The Orphan Band of Springdale

by Anne Nesbet

  “Along with yours, Georges,” said Miss Hatch. “But please do try to remember not to interrupt.”

  After the lunch recess, however, Miss Hatch was not waiting in the classroom for them all to come back in. The room was unlocked but empty. The children couldn’t understand where she might be. For the first five minutes, they sat at their desks, and then the situation deteriorated.

  “What if she fell sick?” said Sally Cairns, who was famous for imagining the worst.

  “An ambulance car would’ve driven up to the school, if they had to cart her off to the hospital,” said a boy. “There hasn’t been any car.”

  They looked at each other. Molly thought they should send someone to the office to announce they were all alone; others quietly doodled on their papers or (if they were Gusta) felt the heavy lump of dread growing and growing in her stomach. And just as the noise level in the room ticked up a few notches, the door opened, and there she was.

  Those who were not at their desks scurried to sit down. Hands were folded. Silence fell over the room.

  Miss Hatch looked pale, except for two angry blotches under her eyes. She looked over quickly, in particular, at Gusta, not just once, but twice, two almost instantaneous glances, and the lead weight in Gusta’s stomach became all at once at least twice as large and four times as heavy.

  “I’m afraid, class, there has been something of a —” She stopped. She was trying to find the right word. “A mix-up,” she said, but Gusta could tell that she wasn’t satisfied with that word, “about the aviation essays. I have been informed —”

  Miss Hatch looked at Gusta again.

  By Principal Jones, thought Gusta. Informed by Principal Jones.

  Gusta’s hands looked as pale as paper as she rested them on her desk, just waiting to see what blow would fall next.

  “I have been informed that I was wrong to let . . . someone new to our community be honored for writing the best essay on the theme of ‘A Vision of America from On High.’ I am very sorry about this change, since it seems to me an injustice. But I am sure our Patriotic Pageant will still be a source of pride and pleasure for all of us. The students who will share their essays with the audience will be Georges Thibodeau . . . and Molly Gowen.”

  A bellow from Georges: “WHAT ABOUT GUSTA?” And although he was the first and the loudest, he wasn’t the only one to ask that question.

  “I am asking you, class, to get out your reading books quietly,” said Miss Hatch. She didn’t even bother to tell Georges not to interrupt.

  At the end of the day Miss Hatch held Gusta back for a moment.

  “Augusta, dear, I want you to know something: in my classroom, it makes absolutely no difference who a pupil’s father may happen to be. The things I have been told about you today, by someone who has not been your teacher and has not seen your hard work, your quick mind, and your community spirit — those things have absolutely nothing to do with the Augusta Neubronner I have come to know and value. You will always be treated like any other student while you are in my classroom.”

  Then she took a breath.

  “But you see, Augusta, the thing is, the Patriotic Pageant is not limited to our classroom. It is for the entire school, and I do not run the school. So I’m very sorry indeed about the injustice being done to your essay, but I trust you will be sensible about this . . . sad error — and cheerfully let it go.”

  “Yes, Miss Hatch,” said Gusta, her lips numb as if she had been practicing her horn for hours and hours and hours. (Oh, her horn!) “Thank you, Miss Hatch.”

  She was feeling in a very great hurry to get herself out of that place, away from that school, away from everything.

  But outside Georges was waiting. He was standing on the walkway and fuming on Gusta’s behalf. “Gusta!” he said. “It’s NOT FAIR. Why are they doing this to you?”

  That was a question Gusta could only have answered properly on a day when all the secrets everywhere had come out to dance in the sunshine — and today was not that day. She stuck to the part of the answer that could be found in incontrovertible print.

  “There’s something about my papa in the paper today,” she said. “I guess it made everyone upset.”

  Georges looked at her. “In the PAPER?” he said. “He’s famous? Like an AVIATOR? Like AMELIA EARHART?”

  “Well,” said Gusta, “I think the paper didn’t say very nice things about him.”

  “Oh!” said Georges. “Then you mean, famous like Al Capone! Wow.”

  He fell silent for a moment, awed.

  Gusta said stiffly, “Not at all like Al Capone. My papa wants the world to be a better place. He wants justice. He’s not a gangster.”

  “Oh,” said Georges again, and Gusta could tell he was wondering why having a father who wanted the world to be a better place could be the source of so much trouble, at school, for that father’s daughter.

  Gusta said good-bye and left him standing there, wondering. Mr. Bertmann wasn’t expecting her that afternoon. Her head was aching. She did not feel quite right, not in any part of her, mind or body.

  When she got back home, her thoughts all in an uproar, she found turmoil there as well.

  “Something’s wrong with Josie,” the boys told her almost as soon as she came in through the door — the boys that weren’t Ron or Thomas, of course, quarantined with the influenza.

  “She was crying,” said Larry, in awe. Josie never cried. “Guess maybe she’s sick, too.”

  Gusta should have asked why, but she couldn’t really get the word out, and anyway, the boys’ words were tumbling over each other, trying to convey to Gusta how awful the last half hour had been.

  Josie, they said, had come home in tears, because of something someone had said at the high school.

  “Not just anybody — that music teacher of hers. The teacher said something that made her cry,” said Donald. “And you know how Josie loves the music teacher. So it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Teacher’s a Kendall. What do you expect?” said Clarence, with his usual sneer.

  Donald plowed on with the story: “And Miss Marion said, ‘but you said the concert went well!’ And Josie said it wasn’t about the singing at the concert, that it was something else. Something that Kendall fellow said, the one who runs the mills. Guess he said that Josie had asked for money or something —”

  “But Josie didn’t,” said Larry. “She didn’t do whatever that is. Did she?”

  Clarence shrugged, but Donald said with conviction: “No!”

  “And then Mrs. Hoopes came swooping in,” Donald went on. “And she made Miss Marion and Josie go with her into her room, and they’ve been there ever since.”

  A desperate, confused hush fell over the hall for a moment, all the boys looking at Gusta as if she could untangle these mysteries for them. It was awful. She felt a little sick. It was hardly ever quiet like this in this hall.

  That made her think of something else.

  “Where’s Delphine?” she said. “Is she asleep?”

  “Bess was here earlier — she took Delphine off to see Mr. Bill’s cows,” said Donald. “What’s going on, Gusta? Bess was all upset, too, I could tell. You don’t look great, either.”

  “I’m sorry, sorry — I’ve got to —” said Gusta, and then, completely unable to imagine how she could ever finish that sentence, or, for that matter, any sentence ever again, she slipped by them all and up the stairs.

  She shut the door of the little bedroom behind her, telling herself she must not cry. Everything had gone wrong; everything was falling apart. She had been tested by the storm that was Mr. Kendall — and she had failed. Nevertheless, she must not cry.

  When all has failed, then a person must do whatever she can with whatever is left, even if what is left is impossible, like a Wish.

  So she gave herself instructions: Pull the box out from under the bed. Find the sock with the thin, round, coin-shaped lump in it. Put her mended sweater on, and then her jacket.

&
nbsp; The lump went into the jacket pocket. It wasn’t so cold outside, late in the spring as it was already, but it would probably get colder soon enough. She could hardly tell, just at that moment, whether she was hot or cold, but she put a scarf around her neck. She would gladly have wound herself up in a hundred sweaters and a million scarves if it meant she wouldn’t have to feel anything, ever again.

  “Where are you going, Gusta?” said Larry when she pushed past him on the stairs. The boys had unclumped and scattered into various gloomy corners.

  “There’s something I have to do,” said Gusta, almost running now, escaping through the hall, past Clarence saying “What?,” and out across the porch, down the steps, down to the road.

  She turned up the road and fled to the woods, up into the wilds of Holly Hill.

  The world was surely coming apart at the seams.

  What had Gramma Hoopes said as she sewed Gusta’s button back onto that sweater? I can’t mend everything, but I can mend this.

  I don’t know whether I can mend anything at all, thought Gusta, as she climbed the dirt road up the hill with the Wish clutched fiercely in her fist. But I guess I have to try. I have to try. I have to try. Even if it’s just fairy-tale nonsense, still I have to try.

  She stumbled over a rock in the road, but didn’t fall, didn’t fall. Although her feet were being careless, inside her head Gusta was trying to be very careful. She was making a list, as she rushed up the hill, of everything that had gone wrong in her world:

  Josie! She had not meant to break that secret out of its shell. Now Josie was crying, and Josie never cried.

  And Bess’s father was still in trouble, still without a job. She had tried to do one right thing, and it had all gone wrong.

  She had lost her French horn. She had sold it for a hundred dollars, but in the end, she had nothing, not the money and not the horn.

  And her own father gone, too, a fugitive — if they caught him he would be in prison.

  Or if he had made it to Canada, he might soon — might already — be fighting in the European war.

  And the war might not stay in Europe. That headline in the paper today: PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: HITLER A THREAT TO AMERICAS — TIME TO PREPARE IS NOW.

  When you added it all up, it seemed a lot for any one Wish to fix. But you have to add things up, nevertheless, before you start planning.

  Insight into necessity, as her father would say.

  She was passing by the cemetery already. The Wish tingled in the palm of her hand. She left the dirt road here and took the path up the back of the hill. It seemed like the natural place to go.

  Even if she was going to try to use a Wish to mend the world — fairy-tale nonsense, whispered her papa — even if she was using fairy-tale nonsense, she was determined to do it in the most logical possible way.

  She was feverishly determined: she would be careful. She would not mess this up. Probably you had to say something out loud to make a wish. But just in case, she slipped the Wish back into her pocket, to keep it safely away from her planning thoughts.

  She had to walk more carefully here, where there were tree roots and surprising outcroppings of stone to catch your feet, but she kept only a third of her mind on the path. The other two thirds worked away at the question of the best possible wish, kneading words into place, tinkering, rejecting, reshaping, despairing. Not any old sentence would do. She needed everything bundled up into something terse, ironclad, and loophole-free.

  The first version that came floating into her head was silly: Please make Mr. Kendall and Principal Jones and Hitler change their minds and become kind, generous people, and in particular give me my hundred dollars back. She rejected that right away, as all loophole. It left all the people she cared about unmentioned, and who knew what a Wish might do with “kind and generous”! Maybe someone as wicked as Hitler might think it was kind and generous of himself to conquer ever more countries. No.

  Then a very different sort of thought: Please make Miss Kendall stay fond of Josie, no matter what. For a moment that seemed perfect: selfless and simple. But in the second moment she realized that a wish like that did absolutely nothing to help anyone. Probably Miss Kendall was still “fond of Josie,” even now, but being fond of people didn’t necessarily mean you would go against your bossy brother’s orders. Or even let talented Josie back into the high-school chorus. No, that was a bust.

  Third, a bright, clear bubble: Keep my father safe.

  But . . . only her father? In all that war? She shook her head: her father, who didn’t like the very idea of wishes, would hate the selfishness of this one.

  So: Keep everyone safe.

  Alarm bells! Alarm bells! Alarm bells in her head!

  Because just think how magic — sneaky, loophole-seeking magic — might interpret that term, safe! Gusta had a quick image of the whole world falling under some sort of Sleeping Beauty spell, falling asleep, wherever they were, so that they could never hurt anyone else ever again, or be hurt themselves.

  An icy prickle ran suddenly up her arm, and she found that her hand had somehow made its way back into her pocket and was actually scrabbling around there for the Wish. No! She raised both her hands very fast, right into the air, far from any pockets. And stood there, feeling dizzy. She had to stop walking a moment so she could shake her head clear.

  Had she really just been about to — to — to risk shutting down all of the human world? With one poorly phrased wish?

  Her head was so hot and achy. It felt about twice its ordinary size — it made even walking up the path feel like an endless slog.

  On Holly Hill, the woods were made up of a tangle of many kinds of trees, pitch pine trees and paper-skinned birches and old spruce, pointy-leafed maple and broad-leafed beech. As the path around the back of the hill skimmed the edge of a neighboring pasture, Gusta could see, through a gap in those mixed-up, tangled trees, mountains rising in the far distance, maybe as far away as the next state, which was, Gusta knew from school, New Hampshire. Gusta put a testing finger on the rim of her glasses: it was already a kind of magic, she thought, to look up with your own eyes and see mountains that were a hundred miles away.

  One last rise up through the trees, and the path spilled her out on the rock where the sea captain’s stubby, wonderful lighthouse rose up before her, with its funny name chiseled into its side, The Beckon Beacon. That seemed like the right place to bring a (possible) Wish, she guessed. Gusta clambered up to the little platform there, where the vase filled with fool’s gold shimmered a little in the late-afternoon sun. It was time. She fetched the Wish back out of her pocket; it seemed to tingle in her hand. Far away to the east, she knew, over there where the clouds were thick and dark, was the sea. You could not see the sea, but the lighthouse looked out and remembered it was there. The old captain had wanted to keep the lighthouse always looking out toward that ocean.

  She opened up her tingling palm and looked at the Wish sitting there. It glittered differently from the mica in the road: it sparkled as you looked at it, as if it were thinking bright, secret thoughts.

  The glittering Wish and her pounding head made it so hard to think properly. She looked at it, and she wished . . . she wished . . . she longed for everything to be — oh, how could she say it? What were the words? Everything was getting tangled up in her mind: her father, her mother, Josie, Gramma Hoopes and Aunt Marion, the war, Bess’s family, the principal, the mills, back to the war, and Josie again, and everyone hurting, sweaters with their buttons torn off, oh —

  “I wish,” she said right aloud, and then she clapped her hand over her mouth, because she had spoken without meaning to, and the Wish had become warm and very bright and almost slippery in her hand, and she realized she was already, without meaning to be, in the middle of making her wish, and oh, if only she knew what she was doing! But she also saw, suddenly, already halfway into using the Wish, already too late, that of course she had no idea how to solve all the world’s problems, that she had no more idea t
han a squirrel about how to make this wish perfect and fail-safe and fine.

  In the end, she wasn’t capable of making a wish, some wish in particular — all she could manage was wishING.

  Wishing, wishing, wishing. A gust of wishing wafted through her, without logical structure or carefully avoided loopholes or direct objects or even words — just a great wordless tidal wave of longing. Wishing. Wishing. She had set it off with those two little words, and now could not speak even a single word more. Her hands were shaking.

  And perhaps because of the tremble that now ran all the way down her arms to the very tips of her nervous fingers, the wishing spilling forth from Gusta became so great that the Wish itself tumbled out of her hand into the vase, hit the shiny rocks kept there, and for a moment Gusta had the impression that the lighthouse had burst into light, as if the vase held bits of actual stars.

  She seemed to be surrounded by light, almost too bright for her merely human eyes — she blinked — and the light was gone.

  In the vase, the Wish rested between two of the shiny rocks, and it looked as dull and gray as any ordinary coin. It looked empty.

  A bird in the trees behind her said, “Tooweet! Wit tooweet!”

  It was not fair. Not fair. But there it was: Gusta had had her chance (maybe) to wish the world well, to wish everything mended, and instead the last Wish was gone, all used up, and nothing to show for it. In the light of trouble, Gusta turned out to be so full of wishing that she couldn’t even manage to make use of one single actual Wish.

  She had wasted it. That was the plain truth. The world was still torn all apart, and Gusta had not mended it, not a single stitch’s worth.

  GUSTA!” said a brisk voice nearby. “For Pete’s sake. Wake yourself up!”

  Gusta had just closed her eyes for an instant, but now she found herself pushing up from an oddly unforgiving surface in a world without sunlight. Why had she been sleeping on the floor of their room? That was foolish. No wonder Josie — because that was the person the voice belonged to — was yelling at her.