Emily and Jackson Hiding Out

  “We’ve got us five hundred dollars here to use as we need it, and I’d like your ideas on a good hiding place,” she said. “If anything happens to me, you children need to know where to find it.”

  “Could stick it under your mattress,” said Jackson.

  “Very first place a thief would look,” Aunt Hilda said.

  “What about the flour bin?” asked Emily.

  “Second place he’d look,” replied her aunt.

  “A hole in the ground?” Emily and Jackson said together.

  “You know, I had the same idea,” said Aunt Hilda. “We could bury it out in the yard. I’ve got an empty coffee tin and a wood box I used once as a birdhouse. We could put the money in the tin, the tin in the box, and the box in the ground, then roll a heavy rock over the top to mark the spot.”

  So they chose a place halfway between the barn and the cottage. Aunt Hilda got a shovel and they took turns digging a hole, huffing and puffing, as Spook lay in the grass and watched.

  All at once there was a clink. Aunt Hilda tossed out the dirt and thrust the shovel in again. Clunk, they heard this time. Aunt Hilda reached down and pushed the dirt aside.

  “Well, blow me over!” said Aunt Hilda as the three of them stared down into the hole.

  It was a watch. A gold watch on a gold chain. When Aunt Hilda picked it up and rubbed it against her apron, it gleamed as good as new.

  “Sam’s pocket watch!” the big woman said softly. “My husband, Sam, lost this a week before he died. We looked for it all over the place, but he’d dropped it somewhere, and I guess the somewhere was here.”

  “But … how did it get down in a hole?” asked Jackson.

  “That was a long time ago,” said Aunt Hilda. “The wind blew dust over it, I guess, and when the rain came, grass grew over it and the watch just sank deeper and deeper.”

  She held the pocket watch against her cheek and kissed it. “Oh, how I’ve wanted to find this. It was the dearest thing he had, next to me.”

  “H-how did he die?” asked Emily hesitantly.

  “A big old tree fell on him,” said Aunt Hilda, wiping her eyes. “A hurricane blew in off the Gulf—wind and rain like you wouldn’t believe. Our little house took it okay, but all that water loosened the roots of some of the trees. And the next day, when Sam was down by the river, a cottonwood just blew over and hit him. Oh, but that was a sad day for me.”

  Emily put her arms around her aunt and hugged her tight, but Jackson stood there uneasily, staring at the watch.

  “Would you like to hold it?” Aunt Hilda asked him.

  Jackson shook his head and backed away.

  “What’s the matter, child?” Aunt Hilda said.

  “It’s bad luck,” said Jackson.

  “Bad luck to find a watch that’s been missing for twenty years?” said Aunt Hilda. “Seems like good luck to me.”

  “The hands are at midnight,” said Jackson. “That’s bad luck for sure.”

  Aunt Hilda stared at Jackson, then at the watch. “Now, how do you know that watch might not be showing noontime, not midnight? Didn’t know you were superstitious, Jackson.”

  “I know bad luck when I see it, ’cause I’ve sure had plenty,” Jackson told her.

  “Well,” said Aunt Hilda, giving the watch a final pat and dropping it in her apron pocket, “I’d say that today is a lucky day. And we’ve got us five hundred dollars here, so let’s finish the job.”

  They set to work digging again, and when the hole was wide enough, Aunt Hilda took the coffee tin with the money in it and placed it in the wooden box that used to be a birdhouse. She closed the lid and set the box in the hole.

  The three of them filled the hole with dirt, patted it down, then scattered leaves and twigs over the dirt. Finally they rolled a big rock on top of it.

  “There!” said Aunt Hilda, clapping her hands together to shake off the dirt. “That’s our little nest egg. Now I’ve got us some sausages for our supper, so let’s eat!”

  • • •

  That evening, after the two children were in their nightclothes, Aunt Hilda took her husband’s gold watch from her pocket and gently placed it in the little drawer of the lamp table.

  “Now I’ve got something of Sam’s right here in this room with me,” she said. “Maybe I’ll even wind it once in a while and listen to it tick.”

  And because it had been such an eventful day, she let Emily climb up the ladder to the loft where Jackson slept, so that she could look out for a bit and see the stars.

  It was a particularly bright night. Emily and Jackson lay on their stomachs, looking up.

  “Ever think about who else is maybe looking at the same stars in the same sky?” Jackson asked.

  That seemed like a strange question to Emily. “Hundreds and hundreds of people,” she said.

  “Could be people you never want to see again, like your uncle Victor, looking at the same stars in the same sky at the very same time you are, and you don’t even know it.”

  “I hope not,” said Emily. “It could also be somebody you miss very much.” She rolled over on her back and looked at the stars upside down. They were just as bright as they were right-side up. “Who do you miss the most?” she asked.

  Jackson thought for a while. “Guess I miss havin’ someone to miss. Didn’t ever get to know my pa, and my ma ran off when I was little.”

  “Then who took care of you?” asked Emily.

  “I was just tossed from one family to the next—nobody wanted another mouth to feed. They said I caused more trouble than I was worth,” Jackson told her. “Can’t have been too much trouble, ’cause I wasn’t worth very much.”

  “That’s not true,” said Emily. “If it weren’t for you, Uncle Victor would have taken me with him and tried to become my guardian. You’re worth a lot to me.”

  “Well, finally they just turned me over to the child catchers and told them to find me a place to live,” Jackson continued. “Those Catchum folks get a bonus when they find a boy to work hard at something nobody else wants to do.”

  “That’s awful!” said Emily. “Why don’t you ask Aunt Hilda to be your guardian?”

  “And what would that mean?” asked Jackson. “That she would own me like a dog?”

  Emily rolled over again and sat up. She studied Jackson’s face in the moonlight. “It wouldn’t mean she owned you, Jackson. It would mean you belonged. Just like I belong now.”

  Jackson let out his breath. “I don’t know,” he said. “Never really belonged to anyone before, and don’t know if I’d like it.”

  Suddenly Emily cried, “Jackson! Look!” She pointed out the window.

  Jackson looked just in time to see it too—a shooting star. A streak of light moved over the dark sky and, just as suddenly, it was gone.

  “I made a wish!” Emily said.

  “Why?” asked Jackson.

  “When you see a shooting star and you make a wish before it’s gone, the wish will come true,” Emily told him.

  “Who’s superstitious now?” said Jackson.

  “Well, I think something good is going to happen,” said Emily.

  “It already has. You got ten million dollars,” Jackson said. “What did you wish?”

  But Emily wouldn’t tell. “It’s a secret,” she said. She had wished that Aunt Hilda would become Jackson’s legal guardian. That, however, was up to her aunt and Jackson.

  • • •

  Every morning, Emily got up and made the beds before breakfast. She happily swept the floor and dusted the furniture, and always asked if there was anything more she could do to help before she went out to play.

  Jackson too was doing his part. At first, Emily had thought he might try to get out of the jobs Aunt Hilda had given him. If there was any way Jackson could get into trouble, he usually did. So far, though, he had brought in wood for the stove each morning, and he filled the water bucket when it was getting low. He did it all without complaining.

  Sometimes A
unt Hilda asked him to pick some beans from her garden, or ride Old Billy around the pasture to check the fence. And each new chore Jackson learned to do seemed to make him stronger.

  It was amazing to Emily how many things Aunt Hilda and her husband had made themselves when Sam was alive.

  “Why buy it if you can make it yourself?” Aunt Hilda liked to say.

  She had made their mattress by sewing two sheets together to make a huge bag and filling it with cotton. Sam had made a beehive from a large wooden box, and bees buzzed happily in and out, making honey. Aunt Hilda and Uncle Sam had made a scarecrow out of Sam’s old clothes and tied it to a pole in the garden. They had put up their own fence, built their own shed, sewn their own curtains, and gone fishing with only a long stick and some string. And because Hilda liked to swing on warm summer nights, Sam had made a swing for her out of a piece of board and two strong ropes fastened to a high branch on the beech tree.

  “I expect there’s nothing in this world your aunt can’t do herself,” said Jackson one afternoon. He was standing on the seat of the swing, one foot on either side of Emily, who was sitting and pumping her legs. Higher and higher they went, the limb of the beech tree rising and falling with the swing. Emily liked to feel the breeze on her face as she swung. Each time the swing went high, she could see far out over the flat countryside to the river. Each time the swing swung low, she pulled her legs up tight so her feet wouldn’t scrape the ground.

  “I don’t think Aunt Hilda could make herself a carriage,” Emily said. “She told me that Sam made their big farm wagon, but I’d love for her to have a carriage so she could ride somewhere in the rain if she wanted.”

  Far out on the road, they saw Aunt Hilda coming back from town, little clouds of dust whirling up behind the wheels of the big wagon.

  Emily and Jackson leaped from the swing and went racing down the lane to the gate. Aunt Hilda always had something for them when she came back from a trip to town. Today it was a bag of marbles for Jackson, a finger puppet for Emily, and a little toy palm tree for Rufus, to go in his pen. Even Rufus, tucked in Emily’s apron pocket for the swing ride, seemed to know it was market day. When Emily lifted him out, he stretched his little neck as high as it would go, waiting for a raisin from Aunt Hilda.

  “I surely have a lot to be thankful for,” Emily’s aunt said. She carried a big sack of flour into the cottage, and Jackson followed with a sack of cornmeal. As she was putting things away in the cupboard, she said, “A poor old widow woman in her black dress and veil was sitting on the church steps, tin cup in hand. She was still mourning the death of her husband, and needing every penny folks gave her. I’m lucky to have a roof over my head, food in the cupboard, and two young’uns to help out. I surely am.”

  Later, when they sat down to supper, Aunt Hilda said, “Might be a good idea if you didn’t get too close to the road, Jackson. I saw the child catchers in town again today, hunting down stray boys like dogs. If someone was to say you were seen out here at my place, they might just get it in their heads to come after you.”

  “Isn’t no way they could take me from here, is there, now that I got a place to stay?” Jackson asked, reaching for another pork chop.

  “Well, I can’t exactly keep you here if we’re not related, not if they have the papers to send you someplace else,” Aunt Hilda said. “Emily, now, she’s my niece, so it wasn’t hard to make that legal. But you just appeared like a little waterspout over the sea. I’d keep you if I could, but I’d have to have the papers.”

  “What do we do to get them?” Jackson asked.

  “Got to go before the judge and tell him how you came to be an orphan, and whether or not you’d like to live with me,” Aunt Hilda said. And when Jackson made no reply, she said, “It’s all right. You don’t have to decide this minute. Just something to think on.”

  • • •

  The following morning, Aunt Hilda was making a cake and found that she had no eggs.

  “I’ll be danged if those chickens aren’t hiding their eggs from me!” she said when she saw that the egg crate was empty. “I’ve not an egg to my name. Jackson, would you go out to the barn and see if there are any eggs up in the haymow, where those hens hide ’em sometimes?”

  Jackson immediately set out for the barn, and when Aunt Hilda called after him to take a basket, he just swaggered on, sure he could handle it by himself.

  Aunt Hilda waited with her spoon and her bowl, and Emily stood by the door, ready to open it for Jackson when she saw him coming.

  A few minutes later, Jackson came out of the barn, walking very slowly, a few pieces of hay in his hair. He had two eggs in one hand, two eggs in the other, and a fifth egg tucked under his chin.

  What happened next was that the egg under Jackson’s chin began to crack, and as he reached up to grab it, he dropped the eggs in his right hand. When he lurched forward to catch those eggs, he dropped the ones in his left hand and went sprawling to the ground on his stomach.

  Jackson sat up, wiping the egg off his chin, and Emily could see that all five eggs had broken—five little circles of white and yellow that made sticky puddles there on the dusty ground.

  “Are you hurt?” Aunt Hilda asked, coming out the door.

  “No, ma’am,” said Jackson, “but I guess I should have used a basket.”

  “Guess you should have,” Aunt Hilda said, unsmiling. “And I guess we’ll have to forget about the cake.”

  That was a big disappointment to Emily, and to Jackson too. All week long, Aunt Hilda had said that when she got enough honey from the beehive, she’d make a cake. Now there was honey but no eggs, and Aunt Hilda, who usually hummed while she worked, put the bowl and spoon back in the cupboard. She was not humming now.

  Some days, Emily had discovered, started out good and ended up even better. But this day started out bad and got worse.

  That evening, when Spook went out to bring the two cows in from the pasture, only one cow came back. Aunt Hilda went to the fence and called in her loudest voice: “Clarabelle? Claaa-raaa-belle? Claaaaaaa-ra!”

  But there was no answering moo, and Aunt Hilda went back into the house for her boots and a lantern. With Emily and Jackson following along behind her, Aunt Hilda walked across the big pasture, the evening sky getting darker and darker. It was hard to see all the bumps and dips in the ground, and Emily’s ankles twisted this way and that.

  “Clarabelle!” Aunt Hilda kept calling as the lantern swung to and fro. “Come on, bossy!”

  When they reached the very end of the pasture, they found that a post had fallen over and the wire fencing had been trampled. It was clear that Clarabelle, the older and smarter cow, had wandered out.

  Aunt Hilda turned and faced the two children. “Jackson,” she said, “didn’t I tell you to get on Old Billy this morning and ride around the whole pasture to make sure none of the fence was down?”

  “Yes, ma’am, you did,” Jackson answered, his eyes on his feet.

  “Then how come this fence post is here on the ground? Looks to me, with weeds growing up over it, that it’s been down a right good while.”

  Emily knew the answer to that. She knew that once Jackson was out of sight of the kitchen window, he was more interested in riding than he was in checking fences.

  “I’m sorry,” Jackson said.

  “Well, we’re going to find that cow if it takes us all night,” said Aunt Hilda, and they climbed over the broken-down fence, Spook leading the way.

  They followed the trampled grass, but the path was getting even more difficult to see.

  “If Clarabelle wandered off close to sundown, she can’t be too far,” Aunt Hilda said. “But if she got out this morning, she could be mighty far from home.”

  Because the sky was cloudy, there was no moonlight to guide them, only the light from the lantern. Now and then the bushes rustled and a small creature skittered out of the way. An owl hooted and made them jump.

  But then, far off, they heard Clarabelle bawling.
She needed to be milked, and she probably wanted her supper as much as Emily and Jackson wanted theirs.

  Clarabelle was standing down by the creek, her hooves deep in the mud. Aunt Hilda waded in, and with her pushing the cow from behind and Jackson and Emily tugging at Clarabelle’s collar, they finally managed to get the stubborn animal back up the bank.

  All the way home, Emily wondered if it had been such a good idea to invite Jackson to live with them. She had known since she’d first met him on her long journey to Redbud that he was a boy who got into mischief. Maybe he had caused so much trouble in the other places he had lived that nobody wanted him.

  After Clarabelle was safely in the barn again, Aunt Hilda fixed a supper of cold beans and corn bread. She was too tired to cook, and Emily was almost too tired to chew.

  No one said much at the table, and when Emily laid her head on her arm and fell asleep, Aunt Hilda said, “Go to bed, child. Tomorrow’s another day.”

  Jackson too left the kitchen. While Emily prepared for bed in her own little room, she heard the squeak of the ladder as he climbed up to the loft.

  • • •

  Emily slept soundly all night, waking only when she heard Aunt Hilda calling her and Jackson to breakfast.

  She dressed quickly, laced up her high-topped boots, and hurried out to the kitchen. But Jackson, who usually got there first, still wasn’t at the table.

  Aunt Hilda walked into the parlor and called up into the loft. “Jackson! Get yourself down here, boy.”

  There was no answer.

  “Emily,” said her aunt, “would you crawl up there and wake him? A bad day can make you extra tired, and yesterday was a very bad day.”

  Emily crawled up the ladder, rung by rung.

  Except for the pillow at one end and a blanket at the other, the loft was empty.

  Emily looked down at her aunt.

  “He’s gone!” she said. “And all his things with him.”

  “Gone?” said Aunt Hilda. “Where could he go?”