The Hole in the Wall

by Lisa Rowe Fraustino

  We’d get fresh batteries for the flashlight tomorrow so we could look around for more clues in the tunnel and cavern. And then we’d sneak into the gore to look around at the base of the cliff below the tunnel. If there was any sign of Jed in sight, we’d find it.

  Along our walk home we came across Celery sitting on a rock, shivering. She fluttered onto my sneaker and rode the rest of the way back to the henhouse. Barney was thrilled to see her. I propped Jed’s protest signs against the hole in the closet to keep Celery out of there during supper time.

  We had no idea what hour it was, so we hurried into the house. Grum sat in her rocker, clicking her false teeth over her yarn ball. Ma hunched over the sink clanking pots and pans. The pillow and the cushions on the couch looked as if Pa had just gotten up. Everything seemed normal. The tunnel, the cavern, the rock wall, the boulder—none of that seemed real. Not the visit from Odum, not Ma’s fight with Pa, not him leaving.

  Maybe none of that had happened. Maybe I’d imagined all of it. The whole day. No, three whole days! Maybe I’d just now gotten out of bed Thursday morning and was on my way to tend the chickens. They’ll all gather around my feet when I walk in, squawking for their corn.

  “Good, just in time to wash your hands for supper,” said Ma with a smile over her shoulder. Her glasses were all fogged up with steam, making me think of the magic glasses that had shown us the secret world hidden in the rocks. I felt in my pocket for them, and instead something crinkled under my hand. Jed’s letter. Just as good. It proved the chaos was all real.

  Humming, Ma turned to stir something on the stove. And then the hum broke right out into an old rock ’n roll song. Not a sad sort of my-life’s-gone-wrong song, either. A dancing-in-the-streets sort of song. You’d think she’d be in a sad mood after what happened with Pa, not knowing what the future would be, but I hadn’t seen her looking this happy in a long time. No, I’d never seen her looking this happy. She looked younger and perkier, as if weights had been lifted off her face.

  Barbie and I made faces at each other. I shrugged. She shrugged back. Then we smiled, just happy to see Ma happy.

  Grum looked up and smiled at us smiling at each other. “So, what have you two been up to?” She always wanted to know that.

  “Oh, not much. Just goofing around outside,” I said. “What have you two been up to?”

  “Let’s see. Your mother and I rented a family movie for tonight, then we both had a little nap, and now I’m keeping her company while she makes supper.”

  “Cool,” I said, mostly about the family movie. We hadn’t watched one in months. Pa never liked the ones Ma let us kids watch, and he’d get all ornery if we cut into his time with the remote control, so we just gave up and did other things.

  While Ma pulled the garlic bread out of the oven, Barbie reached the plates down from the cupboard and handed them to me. I set them on the table without bribery or blackmail.

  Now Ma looked at me suspiciously. Or maybe it was just concern. “Hey, Seb, how’s that stomachache of yours? I was thinking, maybe we should take you to the walk-in clinic in Exton tomorrow. They’re open Sundays, and they take the government insurance for kids. Grum says if there’s a big copay, we can sell some cuckoo clocks.”

  “That’s right, we can,” Grum chimed her agreement. She had just made herself comfortable on the couch with her feet up on Pa’s pillow and was channel surfing the home shopping stations. “Some things are more important than keepsakes. On Monday we’ll ride to Exton to sell them and stop on the way home to get Sebby some good sneakers.”

  I was really touched. “Thanks, Grum, but you don’t have to sell any clocks. Well, maybe one, for sneakers, if you really want to, but not for doctor bills because guess what? My cookie dough came up a few minutes ago!” I announced this with a flourish of the forks I was setting on the table. “Ma, I hope you made a lot of food.”

  It was typical Saturday night spaghetti, Ma style. She’d boiled the noodles to death and burned the sauce. The meat-balls were tiny hard lumps of beef that made my molars ache, with so many chunky onions in them that I started burping before I was even done eating. Best meal of my life.

  After we got done cleaning up, it was already getting dark outside. Barbie and I grabbed our sweatshirts and headed for the door to rescue Barney’s harem and block off the tunnel.

  “Where do you two think you’re going at this hour?” said Ma, squatting in front of the DVD player. “Don’t you want to watch the movie?”

  Me and Barbie winced at each other. The disappointment in Ma’s voice was painful to hear. My stomach swam with a feeling I knew well, guilt.

  “Of course we want to, Ma,” said Barbie. “We just forgot you had a movie, that’s all.”

  “That’s right. We can . . . play outside tomorrow,” I said more to Barbie than to Ma.

  “Kids don’t play outside like they used to,” Grum said.

  She sat with her string in her rocker while Barbie and I cuddled with Ma on the couch. I felt warm and safe and, for the first time in a long time, like everything was going to be all right.

  And then, when the movie was almost over, the phone rang. I felt Ma stiffen as we waited, hoping not to hear another ring so we’d know it was Jed, letting us know he was okay.

  It rang again, and a third time. Who could be calling at this hour? A call this late could never be good.

  “Sebby, will you get that?” Ma said, since I was on the kitchen side of the cuddle.

  I didn’t want to get the phone. I was afraid it would be Pa calling to ruin the good mood everyone was in. But Ma asked me to, so I answered it, cautiously. “Hello?”

  “Sebby, good, it’s you. Listen, I don’t have much time. Don’t let anyone else know it’s me.”

  It was Jed! “What’s wrong?” I whispered into the phone. Something in his voice made me picture him looking over his shoulder, but I couldn’t imagine what he was afraid of seeing. I looked over my shoulder into the living room. They had paused the movie and the three of them were talking about something that had just happened.

  “Things have gone too far,” Jed said. “As long as you have that cookie dough in you, you can’t stay home. Get off the property or who knows . . .”

  “But—”

  “Look, I can’t explain. Just do as I say.” And click. He hung up.

  “Who was it?” Ma asked.

  “Oh, just a courtesy call.” I smiled to myself. That should do it.

  “How rude!” said Grum. “Up is down and war is peace, too. Those telemarketers . . .”

  That night I was so tired, I don’t even remember going upstairs. I just remember waking up in the dark not knowing where I was, with my bunk shaking, my back aching, and an awful noise filling my head. It was Barbie having one of her nightmare howls, and Ma trying to shake her out of it.

  “Barbie, wake up, honey.”

  “Where’s Pa!” Actual words. She was awake now.

  “He’s not here. Don’t worry, it was just a dream,” Ma soothed. “You can go back to sleep.”

  Maybe she could, but now I couldn’t. I lay there thinking about everything: Celery, the other chickens, the secret tunnel, Pa, Boots Odum, Jed. Especially Jed. How did he know about the cookie dough? He must still be around Kokadjo! And why did he warn me? He didn’t give me a chance to tell him I’d heaved. Was I still in danger? Should I still get off the property, like he said? Maybe spend the night at the Hole in the Wall? But if our property was dangerous, the gore probably wasn’t any safer. Maybe I should sneak into one of the outbuildings up at the commune. There were plenty of places to hide up there.

  And then I realized. Of course! The answer had been right under my nose the whole time. Or right next door. Zensylvania. Where if you sat in the right tree with a pair of binoculars on a clear day, you could see in our kitchen window. That’s where Jed must be. And as soon as I knew everyone had fallen back to sleep, I was going to ride my bike up there and find him.

  14

&nb
sp; I would have gone to find Jed right then if it hadn’t been for Grum’s cuckoos. They all chose that moment to go off, the one in her bedroom and all of them out in Jed’s castle. Everyone in the house was so startled, we added screams to the noise. Good thing Pa wasn’t there.

  We waited a minute for the cuckoos to get past the hour and quiet down, but it was a minute without end. Grum’s bed creaked and the light showed under her door. She was up fiddling with the cuckoo in her room. It stopped, but the ones in Jed’s castle kept going and going.

  “Someone’s been fooling with those clocks again!” Grum called.

  “Not it,” I said.

  “Me neither,” Barbie said.

  Grum knew that me and Barbie used to have fun playing with the cuckoos when Jed first moved out to the castle. We’d set the pendulums all out of sync, and after a while they’d all sing together. “Like magic,” Barbie said.

  “No, they synchronize because their motions send perturbations through the walls,” Jed said. I asked him if that was anything like ESP, and he said he wouldn’t be surprised if the same theory applied, but he meant that they vibrated themselves into unison. I sure missed listening to Jed. But with any luck I’d be hearing his voice again real soon.

  “Sebby,” Ma called in a groggy voice, “go do something about that racket.”

  And then I had a thought that scared the idea of going to Zensylvania straight out of my head. “Ma, what if someone’s out there?”

  The light in her room came on. She appeared in the doorway tying her robe, her hair sticking out all over and night cream splotched on her face. “Seb, where’s your baseball bat?”

  “Uh . . . Yankee Stadium?” Which in my imagination was located across the road in a certain cave where Babe Ruth hung out with outfielders from another galaxy.

  “Never mind.” Ma went back in her room and emerged with Pa’s hunting rifle. “You kids stay here with Grum. Lock yourselves in her room till I get back.”

  Grum appeared in her doorway looking skeptical. “Claire, is that thing loaded?”

  “Well, I, ah, don’t know,” Ma admitted. She didn’t like guns. She didn’t even know how to use one.

  “Find me some bullets, then. I’m going with you.” Grum held her hand out for the gun. She was a good shot. When she lived in the gore she used to pick squirrels off the bird feeder from her bedroom window.

  “Sweet,” I said, jumping down from the bunk. “I’m going too. Ow!” Upon landing a sharp pain ran up through my backbone.

  “Next time use the ladder,” Ma said, handing Grum the bullets.

  “I’m not staying here alone,” Barbie said. The two of us helped Grum into her shoes, then held her loose-skinned arms as she picked her way down the stairs. Usually Grum only did the stairs once in the morning and once at night because they were hard on her knees.

  She stopped in front of the mirror to pluck her new perm into place.

  I yanked the door open. It had been raining again, probably pouring, as I immediately felt when I stepped onto the so-called lawn. Luckily I was barefoot or what was left of my sneakers would have dissolved. An inch of water had pooled all around. And here’s the really strange part: that green stuff which passed for grass had turned all hard and pokey like a welcome mat made of Velcro. Don’t things usually get soft when they’re soaked in water? Anyway, I didn’t have a good feeling about Grum walking in this. The rutty lane was dangerous enough in the daylight when the ground was dry.

  “Grum, it’s really nasty out here. You should go back in. I can take the gun. Pa taught me to shoot.” It wasn’t a lie, exactly. He had let me aim the gun at a beer can once when he was target practicing.

  My grandmother hesitated, clinging to the railing, and craned her neck out toward the cuckoo ruckus. The porch light made a moony glow around her white asbestos curls, and without her teeth in, her cheeks looked like sinkholes in the strip mine. She could have been some photographer’s masterpiece.

  “I’ll pray for Jesus to guide me,” I offered. If anything would convince her to turn back, that would. But no, she was too worried to leave it to me to leave it to Jesus.

  “You two each take an elbow and help her,” Ma said. “I’ll light your way—I’ve got the flashlight. Oh, my, we need to get some new batteries. That trip to the commune must have used these up.”

  “Yeah, it must have,” I said.

  And so we headed out slowly, taking careful steps. There weren’t any lights on in Jed’s castle. The farther we got away from the house, the darker the ground seemed. The dying flashlight cast a weak yellow arc on the puddles and rivulets we steered around.

  “Ow!” My bare toe knocked something. It didn’t hurt, though, just startled me.

  Ma snapped the flashlight that way, and it spotlighted the cat dish, tipped on its side and spilling milk. “Who’s still wasting our good milk on the cat!”

  “Who might that be?” said Grum, pointing the gun at two foot-long shadows. Shoes, to be specific. Ma turned the thin beam on them to reveal a man’s body sprawled toes-up between the henhouse and Jed’s castle.

  Ma swore at Pa. They were his shoes.

  She traced the light along the rest of him. Yep, his best pants, his dress shirt, and his face, too. What we could see of it. Because on top of his chest sat Stupid, purring like Pa was his best friend. I was amazed. Pa the cat-hater had been taking care of Fluffy Kitty!

  “That’s my boy,” Grum said in mock pride. She clucked and gave Pa a poke with the gun. “Wake up, Sleeping Beauty.” The cat meowed and ran toward the henhouse.

  I would have checked to see if Pa was still breathing, but he started snoring when Grum poked him. He was passed out drunk, or so I figured from the sour beer smell. Luckily he’d fallen face up instead of down, or he could have drowned in the mud puddle. Or unluckily! Wishing Pa dead flooded me with pleasure. And then guilt.

  The cuckoos were still at it, so we left Pa and carefully made our way out to Jed’s castle. The nonstop cuckoo riot made me feel so crazy, I itched to run ahead and stop the clocks. For once I kind of understood the feeling Pa must have had when he used to go to such lengths shutting them up. But I held myself back to let Grum lean on me. Even though it wasn’t far, it took a long time for Grum to find firm ground to put her weight on. Between steps I wiggled my toes in the nubby mud.

  When Ma opened the door, a mixture of smells wafted out. Candles, sour beer, and something sweet that I had been smelling a lot of lately—the Perfume-Lady smell in the cookie dough and the secret tunnel. Barbie glanced nervously at me, and I knew she recognized it too.

  Back when he moved to the castle, Jed had run an extension cord from the house for electricity. Pa had yanked that out of the outlet with some flaming words after Jed ran away, so now our only light was a flashlight fading fast. Grum lowered herself onto the bed to rest under the crazy cuckoos as Ma shone the narrowing beam around to find some candles and matches.

  There they were, on a milk crate beside Jed’s bed, along with a bunch of empty beer cans. Pa must have been here earlier tonight drowning his sorrows with the cuckoos!

  The candles soon filled the little room with flickering light, and we saw the birds all popping out and singing. Grum reached up carefully to remove a clock from the Sheetrock wall.

  I remembered when we’d put up those walls, Jed and me and Pa, the day after Jed got the idea to move out there with Grum’s clocks. Until then, the play castle had just had bare stone walls. The clocks needed a flat surface to hang on, and a new layer of insulation in between would keep the room warm in winter.

  Pa whistled and told growing-up-in-the-gore stories as he showed me and Jed how to spread the Sheetrock mud over the seams and sand it down smooth. That day was the last time I remembered seeing those two in the same room for more than ten minutes without getting at each other’s throats.

  Now picturing Pa all pathetic in the mud with Jed’s cat made me feel bad for him. He blamed himself for Jed running away. We all blamed Pa. B
ut maybe we were all wrong. That note Jed had left in the caves made me wonder. I wished I could figure out the truth. But first, quiet the birds.

  When Grum took down the first clock, its cuckoo stopped singing, but the others kept at it. Grum inspected the clock front and back, then put it back on the wall. The cuckoo started popping in and out again.

  Barbie took another clock down. The cuckoo stopped. She put the clock back and the bird resumed its cuckoo business.

  I gave it a try—same thing. On off, on off, on off. It was pretty cool. I wasn’t minding the noise so much now.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, enough of that!” Ma started taking the clocks down and piling them on the bed. We all helped. The room gradually grew quiet. Outside the cat meowed.