Zeely (2 page)

“What things happen to all these people?” Geeder whispered. “I don’t suppose they all have farms to go to in the summer, like me and Toeboy.”

That made her smile. Oh, it was nice that school was over so that she and Toeboy could leave. . . . It wasn’t that she didn’t like her home. She liked it well enough. You could go to the park or to a show. You could go for a drive in the car and have hamburgers and ice cream or you could play along the river. There was lots to do. But lately she’d grown tired doing things she had done time after time. It wasn’t that she liked going to Uncle Ross’ any better. The truth was that she didn’t remember what it was like there.

“Let’s see, there’s the farm and the town, and there’s Uncle Ross,” she said to herself. But try as she might, she couldn’t recall what she did at the farm three years ago. “Maybe I didn’t do anything. Maybe I was just too young to do much.”

This time, she promised herself, she would do everything and see everything and remember everything she saw.

“I won’t be silly, either. I won’t play silly games with silly girls.”

Suddenly, her father’s last words came back to her. At the same time, she saw that the tall buildings had given way to open country. There were houses and a few farms and fields. The train had gone beyond the river and she hadn’t seen any of it. From then on, she set her mind on seeing everything. The waning day she saw as clear as morning in the country; her father’s words, bright as sunlight in the fields.

“
And now, I leave it all to you,
” her father had said.

“Why, he means something will happen and I’m to take care of it!” she said.

Toeboy thought Geeder spoke to him. He’d been waiting for her to say something above a whisper so he would know she wasn’t still angry with him.

“Geeder,” he said, softly, “just look at this.”

She ignored him.

“Geeder, it’s something you’ll never believe.”

“Toeboy, you read your books and don’t bother me.”

“It says here,” he began, “there are these people living way in the middle of Australia where there isn’t any water. When they want a drink, they pick a big, fat frog and squeeze all the water out of it into their mouths.”

Geeder gasped and spun around in her seat. “That’s just awful!” she said, taking the book away from him to look it over.

“It doesn’t hurt the frogs,” Toeboy said. “They just go along until they fill up with water. Then, they get drunk up again.”

Geeder tossed him the book. “Please don’t bother me, Toeboy. I’ve too much to think about without worrying about you.”

“What do you have to think about?” he asked.

“Oh, things,” Geeder said, “things that happen.”

“What things?” he asked.

“Never you mind, Toeboy,” she said. “Be quiet and read your books.”

Toeboy reached in his pocket for his note pad. Geeder saw him. She at once smiled pleasantly at her brother.

“Pretty soon, we’ll go eat,” she said, “and you can have ice cream and cake after you have dinner. Oh, we’ll eat everything and then we’ll come back here. They’ll turn out the lights and you can sit by the window. You’ll be able to see everything in the night—won’t that be fun? Then, we’ll go to sleep and before you know it, we’ll be there and Uncle Ross will take us to the farm.”

Toeboy forgot about writing to his father. The mention of food made his mouth water.

“Will the dining car be scary?” he asked.

“Not like the tunnel,” she said. “Don’t you worry. I’ll take care of it.”

3

THE NIGHT RIDE PASSED
quickly, as Geeder said it would. The trip had seemed almost too short. In the morning, Uncle Ross was there at the station to meet them. Geeder had nearly forgotten what he looked like. She had a picture of Uncle Ross in her wallet and a picture of him in her mind. The one in her mind was closer to what she saw waiting on the train platform: a big, powerful man, like her father, whose smile was broad and gentle.

Uncle Ross’ eyes shone as he caught sight of them and he tipped his hat eagerly with a friendly swoop of his arm. As Geeder ran up to him, laughing, the suitcase banging against her leg, he held out an arm for her to hold on to.

“Well, look here!” he said. “Look what’s come to stay!”

“I’m Toeboy!” Toeboy shouted, running up and catching hold of Uncle Ross’ free arm. “The train wasn’t scary at all.”

“And I’m Geeder,” said Geeder. “You must remember because we’ll be Geeder and Toeboy for the whole summer on the farm.”

“Geeder, is it?” Uncle Ross said, “and Toeboy. New names for a new summer. I like that! Give me a chance to catch my breath and I won’t forget those names, ever!”

Uncle Ross hurried them into his battered old truck. Geeder recalled that it smelled always of leather and cigars.

At the farm, Geeder saw everything for what seemed the first time. She went in and out of the rooms, looking over all the antique furniture and fixtures Uncle Ross had collected at auctions over many years.

Uncle Ross and Toeboy walked behind her. “I’d hate to think you’d forgotten what my house looked like inside,” Uncle Ross said, teasing her.

Geeder stood fingering a faded piece of silk folded neatly on an old end table. “It’s not that I don’t remember,” she said. “I guess it never mattered before whether I remembered or not.”

“But it matters now?” Uncle Ross asked.

“Oh, yes,” Geeder said. She felt a sudden, sweet surge of joy inside. “Everything matters now!”

“Why?” asked Toeboy.

“Just never you mind,” she said to him. “But I’ll tell you this much. I’m three years older than the last time I was here. That means I know ten times as much as I did then.”

Uncle Ross smiled, noting the great change in the children. He said nothing about it, however. He left them so they could roam the house on their own. “Well, call me if you find anything you don’t know about,” he said to them as he left.

There was a pantry in Uncle Ross’ house. Toeboy and Geeder hung on to the door and looked inside carefully.

“I don’t remember this at all,” Toeboy said.

“Well, I do,” Geeder said. “I don’t remember it being so large, though, with so much food.”

They couldn’t decide if the pantry had been there the last time they visited the farm, so they called Uncle Ross. When he came, he told them the pantry had been just where they found it since the house was built.

“There’s not another house in these parts with a pantry this size,” he told them. He stood rocking on his heels in the center of the room, smiling proudly. “Each year, I put up beans, tomatoes, applesauce and jelly, among other things. Oh, I don’t use half of it in a year,” he said, “but I like giving it to folks in the village. These days, not many people put up food the way I was taught to.”

The pantry was a large square. On every side were cupboards full of canned goods up to the ceiling. Geeder walked to the center of the room and slowly turned around until she had every cupboard fixed in her mind.

“Isn’t it just the nicest place?” she said. “I love it, with all the jars and big cupboards.”

Uncle Ross laughed. “Well, then, you can come in every day and pick out all the food we’ll need for each meal. That way, you’ll get to know this pantry as well as I do and it will get to know you.”

Toeboy wasn’t much interested in the canned goods or the cupboards, even if they did reach clear up to the ceiling. But he did want to stand in his bare feet on the cement floor. He took off his shoes and socks hastily, and stood there. The coolness curled his toes.

“I think I’ll just sit on the floor,” Geeder said. She sat down with her back against the wall. She felt comfortable and decided she would sit on the floor for five or ten minutes each day.

Off the pantry there was a pump room.

“What in the world kind of place is this?” asked Toeboy.

“Uncle Ross—Uncle Ross!” Geeder called. He had left so that they could explore again. “Look, come and see this
place!
”

Uncle Ross came in a hurry, wondering what discovery the children had made in his old, familiar house. Then he saw it was the pump room. It was his favorite place of all.

“Now, you’ve come to something!” Uncle Ross said. “It’s been thirty years since a house was built with one of these rooms.”

“What in the world do you use it for?” Toeboy asked.

“Maybe you won’t want to use it for anything,” Uncle Ross said, “but I come in here when I need a drink of water that’s finer than any other.”

The pump room was quite a small place with just a hand pump attached to a square tub.

“Before there was running water in houses,” Uncle Ross said, “people had pump rooms. There, they filled buckets with ice-cold well water for drinking and for heating on the top of wood-burning stoves.”

Toeboy went up to the pump and cautiously pumped the handle a few times. There wasn’t even a trickle of water.

“The pump has to be primed,” Uncle Ross said to Toeboy. “Go get a pitcher from the dining room and fill it with water from the tap in the kitchen.”

When Toeboy came back with the full pitcher, Uncle Ross showed him how to pour it slowly into the opening around the plunger.

“Now. You pump the handle,” he said to Geeder.

Geeder pumped. Soon, they heard a dry, harsh sound. A minute later, water came gushing out.

“Have a drink,” Uncle Ross said. He took a tin cup from a hook by the door and filled it, first offering it to Geeder and then to Toeboy.

“Oh!” Geeder said. “That’s just the sweetest water!”

From that moment on, they refused to drink the perfectly good water from the sink in the kitchen and feasted in the pump room on well water cold as ice.

The rest of the house was large and spread out. Geeder supposed all farmhouses were like that. Her favorite place was the parlor; it was silent, with blinds and curtains drawn to keep out the heat.

Standing in the room, she didn’t know she had begun to talk to herself. “Look at all those old pictures,” she said. Photographs, yellow with age, lined the walls and the tops of tables. “I’ll bet that one is Uncle Ross when he was a boy. And that one is him for sure as a young man. I don’t even have a memory of those other people. Probably Uncle Ross doesn’t either, the pictures are so old.”

There was a large photograph of a woman she knew to be Uncle Ross’ wife, Aunt Leah. She was no longer living.

“She’s awfully pretty,” Geeder whispered. “I wish I could have known her.”

The parlor had comfortable chairs, a sofa with many soft pillows and tables with drawers full of candy. Some of the candy tasted as though it had lain in the drawers for years, but Geeder ate it anyway. There was an upright piano against the far wall, away from the windows.

“I think I’ll just play it once,” Geeder said. She sat down on the piano bench and touched the keys gently. The sound came forth muted, as if it had waited a long time. The soft tone thrilled her.

“I can play a few songs a little bit.” She spoke more to the piano than to herself. “I wish I could play well. I wish I knew a lot of pretty songs that would just fill up this room!”

A breeze pulled the blinds in and out against the window screens. The lace curtains were sucked up and down along the blinds, making a queer sound all of a sudden. Geeder felt a chill creep up her neck. The photographs seemed to look through her, as though she were a stranger.

She got up and, not looking back, flounced out of the room. “There’s nothing you can
do
with an old piano,” she said.

She wandered into the hall, where there was a cherry-wood staircase. She had noticed it when she first came into the house. Uncle Ross had said it was new, that the old one had fallen down in a heap a long time ago. It led, curving gently around, to the bedrooms above. The stairs had been in the back of her mind ever since she sat down at the piano. And the banister was the kind of thing she could touch and know.

“Better than old, yellowed photographs anytime,” she said. She tried sniffing the banister. “It smells just like the tallest tree in the woods!”

Upstairs, she and Toeboy had separate bedrooms on opposite sides of a long corridor. Her room had a large, soft bed, a bureau with a mirror that she could turn any way she wished and two antique cherry-wood chairs with silk cushions. She opened her suitcase and put all her clothes away in the closet and bureau. At the bottom of the suitcase was a box full of the rest of her necklaces. These she hung from the bedposts and the backs of the chairs. When she lay on the bed, the necklaces made her feel that she rested among stars.

Across the room from the bed were windows that looked out on the rear yard, a big, empty barn and a smaller shed.

Since he no longer farmed, Uncle Ross kept no livestock about. There was just a fenced-in yard at the side of the house for the chickens.

Soon, Geeder got up from the bed and left her room. Slowly, she went over the whole house. Uncle Ross was somewhere outside, and she supposed Toeboy was with him. She had no one to bother her and could take her time. She went to Toeboy’s room. His bed was large like hers and his windows looked out over the front yard and the high hedge that shielded the house from the road. She put all Toeboy’s clothes away and stacked his books neatly on the floor by the bed.