The other driver cut in smoothly. “Y’see, officer,” he said, “we were coming home from church, my wife and me and the baby, and coming along the road here like we do every day, and this lady here, and I’m not saying she was out of her senses with drink or anything, but she come along over this road maybe fifty, sixty miles an hour, and—”
“I did not,” I said flatly. “He—”
“Well, now,” Carmen began, “I don’t want to make any trouble for the lady, and I suppose what I say favoring my own cousin won’t count for much, anyway, but she’s got to admit she was on the wrong side of the road. I noticed her around here a lot, that big car, and maybe she doesn’t always care about what happens to other people.” He looked blandly at the trooper. “I guess that’s what she’s got insurance for,” he suggested.
“But he wasn’t even here,” I said wildly.
Carmen and his cousin smiled understandingly at one another, and Carmen shrugged and said, “Not that I want to counterdict a lady, but she knows I saw what happened, and I guess I ought to kind of point out to her that it won’t do no good to lie about it. I was right behind Verge here, following him down the road. From church,” he added faithfully.
The trooper looked at me. “Well?” he asked coldly.
“Teaching her little children to tell lies,” Carmen said sadly to his cousin, and they both nodded.
I stood there literally helpless with fury. I do not remember that I have ever been so angry in my life. Everything I tried to say ended in a gasp, and I gestured violently; perhaps the trooper thought I was reaching for a shoulder holster, because he took a step backward, and then Laurie spoke cheerfully from beside me. “Mommy’s mad,” he said, “so I’ll say what happened. Recognize that guy, sheriff?” He spoke over his shoulder to Jannie, nodding at Carmen at the same time.
“Sure do, cowboy,” Jannie said. “Toughest hombre in—”
“I’m the Black Knight of the Forest,” Laurie said graciously to the troopers, “and my squire and me recognized this fellow because we see him a lot, him and the guy he calls his cousin here, because they go up and down these back roads all the time, stealing horses.”
“Rustling cattle,” said the Black Squire.
“And one day we were playing in that old hot rod the guy has, and it’s got a false bottom and the bottom’s full of drug traffic.”
“Admirable, Watson,” said the Black Squire approvingly. “Cattle rustlers and addicts, they are. And the reason they waited till my mother came along here was they are planning to blow up the old bridge.”
“With stolen dynamite,” Laurie finished. He looked at me brightly and smiled; apparently the defense had rested its case.
“Old Cap’n Hook,” Sally shouted then from the back window of my car, “where’s your crokkerdile, old Cap’n Hook?”
The troopers were regarding Laurie with sober attention, and I had the sudden first suspicion that they had not given entire belief to Carmen and Verge. “Officer,” I began calmly, “shall I try to describe what happened?”
“Yeah,” Carmen said loudly, “let’s hear her tell it.” He looked at Verge and they laughed.
“Ramming into people,” the woman said. She rubbed her forehead and said “I ought to get to a doctor.”
“Hey, listen.” Junior spoke up suddenly. “Hey, listen, you guys. Hoppy’s after these two, both.”
“Good work, kid,” Laurie nodded approvingly. “Our spy in the confederate camp,” he told the troopers.
“Oh?” Jannie twisted her face into a ferocious scowl. “Who let out Murphy’s bull?” she asked sternly, and Junior retired behind his mother. “I ain’t hurt,” he said distinctly.
“And they’re moonshiners,” Laurie said.
“Hey,” said Carmen, grieved. He glared at Laurie. “Watch out who you’re calling names, bud,” he said.
“Children,” I said, “get back in the car at once. My little boy,” I told the trooper, “is very excited. Naturally, the question right now is not the . . . ah . . . occupation of these gentlemen.” I smiled kindly on Carmen. “I was coming slowly along the road,” I said, “and when I got to this bad turn I slowed down, shifted into second, and blew the horn. As I came around the turn I saw this other car coming quite fast, and both cars skidded, and hit. Then,” I went on, “this gentleman went into that house over there and called his cousin and told him to come over.”
“Ask that guy does he have a license to drive,” Laurie said, putting his head out of the car window, “I know that hot rod, just ask him. Ask him about how his kid got kept after school for throwing stink bombs, ask him.”
“Cattle rustlers!”
“Where’s your crokkerdile?”
“Well.” The trooper shook his head. “Let’s get this thing straight,” he said. “This moonshiner was coming slowly along the road on his way home from church. Church?”
“Yeah,” said Verge without conviction.
“And this lady was coming around the turn at a speed of—”
“About fifteen miles an hour,” I said sharply.
“Gangsters!”
The trooper looked at Verge. “I guess so,” Verge said miserably.
“Train robbers!”
“And the driver of the third car, the hot rod, was—”
“About two, three miles back,” Carmen said hastily.
“And the lady was driving recklessly?” the trooper asked, his pencil poised delicately above his notebook.
Verge swallowed, looked at Carmen, and then down at the ground. “I guess we won’t prefer charges,” Carmen said generously. “Give the lady a break on the whole thing, officer,” he said.
“Say, Lieutenant.” Laurie was out of the car again. “Like to have a look at my BB gun?” he asked.
Half an hour later I stopped my car, battered and limping, in my own driveway, with the bacon in the pan in the house ready to fry and the coffee by now probably boiled dry, and my husband peacefully asleep. For a minute we all sat in the car, breathing deeply, and then I asked shyly, “Laurie, was any of that true?”
“Any of what?”
“About the moonshiners and the dynamite and the false bottom on that car?”
“What about it?”
“Is it true? Did you really find a false bottom in that car?”
“We’re not allowed to play in somebody else’s car,” Laurie said, shocked. “What would Dad say? Hey,” he added suddenly, “I’m going to tell Dad right now.”
“I’m going to tell Daddy,” Jannie said. They struggled, pushing, out of the car, and raced for the house, with Sally following and shrieking, “Daddy, Daddy, Mommy hit another car and smashed it all up and the police came and I found a penny and Mommy—”
“Maybe I’ll just stay out here,” I said to Mr. Beekman, and he nodded.
“Cookie,” he said sympathetically.
Verge’s wife telephoned me about a week later and told me with enormous satisfaction that she had not had a concussion after all, but a deviated septum, and she had the doctor’s word to prove it, and they were going to sue me for plenty for her deviated septum and Junior’s many injuries. I think Verge forgot about it, though, because there was an item in the paper a few days after that saying that Verge had miraculously escaped injury when his car went through a guard rail along a back road and rolled down the hill into the river. Sole witness to the accident was his cousin Carmen, who had been driving along behind him. They were going to bring suit against the township for criminal neglect.
• • •
The children were changing in the new house. They belonged in the town now. Laurie could go over to the gym in the evenings to see the basketball games, and Jannie walked to the library after school. I took movies of Sally riding her tricycle up and down the back walk, and of Barry being pulled in a wagon and walking unsteadily across the po
rch. The gatepost continued crooked. When the sap was definitely running that spring we thought we would tap our maple trees, and my husband consulted the Encyclopaedia of Social Sciences for directions, while I drove down to the grocery to get mason jars. Laurie drilled holes in four maples, just as the encyclopaedia said to, and we hung the jars on pegs under the holes. I set up a wash tub on the back of the stove. Some friends from New York called to ask if we were free for the weekend because they thought they might drive up and we said we were sorry but we were sugaring off, and could they make it the weekend after? Laurie and his father kept emptying the jars full of sap into the washtub on the back of the stove, and we kept it boiling day and night. After nearly five days we had boiled down about a pint and a half of syrup, and we put it into tiny medicine bottles, about enough for one pancake each, and sent it to all our friends, with a label saying it came from our own sugarbush. We estimated that what with the electricity and the repairs to the stove and the mason jars and the pots and the laundry bill and the wallpaper in the dining room peeling off from the steam our maple syrup had cost us about seventy-five dollars a gallon. I took movies of Laurie tapping the maple trees. Someone told us later that you were supposed to strain the sap before you boiled it.
I went down one morning to get the mail, and there was a magazine from the Junior Natural History Society for Laurie, a letter from my mother, six bills which I passed on unopened to my husband, and a birthday card for me. I opened it, looked at it, thought for a minute, and then leaned around to look at my husband past the coffeepot. “When is my birthday?” I asked him.
“Good heavens,” he said, staring.
“For the past eleven years, I believe,” I said icily, “I have had to remind you regularly once a year that my birthday is on . . .” I hesitated. “Oh,” I said. I held out the card. “Then why do I get a birthday card today?”
He looked at it with a kind of relieved smile. “Mistake, probably,” he said. “Someone must have made a mistake. They thought,” he explained more fully, “that today was your birthday. You’re sure it’s not?” he asked anxiously.
“I could telephone my mother,” I said, “or look up my birth certificate. And I’ve written it down for you a hundred times.”
“Then why,” he asked, putting his finger on the vital point, “send you a birthday card? You suppose someone thought it was your birthday?”
“That must be it,” I said.
He took the card away from me and scowled at it. “Signed L or F or maybe even J,” he said. “Nothing but an initial. Wouldn’t you think people—”
I took the card back again. “F,” I said. “I’m sure it’s F. And the envelope is certainly addressed to me, right name, right address.”
“Then someone must have made a mistake,” he said with finality.
“But who?”
My husband was opening the bills. “Now here’s a real mistake for you,” he said, nodding. “The dress shop. Thirty-seven—”
I took my birthday card and tiptoed away.
Although our life pursues a fairly even tenor, generally, it is very easy to upset our family equilibrium, and a minor unsolved mystery is surely a splendid way to do it. When my husband left the breakfast table he came into the kitchen where I was gathering myself together to defrost the refrigerator and said, “Any ideas?”
“No,” I said, “unless a kind of hash . . .”
“About that card, I mean,” he said. “Any idea who sent it?”
“Someone whose name begins with L or F,” I said. “Linda? Laura? Florence? Laurence?”
Laurie’s name is Laurence, but he sends people birthday cards only under the most extreme persuasion, and only if I buy them first and then sit him down and hand him the pen to sign and address them, and, besides, he always signs them “Laurie,” with a flourish underneath, and “Anyway,” I said, finishing my train of thought aloud, “he would have given it to me to mail.”
“And why send a card to you? He never did before.”
“And Sally and Barry can’t write, and if Jannie wanted to give me a birthday card she’d just give it to me, and besides Sally only believes in birthday cards if she gets invited to the parties and Barry—”
“Must be some kind of a mistake,” my husband said heartily, and went on into the study, still carrying the bill from the dress shop.
About half an hour later I stopped by the study and said, “You know, I’ve been thinking. About that birthday card—”
“Mistake, probably,” my husband said absently. He was putting a new ribbon into his typewriter, and had involved himself deeply.
“But I don’t recognize the handwriting. It looks like a child’s, almost. Look at the envelope.”
“I can’t look at the envelope,” my husband said. “I need another hand as it is.”
“Well,” I said, “either by a child or maybe someone writing left-handed. As though they were trying to disguise their handwriting, you know. Almost illiterate.”
“Well, ask Laurie,” my husband said. “He’s the only illiterate child I know.” He thought. “Except for the rest of your children, of course,” he finished generously.
I went and asked Laurie and Laurie said no, he had never seen the birthday card before. “Why?” he asked. “Your birthday or something?”
“My birthday is a hundred and forty-three days off and I want a plain silver necklace to go with my new black dress,” I said. “I was just curious about why someone sent me a birthday card.”
Jannie had never seen the card before, but thought it might have been meant for her. “I haven’t had as many birthdays as you have,” she pointed out, “so people are more liable to make a mistake on mine.”
Sally was not expecting any birthday cards, either, but added shrewdly that although her birthday was quite a while off, there would be no harm in her taking the card and keeping it until it was her birthday. “Then they wouldn’t have to send me another,” she explained.
Old Beekman did not recognize the card, but seemed to think that he would like to have it anyway. He offered me half a lollipop and a broken airplane in exchange, and was loudly indignant when I rejected what he must have regarded as a supremely fair offer.
“Cookie?” he suggested tearfully. “Candy, cookie?”
“Well,” I said, returning to my husband in the study, “about all I can think of now is to call everyone I know and ask them. Even though it seems kind of silly to send someone a birthday card and disguise your handwriting. I mean, why bother to send it at all?”
My husband, who was typing “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country” over and over again, looked up briefly and said, “Also, they used a two-cent stamp. Didn’t notice that, did you?”
I took up the envelope and looked at it again. “Most people only use two-cent stamps around Christmastime,” I said. “For Christmas cards, you know. Sometimes you come across them in a desk drawer or something but most people—”
“No,” my husband agreed. “You won’t often find anyone who remembers to use a two-cent stamp the rest of the year.”
“Looks kind of . . . well . . . cheap, doesn’t it?” I said. “Sending me a birthday card and then going out to get a two-cent stamp to mail it with. Imagine!”
“Might just as well not have gone to any trouble about it at all,” my husband said.
“Naturally,” I said reasonably, “it’s nice of them to want to send me a birthday card and of course I appreciate the thought and all, but it does seem that if you’re going to disguise your handwriting and go buy a two-cent stamp you’re a very strange sort of person, is all.”
“What’s another penny, anyway?” my husband asked. “The way things cost these days, a three-cent stamp is nothing. They probably just had the two-cent stamp left over from Christmas.”
“Imagine!” I said again. “Keepin
g an old two-cent stamp from a Christmas card. I wouldn’t be surprised if they steamed it off.”
“Fine lot of friends you’ve got,” my husband said indignantly. “Probably an old leftover birthday card too. See if another name’s been erased.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “Naturally, I don’t expect a gift from every casual acquaintance, naturally, but I do like to think that if anyone is going to send me a card, well, after all, I get enough birthday cards so’s I don’t have to take any old—”
The phone rang, and I went to answer it. It was my husband’s Aunt Lydia, and after I had asked how she was and how Uncle George was, and she had asked after me and my husband and the children I said how nice it was of her to call, because we hadn’t heard from her in so long, and she said oh, she just thought she’d call, and she was surprised that we hadn’t called her, and I said, well, I had been meaning to. Then she said well, she really wouldn’t have called at all, actually, only she was going out for the day and of course today was her birthday and she thought we might have been planning to call her and she wanted us to know she wouldn’t be there, because of course she usually expected to hear from us on her birthday, even if it was nothing but a card. “But I sent . . .” I said, and was suddenly silent.
She was saying oh, really, because then wasn’t it funny that it hadn’t arrived, because really she wouldn’t have bothered to call at all except she was going out for the day and it being her birthday of course . . . I handed the phone silently to my husband and went and looked at my birthday card. “Happy birthday, Aunt Lydia,” my husband said into the phone, and I stood there looking at the card and wondering at the way my handwriting had deteriorated since college.
My husband said goodbye to Aunt Lydia and hung up and came back into the study. “Funny thing,” he said, going toward his desk, “here Aunt Lydia didn’t get a card on her birthday, and you got a birthday card but it wasn’t your birthday. Funny.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I thought I’d write that place a letter about their bill,” my husband went on, “tell them they can’t get away with that kind of thing.”