by Cary Fagan
The Hollow Under the Tree
Cary Fagan
Groundwood Books
House of Anansi Press
Toronto Berkeley
Copyright © 2018 by Cary Fagan
Published in Canada and the USA in 2018 by Groundwood Books
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Groundwood Books / House of Anansi Press
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We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Government of Canada.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Fagan, Cary, author
The hollow under the tree / Cary Fagan.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55498-999-7 (hardcover).—ISBN 978-1-77306-000-2 (EPUB).—
ISBN 978-1-77306-001-9 (Kindle)
I. Title.
ps8561.a375h65 2018 jc813’.54 c2017-905950-5
c2017-905951-3
Jacket art by Nolan Pelletier
Jacket design by Michael Solomon
For my mother, Belle Fagan, with love
1
Scaredy-Cat
A train approached the city from the west. The steam engine’s giant wheels turned as smoke trailed behind, blacker than the night sky.
It was May 15, 1925. The train had pulled out of Buffalo, New York, fourteen hours late, due to a faulty hitch between the last two cars. A new hitch was supposed to arrive, but it never did. So the train’s owner, Josiah Wasserman, insisted that the faulty one be welded together so that the circus could move on.
Josiah Wasserman was the proprietor of Wasserman’s Spectacular Circus and Animal Menagerie. The performers had finished in Buffalo and were supposed to move on to Toronto. But because of the delay, Mr. Wasserman had decided to skip the city and head to the next destination, Montreal. The people of Toronto would be deprived of the Wasserman circus, with its acrobats, clowns, elephants, bears and other exotic beasts.
The stationmaster at Union Station had already been notified that the train would not stop. The steam engine did not need to slow down much as it approached. Most of the circus employees were asleep in their bunks. But the animals, which had been confined too long and had missed a feeding, whined and howled in their cages.
One employee couldn’t sleep. His name was Sam Hibbins, the assistant animal trainer. He had once been the head trainer, but the owner felt that Sam was too soft on the animals, and so he demoted him. Besides, Sam was getting old.
Now he lay on a straw mattress that he had taken from his bunk, his dachshund Daisy beside him. He had placed the mattress beside a cage in the last car of the train. After this car there was only the caboose.
Sam never slept well anyway, but on this particular night he was worrying about the lion in the cage next to him. This male lion was the youngest of five owned by the Wasserman circus. He was just about grown, with a magnificent and nearly full mane, a handsome face and a powerfully muscular, if still slim, body.
He looked every inch the king of the beasts.
In fact, he was a scaredy-cat.
The lion had been born at the circus’s winter home in Florida, only to be rejected by his mother. Sam had brought the tiny cub into his own bed to keep warm. He sang to him and held a baby’s bottle to his hungry mouth.
The cub was a particularly sweet-natured animal, so Sam named him Sunshine, or Sunny. Not surprisingly, Sunny became attached to the old trainer — so attached that he wouldn’t let another human come near. That included the lion tamer called Fearless Fotham, a sour-tempered man with a handlebar moustache and a drinking problem.
Sunny was even more afraid of other lions. When Sunny was old enough, Fearless Fotham brought him into the ring, cracking his whip over the young lion’s head to make him rise up. But Sunny jumped off his stool in fear, banging into the mature male lion next to him, who bit Sunny on the ear.
Sunny howled. The other lions began to roar. Fearless Fotham smacked Sunny on the thigh with his club. Sunny dived to the ground, causing the lions on either side to snarl as they swiped at him with their claws. The scene might have ended in bloodshed if Sam Hibbins hadn’t risked his own life by jumping into the ring and separating the lions with stern words. He led Sunny out of the ring while Fearless Fotham, cursing loudly, used his whip to keep the others in place.
This near-catastrophe happened in Buffalo, and it was the reason that Sunny was traveling in his own car. Josiah Wasserman was threatening to sell the animal to a zoo in Ohio. Sam didn’t want Sunny to languish in some dismal cage for the rest of his life, so he asked for another chance. He had a bed for himself and Daisy in the same car so that the animal would stay calm.
As the train approached Toronto, Sam opened the car door to let in the early summer air. The dachshund yawned and shuddered in her sleep.
But the lion, poor creature, paced in the swaying cage, moaning unhappily.
What, thought Sam, was he going to do with Sunny?
Just then came the high whine of metal under stress, and then a sudden lurch.
“What the …?” Sam said.
The faulty hitch had broken again.
* * *
The train was less than ten miles from Toronto’s downtown Union Station. The weld cracked, the hitch broke in two, and the last car, along with the caboose, was released from the rest of the train. The steam engine surged forward while the separated car and caboose began to slow down. The car tilted and the wheels jumped off the rails. It began to tip sideways, skidding on the gravel track and pulling the caboose over with it.
The terrified lion pawed the wooden floor, trying not to slide against the bars.
Sam Hibbins grabbed Daisy as they were thrown out of bed. Another jolt caused him to tumble head over heels, right out the open car door. He landed in some dense bushes that grew along the track. The bushes scratched him up but also cushioned his and Daisy’s fall.
But the lion was trapped in the cage. The car began to slide down the slope of the track bed. Sunny was tossed sideways, banging his jaw against a bar. The cage twisted, buckled and split apart, sending splinters of metal and wood in every direction. The lion was thrown free of the debris. He landed in bushes a hundred yards farther on.
Sunny lay there for a minute or two before rising painfully, bruised on his thigh and shoulder and ribs. He shook himself and limped past the bits of wood and metal to begin walking up the dark hill ahead.
The lion came to a post in the ground. He smelled on it the disagreeable odor of the many dogs that had stopped there to lift their legs.
Attached to the post was a sign:
Welcome to High Park
No Littering
Of course, Sunny couldn’t read, but he could smell earth, trees, grass, wildflowers, water.
He limped on.
2
The Pie Maker’s Daughter
“I hate the way he watches me from the window,” Sadie Menken said to her father. Strawberries had just come into season, and he was pouring the red filling
into the pie crusts while Sadie evened it out with a spatula.
“He goes from one window to another,” Sadie went on. “Sometimes he holds things up. Yesterday it was some dumb hand puppet. Or he makes faces. Maybe next time I’ll bring a rotten tomato with me. Then I’ll throw it at the window — splat! That would show him.”
“Maybe he’s curious about you,” her father said. He put a flattened circle of dough over a filled pie, trimmed it and began to pinch the edges.
When they had finished, twenty-five pies were lined up on the wooden table waiting to be baked.
“Maybe he’s lonely and wants a friend,” her father went on, picking up a pie with each hand while opening the heavy oven door with his foot. “Rich people can be lonely, too.”
Sadie pretended to choke herself and then fell to the ground, gagging. When her father merely continued to work, she got up again.
“And you could use a friend,” her father said.
“I’m too busy. I have … responsibilities.” She used her most adult voice.
“I know you do. Too many, in fact. You need to have some fun. But you’d better be off or you’ll be late for school.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure the school wouldn’t dare to start before I got there.”
“You sound awfully important,” her father said with a smile.
“You have no idea how important I am in that place. And how popular. Why, I’m the most popular person in school. It just can’t run without me.”
With that, Sadie turned around and headed to the front hall to pick up her satchel.
* * *
Sadie and her father lived in a small house on Radford Avenue, just a few blocks from High Park. In 1925, Toronto was a city of horse-drawn wagons and rickety streetcars and noisy Model T Fords. Electrical wires crossed overhead from pole to pole like spiderwebs. It was a city of red brick and gray stone and small houses lined in rows, but big houses, too. There were hotels and movie palaces and department stores and factories with tall chimneys spewing smoke. Boys wore knee-length breeches, and girls wore dresses.
Even Sadie Menken, who liked to spend her time catching frogs and climbing trees, wore a dress and stockings and well-shined shoes.
To Sadie, High Park was the best thing about the city. It was so big, it was almost a country of its own. It was part valley, part forest and part plains. Here and there were clearings for a playground, a garden, a picnic area, a tennis court. Small streams trickled south down the slope towards Grenadier Pond at the bottom. Sadie would have spent all her time in the park after school, if she didn’t have to deliver pies.
There are many stories about children without a mother or a father or both. A reader might think that every child in the world was an orphan! And yet here is another, for Sadie Menken had lost her own mother. That was how her father put it. Lost. But she wasn’t dead. Instead, she had left them for the dream of becoming a Broadway actress in New York. She hadn’t yet become a big star, but she hadn’t come back, either. Sadie could barely remember her.
Sadie loved her father and only wished that he wasn’t so busy. As a pie maker he had to get up at five in the morning to begin rolling out the dough and warming up the ovens. By the time Sadie got up he had already finished his first batch. He made pies in many varieties, depending on the fruit in season — rhubarb, strawberry, cherry, peach, plum, blueberry, apple. His pies were delicious, and he had a standing order from the King Edward Hotel as well as several restaurants and private homes.
He would bake all day, pausing only to make dinner, after which he would spend an hour preparing for the next day before falling into bed, exhausted.
Sadie knew how hard her father worked. When she was little she would keep him company, sitting on a stool and chatting as she played with a ball of dough. But as she got older she began to help. Now she could roll out the dough, cut up the fruit, make the cross-hatches in the top of the pie to let out the steam as it baked.
But her main job happened after school. Every day she delivered six or eight pies to houses in the neighborhood. She had an old Red Bird delivery bicycle with a square iron basket between the handlebars where the pie boxes could be stacked. Although she was small, Sadie had grown used to pedaling the heavy bicycle and keeping it steady, so as not to damage the pies.
Her route took her through the nearby streets where the grandest houses stood, lived in by rich bankers and businessmen. The last pie always went to the house of Mr. Theodore Kendrick, whose handsome stone residence stood on a rise just one block from the park.
It was in this house that a boy always stood in an upper window watching Sadie as she climbed off her bicycle. The same boy she had complained to her father about. He would scurry from one window to another to see her better as she carried the pie box through the open gate, past the front door and around to the servants’ entrance. There she would knock on the door and wait for the maid. The boy would look through the nearest window and wave his fingers at her. He had a round face and bangs and to Sadie looked like a smiling pie plate.
On this afternoon, Sadie passed through the Kendricks’ gate as usual, went around to the side door and banged the knocker. Sure enough, the boy appeared, only this time he looked at her through a brass spyglass. She waited and knocked again.
At last the door opened to reveal not the maid, but the boy himself. He was wearing a blue and white sailor suit, complete with little hat and ribbon.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “I’m Theodore Kendrick Junior. But everyone calls me Theo Junior.”
“And I’m one of Santa’s elves.”
“You’re the pie maker’s daughter.”
“You’re the bee’s knees in that outfit.”
“You think so?”
“Of course not. You look ridiculous.”
Perhaps another boy might have shown that his feelings were hurt, but Theo Junior just looked at Sadie thoughtfully. “I wasn’t sure. My mother sent it by steamship from Paris.”
“Here’s your pie,” Sadie said. “Be careful. If you drop it you still have to pay.”
“I’m sure it’s scrumptious,” Theodore Junior said. “They always are.”
“All this pie,” Sadie said, “is making you fat.”
“I’m naturally round. It runs in the family. My father says that we’re ‘robust.’ But I do have an exercise trainer. And I have a cello instructor and an astronomy teacher and —”
But Sadie had already turned around. She marched to her bicycle and rode back the way she had come.
Perhaps the boy’s feelings were hurt. Whose wouldn’t be?
3
Blue
But the next day, the boy answered the door again. This time he was wearing a flying-ace outfit complete with pilot’s jacket, leather helmet and goggles. The goggles, thought Sadie, made him look like a frog.
“Up, up and away!” Theodore Junior said, making his hand into an airplane taking off.
“If you say so. Here’s your pie.”
“I hope it’s blueberry.”
“Blueberries aren’t in season. But I suppose a pilot wouldn’t know that because he has his head in the clouds.”
“That’s a good one. So what kind is it?”
“Snotberry.”
“Snotberry? Never heard of it. Are snotberries green?”
Sadie almost smiled. “Maybe.”
“Because I really do have a nose for pie.”
“I’m sorry I started this,” Sadie said, turning away so he wouldn’t see her laugh.
“Goodbye!” he called, following her to her bicycle. “See you in the funny papers!”
Pedaling away, Sadie had to admit that Theodore Junior was a good sport. He didn’t get mad at being teased the way most kids did. Otherwise, he was still annoying.
Thinking about Theodore Junior, she forgot to pay attenti
on to the direction she was going. She steered her bicycle around the corner and down the alley.
And that was when she found her way blocked by three boys.
Sadie knew who they were. The Parkside Gang.
The Parkside Gang consisted of just three. Big Fergus Gumpy, who always wore a dirty cap pulled low over his eyes. And the Tarpinsky twins. Dylan and Wylie Tarpinsky were both pale and skinny, like two sheets of paper.
The three of them were carrying fishing rods made out of willow branches. They were probably on the way back from Grenadier Pond, where it looked like they’d had no luck. But Fergus was also carrying something else. A metal can of blue paint. Sadie knew it was blue because the top was missing and some of the paint had sloshed over the sides.
“If it isn’t that phonus balonus, Sadie Menken,” said Fergus.
The three boys went to Sadie’s school. She knew them well enough to be slightly nervous, even though she had always bluffed her way past them.
“Something smells fishy,” she said. “And since you didn’t catch anything, I guess it must be you.”
“Shut your trap,” hissed Fergus. “We don’t care about fish because we found ourselves something better. A whole can of paint. From somebody’s back porch.”
“You mean you stole it.”
Fergus shrugged. “How come you never give us one of your father’s pies? You know I told you to.”
“I thought about it. But then I decided it would be a waste of a good pie.”
“You think you’re so hotsy-totsy. Maybe we ought to teach you a lesson.”
“Or I could teach you one,” said Sadie. “Like how to tie your shoe.”
Fergus looked down. Indeed, his shoelace was dragging.
“I like it that way.”
“What are you going to do with the paint? Pour it over your head?”