A Stitch in Time

by Daphne Kalmar

  Her auntie should be knitting or reading one of her books.

  “Too darn bad she’s worried. That’s her problem.”

  But Donut knew that Aunt Agnes’s worry was all because of her. And people didn’t worry unless they cared. Donut kicked a rock into the scrub. She never should have left Chanticleer.

  At Sam’s, she climbed up on the bulkhead door and looked in the parlor window. He was there, crouched under the moose’s belly. Ichabod was no ghost moose anymore. His dark brown fur glistened and his long, knobby legs were ready to walk right off the spruce slab. He had a distinguished beard and his gigantic antlers almost touched the ceiling. With his hunchback and droopy moose lips Ichabod wasn’t elegant like a deer, but his bigness was magnificent.

  Magnificent, yes, but a deep-down sadness hovered around this moose, stuck there on that spruce slab, dead. It was back in March when Sam had gotten the telegram from Maine. He’d loaded his equipment into his truck and headed north with Tiny to help with the heavy lifting. Tiny said they’d skinned the moose right there in the woods. The Great North Woods where Ichabod had grown up, lumbered around in marshes and lakes, dipped his great head into the water, gathering up delicious cress and lilies.

  They’d given the meat away and left the guts for foxes and crows to eat. Probably took days and days—a feast with cawing and yapping, dancing and the fluttering of wings. There would be nothing left of Ichabod’s insides now. Insects and worms would have gotten the last traces.

  Donut watched Sam for a long time. Kneeling on the spruce slab, he dabbed brown paint on the seam he’d stitched to close up the hide. Sam had that look he got when she’d have to poke him with something to get his attention. She should bang open his door and whomp him over the head with one of his butterfly nets. Give him a good talking to about being an especial friend and what that really meant.

  But there was no changing him, and he had offered to take her in even though it would muddle him up something terrible to have someone else living in his house. With all her heart Donut wanted to run into the parlor, give Sam a hug, and get hugged back. Because she knew he would, no matter what.

  Donut pulled herself away from Sam’s window and ran back to the road, keeping one step ahead of stopping, sitting down in the mud, and melting into a puddle of tears. She might just sink so deep into that mud she’d never climb back out.

  She kept running until she got past her house and far enough away from Sam that she could slow down and not fall to bits.

  Halfway up the hill she heard Ernie’s Ford. It sputtered and groaned, coming on at top speed. He must have found the potato in the tailpipe. Donut cut off the road into the brambles. There wasn’t much cover and she could hardly move, what with her coat getting snagged on the blackberry thorns—last year’s canes, old and tough. She dropped to the ground just before Ernie flew by, trailing a cloud of exhaust.

  Donut choked on the oily smoke. She pulled her arm free from the thorns, heard her coat rip, wiped blood off her cheek and sucked on a deep scratch on her palm. It took a good deal of work and three more scratches to yank herself loose from the brambles and stumble back to the road.

  “Ernie, go soak your head!” she yelled at the dust cloud. “You’re supposed to drag me back to Aunt Agnes alive, not kill me.”

  Donut hoofed it up the trail, got off the road and halfway to the pond before she stopped to wipe more blood off her cheek and inspect her torn-up hands. She brushed the mud and leaves off her coat as best she could, but the scratches on her hands were tender and the brambles had caught hold of her braid and yanked it, giving her a sore scalp.

  “Blast it all,” she said to no one.

  She made it back to the cabin—kicking rocks and stomping in the mud the whole way. She packed the stove with wood and set a pan of milk to warm up.

  “Glow all you want,” she said to the stovepipe.

  The scratches had stopped bleeding but were sore to the touch, and the cut on her thumb from the jagged hole in the Nehi throbbed when she pulled on dry socks. Come August she was gonna eat every last blackberry in that good-for-nothing bramble patch.

  She sat at the table with her mug of Ovaltine and the Rand McNally World Atlas, second edition. Breathing in the familiar scent of her atlas calmed her down some. She got out her tablet and began a sketch of the Mississippi River Delta.

  But without her Encyclopedia Britannica, the map was flat. She couldn’t pull out the M–N–O volume and read up on the history or the animals—the shipwrecks, hurricanes, and all the exotic birds and snakes that lurked in the steamy bayou there in the delta. There was no story. Like the mouse and bird skins in her mother’s hope chest had no story. Stitching them up tight and gluing in glass eyes didn’t let on a thing about their lives. The living, breathing notch-eared mouse was loads more interesting, what with his hankering for gingersnap crumbs, and her wondering where he slept at night and how he’d gotten that notch.

  Donut closed her atlas. Tiny hadn’t shown up, and it was getting dark. She carried her last apple down to the shore and set it on the flat rock. Shivering, she hurried back to the cabin. It was going to be a cold night.

  She stared out the window. If only Tiny would come stomping through the door. But she knew he wouldn’t. Not today. Poor Winnie. She’d seen Mr. Patoine shoot a cow once before. Tiny and her had stood by the fence, just seven or eight years old. Mr. Patoine had stroked the neck of the old cow, Lottie, talked in a way Donut had never heard, gentle and sad.

  The shot was loud, made them jump. Lottie had just dropped, crumpled like she’d emptied out. It was right then that Donut understood the difference between dead and alive. Death wasn’t some peaceful drifting off. It was a clap of thunder, a door slamming—Lottie, standing, swishing her tail, turned into a slack heap in an instant.

  Donut sat for a long time wishing Tiny would come so she could say how sorry she was that he’d lost his beautiful Winnie.

  The chill air in the cabin got her moving. She put more wood in the stove, lit the lamp, and checked on the pile of gingersnap crumbs on the counter. She changed for bed, sat back down, and ate the last of the cheese and crackers for dinner.

  She blew out the lamp and gazed out at the pond. It was lit with a wide stroke of moonlight. Down by the shore the rocks were all grays and blacks, with white moon patches where there was a puddle or wet on the mud or boulders.

  It was then, right then while she was watching, that the bear ambled out of the trees. He headed straight for her gift. She could see the outline of the apple. Her bear moved slowly toward it, his head down, on all fours, climbing over the rocks. Then he sat, sat on his big rump, picked up the apple in his front paws, and ate it. She watched him eat the apple while he sat there on the shore of Dog Pond with no cares in the world.

  It took just a few seconds, a few bites. Donut held her breath. Didn’t move. Finished, the bear gazed out across the pond. Then he hooted, kind of barked, three times, his nose up in the air. Donut and the bear were quiet then, waiting together. They waited a good long time. Then it came. Three soft barks from across the pond. Donut grinned. She couldn’t help it. She grinned even though the grinning hurt the cut on her cheek. Her bear stood on all fours, lifted his head up high, and hooted back. The bear on the opposite shore answered with shorter barks, four of them. Her bear stood still for a while, then trotted, sort of galumphing like a bear does, back into the woods.

  The shore was empty, then. Just shadows. Even the mice in the cabin were quiet, with a pile of gingersnap crumbs still on the counter. Donut climbed into bed, curled up into a ball under the blankets. Chanticleer was emptied out now, like the flat maps in her atlas.

  20

  Donut woke, coughing. Smoke. Heat. The stovepipe was alive—a deep, hot red in the dark cabin. The fire inside it rumbled, blasted up toward the roof. The whole thing like a rocket ready to blow right through the ceiling.

  Fire snapped and hissed above her head. The roof was burning. She couldn’t breathe. Donut
pulled the blanket up over her head. To keep the smoke away. To hide. The fire crackled and roared. Get out. Get away. The blanket held her there. She kicked and tore herself free.

  Coughing and choking, she stumbled out of bed, got ahold of the photo of her and her pops in the silver frame, and ran for the door. In her socks and nightgown and her mother’s sleeping cap she yanked the door open and ran. Down to the shore. She tripped and fell on the rocks, got up, and kept moving. To the water, to the rock where she’d put the apple. She stepped in the tracks of her bear, leaned over, coughed, tried to breathe, and coughed some more. Donut turned around to look.

  Chanticleer was on fire. Flames and sparks shot out of the chimney pipe. The old shingled roof burned—kicked red-hot cinders high into the air, sent plumes of smoke up into the night sky. Despite all the soaking rain a few days back and the damp earth all around, Chanticleer was burning. And the noise of it was not the comfortable flickering of flames in a fireplace or a campfire. This fire howled like a wild thing in the night. Night, a time for stillness and quiet creeping.

  The notch-eared mouse.

  “No, no, no.”

  Surely he’d known when he sniffed that smoke, when he twitched those whiskers at the growing heat. He’d known like any sensible creature that he should run, leave his cozy nest, find a knothole in a tree, a crevice in a rock, far away from the fire.

  Donut looked down at the photograph in the silver frame. Everything else was burning. Her Rand McNally World Atlas, second edition, her book bag, and the scratchy blue blankets. Her coat and boots and the orange from Mr. Hollis that she’d been saving.

  She could see flames inside now, through the window. The old rickety cabin was going to burn to the ground. She’d never asked him. Marcel’s cabin. She’d burned his cabin down. The old stovepipe.

  Burning bits of Chanticleer were getting picked up by the wind and carried out over her head, over Dog Pond. They dropped like shooting stars, sizzled in the water. The flames lit the whole cove in a red glow. The noise of it, the cracking and bursting of wood, echoed off the hillside.

  What if the whole forest began to smolder and then to burn? She had to get away. But she couldn’t move. She couldn’t take her eyes away from the fire. Chanticleer burning.

  “Go,” she said. “Move.” Her voice a small thing, drowning in the roar of the fire.

  In the fire’s light, Donut moved along the shore. At the edge of the clearing she followed the path of her bear into the woods and up to the trail. Her stocking feet were heavy with mud. Away from the heat she began to shiver. Little moonlight made it into the thick woods. She picked her way along the trail in the dark, shuffling forward with each step, her teeth chattering with the cold. She’d escaped burning up in the fire and now she was going to freeze to death.

  An enormous crash and roar filled the woods. Donut stood stock-still. The roof. The roof must have caved in. Squashed everything. The table. Tiny’s chair. Her chair. All burning in a heap now.

  Donut moved on, away from the noise and wildness of the fire. What was she doing, here in the woods in her nightclothes? This was just all wrong. Not her plan at all. She was cold to the bone, what with her feet in the mud and wearing just a nightgown. She gripped the silver frame in her left hand and pulled her mother’s nightcap down around her ears. And she kept moving, a little faster now where the trail drew close to the pond and there were fewer trees casting black shadows.

  She thought she might keel over soon. Give up and drop down on the muddy ground because of the cold and the sting of her bloody knee from falling on the rocks and from the world being such a rotten place. And then she could rest. Sleep.

  Donut stopped at the old maple. She could just curl up in the hollow spot in the gnarled roots and maybe stop shivering and maybe not have such a cotton head. Her bear would come, reach down, and pick her up in his big paws, carry her, lumber along on two legs. He’d take her to her house, set her on the doorstep, and hoot a soft bark to wake her. When she woke she’d see him galumphing off to the road and back to his woods.

  Donut squinted her face into a frown to stop the tears from coming at the thought of her bear rescuing her. She marched on as best she could with just socks on her feet. Socks with a few holes in them now, and so muddy they weighed her down. With each step she followed the Mississippi.

  “New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Vidalia, Arkansas City, Helena, keep moving, Memphis, St. Louis, Hannibal, Keokuk, Davenport, Dubuque, La Crosse, St. Paul, Minneapolis, Bemidji. Again. Do it again. New Orleans, Baton Rouge, Vidalia…”

  She made it to the shore opposite Chanticleer and stood on a rock and looked across Dog Pond. The flames were low to the ground now, in the hollow up against the hillside. The burning pile of what had been Marcel’s camp glowed red, sending a streak of color across the water, the color of sunset.

  At least the forest wasn’t burning. Would Tiny see the red glow in the sky? He and his dad would be getting up soon for the first milking. It had to be close to dawn. The night had pushed on for days and days. Donut turned toward the trail. No one was coming to find her.

  “St. Paul, Minneapolis, Bemidji…”

  She stumbled over tree roots and rocks hidden in the dark, banged her shins, stubbed her toes. At the road she kept moving. She passed the field, Tiny’s house. It was home she wanted. Donut stumbled down the road.

  And then she was there, standing at the door to her house, her head so numb she wasn’t sure whether her bear had gotten her home after all.

  When she opened the door the warmth hit her, thick as soup. There was a lamp lit in the kitchen. She stood and breathed in the smell of the house, the smell of wool, of lemon polish, of books and carpets. Her legs wouldn’t hold her in the warmth. She crumpled up onto the floor in a heap.

  “Child, dear child,” said Aunt Agnes from the doorway.

  Donut felt Aunt Agnes’s hand on her face, pushing back her hair.

  “You’ll shiver the life out of yourself, child, up, up you get.”

  Her auntie helped her into the parlor, set her in her mother’s wingback chair. Aunt Agnes took the silver frame from Donut’s grip and stood it on the side table. She pulled off the ragged, mud-caked socks. Donut didn’t argue, didn’t fuss. She let Aunt Agnes wrap her up in the afghan and watched as her auntie got a fire going in the fireplace.

  “Child, child, where have you been?” Aunt Agnes took Donut’s hands in hers. The warmth of them got her shivering more.

  Donut studied her auntie’s face, all teary and sad, the great black, tired circles under her eyes. “I burned it down,” she said. “Right to the ground. But the notch-eared mouse, he got out, I’m sure of it.”

  She was crying now. Donut started blubbering, what with her auntie’s warm hands and Chanticleer burned up and all the scratches and bumps she’d got on the trail on top of the others she’d already had and because her pops had died. Left her all alone and now here she was.

  Aunt Agnes kneeled down on the floor in her bathrobe and put her arms around Donut, which made it worse, and Donut just gave up and cried in earnest, her whole body heaving and shaking with the weight of it all. Her auntie didn’t say a word, just held on to Donut, kept the blanket wrapped up so tight she wouldn’t break into a hundred bits and fly apart, which is what she’d do if Aunt Agnes let go now. There was no stopping the sobs and the hurt until it just kind of petered out on its own. Aunt Agnes pulled back just a little and used the handkerchief she always had stuffed up her sleeve to mop up Donut’s face.

  “Child, I don’t care what you burned down. You’re safe now, sitting right where I can see you.”

  Aunt Agnes tucked the afghan in around Donut’s shoulders and sat in the chair opposite with her knitting.

  “I’m going to sit right here until you fall asleep,” she said.

  What with the warm room and having cried herself out and her auntie sitting right there, Donut laid her head back against the chair and closed her eyes. She slept one of those deep sleeps
that happen sometimes, when dreams are just colors and faces and music with no story. A faraway place.

  It was Tiny and Sam who woke her up, banging on the door and charging into the house, muddy boots leaving a trail on the carpet.

  “Is she here?” hollered Tiny. “Donut? Is she here?”

  Donut opened her eyes, still groggy.

  “Right here, safe and sound,” said Aunt Agnes, getting up from her chair, tightening the belt on her bathrobe.

  Tiny barged right in, stood over Donut in her chair.

  “I thought you were burnt up, dead in the fire. Saw the smoke. Knew it was the camp.”

  “He came looking for you,” said Sam in his jacket, red long johns, rubber boots. “Scared the dickens out of me when he described the pile of ashes he’d seen out at Marcel’s camp.”

  “I burned it down,” said Donut. “It was all my fault.”

  Tiny blew out a sigh. “But you’re all right.”

  “Yes.”

  She was sad and tired and ached all over. But they were all there. All three of them, Sam, Tiny, her auntie, anchoring her to the earth like they each had ahold of one of the ribbons her mother had stitched on her white dress in the photograph of her and her pops in the silver frame.

  Aunt Agnes moved closer to Donut, leaned over, and tucked the afghan in tighter around her shoulders. Tiny raised his eyebrows.

  “Safe and sound,” said Sam. “But you need your rest.”

  “And I got to get back, let my folks know you’re okay.” Tiny shook his head at Donut. “Ran out of the barnyard like I was off my trolley. Had to tell them you were holed up where that smoke was coming from. Ratted you out in the end, sorry.”

  “It’s okay, Tiny. It’s me that’s sorry I scared you into thinking I was dead and all. For the second time.”