by Anne Nesbet
It was almost as if Gusta were one of those pigeons, being tossed into the air.
Gusta waved good-bye and turned to face Elm Street — and all of a sudden, of course, she was facing a brand-new world.
Even those first few steps down from the oculist’s door required great caution. Everything felt nearer than it had a few minutes ago, and that made her feet just slightly uncertain about where the ground actually was.
She didn’t want to stumble and fall, because there was Nelly in her fragile little cage, depending on Gusta to carry her safely through this suddenly so complicated-looking world.
To tell the truth, Gusta hardly knew which way to look first. There were little earthy bubbles and clods everywhere that wasn’t paved. She hadn’t thought about how rough and grainy the ground mostly is, except where human beings have covered it over with stone or slabs of wood.
And the bark of the trees! She crossed the street to start down the road leading to the Hoopes Home. There was a sign on a pole over there — on the other side of the street — and she knew as soon as she looked at it exactly what it said (“Elm Street”), almost as if her eyes now had seven-league boots and could bound far distances whenever they wanted.
That was a silly way to put it, Gusta told herself sternly. Honestly! Seven-league boots?
But when she raised her head and looked at something, no matter what it was and no matter how far away it seemed to be, that thing was suddenly present in her immediate world, in a way it had never been before. She kept looking down and then looking up again, at one thing and then at another.
She could see the paint fading on the walls of all the houses. This was not a town where anyone had extra money for painting the outside of their houses, that seemed clear. But she hadn’t really known that before. It was a brand-new piece of knowledge for her now.
On top of the nearest house was a black shape, pointed at one end. It looked at Gusta, spread its wings, and flew away with a great, thunderous CAW!, and the funny thing was, she could see it fly. It didn’t just disappear. It was in the air — hard to focus on, true; her eyes weren’t very quick about catching it — but it was there. Not suddenly invisible. In the air, and still there.
She repeated her rhyme a few times, under her breath, and then stopped walking so she could catch her balance again.
She had stopped right next to the trunk of a tree. It was comforting to stretch out her hand and feel all those lines of rough-edged ridges that her eyes insisted, suddenly, were there. She still believed her hands more than her eyes. She looked up that trunk — but it wasn’t anything like an ordinary tree anymore! Where there was usually a soft woven texture of dark and light, this time of year, there was now an incredibly specific tangle of branches, large ones and tiny twigs, each one as if an astonishingly gifted artist had spent hours drawing it with the most fine-nibbed of pens. The branches weren’t smoothly gray anymore, either. They were, each one, quite knobbly. They would be rough under your fingers if your fingers could reach them. It was almost as if her eyes were suddenly reaching out and touching things!
And some of those knobbly branches had bits of green leaking out of them.
Little oval bits of green.
Oh!
Gusta actually clasped her hands together in awe as she tilted her head back.
For the first time — the first time!— in her whole entire life, Gusta Neubronner was seeing LEAVES — not the ones underfoot, that you pick up and think about one by one, but the thousands of tiny, living, green-as-green, just-beginning-to-be-growing leaves on trees.
And it was wonderful!
Gusta arrived in time for the last bit of dinner, so Mr. Bertmann had kept his promise after all. She parked Nelly in her cage in a dark corner of the front hall, knowing that pigeons are not fond of light and noise. To be honest, the darkness of the hall was actually quite soothing for Gusta, too, after the strain of seeing so much, all that way home from Mr. Bertmann’s. She took off her new glasses and rubbed her eyes, and then made her way to the long table surrounded by the familiar general blur of all those boys and Gramma Hoopes presiding at the head. Aunt Marion came in at that moment with more food from the kitchen — dinners kept her busy.
“Oh, hello there, Gusta!” she said. “Just in time. Sit down and have some chipped beef, child.”
Gramma Hoopes tapped her plate twice with her fork, just to get Gusta’s attention. “Well?” she said. “Aren’t you supposed to have eyeglasses now, Augusta?”
Gusta jumped a little. Her glasses were still clenched in her right hand. She held them up now.
“Well, that’s not how they work, as far as I know,” said her grandmother. “Put them on, for goodness’ sake.”
“Yes, go ahead, show us, Gusta!” said Josie.
Even before she had tucked the frames behind her ears, she knew that every face around that table was staring at her — but when she looked up with the glasses on, the vividness of those stares made her gasp and look away.
“Heavens, what’s that about, Augusta?” said her grandmother sternly. “I hope you’re not vain. Nothing wrong in wearing spectacles, since it seems you need them.”
Gusta couldn’t find the words to explain. It was so shocking to see all those eyes and noses and mouths everywhere all around her. Her own eyes hardly knew what to do with them all. She looked down at her plate instead.
Larry had the next place at that table; he leaned closer so he could murmur, “I think you look fine.”
Even though Gusta hadn’t actually been thinking at all about how she looked, she felt comforted. Larry was as gentle with people as he was with eggs.
“Do those things make the world look funny?” said Thomas, the youngest of the brothers. Being six apparently gave him the courage to ask the question everyone was wanting to ask.
“Well, I have to get used to them, that’s all,” said Gusta.
“Quite true,” said Gramma Hoopes. “Now, after dinner I’ll ask you to help Josie and me with some cleaning.”
“Oh!” said Gusta, looking up from her chipped beef over mashed potatoes (with a pretty tasty garnish of canned corn and peas). “I forgot to tell you about Nelly!”
“Nelly? Whoever is Nelly?” said Gramma Hoopes, setting down her fork. Gusta had never properly noticed before how interesting Gramma Hoopes’s hair was. The crown of her head was silver-gray, but a long braid ran around that head, and the braid was a lovely dark color, so that the head of Gusta’s grandmother was a kind of snow-capped peak.
“Nelly’s one of Mr. Bertmann’s pigeons. I’m supposed to take her up the road into the woods this afternoon and let her go. It’s part of this experiment he’s been undertaking. He thinks specially trained pigeons could eventually be used as, well, actually, photographers.”
“Photographers!” said Gramma Hoopes. She said it as if certain suspicions she had secretly been harboring about Mr. Bertmann were suddenly being proven true.
“It’s an experiment,” said Gusta. “But he’s paying me to release the pigeon.”
“You brought home a pigeon?” said Thomas, popping up like a jack-in-the-box from his chair. “Where’s the pigeon?”
“Sit down and stay put, silly!” said Josie. “You can’t all barrel off looking for the poor pigeon. She’ll keel right over and die of fright.”
Gusta had a flicker of fear that might be exactly what Nelly would do. All these wild people! With all of their fiery, vivid eyes. She felt like she herself might be just about to keel over.
She took the glasses off, just to have some peace for a moment. Four or five voices chimed in immediately to ask her what she was doing and to tell her to put them back on. It was quite flustering. She put them back on, and all the faces around her became louder-looking again.
Then Clarence started saying in his jokey voice, “How many fingers am I holding up, Gusta?” and there was an unseemly din until Gramma Hoopes actually had to rise up from her chair to quiet them all down.
“Since you’re so p
owerfully clever, Clarence,” she said, with a voice that could have quarried blocks of marble from a mountainside. “You can go along with Augusta on her errand for Mr. Bertmann.”
So that was that. Clarence made a face, but under the glaring eyes of Gramma Hoopes, he followed Gusta into the front hall.
“That’s the pigeon? You just carry the pigeon somewhere, and then let her go?”
“More or less,” said Gusta. She didn’t feel very confident about Clarence and pigeons. He was the one who “couldn’t be trusted with eggs,” and wasn’t a pigeon at least as fragile and valuable as an egg?
They set off up the road that went past Gramma Hoopes’s home and then on up Holly Hill into the woods. Gusta had been up the road this far before, of course, but it turned out the road went farther than that.
This was the north-going road. It made Gusta think: If you walked and you walked and you walked, where would you eventually get to?
And she couldn’t help it: she imagined for a moment her father looking up from some oh-so-Canadian table, turning his head her way in happy surprise. Gusta, my little thingling, are those new glasses you’re wearing?
“Hey, Gusta, be a pal?”
Canada vanished.
Gusta looked over at Clarence, who was kicking at the dirt road and fiddling with a strange-shaped object that her eyes and brain figured out, slowly, must be a slingshot.
“You’re just gonna walk a little on this road into the woods, let the silly pigeon go, and walk home, right? You’re not gonna wander off and get lost or anything.”
Gusta shook her head.
“So you don’t need me tagging along, do you? I wanna go knock down some cans we’ve got stashed over in that field there. When you get home you can say you sent me on to Mr. Bill’s or something. All right, then!”
And he skedaddled.
To be honest, Gusta was relieved. Clarence was such a twitchy sort of boy. Maybe it was just making up stories in her head, but she felt like Nelly gave a pigeon-size sigh of relief when Clarence went loping off with his slingshot.
Pigeons must not like the look of a slingshot one bit, thought Gusta. It must be in their blood not to like slingshots, like fear of snakes and the desire to fly away home.
Now it was just Gusta standing there, and Nelly in the little cage in her hand, and the north-going road, climbing Holly Hill into the deeper, wilder woods.
Papa, thought Gusta.
And she let her feet follow the tug of that road.
It was an exaggeration, honestly, to call the Holly Hill road a road, if by “road” you meant the usual thing — a smoothish, widish track that a motorcar could roll along on, or a bicycle. As the woods thickened around her, rocks seemed to bubble right up to the surface of the dirt road, so that it was no longer even slightly smoothish. In fact, in some places it was really more like scrambling up a dry creek bed than walking down a road.
The trees came together high above Gusta’s head; they stretched out their bare branches like long, scratchy-skinned arms as they whispered secrets to one another.
There was something else out here on Holly Hill: a whole lot of hush.
Gusta wasn’t very used to hush, having grown up in noisy places, in cities and (now) in a house absolutely jam-packed with rowdy kids, but she found she liked it. Nelly was quiet in her little cage. The trees kept murmuring in the breeze. Gusta’s feet quietly avoided the pointiest rocks and deepest potholes.
Her eyes kept noticing things: the details of the trees, their first buds, their twigs, the white papery trunks of the birches. And then the places where a path would climb off to the left, up the hill, or a mossy old stone wall would loom up in the middle of nowhere.
“Why are there walls in the middle of the woods?” she asked Nelly, and her voice sounded funny out here in such a quiet place.
A little farther down the road, the rocky bits began to wink at her, as if they had streaks of glass or diamond in them. She stopped to take a closer look, and as she did, the quiet of the woods, down past a little bend in the road, was interrupted by the sound of twigs breaking and the rustle of — wait, what kinds of animals lived in the Maine woods?
Gusta stood up quickly, thinking alarming, incoherent thoughts about enormous squirrels, deer, bears!
But her eyes with their new glasses looked again and saw only a human being — which could have been a little alarming in its own right, of course, but this person wasn’t some kind of rugged backwoods hermit with a long beard and two rifles.
This person coming up the woods road was an ordinary, medium-size boy.
A boy who had just seen her and was now waving his hand in her direction.
“Hey, there!” he was calling up the road. “NEW GIRL, Augusta Neubronner, is that really you?”
She recognized the voice right away, though the face the voice was coming from looked rather different than it used to, now that those eyeglass lenses were busy working their detail-etching magic.
It was pretty much the last person you might expect to meet on an empty dirt road over Holly Hill: George Thibodeau, of the Dairy Wars.
He wasn’t wearing his schoolgoing clothes. He was dressed in boots and a rough jacket, and he had an old knapsack on his back, and (it was amazing how much information eyes wearing glasses could reach out and grab) a notebook in his hand, as if he were out here to be taking notes on something.
“George Thibodeau,” she said, just to state the obvious and because she was so surprised to see him here.
Had they ever talked to each other at school? Not much, anyway, beyond whatever you say to someone waiting in line behind you at the pencil sharpener.
“Are you out here trapping birds?” asked George as he sped up the last part of the road.
“This is Nelly,” said Gusta. “I didn’t trap her. She’s one of Mr. Bertmann’s pigeons.”
“Mr. Bertmann? The eye doctor man? Why does he need pigeons?”
“They’re very clever,” said Gusta. “They know how to fly home. He says they are even going to learn how to take photographs, eventually.”
She felt embarrassed as soon as she said that, of course. It sounded so much like boasting, and anyway, it didn’t explain why Mr. Bertmann needed his pigeons.
“He really loves them,” she added.
“WHAT did you just say?” said George. Now he was really interested. “Photographs? What? And I didn’t know you had glasses. You don’t wear them at school, do you?”
“They’re completely brand-new,” said Gusta. “I’m working for Mr. Bertmann now some to help pay for them. That’s why I’ve got Nelly with me. I’m to carry her into the woods and release her. So she can get used to the new harness. It’s part of practicing for his pigeon photography experiment.”
“Do you really mean the pigeons are going to take PICTURES?” said George. “Are you kidding? How could that possibly work in a million years?”
Gusta was used to reading people’s emotions in a general way, from their voices, from the overall gist of their movements, so the overly specific details in George’s face right now — the way his eyes lit up with interest and the way a dent appeared in his left cheek when he grinned — actually overwhelmed her so much that without really meaning to, she pulled her glasses off with her left hand, the one not holding Nelly’s cage. And the world calmed down into blurriness all around her.
“Does it all look very different with the glasses on?” said George, somehow more recognizable when blurry.
“I’m in the process of getting used to them,” said Gusta, and with as much dignity as she could pretend to possess, she slid the glasses back onto her nose and hooked them back behind her ears. “Because of them being so new. Mr. Bertmann told me to go out walking to get used to the glasses, and to send Nelly back in her harness.”
“With the CAMERA!” said George.
“Not yet,” said Gusta. “Mr. Bertmann hasn’t finished putting the camera together yet. I’m sure it must be a very tricky sort of
thing to do, making a camera for a pigeon.”
There was a silent moment, and then all of a sudden Gusta found herself asking, “Anyway, I was wondering where this road would go, if you kept walking and walking and walking.”
She let her mind’s eye imagine the north-going road for a moment, pushing ever deeper into the woods and the wilderness, maybe — who knew?— all the way through the hundreds and hundreds of miles of deep Maine forest to the border of —
But George was already shrugging his shoulders. “Nowhere much. Just up over Holly Hill and down, through the woods. Then it swings back around into town, eventually.”
“Oh,” said Gusta, disappointed. No Canada, after all. “But it looks so wild up here.”
George laughed.
“Hate to break it to you, then, but our own farm’s only about five minutes along the road, when it folds back toward town, over this side of the hill. We’re just about neighbors, I guess, the Hoopeses and the Thibodeaus. Though nobody’s been keeping up these woods for years and years and years. The Hoopeses, and I mean no offense to you personally, have pretty much let most of the hill go back to scrub. Anyway, follow me. I’ll show you where I live.”
It was a tiny bruise of a disappointment, to so soon be heading in the opposite direction entirely from Canada. But of course she couldn’t explain that to George Thibodeau.
She followed him down the road, which, sure enough, soon turned away from the north and became a little less rocky and then suddenly was much less rugged, and finally spilled them out into a lane running between fenced pastures, with what looked like a very large farm sprawled over the shoulder of the next hill.
There was probably some weather on its way: the farm buildings gleamed very white against the dark sky. The clear light of trouble —
“Oh!” said Gusta aloud. She had never seen how specific that clear light could be — how it wasn’t merely brightness, but etched out all the edges of things. She glanced at George, and of course at that moment he was, like his farm, an extra-crisp, super-definite version of himself.