by Betsy Byars
“I know about the storm. I know about the hail. I thought you were going to be my mother.” With great control he stopped himself from yelling, “I want my mother!”
“Also tornadoes—which probably won’t actually happen—but hail—the TV said golf ball-sized hail to baseball-sized hail. You know what golf ball-sized hail can do to a greenhouse?”
“Yes.”
“It can shatter every pane of glass, batter every plant. Do you remember the time I hit a baseball through someone’s picture window?”
“That was our picture window.”
“Well, remember—” He broke off. “I got to go. Linda’s coming.”
The conversation ended with a bang. Mozie waited a moment and then hung up the phone.
“Was that Batty?” Richie asked.
“Yes.”
“I wish Batty was here instead of you.”
“So do I.”
“Batty makes me laugh.”
“He makes me laugh too.”
Mozie picked up the phone again and dialed his own number. He waited for fourteen rings, but there was no answer at Crumb Castle. “Where can she be? She can’t be out in the storm.” He dialed again. Again no answer.
As he put down the phone, he heard the sound of rain—big drops—they had to be as big as golf balls themselves—begin to pelt the roof like bullets. The wind grew stronger. Lightning struck close by with an ear-splitting crash. The air had a strange metallic smell.
Richie clutched Mozie around the neck.
“Not so hard. You’re strangling me.” Mozie began to make his way back to the sofa. “Let go of my neck, or I’m going to—”
This was his big weakness as a baby-sitter, one of his big weaknesses—he didn’t know how to make kids do things they didn’t want to do. The only thing he could think of—I’m going to take you to the doctor and tell him to give you a shot—wouldn’t work because Richie knew Mozie didn’t have wheels.
“Noooooooooooooooo—”
“Let go, I’m not kidding.”
A shutter on an upstairs window began to bang against the house. The porch swing began to do the same thing. A limb crashed onto the porch.
There was a blinding flash of lightning.
“One-thousand-and-one, one-thousand-and-two,” Mozie counted in an unsteady voice.
Then came the thunder. Two miles away that time.
The huge drops of rain on the roof sounded louder now, as if frozen. Hail.
Then there came a crash of lightning so loud, so earsplitting, so powerful that the floor actually shook under Mozie’s feet.
And the lights went out.
Thunder and Lightning
IN THE DARK LIVING ROOM Mozie held Richie on his lap while the storm raged. He had stopped having cheerful thoughts about Santa dropping kids on the floor. Mozie was afraid.
The black, almost primordial darkness of the room was broken by blinding flashes of white lightning. There was no separation between the thunder and lightning now.
Richie had a cushion over his ears. Mozie wanted to hold one over his head too, but every time he loosened his grip on Richie, Richie began to scream.
The house had started to shake with the fury of the storm. Doors rattled. Windows trembled so hard that glass panes popped and splintered into the house. The thunder overhead was like tons of stones falling on the house.
“Do you have a basement?” Mozie said.
Richie didn’t hear him.
Mozie picked up one side of the pillow. “Do you have a basement? If you do, we ought to get down in it.”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to know if you have a basement!”
“What be a basement?”
At that moment, the door to the garage’ burst open and the storm was in the house. Curtains flew in the air. Rain splattered into the kitchen, a lamp blew over in the bedroom.
A scream rose in Mozie’s throat and he struggled to his feet. He would have dropped Richie if Richie had not gotten another of those strangleholds around his neck.
“It’s us,” Mrs. Hunter called. She was out of breath. “We’re back.”
She held a flashlight under her chin to prove her identity, but a blinding flash of lightning turned her into a stranger and made Mozie want to scream more than ever.
“Mommy, Mommy,” Richie cried. He pushed his way out of Mozie’s arms and ran for his mother.
“It’s all right,” she told him. She looked at Mozie. “The power is off all over town. Lines are down. The Hawkinses’ whole pecan grove—every single tree—is laid over on its side. We saw fire trucks turning in to the”—she broke off as the thunder rattled the house—“the airport,” she finished.
She took off her scarf with her free hand and shook the drops of water from it. “I’ve never seen such a mess.”
In his mother’s arms, Richie said, “Mozie told me to shut up.”
Mozie came forward tensely. “Where’s Mr. Hunter?”
“Trying to get the garage doors shut.”
“Why? Isn’t he going to drive me home?”
“There is no way you can get home tonight. We’ll call your mother—if the phone isn’t out. Lines are down all over town. We had to drive to Sumpter to get home.”
“But my mom’s expecting me. If I’m not there …”
“Your mother will know you can’t get home.”
“But I could if Mr. Hunter would drive me!”
“That’s not possible, Mozie.”
Mozie’s shoulders slumped.
“Now, now.” Mrs. Hunter gave him one of her hugs. “You can sleep in the guest room. I’ll get one of Bob’s T-shirts for you to sleep in, and in the morning”—another hug—“in the morning Bob will drive you home.”
“I’ll walk,” Mozie said.
“Absolutely not. I won’t hear of your walking.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Well, I do.”
“I want to walk.”
“You are not leaving this house. Bob, talk to him.”
Mr. Hunter was closing the door to the kitchen, and Mrs. Hunter swung the flashlight around to spotlight him. “Bob, he has some idea that he can get home tonight. He’s talking about walking!”
“No,” Mr. Hunter said, shaking his head. “There are trees blocking the roads. Power lines are down. It’s like a war zone out there.”
“See?” Mrs. Hunter said. “Now, come on, Richie, I want you in bed. And Mozie, I know you’re tired too.”
Reluctantly Mozie allowed himself to be pushed down the hall. Mrs. Hunter opened a door and shone the flashlight, revealing a room that appeared never to have been used.
“I’ll leave this flashlight with you,” she said. “Bob’s getting some candles for us.”
Mr. Hunter came down the hall, lighting his way with a candle. “Here’s the T-shirt.”
“And there are toothbrushes in the guest bathroom. What we all need now is a good night’s sleep.” She lifted her head. “The storm is moving on—listen!”
“If it’s moving on—” Mozie began quickly, but Mrs. Hunter cut off his words by giving him a hug.
Mozie was still standing in the hall, keeping his toes out of the guest room the way Batty kept his toes out of his sister’s bedroom when he had to talk to her for some reason.
“Well, go on in.” Mrs. Hunter gave him a gentle shove, put the flashlight in his hand, and Mozie, much against his will, found himself for the first time in his life in a guest bedroom.
Daddy Longlegs
MOZIE LAY STIFFLY ON the guest bed. He had taken all of the little pillows off and put them on a chair, but he was still uncomfortable. The remaining pillow had lace on it.
Mozie felt stiff and awkward and strange. More than anything in the world, he wanted to be home.
He shifted. He was wearing Mr. Hunter’s T-shirt, but his legs were cold. He didn’t want to get under the covers because the sheets had lace on them too.
If he were at home, he
thought, and if he felt this strange and uncomfortable, he would know exactly what to do. He would get out of bed, go to his closet, and take his father’s box down from the top shelf. The box on the shelf in his closet and its contents were the only valuable, irreplaceable things Mozie had ever owned.
He would sit with the box on his lap and he would lift the lid. And always, there would be the immediate smell of leather and wool and a vague, indefinably masculine scent—after-shave perhaps. What Mozie knew of aftershave he had learned in Eckerds, standing in men’s toiletries, testing the various scents, but he was never able to identify the exact one that his father had favored. Perhaps his father had shopped at a finer store.
At any rate, the sum total was the true scent of his father. Mozie had no actual memory of his father—he had died when Mozie was a baby—but when he opened this box, he got a sense of his father that was strong and loving. It never failed to comfort Mozie.
Everything in this box had belonged to his father, had been worn by him or used by him or saved by him. On top was his dad’s wallet—leather, dark and smooth. His father had worn his wallet in his hip pocket, his mom had told Mozie, and so it still bore the slight curve of the contour of his body.
Inside the wallet he could see his father’s face, framed in a yellow construction hard hat. His eyes were bright and brown, kind eyes. Mozie would flip slowly through the wallet, checking the other IDs, the credit cards, the snapshot of his mother, the lock of her hair curled in one corner. Among the contents of the box was a Swiss Army knife, and one blade of that knife was the tiny scissors his father had used to cut the curl from his mother’s neck.
Mozie liked that story, but his favorite was how his parents met. They met at an Elks dance. The first time his mom saw his dad he was sitting down at a table. He was the same medium height as everyone else.
He asked her to dance and she said, “Yes.” They stood up together, and Mozie’s father was the tallest man she had ever seen off a basketball court. “His legs! His legs! I fell in love with your dad because of his legs!” she always cried in such a comical way that Mozie begged to hear the story again and again. “Tell about Daddy’s long legs,” he’d say.
Later his mom told Mozie she had once read a book called Daddy-Long-Legs, and they checked it out of the library and read it together. After that, their nickname for him was Daddy Longlegs.
Mozie would give a lot right now to be sitting on his own bed, turning through his dad’s wallet, touching the dollar bills, the exact ones that had been in his wallet the day his dad died, saying to himself that his father had touched this ten-dollar bill, this five, these very ones, that he was touching.
Mozie got out of bed. He walked to the window. The moon was full and beautiful and the air was so clear it seemed that the moon was within reach.
In the bright moonlight, Mozie could see the destruction. The Hunters’ yard was covered with branches from trees, big branches. Hail, big as eggs, shone white against the ground. The driveway was completely blocked by the wreckage.
And what had the Hunters said about the airport? Fire trucks had turned into the airport? Crumb Castle was right at the end of runway 28. And the greenhouse was not two miles away.
He began to tremble. He knew the greenhouse had not survived—the wind would have blown out the glass panes if the hail had not shattered them. And the limbs from the forest … And if none of that happened—if the greenhouse still stood, there had been thunder—the thunder so dreaded by the pod that it trembled at the sound.
Now his mind traveled to the thought he had been avoiding. His own house … Crumb Castle … his mother.
With a heavy heart, Mozie crossed to the guest bed. He wished he could cry, but he had never been much of a crier. Even as a baby he had cried so seldom that his mother had asked the doctor if he were normal.
He wanted to cry. The unshed tears were an actual, physical ache.
He lay down.
It was just as well, he told himself. He would have gotten tears on the guest-room sheets.
Greenhouse
“THE GOOD THING ABOUT the storm is that it finally got me out of the house,” Batty said, “only I’m sort of on parole. Whatever you do, don’t ever make me laugh at my sister’s piano playing again.”
Batty and Mozie were picking their way through the forest, on their way to the greenhouse. They worked their way around a fallen tree.
Over the weeks that Mozie had been taking care of the greenhouse, he had worn a path through the trees. Now the path was so littered with the effects of the storm that it had disappeared.
“I had ‘stick and limb’ duty this morning,” Batty continued. “There were sticks and branches all over the place, and so after my dad and I cleaned up the whole yard, then my mother agreed I could come over and help you—since you don’t have a dad to do that kind of thing.”
Mozie did not reply. The closer they got to the greenhouse, the more his dread of seeing it grew. This was what his life had consisted of for the last few days—a feeling of dread interrupted by feelings of sorrow, despair, fear, even joy. But the dread was always there, returning in a rush as soon as the other emotions receded.
The one moment of joy had come when he and Mr. Hunter drove up to Crumb Castle at noon. Mozie had been up at dawn, but Mr. Hunter refused to leave until he heard on the radio that the streets were cleared.
They turned into Crumb Castle’s drive and Mozie saw his mom standing in the front yard with a tree limb in her hand, as if she were wondering what to do with it. Her face looked worried, but the lines smoothed out into absolute, total happiness as she saw Mozie’s face looking out of the window of Mr. Hunter’s car. She dropped the limb and held out her arms as Jack’s mother had in the picture he almost colored.
“I’ve been so worried,” she had said, running across the yard to embrace him. Pine Cone was at her heels, as if he didn’t want to risk separation.
Mr. Hunter got out of the car to explain about the guest room and the trees being down on Sumpter Road while Mozie remained in his mother’s arms, for once not twisting with embarrassment to get away. Pine Cone rubbed around the back of his legs.
But then, as soon as Mr. Hunter drove away, and he and his mother began to clean the yard of Crumb Castle, the thought of the greenhouse returned … and the dread.
If there had been this much damage to their trees, he thought, the greenhouse could not have escaped unharmed.
“I’ll have to go check the greenhouse, Mom. It’s probably ruined.”
“You don’t have to go right now. There’s nothing you can do, Mozie.”
“There might be.”
“I haven’t let myself think about that greenhouse.”
“I thought of it all night.”
“Well, it’s just plants. Plants can be replaced. Human beings can’t.”
“But—”
“You and I are alive and well—and, Mozie—” She took him by the shoulders and turned him to her. She looked into his face. “That’s not true of everybody in this county. That trailer court behind the laundry is wiped off the face of the earth. I hear there are whole airplanes up in the trees at the airport. Mrs. Miller told me—”
Her list of dooms was interrupted by a triumphant yell from the street, and they turned to see Batty arriving on his bicycle. For once he looked more cheerful than Mozie.
“I’m free!” he cried, coming to a stop on the slick grass.
“Good.” Mrs. Mozer turned to Mozie. “Now Batty can go with you to the greenhouse. That way it won’t seem so bad if it’s damaged.”
“I want to go, Mrs. Mozer,” Batty said. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
But now, as they neared the greenhouse, Batty was speaking less positively. “If the greenhouse has been destroyed—I mean, I hope it hasn’t—”
“It has,” Mozie interrupted with flat certainty.
“Well, if it has been destroyed, then …”
“Then what?” Mozie prompted.
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“Then let’s cut the pod open and see what was inside,” Batty finished in a rush.
Mozie gave his friend a look—not the look, but a look of displeasure—but Batty didn’t notice. “I cannot spend the rest of my life wondering what was inside that pod!” Batty said.
“Well, I want to know too …”
“Then let’s do it. If it’s dead—it’ll be like an autopsy on TV. We’ll be doing mankind a favor.”
As they stepped into the clearing, they both fell silent. The greenhouse lay before them in total ruin.
The wind seemed to have hit the greenhouse broadside, sweeping broken glass and plants into the forest, and the hail had done the rest. Vegetables were smashed into pulp, mashed so badly that there was no telling what they had once been.
The pipe that connected the sprinkler system had burst, and a fountain of water shot, geyserlike, into the air. Gradually it washed the debris deeper into the forest.
Shards of glass were everywhere and the drops of water trapped beneath gave the impression the boys were approaching a lake of ice.
Glass crunched beneath their feet as they walked forward, and Mozie felt as if he were walking into a nightmare.
They paused at the edge of the geyser’s reach. Batty gave a low whistle. “Yesterday this was a regular greenhouse,” he said, “with plants that could save the world.”
“I know,” Mozie answered, remembering the last time he had seen it.
“They’re calling it a killer storm and they’re right. I’m going this way.”
Batty headed for the rear of the greenhouse, skirting the worst of the damage. Mozie followed.
“That’s the plant,” Mozie said, looking at what had once been a corner of the greenhouse.
Batty stopped beside him.
The roots of the huge plant had been pulled from the soft earth, and the plant itself—or what was left of it—lay on its side, toppled. Mozie thought of the picture in Richie’s coloring book where that vine lay dying on the ground.
Stripped of its leaves, the stem seemed fragile. It had been severed in places and a dark brown pulp showed through the pale green of the outside.