Then There Were Five (22 page)

“Going someplace?” inquired Rush.

“My Cecropia!” panted Oliver. “It's my Cecropia! It's hatched, come and see! Come and see!”

“His what?” said Cuffy, as they went up the stairs.

“His moth,” Rush said. “The one that used to be that big green job with all the buttons when it was a caterpillar. He must be a freak. He's six months too early.”

They came into Oliver's room, all of them, and there, on the curtain, was the beautiful thing. It had wide, velvety wings with red borders, and broad, fringed antennae. In the middle of each wing was a mark like a Persian crescent.

Oliver stood gazing at it, gratified as though he had created it with his own hands.

“It's wonderful!” he sighed. “It's almost as wonderful as my luna.”

“What luna?” said Rush.

“Oh, just a luna I saw. Father, isn't he
beautiful?
”

“Perfectly beautiful, Oliver.”

“Cuffy, isn't he
beautiful?
”

“Real pretty,” Cuffy had to admit. “My lands, it's a good thing he isn't the kind that eats clothes, though, being the size he is.”

“Are you going to let him go?” asked Mona.

“Yes, right now. I want him to have a good time before the nights get too cold.”

Oliver caught him in a little net, and started out of the room.

“Oliver!” cried Cuffy. “
Not
in your underwear!”

But Oliver kept right on going, the other children behind him. They went out onto the dusky lawn, Oliver opened the net; the great, soft creature crawled out onto his finger, hesitated a moment, and then fluttered away, vanished in the darkness.

Mark, watching, thought: I was like that. All folded up tight in a cocoon, dark and uncomfortable, and now I'm out of it, like him, now I'm free. Naturally, he didn't voice this sentiment. It would have sounded corny. It would have sounded so corny, in fact, that he got hot thinking about it, gave a great war whoop to get his mind off the subject, and chased Rush into the house.

When Oliver and Mona had gone in too, Randy took a short walk.

She had the world to herself. It was very dark. Everything frightened her a little; the moving shadows, the melancholy sighing of the spruce trees. A falling leaf touched her cheek softly, and she jumped. She came upon the sunflowers sooner than she expected, and they rustled faintly, like tall people breathing. They frightened her, too. She turned and walked back toward the brook.

The earth seemed to quiver, and sing, and vibrate with endless insect sounds. The scent of ladies' tobacco drifted down from the pastureland near Carthage. At the far end of the lawn Randy turned and looked at the Four-Story Mistake. The windows were all open, and most of them were lighted. The house was like a big, airy lantern. A sound of talking came from it, and a sound of running bath water. Up in the Office Rush was practicing his Schumann, and out in his rooms above the stable Willy was tootling on his recorder. Randy listened to all these familiar noises, and in addition she heard the hollow voice of Mona's radio, a single, querulous bark from Isaac, and the woodpecker tapping of Father's typewriter. The house hummed with life.

She could see things happening in it, too. There was Cuffy walking to and fro past Oliver's window. Putting away his clothes probably, and picking out clean ones for tomorrow. Up in the Office Rush was playing the piano, and Mark was sitting near-by, listening, and scratching his back with a pencil. Down in the study window Randy saw Father's beloved head, in profile, studiously bent above his typewriter, the reading glasses far down on his nose.

Randy played a game with herself that she had sometimes played before. She played that she was a stranger, a wanderer in a foreign land, who had come upon this house unexpectedly, after a long and lonely journey through a forest.

She stood in the shadows and looked at the way the light from the windows lay in long rectangles on the grass; she listened to the many noises, and watched Cuffy moving about in her comfortable way, the two boys at the piano, and Father at his desk.

Randy sighed, a lonely pilgrim's sigh. The people in that house are happy people, she thought, and felt a stab of longing. That was the thing about this game. It seemed so real, and the sense of relief was so marvelous a moment later when she told herself, That's
your
house, dopey. That's
your
family, and you're part of it!

She ran quickly across the grass and jerked the front door open so hard that all the little moths were jarred off the screen.

She ran upstairs to Oliver's room. He was sitting up in bed in blue-striped pajamas, surveying his birthday presents for the last time till tomorrow.

That is Oliver Melendy, my brother, thought Randy, staring at him with her stranger's eyes. He looks like a nice boy.

“Did you enjoy your birthday, Oliver?” she asked him.

“Yes, I did,” he replied. “It was the best birthday of my whole life, and I got almost everything I wanted, except a helicopter, and I didn't
really
think I'd get that. And I caught that good big sheepshead, and my Cecropia hatched out, and I got a new brother that isn't a baby. Yes,” Oliver said slowly, as though carefully weighing the value of each of his birthday events, “I guess that was really the best thing that happened to me today: getting Mark for a new brother.”

CHAPTER XIV

Admit One

Oren's farm went to the bank for mortgages. The little that was left over had to be spent on his old debts. Mark saw the farm go without regret. With its burned buildings, black skeleton tree, and eroded gully full of debris, it seemed to stand for all the castoff wretchedness of his past life. Let it go, thought Mark, let it all go. I never want to see it again as long as I live.

“The livestock, though,” Father said. “It all belongs to you now. You were Oren's only relative as far as we can find out. You now have seven cows, a team of work horses, a pretty good Hampshire boar and sow, and sixteen pigs and some chickens. Also some dilapidated farm machinery. What shall we do with it all?”

“Could I make you a present of a cow or two, Mr. Melendy?” offered Mark, as if he were proffering chocolates. “How about the pigs too? I'd like it fine if you'd take 'em
all!
”

“Nobody ever offered me a cow before,” replied Father thoughtfully. “I'd like a few, very much. There's not enough heavy work on the place for a team, though, and I don't honestly think we need pigs. Perhaps Willy would be grateful for some more hens.”

So after that there were three cows at the Four-Story Mistake. They lived in the stable with Lorna Doone, Persephone the goat, and her daughter Persimmon. In the morning, after milking, Rush or Mark drove them out to pasture. In the evening Oliver fetched them home again. From lean cows with peaked joints and barrel-stave ribs they became round, queenly cattle with a dignified and measured gait. Their bells tinkled all day long, and from time to time a distant sound of mooing could be heard, as if someone were blowing into a conch shell.

As for the remaining Meeker livestock, it was Mona who thought of what to do about them. “Auction them,” she suggested. “But let's auction them here. We'll have—
I
know!—We'll have a kind of fair. We can have a show, maybe, and sell something or other; for the benefit of the Red Cross, or something. (Except Mark's cow money, he'll need that for himself, of course.)”

Everyone thought this was a splendid idea, combining all the best features of business, pleasure, and good deeds. The date was set for the middle of September, a Saturday. Father promised to come home for it.

For his three weeks' vacation was at an end. His bags were packed, his briefcase dusted off and bulging with its own importance once more. Also he was returning to his labors with an added six pounds of weight and a healthy tan.

“If only you could always be here,” sighed Mona, her cheek against Father's scratchy sleeve. “We'd all have such a good time, and you'd never get that green, crumpled look again.”

“Green, crumpled look, eh?” said Father. “Must be what they call Pentagon Pallor. Ah, well, one must sacrifice something even if it's only beauty.”

“Father, you're so
silly,
” Mona said, and gave him a hug.

It was sad to have him go. It was always sad. But this time they had many things to occupy their minds. There were plans for the Fair. And then there was school.

School began the day after Father left. The children looked different that morning. The girls wore clean sweaters and skirts. Everybody wore shoes and socks, their hair was brushed smooth for once, and all were clean. Isaac and John Doe prowled around the breakfast table distrustfully. “Where are they going now?” the dogs asked each other. “What is the matter with them? All their shoes smell of polish!”

After breakfast there was a tremendous lot of hurrying and dashing up and downstairs, and collecting pencil boxes and copybooks. At last they were ready. Willy drove the surrey around to the front and they all piled in.

Cuffy stood on the doorstep, issuing last-minute commands and admonitions. “Oliver,
use
your handkerchief when you need it. Mona, you see he drinks all his milk at lunch and see that Mark does too. Randy, stop leaning out like that. Rush,
Rush,
you didn't take your sweater—”

But the surrey was halfway up the drive. “Too late now, Cuff!” called Rush, free as air.

“Lands, lands, them
young
ones!” muttered Cuffy, going into the house. How big it was, how empty. The air seemed still to ring from all the recent haste and noise.

Isaac sat down in a patch of sunshine and scratched at his ear with a loud, boney thumping. Then he went to sleep. Cuffy stood in the middle of the living room, lost in thought. Suddenly she turned, hurried to the broom closet in the hall, and dragged out the vacuum cleaner with a clatter. She couldn't stand the silence.

But by the next morning she was used to it, and even rather liked it.

As for the children, their lives were frantically busy. At school there were new teachers, new classrooms, new faces, new books. And after school there was homework, and there were long, thrilling conferences about the Fair.

It was to be a Children's Fair, Mona decided. Everything about it was to be done by children. She, and Daphne Addison, and all the girls they knew would bake cakes, cookies and candy, to sell. The boys would take care of putting up the decorations, building the booths, and so on. There were going to be grab bags too, and a fortune-teller, and a show. The Melendys adored giving shows.

In the afternoons when they came home they took their homework as if it were castor oil, gulping it down as fast as possible, and immediately afterward plunging into the important matter of the Fair.

Mona (who was to be the fortune-teller) wandered about with a Cheiro palmistry book, practicing on the palms of her family. She was always grabbing somebody's hand and saying, “You're going to live to be a hundred. You'll always be safe in accidents. You're going to have five children. Or do those lines mean that you're going to be
married
five times?” And then she would look in the book to make sure.

“You have a good, even head line,” she told Willy Sloper. “And your heart line's nice and steady, but
this
thing—well, I don't know exactly what it is, but I know it means something extremely interesting. Just wait till I look it up in the book—”

“It means I peeled a potato the wrong way thirty years ago,” Willy said bluntly. “It's a scar.”

Randy practiced dance steps for the show. She also painted posters. Already there was one in the Carthage post office, one in the school gymnasium, and another over at Eldred, in the bank.

AUCTION AND FAIR
!
[the posters said]

3
P.M. SEPTEMBER
18

FOUR-STORY MISTAKE
.

LIVESTOCK TO AUCTION
.

CAKE SALE AND CONCERT
.

ENTERTAINMENT AND REFRESHMENTS
.

COME ONE, COME ALL
.

Tickets 50 cents. Benefit of Red Cross.

Oliver made the tickets. He cut them out of cardboard and printed the words “Admit One” on each, in colored crayon. He made so many of them that at night when he closed his eyes he kept seeing everywhere the words “Admit One.”

Rush and Mark did a lot of striding about with hammers and nails, though actually there was little to be built. Mona was going to use the summer house for her fortune-telling; the animals were to be tied up in the stable (except for the pigs, of course), and the Addisons had contributed two tents for outdoor booths. Still there were some boards in the stable, and Rush and Mark both liked to build, so they made a pavilion down near the brook; rather lopsided, it was, but large, and a splendid place for a cake sale.