Out on a Limb

by Gail Banning

  “I know,”Tilley said. “Let’s live here!” Dad just laughed, the way grown-ups always laugh at their kids’ ideas. Then Mom turned from the window, looking sort of dazed.

  “I think Tilley’s right,” she said, turning toward Dad. “I think we should live here.”

  Dad laughed again, but he didn’t seem so sure of himself this time. “Andrea,” he said. “It’s all very nice for a treehouse, but we can hardly live here.”

  “Why not?” said Mom. “It’s ours.”

  “Only technically,” said Dad.

  “What’s wrong with technically?” asked Mom.

  “Andrea, it’s a treehouse. There’s no electricity,” said Dad.

  “Mankind lived thousands of years without electricity,” said Mom.

  “There’s no running water,” said Dad.

  “There’s a stream right down there,” said Mom.

  “We’re smart people. We could figure something out.”

  “Andrea.”

  “Don’t say ‘Andrea’ in that condescending voice, as though you’ve made some sort of valid point,” said Mom.

  “We’d save a pile of money on rent, you know. And we’d be five minutes from the university.”

  “Come on,Andrea! It’s not the slightest bit practical.”

  “You’re making the assumption that we should be practical,” said Mom. “Maybe we should be adventurous.”

  “We’ve got kids to think of,” said Dad.

  “Kids like adventure,” said Mom.

  “We do!” said Tilley, or maybe it was me, or maybe it was both of us. “We love it! We want to live here!”

  “Oh, David, look out the window! Listen to the birds! How can you think about writing rent cheques every month for some crappy apartment over a brake-and-muffler shop when this place is ours!” Mom was raising her voice. She is a cheerful person, but a lack of enthusiasm can make her really mad.

  Dad said nothing. That’s the way he argues.

  “Consider it at least,” said Mom.

  “I’ll consider it,” said Dad.

  We had our Sunday picnic sitting on the porch outside the treehouse, gazing through the banisters. Tilley elbowed me and pointed down. A deer stood drinking in the stream below us. When it heard the lemonade pour from our Thermos it looked around all big-eared, and its white rump bounded for the woods.We ate our peanutbutter-and-banana sandwiches. Long after they were finished, we sat waiting for the deer to come back. “I guess we’d better get going,” Dad said finally. Cautiously, we all climbed down the oak tree.

  I heard my parents considering the treehouse when I was in bed that night.They were murmuring in the living room, on the other side of my bedroom wall. I lay as still as a dead body to hear what they were saying, but it didn’t work. Every time I caught a couple of words, a car would squeal its tires; or our fridge would get the shakes; or Tilley would rustle in the other bed; or someone would slam a dumpster lid. I had no idea how the considering was going when I finally fell asleep.

  NOTEBOOK: #3

  NAME: Rosamund McGrady

  SUBJECT: Legal Rights

  The results of the considering were announced the next morning.

  “Well, it’s unanimous,” Dad said as he buttered his toast. “We’re moving into the treehouse.”

  “We are?” I crashed my chair backward when I jumped up to hug Dad, but nobody got annoyed. Nobody wanted to spoil the mood.

  All I wanted to do was celebrate, and it killed me to have to go off to school. Tilley and I got home in record time that afternoon. We burst into our apartment at 3:34 to find Mom and Dad sitting at the kitchen table with their friend Clarkson, who was a law student. Clarkson had already written a letter to Great-great-aunt Lydia, claiming our rights under the will. Clarkson’s letter said that in his legal opinion, we were entitled not just to the treehouse and the oak tree, but also to a certain amount of the surrounding land. We also had a right to pass through Great-great-aunt Lydia’s land to get to and from the treehouse. In addition, Clarkson said, we were entitled to riparian rights, which means rights to the stream. Clarkson’s letter said that we would begin making improvements to the treehouse immediately, and we would move in on June 30. Clarkson’s letter all by itself didn’t seem too friendly, so Mom and Dad wrote a letter to Great-great-aunt Lydia, too.Their letter introduced the four of us, and said that we hoped past family conflicts wouldn’t keep us from getting to know each other. We folded Clarkson’s letter and Mom and Dad’s letter into an envelope. Then, all of us walked to the post office and mailed the letter off by ultra extra-special delivery to Grand Oak Manor, Number 9 Bellemonde Drive.

  There were only thirteen days until our apartment building was going to be torn down, and there was lots to do to make the treehouse fit for occupation. We were so busy that Tilley and I got to skip school to help. The very first thing we did was make the climb to the treehouse less dangerous. We made a wooden ladder going all the way up the trunk, along the branch, and through the trap door in the porch. Next, we made a homemade elevator out of pulleys and rope and a big garbage bucket cradled at the end. ‘Dumbwaiter’ is the word for this kind of device. Tilley begged for a ride up to the treehouse in the dumbwaiter, but Mom and Dad said the dumbwaiter was strictly for inanimate objects.

  The dumbwaiter’s very first load of inanimate objects was cleaning supplies. We pulled our broom out of the dumbwaiter and swept out all the dried-up spiders and cobwebs. We dug out our Windex and washed away generations of grime until a new golden-green light slanted through the windows. We dug out our furniture oil and polished the wooden walls until they shone like new chestnuts.

  Next we worked on plumbing. We designed the system ourselves. It featured an old-fashioned iron pump on the treehouse porch, to pump stream water up through a plastic pipe along the tree trunk. The pipe included filters for straining out parasites and stuff. It was a cool design, but gadgets didn’t fit other gadgets the way they were supposed to, and this led to frustration. Tilley and I even heard the occasional swear word. In the end though, we got it working.

  For our heating system, we got a wood-burning potbellied cast-iron stove. It was free on Ebay, probably because it was so heavy that nobody else wanted it. Moving it to the treehouse was a problem. “It would be so much easier to bring it in by Bellemonde Drive,” Mom said. “If we could drive onto the driveway of Grand Oak Manor, we’d just have to worry about getting it out through the Manor garden and across the meadow. That’s so much shorter than dragging it all the way through the woods. Do you suppose Great-great-aunt Lydia would mind?”

  There was no way of knowing. Great-great-aunt Lydia had not replied to Clarkson’s or Mom and Dad’s letters, and in all of our trips to the treehouse we’d never caught a single glimpse of her. We’d seen gardeners clipping hedges and watering flowers in the Manor garden, but never Great-great-aunt Lydia. “I don’t think we should push our luck,” Dad said, so he and some of his friends tied the stove to a trolley and pushed it down the long, bumpy path through the woods. When they got to the stream they untied the stove and rolled it across the stream bottom. The very hardest part was getting the stove up to treehouse level. We tied it securely into the dumbwaiter and six of Dad’s friends cranked the winch until the stove levitated slowly off the ground. Before it was even halfway up to the treehouse their necks were purple and throbbing with veins. I waited in suspense for the stove to plummet to the centre of the earth. It was a big relief to get it safely onto the porch. Dad and his friends put the stove in the centre of the treehouse, and added a sheet-metal chimney that went out the roof and up past the highest branches so that no sparks would ever come into contact with the oak tree. My job was to keep the friends supplied with the cans of beer we had chilling in the stream.

  “Now that was hard work,” Dad said when the stove was finally in and the friends had gone. He leaned against the banister and turned his beer can upside down into his mouth. “I sure hope Great-great-aunt Lydia isn’t about t
o come brandishing a court order to get us off her property.”

  “She won’t, David,” Mom said. “If she really didn’t want us moving in, she’d have done something to stop us already. My guess is that she’s glad for a chance to reconnect with her family. That’s how I’d feel if I was an old lady with a big, empty mansion and no one of my own.” We all looked across the meadow to Grand Oak Manor. As usual, there was no sign of Great-great-aunt Lydia.

  “Dad,” I said. “You know how Great-great-grandfather Magnus was so mad at Great-grampa that he cut him out of his will?”

  “Mmhmm,” said Dad.

  “Well, I don’t get how he could be so mad at his very own son.”

  “Oh, Rosie,” Dad said. “Grown-ups think up all kinds of reasons for getting mad at each other.”

  “But what was his reason,” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Great-grampa never said. He tended to keep his past to himself. And he never, ever talked about family. The rift was Great-grampa’s big secret.”

  About the only secret we’d ever had in my family was where the leftover Halloween candy was hidden, so the idea of an old, important secret intrigued me.“But why do you think,” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Rosie,” Dad said. “This is not one of those things that I know but won’t tell you. It’s a complete mystery to me.”

  “Great-grampa Tavish married Isobel pretty young, didn’t he?” Mom asked. “Maybe Magnus didn’t approve of the marriage.”

  “Could be,” said Dad.

  “And then didn’t he leave the country for years and years and design theatre costumes in England?” Mom said. “Maybe Magnus thought that was a dumb career choice for the son of a lumber baron.”

  “Maybe.” Dad stood up. “Come on, we’ve got another full day here tomorrow. We should go back to the apartment and get some rest.”

  The days leading up to June 30 sped by. We measured the treehouse, and took notes, and made trip after trip to Home Depot. On June 29 we had a yard sale. It was weird to see our toaster and our television and our computer monitor on the grass outside of our apartment building, blinking at the daylight. It was weird to watch strangers walk off with my ice skates and Tilley’s Barbie Dream House. It was necessary, though, to get rid of most of our stuff. There’s not much storage space in a treehouse.

  The day after the yard sale was demolition day. The foreman of the demolition crew stood in his hard hat in our apartment while Mom knelt on the floor, taping up cardboard boxes. “So how are we doing here,” he asked, his voice bouncing around our emptied-out living room.

  “Good. We’re out of here.” Mom straightened and held a cardboard box out to him. He looked a bit surprised, but he unfolded his arms and took it. I looked around our apartment one last time, but there wasn’t much to see. Nothing was left but the wire coat hangers pinging in the closet. I picked up my cardboard box and followed my family. We all stepped over the yellow tape that surrounded our apartment building. DANGER! DO NOT ENTER! it said.

  “Thanks for your patience,” Dad said to the foreman. “No problem,” the foreman said, taking his cardboard box out to our car. We all loaded our boxes into the trunk. The demolition crew sent a German shepherd through our apartment building to make sure there was no one still in there, unconscious in a bathroom or something. Then they sounded a big horn that was enough to make anyone jump out of his skin, unconscious or not.

  We watched the demolition from across the street, which was as close as the crew would let us get. The wrecking truck lumbered closer to our building, manoeuvred its boom into position and swung its wrecking ball. There was a surprisingly delicate sound of shattering glass. Our living room and bedroom windows were gone, and other windows too. The wrecking ball swung again, and this time the sound was more the sort of major crashing you would expect. The stucco, whose glass bits we had picked out so patiently, fell away in big slabs. The wrecking ball swung again and again. Our side of the apartment building wobbled, then hesitated, then collapsed into billowing dust. The home I’d lived in all my life was gone.

  We drove toward the woods and parked. We transferred everything from our car trunk into four rented wheelbarrows. Pushing all our worldly possessions before us, we set off on the path to our new home.

  NOTEBOOK: #4

  NAME: Rosamund McGrady

  SUBJECT: Ripped to Shreads

  It was a long way to push a wheelbarrow. Roots the size of boa constrictors got in the way.Then there was the plywood ramp we had built to get over the stone wall that surrounded Great-great-aunt Lydia’s woods. I pushed my wheelbarrow up the ramp with all my might, but the force of gravity pushed right back. I couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been getting our stove over it. Then there was the stream. We’d bridged it with planks but I got my wheelbarrow too close to the edge. It flipped itself into the stream and took me along with it. Water flowed up my nostrils. I blinked to see Tilley’s pink pyjama top swimming in the current. “After them,” Mom pointed, and I waded downstream, slipping over river rocks. I snagged the pyjama top and flung it in an arc of droplets to the meadow. Then I went after her pyjama bottoms, her hoodie and her undies. “My triceratops sweatshirt!” Tilley yelled, hopping as though it were a drowning child. “It’s getting away!” It looked as though the sweatshirt would slide away in the rapids, but a tangle of twigs snagged it. When I sloshed up to the sweatshirt I saw something else clinging to the criss-crossed twigs. It was a long, ragged strip of blue paper, covered with handwriting. The ink had blurred, but the torn-up words were still readable.

  e McGrady

  t confess it w

  d forgotten th

  afraid th

  hope you w

  ives. It turns

  possessed a

  tree house i

  It turns o

  you are who

  it turns ou

  e forgive m

  welcome I’

  e old bones

  h ground.I

  ation fo

  someday soon

  The writing was shaky, but fancy too, as though the writer had taken special handwriting lessons.

  “Come on, Rosie,” Dad called. “Let’s get going.”

  “Just a second,” I called back. “I’ve found something weird. I think it’s a letter. Part of one.”

  “A letter ?What would a letter be doing in there?” Dad asked.

  I waded upstream, the current tugging at my ankles. “I think Great-great-aunt Lydia wrote it,” I said, carefully handing the torn blue strip to Mom.

  “I doubt it,” Dad said. “The Manor is downstream from here. More likely somebody upstream wrote it.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “It says our name. And it mentions the treehouse.”

  Mom smoothed the torn strip. “It says welcome,” she read, showing it to Dad. “It’s a letter of welcome.”

  “A letter of welcome, ripped to shreds,” Dad said.

  “How come she ripped it?” Tilley wanted to know.

  “I wonder,” said Mom. “Maybe this is a practice copy?”

  Dad looked doubtful. “And instead of putting the practice copy in the garbage or recycling, she threw it in the stream?”

  “That’s bad for the environment,” Tilley said.

  “Maybe the scrap is a puzzle she wants us to figure out,” I said.“

  But how could she possibly know we’d find it?” Dad objected. “If the clothes hadn’t fallen in the stream, we never would have.” We all looked at each other, waiting for improved theories. Our brains were whirring away, but coming up with nothing. “Well,” said Dad, “let’s get the rest of this stuff across the bridge.” I threw Tilley’s drowned sweatshirt to the meadow and took the torn blue strip back from Mom. Folding it carefully into my wallet, I waded off to look for the rest of the letter. “I can’t find any more pieces,” I reported to my family.

  They were sitting with the wheelbarrows at the meadow’s edge, dangling their feet in the stream, and pas
sing a water bottle. I sat beside them and squirted water down my throat.We all kept looking up at the mansion, hoping for our very first glimpse of Great-great-aunt Lydia. But there was no movement.

  “Okay,” Dad said. “Let’s be on our way. Last one to the giant oak is a rotten egg!”

  “‘Rotten egg’ is such a lame insult,” I said, but I grabbed my wheelbarrow anyway and ran across the meadow. I reached the giant oak before anyone else, so I saw it first.

  “What’s this?” Mom said, as she came barrowing up behind me. At the base of the oak tree was a big pink and yellow flower arrangement. It would have been amazing, except that it had been destroyed. It was smashed sideways on the hard ground between the oak roots. I knelt down and turned it right side up. The stems were all bent, as though every single flower had had its neck snapped.

  “They must be from Great-great-aunt Lydia,” said Mom. “She must have brought them as a housewarming present. They must have fallen off the root where she left them.”

  “Maybe,” said Dad.

  “Well, what else,” asked Mom.

  Dad shrugged. “They sure had one hard landing.”

  “Well, flowers are delicate,” Mom said. “They can’t have been here long, that’s for sure. They aren’t even withered. We can probably save some.”

  I helped Mom pull the broken stems out of the florist foam. I pulled out a clear plastic stick with a clip at the end. “There’s one of these things that you stick a note into,” I said. “But no note.”

  “Because it’s been ripped up and thrown into the stream,” said Dad.

  “Maybe a raccoon ripped it,” said Tilley. “’Cause I’ve seen raccoons at the stream, and they have real hands just almost like people.”

  “Yeah, maybe Tilley,” said Dad. We all nodded, unconvinced. Once again we stood around, waiting for a good theory to materialize out of the summer air.

  “Who knows,” Dad said finally.

  “Can’t say I get it either,” said Mom. “Let’s unpack.”