The Wanderer

by Sharon Creech

  “Found Grandma’s cookbook! Followed the recipe!” Uncle Mo was very proud of himself. “I’m not a complete doofus!”

  That afternoon, when Cody and I were sitting with Bompie, watching him sleep, Bompie took a short, quick breath, and then another, and then there was a long pause before another breath, and then it was quiet.

  Cody and I stared at each other. Then Bompie spluttered and took another breath and went on breathing.

  “Were you thinking what I was thinking?” Cody asked. “Were you thinking, Giddy-up, Bompie?”

  “Yes, I was,” I said.

  You would think that at a time like that, with Bompie frail in his bed, everyone would be extra kind and quiet and considerate, but Uncle Stew and Uncle Mo got into one of their big arguments. It was over whether or not they should take Bompie back to America.

  “How can he stay here?” Uncle Stew demanded. “He can’t take care of himself—who will look after him? I say he comes back to America.”

  “I say he stays here,” Uncle Mo said. “And besides, if he comes to America, where will he live? Will you take him?”

  Uncle Stew spluttered. “Me? We don’t have room—we aren’t set up for—why don’t you take him?”

  Uncle Dock intervened. “Maybe you should ask Bompie what he wants to do.”

  And so they asked Bompie, and he said, “I’m home! I’m staying put!” Uncle Dock said that Bompie had made his choice. He had come home, and it was a beautiful place, and we ought to let him stay in his England, with the roses and the lavender growing all around.

  “So who’s going to take care of him?” Uncle Stew asked.

  “I could,” I said. “For the summer. Couldn’t I?”

  “Too young,” Uncle Stew said. Then he crossed his arms over his chest, the way Brian does sometimes, and said, “You know what? I am not going to worry about this. You all worry about it. I’m going to take a nap.”

  About that time, Rosalie arrived, and so we all stood around gawking at Dock and Rosalie. They must’ve gotten tired of us staring at them, though, because pretty soon they said they were going out for a walk.

  In the kitchen, Brian was copying the apple pie recipe. “I’ve been thinking about that pie all the way across the ocean,” he said. “I’m going to learn how to make it, too.”

  “Hey,” Cody said. “Look out there—”

  Out in the backyard, Uncle Mo was juggling apples. He kept on juggling even when we went out to watch. “Look at this,” he said. “I can do four at a time! This is pretty cool, this juggling. What do you think, Sierra-Oscar-November?”

  “Pretty cool, Delta-Alpha-Delta,” Cody said, “pretty cool.”

  So the rest of us started picking apples and we went over to Bompie’s window, where he was propped up on pillows watching us, and we all started juggling, and we were clunking each other over the head a lot with flying apples, and that’s where Uncle Dock found us when he came back from his walk.

  CHAPTER 75

  OH, ROSALIE!

  Women!

  Rosalie’s gone.

  Uncle Dock came back from his walk alone and looking grim. We pounded him with questions, wanting to know where Rosalie was.

  “Gone,” he said.

  “Gone?” Sophie said. “She can’t be gone. She just got here—”

  “Gone,” Uncle Dock repeated. “Gone, gone, gone.”

  Then everyone was asking questions a mile a minute, wanting to know where she went and why she went and if she was coming back.

  Uncle Dock said, “She had some plans she couldn’t change. She’s leaving tomorrow for Spain.”

  Then Sophie said, “Go get her!” and Brian said, “Stop her!”

  Uncle Dock shrugged. “She’s got a mind of her own, that Rosalie.”

  Brian and Sophie kept saying “Go get her!” and then, I don’t know where this came from, but I said, “Why didn’t you ask her to marry you or something?”

  “I did,” Uncle Dock said.

  “Way to go, Dock,” Uncle Mo said.

  I said, “So what did she say? Why did she go?”

  “Like I said, she has some plans.”

  “But what did she say about the getting married part?” I asked.

  Uncle Dock stood there tossing a lone green apple up and down with one hand. “She said it was too soon—”

  “Too soon?” Sophie said. “You’ve been waiting your whole life. You’ve been pining away—”

  “Shoot,” Uncle Dock said. “Can’t a guy have any secrets around here?”

  Then somebody said maybe Rosalie would change her mind or maybe she would go finish her plans and come back, and then Sophie said, “If you two ever do get married, you’re not going to make her do all the housework and stuff, are you?”

  Uncle Stew, who had joined us by then, said, “Okay, enough of this chatter. What are we going to do about the looking-after-Bompie question?”

  “I may have solved that one,” Uncle Dock said.

  “How?” Uncle Stew said.

  “I’m going to stay here,” Uncle Dock said. “I’ll stay here in England. I’ll look after him.”

  Everyone else seemed relieved and seemed to think it was a good solution. Later, though, when Brian and Sophie and I were packing up our things, Brian said, “I think it’s sad. Uncle Dock just found Rosalie, and then he loses her again. And now he’s going to give up everything and stay here to take care of an old man.”

  I told him that Bompie wasn’t just an old man, that he was Uncle Dock’s father.

  And then Sophie started wondering if maybe Rosalie would change her mind someday, and if Bompie might get better, and then I said maybe we could visit them in England, like in the summers, and then Sophie said, “And maybe we could all take another trip on The Wanderer.”

  “Cool,” I said. “We’ll all take a trip and we’ll sail really far—”

  “Not too far,” Brian said. “Not too soon.”

  And Sophie said that if Rosalie wasn’t back by then, we could all go searching for Rosalie, oh, Rosalie!

  CHAPTER 76

  GIFTS

  Last night, we all sat around with Bompie, and we told him about our trip over on The Wanderer, and he seemed absorbed in all of it. When we finished, Bompie said, “You all are the ones who should be eating the pie. Where’s the pie? More pie!”

  Uncle Mo said, “Wait a minute—I’ve got something—”

  We thought he was going to bring in some pie, but instead he brought in a bunch of flat packages. He lifted one off the top and said, “This one’s for Bompie.”

  Bompie tore the paper off the package, and inside was one of Mo’s drawings. It was a sketch of Bompie sitting up in bed, eating pie.

  “Pie!” Bompie said. “Ha ha ha! Pie!”

  At the bottom of the drawing, Uncle Mo had written Ulysses Eating Pie.

  “Ulysses!” Bompie said. “Ha ha ha! That’s me!”

  Uncle Mo passed out packages to Uncle Stew and Brian and Uncle Dock. The one for Uncle Stew was a drawing of Stew and Brian, using the sextant. The one for Brian was a sketch of Brian tacking up a list in the galley. The one for Uncle Dock was a watercolor of Dock’s “baby,” The Wanderer, with Captain Dock at the bow.

  We were all ooh-ing and ah-ing over these drawings.

  “Now, this one’s for Cody,” Uncle Mo said.

  Cody ripped off the wrapping. Inside was a pen-and-ink drawing of Cody juggling. He was standing on The Wanderer, and the boat was leaning way over, but Cody was perfectly balanced, and he was juggling not pretzels—or socks—but people. Each of us was a little wee tiny person up in the air, and Cody was juggling us.

  “Man!” Cody said. “This is amazing!”

  “Did you notice the knots?” Uncle Mo said.

  We all looked closer. And then we saw them. Cody’s hair was all tied up in little end-knots and clove hitches.

  “This is the most brilliant drawing I ever saw in my whole life,” Cody said.

  I think Uncl
e Mo was pleased by that compliment.

  Then Cody said, “Wait!” and he dashed out of the room, and when he came back, he handed Uncle Mo a page that he’d torn from his dog-log. “For you,” he said. “I’ll clean up the edges—”

  “For me?” Uncle Mo said.

  It was a drawing of Uncle Mo, leaning back in a deck chair on The Wanderer. In his lap was his sketchbook. Underneath, Cody had written Moses, The Artist.

  “Moses,” Uncle Mo said. “That’s me!”

  Bompie said, “Hey! What about those other two thingys over there? Who are those for?”

  Uncle Mo said, “Oh. Right. These last two were supposed to be for the newest members of the family, but—” He looked at Uncle Dock. “This one was supposed to be for Rosalie. I guess you should open it—”

  Uncle Dock slowly unwrapped it. Inside was a drawing of three whales: the mother and the baby and father whales that we had seen on the ocean.

  “Oh,” Uncle Dock whispered. “Oh, Rosalie—”

  Bompie said, “Rosalie? Who’s this Rosalie everyone keeps talking about? Do I know Rosalie?”

  Cody said, “She’s this really neat woman that Uncle Dock knows. She’s temporarily lost.”

  “Send out a search party!” Bompie said.

  We all looked at Uncle Dock. “I get the hint,” he said. “Now what about that last package?”

  Uncle Mo said, “This one’s for Sophie.”

  My fingers were trembling. A present? For me? I could hardly get the wrapping off, I was so excited. Inside was one of Mo’s drawings.

  There I was, swinging high up in the air in the bosun’s chair, swinging way out over the waves, and the water was very blue, and the sky was blue, and beneath me, in the blue water, was a pair of dolphins, leaping in the air.

  Underneath the drawing, Uncle Mo had written, Giddy-up, Sophie!

  CHAPTER 77

  REMEMBERING

  It sure was hard saying good-bye to Uncle Dock and to Bompie. But we did, and we flew over that wide, wide ocean, and it was amazing to realize we’d sailed all the way across it.

  I’m home, and Sophie is staying here for the week. We went down to the oceanside yesterday and walked along the beach and stared out at the water and we couldn’t stop talking about our trip. We went all the way back to when we’d first seen The Wanderer and all the things we’d fixed on her, and we remembered going to Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard and Grand Manan, and then that long, scary stretch across to Ireland.

  I said, “You know when you said you went clamming on Block Island with Bompie when you were little?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “If you don’t want to remember this, that’s okay, but I was wondering, maybe that was your other Bompie, your first Bompie—”

  She stopped right in her tracks. “My first Bompie?”

  “Yeah, maybe that’s who took you clamming, and maybe you were with your parents, too—your first parents—”

  “My first parents?”

  “That sounded like a really nice time,” I said. “That would be a good thing to remember, wouldn’t it? That little kid you told me about—that little kid wouldn’t mind remembering things like that, would she?”

  “That little kid is bigger now,” she said.

  I’ve been thinking about the little kid. I think that one day the little kid got lucky and she landed in a place where it was okay if she couldn’t remember all the time, and because it was okay not to remember, she started to remember. And along with the painful things came the good things to remember and maybe she felt as if she’d found some things she’d lost.

  Uncle Stew phoned to say he’d found a job with a company that charts the ocean bottom. “You should see the equipment they have!” he said. “It’ll be cool to see what’s down there at the bottom of the ocean.”

  At first Sophie was really intrigued by that and was asking a million questions about what kind of equipment and what sort of stuff it could find, but later she said she wasn’t so sure she wanted to know what all was on the bottom of the ocean.

  And my dad has enrolled in art classes at night. “Does that mean you get to do what you want to do?” Sophie asked him.

  My dad said, “Well, during the day I’ll still crunch numbers, but at night—at night I’ll be Moses the Artist.”

  Uncle Dock phoned to say that The Wanderer was fixed and that he thought Bompie might be well enough by next month to take a little sail with him.

  Sophie said, “Don’t let him fall overboard. Don’t let him fall in that water.”

  I said, “Maybe you could sail over to Spain.”

  Uncle Dock said, “Yep, you just never know where we might end up.”

  Next week, Sierra-Oscar-Papa-Hotel-India-Echo and Bravo-Romeo-India-Alpha-November and I are going to meet up at Sophie’s to check out the Ohio River. Sophie says a raft on the river will seem real calm after that ocean. Brian’s busy making out lists of what we will need in order to build the raft, and we’ve already decided to paint the raft blue and name it The Blue Bopper Wanderer.

  “We’ll find that bridge Bompie jumped off of,” I said.

  “And the place where Bompie and the car turned over in the river,” Brian said.

  “And where Bompie got baptized and bit the pastor,” Sophie said.

  I guess this dog-log is over, though.

  Bravo-Yankee-Echo–Bravo-Yankee-Echo.

  CHAPTER 78

  HOME

  I’m home, and it sure is nice to be home. Cody and Brian are here for a couple of weeks too.

  I can tell that my now-parents are awfully relieved that I made it back in one piece. They keep coming into my room at night and sitting on the edge of my bed, and when I open my eyes, they say, “You okay? You need anything?” and I say, “I’m just fine.”

  On the first night home, my dad made barbecued chicken and corn on the cob, my favorites.

  Cody said, “Yum, beauteous chicken!”

  Brian said, “Yum, beauteous corn on the cob!”

  For dessert we had great big chocolate fudge sundaes. Brian said, “Guess we’re going to have to show them how to make pie.”

  Yesterday, Cody and Brian and I were standing by the Ohio River, watching the current carry branches and leaves down under the train bridge and along, beyond it, round the bend.

  “Don’t you wonder what’s around that bend?” Cody asked.

  “You been there, Sophie?” Brian asked.

  “Nope,” I said. “Not yet.”

  “Well?” Cody said. “What do you think? Want to cast off the flibbergibbet on The Blue Bopper Wanderer and go that way?”

  “Soon as we get some wooden paddle thingys,” I said.

  Brian said, “Huh, huh, huh, huh, huh, huh.”

  I’m not in dreamland or earthland or mule-land. I’m just right here, right now. When I close my eyes, I can still smell the sea, but I feel as if I’ve been dunked in the clear cool water and I’ve come out all clean and new.

  Bye-bye, Bompie. Bye-bye, sea.

  READER’S GUIDE

  QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. Chapter 1 begins with Sophie’s poetic musings: “The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolled and rolled and called to me. Come in, it said, come in.” We see variations on these lines echoed throughout the book (pp. 87, 99, 106, 111, 160, 176, and 190). How do the slight changes in this refrain reflect Sophie’s changing relationship with the sea?

  2. In what ways is The Wanderer like a mystery novel? How does the author “drop clues” for the reader? Did you find it suspenseful?

  3. The book first switches from Sophie’s to Cody’s point of view on page 23, the first entry in his “dog-log.” It’s our first hint that Sophie is an orphan, and has only lived with her current parents for three years. What was your reaction when you found out? Did it change your view on Sophie’s reliability as a narrator?

  4. Sophie’s father calls her “Three-sided Sophie” on page 3: “one side is dreamy and romantic; one is
logical and down-to-earth; and the third side is hardheaded and impulsive.” Do you agree with his assessment? Can you find moments in the book that reflect these three sides of Sophie?

  5. Uncle Stew decides that each crew member has to teach the others something while on the trip (p. 21). What do each of the young people’s choices—Cody’s juggling, Sophie’s storytelling, and Brian’s points of sail—show us about these three characters? What do the crew members’ attitudes toward one another’s choices tell us about them?

  6. Sophie is the only girl on a crew of men and boys. How does Sophie feel about this? Do the boys and men treat her differently because she is a girl? If so, how?

  7. The characters in The Wanderer all deal with pain differently. What are some of Sophie’s challenges and survival mechanisms? Cody’s? Uncle Mo’s? Dock’s?

  8. Sophie’s evolving relationship with Cody is one of the cornerstones of The Wanderer. How does Sophie’s impression of Cody change from the beginning when she wonders if he has any brains in his head (p. 41)? How does Cody’s impression of Sophie change?

  9. Sophie has a recurring dream she calls “the one with The Wave” (pp. 125, 208). What role do dreams play in this novel?

  10. Have you read any other books by Sharon Creech? If so, can you think of any similarities in themes or techniques?

  QUESTIONS FOR SHARON CREECH

  1. Sophie, like Sal in Walk Two Moons, is the kind of storyteller that makes stories come alive. How do you perceive your own role as storyteller? Have there been storytellers in your life who have influenced you?

  I suppose I see my role as storyteller as similar to the narrator’s role: to make stories come alive, to allow the reader to feel as if he is in the story and can see and hear and feel the same things the narrator does. I try to exclude the boring bits and to quicken or slow the pace as needed.