When the Stars Begin to Fall

by James Lincoln Collier

  I decided I wouldn’t say anything about Dad stealing. It would make her hate Timber Falls even more. “And having a junky house,” I said, “with the paint peeling off and old cars in the yard.”

  “I’m never coming back,” she said. “After this I’m never coming back.”

  “It’s making Mom sad,” I said.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t care if she dies of sadness. I don’t care if they both die.”

  That kind of talk scared me a little. “You don’t really want them to die, do you?”

  “Yes, I do. Yes, I do.” She put her hands over her face and started to cry, but then she stopped herself. “Listen, Harry, I came up to get my clothes and stuff. You have to help me get it. I’ll pay you.”

  “You don’t have to pay me. You already gave me a hundred dollars.” I wondered why she came all the way home for those old clothes when she had all that money.

  “That wasn’t for anything,” she said. “That was for nothing.”

  “How am I going to get your stuff out of there? I mean Mom will go up there and see everything gone.”

  “I’ll be out of here by that time. The minute you get the stuff out, I’ll pack it in the suitcase and go.”

  “Dad might not be around tomorrow,” I said. “Sometimes he takes off on Sundays.”

  “We have to do it tonight,” she said. “We have to wait until they’re asleep. Then you can go into my room and throw the stuff out the window. I’ll pack it up and hitch over to Watertown. I can get a bus there.”

  “I don’t know if I can stay awake until they go to bed,” I said.

  “They don’t stay up too late,” she said. “You can have some coffee.”

  It worked out just the way she figured. I went back into the house, and upstairs, and opened Helen’s window. Then I went downstairs and sat watching TV with Mom and Dad for a while. They stayed up for the news and then they went to bed. I went up and lay there on my bed for a while. After a little I shut off my light like I was going to sleep, and went on lying there in the dark with my clothes on. When I figured they were asleep, I tiptoed into Helen’s room and looked out the open window. I could hardly see anything, but I could just make her out waiting out there. I threw her stuff down. There wasn’t much of it: a pair of jeans, a couple of blouses, a sweater, some underwear, a pair of beat-up running shoes, and a pair of regular shoes. It wouldn’t anyway near fill the suitcase she’d brought.

  When I’d flung everything down, I decided to take a chance and go down to say good- bye. If Mom and Dad woke up, I’d say I thought I heard a raccoon trying to open the garbage cans. So I crept out of Helen’s room, down the stairs, and out the kitchen door. Helen was around the side of the house jamming her stuff into the suitcase. She wasn’t folding it or anything—just jamming it in. I knelt down and helped her, and then without saying anything, we went down the dirt driveway and out onto the road. We could hardly see each other. The peepers were still going and it was pretty chilly.

  “You ought to put on your sweater,” I said.

  Suddenly she put her arms around me and squeezed me. “Sometimes I get so homesick. I keep on missing you, Harry.”

  “Maybe you ought to come back,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I’m never coming back. I get homesick sometimes, but I’m never coming back.”

  “There’s nobody for me to talk to now,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. She took her arms off me. “I didn’t really come up to get those clothes,” she said. “I just missed you. I came up to see if you were all right.”

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “In three more years you’ll graduate and you can leave too.”

  I didn’t say anything. So she squeezed me again. “Well, I better get going.” She turned and started walking off fast down the road. In a moment I couldn’t see her anymore. I wondered when I would ever see her again.

  SEVEN

  It took Mom three or four days to realize that Helen’s stuff was missing. I guess she was trying to stay away from Helen’s room and forget about her, but one day, just as I was coming in through the kitchen door after school, she was coming down the stairs with a funny look on her face. “Harry, Helen’s clothes are gone.”

  I tried to look surprised. “Gone?” I said.

  “Yes, they’re gone,” she said. “You don’t know what happened to them, do you?”

  “I didn’t do anything with them,” I said.

  “I know you didn’t,” she said. “You’re a good boy, Harry.” She stopped to think. “Maybe your dad packed them away.”

  But when he came home for supper, he was just as surprised as she was. He went upstairs and stood in the middle of Helen’s room, looking around. There wasn’t much to see—a few of her books under her bed, and some makeup on one of the windowsills.

  “Nobody would have stolen the stuff,” he said. “It wasn’t worth stealing.” He stood in the middle of the room scratching his head. “I’ll bet she took her clothes herself. I’ll bet she came up here some time when nobody was home and took them herself.” He gave me a quick look. “You haven’t seen her, have you, Harry?”

  “No,” I said.

  He cocked his head and stared at me, but I managed to give him a straight look. “It had to be her,” he said. “If anyone wanted to steal something from around here, they wouldn’t have taken a few old clothes. They’d have taken the TV or some of the tools out of the barn. It had to be her.”

  “You mean she was here?” Mom said. “And she didn’t want to see us?” She put her hands over her face and began to cry. It made me feel awful to see her cry like that, when I knew where Helen was.

  “At least we know she’s all right, Doris,” Dad said.

  Mom went on crying. “I don’t care,” she said. “I want my baby back. I miss her so much. I want her back.”

  “She’s sixteen, Doris,” Dad said. “She’d have left home in a couple of years anyway.”

  “Maybe she wouldn’t have,” Mom said. She tried to stop crying and it made her gasp. “Maybe she would have gone on living at home.”

  The whole thing seemed weird to me. How could Mom think Helen would want to go on living in some junky place like ours with a tough father who paid hardly any attention to anybody and a mom who spent all her time in a bathrobe watching TV? Didn’t they know anything about us? But I didn’t say anything.

  “Doris, that’s wishful thinking,” Dad said. “Helen’s pretty, she’s bound to get married soon anyway. Maybe that’s what happened. Maybe she and her boyfriend ran off to get married.” He looked at me. “Who’s her boyfriend, Harry?”

  He’d already forgotten that I’d told him she didn’t have a boyfriend. “I don’t think she had a boyfriend,” I said.

  Mom shook her head. “Helen wasn’t interested in boys,” she said. She stopped crying and wiped her eyes on her bathrobe. “She told me so. Once I asked her if she had a boyfriend, and she said no, she wasn’t interested in boys. Helen’s young for her age. She’s still my baby.” She looked like she was going to start crying again, but she didn’t.

  Of course Helen had to tell Mom she wasn’t interested in boys. How else could she explain why she didn’t have a boyfriend? Could she tell Mom that she didn’t have a boyfriend because all the boys thought she was trash? I couldn’t stand thinking about it anymore, and I went out to the barn to see if I could get the lawnmower started. The grass was getting long and it was about time I started cutting it. It was always a problem getting the mower started the first time each spring.

  The main thing was, now I had the hundred bucks that Helen had given me. That meant that I could buy some kind of camera to take photographs of that pipe with. For I was determined to go back there again, regardless of the risk. I would just be more careful this time.

  The big problem was the hundred-dollar bill. If I tried to pay for the camera with a hundred-dollar bill, they were bound to think I’d stolen it. Any other kid could s
ay he’d got it from his father, or his grandfather had given it to him for his birthday, or something, and they’d believe him.

  Could I say that my sister had sneaked up from New York and had given it to me? No, I couldn’t just spend the hundred-dollar bill the way anyone else could. I’d have to get it changed into fives and tens first, which wouldn’t look so suspicious.

  I wished I’d thought of it and asked Helen to give me tens instead of a hundred. But it was too late for that. The big question was, where to cash it?

  In the end I had to ask Dad to change it. I hated to do it, because I knew what he would think. But I didn’t have any choice. So one night at supper I said, “Dad, I found a hundred-dollar bill.”

  “What?” he said. “You found a hundred dollars?” He gave me a look. “Where?”

  “On the street,” I said. “In front of the bank. Somebody must have dropped it when they came out.”

  He squinted at me. “In front of the bank?”

  “I want to change it, but I figure if I asked them to change it at the bank, they’d think I stole it or something.”

  “Found it?” he said. He gave me a grin. “Sure, you found it.”

  I expected that, but it made me mad anyway. “I didn’t steal it,” I said.

  “Did I say you stole it?” he said.

  I was feeling plenty hot. “You can’t say I stole it.”

  “Frank, Harry wouldn’t steal,” Mom said. Then she looked at me. “You didn’t steal it, did you, Harry?”

  “I didn’t steal it, everybody,” I said.

  “You see, Frank,” Mom said. “He didn’t steal it.”

  “Okay, he didn’t steal it,” Dad said. “Give it to me, and I’ll cash it for you.”

  The truth was, I didn’t want to give it to him. I didn’t really trust him. I thought he might have a hundred dollars in his wallet and could change it right then. But I realized that he probably didn’t have a hundred dollars on him very often. So I handed over the bill. He tucked it into his wallet, and the next day he brought me back the change in tens. He counted off ten ten-dollar bills, and then he took one off the top and put it into his pocket. “I figure anybody who is that rich can make a contribution to the household expenses,” he said.

  It made me good and mad, but I didn’t dare say anything, for I knew that if I argued with him, he’d just take another ten to show me who was boss.

  The next day after school I went to the drugstore and bought a camera. It was an Olympus with a built-in flash and timer so you could take pictures of yourself. I bought a lot of color film, and extra batteries, and a case for it. The whole thing cost fifty-five dollars. It was a lot of money, but at least I was getting something for it.

  It felt really good to have my own camera. I took it home, put it down on the kitchen table, and sat there staring at it. I really loved looking at it. I loved looking at the dials and the various buttons and knobs for switching on the flash or the timer, so you could take a picture of yourself. I figured I’d do that; I figured if nobody else would take the pictures of me when something interesting was happening, I’d take them myself. I just wished Helen was back. I could have taken a lot of pictures of her. She would have liked that.

  Mom came out into the kitchen and saw the camera. “Oh, my,” she said. “What a fancy camera. How much did it cost?”

  I told her.

  “My goodness,” she said. Then she looked at me. “Harry, you didn’t steal that money, did you?”

  “Mom, I didn’t steal it.”

  “Honestly?”

  “I swear it, Mom.”

  “You’ve always been a good boy,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t steal anything,” I said. I hoped that was true. It still worried me that maybe someday I would.

  She sighed. “I wonder if you should have returned the money.”

  “Returned it? Who would I return it to?”

  “Why, the bank.”

  She was right, of course. If I’d really found it the way I’d said, I probably would have taken it into the bank and asked if they knew who’d lost it. But, of course, I hadn’t found it—Helen had given it to me. “How would they know who lost it?”

  She sighed again. “Yes, I suppose that’s right. You deserve it, Harry.”

  I didn’t know if I did. But I was going to keep it. To change the subject, I told Mom I would take some pictures of her, to try out the camera. She made me wait until she put on a dress instead of her bathrobe and combed her hair. She kept fussing and fidgeting like she’d never had her picture taken before. To tell the truth, I guess it had been a long time since she’d had her picture taken. The only pictures of her that I’d ever seen were the one of her holding me when I was a baby, and a couple that she and Dad had taken on their wedding day, which were in a double frame on the dresser in their bedroom. They were just pictures of Mom and Dad, looking young, standing with their arms around each other in front of an old brick building in Watertown—the courthouse, or the justice of the peace’s office, or something. So I took some pictures of her, and when she discovered about the self-timer, she had me take some pictures of the two of us standing there together.

  After I’d taken a bunch of pictures of Mom, I went outside and took some more, some with the flash and some without. And that night, after it was good and dark, I walked down the dirt driveway until I was a good way from the barn—about as far as I figured I’d be from the pipe when I was photographing it—and took some flash pictures. I shot up the whole two rolls on these various tests, and the next day I took them into the drugstore to get them developed. They came back the next Monday. They were pretty good, and I was satisfied that I’d be able to get good pictures.

  Mom was tickled over the shots I’d made of her. When she dressed up and combed her hair, and smiled the way she did for the camera, she really looked pretty. At supper she showed them to Dad. He said it was a lot of middle-class baloney, but a couple of days later I noticed that he’d got one of them taped up in the cab of the truck. And later, when I got to meet my grandparents for the first time, I saw sitting on their mantelpiece in a little frame a picture of me and Mom standing side by side. Mom had sent it to them that Christmas. But that was later.

  Now I was all set, and I was pretty nervous. If they caught me out there again, they were sure to know that I wasn’t watching any birds, I was up to something. I was bound to get into serious trouble with the police. It wouldn’t be just trespassing; they’d figure out something worse to charge me with.

  But going out there at night would be an advantage. For one thing, the security guard wouldn’t be able to see me—at least not until I fired off the flash. For another, if anyone did come after me, they’d have an awful hard time finding me in the dark woods. Somehow, I could manage to lose them and escape. There was an awful lot of woods in the Adirondacks to hide in.

  It rained the whole next weekend. I hadn’t been able to get the lawnmower started before, so I spent most of the weekend working on it. Because of the rain Dad was around a lot, and I knew he could get it started easy. He liked fooling around with engines, and he could usually get them to work. But I didn’t want to be around him anymore. I didn’t like the feeling of having him near me, his old work shirt and jeans, and the stubble on his face from not shaving. Once during the weekend he came out and stood there watching me strip the engine down. “Want some help?” he said.

  “No,” I said, not looking up. “I can do it myself.” And I did. Once I got the jets cleaned out, and the air filter washed, and cleaned off the spark plug and put in fresh gas, it started. I was proud of myself, even if it had taken most of the weekend to do it.

  All the next week I kept watching the weather report on TV, and by Thursday I knew it was going to be a good weekend—sunny and seasonable weather, the way they say. I didn’t care how warm it was, so long as it wasn’t raining and the woods were dry. I knew I might have to sit out there with the camera for a while, and I didn’t want to get soaked a
nd start sneezing, or something.

  It turned out to be a perfect day for cutting wood too. Dad had an order for a couple of cords, which would pay a hundred dollars. Whenever we got an order for cordwood, we went up into the woods that sloped up toward the mountains behind the house. It wasn’t our land—we just rented the house—and we weren’t supposed to cut wood there, but we always did. Dad was careful just to cut here and there so we wouldn’t make a big clearing that would be obvious. He cut low to the ground, so that the stumps were practically flat, and if you kicked a little dirt over them, you wouldn’t notice them unless you were looking for them. We mostly cut dead stuff, anyway, which burned easier. The people we rented from didn’t come around much. Dad said they were afraid to because he might demand they fix up the house. I knew that wasn’t it, though, because once Helen, after she got interested in guys, asked Mom why the people wouldn’t fix up the house a little. Mom said it was because we paid such a low rent, Dad couldn’t ask them to do anything to the house.

  So we took Dad’s old chain saw up into the woods and cut. Dad ran the chain saw, and I trimmed the branches off the logs and scattered the brush around the woods so it wouldn’t be in a noticeable pile. In a couple of years it would begin to rot away. We worked all morning and into the afternoon, and then we drove the truck up into the woods as far as it would go, loaded it up, and drove around to the people who had ordered the wood.

  It was a big house, one of these old farmhouses that somebody had spent a lot of money fixing up. It was white clapboard with big maple trees and a lot of lawn around it. A blues tone driveway circled around to the back. There was a new-painted red barn here, and some nicely pruned apple trees beside the barn. A Mercedes was parked on the bluestone. It was some place all right. I wondered what it would be like to have all that money and be able to have everything you wanted. Would I ever have that much money? I didn’t think so; I didn’t think you got paid a whole lot in the air force—just a good salary. It kind of hurt to know that I’d never be rich. Dad always said that money corrupted people, and he wished he was corrupted. I didn’t know if it did or it didn’t, but I sure wished I had money.