True Colors

by Natalie Kinsey-Warnock

  It was such tough going that I figured Raleigh must have some easier route getting to and from town. Just when I thought I was lost for good again, we came to a house.

  It was small and set back in the trees, and from the outside, it looked like it was a bunch of old boards thrown together, a lot like that rickety bridge, but when I looked in the window, everything was neat as a pin. I felt a little disappointed. I’d half hoped Raleigh really did live in a caboose or a tree house.

  I walked Dolly down along the river, looking for the best place to cross. I rounded a bend and stopped.

  I stared for a long time, not believing what I was seeing.

  Under the trees, and spread out along the riverbank, were dozens of pens and cages, each holding a different animal. In one, a heron with a bandaged wing stared at me with beady eyes, and three half-grown heron babies squawked and hopped around her, flapping their wings.

  The heron that the Wright brothers had hurt. Raleigh hadn’t “dispatched” her, and he’d retrieved her babies from the nest, too.

  Some of the bigger pens held pigs and sheep. In one of the smaller cages, a three-legged rabbit munched on some lettuce, and in another cage was a chicken that looked exactly like the hen that Mrs. Wells had given Raleigh. He hadn’t turned her into soup after all.

  Looking in each pen and cage, I realized that Raleigh hadn’t eaten any of the animals people had given him. He’d taken care of them and turned them into pets!

  I thought of how the Wright brothers had called Raleigh yellow. Well, maybe Raleigh was yellow, but at least he had a good heart, which was more than you could say for the Wright brothers.

  Around the next bend in the river, I found more animals, but not animals that people had given Raleigh.

  Daisy lifted her head and mooed when she saw me.

  I ran toward her, laughing. Good old Daisy. The Wright brothers hadn’t turned her into hamburger after all, but how had she gotten away from them? How had she gotten here?

  I stopped dead in my tracks.

  There was another cow beyond Daisy, a red and white cow with the longest horns I’d ever seen. It took a few seconds before I figured out it was the Texas longhorn Mr. Wright had lost in the swamp and had never been seen again.

  Except I was seeing her.

  That wasn’t all. My eyes moved from animal to animal, like one of those pictures where you have to connect the dots before you can tell what it is.

  I guessed that the sheep grazing next to the cows was Mr. Butler’s missing sheep, and the calf with a splinted leg was Mr. Lapointe’s.

  Just past the Texas longhorn was another animal I’d only seen in movies, like Lawrence of Arabia. It’s not every day you find a camel in a Vermont field, and it took a second for my brain to recognize it, but there it was, a real-life camel, lying down, chewing its cud.

  I knew then that if I looked in one of those cages nearer Raleigh’s, I’d probably find the monkey, too.

  The Wright brothers hadn’t stolen the animals.

  Raleigh had.

  I don’t know how much time passed with me just staring at those animals. You would have thought I’d be happy to have solved the mystery, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t write my article now. If I did, showing that it was Raleigh who’d taken the animals, that just might be all Mr. Wright needed to have Raleigh put away for good.

  I left the animals and pushed Dolly as fast as she would go back to town. This was too big for me to figure out: I had to tell Mr. Gilpin. He’d know what to do.

  I got there just as the three-legged race finished up. Nadine shot me a look, and I knew I’d hear words later, seeing as how I’d made her miss it. We always seemed to be fighting, but I couldn’t worry about that right now. I had to find Mr. Gilpin.

  He was busy lining up the veterans for the parade: first, Mr. Emerson, who’d fought in the Spanish-American War; then Mr. Barclay and Mr. Thompson, in their World War I uniforms; and then two rows of World War II veterans. Raleigh stood right in the middle, waving a flag. He had no idea how much trouble he was in.

  Mr. Wright was standing off with a group of other men. They had beer bottles in their hands and were talking and laughing, loud.

  Looking at him, I could see why Dennis and Wesley had turned out so bad. Made me almost feel sorry for them.

  Almost.

  Mr. Wright swaggered over and shoved his nose right into Mr. Gilpin’s face. I’d seen Dennis do the same thing with Raleigh, so I could see where he’d gotten it from.

  “It ain’t right, him marching with them,” Mr. Wright growled, pointing his bottle at Raleigh. “He ain’t a veteran.”

  I saw the muscles in Mr. Gilpin’s jaw moving, but he kept his voice even.

  “The veterans are fine with having Raleigh march with them,” Mr. Gilpin said. “And since you’re not a veteran, I don’t see as you have any say in the matter.”

  Mr. Wright’s eyes got even beadier, and I shivered.

  “People like him ought to be locked up,” Mr. Wright said. “He’s a menace to the law-abiding citizens in town.”

  I could just imagine what Hannah would say to that.

  Menace, my foot. And that man wouldn’t know law-abiding if it bit him.

  Mr. Gilpin must have been thinking the same thing.

  “Menace?” Mr. Gilpin said. “Raleigh wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  Mr. Gilpin didn’t know how right he was. Raleigh probably rescued flies, along with everything else.

  “I got some things missing around my place,” Mr. Wright said, “and I think he took ’em, things like fence wire, some sap buckets, couple sticks of dynamite. I bet he’s been stealing things for years, but no one suspects him because he’s everybody’s favorite retard.”

  Mr. Gilpin looked too shocked to say anything right away. No one else said anything, either. Most of what Mr. Wright had said was lies—Raleigh certainly wasn’t a menace to anyone, and I didn’t think he had taken the buckets or dynamite—but Mr. Wright was right about one thing: Raleigh had been stealing for years. Animals.

  I cleared my throat, and both men looked down at me.

  “What is it, Blue?” Mr. Gilpin snapped.

  I could feel Mr. Wright staring at me with his little pig eyes.

  “Nothing,” I murmured.

  Mr. Gilpin turned his attention back to Mr. Wright.

  “If I ever hear you talking about Raleigh again, I’m going to sue you for slander, and have you arrested for robbery,” Mr. Gilpin said. “We both know who’s been stealing things for years in this town, and it isn’t Raleigh.”

  Mr. Wright’s face turned bright red. He clenched his fists, and I thought for sure he was going to clobber Mr. Gilpin. But Hannah’d always said if you stand up to a bully, he’ll back down, and I guess she was right because after a minute he slunk back to his buddies.

  Mr. Gilpin let out a breath. I realized I’d been holding mine, too.

  “What a misery he is,” Mr. Gilpin said. “Bet his wife died just to get away from him. No, now, I shouldn’t have said that; it’s just he has a way of getting my dander up. What is it you wanted to tell me, Blue?”

  “Nothing,” I said again. It wasn’t the right time to tell him, with the parade ready to start any minute. I’d tell him later.

  “You know, I shouldn’t be marching in this parade, either. I’m not a veteran, but I do it to honor Herbert, to make sure he’s not forgotten. He was a real hero.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know who he was talking about.

  Mr. Gilpin must have seen that in my face.

  “Herbert,” he repeated. “Herbert Spooner. Hannah’s husband.”

  I didn’t know anything about Hannah’s husband. There was a picture of him on Hannah’s dresser, but Hannah never talked about him. I knew Hannah well enough to know she kept her feelings to herself, but still, you’d have thought she would have said something about him.

  “A good man, Herbert,” Mr. Gilpin went on, “though he wasn’t ever the same aft
er he came back. War changes a man, you know.”

  I didn’t remember the start of World War II, of course (I’d just been born), but I did have a few memories of the end of the war: horns honking, people hugging and kissing in the street (I’d never seen that before), Hannah crying (I’d never seen that, either), but I didn’t remember Herbert coming home.

  How could I not remember something like that, I wondered.

  “We all thought World War I was going to be the war to end all wars,” Mr. Gilpin said. “Then we had World War II, and now here we are, in another war.”

  Oh. Herbert had been in the First World War.

  I wondered how the war would change Keith.

  Mr. Gilpin kept talking about Herbert, but all I could think about was Raleigh. I’d changed my mind about telling Mr. Gilpin about the animals at Raleigh’s. Raleigh had taken those animals; he’d broken the law. I wasn’t sure that even Mr. Gilpin would be able to keep Raleigh from going to jail.

  I tried to picture Raleigh in jail. I saw him huddled in a corner, shriveled and dying, like Hannah’s begonia that I’d forgotten to water while she was in the hospital. And it would be my fault because I’d squealed on him.

  I couldn’t take the chance of that happening. I had to keep his secret. To protect him.

  “… pretty soon?” Mr. Gilpin said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I must say, you seem distracted today,” Mr. Gilpin said. “I said, now that Hannah’s doing better, does that mean you’ll be coming back to the paper pretty soon?”

  I shook my head. Who could think of writing a column with all this going on? If only I could put it in the paper, I’d have more people talking about my column than Nadine even dreamed about!

  “Nadine’s better at writing than I am,” I mumbled.

  Mr. Gilpin pursed his lips and stared at me.

  “Do you know why I’ve been so hard on you?” he asked. “Because I think you can be a good writer.”

  “But Nadine’s better at—” I began, but Mr. Gilpin interrupted me.

  “No, she isn’t,” he said. “She’s got a good vocabulary, but she doesn’t know how to bring life to the words. Sometimes you can get so focused on the words that you forget the story.”

  Well, I had a story, all right, except I couldn’t write it!

  I was worrying so much about Raleigh that I couldn’t even enjoy the parade, and the cotton candy tasted like sawdust in my mouth. For once, it wasn’t the Wright brothers who’d ruined the day—it was Raleigh. What would happen to him when people found out about all the animals he’d stolen?

  Nadine and I rode home together, she on her bike and me on Dolly. Nadine talked the whole time, about parades (“It was a pretty good parade, I guess, for a small town, but you should see the parades I’ve seen in New York and Washington, D.C.—they took hours, they had ever so many giant balloons and floats. I expect they’ll be asking me to be the queen on one of those floats …”) and her bicycle (“It’s so old-fashioned. I’m going to have Daddy buy me a new bike, and then you can have this one”), and then she got onto the subject of the Wright brothers.

  “You know,” she said, “we never actually found any evidence last time. I think we should go on another spying expedition over there. I’ve got it all planned.” But I was only half listening. I kept going back and forth in my mind on whether I should tell her about finding the animals. Best friends shouldn’t be keeping secrets from each other, and I was keeping one big secret from her already. But she couldn’t tell anyone else, and that’s the part that worried me. Nadine was kind of a bigmouth when it came to secrets.

  By the time we got to Nadine’s yard, I’d decided to tell her. Maybe it’d be easier if I told her this one; that way I wouldn’t feel so guilty about not telling her about her parents’ divorce.

  Nadine leaned her bike up against the porch. She ran in and got us two Popsicles, and we sat on the steps licking them. I decided to start with taking back my column, then I’d tell her about the animals.

  “Thanks for writing my column for me,” I said, “but I can write it now.”

  “That’s okay, I don’t mind,” Nadine said.

  “I know, but I told Mr. Gilpin I’d start writing it again,” I said.

  “Mr. Gilpin said I could do it as long as you needed me to,” Nadine said.

  “I don’t need you to anymore,” I said.

  “But I’ve already got it partly written,” Nadine said. “And, no offense, but I think Mr. Gilpin would rather have me write the columns.”

  “Mr. Gilpin said he wanted me to write the columns again,” I said. That wasn’t exactly what Mr. Gilpin had said, but I didn’t think Nadine would want to hear what Mr. Gilpin had said about her writing.

  “I think you’re making that up,” Nadine said. “You’re just mad because everybody liked my columns better than yours.”

  “Did not,” I said.

  “Did too!” Nadine yelled. “And you’re mad, too, because I’ve got a father and brother and you don’t.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I yelled back. “Well, at least I don’t have parents that are getting a divorce!”

  chapter 27

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to snatch them back, but it was too late.

  Nadine’s face went as white as the spot on Chrysanthemum’s forehead.

  “You’re lying,” she whispered.

  “I heard your mom on the phone,” I said.

  “When?” she asked.

  “When I stayed with you,” I said. “When Hannah was in the hospital.”

  Nadine’s mouth formed an O.

  “That was weeks ago,” she said. “All this time, you knew and you didn’t tell me? You’re supposed to be my friend.” She threw the rest of her Popsicle on the ground, jumped up, and ran inside, but at the door, she turned back.

  “You know, you were only my best friend here because no one else was around,” Nadine hissed. “Back home, I have lots better friends than you.”

  I stood, too stunned to say anything, and watched her slam the door behind her. I’d always been afraid that was true, that Nadine was my best friend but that I wasn’t hers, and she’d just admitted it.

  I felt like one of those shell-shocked soldiers I’d seen in old magazines, eyes wide open but empty. I didn’t even remember walking home. Once there, I went into the barn instead of the house so Hannah wouldn’t see me. I crawled into a corner of the hayloft and cried myself dry.

  That night, not even tucking the blue quilt under my head could make me sleep. Tossing and turning, I couldn’t help but think that telling Nadine about the divorce had been every bit as mean and thoughtless as she’d been to me.

  All the next day, I moped through church and Sunday school and around the house, my feelings going between angry and guilty and back again.

  “I know I hurt her,” I told Cat. “But she hurt me first. Besides, she doesn’t even want to be friends with me. Who needs her, anyhow.”

  Two days passed with no sign of Nadine. My anger had simmered down, and now I mostly just felt sad.

  My column was due in one more day, and I hadn’t written a single news item for it. Now that I had to write my column again, I didn’t feel like it. All I could think of was Nadine and how much I’d hurt her.

  Last time, our fight had been Nadine’s fault—in fact, most of the fights had been Nadine’s fault—but this time it was mine. Even if we weren’t friends anymore, I felt I needed to write her an apology.

  I got out a piece of paper, but couldn’t think of anything to say, and decided I needed to look in Mr. Gilpin’s dictionary for the right words.

  Hannah sent me into town with some deliveries, so afterward, I swung by the Monitor.

  Next to the dictionary on Mr. Gilpin’s desk was a photo of an old plane with a young woman sitting in the seat.

  “That’s Hannah,” Mr. Gilpin said. He was looking at the picture so he didn’t see my jaw drop. I looked closer, squinting.
>
  “She was a daredevil,” Mr. Gilpin said. “In 1911, the first plane came to the fairgrounds, and the pilot offered to give rides. It was awfully gusty that day, and Roy Allard said a person would have to be a fool to go up in that contraption, but Hannah went up.

  “After that, Hannah was just crazy for airplanes,” Mr. Gilpin went on. “She wanted to learn how to fly. She could have been another Amelia Earhart.”

  “Why didn’t she?” I asked.

  “After her father and brother died, Hannah had to help her mother run the farm,” Mr. Gilpin said.

  So Hannah had had to give up her dreams. Maybe that’s why she wanted me to go to college so much.

  I wished Nadine and I were still friends so I could talk to her about it. Cat was a good listener, but all my conversations with her were one-sided.

  It took me an hour looking through Mr. Gilpin’s dictionary to come up with the words I wanted to say. I chewed on the end of my pencil and then wrote:

  Dear Nadine,

  I am contrite, remorseful, regretful, and penitent, but mostly I’m sorry.

  Your friend,

  Blue (which is how I feel, too)

  On the way home, I tucked the letter into the Tiltons’ mailbox.

  All the next day, I waited for Nadine to come over, but she didn’t. Maybe they hadn’t found my letter yet, I thought, but when I checked their mailbox, the letter wasn’t there. I did chores, sneaking glances toward their camp and hoping I’d see Nadine walking up the road, smiling, ready to make up.

  “Maybe she just said all that because she was mad,” I told Cat. “Maybe she really didn’t mean I wasn’t her best friend, and she’s sorry about what she said, too.”

  Cat scratched behind her ear with her hind leg.

  Over the next two days, I must have checked our mailbox a least a dozen times.