I know what the matter is now. The man is drunk. He is saying “Mizzzzz,” like a buzzing bee. It sends chills down my arms.
He pulls me by the neck across the sand so that my heels drag. It hurts and I am afraid of choking to death and I can see by my mother’s wide eyes that she is afraid of this too. She stops in her tracks and one hand goes to her throat as if she can feel mine. “I’m takin’ her home to babysit, Mizzzz Fielding.”
Then I know who it is. It is Mr. Gourd. I have never heard him so drunk but I remember the day we heard him throwing things in the trailer. He is staggering left and right and sometimes it feels as if he isn’t aware of me even though he has a forearm pressed so tightly against my neck.
“Taking her home?” repeats my mother in a croaking whisper. Then more loudly, “Why, you’re the janitor at the school, aren’t you? Please. Please stay calm.”
“I am calm,” he says, and laughs and staggers again. Every time he staggers he tightens his arm as if holding on to me for support and I can’t get my breath for a minute. I hear strange animal sounds and realize they are coming from me. I see my mother’s eyes get even larger as we listen to me.
“Yeah, I gotta take her home. Mrs. Gourd says she had to quit her job because this one doesn’t babysit for us no more but I said, Don’t worry, I’ll get her. I got her now. She kin baysit.” He stops and with a free hand removes a bottle from his pocket and takes a swig. “We gonna pack up and move now to ‘nother town. Haul her with us to baysit. She almost killed the baby. You hear that? Dropped something on his head. Bible.”
I think my mother is going to faint. She is swaying. Instead, she says calmly and clearly, “Don’t worry, Mr. Gourd. I will never CALL 911! I will never CALL 911!”
I think this is such an odd thing to say. It is part of this nightmare of things suddenly off-kilter. Why is she saying this?
“Don’t you call NO ONE!” he yells savagely in my ear. He totters a bit and then starts dragging me again. I can’t breathe and my mother starts running toward us but stops when he holds the hand with the whiskey bottle out to the side threateningly as if he will strike me.
My mother is twisting her hands but she isn’t looking at him or me. She is looking behind us and she seems even more terrified by what she sees there and I am thinking, What can be worse than this? when suddenly I am yanked backward and then I fall in the sand away from Mr. Gourd. I seem to bounce to my feet and start running without thought, before I realize that Ned must have pulled Mr. Gourd off me. But when I turn I see it is Mrs. Spinnaker, sitting on the small of Mr. Gourd’s back, her legs still around his middle. She is so small she must have jumped on him. She has his head pushed into the sand. My mother is sitting on him as well. The whiskey bottle is next to him. Then we hear a siren.
“I heard you yelling ‘Call 911! Call 911!’ I looked out the window and I called the sheriff,” says Mrs. Spinnaker. “And then I thought, What can I do? What can I do? That man is drunk as a skunk and Jane is going to get hurt and I see I can creep around the side of the house and leap on his back before he hears me coming.”
The sheriff arrives now, running, and takes control so my mother and Mrs. Spinnaker move off to the side, away from Mr. Gourd, who is in handcuffs.
“Oh, Mrs. Spinnaker, Mrs. Spinnaker! You were so brave!” says my mother. “How can I ever, ever thank you enough? You saved Jane’s life. You saved her life!”
“And you saved Horace’s. So we’re even,” says Mrs. Spinnaker, looking pleased at the praise.
“No, no, it’s not the same at all. I can never, ever repay you,” says my mother.
“Oh, so that’s what you think of Horace!” says Mrs. Spinnaker, her face darkening. “I might have known.” And she storms back to her cottage in a huff.
My mother watches her go in dismay and looks like she would like to go after her but then says, “Enough, enough for one day, enough, enough.”
And then I very quietly faint.
When I wake up the sheriff is leading Mr. Gourd away. He offers to take me to the hospital but I do not want to go and all I have are a few scratches on my neck where Mr. Gourd’s fingernails raked me when Mrs. Spinnaker jumped on his back and he tried to hang on to me. My mother has gotten out the Band-Aids and antibiotic ointment. She cleans me up but we don’t even talk, we are so stunned.
Ned has returned and is feeding and putting Max and Maya and Hershel to bed.
My mother and I cannot eat. We take a slow walk on the beach. She has not asked me once about any of it although the cat is out of the bag about dropping the Bible and all that followed.
Because Mr. Gourd has already mentioned it, I tell her about Willie Mae and Mrs. Gourd and the dropped Bible. So that she will know that Mrs. Gourd lied. That I did not drop a Bible on Willie Mae. Still, it is only a lucky accident that I didn’t seriously hurt someone. What will she think of me that at one point I thought I had, and kept this secret all summer?
Our legs grow tired. The sun is soft and full and golden as it dips in a haze toward the sea. We finally return to the porch.
My mother and I sit quietly on the steps with our sides touching. Our legs are bent and we lean over our knees. I can hear her breathing along with the waves. “We all belong here equally, Jane,” she says. “Just by being born onto the earth we are accepted and the earth supports us. We don’t have to be especially good. We don’t have to accomplish anything. We don’t even have to be healthy.”
I put my hands over my eyes and press the flesh back in hard. In relief it is melting off my bones. We sit there all through the twilight. I lean into my mother’s side and cry.
To Canada
My Fourteenth Adventure
The last two weeks of summer are a blur. Ned and my mother get married quietly at the town hall without telling anyone until it is done. Mr. Gourd takes a plea and does not have to go to trial. My mother finishes making the rest of the blackberry jam until she has filled the last shelf. This is somehow satisfactory even though she has said that we cannot take it with us. She doesn’t want to take all that jam over the border and besides, there is no room in Ned’s car. He has traded his old car for a station wagon but even so, with all of us and our clothes and a few things it is full. My mother explains that we will all come back to the house for the summer and maybe if it doesn’t work out in Saskatchewan Ned can try to find a job here.
“But we will never sell the house?” I ask.
“We will never sell the house,” says my mother with one hand on a doorjamb as if she is reassuring it as well.
“Still, all that jam,” I say sadly.
“I have an idea about that,” she says.
Mr. Gourd has gone to jail and we go to visit Mrs. Gourd. She is angry with us. She thinks somehow it is all our fault.
“I had to quit my job,” she says to my mother after we knock on the door of the trailer. “You probably heard that. And now without Dennis’s salary we’re going to have to give up the trailer too. Just where do you think me and my babies are going to live? I can’t work. I got no one to watch them so I can’t get a job. I got no money, no husband, no home.”
“You can live in our house,” says my mother.
Mrs. Gourd just stands there, her eyes doing their mechanical brain movement, back and forth and this way and that. Finally it seems to register.
“What about you?”
“We’re going to Saskatchewan,” says my mother. “You can live in our house until next summer when we return. As you can see, it’s only a stopgap solution but maybe it will see you through to better times.”
“That’s very kind of you,” says Mrs. Gourd. She spits it out like she can’t quite believe it herself. I don’t think she knows any other way to talk but grumpy.
“I still can’t work. I got no one to watch my kids.”
I know a solution suddenly but I don’t want to say it. I tell her about Mr. Fordyce despite myself. My mother looks surprised when I mention him but says nothing.
&
nbsp; “Well, I can’t pay him much,” says Mrs. Gourd.
“He’ll probably do it for free. I think he likes children,” I say. “I think he wants a job and someone to read to.”
“You tell him I can’t pay him,” says Mrs. Gourd quickly.
I tell her where his trailer is and we leave her heading over there with the children to talk to him.
“I hope she likes the house,” says my mother.
“Are you nuts?” I say. “She’d just better hope you like the prairies!”
“Oh, I do,” says my mother.
Then she tells me about the road trip that she and Ned took in a falling-apart car when they were “young and wild.”
“You were in love with Mr. Fordyce and H.K. and the clothes hanger man, back then, weren’t you?”
“Well, yes, I guess in a way, but I really loved Ned and when he came back I loved him all over again. On this car trip we took, we stayed one night on the prairies. It is so beautiful in the grasslands. You can see the wind before you hear it, moving the long grasses. You can see the weather before you feel it. We stayed with some of Ned’s friends in a farmhouse they owned in the middle of nowhere. You could look out of any window and see nothing but flat ground to the horizon. Imagine. I was helping Freda, his friend, make pies with cherries she had picked from her own tree. We were rolling out the dough and you could feel the barometric pressure drop. She looked out the window. It made her nervous. There was a quiet excitement in the air. Even the birds stopped and the horizon grew black and lightning flashed from up high in the sky all the way to the ground. The men were out scurrying to bring in the horses. Freda kept watching for funnels coming down from the clouds. They’d had tornadoes before. And everyone was worried but I was rolling out pie dough, so contented, so peaceful, so stilled with everything else, waiting for the storm.”
My mother’s face is alight with the memory and I realize that I don’t need to worry about her leaving this place. To her all places are this place.
“Those kids better not pee on any of our beds,” I say.
“We’ll put rubber sheets on them before we leave,” says my mother.
“We’ll put rubber sheets on everything,” I say.
The next day Ned and I walk into town to buy rubber sheets.
“I thought you didn’t like having a stationary job and being settled,” I say as we walk slowly through the sand, no hurry to do anything today, we’re really just waiting to leave for Saskatchewan.
“Well, with that poet sniffing around your mother I knew I’d have to do something or I didn’t stand a chance. I had to have something to offer her. That’s why I went back to Canada. To see what I could scrounge up in terms of a stable job. Oh, say!” He reaches into his jeans pocket and pulls out some snapshots and hands them to me. “I got these from the car the other day and in all the excitement forgot to show them to you. There’s the house, and that’s what the countryside looks like. I know it looks kind of empty with nothing much to see.”
It is endless waves of land with nothing on it. It is bleak and barren and empty with nothing much to see. But where have I heard these words before? Then I remember and gasp.
“Well,” says Ned sheepishly, “it’s not so bad as that. I grant you your first views of Saskatchewan are like, Who the heck would live there? But between the broiling-hot summers and the freezing-cold winters, the tornadoes and flies, why, it’s practically a paradise.”
“It’s not that,” I say. It is Madame Crenshaw’s words coming back. How soon I was to go “someplace empty with nothing much to see.” I had stopped believing in mystic happenings and miracles. I had thought Madame Crenshaw nothing but a con artist and a thief. Not a visionary. But it appears she can be both.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asks.
“I’m just trying to figure something out,” I say. I cannot tell him about Madame Crenshaw. I look at him and wonder if he is my father. If I want to know whose father Ned is or if he’s anyone’s, now is the time to ask. But the moment passes and with it my nerve. I cannot ask him any more than I can tell my mother all my adventures any more.
Is this what it is to get older, to have adventures you can no longer tell your family because you are moving apart from them? Is this why my mother likes to have Ned around, so that she has someone to whom she can always tell her adventures? Or do you grow up and have adventures you tell no one? Are some adventures only yours alone? Will my mother have adventures she won’t even tell Ned?
“Figure out what?” Ned asks as he turns to look down at me, maybe because I have been staring at him.
“I am thinking that if I count my adventures this summer, there weren’t one hundred and I am wondering when the rest will come. Or if they will. I want my life to be a series of adventures. I want a hundred.”
“Bibles, you’re going to CANADA. You’re going to have nothing BUT adventures.”
The last few days of summer I spend on the beach. We build fires at night and Ned shows us how to find the North Star by looking first for the Big Dipper. I cannot go out at night now without seeing the Big Dipper and it feels to me as if it is looking at me, aware of me too. There is the sound of Canada geese in the mornings, honking and flying south, as we will be going north. We are just changing places. The Big Dipper will find us all in new locations. We are not moving so far from its perspective, perhaps.
Maya and I have started a lucrative restaurant with a menu of minnows and sand pies and crayfish. Her paper dolls come to order meals there. Sometimes Hershel does too. We have had to tell him twice not to eat the things we serve. Max does not see whales anymore. I see summer’s curtain closing and behind it something closing for him as well. More often than not, when my mother sits on the porch steps now, we are totally silent. I think we are memorizing the sound of the waves.
Saying goodbye to Ginny is the worst. I go over to her house the night before we leave, but she solves the problem by telling her mother she won’t see me. She will write to me in Saskatchewan. “I don’t say goodbye,” says the note she has left her mother to pass on to me, and I think of Ginny with her breaking heart, and leaving her alone now with all that drive and desire, and I figure that will give me something to worry about all the way to Saskatchewan.
On the way home through town I see Nellie stumping along with groceries and I call out, “Nellie! Madame Crenshaw was right! About going someplace barren? I’m going to Saskatchewan.” She stops and gives me a long look and then trots on, busy and driven as Ginny, with her dreams and obsessions.
The next day Mrs. Gourd and her children come over. My mother shows her the jars of jam. She tells her that next summer she will teach her how to make her own. Mrs. Gourd says she can’t afford all the berries but my mother takes her for a walk. She shows her the blueberry bogs and the clam beds and the places where the wild orach grows.
about the author
Polly Horvath is the highly acclaimed author of many books, including the National Book Award winner The Canning Season, the National Book Award nominee The Trolls, and the Newbery Honor Book Everything on a Waffle. Publishers Weekly has described her writing as “unruly, unpredictable, and utterly compelling,” adding that “Horvath’s descriptive powers are singular…her uncensored Mad Hatter wit simply delicious, her storytelling skills consummate.”
Polly Horvath lives in Metchosin, British Columbia.
Published by Schwartz & Wade Books an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc. New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Polly Horvath
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Horvath, Polly.
My one hundred adventures / Polly Horvath.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Twelve-year-old Jane, who lives at the beach in a run-down old house with her mother, two brothers, and sister, has an eventful summer accompanying her pastor on bible deliveries, meeting former boyfriends of her mother’s, and being coerced into babysitting for a family of ill-mannered children, all the while learning valuable lessons about life.
[1. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 2. Single-parent families—Fiction. 3. Summer—Fiction. 4 Beaches—Fiction. 5. Babysitters—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.H79224My 2008
[Fic]—dc22
2008002243
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89231-8
v3.0
My One Hundred Adventures Page 15