As Simple as It Seems
“What’s it for?” he asked.
She pointed down the driveway at Jack.
“I don’t like the looks of that dog,” she said.
The boy put his hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun. “He looks friendly to me. He’s wagging his tail, see?”
Jack started up the driveway dipping his head, coming to say hello, but as soon as he got within full view, the woman gasped.
“I told you there was something wrong with that dog,” she said. “Look at him—he’s missing a leg. Some wild animal probably chewed it off. What if he’s got rabies?”
The boy shook his head.
“If he had rabies, he’d be foaming at the mouth, Mom. Besides he’s wearing a collar. He must belong to somebody around here.”
“Who in their right mind would want a dog like that for a pet? He ought to be put to sleep. Git!” the woman yelled at Jack.
Jack stopped in his tracks and tilted his head, confused by her unfriendly tone.
“I said git,” she shouted again.
When Jack still didn’t move, she picked up a stone and threw it at him, clipping him in the side. He yelped and jumped back. When she bent down to pick up another stone, Jack finally got the message, tucked tail, and slunk back down the driveway.
“The last thing I need is to get bitten by some rabid hillbilly dog,” the woman grumbled, dropping the stone.
“I told you, Mom. Rabies makes you foam at the mouth,” the boy said. “And then you go crazy and die.”
“Thank you, Doctor Doom,” his mother said. She touched her cheek with her fingertips and grimaced. “I need a pain pill and an icepack. Help me get this stuff inside. I think I’m starting to swell again.”
When the boy didn’t move, his mother got annoyed.
“What’s the holdup, Pooch?”
“I was just wondering,” he said. “Do you think it’s true, what that lady at the post office said about the house?”
The woman waved his question away like she was shooing a fly.
“Of course not. She was just trying to get a rise out of you, Pooch. Fun is hard to come by in a podunk town like this. Can you imagine having to live here year-round? I’d rather die. They don’t even have high-speed internet up here—they use dial-up. Dial-up. Now come on, help me get this stuff inside before I puff up.”
I’d never heard the word podunk before, but it didn’t take a genius to know that it was an insult. Typical. Flatlanders always thought they were better than everybody else.
I stayed hidden in the weeds watching until the boy and his mother had lugged the last of their stuff up the stairs and into the house. When they were finished, the boy came back out and sat on the porch by himself for a while. Pooch. Could that really be his name, I wondered? And why had they come to Clydesdale if they thought it was such an awful place? One thing I didn’t have to wonder about, though, was what it was they’d heard down at the post office. Francine, the postmistress, loved to gossip. When she learned where the newcomers were staying, she would have been eager to pass along what everyone in town had been saying for years…the Allen house was haunted.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Muziky-Muziky
Tracy Allen was the youngest of the three Allen girls. The summer she turned nine, she and her family went on a picnic down at Bonners Lake. Tracy was a good swimmer—she’d earned her deep-water badge at the community pool in Washerville just like her sisters—but that day down at Bonners Lake, she drowned.
Nobody knows exactly what happened. Maybe she got a cramp, or maybe she dove too deep and hit her head on rock. All anybody could say for sure was that one minute she was there, and the next minute she was gone forever. I was only a baby when Tracy Allen died, so I never knew her, but I’d heard the story a million times. When something tragic like that happens in a small town, it never quite goes away.
The Allens moved away soon after the accident, and it wasn’t long before the rumors started up about the house being haunted. People claimed to have seen Tracy’s ghost sitting in the window, and some even said they’d heard her crying and calling out for help in the middle of the night.
It was because of Tracy Allen that I refused to take swimming lessons when I was little.
“Swimming is fun, Verbie,” my mother told me, “and besides, it’s not safe for a person not to know how to swim. You’re six years old now. Plenty old enough to learn how to swim.”
But Tracy Allen had learned how to swim, and look what had happened to her.
In spite of my protests, my mother insisted that I take lessons at the community pool. I spent the first three classes clinging to her legs sobbing. Eventually, after much coaxing by both the swim instructor and my mother, I was persuaded to get into the shallow end of the pool, where after a good deal more coaxing I finally managed to master the dog paddle well enough to take me, kicking and spluttering, from one side of the pool to the other. By that time the other kids in the class, Annie among them, had moved into the deep end to learn how to tread water in preparation for the deep-water test, but I dug in my heels. Although I was no longer afraid of getting into the pool, and could not only dog paddle but also float on my back, the thought of being in water over my head threw me into such a panic that I think everyone just decided to be satisfied with what I had already achieved and leave it at that.
As I pedaled home in my nightgown that summer afternoon after spying on the new neighbors moving into the Allen house, I wondered what kind of people threw stones at innocent dogs who were only trying to be friendly. Flatlanders, that’s who. If they hated Clydesdale so much, why didn’t they turn around and go back where they’d come from?
Jack beat me home and was back in his favorite spot under the clothesline when I arrived. Inside, my dad was napping on the couch, with the newspaper over his face. There was a peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich waiting for me on the counter, and next to it a note from my mother saying that she’d gone into town for an emergency band practice.
My mother played in the Clydesdale Band. It wasn’t much of a claim to fame, since anybody who knew how to play an instrument even halfway decently was allowed to be in the band. She sat in the middle, in between the clarinets and the flutes and right behind the trombones. It was easy to spot her, not only because of her size but also because she was the only one in the band who played the spoons. When she played at home she used our regular everyday silverware, but on concert nights she always used a pair of silver soup spoons, holding them together back to back, making them click in time to the music by tapping them against a little padded block of wood that my father had wired onto an old snare drum stand.
Clydesdale was very proud of its band, but nobody had much time to practice, so the music always sounded a little rough around the edges. That didn’t stop people from coming to the concerts, though. Not just summer people either—town people came too. Everybody brought blankets or lawn chairs to sit on and cans of Off! to keep the mosquitoes and no-see-ums from biting. If it was raining, people would park in front of the post office and along both sides of the road. Then they’d sit in their cars with the windows cracked open, honking at the end of each number instead of applauding.
The summer concerts were on Wednesday nights, and sometimes the band would get together earlier in the day to run the numbers a couple of times, but this was a Sunday, so I had a feeling the reason my mother had called it an emergency practice was because the band was scrambling to get ready for the Fourth of July.
The Clydesdale Band always played at the Fourth of July celebration. There would be barbecued chicken, a strawberry shortcake raffle with proceeds going to the ladies’ auxiliary, and after the concert a small fireworks display. Annie and I had always watched the fireworks together, lying on our backs on an old blue bedspread. We would each hold our breath in anticipation as the rockets shot up, then whoop and shriek as they exploded into patterns we gave names to, like waterfall, curly fry, and dandelion puff. I had never missed a Fourth of July celebrati
on in my life, but I’d already made up my mind that I wasn’t going that year. I knew the old blue bedspread would feel as big as the ocean without Annie lying beside me.
I poured myself a glass of cold milk and ate my sandwich standing up at the counter. Nearby, two spoons lay near a jar of silver polish and the rag my mother had used to shine them that morning in preparation for the upcoming concert. I picked up one of the shiny spoons and was making a face at my upside-down reflection when Honey came over and began rubbing against my legs, meowing. I reached down and scratched her between the ears, but we both knew it wasn’t me she’d come looking for.
Most of the animals my mother brought home from the shelter were too sick or too old or too sad to get better. She cared for them anyway, and gave them names, and did her best to make them comfortable until their time was up. Over the years a parade of abandoned pets had come through our house, but from a very early age I got good at being able to tell which ones it wasn’t safe to love. I thought Honey was one of those, but she ended up surprising me.
I was four years old when my mother brought her home. One of the grocery clerks at Peck’s had discovered the tiny kitten curled up behind the soda can machine in the recycling shed.
“Where is the mama cat?” I asked.
“Nobody knows,” my mother told me.
“What if she comes back looking for her baby?”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, Sugarpea.”
“Why not?”
“Sometimes the mama rejects a baby if it isn’t perfect.”
“What’s not perfect?” I asked, peering at the little ball of golden fluff in my mother’s hands.
She gently pulled up one of the kitten’s eyelids, revealing a milky white eye. “She’s blind,” she told me. “See?”
I shuddered and hid my face in my hands.
Dr. Finn explained to my mother that because the kitten was so young—in addition to being blind—the chances of her surviving without her mother were slim to none.
“The most humane thing would probably be to put her down, Ellen,” he said. But he knew my mother wouldn’t let him do that.
Instead she brought the kitten home and made a little bed for her with a heating pad in it, and she got up every two hours all night long for weeks to feed her warm milk with an eyedropper.
“I’ll be your mama now,” I remember hearing my mother croon to the tiny kitten once as she held her up against her cheek.
After a while Honey, which is what my mother decided to call her because of her color and her sweet temperament, was strong enough to stand up and lap milk from a saucer if we put it down right in front of her and dipped a finger in to help lead her mouth to it. She would never be able to hunt mice or chase yarn balls the way other cats could, but no matter where my mother went in the house, somehow Honey could always manage to find her.
I poured what was left of my glass of milk into Honey’s dish and set it down in the corner.
“Here you go, kittycat,” I said.
I watched Honey make her way across the room. Stepping carefully, her eyelids closed tight, she looked as if she were sleepwalking. I pushed my glasses up with a knuckle and pulled them partway back down.
My father was still asleep on the couch, snoring loudly. I looked up at the clock, which was shaped like a teapot and hung on a nail above the stove. It was only twelve thirty. How was I going to fill the long afternoon ahead? I found myself thinking about that boy, Pooch. If only someone else had moved into the Allen house instead—a nice girl my age, for instance.
I got an apple out of the fridge and went back outside. Band practice never lasted very long. My mother would be home soon. If I didn’t want to risk another exhibition of my true nature, I was going to have to find something to do other than hang around the house all afternoon. I had left my bike out in the driveway, so I wheeled it back into the garage. That’s when I noticed the fishing poles leaning up against the wall in a corner. And suddenly I knew exactly how I was going to spend the rest of my afternoon.
CHAPTER EIGHT
My Treasure
It was my father who taught me how to fish. By the time I was four, I knew how to thread a night crawler onto a hook to get the most mileage out of it and how to catch a catfish by tying lead sinkers to the line so the bait would dangle down near the bottom. Bonners Lake was about a quarter of a mile away from our house, and sometimes when I was younger, my father would wake me up early in the morning before he left for work and we’d go fishing there together.
My mother didn’t like our little fishing trips. Even though it was one of the only things my father and I ever did alone together, she felt jealous and left out. If she could possibly have come with us, she would have, but she had bad knees, and the only way to get down to the lake was on foot, down a steep path that wound through the woods. She would try to stall our departure as long as possible by insisting on coating every inch of me with sunscreen and bug spray, and tucking and retucking my pant legs into my socks to protect me from tick bites. She would tell us to watch out for poison ivy and water snakes and whatever else she could think of, but the final warning was always the same—“Don’t take your eyes off her, Tom. Not even for a second. You remember what happened to that little Allen girl.”
My mother was afraid that I might drown in the lake the way Tracy Allen had, but I wasn’t worried about that at all. A person can’t drown if they don’t go in the water. In the pool in Washerville, there was a nylon rope with blue plastic floats tied to it separating the shallow end from the deep end. It was easy to tell where the water would be over my head. But Bonners Lake was dark and murky and you couldn’t see the bottom at all. There was no way of telling how deep it was, or where it might drop off, which is why I had never gone swimming there. And I never planned to either.
Bluegill and perch would practically jump onto our hooks the minute my father and I put them in the water, and if we were willing to put up with the inconvenience of tangled lines and lost lures, sometimes there were pike and bass lurking in the weedy spots. I enjoyed those fishing trips with my dad, but as his business took off, he had less and less free time, and pretty soon the poles began to gather dust out in the garage. A couple of years back Annie and I had come across them one day when we were bored and looking for something to do. We’d asked my mother if it was okay for us to go fishing together.
“Absolutely not,” she’d said. “I don’t want you girls anywhere near that lake by yourselves.”
But I was older now, almost twelve. Old enough to go fishing by myself, whether my mother thought so or not. And best of all, I knew that she couldn’t follow me there, so at least for the afternoon I could let down my guard and not have to worry about losing my temper.
I’d hiked up my nightgown, and was down on my hands and knees in the flower bed digging for worms to use for bait, when I heard the sound of a car approaching. Hopping up onto the speckled rock, I looked down the hill and recognized my mother’s car, raising a plume of gray dust behind it. Band practice was over. I had planned to change out of my nightgown into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt before heading out, but there wouldn’t be time now. My mother would be home any minute. I ran inside, tiptoed past my sleeping father, and scribbled a note saying that I’d gone for a walk—which was the truth, just not the whole truth. I noticed there was a little breeze coming through the open window, so I anchored the note to the counter with one of the silver spoons. By the time my mother’s car started up the driveway, I was already in the woods following the path down to Bonners Lake.
Jack decided to tag along, but after a while he picked up the scent of something I sincerely hoped wouldn’t turn out to have a white stripe running down its back, and took off. Even on only three legs he was fast, quickly disappearing into the bushes. I was barefoot and my progress was hampered by the nightgown, which billowed out around my ankles as I moved, snagging on the prickers and blackberry brambles that grew along the edges of the path. Eventua
lly I got tired of having to stop and work the tiny thorns out of the fabric and took to yanking myself free, which quickly reduced the hem to tatters. I wasn’t worried, though—it was an old nightgown, and I had plenty of others at home.
Near the end of the path, the trees began to thin and the undergrowth changed from brown to green. As I stepped out of the cool woods into the heat and light of the day, the air was completely still. Without even a wisp of breeze to ripple it, Bonners Lake stretched out before me like a giant sheet of green glass. Jack barked in the distance. I saw what looked like a promising skipper, bent down, and picked it up. Wrapping my finger around the curve of the flat stone, I cocked my arm back and skimmed it out across the smooth surface of the water—one, two, three long skips, and then a bunch of smaller ones, too close together to count. When I bent down to pick up another stone, something glistened in the sun near the edge of the lake and caught my eye. At first I thought it was a shiny black rock, until I realized it was actually a turtle sunning itself on a log, and curious to see what kind it was, I crept slowly toward it. As soon as my shadow fell across the water, the turtle slid quickly off the log, disappearing with a soft plop. That’s when I saw the boat.
It was an old wooden rowboat, stuck in the dark mud at the edge of the water and almost completely hidden by cattails and reeds. Propping my fishing pole against a tree, I made my way carefully over to the boat, concerned with the possibility of stirring up a water snake. As I leaned over the splintery side, peering in at a couple of inches of brown water teeming with mosquito larvae, an idea began to form in my head. I could fix up the boat. Patch any holes it might have and sand it smooth. Maybe even get it to float.
I had learned to float on my back in the swimming pool, but I hadn’t been able to enjoy it. I was always afraid that I might accidentally float too far and end up in the deep end where the water was over my head. If I got the boat to float, I could tie it to a tree to keep it close to shore and float in it without even having to get wet.