“Naw, Joyce Ann. He knows the way. He knows everything.” She squenched up her right cheek in a vain effort to return his wink. She was a good kid. He really liked old May Belle.
The next morning he helped her dress and undress her Barbie at least thirty times. Slithering the skinny dress over the doll’s head and arms and snapping the tiny fasteners was more than her chubby six-year-old fingers could manage.
He had received a racing-car set, which he tried to run to please his father. It wasn’t one of these big sets that they advertised on TV, but it was electric, and he knew his dad had put more money into it than he should have. But the silly cars kept falling off at the curves until his father was cursing at them with impatience. Jess wanted it to be OK. He wanted so much for his dad to be proud of his present, the way he, Jess, had been proud of the puppy.
“It’s really great. Really. I just ain’t got the hang of it yet.” His face was red, and he kept shoving his hair back out of his eyes as he leaned over the plastic figure-eight track.
“Cheap junk.” His father kicked at the floor dangerously near the track. “Don’t get nothing for your money these days.”
Joyce Ann was lying on her bed screaming because she had yanked the string out of her talking doll and it was no longer talking. Brenda had her lip stuck out because Ellie had gotten a pair of panty hose in her Christmas stocking and she had only bobby socks. Ellie wasn’t helping matters, prancing around in her new hose, making a big show of helping Momma with the ham and sweet potatoes for dinner. Lord, sometimes Ellie was as snotty as Wanda Kay Moore.
“Jesse Oliver Aarons, Jr., if you can stop playing with those fool cars long enough to milk the cow, I’d be most appreciative. Miss Bessie don’t take no holiday, even if you do.”
Jess jumped up, pleased for an excuse to leave the track which he couldn’t make work to his dad’s satisfaction. His mother seemed not to notice the promptness of his response but went on in a complaining voice, “I don’t know what I’d do without Ellie. She’s the only one of you kids ever cares whether I live or die.” Ellie smiled like a plastic angel first at Jess and then at Brenda, who glared back.
Leslie must have been watching for him because as soon as he started across the yard he could see her running out of the old Perkins place, the puppy half tripping her as it chased circles around her.
They met at Miss Bessie’s shed. “I thought you’d never come out this morning.”
“Yeah, well, Christmas, you know.”
Prince Terrien began to snap at Miss Bessie’s hooves. She stamped in annoyance. Leslie picked him up, so Jess could milk. The puppy squirmed and licked, making it almost impossible for her to talk. She giggled happily. “Dumb dog,” she said proudly.
“Yeah.” It felt like Christmas again.
SEVEN
The Golden Room
Mr. Burke had begun to repair the old Perkins place. After Christmas, Mrs. Burke was right in the middle of writing a book, so she wasn’t available to help, which left Leslie the jobs of hunting and fetching. For all his smartness with politics and music, Mr. Burke was inclined to be absent-minded. He would put down the hammer to pick up the “How to” book and then lose the hammer between there and the project he was working on. Leslie was good at finding things for him, and he liked her company as well. When she came home from school and on the weekends, he wanted her around. Leslie explained all this to Jess.
Jess tried going to Terabithia alone, but it was no good. It needed Leslie to make the magic. He was afraid he would destroy everything by trying to force the magic on his own, when it was plain that the magic was reluctant to come for him.
If he went home, either his mother was after him to do some chore or May Belle wanted him to play Barbie. Lord, he wished a million times he’d never helped buy that stupid doll. He’d no more than lie down on the floor to paint than May Belle would be after him to put an arm back on or snap up a dress. Joyce Ann was worse. She got a devilish delight out of sitting smack down on his rump when he was stretched out working. If he yelled at her to get the heck off him, she’d stick her index finger in the corner of her mouth and holler. Which would, of course, crank up his mother.
“Jesse Oliver! You leave that baby alone. Whatcha mean lying there in the middle of the floor doing nothing anyway? Didn’t I tell you I couldn’t cook supper before you chopped wood for the stove?”
Sometimes he would sneak down to the old Perkins place and find Prince Terrien crying on the porch, where Mr. Burke had exiled him. You couldn’t blame the man. No one could get anything done with that animal grabbing his hand or jumping up to lick his face. He’d take P.T. for a romp in the Burkes’ upper field. If it was a mild day, Miss Bessie would be mooing nervously from across the fence. She couldn’t seem to get used to the yipping and snapping. Or maybe it was the time of year—the last dregs of winter spoiling the taste of everything. Nobody, human or animal, seemed happy.
Except Leslie. She was crazy about fixing up that broken-down old wreck of a house. She loved being needed by her father. Half the time they were supposed to be working they were just yakking away. She was learning, she related glowingly at recess, to “understand” her father. It had never occurred to Jess that parents were meant to be understood any more than the safe at the Millsburg First National was sitting around begging him to crack it. Parents were what they were; it wasn’t up to you to try to puzzle them out. There was something weird about a grown man wanting to be friends with his own child. He ought to have friends his own age and let her have hers.
Jess’s feelings about Leslie’s father poked up like a canker sore. You keep biting it, and it gets bigger and worse instead of better. You spend a lot of time trying to keep your teeth away from it. Then sure as Christmas you forget the silly thing and chomp right down on it. Lord, that man got in his way. It even poisoned what time he did have with Leslie. She’d be sitting there bubbling away at recess, and it would be almost like the old times; then without warning, she’d say, “Bill thinks so and so.” Chomp. Right down on the old sore.
Finally, finally she noticed. It took her until February, and for a girl as smart as Leslie that was a long, long time.
“Why don’t you like Bill?”
“Who said I didn’t?”
“Jess Aarons. How stupid do you think I am?”
Pretty stupid—sometimes. But what he actually said was, “What makes you think I don’t like him?”
“Well, you never come to the house any more. At first I thought it was something I’d done. But it’s not that. You still talk to me at school. Lots of times I see you in the field, playing with P.T., but you don’t even come near the door.”
“You’re always busy.” He was uncomfortably aware of how much he sounded like Brenda when he said this.
“Well, for spaghetti sauce! You could offer to help, you know.”
It was like all the lights coming back on after an electrical storm. Lord, who was the stupid one?
Still, it took him a few days to feel comfortable around Leslie’s father. Part of the problem was he didn’t know what to call him. “Hey,” he’d say, and both Leslie and her father would turn around. “Uh, Mr. Burke?”
“I wish you’d call me Bill, Jess.”
“Yeah.” He fumbled around with the name for a couple more days, but it came more easily with practice. It also helped to know some things that Bill for all his brains and books didn’t know. Jess found he was really useful to him, not a nuisance to be tolerated or set out on the porch like P.T.
“You’re amazing,” Bill would say. “Where did you learn that, Jess?” Jess never quite knew how he knew things, so he’d shrug and let Bill and Leslie praise him to each other—though the work itself was praise enough.
First they ripped out the boards that covered the ancient fireplace, coming upon the rusty bricks like prospectors upon the mother lode. Next they got the old wallpaper off the living-room wall—all five garish layers of it. Sometimes as they lovingly patched
and painted, they listened to Bill’s records or sang, Leslie and Jess teaching Bill some of Miss Edmunds’ songs and Bill teaching them some he knew. At other times they would talk. Jess listened wonderingly as Bill explained things that were going on in the world. If Momma could hear him, she’d swear he was another Walter Cronkite instead of “some hippie.” All the Burkes were smart. Not smart, maybe, about fixing things or growing things, but smart in a way Jess had never known real live people to be. Like one day while they were working, Judy came down and read out loud to them, mostly poetry and some of it in Italian which, of course, Jess couldn’t understand, but he buried his head in the rich sound of the words and let himself be wrapped warmly around in the feel of the Burkes’ brilliance.
They painted the living room gold. Leslie and Jess had wanted blue, but Bill held out for gold, which turned out to be so beautiful that they were glad they had given in. The sun would slant in from the west in the late afternoon until the room was brimful of light.
Finally Bill rented a sander from Millsburg Plaza, and they took off the black floor paint down to the wide oak boards and refinished them.
“No rugs,” Bill said.
“No,” agreed Judy. “It would be like putting a veil on the Mona Lisa.”
When Bill and the children had finished razor-blading the last bits of paint off the windows and washed the panes, they called Judy down from her upstairs study to come and see. The four of them sat down on the floor and gazed around. It was gorgeous.
Leslie gave a deep satisfied sigh. “I love this room,” she said. “Don’t you feel the golden enchantment of it? It is worthy to be”—Jess looked up in sudden alarm—“in a palace.” Relief. In such a mood, a person might even let a sworn secret slip. But she hadn’t, not even to Bill and Judy, and he knew how she felt about her parents. She must have seen his anxiety because she winked at him across Bill and Judy just as he sometimes winked at May Belle over Joyce Ann’s head. Terabithia was still just for the two of them.
The next afternoon they called P.T. and headed for Terabithia. It had been more than a month since they had been there together, and as they neared the creek bed, they slowed down. Jess wasn’t sure he still remembered how to be a king.
“We’ve been away for many years,” Leslie was whispering. “How do you suppose the kingdom has fared in our absence?”
“Where’ve we been?”
“Conquering the hostile savages on our northern borders,” she answered. “But the lines of communication have been broken, and thus we do not have tidings of our beloved homeland for many a full moon.” How was that for regular queen talk? Jess wished he could match it. “You think anything bad has happened?”
“We must have courage, my king. It may indeed be so.”
They swung silently across the creek bed. On the farther bank, Leslie picked up two sticks. “Thy sword, sire,” she whispered.
Jess nodded. They hunched down and crept toward the stronghold like police detectives on TV.
“Hey, queen! Watch out! Behind you!”
Leslie whirled and began to duel the imaginary foe. Then more came rushing upon them and the shouts of the battle rang through Terabithia. The guardian of the realm raced about in happy puppy circles, too young as yet to comprehend the danger that surrounded them all.
“They have sounded the retreat!” the brave queen cried.
“Yey!”
“Drive them out utterly, so they may never return and prey upon our people.”
“Out you go! Out! Out!” All the way to the creek bed, they forced the enemy back, sweating under their winter jackets.
“At last. Terabithia is free once more.”
The king sat down on a log and wiped his face, but the queen did not let him rest long. “Sire, we must go at once to the grove of the pines and give thanks for our victory.”
Jess followed her into the grove, where they stood silently in the dim light.
“Who do we thank?” he whispered.
The question flickered across her face. “O God,” she began. She was more at home with magic than religion. “O Spirits of the Grove.”
“Thy right arm hast given us the victory.” He couldn’t remember where he’d heard that one, but it seemed to fit. Leslie gave him a look of approval.
She took up the words. “Now grant protection to Terabithia, to all its people, and to us its rulers.”
“Aroooo.”
Jess tried hard not to smile. “And to its puppy dog.”
“And to Prince Terrien, its guardian and jester. Amen.”
“Amen.”
They both managed somehow to keep the giggles buttoned in until they got out of the sacred place.
A few days after the encounter with the enemies of Terabithia, they had an encounter of a different sort at school. Leslie came out at recess to tell Jess that she had started into the girls’ room only to be stopped by the sound of crying from one of the stalls. She lowered her voice. “This sounds crazy,” she said. “But from the feet, I’m sure it’s Janice Avery in there.”
“You’re kidding.” The picture of Janice Avery crying on the toilet seat was too much for Jess to imagine.
“Well, she’s the only one in school that has Willard Hughes’s name crossed out on her sneakers. Besides, the smoke is so thick in there you need a gas mask.”
“Are you sure she was crying?”
“Jess Aarons, I can tell if somebody’s crying or not.”
Lord, what was the matter with him? Janice Avery had given him nothing but trouble, and now he was feeling responsible for her—like one of the Burkes’ timber wolves or beached whales. “She didn’t even cry when kids teased her ’bout Willard after the note.”
“Yeah. I know.”
He looked at her. “Well,” he said. “What should we do?”
“Do?” she asked. “What do you mean what should we do?”
How could he explain it to her? “Leslie. If she was an animal predator, we’d be obliged to try to help her.”
Leslie gave him a funny look.
“Well, you’re the one who’s always telling me I gotta care,” he said.
“But Janice Avery?”
“If she’s crying, there gotta be something really wrong.”
“Well, what are you planning to do?”
He flushed. “I can’t go into no girls’ room.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re going to send me into the shark’s jaws. No, thank you, Mr. Aarons.”
“Leslie, I swear—I’d go in there if I could.” He really thought he would, too. “You ain’t scared of her, are you, Leslie?” He didn’t mean it in a daring way, he was just dumbfounded by the idea of Leslie being scared.
She flashed her eyes at him and tossed her head back in that proud way she had. “OK, I’m going in. But I want you to know, Jess Aarons, I think it’s the dumbest idea you ever had in your life.”
He crept down the hall after her and hid behind the nearest alcove to the girls’ room door. He ought at least to be there to catch her when Janice kicked her out.
There was a quiet minute after the door swung shut behind Leslie. Then he heard Leslie saying something to Janice. Next a string of cuss words which were too loud to be blurred by the closed door. This was followed by some loud sobbing, not Leslie’s, thank the Lord, and some sobbing and talking mixed up and—the bell.
He couldn’t be caught staring at the door of the girls’ room, but how could he leave? He’d be deserting in the line of fire. The rush of kids into the building settled it. He let himself be caught up in the stream and made his way to the basement steps, his brains still swirling with the sounds of cussing and sobbing.
Back in the fifth-grade classroom, he kept his eye glued on the door for Leslie. He half expected to see her come through flattened straight out like the coyote on Road Runner. But she came in smiling without so much as a black eye. She waltzed over to Mrs. Myers and whispered her excuse for being late, and Mrs. Myers beamed at her with what was becom
ing known as the “Leslie Burke special.”
How was he supposed to find out what had happened? If he tried to pass a note, the other kids would read it. Leslie sat way up in the front corner nowhere near the waste basket or pencil sharpener, so there was no way he could pretend to be heading somewhere else and sneak a word with her. And she wasn’t moving in his direction. That was for sure. She was sitting straight up in her seat, looking as pleased with herself as a motorcycle rider who’s just made it over fourteen trucks.
Leslie smirked clear through the afternoon and right on to the bus where Janice Avery gave her a little crooked smile on the way to the back seat, and Leslie looked over at Jess as if to say, “See!” He was going crazy wanting to know. She even put him off after the bus pulled away, pointing her head at May Belle as if to say, “We shouldn’t discuss it in front of the children.”
Finally, finally in the safe darkness of the stronghold she told him.
“Do you know why she was crying?”
“How’m I supposed to know? Lord, Leslie, will you tell me? What in the heck was going on in there?”
“Janice Avery is a very unfortunate person. Do you realize that?”
“What was she crying about, for heaven’s sake?”
“It’s a very complicated situation. I can understand now why Janice has so many problems relating to people.”
“Will you tell me what happened before I have a hernia?”
“Did you know her father beats her?”
“Lots of kids’ fathers beat ’um.” Will you get on with it?
“No, I mean really beats her. The kind of beatings they take people to jail for in Arlington.” She shook her head in disbelief. “You can’t imagine….”
“Is that why she was crying? Just ’cause her father beats her?”
“Oh, no. She gets beaten up all the time. She wouldn’t cry at school about that.”
“Then what was she crying for?”
“Well—” Lord, Leslie was loving this. She’d string him out forever. “Well, today she was so mad at her father that she told her so-called friends Wilma and Bobby Sue about it.”