by Anne Nesbet
“Out now,” she whispered to Delphine, pulling her very quickly toward that sliver of light.
They were bats.
On the way back down the hill, the girls didn’t talk very much, being all shivery still from the thought of what might have happened — what had almost happened.
Delphine chattered about her adventures for a while, and then let her head bob peacefully against Josie’s shoulder.
“Hiding in a cave!” said Josie in wonder. Bess shook her head.
Gusta was trying very hard not to think about Delphine being lost. She tried to think instead about Delphine being found, and about the bats in that surprising cave.
She had seen that cave before.
In the old captain’s notebooks.
And what had it said by that picture?
Here I have found treasure. . . .
The following Tuesday the girls had more to carry than usual on their walk into town. They were going to follow through on that good idea they’d had in the woods: of playing for Uncle Charlie.
But when they stamped up the frayed porch steps of Bess’s house that afternoon, Bess’s stepmother met them at the door, looking more worried than usual (if such a thing was possible).
“There’s some man here, girls,” she said. “Wanted to speak to Charlie. Don’t know what it’s all about.”
“Audience just almost doubled, then!” said Josie cheerfully. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Goodman. We don’t mind.”
But Mama-Liz shook her head in doubt. It wasn’t the girls minding that she minded, that much seemed obvious.
“What kind of a man, Mama-Liz?” asked Bess. “Do you think he’s going to stay a while?”
Bess’s stepmother shook her head. “Dunno,” she said.
“Then I’ll just go on in,” said Bess, “and ask Papa whether he still wants us.”
“I dunno what the fellow’s here about,” said Bess’s stepmother, stepping to the side so Bess could slip on in through the door. “He’s full of all kind of questions, I’ll tell you that much.”
Questions!
It was never good news, when men showed up to ask questions. All those times when Gusta’s papa had been picked up during a strike, when they were waiting for some kind of knock at the door . . .
Fear is such a strange thing. Fear hides in crevices in our brain, just waiting for a chance someday to leap up and grab us and make us want to leave our skins and run away.
“What if it’s the police?” she asked.
“Oh, now, Gusta, don’t be ridiculous!” said Josie. “Why would we care one single teaspoon’s worth of moldy wheat flour who it is in there? Now look — there’s Bess back.”
“Papa says we should come on in and play, all the same,” said Bess to her stepmother, who shrugged and opened the door wider again.
“In you go, then,” she said. “All the warm air’s about gone from this house already.”
Josie, with a slight but audible growl of impatience, dragged Gusta up the steps and through that door.
Gusta blinked as the world came into focus. Even fancy eyeglasses didn’t make your eyes adjust any faster to the dark. The room was like a cave, but there were people in it instead of bats. Last time she’d been in this room, she hadn’t been able to see the details, like the calendar on the wall — too old and raggedy to be for this year, surely — with a covered bridge in the picture.
There was a second chair dragged right up next to Uncle Charlie’s chair, and a man in that chair, leaning toward Uncle Charlie. The sweet, stuffy smell of someone having recently smoked a cigarette hung over everything, thickening the already thick air of that closed-in room.
“Here’s quite a crowd!” said the strange man, turning around to look at them. “Who have we here?”
“That’s my Bess,” said Uncle Charlie, gesturing in Bess’s direction. “And her cousin there.”
He didn’t say anything to explain about Josie, but that didn’t bother Josie very much. “We’re the Honorary Orphan Band now,” she said.
“An orphan band!” said the strange man. “Well, now, how about that!”
“Not real orphans,” said Bess in a rush, because of course, there was her own father sitting right there.
“This is quite something,” said the strange man, and he turned to Uncle Charlie. “What do you think, Mr. Goodman? All right if I stick around to hear a song or two?”
Who was this fellow? The voice was oddly familiar to Gusta. Maybe it was the rhythm of it. A sort of crispness that reminded her of people she had known (or her parents had known) in New York.
And Uncle Charlie didn’t have the air of someone dealing with the cops.
Gusta began to feel just a little less anxious.
“Go on, girls, why don’t you?” said Uncle Charlie. “Play us something.”
So they got out their instruments and rubbed their hands together to warm them up some, and then they went ahead and played a couple of their songs.
“Not half bad!” said Uncle Charlie when the Honorary Orphan Band looked up shyly after the second song. What’s more, he was smiling a little, and that changed something about the shape of his face. Some of the shadows had backed off for a moment. Bess grinned.
The strange man slapped his knee with a surprising amount of enthusiasm.
“Wherever in the world did you girls learn those tunes?” he said. “That surely does beat all! ‘Hard Times in the Mill’! They won’t believe me when I tell them.”
It turned out to be quite satisfying, having an audience.
“Mr. Smith is up from New York,” said Uncle Charlie.
Gusta jumped a little. Oh! Mr. Smith! Up from New York!
Could it be?
Of course, there were lots of Mr. Smiths in the world. Almost more than any other kind of mister. And a lot of them surely lived in New York. It only made sense.
“Listen, girls, what would you say to earning a little money?” said the enthusiastic Mr. Smith. Now Gusta could hear it in his voice: he was definitely a New Yorker. In fact —
“Sure,” said Josie. She said it right away, as if it were the most ordinary and expected sort of thing, to be offered money for playing songs on a ukulele, a French horn, and a jar full of dried beans.
“What do you have in mind?” asked Uncle Charlie with a frown.
“Come play for the big union vote we’re holding for the Kendall Mills. It’ll be in the town hall — lots of folks to vote. We’ll pass the hat and make it worth your while. Five dollars, guaranteed.”
And suddenly, just like that, Gusta closed her eyes and was completely confident about which Mr. Smith this Mr. Smith was. It had only taken her this long because her new eyes had so flatly disagreed with her ears. Her eyes saw all the details in that face — the two moles on his cheeks, the angled eyebrows — and the details were all unknown to her. But the voice was not just familiar because it was a New York voice: it was a voice she knew.
“You work for the union,” said Gusta, and again she missed the warm brassy voice the French horn gave her. Her letter! That’s what she was thinking. Her letter must have worked some kind of magic, after all.
“Surely do, little girl,” said the man. “Elmer Smith, up from New York City.”
Gusta sucked in a lung’s worth of air so fast she started coughing.
It was indeed the Mr. Elmer Smith. She had sat on a little chair in the corner in his union offices a dozen times, probably. But for a moment there her new eyes had blinded her.
“You all right?” said Elmer Smith. He didn’t recognize her, but then he would never even have glanced over at the Neubronners’ quiet, scrawny daughter — why would he? And he wouldn’t have guessed in a hundred years that that same quiet, scrawny, forgettable daughter was up in Springdale, Maine, now, living in her grandmother’s children’s home. He didn’t have to blame any fancy new glasses for his misrecognition. He would certainly have misrecognized forgettable Augusta even in Manhattan, without her parents in the pi
cture.
Gusta just nodded. She was fine.
“Mr. Smith got a letter about the Kendall Mills,” said Uncle Charlie. “That’s why he’s come up here.”
A satisfied thrill ran up and down Gusta’s neck. She couldn’t help it: she was holding her breath.
“Not just any old letter,” said Mr. Smith. “An appeal from a local workingman, up here in southern Maine. Thought it was Mr. Goodman himself who penned that eloquent appeal, but apparently not. Letter described some lamentable instances of exploitation and injustice, as for instance what has happened to Mr. Goodman here. ‘High time we lent the mill workers of Springdale a hand up,’ we all said when we read that letter. So up I’ve come, to support the fine work of the Federation of Woolen and Worsted Workers and to organize our brothers and sisters in the mills and the shoe factories. And Saturday in two weeks, it’ll be the big vote. Can’t waste time now. There’s a race in this country, between the war, you know, and the rights of the Working Man.”
“What do you mean by that?” said Uncle Charlie. “We’re not at war.”
“Not yet, we’re not,” said Mr. Smith. “But they’re already using it as an excuse for all kinds of mischief. Look how they’ve been trying to nab that old crusader Harry Bridges! They passed a whole law just to try to bring him down and get him deported.”
Oh, yes, thought Gusta. Oh, yes. The Smith Act.
Not the same Smith as Mr. Smith from New York.
She remembered her father’s voice, the tension in his shoulders, the way he punched one tense fist into the tense palm of his other hand. “There it is! They’re coming after us for sure. They’re after Harry Bridges, and they’ll be after me. Alien Registration Act! Smith Act! Ha! They can call it whatever they want, but they’re not really worried about Nazi spies — they’re worried that people might start organizing in their factories. They’ll do anything they can to deport us organizers. That’s all that Smith Act is really about: it’s about how much they want us gone.”
They were going to charge August Neubronner with being an alien and a Communist, that’s what he had said, and they changed the laws so that they could deport you, if you had ever been in some too-revolutionary group. Look at how they kept trying to deport that courageous Harry Bridges, who had come all the way from Australia to help the dockworkers of San Francisco get a fairer deal! At least being sent back to Australia was better than being sent right back into the gnashing teeth of Germany.
That was what her papa had said.
But Josie had already headed back to the crux of the matter. “Five dollars, you said, Mr. Smith?” she said. “Sure thing, we’ll be there. I mean, if it’s all right with you, Mr. Goodman, of course.”
Josie had almost forgotten to add that last bit in her enthusiasm.
“Will there be any trouble?” said Uncle Charlie. “I don’t want my Bess mixed up in any trouble.”
Mr. Elmer Smith smiled. “Everything’s as legal as legal can be,” he said cheerfully. “Shouldn’t be a stitch of trouble. You come along and see for yourself.”
“But Charlie . . .” said Mama-Liz.
Her worries didn’t have a chance, though, up against the confidence of Mr. Elmer Smith, or the magic of the words five dollars.
Five dollars was to Uncle Charlie what a ribbon at the fair would be to Gramma Hoopes: something real.
It was a Saturday in May. By decree of Gramma Hoopes, it was also Potato Day, 1941.
Gramma Hoopes had consulted the almanac and had poked an inquisitive finger into the soil of the kitchen garden, and her voice was law, in the area of potatoes. Uncle Jay drove the tractor over on Thursday and plowed up an acre’s worth of the kitchen garden, ready for planting; then he raked it smooth with the harrow, and after school Thursday and Friday, the older children started hoeing the earth into proper rows, to get a bit of a lead on Saturday’s planting.
It was all pretty hard work, but the boys were excited. They liked potatoes, and they liked doing something different with their Saturday (the uncles would have to do without their help for a day), and they really, really liked the early morning pancakes and bacon that Gramma Hoopes considered essential fuel for potato planting.
You didn’t grow potatoes from seeds, like other plants. You started off the new potatoes with pieces of old potato. Bess showed Gusta how to cut the potatoes into useful chunks, not too big and not too small, each with not too many sides and — most important — an eye.
“Don’t mangle them!” said Bess, watching Gusta early in the day. “That’s the main thing. They won’t grow right if the cuts aren’t clean. It’s just like people — Mama-Liz says ragged wounds always heal slower —”
“Bess, ick!” said Gusta, whose knife would never be able to keep up with Bess’s, no matter what. “Don’t you go making me think of them as little people! These are just potatoes.”
“Well,” said Bess reasonably, “I’m sure that even potatoes don’t want to be mangled.”
Gusta couldn’t help thinking about all the ways wounds could turn out to be ragged — like Uncle Charlie’s mangled hand. He had been mangled, all right. Not all damage can be fixed, but maybe some can. . . .
“Grow strong, little potatoes!” Bess was saying. “Be brave and grow!”
When the potatoes were all safely in the ground — except for the traditional scalloped potatoes, which were all safely tucked into the many bellies of the Hoopes Home boarders — Gramma Hoopes declared a general period of repose, meaning naps for the littlest (Delphine) and the oldest (Gramma and Aunt Marion), and either absence or utter quiet for everyone else. Bess went walking home, to see whether Mama-Liz needed anything from her. The older boys trickled off in various directions; Gusta caught a glimpse of Larry lugging a book out the back door, to go do some reading in the cozy warmth of the pullet house. Josie did the dishes, and then fell uncharacteristically asleep in a big chair in the front room.
Gusta could hear the old clock ticking away in the hall, a sound accompanied only by some light snoring from the direction of her gramma’s room.
She couldn’t help it — she found herself wondering where her papa might be, just at that very moment. In a jail cell somewhere? In an airplane, flying toward danger? She had looked and looked and looked, and found no Wish in this house to save him. And was her mother at work right now, or sitting in a chair and wondering where her August and Augusta were? It made Gusta feel raw and off-kilter, not knowing any of these things. It was like a great knife had come down out of the sky and hacked their family into pieces. Ragged wounds heal slower. That was probably true — about people and potatoes both.
Gusta shook her head, trying to get out of that dark space.
It was so odd to be the only one awake and alert in that house — so entirely peculiar to be standing there in the middle of silence, when there was never silence at the Hoopes Home — that it made her feel quite odd indeed. Nervous, maybe, even. She remembered the fairy tale about the palace put under a sleeping spell for a hundred years. And then her mind jumped nervously to another place where every creature was more or less sleeping under a spell: that cave filled with bats, up on Holly Hill.
What had the old sea captain called it in his notebooks? A hibernaculum. Which must mean: a place where things hibernated. And then he had said something else, hadn’t he? Here I have found treasure.
The old captain had said that! In his notebook! In ink!
She hadn’t seen anything other than shadowy bats, when she had stumbled into that cave, but of course she had been distracted then by the worry of finding Delphine.
It wasn’t likely, but it was at least a teeny, tiny bit possible, wasn’t it, that treasure might mean an actual chest of jewels and gold?
Or maybe even (if he had gotten confused later, when he started talking about those boxes on shelves) a Wish?
And so, with a shiver, she opened the front door and slipped out onto the Holly Hill road.
Outside there was a faint wash of green in
the trees, the buds busy turning themselves into young leaves. And birds occasionally calling out to one another, probably gossiping about the latest trends in nest building or something.
Gusta walked briskly up the hill, waking up as she went. It didn’t take her very long to get to the cemetery. The road was a lot shorter without a horn weighing you down — or a pigeon cage.
But the bat cave turned out not to be such an easy place to find, even when you had been there once.
Behind the little cemetery, Gusta did pick up that thin track of a path leading up the hill. What she wasn’t entirely sure about, though, was where she (following Delphine) had left the path and stumbled into that wrinkle’s worth of wildness, where the cave was tucked away so cleverly into the rocks of the hill. She decided to be systematic about it, to keep following this path as far as it went, just to see where it led to, and then to turn around and walk back down slowly, trying to guess where you might want to angle around to the left, if you were looking for bats in caves.
The path climbed the hill in a leisurely way, sometimes threatening to fade out and now and then forking (she went uphill at forks) and finally curling around under what must be almost the very top of Holly Hill and suddenly spilling Gusta out onto a sunny lip of grass and rock, on the side of the hill, overlooking endless rolling tops of trees. Probably this lip was not far from the summit proper, but at that moment Gusta had no thoughts to spare about the top of the hill or the side of the hill or really anything about the topography of the hill, because what she was staring at, right there in front of her, was, instead of a cave full of bats, perhaps the very most opposite thing to a cave full of bats: a lighthouse.
The sea captain’s lighthouse! She recognized it instantly from the picture in his notebook. She couldn’t wait to tell Josie she had actually found it.