17
Sunday morning Donut woke up to cloudy skies but no rain. It was time to catch some perch or maybe even a lake trout if she was lucky. Out by the woodpile she dug up some worms and stuck them in a sardine can. She dragged the Nehi down to the water and it scraped something awful on the rocks when she slid around in the slippery stretches of mud.
With no wind to speak of, she paddled quickly out to the middle of Dog Pond. Floating over the deep spot, she gripped the paddle tight. The darkness below, the not knowing what was down there, was like the emptiness of Ichabod’s eye sockets.
It was chilly and the worm didn’t wiggle much when Donut stuck it on the hook. There was water in the bottom of the boat. Her boots were getting soggy. The lead weight pulled the line down a good ways until it went slack. She reeled in a few feet and waited. The water in the bottom of the Nehi seemed to be getting deeper. It was sloshing around now when she moved on her seat.
Donut set the end of the fishing rod down and made a close inspection of the hull. Nothing. She turned and checked the stern. Hidden under the bench seat, there was a hole in the boat. A good-sized hole, with bits of metal, all jagged, sticking up around it. The boat was filling up fast.
Donut yanked her hat off, tried to stuff it in the hole, getting a sizable cut on her thumb in the process. The water in the boat was up to her seat now and had taken on a pinkish tone from the blood dripping down her hand.
She tried to paddle but the Nehi was so weighed down with water it wouldn’t budge. Donut twisted around, jammed her boot down over the hole, but the metal sticking up kept her from sealing it.
It was all happening so fast. Her pops’ boat was sinking. She shouldn’t have dragged it over the rocks.
“Get your boots off!”
Her boots would drag her, feet first, down to the bottom of Dog Pond along with this stupid tin bucket. Donut fumbled in the water in the boat, untied the laces, and pulled her boots off. She tied them together and strung them around her neck.
The sardine can with the worms in it bobbed around in the boat, not leaking one bit. A better design than her pops had come up with. Donut grabbed it.
“Stupid tin can!” she hollered, and threw it far out over Dog Pond.
Right then, with a few inches of boat left, with her sitting in freezing pond water, the line took off from her rod. She’d caught a fish. She grabbed the pole and the line zipped out.
With her boots around her neck and a fish on the line, the boat sank out from under her. With the shock of the icy cold, she let go of the fishing rod. Thrashing her arms around, she got her head above water. Below her she could just make out the Nehi. It rolled over and cut down into the deep like a silver whale.
Donut sank again, her head underwater. She was so cold and had so much weight on her with her coat and clothes and boots around her neck, she just might drown. She swung her arms, got her head out of the water once again and twirled around until she located Chanticleer on the hillside. She could swim it easy in the summer, but this was altogether different.
She started in dog-paddling, stirred up a froth with her panic, inched forward with the boots dangling from her neck, heavy as two boulders. She wasn’t giving them up. She’d already lost her fishing rod, the fish on the hook—and the Nehi.
Donut kicked and paddled. She kicked her feet, searching for the bottom, the eelgrass, rocks, mud. Nothing. She kept paddling. Her head ached with the cold. She kept kicking, her eyes on Chanticleer.
Her toe brushed the rocky bottom and she flailed around until she was standing with just her head poking up out of the water.
“Don’t stop,” she sputtered.
She’d freeze up solid if she stopped. She’d give up if she stopped. Donut leaned forward, pushed off the bottom with her feet, paddled with her hands.
The climbing up on shore part was colder than the being in the water part. Donut pulled her boots off her neck and dropped them next to the pie tin on the rocks. Her feet were so cold, putting weight on them stabbed at her toes and heels. She slipped and slid up the trail to Chanticleer.
Inside the cabin, she pulled off her wet clothes and wrapped herself up in one of the wool blankets on her bed. She loaded wood into the stove, got it roaring hot. The stovepipe glowed pink and she sat up close to the heat, shivering and shaking and cussing.
She’d picked up loads of cuss words from André and Marcel and her pops when they hadn’t thought she was listening. She let them loose now. A whole string of foul words. She could see why they did it. It helped a whole lot to cuss.
The Nehi was gone. Sunk. If she’d been paying attention she would have wondered about the water coming in long before she’d gotten all the way out to the deep spot. She would have had time to paddle back to shore. To save her pops’ boat. Which had turned out to not be so sturdy after all. He wouldn’t ever have made his fortune on the foolish thing, like he’d kept saying. People would have drowned left and right in rivers and lakes and ponds from coast to coast.
As she warmed up and the shivering slowed down Donut got even madder. At the whole stinking world. The flat tire. The long skid and roll and him flying. Flying. And on top of her pops being dead, the whole running away idea was stupid. Aunt Agnes had made up her mind. She wasn’t going to just pick up and leave Donut to Sam. She’d sit in that parlor knitting her ugly socks and wait. She was old. Old people were patient. Had nothing better to do. And the Nehi was gone. A piece of her pops—not his cleverest invention, but still, his boat, just sitting there on the bottom of Dog Pond, forever.
And she’d caught a fish, too. And it had gotten away, along with her fishing rod. All of it. Gone. And it was going to take days for her clothes to dry out.
Donut couldn’t decide if she was going to cry or bust up the furniture. Either way, it wouldn’t change anything. The Nehi was gone and her pops was dead.
18
Donut sat for a long time, wrapped up in the scratchy wool blanket in front of the woodstove, her wet clothes in a heap on the floor. She would have stayed there forever, cussing and mumbling about the rotten hand she got dealt from day one, but she had to use the outhouse.
She pulled on dry socks and her nightclothes. It wasn’t even dark yet, but she didn’t care. Her slippers got muddy on the trip to the outhouse, but she stopped and looked out over the pond. The sun was setting and the sky was a washed-out blue. There was no sign of the Nehi. No ripples or any hint at all. Her boat was just swallowed up.
Back inside Chanticleer, Donut lit the lamp and made herself a cup of Ovaltine. She studied the heap of wet clothes by the door while she ate two gingersnaps. The wet mess could all just lie there. She blew out the lamp, and crawled into bed.
The mice woke her up. They were skittering around over by the table. Donut got out of bed and lit the lantern. Scurrying feet retreated into cracks and crevices.
They’d gotten into the gingersnaps and gnawed through the wrapper of the Hershey bar. Bits of paper were scattered about, and mouse droppings, too. There must have been a whole battalion of them eating the presents that Tiny had lugged through the mud.
“You little creeps!” she yelled.
Donut pulled down three rusty mousetraps she’d seen on the top shelf. It was all her fault, since she hadn’t put the food away.
“Tough luck.”
She baited the traps with ruined bits of her Hershey bar. One she put on the counter by the crack where the notch-eared mouse had disappeared earlier, and the other two she put along the floor against the wall, right where they liked to creep.
The moon was full-on bright and she could see her boots down by the shore. The bears were gone, along with the Nehi. And here she was, wide-awake in the middle of the night. She draped her coat over Tiny’s chair by the stove and hung her other wet things over the woodpile. All of it had that pond smell, not fishy, but alive—an ancient, sad kind of smell.
Her atlas was open to the map of Louisiana. She traced the coastline with her finger. She should
run away good and proper—board a steamer in New York Harbor, not go ashore until it docked in New Orleans. The sailors on board would teach her how to tie knots and drink rum. She’d eat hardtack and sing wicked sea chanteys. Everyone in Cobden would hear about the disappearance of the Nehi. They’d figure she’d drowned, have a big funeral. And because it was believed the fish in Dog Pond had eaten the dead eleven-year-old Dorothy Sedgewick, no one would ever again be entirely comfortable frying up a bucket of perch they’d caught in those waters.
Donut closed up her atlas and blew out the lantern. She sat at the table and gazed down at the water. Maybe her bear had found his way through the woods and around the pond to the far shore. Maybe he had no reason to call to the other bear now because they were together.
She lit the candle on the apple crate, picked up the photograph of her and her pops in the silver frame, and climbed into bed. In the photograph, he was wearing his army uniform from the Great War over in France.
She had on a white baby dress with smocking and ribbons and tiny stitches. The dress went down way past her toes and made it look like she could fly, not needing the use of her feet and legs. As she circled above her crib her pops would reach up for the ribbons, try to drag her back down to earth like the musclemen at the Lamoille County Fair pulling on the ropes to get the rainbow-striped hot-air balloon to behave.
In the photograph her pops sat a little stiff in his uniform, but he had a smile on his face and he was aiming it right at her, holding her in the crook of his elbow. Her pops had a smile that made a person want to twirl in a circle with arms wide.
Donut set the photograph in the silver frame back on the apple crate and blew out the candle. The missing her pops was a wave this time, an ache moving through her guts. Under the blankets, her eyes closed, she waited for it to ease. She knew now it would, because a person couldn’t hurt like this for too long or they’d just die.
* * *
Donut crawled out of bed just before dawn the next morning. She pulled on her clothes and slippers and took a trip to the outhouse. Back in the cabin she reached for the can of Ovaltine and saw that the mousetrap on the counter was flipped over. A mouse tail poked out. She took a quick breath and picked the trap up by the edges. The metal bar held the body down tight and the tail drooped. It wasn’t the notch-eared mouse. But still, she was sorry she’d killed it. The scritch-scratch of the mice in Chanticleer had kept her company. She lifted the bar off and slid the dead mouse onto the table.
“Hey, Donut. You in there?”
She turned. Someone was banging on the door.
“Tiny?”
The door swung open and Wally and Pete came trooping in. Wally held up her boots and Pete handed her the empty pie tin.
“Boat’s gone. Didn’t see it on the water, neither,” said Wally.
“Thought you drowned,” said Pete.
“Almost did,” said Donut. She set her boots down by the woodstove.
“Tip over?” asked Wally.
“Nope. Sprung a leak. Boat sunk.”
“Jeesh,” said Pete.
“That’s too bad,” said Wally. “But hey, good thing you didn’t drown ’cause we brought you breakfast.”
“Bacon,” said Pete.
“Ma won’t miss it, just a small slab hanging way back in the smokehouse,” said Wally, handing her a soot-covered end of bacon.
“Spring pig,” said Pete.
“Thanks, boys,” she said. “I’m running low on food.”
“Got eggs, too.”
Pete proudly pulled a handkerchief out of his coat pocket. It was yellow with yoke. Donut took it in two hands and opened it up on the counter.
“Three out of four’s not bad,” she said.
“I told you to keep ’em in your hat,” said Wally.
“Hey, you know there’s a dead mouse on the table?” said Pete holding it up by its tail.
Donut took the mouse, set it on the trunk, and got busy cutting up chunks of bacon with her jackknife. “Stick around for breakfast, why don’t you.”
She added wood to the stove and fried up the bacon and eggs in an old skillet. The smell made her stomach rumble. Wally and Pete inspected the cabin and settled at the table, Wally in Tiny’s chair and Pete on an apple crate.
“That old stovepipe’s gettin’ kind of red-hot, ain’t it?” said Wally.
“It’s been cold with all the rain.” Donut studied the pipe. It did look about ready to give out. She’d need to keep an eye on it.
“Anyway, it’s a good hideout,” said Wally. “Marcel know you’re here? You never said.”
Donut didn’t answer. She busied herself serving up breakfast.
“Some dogs he’s got,” said Wally.
“Eat you alive,” said Pete.
“Not if they know you,” said Donut.
The three of them sat at the table and ate their bacon and eggs off three pie tins. She’d never seen the Ducharme boys so quiet.
Wally wiped the grease off his mouth with the back of his sleeve. “Took care of Ernie for a while.”
Pete giggled.
“Jeez, boys, what’d you do?”
“Snuck out around midnight last night,” said Wally. “Shoved a potato up the tailpipe of his old Ford. It’ll kill the engine dead ’til he figures out what’s wrong. If you need to make a quick getaway, he won’t be on the road for a while.”
Pete grinned, egg yolk on his chin.
Donut smiled. She couldn’t help it. They were so proud to be fellow outlaws.
“Thanks, but lay off Ernie for a while. I don’t want you getting into trouble ’cause of me.”
“He can’t prove a thing. Anyway, gotta get to school. Miss Beebe’s waiting with her ruler.” Wally stood. Pete jumped up.
“Great breakfast,” said Donut.
She watched from the doorway until the Ducharme boys disappeared in the woods. Chanticleer was quiet again, but the bacon smell was real homey. She cleaned up and settled back at the table with the dead mouse.
Inside the leather satchel with her scalpels and tins of cornmeal and arsenic powder was a letter from Sam.
19
The letter was a folded piece of notepaper with her name written on the outside in the careful block letters Sam used for specimen tags.
April 22, 1927
Dear Donut,
I’m relieved to hear from Tiny that you are safe. He wouldn’t tell me where you are but assures me that you have a roof over your head. I’m sending on your taxidermy tools in case an opportunity arises.
Agnes has been to see me. Your disappearance has caused her great pain and worry. It may be justified in your eyes, but you should not rest comfortably thinking she is unaffected.
Why have you run off? Agnes won’t leave without you, and Donut, she’s not such a bad egg.
Do come home.
Your most especial friend,
Sam
P.S. Ichabod is coming along. I’m quite pleased with the stitching.
Donut slammed the letter down on the table. Aunt Agnes had gotten to Sam. Not a bad egg. Her auntie was a downright rotten egg. And so was Sam. It’d stink real bad if they bumped heads and cracked open, the both of them. He should have convinced Aunt Agnes to give her up. Begged to be allowed to take her in—his goddaughter, too. But he wouldn’t fight hard enough for her.
Donut got up and grabbed a stick of kindling. She poked the two traps along the wall. They snapped and jumped off the floor. She wasn’t going to kill the mouse with the notched ear. She wasn’t going to kill any more of the mice. At least they hadn’t double-crossed her.
She picked up the dead mouse and held it in her palm. Growing up around Sam she’d seen her fair share of dead animals, so she wasn’t going to get all busted up over it. But she wasn’t going to skin it and put glass eyes in its skull, either.
She’d spent hours at Sam’s learning how to use the scalpels and scrapers and needles. She liked how the rest of the world would drop away when she was wor
king on a specimen. But now the idea of trying for a lifelike pose in something dead filled her up with sadness.
Donut crumbled a gingersnap into a pile on the counter in the shadow of the water bucket, where the notch-eared mouse might feel safer for a visit. She pulled her damp coat and boots on, went outside, and threw the dead mouse behind the woodpile for the crows. Down on the shore she looked for tracks. There was nothing but bird prints all in a jumble in the mud, like Egyptian hieroglyphics. Tonight she’d leave another apple.
Despite the clear skies it was a cold day. Her damp coat and boots drew in the chill and gave her the shivers. Walking would help warm her up, and she wasn’t going to go far. Donut jumped over the muddy spots in the trail, climbed over the rotted trunk of a balsam, and hurried past the old maple. She knew she should turn around, but she didn’t.
She could just sneak down the road and peek in to see how Ichabod was coming along. Sam would never spot her. He’d be too busy stitching up the seams in Ichabod’s rear end like some old lady patching a sofa cushion. And Aunt Agnes wouldn’t catch her. She wouldn’t set foot outside in this mud.
Donut picked up her pace. She got to the rocky shore where she and Tiny had launched the Nehi and didn’t stop. Now that she’d decided to spy on Sam and Aunt Agnes, she was in sort of a panic to get there.
She kept to the edge of the road, listening for Ernie’s Ford. When she caught sight of her house it was a fresh look, like she’d been gone for an age. The shingled roof had built up a good crop of moss, the blue trim around the windows looked worn, and the chimney with the one white brick was kicking out thick black smoke. Aunt Agnes wasn’t keeping the wood furnace burning right.
Donut slipped into the yard. She had no doubt that her auntie was perched on her mother’s wingback chair, click-clacking away with those knitting needles. She got past the woodpile, crouched down at the window, and peered in. She could see the back of Aunt Agnes’s head above the high-backed chair. Her knitting was piled up on the side table along with her reading glasses. She was just sitting there all still and quiet. Donut turned away from the window and hurried back to the road.
A Stitch in Time Page 9