My One Hundred Adventures

by Polly Horvath

  I run up the road first to ask my mother if it is okay if I come home later. She says of course it is. Sunday dinner is always in the evening at our house, as the sun sets. As if we are feasting to mark the end of another week. I know Sunday is supposed to be the beginning of the week but my mother’s Sunday tranquility makes it feel as if we are putting the week to bed, pulling the covers up under its chin, blessing what has been and closing its eyes for sleep.

  My mother goes off with my sister and brothers. She has much to do. Summer Sundays she spends sweeping the sand out of the cottage and changing the sheets and picking fresh flowers to go around all the rooms. I watch their innocent backs going over the crest of the hill as if I will never see them again.

  I go into the Sunday school room but get shooed out by Mrs. Henderson, who is the piano teacher in town but also teaches the younger children’s Sunday-school classes. She frightens me and I am glad I no longer have to return to that room with her snapping voice and heavy piano-pedal-pounding foot.

  I sit on the back steps of the church by the Sunday-school room and make daisy chains from the tiny daisies growing in the church field. Finally Nellie has blessed everyone she can find, even some men stumbling out of the tavern, confusing them more than they normally are. She can no longer put off dealing with me.

  “So,” she says, approaching.

  I tell her my worries about deliberately not praying for Mrs. Nasters.

  “It’s all energy,” she says finally. “It’s like illness. When people are sick, it is just their own unresolved issues affecting their energies. Do you understand what I mean?”

  I nod as if I have known this all along. As if this is perfectly natural. It does make a kind of sense.

  “Then Mrs. Nasters…”

  “Cancer is usually caused by people’s unresolved anger,” says Nellie. “Mrs. Nasters has a lot of work to do. Spiritual work.”

  “Mrs. Parks’s thrombosis?”

  “Blocked energy. Are you interested in these things, child?”

  I nod. She is clearly interested in them. How can I say no without being rude? But it’s not this so much that I am interested in as something, that I want to find, or see, something that I know is there, in everything, that if I can only be good enough, or, as she believes, positive enough, I can get a clearer glimpse of.

  “Well, I should take you on my healing sessions, then.”

  I must look completely blank, because she explains to me that she uses her hands to move people’s energies and unblock them.

  “Of course, not everyone is receptive,” she says.

  I would guess not. I try to imagine telling Maya or Max or Hershel, Sit still, your energy is going to be unblocked.

  “Well then, come with me. I have to deliver Bibles this afternoon and I will drop in on Mrs. McCarthy. She has asked me for a healing session. Of course, she calls it laying on of hands because that’s what the old-timers used to call it. She’s in an old folks’ home outside of town. We can drop in on her and spend the rest of the day delivering the Bibles in that direction, because I haven’t been out that way yet.”

  The missionary movement within our church sends every congregation boxes of Bibles to distribute. Every week Nellie tries to rope in anyone she can to help. But as much as people seem to like Nellie Phipps, you know what Sunday is, it’s a day with a lot of potential for naps.

  “I ought to ask my mother,” I say, getting into Nellie’s car.

  “When are you people going to get you a phone out there?” she asks as we drive to the parking lot closest to our beach.

  “Oh gosh, Miss Phipps, I dunno,” I say. My mother has five mouths to feed.

  “You run on, now. I don’t want to get sand in my Sunday shoes,” she says. “And tell your mother you don’t know if you’ll be home for dinner or not. It’s time-consuming to get your energies flowing again. You stopped them when you didn’t pray for Mrs. Nasters but we’ll release them with this positive work.”

  I run over the hot sand and find my mother digging some clams for dinner. I tell her I’ll be gone all day and maybe won’t come home until after dinner because I am going to distribute Bibles with Nellie Phipps. At this my mother straightens up and wipes her hands on her skirt and says, “Well, how in heaven did you get yourself roped into that?”

  “I don’t know,” I lie. Nellie Phipps wants me to explain how I need to unblock my negative energies to let the positive energies flow and that Bible delivering is one step, but I know what will fly with my mother and what won’t.

  “Well, if you said you would I guess you’d better, though it’s a shame to waste such a lovely day.”

  “I know,” I say. “I just got stuck.”

  My mother nods.

  I am interested in seeing Nellie do this stuff with her hands. This sounds miraculous to me. I just don’t really want to deliver Bibles. Forcing anyone to read anything doesn’t sit right with me. I run back along the beach looking out to sea, praying to be distracted by whales. If I see whales, I think, it means my energy is fine and I don’t have to bother with Nellie Phipps and her Bibles, but I don’t see whales. I decide that this isn’t conclusive. It may just mean that God isn’t into the obvious.

  I get in the car and Nellie and I drive right out of town, the boxes of Bibles slamming around in the back of the station wagon, which doesn’t have very good springs, and so we and the Bibles bounce along the country roads, giving new meaning to the expression “Bible thumping.” I don’t share this with Nellie.

  We stop at the old people’s home first and I trail along shyly behind Nellie. She goes right up to Mrs. McCarthy’s room.

  “Reverend Phipps!” says Mrs. McCarthy from her bed. She is white, her skin pale with age and illness, her hair snowy and fluffy; her sheets are white, her nightgown is white. I imagine when she dies, she just melds further into this whiteness and then disappears. There is no need to bury her. It is a very clean death.

  No one pays any attention to me. They are chatting as I stand there thinking about Mrs. McCarthy’s whiteness. And then, as if they have done this a thousand times, Mrs. McCarthy silently lies back on the bed and closes her eyes and Nellie moves her hands slowly and deliberately about six inches over her. She does something strange over Mrs. McCarthy’s head, as if she is pulling invisible things out of it.

  It takes about ten minutes and then Mrs. McCarthy sits up and smiles peacefully. “Oh my,” she says. “Oh my. That was powerful! Powerful!”

  “Yes,” says Nellie. “I’ll be seeing you next week, then.”

  We go silently back down the stairs. I feel oddly peaceful, as if whatever Nellie was doing has affected me too.

  We get into the car without a word and drive on.

  Eventually this serenity fades, like bathwater seeping out a leaky drain, and I am sad that the real world and my usual feelings return and intrude. I begin to wonder if it was all in my head back there and I look at Nellie. She doesn’t look so coolly serene anymore either. What happened and why didn’t it last? I am too shy to ask and I’m not sure Nellie knows anyway.

  We are far out of town now. Nellie says we have to drive a long way to be in a Bible-dropping territory she hasn’t covered yet. I see long wild lupins and some kind of yellow wildflower I can’t identify and lots of fields of cows. I wish I had a flower book with me to give these yellow flowers a name. I ask Nellie if she knows what they are. She has her hands gripped on the steering wheel and her eyes bore holes down the road as if she is clearing a way ahead for us with her laser vision, and she looks neither to left nor to right.

  “What flowers? Never had much to do with flowers. Dairy country in these parts. Good ice cream.”

  I am surprised that someone so in tune with the universe is not interested in its flowers but perhaps she doesn’t pay attention to such trivia because she has big, important issues of good and bad energy to concentrate on. We stop at a small town to buy cones and slurp them up as we drive along. The ice cream is so full
of fat it hardly drips. It’s like eating a mound of flavored butter. What does melt slides down the cone in a creamy lather. This is like nothing I have eaten before and I begin to feel the stir of excitement in my rib cage of adventures to be had and I smile.

  “Don’t worry, child, we’ll fix your bad energy,” says Nellie, and that puts an end to my contentment.

  We drive for a long time without a person to hand a Bible to. Then we come upon an old farmer walking down the road with his cows. I think the cows must have broken a fence somewhere and escaped and the farmer is taking them back. Either that or he takes them for walks the way some folks walk their dogs. It would be peaceful to walk some cows. They wouldn’t bark alarmingly. They would moo in celestial harmony.

  I am thinking this when Nellie stops the car suddenly, jolting me, and tries to hand the farmer a Bible out the window—we have a few on my lap at the ready. But the stopping of the car causes a ruckus with the cows, who begin to scatter in a frightened way that looks like the beginning of a stampede. The farmer waves us off with an irritated look. His peaceful cow walk has been disturbed. One of the cows brings its head too close to Nellie’s window and she gets in a panic and puts the car in the wrong gear, which makes an awful, loud grinding sound, which further inflames the cows who begin to race around in six directions at once with the farmer shouting and flapping his arms and cursing us. Nellie finally gets the car out of there before we are run over by cows. The sound of the farmer’s curses follows us down the road.

  “He should have taken the Bible,” Nellie says, panting. “Now, that’s a man who could use a little positive energy.” Sweat drips off her forehead. If I’d been killed by a cow it would have been hard to explain to my mother.

  We drive on silently.

  “I’ve never been in these parts,” says Nellie after a while, breaking the comforting silence of the bubble that is our car moving through the stillness of the country afternoon.

  We round a bend. I gasp. The field ahead of us looks like something out of a storybook. Giant balloons, all different, all in birthday-party colors. It is like being in someone’s imagination.

  “Can you see them too?” I ask, thinking maybe it is my imagination they are in. “Those things in the field?”

  “Of course I can. They’re right ding-dong there,” says Nellie, who is beginning to look hot and cranky, pulling the car over to the side of the road with a thunk. “A bunch of hot-air balloons. You know what hot-air balloons are, don’t you?”

  “Hot-air balloons?” I say, breathing dizzily. Why has no one ever told me?

  “Well, I expect you live in ignorance a fair amount of the time,” says Nellie, sighing. “I always say to your mother that it’s wrong cloistering you children like that down at the end of the beach where you’re so sheltered from the world.”

  I think this is a strange way to look at it. As if, if we’d moved to town, the whole of mankind and its mysteries could then make its way to us and we’d know about everything that is. My best friend, Ginny, lives in our town’s only new development. She has houses packed all around her and I know for sure she doesn’t know everything there is. I envision the world coming to us, full of its hot-air balloons and countries and peoples and cities, all piling up in a giant mess at our doorstep. We’d never sort it out and all kinds of things would get broken and lost.

  “See those baskets under the balloons? People ride in those,” says Nellie.

  “Do you think we could ride in one?” I ask Nellie. I pray right at that moment to get a chance. If I can, then I will let the universe off the hook for the other ninety-seven adventures it owes me.

  “No time,” says Nellie. “We’ve got important work ahead of us today.”

  She pauses a moment. “Those folks that are going up, though, they’ll be covering a lot of territory, I’ll be bound. Come on.”

  And then I see what she has in mind. She goes to the back of the station wagon and hauls out a box of Bibles, her knees nearly buckling under the weight. She bids me do the same and we trudge across the rutted field, getting bitten by bugs we are unable to swat.

  “Now, what have we here?” asks one of the balloonists as we approach, but a kindly-looking lady says, “Shhh,” and comes up to us. Nellie declares that she would like all the balloonists to take a few Bibles to distribute wherever their balloons take them, and that they can keep one for themselves to read on those long flights. One of the men starts laughing and the kindly woman puts her hand on his shoulder and tells him to go off and check some valves. Then she leads us over to a bright purple balloon, explaining that the balloons can’t take a lot of extra weight.

  “Maybe the two of you would like to get into the basket to see how it feels,” she offers.

  Nellie says she is too big and ungainly but that I’d probably like to. She frowns at me meaningfully. I can’t think why. She knows I’m dying to get into the basket.

  The kindly lady explains the workings of the balloon to me and tells me to be careful of the burner, it is hot. She shows me how the port line is used to maneuver the balloon as it lands and how the blast valve gets the balloon up and how you make the balloon go down again. I keep hoping she will offer to take me for a ride but she doesn’t. Never have I felt so much like a candle on a cake ready to be lit.

  Instead, someone calls to her that they need help and she leaves us.

  Nellie moves swiftly. She picks up a box of Bibles and goes around to the side of the balloon, which shields her from the others, and starts passing me Bibles. “Quick, quick, child, you just lay these in the bottom of that basket.”

  “Oh, Miss Phipps,” I say. “It’s no use. As soon as they get in, they’ll just throw the Bibles out again. You may as well leave them lying in the field for all the good it will do.”

  “Hush, child, you do as I say,” she hisses, busy passing them to me.

  So I indulge her until nearly the whole bottom of the basket is full and then I say, “Besides, they told you it wasn’t safe. The balloons can’t take the extra weight. You don’t want to endanger them.”

  “You don’t weigh more than a feather, now do you?” asks Nellie. “We’re just giving you a little necessary ballast. Now, you let those Bibles out over the houses as you go by.”

  “ME?” I squawk.

  “Don’t you get it? The universe has led us here,” says Nellie.

  I remember my prayer and how I wanted to ride in a balloon. I should have asked for someone who knew what they were doing to be there with me.

  “Wait a second, Miss Phipps,” I say. “I don’t know how to work this thing.”

  “You’ve got your valve and your port rope. You heard the lady explain it. You’ll do fine.”

  I want to say, Yeah, but what if I don’t?, but it’s too late because Nellie has untied the last rope and I am skyward bound.

  Once I am aloft I am surprised how well I operate the balloon. I figure out the blast valve as I move very slowly on currents of air. It is quiet and peaceful and I wonder if I will be going to jail at the end of this.

  One of the first things I see from on high is Nellie running for all she is worth across the field with a pack of angry balloonists after her, but they are out of sight before I see the outcome. I am surprised by how fast Nellie can run.

  I float above woods and fields serenely in the quiet space between earth and sky, heaving Bibles until I remember the backs of my family going over that hill as though it were the last time I would ever see them. Was that a premonition? I’m awfully high up.

  This thought puts the brakes to the endeavor and I find a good field and maneuver the balloon down with a minimum of bumping and jerking. I am a natural balloonist but I doubt if anyone will be interested in this by the time they catch up with me. I am not surprised when I hear sirens and the sheriff appears.

  But it is not me who goes to jail, it is Nellie. It turns out the sheriff had just dropped her off there when he got the call to pick me up. He tells me all about it as he dri
ves me home. When he asked Nellie what in the world she was thinking, sending me up in a balloon, she insisted she was merely doing God’s work, just like the saints. She told the sheriff he martyred her and asked if he planned to torture her too. He said he didn’t own a rack but he could always bring her dinner from the Bluebird Café.

  The sheriff gets a call from his office while we drive. They have already let Nellie out. The balloonists have decided not to press charges. The sheriff says he’s glad and anyhow everyone knows church folks are simply crazy.

  All my mother says when the sheriff drops me is “That Nellie Phipps.” The sheriff tells my mother no one is blaming me. Nellie was the responsible adult. She was the brains of the outfit. Now that I am no longer eaten up by the desire to go for a balloon ride and can think straight, it occurs to me that I have kept all the balloonists from the day of ballooning they had planned. I ask the sheriff to please tell them how sorry I am.

  Then the sheriff says he is glad no one is pressing charges because his wife is holding dinner for him.

  Once he goes home I sit down and have clam chowder with my family. We are at the picnic table and the wind is blowing little salty blasts over our bowls. My mother says you don’t need a saltshaker when you eat outdoors by the sea. Hershel says you don’t need a sand shaker either, because sand has blown into his soup. My mother says she will get him a fresh bowl but he says don’t bother, he likes the taste of sand.

  “That’s gross, Hershel,” I say.

  I tell them about the balloon ride. My mother says it’s a miracle I wasn’t hurt and I think she is right and then I remember gazing up at the balloon, a circle of purple light against the sky—the sign I had asked for. Goose bumps come up on my arms.

  “What did you do in the balloon?” asks Maya.

  “What was there to do but just ride?” I say. I don’t mention dropping the Bibles.

  The sea is turning bloodred in the sunset and I wonder what it means about the kind of week we have had. Even my mother says that it is a violent-looking sea. But all’s well that ends well. Nellie Phipps got let out of jail so there’s no reason to think this is a portent. It’s just a sunset.