The Orphan Band of Springdale

by Anne Nesbet

  “Pretty good,” admitted Josie.

  Relative of the Lemur, called locally the “aye-aye,” the Island of Madagascar, June 1896, it said at the bottom of the picture.

  Madagascar! Then maybe — maybe — there would be some mention of the most important thing, right? The Wish that had survived sea and shipwrecks in the sea captain’s pocket, and that had eventually come along home to Springdale.

  Gusta paged through the notebook carefully, looking for clues as if she had turned right into Sherlock Holmes. In any case, these books didn’t feel like things that should be packed away and forgotten in the attic of a farmhouse in Maine. If she hadn’t been sitting on the cold planks of the attic floor, she might have been able to imagine herself in an ancient library. Or in a museum.

  She turned the page and saw a parrot, absolutely perfect in all of its feathers, and quite understandably proud of that, too, to judge from the glint in its eyes.

  He had sketched some maps in his notebook, too. Gusta had no idea what they were of. But islands somewhere, she assumed? And stretches of coastline?

  No Wish anywhere, though.

  She set that notebook very carefully back in its box, and opened up the next one.

  “There, now!” called out Josie from the other end of the attic, where the lumpier objects had clustered. “Not what I remembered seeing, but what do you think of this?” And she raised her hand and waggled some object in Gusta’s direction.

  “What is it?” asked Gusta, balancing the big notebook on her knees.

  Josie came over closer to Gusta to show her what she had found. “A sailor’s squeezebox,” she said.

  What Josie called a “squeezebox” was a smallish, six-sided thing, with rows of little round buttons on either side and the folds of a bellows in the middle.

  “That’s got to be some kind of accordion,” said Gusta. “Right? But where’d it come from, and how’d it ever get up here? Looks kind of complicated to play, though, doesn’t it?”

  All those little buttons! How were you supposed to know which one to press at any particular time?

  Josie shrugged. Maybe she wasn’t the type to be so easily discouraged by little buttons. Gusta had to admire her nerve. She watched Josie pull the little accordion open and shut a few times, just messing around to see what might happen. And what actually happened was that a tremendously loud wheezing blat of a note rolled out into the attic.

  “Oh, no, don’t!” said Gusta, suddenly full of alarm. “You know Gramma Hoopes will just hate that if she hears you!”

  “Maybe that’s not the one for me, then!” said Josie as she set the squeezebox down on a box by the stairs. “Who knows how it even works? I’ll go rummage some more. But hey, now, Gusta — what’s that picture there?”

  The second heavy notebook had fallen open on Gusta’s knees to a picture that seemed very far removed from lemurs and parrots: a funny sort of tower rising up, with woods behind it, and a woman sitting on a low step with a baby in her arms. It was drawn from a peculiar sort of perspective, so that the woman and her baby looked close and large, and the tower oddly shrimpy behind them.

  “I don’t know,” said Gusta. “People in front of a lighthouse? Who do you think they are? Where do you think they are?”

  Josie leaned in for a closer look. “That must be your own Gramma Hoopes right there,” she said, pointing at the baby in the woman’s arms. “Which would make the woman there your great-grandmother, I guess. Her name was Prudence. I remember about her because she was the one so beautiful and charming that the old captain left all the seven seas behind, to come live in the Maine woods. Even I’ve heard that story a hundred times by now, believe me.”

  “What about the lighthouse? Did they live by a lighthouse?”

  “Well, as far as that goes,” said Josie, “that’s just one of the old captain’s follies, up on the side of Holly Hill. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. There’s a nice view out the direction of Portland from there. He built it himself. Mrs. Hoopes says her father could never not be building or whittling or carving — I guess that’s the usual thing, for sea captains.”

  “A lighthouse in these woods?” said Gusta. That didn’t make sense. Lighthouses stood on the edge of the ocean. On rocky cliffs. Where there were barnacles clinging and huge waves all the time. But here they were so far from the sea!

  Josie shrugged. “I don’t know why he wanted it out in the woods, but I guess a lighthouse is what he wanted to build, so he built it. Turn another page, Gusta. What else is there?”

  Gusta turned the page, and another page, and there were birds from the Maine woods there, and a squirrel, and then —

  “Ew!” said Josie. “Bats!”

  Not just one single bat. Pages and pages of bats took over that whole notebook. An infestation of bats! Bats peering out from their own wings. Bats hanging upside down from some strange surface, bats stretching out their wings, bats in such close-up detail that you could see every nuance of their mixed-up little faces: point-like eyes, sharpest miniature needles for teeth, squidgy little noses, all dwarfed by those extraordinary ears. Arrows pointing to the details, especially, again and again, to a stripe of gold running down the backs of their furry heads.

  Josie had been driven back to the other end of the attic by that horde of two-dimensional bats, but Gusta found herself turning the pages slower and slower, sinking into the details of the pictures. They were hideous and beautiful, those bats, both at once. Adorable and horrible. And the artist, the sea captain — her own great-grandfather — must have spent hundreds of hours sketching those adorable/horrible bats. You could tell, looking at those pictures, that he had not just been interested in them: he had loved them.

  And that sent an odd pang through Gusta’s own heart: to think of someone actually loving bats — ugly-toothed, ugly-faced, blind little bats. Monkeys and parrots — those are lovable, it’s easy enough to understand. But bats!

  “My-o-tis lu-ci-fu-gus cle-men-ti,” she read aloud. That was the name of these bats, apparently. She turned the pages ever more carefully, not wanting to damage the pictures. She was so careful not to put a finger on the pictures, to see if the furry heads felt the way they looked, but she imagined doing so.

  One page was unlike the others: all gray shadows, so much so that at first glance you might think he had had an accident with his inks. And then on second and third glance you saw that there were rocky sides to that shadowy space, and little creatures dangling from the top of the picture. A place inhabited by the sea captain’s bats. It must be the names of the place and of those bats written in neat ink beneath that picture: Hibernaculum, Holly Hill. Myotis lucifugus clementi. And then a phrase that made all the little hairs up and down her arms tingle and clamor a little: Here I have found treasure!

  Gusta took a closer look, trying to spy out any signs of chests or jewels or pieces of eight or Wishes. Any traces of treasure.

  She couldn’t see any of that, no matter how much she squinted.

  Nevertheless, it was an amazing image, once you knew what it was showing you. Everything in that cave was sleeping. Everything was quiet. It was like the bats themselves: ugly and beautiful, scary and somehow peaceful. She stared at that picture for the longest time, letting herself slip right into it, almost as if she were there.

  “Aha!” said Josie, emerging again from the far corner, where the biggest trunks and boxes were. “This is what I remembered! This banged-up little guitar!”

  She was so happy to have found it that Gusta didn’t have the heart to speak her doubts aloud. It didn’t look like any guitar she’d ever seen — it was so small. Half the strings were busted, and one was missing. But it had a pretty striped pattern ringing its sound hole, and a faded sticker up on the end where the tuners were.

  “ ‘1915 Panama’ something or other,” said Josie. “Where’s Panama? This must be a Panama guitar.”

  “It won’t play,” said Gusta. “Not without strings.”

  Josie laughed
.

  “Not to worry about that!” she said. “I’ll take it in to show Miss Kendall. She’ll help me out. She knows every instrument there ever was, and I just bet she can help me figure out how to string it up again.”

  “Girls!” called Gramma Hoopes from the hall below. “Are you lost up there? I need you right this minute, Augusta. Mr. Bertmann has come by and wants you.”

  Mr. Bertmann! Why would he just show up out of the blue like that? Gusta hurried to put the notebooks back in their box, while Josie scrambled for Aunt Marion’s pile of pillowcases. She would have to come back, Gusta decided, to read more of those beautiful pages, even if they neglected to mention the most important thing, the Wish. She was curious now, about a person who would build a lighthouse so far from the sea, and who could see the beauty even in snaggletoothed bats.

  Once back downstairs, Gusta found Mr. Bertmann waiting very patiently in the front hall, with a dark pigeony blob in a little cage in his right hand.

  “The parcel has come, Augusta Neubronner!” he announced. “Of course, they will need adjustments and so on, so come along now, do. Your grandmother says you may.”

  “Mr. Bertmann assures me it won’t take so very long. Hurry along now, and hurry back,” said Gramma Hoopes.

  Oh, it was the glasses they must be talking about! The glasses must have come. Had it already been two weeks since Mr. Bertmann had placed the order?

  Gusta grabbed her coat and hat.

  Once they were outside, Mr. Bertmann paused to take the pigeon out of her cage. It was ash-feathered Ruth.

  “Fly along home, you adventurer!” Mr. Bertmann said to his pigeon, and she fluttered up and vanished into the sunny blur of the air above Elm Street.

  “She will arrive before us,” said Mr. Bertmann. “We will have a pigeon and your own new spectacles waiting for us when we arrive. So you see there is much to look forward to.”

  Gusta’s stomach felt a little tossed and turned, like a ship on an unknown ocean far away.

  And by the time she entered the already rather familiar space of Mr. Bertmann’s workshop and office, her heart was pattering along at almost a pigeon pace.

  What if these fancy eyeglasses, whose value had been set at twenty-three hours of her labor — what if these eyeglasses worked no better than the cheap things the school nurse kept in the box in her office? She suspected that would be the case. Nothing had ever made much difference in how she saw.

  And that was fine! She reminded herself to stand up straight and look like she knew what she was about. It was fine to see exactly as she already saw. She had come this far in life without the help of eyeglasses, and if she had to travel the rest of her life the same way, well, that was just what she would do.

  It was exciting, though. Gusta’s hands were beginning to feel just the slightest bit clammy.

  “Take a seat here, Augusta,” said Mr. Bertmann, and he went over to his desk in the corner to fetch something. There was a small, rather fancy mirror on the table, a mirror that could tilt up and down. She tested its movements with the tip of a finger, wondering why anyone needed such a mirror. Her face, slightly blurry and more than slightly worried, looked back at her from the glass. She looked so serious and so gloomy! She made herself smile into the mirror, but without letting any of her snaggled teeth show. Although she couldn’t be sure, she didn’t think the smile did all that much to erase the worry.

  The oculist had returned to the little table. He sat across from Gusta, pushed the fancy mirror to one side, and reached forward to place something on her nose — actual spectacles!— and to tuck the sides of those eyeglasses safely around her ears.

  The world changed. Gusta blinked. In that moment everything became suddenly harder and brighter and louder! And then Mr. Bertmann made a dissatisfied harumphing sort of sound and took the glasses off her nose and back to his workbench, while Gusta’s heart beat very fast and her hands refused to stop trembling.

  “Is there — is there something wrong?” she asked in a faint voice.

  “No, no! Everything is fine so far,” said the oculist. “I am adjusting the frames so they fit your young face.”

  He leaned over what must be the eyeglasses on his workbench, and he poked and prodded and pried at them, using little tools that were really too thin to be seen.

  Gusta waited and tried to think calm thoughts.

  “One little moment!” said Mr. Bertmann. “And there!”

  He came puttering back, leaned forward again, and placed with such great, extraordinary care those eyeglasses on the bridge of her nose, with the frames over her ears — more comfortably, she had to admit, than they had fit at first.

  Instantly he looked like a different sort of person, someone with a face carved out by an obsessive artist whose aim had been great precision in every line. It did not necessarily improve him, beauty-wise, but it certainly changed him.

  “How is that, Augusta?” said that face to her now.

  The strange thing was the way the voice and the face no longer fit together in the usual way. The face was so insistently moving its lips to speak every one of those sounds, in a way that Gusta found just slightly grotesque — but the voice was the crispy-consonanted but familiar and gentle voice of Mr. Bertmann, a voice she already knew well. She could not combine in her mind the familiar voice and this brand-new face. For a moment she put her hands over her eyes, shutting out the world.

  “Now, now, now,” said Mr. Bertmann soothingly. “Are they painful in some way? Tell me how they feel, and what you see. Let’s try our old friend over there, the eye chart.”

  And Gusta turned to look at the eye chart, and it was as if the wall had zoomed forward magically and was right before her nose, almost.

  “Oh, it’s right there!” she said, pointing.

  “Can you read it?” said Mr. Bertmann.

  She could. She could read it as if it were in a book just inches from her nose.

  The wall had given up being a blur. Next to the eye chart, there was a hook in the wall, and on the hook there hung a bunch of keys. Above the eye chart, there was a knot hole in the wood paneling, a sworl of thin dark lines against the slightly less dark panel.

  “Is that fourth line still difficult for you?” said Mr. Bertmann to her, while his face made those distractingly precise little movements with its lips and its teeth and all. She had stopped reading the eye chart by accident; she had simply shifted to reading the wall. Now she rattled through the fourth line for him — the fifth — the teeny-tiny sixth. Only at the very bottom of the chart did the letters hide themselves from her, and even then it didn’t feel like they were blurry, it just felt like they were being shy.

  “P,” she said. “Or F. I’m not sure. Is it changing its mind?”

  “Excellent, excellent, excellent!”

  The oculist was really delighted.

  He clapped his hands together, and Gusta realized she could see every little line in his fingernails, which was disconcerting. She kept looking away from his face, because it felt too close, seen through those amazing eyeglasses.

  She turned her head, and it kept happening: the world kept being entirely different in appearance than it had ever been. She pulled the eyeglasses off and looked again: everything was comfortingly blurry again. Soft. Unthreatening. But, now she saw, at the same time: absent.

  She put the glasses back on and blinked.

  “You may feel a little dizzy at first,” said Mr. Bertmann. “But I think you will adjust with rapidity. Young people have such excellent skills in adjusting! And now — it is almost your dinnertime, and I promised your grandmother I would not keep you long. Here’s a case for those new glasses of yours, and here’s a little cloth to clean them with. Don’t rub them on your clothing like a wild animal! They will scratch!”

  For one moment the funny image of a leopard rubbing its glasses on its necktie sprinted through Gusta’s head — the new spectacles must be making her giddy. She took the case for the glasses and tucked the c
loth inside it. Then she started to unhook the eyeglasses from behind her ears, but Mr. Bertmann stopped her.

  “Why?” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “Putting them away safe,” said Gusta.

  The oculist laughed, but kindly.

  “They are not things to be kept hidden away safe, dear girl. They are to be worn, every minute of every day if need be. They are companions to your eyes. You must practice moving through the world with your eyeglasses on. Like our friends, you know, the pigeons.”

  Gusta blinked. “The pigeons, Mr. Bertmann?”

  She didn’t see what pigeons had to do with eyeglasses, but she was trying to be perfectly polite.

  “But yes!” said Mr. Bertmann. “The pigeons! You know my great ambition: to follow in the steps of the apothecary Neubronner, who is not, after all, your relative. To turn my pigeons into photographers.”

  “Um, yes,” said Gusta. (But it still seemed to her like the least likely project anyone had ever thought up in the history of unlikely projects.)

  “Well! Inch by inch, dear child, is progress. And the next inch, while I work on my little lenses and little shutters and you work on getting used to your eyeglasses, is, it seems to me, to accustom our winged friends to carrying something heavier than feathers. See, I have made a harness . . .”

  And suddenly he was bringing out a little leather contraption with a cardboard box, where he said the camera would eventually go. He fetched Nelly down from the pigeon room in her travel cage, and showed Gusta how you put a harness on a pigeon, which turned out to be a fiddly sort of thing to accomplish.

  And then he said, as he led Gusta to the front door of the workshop and popped the pigeon cage into her hand, “It is an assignment for you, dear girl, to help you practice being out in the world with your new eyes. Take our Nelly on a walk this afternoon. Go up the road a ways past your grandmother’s house, so that it’s a bit of a challenge for her. And we shall see how she does. And now, off you go!”