looked cross and witchlike again. "If you can call her that. But
she's
no help." And she went on to say that this aunt had a career, and no time to spend on Sylvia, just money. That was why she had sent her to Hopeful Hill.

"But she doesn't seem to be getting any hope-, fuller?" I said.

"No," said the old lady, "she doesn't. That is my problem. I have been wondering if perhaps she wouldn't talk to another child."

It took me a second to realize what she meant. "Me?" I said then, surprised.

"Why not?"

"I'm no great shakes at talking. I've got some friends who could do lots better. Wouldn't you rather ask one of them?"

I had almost forgotten about James and Laura and the others. But now I could hear them coming closer behind us, rustling and whispering, and that was what reminded me. And I think the old lady heard them, too, because her voice went gruff and snappy.

"If I had wanted one of your clever friends," she said, "I would have said so. I'm asking you."

And then I knew this was what the magic had been leading up to, all along, and that my big chance for a good turn was coming, and it was up to me not to fail.

"All right," I said. "I'll try."

I felt solemn as we went up the drive and I looked at Hopeful Hill's big main building, and remembered all the troubled people inside, behind all those curtained windows. And I guess the old lady could tell I was feeling nervous, because she patted my arm.

"Cheer up, Diogenes," she said. "By the way, isn't it time we introduced ourselves?" So I told her my name. When she heard it, she grinned her crocodile grin. "Very well, Gordon'T. Witherspoon III," she said. "Will you walk into my parlor?"

And we went inside.

***

This is Laura writing now. Gordy said I should do this bit, because the first adventure ought to have been mine by rights. But I am glad he got it.