The Orphan Band of Springdale

by Anne Nesbet

  Gusta’s mother reached into her pocket and pulled out a piece of mica to plonk into the old jar.

  “Tradition,” she said to Gusta.

  “I know,” said Gusta, and then of course she couldn’t help but remember that other time when something had fallen, midshine, into that jar. “Oh, Mama, I didn’t even get a chance to tell you before — but I went and wasted the old sea captain’s Wish.”

  Gusta’s mother passed the tonic over so Gusta could have another sip.

  “My grandfather’s Wish? You found something that really looked like a Wish? So where did you find it?”

  “It was in the button box!” said Gusta, and her mother slapped her own knee with satisfaction.

  “The button box! Of course. Where else would it be?” she said.

  “And now it’s in here somewhere,” said Gusta, pointing into the jar, where the mica twinkled so quietly. “It was that horrible day, when everything went wrong and I was sick. I wanted to make a wish that would make everything better, that would fix up Uncle Charlie’s hand and end the war and make the Kendalls be nice to Josie and save the French horn and bring Papa home . . . and instead I wasn’t thinking straight, and I messed up, and I dropped it. I’m so sorry.”

  Her mother was quite silent and still for a moment. Gusta felt like a stone on a teeter-totter, not yet knowing whether its fate would be to roll this way or that way.

  Listing everything out like that made Gusta remember all the things she had meant to fix and had messed up instead.

  But her mother made a sweeping-away gesture, and it turned out Gusta wasn’t on a teeter-totter at all.

  “Oh, goodness, Gusta,” said her mother. “Don’t feel bad. Wishes are such sneaky things. You never can tell how they’re going to go, wishes. Plus your Uncle Charlie’s headed off to Portland tomorrow, and that’s something.”

  Yes, it was true: Uncle Charlie was going to the big hospital in Portland.

  They were going to work to free up his hand from the scars binding it. It was the kind of fine-honed medical work that couldn’t have been done even twenty years ago, they said, and all that fancy doctoring was surely going to cost even more than a mere hundred dollars — more than even a French horn could pay for. But Uncle Charlie was going to have his hand worked on anyway, and that was all thanks to the sea captain’s bats.

  “I certainly never expected to owe so much to a bunch of flying mice,” said Gusta’s mother.

  “Thank you, bats! And thank you to your magical typewriting machine,” said Gusta.

  That, too.

  When Gusta’s mother came back up to Maine, she had brought a great clunky gray box with her, and in that gray box was an actual typewriter, such as they had in some of the training classes at the high school (Josie was very impressed).

  There was news to go along with that typewriter: the Museum of Natural History, where Professor Jones worked, turned out to be very interested in the notebooks of old Captain Griffiths. They liked his sketches from the forests of Madagascar, and they liked his sketches from the woods of Maine. They really, really liked his bats, which they thought might be a new subspecies, hitherto unknown. They wanted to make a book, a printed book, with copies of those sketches, so that many people could buy it and read it, and they wanted to put the original notebooks on display in the museum, and not only were they willing to hire Gusta’s mother to type up the captain’s notebooks, which she could do even while living up in the faraway woods and fields of Maine, but they would pay Mrs. Clementine Hoopes a thousand dollars for her permission to turn those lovely notebooks into a real and actual book and then put them in a glass case, on display.

  A thousand dollars!

  So it turned out that the “treasure” the old captain had found in that cave was those bats themselves.

  A thousand dollars was enough to pay for Uncle Charlie’s hand and more besides. That money would surely help them all get through this strange time, while the war was burning its way through so many parts of the world.

  Gusta’s mother put her arm around Gusta’s shoulders and squeezed her tight. And then she did something Gusta wasn’t expecting at all: she pulled a battered envelope out of her pocket and handed it to Gusta.

  “I’ve got something here for you, Gusta,” she said.

  The half sheet of paper inside that envelope did not have a lot of words on it, and they were cautious words, but Gusta read them with a fluttering, breathless heart:

  My dear small thingling! I am learning to fly. I hope you are learning to sail your own little boat. Be ever brave, for these are times which call for courage, even from the smallest thinglings. Your loving Papa.

  Oh! Gusta looked greedily back at the envelope — there was no stamp.

  “It came from someone who got it from someone who got it from someone else,” said her mother. “He is so careful, you know, your papa.”

  “And brave,” said Gusta.

  “Yes,” said her mother.

  “And now we know for absolute certain that he got to Canada,” said Gusta, with such a whoosh of relief in her heart and her voice that her mother put her hand on Gusta’s shoulder for a moment to steady her.

  “You were worried, too?” said her mother. “Of course you were!”

  She sighed. Gusta could feel the empty spot in her mother radiating its own complicated wishing. That was something they had in common, the two of them, a weakness for wishes. And an empty spot in their hearts that was roughly the shape and size of August Neubronner, husband, father, fugitive, and faraway fighter.

  “I hope they can finish their war, over in Europe, and the whole world can calm down,” said Gusta’s mother. “And your papa can come home again. But I don’t know when those things will happen, Gusta. I really don’t.”

  Gusta was rereading her letter.

  “He forgot I’m in the part of Maine where there are no boats,” she said.

  Her mother laughed a little; the laugh was sad, but it was a laugh.

  “Said the girl sitting in a lighthouse . . . Well, anyway. It’s a metaphor, that bit! Here, let me have another sip of that lovely stuff.”

  Gusta’s mother took that bottle of tonic back and finished it right up, smacked her lips, and looked out over the slopes of Holly Hill, rolling down toward (eventually) the invisible sea.

  The dark wall of a thunderstorm was taking shape over to the north. And ahead of the storm, the light danced about, making everything glitter while glittering was still possible.

  Making everything more intensely what it really, truly was.

  The clear light of trouble, etching out the edges of things against the black backdrop of the storm.

  Gusta leaned against her mother’s arm, and they watched that light doing its work.

  “You know, when I think about it, it’s almost as if —” Gusta said, and she stopped, because it seemed like it might be silly, and then she started bravely up again, because sometimes saying things that might be silly to your own mother is actually a perfectly reasonable thing to do. “It’s as if, even though I messed up that wish so badly, a lot of things are a little better, anyway. Do you think — do you think maybe that wish found ways to come a little bit true?”

  “Wishes are sneaky,” said her mother. “That’s the only sure thing.”

  Then she laughed.

  “Look at us, talking about those old Wishes as if they really could change the world somehow!”

  “I just want Papa to come back,” confessed Gusta, since this was the kind of place and the kind of light that made a person want to tell the truth.

  “Oh, Gusta,” said her mother, “yes.”

  And then Gusta’s mother did something wonderful and wild. She put down the tonic bottle and cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “Coooooooome hooooome, Auuuuuuuugust!” so that the sound of it went floating out above the trees on the hill.

  Gusta laughed with surprise.

  “Don’t be shocked,” said her mother. “This is the
sea captain’s own beacon we’re perched on. Beacons are for calling to people, seems to me.”

  So Gusta tried it, too: she cupped her hands and called her papa home, calling right out loud. It felt good to let some of her secret wishes out into the world that way.

  She was sure her horn would approve.

  The wind picked up a notch — the storm stepped closer. Gusta thought about the kitchen back on Elm Street, where there must be a bustle of activity right now, of chopping and stirring and kneading and laughing.

  Someone in that kitchen was probably looking up at the clock and wondering where Gusta and her mama were.

  Gusta smiled: it was good to live in a place where you were missed when you were gone and welcomed when you finally came back in through the door.

  Love and stubbornness, she thought. Love and stubbornness could make a family as sweet as blueberries and as real as jam.

  “Come on, Mama!” said Gusta, reaching for that lighthouse ladder, aglow in the last bright rays of the sun. “Come on, let’s go, quick, before the storm catches up.”

  It was time to get those berries home.

  “Oh, this reminds me of Maine!”

  — my mother, in front of any beautiful landscape anywhere

  There are stories that come from the heart, and stories that spring from the very bones that give us form. The Orphan Band of Springdale is one of those bone-marrow tales. It is my echo of a story that I wish my mother had been able to finish telling me — the story of her childhood, which was so hardscrabble and tough that she could only bear to give us scraps and pieces of it when we were little.

  We knew that she had to go to a new school in a new town every year, because her family could never afford to pay the rent and so had to move constantly.

  We knew that her father was not around most of the time.

  We knew that during particularly hard times she would be sent to live in the orphan home run by her grandmother up in Maine — an orphan home that had been started in order to hide a family secret.

  And we knew that out of all of this trouble and hardship, our mother emerged with some fine and enduring talents: how to tell a good story, how to bring extended family together around a table, and how to play the French horn. When summer came, she would take us back to the farming country of southern Maine, and we camped on a hill that had been allowed to go back to woods and from the top of which all the grown-ups insisted that with a good telescope you might be able to see sails off the Portland coast.

  This was not the Maine of fishermen and salt water. Instead of the ocean, we had occasional treks to Square Pond. The mosquitoes kept us on our toes.

  The cousins would gather at the end of the day, and over long afternoons my mother and grandmother and aunts and uncles and cousins would share epic stories in few words, while we kids ran around creating small kingdoms in the woods.

  I would have eavesdropped more often if I had known I would lose my mother early.

  My mother died too young, years passed, and all the stories about Maine kept wriggling and whispering inside me. Eventually I realized I was going to have to give voice to them. I could never know the whole truth about my mother’s childhood, but I could still write it anyway — as fiction.

  To make the fiction as true as possible, I spent some time at the Sanford-Springvale Historical Society in Maine, reading through old issues of the excellent local paper, the Sanford Tribune and Advocate. The flavor of 1941 comes through those newspaper pages: anxieties about drought and the war in Europe, “alien registration” drives, union elections in the local mills, a “7-Point Health Certificate” school campaign waged with vigor against bad eyes, crooked teeth, and malnutrition, all garnished with competing hyperbolic ads from the local dairies.

  So the seeds of this story are true, but the resulting crop is fiction. I changed the identities and biographies of my characters and even tweaked the names of the towns out of respect for the difference between Gusta’s fictional world and the childhood of my mother.

  My mother did love a good story, and I hope she would have been tickled by this one. In the heart-and-marrow of my dreams, sometimes she even looks up from the pages and smiles her wonderful, crooked grin and says, “Oh, Anne, this reminds me of Maine!”

  From our first conversation about this story to the final push to get the line edits done, Kaylan Adair always somehow managed to be at once ferociously exacting and lovingly encouraging. I am so grateful to her for helping me through the long labor of this book.

  At a crucial moment, Mary Lee Donovan stepped in with grace and aplomb. The people of Candlewick are a truly wonderful crowd! Anne Irza-Leggat, Phoebe Kosman, Kathleen Rourke, Lindsay Warren, and Allison Cole share an inspiring love for books and benevolent care for those books’ writers. Copyeditors Maya Myers and Maggie Deslaurier and proofreaders Kay McManus and Martha Dwyer turned the last rounds of edits into a surprisingly pleasant experience. Josie Portillo’s cover design makes my heart happy.

  Ammi-Joan Paquette has transformed the experience of being an author into something surprisingly joyous: thank you, Joan, and thank you to all the wonderful people in the EMLA community.

  Writing this book meant rediscovering the hills, fields, and woods of southern Maine that I first learned to love as a small child. Cousins and siblings — Stuart, Sara, Donna, Susan, and Barbara — filled those weeks on Walnut Hill long ago with mayhem and fun, whether we were exploring the woods, admiring the cows, or pumping water for washing socks. We were so proud that our Granny Mac could chop wood like nobody’s business, and we loved the stories told by all the uncles, aunts and great-aunts, and cousins once removed. I am grateful to Uncle Jim and Aunt Paula and to my sister Barbara (and her husband, Ken) for everything they’ve done to keep us all tied to Maine. And to Cousins Donna and Alan for welcoming us back so many times.

  Thank you to the members of the Sanford-Springvale Historical Society and to my eldest daughter, Thera, who joined me on a particularly memorable research expedition. Verle Waters and Kathryn Anderson shared farming stories. Stephanie Burgis and Jenn Reese gave me hope. My family — Thera and Ada and Eleanor and Eric — encouraged me all the way through, as did my dear friends Will, Jayne (and the war tuba band), Roo, and Judy. Roo came tromping through the woods to help me find my mother’s grave on what would have been her eighty-third birthday: friends are truly the bright mica in life’s back roads!

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, Helen, who was the original nearsighted, snaggletoothed child with a French horn in her hands. She died much too young, and I miss her.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2018 by Anne Nesbet

  Cover illustration copyright © 2018 by Josie Portillo

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  First electronic edition 2018

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number pending

  Candlewick Press

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  Somerville, Massachusetts 02144

  visit us at www.candlewick.com