by Kline, Suzy
Mary sneered. “Sidney’s the only one afraid of spiders.”
Everyone stared at Sidney.
“So?” he said. “They can kill you.”
Miss Mackle drew something on her clipboard. “There are two spiders that are deadly. Both have special markings. The black widow has...”
“...a red hourglass on its abdomen,” Harry interrupted.
“Yes. And the other has a violin marking on its back. That’s the brown recluse.”
Everyone studied the teacher’s drawings.
“But most spiders are harmless.”
Sidney made a face. “They’re not my best friends.” Then he paused. “I am ... sorry ... about Charlie.”
“His name was Charles,” Harry snapped.
“Well, I think we should have a moment of silence for Harry’s dead pet,” Mary suggested.
“That sounds like a good idea,” the teacher replied.
So we did. We bowed our heads and closed our eyes and thought about Charles. Then Miss Mackle took us downstairs for a drink and a run in the sun. I think she wanted us to air out our brains.
When we came back to the room, Sidney started looking around for something. “Hey,” he blurted out, “someone stole my burnt wiener!”
Things Get Rocky
The next week, things got a lot rocki er between Harry and Sidney. When we were getting off the bus, Harry said, “Hey, Sid, how would you like to see me eat rocks for breakfast?”
“Huh?” Sidney peeked in the bag of rocks Harry was carrying. There was mica and pyrite and granite and quartz.
“How’d you like to see me eat rocks,” Harry repeated.
Sidney’s eyes bulged. “I’d love to see you do that.”
“Well, it’s going to cost you something,” Harry said.
“You can’t have my milk money,” Sidney warned.
“I don’t want your milk money,” Harry replied. “I want something else.”
“What?”
“To see if you can run around the playground four times and get to our room before the bell rings.”
“That’s it?”
Harry nodded. “I’ll be standing by the window counting to make sure you run each lap.”
Mary and Song Lee and Ida took a step back. “You’re eating rocks for breakfast?” they said.
“If Sidney does his part of the bargain,” Harry said.
“You’re lookin’ at the roadrunner,” Sidney said. “See you in the room when you eat ... rocks!”
And he took off!
Harry and I dashed upstairs and peered out the classroom window. There was Sidney racing around the playground. Each time he ran a lap, Harry held a finger up.
Every now and then, Sidney would look up to see if Harry was watching.
When Harry held up three fingers, I looked at the clock. Five minutes to go!
Sidney was slowing down now. Finally he finished the fourth lap.
Just as he got in the room and plopped down in his seat, the bell rang.
“I ... I ... made ... it,” Sidney gasped. His hands were touching the floor. “Now ... it’s ... it’s ... time for ... your ... part of ... the bargain.”
Harry opened up his backpack and reached for a napkin. He tucked it inside his shirt.
Song Lee and Mary looked worried when he set the bag of heavy rocks on his desk.
“Here I go!” he said. Then he reached into his backpack and pulled out a box of salt and shook some out on his tongue. “Mmmmm, poor man’s potato chips.”
Sidney sat up. “What are you doing? You’re not eating rocks. You’re eating salt.”
“That’s what salt is, Sid. Rocks.” Harry leaned back in his chair just enough so he wouldn’t fall, and sprinkled some more salt in his mouth. “Deeeeelicous!”
Sidney crossed his arms. “I ran myself ragged to see you eat salt?”
“Yup,” Harry said, licking his lips.
Mary and Ida smiled. Song Lee giggled. I just put two thumbs up. Sid had it coming for killing Harry’s spider.
I was actually enjoying third grade, until Miss Mackle made that dreaded announcement.
Murder in the Mine
The next morning Miss Mackle said, “Boys and girls, we are going to the Old New-Gate Prison and Copper Mine September thirtieth!”
When everyone cheered, I motioned to Harry to meet me at the pencil sharpener. I had to talk with him.
Harry broke his pencil on the side of the desk, then joined me.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Remember how you were kind of scared to ride the elevator in the Drop of Doom?”
Harry paused. He never liked admitting he was afraid of anything.
“Yeah ...” he barely whispered.
“Well, I never went down into that copper mine. I was ... afraid.” It was hard for me to say it, too.
Harry flashed his white teeth. “Hey, Doug, you can do it. If I could do the Doom ride, you can walk through a mine. Pretend you’re a spider. They love cool, dark places.”
“Thanks, Harry,” I groaned.
After I sharpened my pencil, I added, “You’ll stick close by?”
“Like Elmer’s glue,” he whispered.
September thirtieth came too soon.
Song Lee and Ida and Mary sat in front of Harry and me on the bus. The girls played hangman. Their first word had eight letters.
PRISONER
I sure felt like one sitting next to Harry. I was trapped, and there was no getting out of it.
Harry could tell I was getting nervous. My knees were shaking. He opened his backpack. “Try not to think about it. Think about other things, like ...”
Then Harry pulled out something wrapped in aluminum foil. “Remember this?”
I watched Harry unwrap it.
“Sidney’s burnt wiener!” I said.
“Shhhh!” Harry put a finger to his mouth. “He’s sitting across the aisle. It’s a secret. Ol’ Sid doesn’t know I have it.”
“What are you doing with it?”
“I’m not sure. I might just keep it until it becomes a fossil.”
“A wiener fossil?” When I laughed, my knees stopped shaking.
“Sure. Or ... it might come in handy sometime for something else.”
Harry
He was a piece of work.
I sure was glad he was my partner. He made me forget about things when we were on the bus.
An hour later, we got to the mine. We got off the bus and walked over to the little museum shop. It was fun to crunch through all the autumn leaves. The trees were red, orange, yellow, and brown. It was a beautiful sunny day, I kept telling myself.
The inside of the museum was small. There were all kinds of books for sale, some rocks, and Granby copper coins. There were also soda and candy machines, but Miss Mackle stood in front of them like a football guard. “Spend your money wisely,” she said.
Sidney made a long face. He had his coins ready. “Man, that’s no fair. I wanted to get a crunchy chocolate bar.”
As soon as I spotted the boys’ room, I ducked inside. I always have to go when I get nervous.
Later, when everyone had bags of souvenirs, a gray-haired man said, “Welcome, boys and girls, gather ‘round. You are about to visit the first copper mine in the thirteen colonies. It also was our first state prison. Back in the 1700s, prisoners worked in the mine.”
“What crimes did they commit?” Mary asked. She had her pencil and notebook and was taking notes.
“Most of them were horse thieves, counterfeiters, and burglars.”
“What did the burglars steal?” Sidney asked.
“Well, in 1780, seven men broke into Captain Ebenezer Dayton’s house and tied up his wife with a torn sheet.”
“Where was Ebenezer?” Mary snapped.
“He was out of town.”
Mary rolled her eyes.
“So, what happened?” Harry asked.
“Well, they kept her tied up in a chair for two ho
urs while they ransacked the house. They took coats, cloaks, gowns, silk handkerchiefs, silver shoe buckles, a spyglass, two muskets, four halberds, and four hundred fifty pounds of gold, silver, and copper coins.”
“What’s a halberd?” Mary asked.
“It’s a long-handled ax.”
We followed the elderly man outside to a courtyard and brick wall. When he leaned over, he picked up some rocks. “Just about everywhere you look you can see copper rocks. If it has green on it, it’s copper.”
Mary bent down and pointed at something green. “This isn’t copper,” she said. “It’s someone’s half-eaten lime lollipop.”
“Gross,” Ida said. “There’s a spider on it, too.”
“Don’t kill it,” Harry said, looking at Sidney.
“Single file please,” the guide said. “We’re about to enter the mine.”
“Oh boy,” I said to Harry. “Here we go.”
Harry walked right behind me. He was so close I could feel his warm breath on my neck. “Remember, Doug. You’re a spider. You love the underground world.”
“I’ll try,” I whispered. Slowly, I walked into the mine. The path ahead of me zigzagged down a sloping hill. The space seemed to get smaller and darker. I clung to the railing when there was one.
“Neato,” Harry said. “This is cool.”
The guide heard Harry. “Actually, it is fifty-two degrees all year round in this mine.”
“Cool,” Harry repeated.
I stopped walking and looked at my arms. There were goose pimples on them!
“Keep moving,” Harry said.
“I like the lanterns along the path into the mine,” Mary said. “They’re neat.”
“Hey! Water is dripping on my head!” Ida said.
“It tickles!” Song Lee giggled.
The guide smiled. “There’s water in the earth. We’re inside the earth now.”
Inside the earth?
I was really underground!
As the hike got darker and wetter, and the stone ceiling got lower and lower, I got more afraid. I wasn’t going to tell anyone, though. I just bent over as I walked, and stayed closer to Harry.
Ten minutes later, it seemed like we were miles inside the earth. My heart was beating like one of those huge gongs.
Song Lee took a picture. “I love rocks,” she said. “Maybe I’ll be a miner when I grow up.”
Not me, I thought. What if some boulders fell and blocked our way back? What if I fell down a hole like Injun Joe?
Finally, I had to ask the question. “How much longer are we going to stay down here?”
“About ten minutes,” the guide said.
Ten minutes. That was ten times sixty seconds, which made six hundred seconds to go.
I started counting backward. “Six hundred, five hundred ninety-nine, five hundred ninety-eight ...”
Sidney must have noticed I was nervous because he started teasing me about it. “Got a case of the heebie-jeebies like Harry did on that Drop of Doom ride last summer?”
Harry raised a fist.
When Sidney laughed, I could hear Harry growl.
“You can see over here, there is a large deposit of copper,” the guide said, as he shone his flashlight in the corner.
Sidney turned around and whispered, “It’s really the green boogeyman.”
Suddenly, I got mad. I never believed boogeyman stories. Sidney wasn’t going to frighten me! Now I was more determined than ever to pretend I was not afraid. I kept on counting, only this time I didn’t say it out loud.
Harry gave Sidney a final warning. “You’d better stop fooling around, Sid the Squid.”
After we turned and entered a small empty room, the guide asked everyone to sit down for a while and rest. His voice echoed off the stone walls.
“I have a ghost story to tell you,” he said.
I grabbed Harry’s ankle and held on to it tightly.
“There once was a prisoner named Abel Starkey who saved one hundred dollars.”
“What was he in for?” Mary asked.
“Counterfeiting money. He was serving a twenty-year sentence.”
The guide continued the story. “Starkey offered the cash to a guard if he helped him escape. The guard agreed because he wanted the money. He told Starkey about a path in the mine that was rarely used. It was behind a locked metal door. It led to an underground well that had an old rope used for pulling buckets. The guard said Starkey could use it to climb to freedom.
“What the guard didn’t tell Starkey was that the rope was frayed in the middle. The guard didn’t really want Starkey to escape. It was too risky. What if Starkey got caught? the guard thought. What if he told on him?
“The night of the escape, when everyone was sleeping in the mine, Starkey sneaked down the path to the old metal door. Yes! The guard had left it unlocked. Starkey opened it and raced to the well. When he got there, he climbed onto the rope and pulled himself up, up, up.
“When he got halfway, the rope snapped, and he fell to his death. Legend has it that Starkey’s ghost still roams the mine today searching for a way out.”
Sidney closed his eyes and groped around with his hands.
“Ooooooouch!” Harry said. “You hit my head.”
“I am Starkey’s ghost walking through the mine ....”
“Cut it out, Sid,” Harry growled. He knew I was in bad shape.
When Sidney kept it up, Harry unbuckled his backpack and took something out. It was too dark to see what.
Then Harry stood up and tapped Sidney on the shoulder with his finger.
“What?” Sidney said.
Harry didn’t answer. He just kept tapping Sidney’s shoulder.
“Stop tapping me!”
When Harry didn’t stop, Sidney grabbed Harry’s finger and pulled on it.
“Auugh!” Sidney screamed. “I pulled Harry’s finger off!”
“AUUGH!” the class yelled. We could tell Sidney was holding on to something and flopping it in the air.
When the guide shone his flashlight on Sidney’s hand, we all groaned. “The burnt wiener!”
“So you were the one who stole it!” Sid said, glaring at Harry.
“I borrowed it,” he said. “And now I’m returning it to you.”
Everybody started cracking up, including me. It felt good to laugh in the middle of that dark, wet mine. It also felt good when we started walking back, and when I first spotted light at the top of the mine entrance.
As soon as I got outside, I lay down on the ground and kissed the grass. “Ahhhhh,” I said. “Sweet earth, beautiful sky, delicious dirt.”
Harry punched me in the arm.
“You did it, Spido.”
I punched Harry back in the arm. “Yeah, I did, didn’t I?”
Miss Mackle tapped my head as she made a quick count of our class.
Suddenly, she exclaimed, “We’re missing one student!”
Sidney Disappears!
The chaperones counted heads again.
“There’s twenty, not twenty-one,” Miss Mackle said. “Who’s missing?”
Harry and I knew right away. “Sidney,” we said.
“Sidney! Sidney!” everyone called.
The guide and two of the chaperones went back into the mine.
Miss Mackle looked really scared as she paced back and forth. I had never seen her look like that before. “Keep calling his name,” she ordered.
“Sidney! Sidney!”
The guide came back with the chaperones. “He’s not in the mine. The pathway isn’t that wide. We would have seen him.”
“Maybe he fell down a hole,” Mary said.
Mary.
She was always the voice of doom.
Harry started to feel a little guilty. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that finger trick with the wiener.”
Song Lee and Mary ran with a chaperone to check the museum.
When they came back, they were shaking their heads.
“He wasn�
��t there.”
Miss Mackle looked like she was going to cry. “Where is he?”
“He’s... not on ... the bus,” another chaperone reported. She was out of breath.
“Oh no.” When Miss Mackle bowed her head, everyone knew she was praying.
Then, suddenly, out of nowhere, Sidney appeared! He strolled across the courtyard, crunching the fall leaves.
When he got closer, I noticed there was chocolate smeared in the corners of his mouth.
Everyone was cheering, even Harry. Miss Mackle put two hands over her heart.
“Sidney!” she gasped.
“What’s everyone so upset about? I just had to go to the can. When everyone started laughing about that finger story, I did, too. Then nature called and I ran out of the mine. Pronto!”
I made a face. I didn’t think that was the full story, but I didn’t say anything.
Harry was the first to give Sidney a hug. “I’m sure glad you’re not dead like that Starkey guy.”
“Thanks, Harry,” Sidney replied. “That’s the first compliment I ever got from you.”
And he hugged him back.
Miss Mackle hugged Sidney too, but then she looked him in the eye and firmly said, “Don’t you ever leave the group again without permission.”
The beginning of third grade was sure full of surprises and changes, but the ones on our field trip were the biggest and the best.
Harry and Sidney made up.
And I made it out of that mine.