Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze (4 page)

“You know about the farm that I was raised on.…”

“In Kneeland Center, Wisconsin,” supplied Oliver. “A hundred and forty-seven acres, pasture and woodland; ten miles from Indian Rocks, and right on the Sac River—”

“Have I said it all that often?” But Cuffy loved to describe the happy background of her childhood, and continued inexorably to describe it again, in spite of Randy's pointed sighs into the canister.

“Yes, right on the river, it was, or part of it, and it was lovely land, just lovely. Good rich soil. Wonderful crops we always had, and our cows gave the most milk of any around. Clover! Well, you never saw clover-tops so big; big as plums, about, and the corn grew high as houses; almost as high. My father, he hardly ever stopped his work a minute and my mother was the same, and the place showed it; and us children showed it too, I don't mind saying. We did our chores without asking questions and we minded our manners, too. We wasn't always putting off and searching for excuses—” Cuffy looked sternly at her audience, through the upper half of her bifocal lenses.

“Now, Cuffy,” said Randy uneasily. “Times have changed. We're products of another era.”

“We-ell,” Cuffy hesitated on the brink of a lecture, but Oliver forestalled her and returned her to the path of narrative by asking a judicious question. (Though he knew the answer well.)

“Let's see, how many children were there, now?”

“Four of us at the time I'm telling about. Quintus wasn't born till two years later. There was my older sister Marcella and my brother Homer and the baby, Albert Edward. We all had our chores—a lot of them, too—but we had plenty of playtime, besides, and it was a wonderful place for children—”

Cuffy laid her sewing in her lap and smiled at her memory of the distant place.

“There was a hollow tree where we kept house, me and Marcella and our friend Evadna Cheever; we didn't have no doll dishes, or just a few, so we used acorns, big ones, for our cups, and acorn caps for saucers. We made a little table out of a box, and hung a worn-out red tablecloth up at the door and, my, we wouldn't've changed it for a palace!… Nowdays I look at all them doll sets in the dime store: plastics and glassware and tin knives and forks, and I wonder if you young ones have half the fun we used to have pretending!”

“Maybe people always feel that way when they grow up,” said Randy, who couldn't help wishing that reminiscence didn't bring out a tendency to lecture on the part of Cuffy.

“Maybe they do, I guess they do,” agreed Cuffy. “I remember how my Grandma Lovell used to—but that's another story. Well, so we had our hollow tree, and our big hay loft, and our toboggan slides in winter, and black-ice on the slough to skate on. Oh, we had plenty to keep us busy, and happy, too. Mama was a wonderful cook, and Papa and Uncle Fisher and the hands and all us kids was wonderful eaters; if we ever left the table without feeling kind of bogged down and logy, we didn't think we'd been fed right. Pie all the time. Pie for breakfast always, and fried potatoes and pork. And all kinds of preserves and homemade bread and peach shortcake with yellow cream and hot, hot pans of biscuit and sweet butter—”

“It's a good thing John Doe can't talk human,” Oliver said. “He'd be howling from hunger. Are there any cookies left?”

“I made some fresh this morning, help yourselves. You might give me one, too.… Well, so, I don't know just exactly how it happened, but what with Mama being the famous cook she was, and the farm so healthy and the milk so rich, the reputation spread, I guess, and one summer a family from Milwaukee came to board; a lady at least, and her two children; Mrs. Wellgrove, her name was, and her daughter, Ethel, was about Marcella's age and her son, Francis, was about mine. Ethel had been sick, she was mighty frail and peaked—guess that's why they come—and Francis he was a problem! In those days a lot of folks considered it stylish to dress their boys like Lord Fauntleroy—he was a boy in a storybook—and that meant they had to wear velvet pants and big lace collars and sometimes even a sash kind of dangling at the hip. Imagine! But the worst, awfullest feature about it was that they had to wear their hair long, too! Real long, down over their shoulders, like a girl, and, if possible, in curls besides. Course the curly-headed boys got the worst of it, and Francis, he was curly-headed; added to that his hair was red, so there he was, feeling like a boy and sure acting like one, but with all this mop, fiery red and hanging to his waist, and trimmed in fluffy bangs on his forehead into the bargain; well, you never saw anything like it. We never did. We'd heard about the Lord Fauntleroy book, of course, even out in the backwoods where we lived, but when we saw it come to life like that!—Homer, he was awful! He teased the poor boy so, and said even his name was a girl's, so of course Francis he had to act double bad and double loud and get himself double dirty just to show folks he was a boy all right in spite of all them curls and croshay collars and black silk sashes! We didn't understand that at the time; we just thought he was an awful nuisance. He tied the cows' tails together, and threw stones at the bull to get him riled up and put salt in the sugar bowl and vinegar in the sorghum and broke the shed windows and put a live turtle in Marcella's bed and ate half the marble cake that Mama had just baked for the Big Hollow Ladies' Aid Collation; that's only some of what he did, and we all got so we couldn't hardly stand the sight of him. Mrs. Wellgrove didn't seem to notice half of what went on; now and then she couldn't help but see, like the time he tied my best hat, my
only
good one, onto our big black ram and sent him galloping, and then she only said: ‘Fran—cis, Fran—cis. What will the little Meinhardts think of you?' Good thing she didn't know. ‘Someday I'm going to tie up his precious curls in the flypaper,' Homer said, and I believe he would have, too, only for what happened later.” Cuffy laughed heartily at her own memories.

“What
did
happen later?” insisted Oliver.

“Goodness, goodness, it don't seem so long ago,” sighed Cuffy, still smiling. “What happened was this. There was lots of little islands in the Sac River; quantities of 'em in fact, but in the place where there was most of 'em the current was tricky; rapid and full of little whirlpools and eddies, and it was real deep, too. Papa and Mama never would let us swim or even wade in that part of the river. We knew that lots of people and even, once, a cow, had gotten caught in that current and drowned. So we left the place alone; and anyway we was allowed to play and swim all we wanted in the part of the river nearest the farm; it was safe there, and shallow and the water moved slow; some days, terrible hot days in July or August, we stayed in all afternoon long, and there wasn't a one of us couldn't swim.

“So one day long about the middle of August I found myself with no one else to play with but this pesky Francis Wellgrove; it was a tossup in my mind which would be worst, him or nobody. But I was a sociable girl, and I decided I'd try to stand him for a playmate just this once. Marcella and Homer had drove up to Indian Rocks with Papa to sell a load of melons. Mrs. Wellgrove and Ethel had gone to Madison to see the doctor, and Mama was in the house with Aunt Nettie, putting up preserves. Corn? Tomatoes? Don't remember. Albert Edward was too young to play with, and Evadna Cheever had the whooping cough. It was real lonesome. ‘Let's go swimming,' I says to Francis. It was awful hot. So we put on our suits (mine was an old blue dress) and went down to the river. Francis could swim, though not so good as we could, and it was all right when he wasn't ducking me or throwing mud. By and by we came out and went walking along the bank looking for cardinal flowers and lobelia—one's so red and one's so blue!—and we found a lot and picked a lot, and walked along the riverbank talking and quarreling and slapping at gnats and pretty soon we came to the islands and we went on walking.… But on one of these islands there was a little house, or shed, all fallen in and broken—been there years, I guess—and Francis he saw it and said, ‘What's that house for? Who built it? What's in it?' ‘I don't know,' I says. ‘I never was to it; none of us was.' And then I told him why, and about the dangerous current and all and how we never went in the water at that part of the Sac even to wade. So then he wanted to get ahold of a boat, but there wasn't no boat anywhere I knew of, and he kept on fussing and fussing about that house and saying there might be something valuable in it, money or old bones or a gun or something; and he wanted me to swim across with him and explore it. Course I wouldn't, and I told him he couldn't, but I could see he was getting his dander up, and first thing I knew, all of a sudden, he threw down his bokay of flowers and jumped in the river and started to swim! Right away it was over his head and the current started rushing him downstream fast as an express train, and I ran along the bank still holding onto
my
bokay and yelling at him to come back. He couldn't, though, and halfway across he got panicky and screamed for me to help him, with his face white and all his long hair streaming out like a mermaid's; he began to gulp and breathe water and I knew I'd have to go after him if he wasn't to drown but, oh, heavenly day! Was I ever scared! So I ran down the bank to below where he was, and then I jumped in, praying out loud, and tried to swim across. That water! It seemed to be alive, like a big strong snake, it pulled so! But luckily I got ahold of Francis, grabbed him by his long hair, in fact, as he went past, and then when he tried to clutch and hang onto me, I slapped him hard as I could in the face and told him to lay still, there was no use trying to beat the current across or back. Don't know how I had the sense, but I figured if we just kept quiet and let it take us, we'd wind up somewheres. Did, too. One of these little islands had a dead tree leaning out from it. We fetched up on that, so hard it knocked the breath clean out of us, and then we had to take it sideways, hand over hand, with our legs half washing away from us, till we reached the island itself. Francis just laid down and was sick. I cried some, but in a couple of minutes we was both all right again, and then it seemed good—so good—just to lay there and breathe the warm air and feel the solid earth under us! Even the gnats seemed good. After a while Francis said, ‘How we gointa get back?' I couldn't tell him. ‘They'll find us,' I says, but I wasn't sure of it: not many folks came that way, no road or houses or anything, and as it turned out we never saw a mortal soul all that afternoon or evening; nothing but three strayed cows across the water, chewing and staring at us, and wandering away. The island we were on was small, bout 's big as this house I'd say, and there was nothing on it but spearmint and nettles and willow shoots. Nothing to eat. And then as evening came on the mosquitoes started up. My soul and body! They'd starved for generations, I guess, and we were like manna from heaven. I never was so bit, not all my life! They made me irritable so I snapped at Francis. ‘It's all your own blame fault,' I says. ‘You knew you wasn't supposed to go in that water! If you wasn't so stupid and so selfish and so proud of yourself we'd never been in this mess, neither one of us.' And he was humble about it. ‘I know it,' he says. ‘I don't know why I did it. I don't know why you'd ever forgive me. Saving my life and all, too.' Well, naturally that made me feel bad, so I said it was all right after all, and somebody'd be sure to find us. But the evening wore on and the mosquitoes kept biting and it was just pure misery, that's all, pure misery, and you know how it is: sharing a miserable predicament can make lifelong friends or enemies of a couple of folks. It made friends of us two. Between the slapping and the scratching we had to keep up all the while, we talked a lot. We confided in each other. One of the things Francis confided about was how he hated his long hair; he said his papa didn't like it either, but his mama's, Mrs. Wellgrove's, heart was set on it and there wasn't nothing they could do. ‘I want to look like a boy,' he says. ‘I want to look just like Homer.' So I had an idea and I said: ‘If we ever get out of here and home I'll fix it so you'll get a haircut all right, and nobody'll be mad, either.' So anyway we were pretty good friends by the time night came, and that was lucky because it began to be real scary on that island; black as pitch, there wasn't a star overhead and not even a firefly that time of year. And then, well you wouldn't believe it, it began to rain! Yes, round about ten, eleven o'clock there was a thunderstorm, and out in Wisconsin those storms aren't the play-acting kind we have around here. I mean the sky splits open, wide open, and the ground shakes like fire engines was going over it, and the lightning licks around every place, not just one place, and it keeps a-going all the time; no stops between, where you can get your breath. The water, the rain, is solid, too; you might be sitting under a dam. Willow shoots, even willow trees, aren't much to shelter under; their leaves are always kind of stingy. We had no place to hide, so we just cuddled close together and bowed our heads and prayed the lightning wouldn't strike us. We never slept one wink. The storm kept up and up and then went off down river, and then came back and played with us all over again like some big mean cat with two wet mice! But finally it went away and the night was over. Oh, I never saw a morning as beautiful as that! The mist laid on the river in a band; you couldn't see the river, only hear it, and the sun was red and lighted every single drop on every leaf so it was red, too, like a ruby, and birds flew in and out of the mist, appearing and disappearing, and the air all smelt of mint and water. On a morning like that you couldn't help but hope, no matter if you was bone-soaked and hungry and a child.”

“When did they find you, though?” demanded Oliver, breaking Cuffy's silence.

“Soon after that. Very soon. My father he'd been down there twice during the night, but his lantern had blew out, and we couldn't hear his shouting for the racket of the storm. In the morning we could, though, and he and Uncle Fisher got a rowboat and launched it well upstream and across on the diagonal and fetched us off the bank and we was safe!”