The Midnight Fox

by Betsy Byars

  He cleared his throat. ‘I never liked to see wild things in a pen myself,’ he said.

  Aunt Millie came down the hall and threw a towel over my head and started rubbing. ‘Now get upstairs. I am not going to have you lying in bed with pneumonia when your mother arrives.’

  We went upstairs, she rubbing my head the whole way, me stumbling over the steps, and Hazeline calling from her room, ‘Who was that at the door?’

  ‘Tom,’ Aunt Millie said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Me,’ I said.

  ‘Oh.’

  We went into my room. ‘There,’ Aunt Millie exclaimed at the sight of my open window, ‘I knew it! I knew you’d be out there on that tree at the first opportunity.’ She shut the window with a bang. ‘There is no explaining a boy.’

  She turned down my bed, went out, and came back with a glass of milk.

  ‘I’m sorry about your turkey and hen,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, that! I bet you think I’m awful, carrying on the way I did.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It was more the heat than anything else, like Fred said. Just don’t think about it any more. That fox and her baby are miles away from here now, and they’ll never come back to bother my birds. That’s one thing about a fox. He learns.’

  She turned out the light, said, ‘It is starting to rain again. I declare we are going to be flooded out,’ and then went downstairs.

  Eighteen

  Goodbye

  The next week I spent in the woods, assuring myself that the black fox had gone. I sat on the rock over the ravine, I lay by the creek, I went back to the den again and again to look at the ruins, I sat by the field where the mice ran. I never once saw or heard the black fox and I knew I never would again.

  While I was making my last trip through the woods – a great double-clover-leaf walk that covered the entire forest – my parents came driving up to the farm. I had not expected them that day but they were so eager to see me – they told me this later – that they had got in the car practically as soon as they got home and set off for the farm.

  I was up the creek having one more look at the old ruined den when I heard this honking coming from near the house. The honking stopped and even though I couldn’t hear him I knew that it was my father and that he was now saying, ‘Anybody home?’

  I ran down the creek and through the orchard, and my mom had come around to the back of the house looking for me. She grabbed me and said, ‘Oh, you look so good,’ and, ‘You are the tallest thing I ever saw,’ and to Dad, ‘Look, we have a giant for a son now.’ Dad came over and punched me on the arm and said, ‘How are you, sport?’

  ‘I’m fine, Dad.’

  ‘Look who we brought with us.’

  I looked and there was Petie Burkis, and I knew suddenly why I looked so different and tall to my parents, because that was the way Petie looked to me.

  ‘Hi, Petie.’

  ‘Hi,’ he said.

  He came over and said, ‘Well, I bet you’re surprised to see me.’

  ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You take Petie around and show him the farm if you want to,’ Aunt Millie said to me, then to Mom, ‘Honestly, that boy of yours has not given me one minute of trouble the whole summer. Come on in the house. He has just been wonderful.’

  They went into the house and I hoped that Aunt Millie was not going to tell about my climbing out the window and down that tree, because the way she would tell it, I would sound like Tom Sawyer, and Mom and Dad would get a great false hope that I had in one summer suddenly changed into an athlete.

  ‘This doesn’t look too bad for a farm,’ Petie was saying.

  ‘No, it’s not too bad.’

  ‘I bet you had fun out here.’

  ‘It was all right.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind spending a whole summer out here. I really wouldn’t.’ He fell in beside me as we walked to the barn. ‘It would be better than being home. There wasn’t anything but re-runs on TV all summer.’

  ‘Those are Uncle Fred’s pigs down there. The big one got some sort of prize.’

  In silence we stopped and looked at the pigs. Then Petie said, ‘Hey, you know what happened?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Teddy Wilson – that big boy with the silver bicycle – broke his leg.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘And you know that girl that sat in the front of our room in maths?’

  ‘Mary McGee?’

  ‘Yes. Well, she accidentally started her father’s car and wrecked into a tree.’

  Then we were silent again. It was a funny thing – I could have gone into the house right then and written Petie a five-page letter about all kinds of things, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘Boy, they sure have got some sickening commercials on TV though,’ Petie said. ‘They have this one for corns and calluses where they show this plastic foot with these fake, lift-out corns. It would make you sick.’

  ‘What else do they have?’

  ‘They have this one about room deodorants. It’s real sickening. It has a kitchen that looks like it smells bad, and then it shows this woman coming into the kitchen and a man’s voice says, “It’s a scientific fact that you can get used to any smell in 151 seconds, only why bother?” And then this hand comes out and sprays room deodorant everywhere.’

  ‘You believe that about the 151 seconds?’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Petie said. ‘That’s just what the commercial says.’

  ‘We could test it. I’ve got my watch.’

  Suddenly Petie looked like himself again. He was rubbing his hands up and down his shirt, which is what he always does when he gets enthusiastic about something.

  ‘Where is the worst smell on this whole farm?’ he said. ‘The very worst?’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘And, listen,’ he continued, ‘if it doesn’t work, I will write them a letter – very business-like – and say something like this. “Gentlemen: Contrary to your scientific fact, my friend –” No, make that, “my partner and I have tested a wide variety of smells. Our discoveries are below.”’

  Nineteen

  A Memory

  We left the farm after breakfast the next morning. Aunt Millie and Uncle Fred were by the car, and Hazeline was saying, ‘Now you come back on the thirtieth to my wedding, you hear? All of you!’

  ‘We will if we possibly can,’ my mom said. ‘I still cannot believe that you are getting married, because the last time I saw you, you know, you were in pigtails.’

  ‘We’d better get going,’ Dad said. ‘The traffic’s going to be bad.’

  ‘Well, at least we won’t be on bicycles,’ Mom said. ‘I couldn’t pedal from here to the porch if my life depended on it.’

  Dad put my suitcase and Petie’s in the back seat and shook hands with Uncle Fred. I hated to say goodbye to people I liked. Nothing made me feel worse.

  Mom hugged Aunt Millie and Uncle Fred and then they all looked at me, and right then I wanted to say the greatest thing in the world to Aunt Millie and Uncle Fred, because I had realised after I let the fox go that they were probably the nicest people I would ever meet. In all the past week they had never mentioned once what I had done.

  All I could say though was, ‘Aunt Millie, I will never, ever forget how good it was to be on the farm with you and Uncle Fred.’

  ‘Well, it’s just been real good for us to have you,’ she said. She hugged me and kissed me on my eyebrow.

  Uncle Fred said, ‘You come back next summer. Send the folks to Australia or somewhere.’

  ‘Only please not on bicycles,’ Mom said.

  We all laughed and got in the car and Petie Burkis said, ‘Thank you for having me,’ in an odd voice.

  ‘You come back, too, Petie,’ Aunt Millie said.

  ‘I will.’

  Then Aunt Millie and Uncle Fred and Hazeline stepped back from the car and we drove off. Dad sta
rted blowing the horn and said, ‘Home, here we come.’

  I looked back all the way to the main road, because you could get a real good view of the whole farm, and I wanted to memorise it. Aunt Millie was still waving, but Hazeline had sat down on the steps and was saying something to her dad.

  ‘Well, how will it be to get home, Tom?’ my dad said.

  ‘Real good, I guess.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, our old house looked better to me than any castle I saw in Europe.’

  Mom turned around and smiled and said, ‘Now, tell me, how was the farm really?’

  ‘It wasn’t bad.’

  ‘I told you, didn’t I? I told you you’d like it.’

  ‘I loved it,’ I said. It was the first time I had ever admitted that my parents were right about something and I was wrong, and this made her feel enormously good and she said again, ‘I knew you would.’

  It was afternoon when we got home and everything was just the same, our street, the house, everything. The only thing that seemed the least bit different to me was when I went in my room, because all I could see at first was models, models, hundreds of models everywhere. You would have thought that I had done nothing all my life but glue pieces of plastic together. That was funny, too, because when I was at the farm remembering my room, I had never thought once about all these models.

  The rest of the summer went by so quickly that it was like the whole summer had been spent on the farm, because Petie and I hardly had time to do anything before school started. Then we joined a science club that met every Saturday, and the whole year just started flying by. I never knew time could go so fast.

  And pretty soon my visit to the farm began to seem hazy. For one thing I couldn’t remember the way Aunt Millie and Uncle Fred and Hazeline looked. Hazeline had sent me a picture of her feeding wedding cake to Mikey with Aunt Millie and Uncle Fred standing beside them, but they certainly hadn’t looked like that, all stiff and formal and in clothes that seemed to have been made for other people. Only I couldn’t remember exactly what they had looked like.

  And one night I tried to think of the name of Uncle Fred’s prize pig. I must have heard him say her name a thousand times that summer, only I had to lie in my bed for about three hours before I finally remembered that it was Rowina.

  It all seemed like something that had happened to another boy instead of me. Like one time Petie and I made a time capsule out of a large jar, and we put into this jar all kinds of things, so that in a hundred years, or a thousand, someone would find this capsule, open it, and know exactly what Petie Burkis and I had been like. We put pictures of ourselves in the jar and lists of things we had done and Petie wrote down everything he ate and drank in one day and I wrote down the books I had read in the past year. We put in stories we had written about our families for English class and Petie’s poem ‘TV Land’ and pictures we had drawn, and then we buried it. A year went by and one day Petie said, ‘Hey, let’s go dig up the time capsule.’ So we ran and dug it up and took all the stuff out and laid it on the ground and read it and Petie kept saying, ‘I never wrote that. I know I never wrote that.’ And I was the same way about this crayon picture with my name on it. I couldn’t remember doing it at all. It was as if two other boys had made up the time capsule and buried it in the ground. And now, that was the way I felt about the farm. It was as if it had happened to another boy, not me at all.

  But then sometimes at night, when the rain is beating against the windows of my room, I think about that summer and everything is crystal clear. I am once again beside the creek. The air is clean and the grass is deep and very green. And I look up and see the black fox leaping over the crest of the hill and she is exactly as she was the first time I saw her.

  Or I am beneath that tree again. The cold rain is beating down upon me and my heart is in my throat.

  And I hear, just as plainly as I heard it that August night, above the rain, beyond the years, the high clear bark of the midnight fox.

  About the Author

  Betsy Byars was born in North Carolina, USA. Her father worked in a cotton mill, and Betsy went to school in a cotton-mill village. Her early aspirations were to work with animals, but then she married an engineering lecturer and moved to Illinois. Housebound with young children, Betsy began writing articles for newspapers and magazines. As the children started to read, so she began to write stories for them. Using her own children’s experience, and memories from her own childhood, she produced many children’s books. She now lives in South Carolina.

  Copyright

  First published in 1968

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  All rights reserved

  © Betsy Byars, 1968

  Illustrations © Martin Salisbury, 1994

  The right of Betsy Byers to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–31034–0