Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze (16 page)

“I remember most of these pictures,” Randy said, “but I'd forgotten that I remember them.”

“Me, too,” said Oliver. “Gosh, did you really ever have a hat like that?”

“I guess so; isn't it peculiar? Why look, here's one of Mother.… I thought we had them all at home.”

Oliver took the picture she held out and studied it: a young girl sitting in a rowboat, laughing at some vanished joke.

“I never knew her very well,” he said.

“Oh, Oliver, of course you did. But you were just a baby.”

“She was pretty, wasn't she?”

“Yes. Yes, now I can see that she was. But when I knew her, I mean when she was living, I never thought if she was pretty. She was just Mother. The way Father is Father. The way Cuffy is Cuffy. The way any grown-up is that you see all the time and love a lot.”

“I guess so.… Say, who is this guy?”

“For heaven's sake. It must be Father.”

The boy looked very serious. He stood with his arms folded, gazing sternly into the lens of the camera. His broad-brimmed hat was turned up in front, his nose freckled. His knickerbockers were torn at the knee; his high-laced shoes scuffed. His stockings—“
Stockings,
mind you,” said Randy—were badly wrinkled.

“He wasn't a very fancy dresser,” she said, “and someone's written on the back of it: ‘Martin Melendy, age 11 years. The prodigal returneth!' Well, well. We'd better ask Father about this.”

She laid the picture aside, and they went on with their family research: pictures of themselves and their parents and grandparents and relatives, known and unknown; pictures of babies galore: babies in bathtubs and sandpiles and buggies; on laps and on shoulders and in unknown adult arms. After a while it was too dark to see anymore and as the storeroom was without electricity, they shut the trunk and went back to the house in the rain.

“I don't think it ever was a piece of luggage,” Oliver said.

“Probably not,” Randy said. “All that talk about travel made me think so.”

“Who ever heard of a trunk dancing?” said Oliver. “Being always
right,
too. Hey!” He stopped dead. “I bet it's a shoe!”

“Maybe. Gee whiz,
maybe!
Unpolished and down-to-earth, too. And holding its
tongue,
and all. But who wears size ten around here. Father? Rush wears eights, I know, and so does Mark. It couldn't be Cuffy or Mona or us.”

Willy came slopping along in his slicker.

“Hi, Willy, how big are your feet?” was Oliver's greeting.

“Size twelve,” replied Willy amiably. “My feet expected to support a larger man. They outdistanced me. Why?”

“We're taking sort of a—sort of a foot census,” said Randy.

“Well, anything to kill time on a bad day,” said Willy.

Father was in the living room, reading. He had built a good fire in the fireplace and turned on the lights. It was warm and cozy there.

“What size shoe do you wear, Father?” asked Randy, the minute she saw him.

“Eleven,” said Father.

“Oh, dear,” said Randy.

“Heck,” said Oliver.

“Is there anything wrong about size eleven?” asked Father defensively. “After all I'm not a small man.”

“No, it's not that. It isn't anything, really, just something I was thinking of,” said Randy helpfully. She held the picture out to him. “Look, what we found. Why does it say that about the prodigal on it?”

“Good heavens, I haven't seen that photograph in thirty years or more,” said Father. “I was eleven years old and had just climbed a mountain by mistake.”

“Tell us,” demanded Randy, flinging herself down on the rug beside the dogs. Isaac was steaming visibly; he had been out hunting in the rain. Oliver preferred the couch; he sat slumped way down, almost sitting on his neck, a position he considered both comfortable and relaxing.

Father lit his pipe, or rather relit it (he seemed to light it as much as he smoked it) and began.

“Well, let's see.… It was a long time ago, as you can guess. I was spending the summer with my grandparents that year, I forget why, and they'd taken a place at Lake Nemesee for the month of August; a little blue, deep lake with mountains all around it. I'd talked Grandfather into letting me take my dog—”

“Hector?” asked Oliver.

“No, the one before Hector. Gus, his name was. I don't know why his name was Gus, but it suited him. He was a low-slung, stout, bowlegged dog with one bent ear. I loved him and he loved me. It was a bitter blow to us both when Grandfather refused to let him sleep in my bedroom. He always had at home; he used to lie down among the shoes on my closet floor. He had a good friendly way of snoring, and when he woke up to scratch himself the floor would shake. I missed all that, but my grandfather was unyielding. He did not approve of dogs in bedrooms. Gus didn't like it any better than I did; sometimes I could hear him give a long dismal howl of loneliness and boredom in the kitchen downstairs. I could hardly stand it. Grandfather could hardly stand it either; he took to shutting Gus out in a little woodshed back of the cottage every night.

“My grandmother was understanding, though. ‘Never you mind, Martin,' she'd say. ‘I'll just slip out and give him a bone before I go to bed. It'll take his mind off his loneliness.'”

“How
horrible
of your grandfather,” cried Randy.

“He didn't realize. He was a fine man, and I liked him; he was a little elderly and strict, that was all, and didn't remember much about boys, being at that time the father of seven grown-up daughters.… Well, one night, full moon, it was, a big wind sprang up. What woke me was a door banging somewhere; it sounded as if it was outside. My first thought was of Gus, naturally, and when I looked out the window, sure enough, there was the shed door wide open, clapping and banging against the wall. I whistled for Gus, but he didn't come, and I listened for him, too, but could hear nothing, so I got out of bed and ran downstairs and out into the yard.

“But no Gus. I searched high and low, but never a sign of him. I began to be so miserable and worried and angry that I lost all sense of proportion. I ran back into the house and upstairs and put on my clothes. Then I ran down again into the kitchen and wrote a note by moonlight and left it on the table. It was a reckless note addressed to my grandfather and informing him that I wasn't coming back till I'd located Gus. ‘Even though it takes me far afield,' I wrote. (I remember being proud of the phrase.)

“I meant it at the time, and started off defiantly, down the road in the windy moonlight, stopping every little while to whistle for Gus. When I reached the end of the road I kept on going, through the woods. The woods ran up the hill, but I thought I'd heard barking up there someplace and I kept on.

“‘Gus! Oh, Gus!' I was shouting and—I confess it—crying a little; I was so mad at my grandfather and so anxious about my dog, and the going began to get tough, too: hazel bushes as high as I was, just about, and blackberry brambles that scratched me half to death. The moonlight fell in splotches in the tangle, and the trees roared in the wind up overhead. When I stopped to rest, I began to think about how wild and lonely it was up there so late at night, and suddenly nearby there was a queer, terrible voice calling out! Lost, inhuman! I nearly jumped out of my skin—”

Oliver got up off his neck. “Yipes! What was it?”

“It called again,” said Father teasingly. “And then again—”

“Father, you're overdoing it,” said Randy, also sitting up.

“So then the thing came flapping out of a tree, big and soft as a shadow: an owl, of course. I'd never been so close to an owl's conversation before, and I didn't care for it—”

“Oh, just an owl,” said Oliver, slumping down on his neck again.

“Try being surprised by one late some night in unfamiliar territory, and see how you like it,” said Father. “I'd been thoroughly scared, and I decided on a compromise. I decided to go back to the cottage, tear up the note, and wait until daylight to search for Gus. But that was easier said than done. I started down the hill in the direction I'd come from, or so I thought; but I must have been royally turned around, because after I'd gone downhill for a while, instead of coming to the road I found myself going uphill again! I didn't know where I was. I didn't know what to do. I just kept ploughing ahead, up and up, figuring that when I came to a clearing I'd be able to see where I was, get my bearings. I wasn't calling for Gus anymore, either. I didn't care for the lonesome sound of my own voice.

“How that hill went up! After I'd been climbing for a lifetime, so it seemed, it even stopped being a hill and turned into a limestone cliff, and I climbed that, too, I don't know how, and still I couldn't see where I was, the trees were so tall. Up and up and up I went, and the wind died away and the sky commenced to lighten, and then I came to the top of the cliff and ploughed through another tangle, and suddenly found myself out in the open on a rough, tilted, grassy field, and every rooster in the county was crowing. I could see for miles! The sun was just showing the tip of its crown over the horizon. Far away below, and to the right of me, lay the valley I had come from, with its toy houses and churches and little toy lake. Tiny cows were filing out of barns on their way to pasture, and my grandparents' cottage—still in shadow as the whole valley was—looked quiet and undisturbed: no distress signals flying, nobody dashing out of the door, probably they weren't even up yet, hadn't even guessed that I was gone. I felt a little put out about it, though. Added to that, from where I was—high as I was—I saw a tiny little speck of white moving this way and that way around the house; it could have been a blowing paper or one of the neighbor's Leghorn hens, but I knew that it was Gus, come home in his own good time.

“My feelings were mixed. I was glad to see that Gus was safe, and to get my bearings; but still I felt I'd gone to an awful lot of trouble for nothing, and now there was the return journey to be done, downhill through all the vines and thorns and mean twigs again, to say nothing of the hazards of scrambling and slipping down the sandstone cliff. I'd had very little sleep, of course, and a terrific amount of exercise and I was dog-tired.

“By the time I staggered in at the gate, it was full daylight, and I found everyone just as concerned as I'd thought they should be. More so. I was thoroughly ashamed of myself when I saw my grandmother in tears and my grandfather about to set out in search of me. He'd gathered up a couple of the neighbors, too, to help, and there was Gus, wagging his tail in an ordinary sort of way, just as if nothing had happened.

“I was a sight to behold, as you can see by the photograph: torn and dirty. ‘Where in the world did you get to?' they cried. When I described the high hill, and pointed to it, it turned out that I had climbed Mount Alfred, the highest hill around there—a mountain, really—without even knowing it; and it was considered a difficult climb.

“‘Climbed it by mistake!' one of the neighbors kept saying. ‘Climbed it by accident in the nighttime. That's rich, that certainly is rich!' And he made me wait while he went and got his camera and then took this picture of me, just as I was, all stuck with cockleburs and sticktights. Later it was published in the local paper with a piece about me. What had been a piece of reckless foolishness turned out, most unjustly, to be glory as far as I was concerned! I didn't deserve it at all.”

“But what did your grandfather say?” asked Randy.

“And what happened about Gus?” asked Oliver.

“Grandfather and I arrived at a compromise after that. Gus was allowed to sleep on a mat outside my bedroom door; that was as far as Grandfather would go, but it was far enough. I could hear Gus snoring, and he could hear my voice talking to him if he got lonesome.

“Then, years later, after Grandfather had died, one of my aunts came across the photograph in his desk with the words about ‘the prodigal' written on the back in his handwriting. She sent it to your mother.”

“Why didn't you ever tell us this before?” said Randy.

“I thought of course I had; but perhaps it was Rush I told, or Mona.”

“I love hearing about when you were young,” said Randy, and for quite a while she forgot about the clue.

However, they were no closer to finding it than they had been, and though they went through all the luggage once again, just in case, and then through everybody's shoes, they never saw a sign of it. And weeks went by.

In the middle of February there came a day that should have been the property of April: mild and sunny and still. It smelled like April. Also by extraordinary luck it was a Sunday. Father cast a withering glance at his typewriter.

“Kids, let's get a lunch together and go exploring.”

“Perfect!” said Randy joyfully.

“Neat!” said Oliver.

“But where are my walking boots?” said Father a little later. “Has anybody seen my walking boots?” he called plaintively over the banister.

“Oh, dear, Mr. Melendy, did you want them?” cried Cuffy. “You asked me to have them repaired, don't you remember? The soles was wore clear through. Oh, dear.”

“Never mind, I'll wear something else. I have another old pair of climbing boots in the storeroom, but I'm saving those for Rush. I can't wear them anymore, they're only tens.”

“I didn't know grownups' feet got bigger,” said Oliver.

“Sometimes they do,” said Father. “Mine did.” And Cuffy took this opportunity to mention once again that, though she now wore sixes, her wedding slippers had been size three. For some reason she was terribly proud of this fact.

Randy, however, interrupted her. “Did you say
tens,
Father?”

“Tens!” echoed Oliver enthusiastically. “Hurry up, Randy, come on!”