The Midnight Fox

by Betsy Byars

  Finally when it was over and they were drying off, I went up to my room and I felt the best I ever felt in my life. If someone had come up to me then with a paper and pencil and said, ‘You may change one thing in this world. What will it be?’ I would have said without hesitation, ‘Nothing.’

  I got in bed and lay there and I realised after a while that there was a big smile on my face. For no reason I was lying there smiling. And then I turned over and went to sleep.

  Petie Burkis had a sitter who could always tell when something bad was happening. One night she was sitting for Petie and she suddenly stood up and said, ‘Someone in my family is in great danger.’ Petie could see that she was really worried, so he told her it would be perfectly all right for her to call some of her relatives and warn them.

  Well, she called everyone she could think of, even a half-sister in Virginia, and they were all fine. They all promised not to take any chances whatsoever for the next twenty-four hours, but the sitter still worried. She kept walking up and down the living-room saying, ‘Someone I love is in danger, grave danger.’ Petie said her hands were clasped together so tightly that her fingers were absolutely white.

  When she got home that night – she called Petie the next day to tell him because he had been so nice – she found her cat lying on the doorstep half dead from a terrible fight, and she figured out that the cat had been in the fight at the very moment she had felt the danger. That cat, she told Petie, was just like a member of the family, because he had been with her for fourteen years.

  I was just the opposite. I never suspected when something terrible was happening. For it was this very night, while I was lying there sleeping with a big smile on my face, that the tragedy of the black fox began.

  Twelve

  One Fear

  Two days went by before I actually learned what had happened that night, because it was at supper on Friday that Aunt Millie said, ‘A fox got my turkey that was nesting by the Christmas trees.’

  My fork went down on my plate with a clang. I had been eating along just fine for weeks now, but after she said that I could not have swallowed if my life had depended on it. It was like my food passage had suddenly shrunk to the size of a rubber band.

  ‘No,’ I protested.

  Aunt Millie mistook my ‘No’ for a cry of outrage that some animal had dared to take her turkey.

  She looked at me and nodded. ‘I think it got one of the hens sometime last week too.’

  Uncle Fred turned his iced-tea glass up and drained the contents.

  ‘Well?’ Aunt Millie said to him. She had been very irritable with all of us for a week. The heat was unbearable and with each passing day, as the ground got drier and the sun hotter, she had grown more fussy. She had been saying for days, ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if it doesn’t rain,’ and now it was as if she had made up her mind, and what she had decided to do was take out all her ill feelings on my fox.

  ‘I’m not going to put up with it,’ she continued. ‘I mean it, Fred. Once a fox gets started, he’ll clean out the whole henhouse. I have worked too hard on those hens to just stand by and watch some fox walk off with them one by one.’

  ‘I know that, Millie.’

  ‘Well, you are certainly acting mighty unconcerned about the whole thing,’ she snapped. She pressed her napkin to her face. ‘If the fox had made off with one of your precious pigs, I’d like to see what you’d do.’

  ‘I’ll take care of it,’ Uncle Fred said.

  ‘How?’

  ‘After supper we’ll go out and have a look,’ he said with great patience.

  I sat silent, trying to think of a plan, anything to divert them from the missing turkey. Finally I said, ‘Maybe it wasn’t a fox,’ but Aunt Millie was already on her feet by that time saying, ‘Well, let’s go.’

  ‘Now don’t get in such an uproar.’

  ‘I am not in an uproar, I am just concerned about my chickens.’

  ‘The heat’s just got you down,’ Uncle Fred said.

  ‘It is not the heat. Every summer you start harping on the heat.’

  ‘All right, it is not the heat,’ Uncle Fred said. ‘Let’s go.’ She left the dishes on the table, a thing I had never seen her do before, and the three of us walked out the back door. There was not a breeze anywhere in the yard and the leaves just hung on the trees. I had been so happy that this was the first time I had noticed how hot it really was. I felt as if my lungs were not going to be able to get enough oxygen out of this thick, hot air to keep me going.

  ‘Turkey gone, eggs gone, cleaned out,’ Aunt Millie said as we walked past the tree where the dog was tied. ‘And you!’ Aunt Millie pointed to the dog, who looked eagerly at us. ‘You never even barked. Some watchdog you are.’

  ‘Come on, Happ,’ Uncle Fred said. He unhooked the dog, who ran ahead of us as if to make up for his laxity.

  We walked down the hill to where Uncle Fred had planted some trees to be cut for Christmas trees in a few years. Now they were no more than waist-high. ‘This way,’ Aunt Millie said, wading through the trees as if through a choppy sea. There were some bushes to the left and we followed her to them. She parted the bushes and we looked in silence at the empty nest. Only a few black feathers remained on the ground and one inside the nest, making it seem even emptier somehow.

  With one hand Aunt Millie pointed towards the orchard, then slowly to the bushes, and then to the nest, as if tracing the path of the fox. And I, as she pointed, could imagine for myself exactly how it had happened.

  The black fox had come gliding like a cat through the orchard, a small dark noiseless shadow moving between the trees. She had paused in the bushes, probably right where we were standing, looked through the leaves, and seen the turkey on its nest. She had remained there a moment, still as a statue, watching the turkey, which slept with its head under its wing.

  The black fox had watched a moment more – she was not an impetuous hunter – and then, suddenly, without a sound, she had leaped to the nest. There was a silent struggle. Black wings beat the air and then drooped, and the struggle was over.

  ‘He took the turkey,’ Aunt Millie said, ‘and never even cracked an egg doing it.’ The ease of the thing seemed to make it even worse.

  The dog was sniffing the ground and running first in one direction, then in the other.

  ‘I don’t see any eggs though,’ I said.

  ‘Sure you don’t,’ Aunt Millie said. ‘Fox took them too.’

  ‘Would a fox take eggs, Uncle Fred?’

  He nodded. ‘He’ll take eggs and hide them till he wants them.’

  ‘Where would he hide them?’

  ‘Want to go look?’ Uncle Fred said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘Well, if you two are going on an Easter-egg hunt, I’m going back and do the dishes.’ She looked displeased. ‘I don’t know what good it’ll do you to find the eggs now.’ She turned and went through the little Christmas trees without looking back.

  ‘Come on,’ Uncle Fred said.

  Without a word we skirted the Christmas trees and walked through the orchard.

  One time my mom and dad had me sit down and make a list of all the things I was afraid of, because they thought that if I wrote all these fears down on paper – things like being afraid of high places and being afraid of dogs – I would see how foolish my fears were.

  Well, I wrote them all down and it took me two notebook pages, back and front, and I took it in and showed it to my mom and dad and they looked very surprised, because even they had not expected four whole pages of fears. I think, in all, there was a total of thirty-eight different fears. At the moment, I thought that all those thirty-eight different fears put together were not as bad as this one fear I had right now – that something terrible was going to happen to the black fox.

  We crossed a field where the trees had been cut and lay across the grass waiting to be sawed and moved. Then we came to the stream and paused. Still neither of us spoke.

  Slowly Uncle Fred bega
n walking up the stream. He was so interested now that he didn’t even seem to notice when his foot slipped into the water and got wet. He paused several times, then continued until we came to a place where there was a sand bar under a high bank. He looked for a moment, and then with a smile he bent down and began to scoop aside the sand with his hand.

  When the hole was about six inches deep he said, ‘There!’ He held up a turkey egg, a large tan egg with brown speckles, and then he stepped aside and I looked down into the hole and saw two more eggs in the sand.

  ‘That’s winter storage,’ he said. ‘Some old fox is planning to come back here when food’s scarce and have an egg dinner.’

  He put the turkey egg in my hand, and it was cold and damp. Then he said, ‘It looks like you and I are going to have to do something about that fox.’

  I had known all along that this was what it would come to. From the moment Aunt Millie had said a fox had gotten her turkey, I had known this would happen. Still, just the way Uncle Fred said it made me feel sick all over.

  ‘Uncle Fred?’ My mouth took this opportunity to make a five-syllable word out of his name. I thought he would look at me to see what was wrong, but he did not.

  ‘What?’ With the toe of his wet shoe he pushed the sand back into the hole.

  ‘Maybe the fox is a hundred miles away by now.’

  He shrugged. ‘Tomorrow afternoon we’ll go see,’ he said. ‘We’ll take Happ and go into the woods.’ He clapped me on the back with his hand – it was the first time he had ever touched me – and I could see that he was excited about going after the fox.

  The turkey egg dropped from my hand, cracked on a rock, and the yolk began to stain the water.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  We stepped up the bank and across the fallen trees. And as we came to the orchard, my nose started to run.

  Thirteen

  Tacooma!

  Suddenly, as we walked, I started thinking of this one word – Tacooma. The past summer I had gone to a very crummy Indian camp in the mountains. I only stayed five days because I got sick, but I remember this word Tacooma very well. The counsellors had told us the first night we were there, having something called the Opening Powwow, that Tacooma was an Indian word that meant ‘Help me, Brother,’ and they told us that it was a rule – an iron, never-to-be-broken rule – that if anyone ever came up to you, clasped your wrist ‘where the blood flows’, and said ‘Tacooma!’ you would have to help him. No matter what he wanted, you would have to help him. Otherwise, the old Indian legend said, the blood in your wrist would flow no more.

  All the while I was at camp this worried me, because I was always afraid that someone was going to come up to me and say ‘Tacooma’ and I would have to do something awful like rush into the lake and pull his drowning friend from the deep, dark water by the rocks where we were not allowed to swim because of the snakes. Or at night, someone would awaken me in my bunk, clasp my wrist, say the dreaded ‘Tacooma’ and I would have to get up and walk down the black slippery path with him to the toilets. In my nightmares I heard the word Tacooma again and again.

  Tonight, though, I thought that there should be a worldwide word like Tacooma, and you could use this word maybe three times in your whole life, and when you did use it, even a perfect stranger would have to help you, because even a perfect stranger would know that you would never, ever use one of your Tacooma’s unless it was a matter of vital importance. I thought how nice it would be right now if I could turn to Uncle Fred, clasp my hand around his thick hairy wrist, feel the blood pounding there, and say, ‘Uncle Fred?’

  Something in my voice would cause him to stop and look down at me.

  ‘Uncle Fred, don’t harm that fox.’

  He would sputter, ‘But that fox is making off with Millie’s birds. You saw how upset she was at supper. She –’

  ‘Uncle Fred,’ I would interrupt. ‘Tacooma!’

  He would pause and then say in the quietest voice, ‘The fox is safe. She will never be harmed here. I will explain to Millie.’

  ‘Thank you, Uncle Fred.’

  This was what I thought about all the way back to the farm. It was an awful feeling to want to help someone as badly as I wanted to help that black fox. My one hope – I decided this as we came to the house – was Hazeline.

  She had gone out to the lake with Mikey on a picnic and would not be back till late, so I waited out on the porch for a while and then I went up in my room and sat in a chair by the window. All the time I was watching for the car headlights to come up the road, I was thinking about the fox. The dog was still running and I could hear his measured barks in the woods and once I thought I heard a high yapping sound like the bark of the fox.

  It was almost midnight when I saw the car lights. The car stopped and Hazeline got out and ran into the house. Usually she and Mikey stayed in the car a few minutes laughing and talking, so I was glad to see that tonight there weren’t going to be any such delays.

  She came up the steps very quickly, went into her room, and shut the door. I went across the hall and knocked.

  ‘I’m getting ready for bed,’ she said.

  ‘Can I see you for just a minute, Hazeline?’ I asked.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  There was a silence. I waited, then said, ‘I have to talk to you.’

  ‘Oh, come on in.’

  I went in and she was lying across the bed with her face turned away. She had not started getting ready for bed at all but was still in the plaid playsuit she had worn to the picnic.

  ‘Hazeline,’ I began.

  She turned around and I saw that her eyes were all red and swollen. She must have been crying for hours to get her face in such an awful condition. You could hardly even see where her eyes were.

  ‘What’s wrong, Hazeline?’ I thought that if she had been soaking her whole head in hot water for four hours it wouldn’t look this bad. She looked like Uncle Fred’s prize pig, Rowina. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m not getting married – that’s what’s wrong,’ she said.

  ‘You mean you’re not going to marry Mikey?’

  ‘I mean Mikey’s not going to marry me.’ And she started to cry again.

  I wanted to turn around and get out of that room as fast as I could. Only the fact that I desperately needed help for the black fox and that I thought Hazeline might know what to do kept me there. ‘He’ll marry you, Hazeline,’ I said. I hoped Mikey had not been able to see how awful she looked with her face all swollen or he probably wouldn’t marry her.

  ‘No, he won’t either.’

  ‘Then you can marry someone else,’ I said.

  She looked up at me and stopped crying long enough to say, ‘Who?’ Then she waited.

  ‘I don’t know exactly who, but I know you’ll get married.’

  ‘I won’t get married. I’m too fat!’ She began to cry again. You could hardly believe that there were any tears left. I got a new respect for the tear glands then and there, because I saw that those glands could really manufacture tears when they had to. I wished that Petie were there to make up a headline. All I could think of was FARM GIRL’S EYES PRODUCE RECORD-BREAKING EIGHT HOURS OF TEARS – YOUNG FRIEND STANDS BY HELPLESSLY, which was too long.

  ‘I don’t think you’re too fat,’ I said finally.

  ‘Well, Mikey thinks so. He says he’s not going to marry me unless I lose twenty pounds.’

  ‘Then just lose the twenty pounds, Hazeline. That’s all you have to do and he’ll marry you.’

  ‘I can’t. I just can’t. I’m never going to get married. I’m going to be like old Miss Helva.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That fat old lady that was over last week, and all she comes over for is to eat. That’s all. Eat, eat, eat! That’s how I’m going to be. I’ll be going around to people’s houses hoping they’ve just made a cake or a pie – one time right down there in our kitchen I saw Miss Helva eat a whole berry pie!�
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  ‘Hazeline, you won’t be like that. It’s silly to even think so. Now, listen a minute,’ I said, because it seemed to me she was quieting down. ‘I need some help.’

  ‘You need help!’ She put her head down on her arm.

  ‘Hazeline, you know that fox I’ve been talking about? The black fox?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t want to hear about foxes. I just want to marry Mikey and I can’t lose twenty pounds. I can’t.’

  ‘Hazeline, your father is going to kill that fox.’ This was the first time I had let myself actually think these words, much less say them, and I suddenly started shaking.

  She turned around and looked at me, and I thought at last I had gotten through to her and she understood. I leaned forward and she said, ‘Look, will you go downstairs and get me a banana?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A banana. Maybe if I eat something I’ll feel a little better. I couldn’t hardly eat anything at the picnic I was so upset, and now I feel awful. My legs are real weak.’ I hurried down to get the banana, and Aunt Millie met me in the hall, her cotton bathrobe held in front of her. ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. She always did this. Hazeline had been crying very loudly for a half-hour and she hadn’t even heard that, but every time I so much as tiptoed to the bathroom for a drink of water she would come out of her room and say, ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m just getting a banana for Hazeline.’

  ‘Well, you need your rest. Don’t you be running errands for her all night.’

  ‘Peel it and put some peanut butter on it,’ Hazeline called down the stairs.

  I took the peeled and peanut-buttered banana up to Hazeline and waited till she ate it. I would have brought her a dozen bananas if I’d thought it would raise her spirits enough to help me. When she had finished, I said again, ‘Hazeline, I need your help.’

  ‘Listen, I can’t do anything about your fox! I can’t do anything about anything. I just feel terrible. You don’t know what it’s like to lose everything you want in one night.’