by Anne Nesbet
It was only because Georges started cheering that Gusta began to unfreeze again. His bellow was so friendly and encouraging that a scattering of people in the audience were infected by it and began to clap their hands or even cheer themselves, although they must all have been mightily surprised, and maybe even amused, by this twist in the Patriotic Pageant.
Molly was still making bossy gestures that definitely meant Come down here right this minute, Augusta Hoopes Neubronner! But of course it wasn’t a simple thing, finding a way to gracefully descend from her pedestal, when Gusta’s mind was all in a muddle of shock and surprise. Stepping down from her perch under all those eyes was plenty scary, especially considering that she knew Gramma Hoopes was sitting out in the audience, watching carefully to make sure no harm came to her bedsheet.
She took a careful step, and another step, and then she felt herself losing her balance nevertheless, knew she was about to fall, knew she was already falling, and curled up in a ball as she fell because she was trying so hard, so very hard, not to put any rips or tears in her grandmother’s sheet.
Wonder of wonders: she rolled, and came back upright again, and the sheet was fine!
The crowd went wild, because no one there had ever seen the Statue of Liberty turn somersaults before. Nor would they likely ever see that happen again, all the long years of their lives.
The rest of the fifth grade had been herded off the stage by then. Only Gusta was still standing there, and she was blinking from the miracle of the unexpected somersault and the untorn sheet.
And then the next unexpected-but-predictable thing happened, which is that as Gusta now looked out at those smiling, waiting faces, one of which belonged to her own mother, she could not remember a single word of that essay she had written in what seemed now like the awfully distant past.
Stand tall, she told herself. Look like you know what you’re about!
She felt a cold shiver all through her — probably the same shiver someone feels when they are about to fly up in an airplane, on their own, for the very first time — and she opened her mouth and even though she didn’t remember a single word of her actual essay, she began to speak anyway.
Gusta couldn’t exactly remember, afterward, the details of what she had said. She remembered little bits of it, like snatches of a dream: she remembered saying something about how many people shared Georges Thibodeau’s dream of flying up in an airplane high in the sky and looking out the windows down at the fields like squares way below you, but that when she had written the first version of this essay on “A Vision of America from On High,” she hadn’t really been able to picture very clearly in her mind’s eye what that would even be like, looking down from an airplane, because her own eyes had been so bad that she wouldn’t have been able to see the whole length of that airplane, much less the fields down below. But that she had learned since coming to Springdale, Maine, that vision is about more than what even a very good pair of eyeglasses allows you to see. That there are all sorts of ways of seeing from “on high,” and all sorts of very different ways of looking at the world.
And then she talked a little bit about bats and pigeons, the pigeons always seeing the world as the way home, and the little bats feeling about themselves with their bat sounds and bat noises, the shape of the echoes painting them a picture of their world almost as if they had tiny invisible fingers hundreds of feet long that they could run over the fields and forests below them, like we might feel the grain of a carpet, maybe.
Each of us has a vision of America, she said, like the way each of the flying creatures — the pigeon, the bat, the flying man in his metal airplane — sees something different when they look down at Springdale, Maine. She hadn’t known that before, and she was glad to know it now.
And that was all. Probably if she had had the written essay in her hands, she would have had another sentence at the end there, something to wind things up with all elegantly, but it was what it was, and the words had spilled out of her under their own power, and now they stopped spilling, and she was done.
The room was applauding — her grandmother was smiling — the Hoopes Home boys cheering so loudly that their neighbors had to lean away — Miss Hatch, over there to the right, looked rather pale and stunned (but also distinctly proud, pleased and proud) — and Gusta’s mother (her mother!) was not just grinning ear to ear, but was pushing forward through the crowd to where Josie and Gramma Hoopes were sitting, was embracing Josie in a great, enormous hug (Josie looked rather surprised), was turning now to come to Gusta — but Gusta was already there, trailing the untorn sheet, her arms around her mother’s neck, and glad, glad, glad!
Well,” said Gusta’s mother, with a sigh of contentment, as she and Gusta looked out over the field, dusted with the pale green of new shoots and first leaves. “It’s a great comfort to see you and the world mending so well. When that letter came from your grandmother, saying you were sick”— she gave her head the kind of sharp shake that sends the past back into its corner —“well, I had a bad time of it. And then I jumped on the bus, as soon as I could manage, and came up here. And here we are! Look at those potatoes sprouting up already! It’ll be time for hilling them soon enough.”
They had already helped with the frying up of breakfast, and the cleaning away after breakfast, and the caring for the chickens, and even some weeding of the vegetable garden. Gusta’s mother seemed to have an insatiable hunger for all the old farmhouse chores, and Gusta stuck by her and helped, and it was like having all the hurt places in her heart weeded and cared for and fed, going through that lovely long day of chores with her mother.
Hilling, though! Gusta liked the sound of that word. For a moment she set the potatoes aside in her mind and imagined instead Holly Hill, where the forest was thickening every day about the old bits of stone wall.
“You and I could go hilling later, couldn’t we?” she said to her mother. “I’ve found so many wonderful things on the hill. The old captain’s lighthouse and glittering rocks.”
“Ha, Gusta!” said her mother. “Maybe when I come back, beginning of August, blueberry season, we can go up the hill and pick for a pie. But you know that’s not actually hilling: you hill potatoes so more potatoes will grow. Shovel earth on top of them, so more potatoes grow underground.”
“Oh,” said Gusta. She was savoring the words when I come back. Then another odd thought came into her head and slipped right out of her mouth: “The baby potato plants must think you’ve given up on them, then, when the dirt gets shoveled over their heads.”
Gusta’s mother put her arm around Gusta’s shoulders for a long moment. “Maybe they do,” she said. “Hadn’t ever thought about it from the point of view of the potatoes. Come to think of it, maybe it’s even like being sent away to live in a place you don’t know, with a grandmother you don’t remember, and a new school and new teacher to get used to. That’s a lot to have shoveled over anyone’s head, even someone as hardworking and capable as you, Gusta. I know. I do know.”
Gusta couldn’t say anything to that for a minute or so. She just leaned against the warmth of her mother, come at last to visit her in Maine, and she felt all sorts of little jagged pieces inside her settling down comfortably into a pattern that meant something, even if she didn’t know quite yet what that something was.
Even if there was still no news from her father. No sign from Canada — no sign from any prisons or jails in this country. They were still in the dark about what had happened to him, Gusta and her mother. That was a still-sharp disappointment, in the midst of so much joy.
And of course there was the problem of the horn. She hadn’t told her mother about Mr. Kendall pocketing those five twenty-dollar bills. She hadn’t said anything about the money, because she also hadn’t said anything about tearing that line off her mother’s letter, way back on that cold day when she had walked up Elm Street for the first time.
“But look how much you’ve grown, underground!” said her mother, with a twisty, hal
f-glad, half-sad smile. “You’re an inch taller and a mile smarter. Wish I could just stay up here and watch you grow.”
“Oh, why can’t you stay, Mama?” said Gusta in a rush. “Now that you’re here, why don’t you just stay?”
But those were unfair questions, and Gusta knew the answers to them already. Gusta’s mother couldn’t stay for very long — not this time. Not yet. She had her job in New York, and you didn’t just walk away from paying jobs.
But here she was now, and that was a pretty good sign that she would come back again.
And part of why she could be here now had to do with Josie. Gusta’s disastrous visit with Mr. Kendall might not have been entirely a disaster, after all. It might be part of the reason her own mother could now come home and do chores for a day or two, instead of always staying so far away. Her mama had explained, and it was almost like a fairy tale, when she described it — a fairy tale that had had to wait a very long time for any kind of happy ending.
Long, long ago there had been a big fight, apparently, over the difference between what Gusta’s mother thought was the right thing to do for Josie, and what Gramma Hoopes and Aunt Marion had decided to do.
Gusta’s mother thought if a child was not an orphan, she needed to know that, come what may.
Gramma Hoopes thought that you should not be so reckless, when there are people’s lives and reputations in the mix. But on the other hand, of course you had to keep family close. If need be, then, you brought in all those other children, orphans and half orphans — you started a Home in your home — to disguise the fact that one of those orphans, the First Girl, was actually your own, the child of your child.
“So I said,” Gusta’s mother had said, hooking a loose strand of hair behind her ear (they were out in the soft evening air together then, looking across the fields toward Holly Hill), “that I wouldn’t be part of their falsehood, and I wouldn’t come back until I could call Josie my own niece. I was hotheaded, wasn’t I? But you know”— she had had a little fire in her eyes when she said it —“I still think I was right.”
Honestly, Gusta was rather amazed that she had never realized, all these years when her father was rallying people to the cause, that her mother, too, was a person who, like the Statue of Liberty, held a light up high and wanted truth to shine into all shadowy places. A stubborn person, when it came to justice and love.
But we discover things about our parents all our whole lives long.
There were things Gusta’s mother had forgotten about her own sea-captain grandfather, for instance.
So when Gusta brought down the big notebook from the attic, with all its pictures of snaggletoothed bats, Gusta’s mother clapped her hands in amazement and turned the pages with careful hands. She thought that the professor in New York for whom she had been doing so much editing and typewriting might be very interested to see those pictures, too. Professor Jones worked at a museum where they studied all kinds of animals — even bats.
So with Gramma Hoopes’s permission, Gusta’s mother packed up two of the notebooks very carefully and took them back with her to New York City.
And just before she climbed up the stairs onto the bus and rumbled away, Gusta’s mother bent and whispered a fairy-tale promise into Gusta’s ear: “And remember: blueberry season, Gusta! I’ll come back for sure, in blueberry season. Apart and working through July — and then I’ll come home and we’ll both eat pie!”
Let me get this straight,” said Josie. “You went and sold your horn, but you didn’t get any money for it?”
Gusta had finally been cornered. Literally cornered: in the kitchen, at the end of a bout of washing dishes. Josie corralled her with arms and dishcloth and wouldn’t let the question go: Why hadn’t Gusta ever bothered to go over to the high school and pick up her horn?
Didn’t she even care about the Honorary Orphan Band? (said Josie) Whose chance at a legitimizing ribbon from the county fair was plummeting every day, without their horn player? Wasn’t that horn supposed to be all special and dear to Gusta’s heart? So why hadn’t she ever brought it home? Didn’t Gusta even care?
Oh, how Gusta cared! But the horror of Mr. Kendall’s hand grabbing the money — his threat about calling the police — the shame of having let him take that hundred dollars away — the feeling of failure Gusta sank into whenever she thought back to that music room at the high school — the fear that if she said too much, Josie would get herself into yet more trouble —
“It’s the Kendalls,” Gusta had said, keeping it all vague, though the pain in her soul was pretty much the exact opposite of vague. “I can’t go back to Miss Kendall, not after everything.”
Josie shook her head.
“Nope, not good enough, Gusta. You are explaining this to me now: Why can’t you just march over to the high school and pick up your horn? Miss Kendall may not like us anymore, and it might not be the most pleasant hour of your life, but she’s not going to steal an instrument from a kid. I tell you honestly, if you won’t go get it back, then I’ll go, and I’m sure that’s worse, where the Kendalls are concerned.”
Gusta stared into Josie’s determined eyes and saw that the game was up.
“Miss Kendall didn’t steal it,” she said. “She bought it.”
Josie blinked. “You sold your horn?” she said. “You really did? Why? And whyever wouldn’t you tell us afterward, anyway? I thought you were bound and determined never to sell that horn until your dying day or longer.”
“Because of Uncle Charlie,” said Gusta. “The horn was worth a hundred dollars, and that’s enough to fix his hand. I couldn’t not sell it, then, could I?”
“Oh!” said Josie. For a moment even Josie could say nothing at all. Then she said, “So he’s getting his hand fixed up for real? You got all that money? And Bess never even said a word!”
Gusta gulped. She hadn’t known before that shame could bubble up in a person like a tarry, viscous fluid, burning every part of your throat and soul.
“That’s because there didn’t end up being any money. He grabbed it away,” she said. “Mr. Kendall. I couldn’t stop him. I should have run away faster, before he grabbed it. But I didn’t, and it’s gone.”
Josie asked about five more questions, pulling the whole story out of Gusta’s poor shame-ridden gut.
Her last question was, “Are you sure Miss Kendall knows he took that hundred dollars away?”
That took Gusta by surprise. She hadn’t done a lot of thinking about what Miss Kendall’s view of it all might have been.
“She needs to know,” said Josie finally. “It’s simple logic. I guess I’ll have to go talk to her after all. I know she’s in the school on Wednesdays — there’s summer rehearsals for Regionals going on.”
“No, don’t,” said Gusta. “I’ll go. I won’t look so much like a frightening blackmailer if I’m all on my own.”
Josie laughed, probably because Gusta was still pretty scrawny around the edges.
“You sure?” she said. “All you have to do is go in there and tell the simple truth, you know. You should have the French horn or the money, after all. It’s only fair.”
And that was how Gusta ended up back at the music room door, after almost being run down by a few grown-up-looking girls with violin cases.
She took a deep breath and went in through that door as if she were actually brave.
There was Miss Kendall, straightening music, as usual. She looked a bit different, though — older and tireder. And when she saw Gusta, her face went pale, which was very different from days gone by.
“Augusta!” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“The thing is, Miss Kendall, there’s something I need to ask you,” said Gusta.
“What can that be?” said Miss Kendall. She sounded so very sad. “I will tell you the truth, Augusta. I’ve never been as perplexed and disappointed in all my days. I was so proud of you girls, of your talents and your hard work. But my trust was misplaced. And now you come bac
k again? Whatever for?”
Gusta took a deep breath.
“The thing is, Miss Kendall — it’s about the French horn,” said Gusta. “It’s just, I only wanted to sell it to help my Uncle Charlie. But without the money, it doesn’t do any good. And I don’t know — I’m not sure — but maybe you don’t know . . . that I didn’t end up with the money.”
Miss Kendall pulled back. The sadness in her face froze immediately, into something harder. “But Augusta! I put the money for it right into your hand, in this very room. How can you say otherwise?”
“So I guess Mr. Kendall didn’t tell you after all?” Gusta was so nervous and so frightened and so angry by now that she wasn’t quite sure how her sentences were managing to come together. But she had backed down too many times, and she was not going to back down today. She figured she must have learned something from her stint as the Statue of Liberty! She stretched her now-sixth-grade self as tall as possible — a mighty woman with a torch — and told the truth, the truth, the truth: “Because, Miss Kendall, he took that money away from me, right outside that door! Two minutes after you gave it to me. I thought he would have told you. But maybe he didn’t tell you. So it did no good for Uncle Charlie after all. He still needs that operation. So I thought I would come ask you about it, since you have the horn and Mr. Kendall took the money. . . .”
Without the horn, her voice seemed like such a puny thing. She ran out of words, there at the end. But she had spoken the truth, and that had to count for something.
Miss Kendall was staring at her. “How can you say such a horrible thing about — about Mr. Kendall?” she said.
“I think you should ask him,” said Gusta. “Ask him, Miss Kendall. Please just ask him. He didn’t know about the horn. And he was so angry. Please ask him, that’s all.”
And that was about all Gusta could manage. She slipped back out into the hall and ran out, out, and away.