Rufus and I walked down to the end of the valley and we sat in the woods and watched for a while. I squinted my eyes real, real tight this time, into the thinnest, meanest slits possible, and sent telepathic messages to the workers like, Get away! You’re at the wrong address!
But as soon as they started cutting down the trees and plowing up their roots, my stomach got sick and my legs and arms got wobbly and my head felt dizzy. I had to get up and wobble-run home with Rufus looking at me, smiling and slob-bering like he thought I was playing with him. It was all I could do to get to my room, lie down on the bed, and cover my ears with my pillow so I couldn’t hear the cracking of the trunks and the grind of the machinery.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said in my head over and over again.
When all of those terrible sounds finally stopped, I kept lying there, just like that, for a long time, sick and tired and numb.
And then my new heart came up with a plan.
Now up until that moment, ever since the day in the barn with Daddy, just about the only thing I cared about was putting together a plan to save me and my valley. But for all my wishing and hoping and sending out ten different kinds of prayers for a good one, not a single decent plan came out of me. It was as if all of the interesting ideas and exciting projects that had been running around in my head forever had just evaporated.
Because those first few weeks I went back to school, the only thing left in any part of me was unhappiness. It was the quiet kind, too, that doesn’t do much and says even less. Every afternoon I’d come home, finish my homework, eat dinner, wash dishes, then sit in the big chair and do nothing.
“Ida B, what are you doing?” Daddy would ask.
“Nuthin’,” I’d say, not bothering to muster the energy to say the word right.
“Well, why don’t you find something to do,” he’d tell me in a voice that didn’t sound like merely a suggestion.
So I’d go and sit on the porch with Lulu on my lap, petting her but not paying any mind, so my hand was thump, thump, thumping on the top of her head. She’d get tired of that and give me a little bite to let me know that I was not giving her the attention she deserved, jump down, and walk away with her indignant tail up in the air as a final warning. Then I’d sit by myself, looking but not seeing, listening but not hearing.
Daddy would walk by on his way to the barn and say, “Ida B, stop moping and find something to do.”
And I’d pick my body up and try to find somewhere else to go.
I couldn’t go to the orchard. The apple trees wouldn’t have anything to do with me. And they were always whispering things to each other like, “Did you hear about Philomena? They cut her down, poor thing.”
“Who’ll be next? What will those people do next?” they wondered.
“If I could, I’d pull up my roots and move to the other side of the mountain, I would. This place is falling apart,” the ones who didn’t want to seem afraid would say.
But the worst was the sounds they made in the evening. “Ohhhhhhh, ohhhhhh,” they moaned as the wind and their branches danced together in mourning, and their leaves waved good-bye to the spirits of their friends.
I stayed away not because they ignored me, though, but because I was afraid they would eventually speak to me. I was afraid they would ask me, “Why didn’t you help us, Ida B? Why didn’t you protect us?”
But I didn’t have an answer, except that I felt like I’d been cut down, too.
So I’d sit up on the side of the mountain, grateful the stars were so far away you could barely hear their voices. Far away from the orchard and the brook and that old tree, until Daddy would call, “Ida B! Time to come in!”
Then I’d go home, get into bed, and do the same thing all over again the next day.
But now my heart had given me a plan. I had a mission, a purpose, and many, many things to do.
I’d rush through my homework and lock myself in my room till dinner, then hurry through dishes and disappear till the next morning. I was working toward nothing less than the righting of wrongs, turning evil to good, and stopping the craziness that was steadily and surely taking over my valley. I was Ida B, Superhero Deluxe, Friend of the Downtrodden, Foe of Cancer, Meanness, Mindless Destruction, and Traditional Schooling.
I drew a symbol for myself with the mountain in the background, and in the foreground were the remains of Ernest B. Lawson Elementary School. It was just a pile of rubble, and the only way you could tell what had been there was you could still put together some of the words from its also-decimated sign. I was suspended just above that heap of concrete, moments after its destruction.
My Super Assistant, Rufus, had cleared every man, woman, and child out of that building. In the next instant, I had flown straight down from heaven and, with one fist in front of me, rammed into the cupola of the school. With that single perfectly placed strike, I had pulverized the entire place. I was wearing purple pants, a purple shirt, and purple socks and sneakers. My braids were streaming behind me and I was smiling really big, too.
All around the school were apple trees, and all of the kids were safe in their branches, with Rufus, eating pie. The brook flowed past the ruins of that school, and in it were all of the teachers, the principal, and the secretary, too, wearing life preservers, on their way to Canada.
It was a tremendous drawing. I put it on the back of my door and I didn’t even try to hide it.
Next, I got on with the part to scare away the new people.
I made signs, posters, and notices in paint, marker, and crayon. In our encyclopedia, I researched the most dangerous and deadly things in the universe, and I brought them to our valley.
BEWARE OF POISONOUS SNAKES, one poster proclaimed, and there were pictures of some rattlesnakes, a cobra, and a boa constrictor squeezing the life out of a terrified woman, whose eyes were popping out of her head because of the pressure. At the bottom was a man, with two bloody fang marks on his ankle, whose life had obviously ended in agony.
TARANTULA SPOTTED HERE, announced another with the biggest, hairiest black spider standing behind the words, ready to grab you in its humongous pincers.
TORNADOES TOUCH DOWN WEEKLY, read a third, with a picture of a twister carrying a cute little house, a mom, a dad, and two screaming children plus their dog off to who-knows-where.
DANGER: TSETSE FLIES; FEROCIOUS, RAVENOUS GIANT MALAMUTE ESCAPED FROM PET STORE AND SPOTTED IN VICINITY; PLAGUE OF LOCUSTS EXPECTED THIS YEAR warned some of the others, with very descriptive pictures.
I knew that some of these things would never occur where we lived, but I was hoping our new neighbors weren’t so well educated. I used lots of big words to make them sound true, and I signed every one of them with the police chief’s name, Vernon Q. Highwater.
They were masterpieces of terror.
When I had about forty of them done, I took my flyers to the building site of the new house, and I posted them everywhere—on the telephone poles by the road, on the trees that remained on the site, on the concrete of the foundation. I even taped them right to the framing that was already up.
And I started collecting things and leaving them as presents in their basement: snakes, spiders, grubs, and slugs. This place was going to sound so bad and scary, and look so disgusting, they’d want to stay in their house in town and never come live out here. They’d give the land back to Daddy, just so they wouldn’t have to worry about an outbreak of bubonic plague or orchard-inhabiting alligators again.
Chapter 18
Back at school, Ms. Washington was trying to wear me down.
Every day at recess I’d sit on the steps. Every day she’d come sit beside me and say, “Anything you want to talk about, Ida?”
And every day I’d say, “No, ma’am.”
But it got harder and harder to say, “No, ma’am” without looking at her, acting like she was a stranger, like it was really true that I didn’t have anything I wanted to talk about.
When som
ebody stops to talk every day, and asks you about yourself, and doesn’t say anything to fill your part of the conversation, just lets you choose if you want to fill it yourself, then it’s hard to think that somebody’s your enemy or to keep her so far away from your heart. It’s hard not to trust somebody like that.
And she was wearing me down in ways she probably didn’t even intend to.
Ms. Washington would read to us every day after lunch, and her voice was like ten different musical instruments. She could make her voice go low and deep and strong like a tuba, or hop, hop, hop quick and light like a flute.
When she’d read, her voice wrapped around my head and my heart, and it softened and lightened everything up. It put a pain in my heart that felt good. When she told stories it made me want to tell stories. I wanted to read like her, so I could have that feeling anytime.
Ms. Washington would read good books, too, not silly ones where kids just learned how to behave right. The kids in her books did fun things, brave things, magical things.
She’d walk by my desk and set a book on it. “I thought you might want to read this,” she’d whisper.
And I’d just leave it there, like I wasn’t one bit interested. Then I’d slip it into my backpack at the end of the day. I’d take it out in my room at home with the door locked, and she was right—I did like it. A lot. But I wouldn’t tell her.
I practiced reading out loud like Ms. Washington to Lulu and Rufus, but I did it in my room and quiet so Mama and Daddy didn’t hear me. Rufus closed his eyes and looked so happy and peaceful, like I bet I looked when Ms. Washington was reading. Lulu got bored fast and started scratching at the door to get out, but I didn’t care and I didn’t take it personally.
I just loved making words into stories by the sound of my voice.
“Ms. W.” is what I’d started to call Ms. Washington in my head, but never to her face, after a couple of weeks in that classroom.
On a Wednesday during silent reading time, I peeked over my book to see what she was up to. And there she was, with her chin in her hand, tapping her pencil on her desk, and staring straight back at me. As soon as she saw me looking, she smiled, got up from her chair, and started toward me.
Now, I know what somebody looks like when she’s putting together a plan. I could tell that woman was cooking up a big one, and I was the main ingredient. And I wasn’t going to have any part of it, because that was what my heart had decided.
Real quick, I turned myself forward again and put my book up in front of my face, so I would look like I was too busy to be disturbed. But Ms. W. was on a mission, and she wasn’t going to be disappointed.
First, she sat next to me, and I brought my book so close to my nose, they were almost touching.
Then, she moved her head next to mine and, real quiet, she almost-whispered, “Ida, I need your help with something.” And I got that good tingle up my neck and down my arms so the goose bumps come out, because she was making soft sounds next to my ear like my mama did.
“I need you to help Ronnie learn his times tables,” she said, like a cat purring. “Do you think you could work with him? Teach him the way you learned them.”
Well, it was like she’d charmed me and I couldn’t break the spell. My hard heart wanted to turn to her and say, cold and sharp, “I’d prefer not to, Ms. Washington,” snap my head back to forward, and that would be that.
But instead I just kept feeling her voice in my ear and all over. And I was nodding, not making any sounds like “Unh-hunh” or “Yes, ma’am” that might interfere with the memory of that soft voice asking me so kindly for something. That reminded me of what it felt like to be loved.
Chapter 19
Ronnie DeKuyper was small and blond and ran faster than anybody in our grade. He was almost always smiling, and if I was going to like somebody, I suppose it would have been him. He was real friendly, even when people were kind of rude, and he never picked on other kids. But he was bad in math.
Not in adding or subtracting, but in multiplication he pretty well stunk so much that every time he raised his hand or got called on, I just closed my eyes and waited it out, because I knew it wasn’t going to be right. Sometimes I’d think, “Man, Ronnie, you need to hang it up.” But he kept on trying, and I respected him for not giving up, even though it looked like a losing battle to me.
So I was supposed to sit with him during study time and show him how I’d learned the times tables. But I couldn’t remember how I learned them, except that Mama and Daddy just kept saying them to me, and asking me questions or making me recite them, and I kept trying, and pretty soon I knew them all.
I could tell Ronnie was embarrassed that I was going to be teaching him, because the first time I came over to his desk he just looked down at his feet.
Now, I know it’s hard to not do well at something, and I know it’s hard to need help. So instead of not saying anything or waiting for him to say something, which would be my cold-hard-heart routine, I ended up saying “Hi.” Because I felt awful seeing friendly, happy Ronnie the Fastest Runner looking so uncomfortable and feeling so bad about himself.
“Hi, Ronnie,” I said as I sat down at the desk next to his, which was the only time I’d said “Hello” to another kid since I started coming there weeks ago.
I believe Ronnie was unaware of the greatness of my effort, though, because he just mumbled “Hey” back, and was still watching his shoe, like seeing it scrape along the floor was the most interesting thing ever.
Well, if this had been big-headed Calvin Faribault, who thinks he’s too fine for his own reflection, I would say he was being beyond rude. But this was Ronnie, and he was just a good guy feeling down. My rock-hard heart swelled up a little bit, even though I didn’t want it to.
I talked to Ronnie real quietly so nobody could hear us, and he wouldn’t get any more embarrassed. “Wanna play a game?” I asked. “Wanna play a game, Ronnie?”
He looked at me, just halfway, to see if I was serious or teasing him or just plain crazy.
“What kind of game?” he asked.
“A brain game,” I said. “It’s like an obstacle course for your brain.”
“I’m not too good at brain stuff,” he mumbled, and went back to being fascinated with his shoe.
“Yes, you are, you just don’t know it,” I told him. “Ronnie, do you run a lot?”
“I run all of the time.”
“I bet if I ran all of the time I could be as fast as you,” I said.
“I doubt it,” he said back, which got me a little peeved, but at least he was looking straight at me now and all of his shame was gone. He was getting ready to go.
“Anyway,” I said, because I decided to let that last bit lie, “it’s all about practice. We’re going to have to practice for this game, and then we’re going to play, and I’m going to beat the pants off you forever unless you keep practicing. If you practice, you might beat me sometimes. Do you want to play or not?”
Now, I knew that we were at the point where either Ronnie gets insulted, spits on my shoe and says, “Forget it,” or he gets fired up and says, “Let’s go.” And I could see both ideas were going through his head at the same time, because he was looking at my shoe and moving his mouth around like he was putting together a big goober, but he was also scraping his shoe real fast across the floor like he was getting ready to hop to it.
“Okay,” he finally said. “What are we playing for?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “We could play for who gets to go first next time.”
“Nah, that’s baby stuff. Let’s play for quarters.”
Well, I liked that plan for two reasons. I liked that Ronnie was a competitor, because that meant he was going to try and this whole thing wasn’t going to be as boring or pitiful as I thought. And I also liked it because I knew I was going to make some money.
“All right,” I said, and I decided in my head that almost every time we played my game, I’d challenge Ronnie to a running rac
e at the end of the day, so he could win his money back. Or some of it, anyway.
But our races would have to be in private so nobody would think I was having any fun.
Then I showed Ronnie what he had to do to practice.
We started with the easiest multiplication you can do, other than one times anything: the ten-times tables. First I showed him how every answer is just the number you’re multiplying the ten by, with a zero after it. Then I made him write out the ten-times table a bunch of times, and I did it with him so he didn’t feel lonely. We had to say the ten-times tables over and over again, backward, too. Then we quizzed each other with just the basics.
“What’s two times ten, Ronnie?”
“Twenty. What’s eight times ten, Ida?” Like that till we were all warmed up.
After two days of that, we were ready for Celebrity Challenge.
For Celebrity Challenge, you can be anybody from any time, even from stories if you want. Ronnie wanted to be Carl Lewis, the all-around track star. And I was Queen Elizabeth the First because she had red hair and she was queen of England without a king or prince or anything.
For this particular game, the first person to get twenty-five right wins. In the first round, you ask each other just the basic times tables questions, but you can switch stuff around a little. You can ask, “What is twelve times ten?” but you can also ask, “What is ten times twelve?” In the second round, you can add or subtract a multiple, too, like “What is ten times ten, minus two times ten?” If you need a sudden death tiebreaker, you can be very complicated, but you have to be fair.
You’re not supposed to use paper, but I let Ronnie use it the first couple of times. And I did beat the pants off him, too. A lot.
But, over time, I could tell he was practicing at home because he was getting better and trickier. Sometimes he’d want to play even when we weren’t in study time, like when we were lining up to go outside and he thought he’d come up with a particularly sly question.
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