Terrible, Horrible Edie

by E. C. Spykman

She had to stand up because the smoke was practically gone, and the mosquitoes were at her everywhere. She tried to get at them by rubbing and whacking and moving while she still kept her eyes on the ground.

  “Here,” said the Voice, and something landed with a small puff of sand at her feet. “Anoint yourself with that.”

  Afterwards Edie was sure she had smelled it even on the way down from his hand. “Citronella! Golly, oh golly!” She might have known God would have some. That was what Father used on camping trips. They, themselves, took it on picnics. Why hadn’t she remembered? She took as much of a bath in citronella as the small half-full bottle would let her have. “Thanks, oh thanks,” she kept saying. “Thanks, thanks.” She forgot, as the mosquito fury lessened, to keep her eyes lowered, and when she put up her chin to rub underneath, she looked square at the Voice. Her hand didn’t even stop rubbing. There up against the sky was a tall old man in blue overalls on a cow pony. He didn’t have a halo and he didn’t have a beard. She got it straight in an instant, now that she could think again. It was Mr. Fawkes, of course—he looked so much like a hawk she could tell—and she had heard about the summer sheep drives. It was awful to think you could go so crazy. God wouldn’t be liable to come down to Millard’s Cove just for her. It was the biting that had done it. She still had to scratch a bit, but the terrible biting had stopped and she was all right now. As soon as she was anointed from head to foot, she stepped up to him and handed him the bottle.

  “What do I do now?” she asked.

  “Can you run at my stirrup for a short way?”

  Edie thought she could. But first she would have to put things straight at her camp and douse the fire. Mr. Fawkes waited for her, and his horse stood as still as stone. He nodded approval when she was ready.

  “Catch hold now,” he said and turned his horse up a path through the brush that she had not noticed.

  Without any explanations or reasons, just as if he were God after all, Edie found herself—in a few minutes—on a horse of her own. She had no idea why it was tied to a tree in a clearing or where the hordes of boys and girls came from who gathered there and wheeled around her as she was getting mounted. Mr. Fawkes gave her instructions. She was to ride between two boys called Bill and Charles, who at once came up to claim her, and starting at the south shore when a gun sounded, they were to beat their way back with the rest of the line to a place called The House. They were to make as much noise as they could or wished to and investigate the hills, valleys, and clumps of trees for sheep.

  Mr. Fawkes might not be God, but this sounded exactly like heaven just the same, Edie thought. He tightened her girths and shortened her stirrups himself.

  “Follow us,” the boys said.

  She was shown where to take up her station and told how to ride from side to side of the territory she was to cover.

  “So long,” said the boys, and went off in opposite directions to take up their own positions on either side of her.

  “Not a sheep must get through the line,” Mr. Fawkes had said.

  If it did, she supposed, as she waited for the gun, he might have to go looking for it on a Sunday, as it said in the Bible, and then she had to remind herself that Mr. Fawkes wasn’t in the Bible at all. It was still hard, she found, not to get it mixed up.

  Then the gun sounded, and there was a thread of cheering that ran up and down the whole beach as the line started forward. It made a kind of quicksilver run through her heart. After this all she knew or felt was that she was on a magic horse who did whatever a touch of the reins told him to, that she galloped over her part of the moor back and forth like the wind, that there seemed to be no holes or rocks in the way, and she herself could ride better, faster, and more skillfully than that long-leggéd boy she had always admired who rode his wingéd horse up to the sky. Later she wondered if perhaps a sheep had got past her. She was afraid that part of the time as she charged up and down the little grass-covered hills she had been partly blind. The setting sun had turned every blade of grass to fire against the dark-blue sea, and it got a little in her eyes. Also there was something special about breathing the kind of air that there was on Millard’s Island. It was cooler than the mainland, and at the end of every breath was what she now thought the most wonderful smell in the world—just a tinge of citronella. Every once in a while she had shaken back her lovely short hair.

  At the end of the ride after the sheep had been shooed into pens and corrals, Mr. Fawkes rode in and out among the riders and told them to leave their horses and meet at the bonfire. Edie, walking stiff-leggéd in the midst of the crowd, thought she had better find her way to the cove. She hadn’t been invited to that.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” said Charles’s voice behind her, and he and Bill were on either side of her again, and somehow they turned her about and made her go with them. They were as old as Theodore, but they did not seem to mind escorting her at all. In fact, when some friends tried to collect them, Bill said: “We’re all right here, thanks.”

  Edie widened her stride to keep pace with them, but she said, overwhelmed: “You can go if you like; I’m only ten you know.”

  “Only ten and yet so fair,” said Bill.

  “Only ten and such an equestrienne!” said Charles.

  She knew they were only fooling, but she stumbled over a root just the same. She looked from one to the other quickly as she recovered herself.

  “Only eighteen and yet so freckled,” she said to Bill. “And such a fine forelock,” she said to Charles in their own voices.

  It made them laugh. “Where has this ten-year-old been all our lives?” Bill asked.

  “Looking for you, of course,” said Edie.

  She had not known it was possible to have such a good conversation with two men.

  It was nearly dark as they came out of the dirt road, and what was ahead of them looked to Edie as if some jungle people were having a celebration. Along by the water were torches, flaring and flaming, and sitting in a half circle round a dark smoking pile of something were all the sheep-herding people with their heads bowed over their hands.

  “What is it?” she said, slowing down cautiously.

  It was true that Bill and Charles were wonderful and Mr. Fawkes the most wonderful of all, but she didn’t really know any of them. They might be cannibals for all she knew. This looked like cannibals exactly.

  The boys suddenly closed in on her. They each took an elbow.

  “Come on!” said Bill. “I’m hungry.”

  “Like a wolf,” said Charles.

  “Tell me what it is,” said Edie.

  They simply hurried her along without paying any attention.

  Maybe they were eating the poor sheep!

  It wasn’t cannibalism or sheep, she found, after she had waited at the place they pressed her into. It was a clambake —clams and lobsters and corn cooked on hot rocks in seaweed, and never since she was born had she tasted anything half so good. It tasted of itself and smoke, butter, seaweed, and very, very, very slightly of citronella. There was no more good conversation, just eating, and throwing shells into the large baskets that stood behind them here and there. That was what you did at a clambake. She was pleased that her shots were as good as anybody’s.

  A surprising thing happened when the clambake was almost over, and then something awful. There was a nudge at Edie’s shoulder, and when she turned, she saw that Bill was being handed a guitar out of the darkness. He touched it up a little and then began to play, and Charles on the other side of her began to sing. Her heart grew so big she could hardly keep it inside her comfortably. These singing and playing boys belonged to her just like Millard’s Cove. She passed sand back and forth from one hand to the other, wishing her ears were bigger so that she could hear twice as well. Then—right in the middle of a song when her head was bent—there was a silence. Charles broke off completely, and Bill let the guitar trail away in dim notes. She looked up to see another boy stepping into the circle of light waving a p
iece of white paper. He was breathing hard as if he had been running, but he still had lots of voice to call: “Government cutter at the southern landing looking for a young girl lost in an open dory.” The circle rose to its feet. So did Bill, Charles, and Edie. “Everybody hear?” called the boy. “Anybody know anything?” There was that dreadful silence again and Edie was going to step into it when Charles and Bill moved in front of her.

  “Wait!” said Charles to the air in front of him. “The Governor’s going to do something.”

  Mr. Fawkes had risen and was walking toward the boy. He put his hand on his shoulder, spoke to him, pushed him gently out into the darkness again, and then turned to the waiting circle.

  “The girl has been found,” he said in his deep voice so that you could not doubt it or ask questions. “All’s well. Boys, one more song—your best—and then it’s `Auld Lang Syne,’ and come again next year.”

  “Before we do,” said Charles, “three cheers for Governor Fawkes. And may we always come again next year.”

  The next song sounded to Edie as though it were a thousand thrushes. In the silence that followed Mr. Fawkes spoke once more. “Will Miss Edith Cares,” he said, “please speak to me before she goes.”

  Then the circle linked arms. The boys put theirs through Edie’s, and they sang together as loud as they could.

  “I’ve got to go now,” said Edie. “Thanks very much, thanks very, very much.” Very politely and not at all freshly she started to shake their hands.

  “Wait!” said Bill this time. “We ought to give her a souvenir. She’s been our mascot all evening, hasn’t she?”

  “What have we got?” said Charles.

  They beat their breasts and their pockets. There wasn’t a chink or rustle of anything. “It doesn’t matter,” Edie was going to say when Bill rolled up a piece of his shirt and there was a small gold football hanging from his belt.

  “My dearest possession,” he said, and he hung it on a loop of Hubert’s white duck pants.

  “I haven’t a thing,” said Charles, rubbing his pockets. “ `But a poor minstrel, I!’ So I think I’ll give her this.” And he kissed Edie on the cheek.

  “You win, old man,” said Bill.

  “Now get!” they both said together as Edie seemed unable to move, and they turned her in the right direction and shoved her off. “Don’t keep the Governor waiting.”

  There was no doubt at all that this was the best conversation of the evening. Edie circled the dying bonfire to Mr. Fawkes, to final capture and disgrace, hardly feeling badly at all.

  Making her way by only the light of the stars down the black path she had been shown that led to Millard’s Cove, with citronella in her pocket and a piece of mosquito netting folded over her arm, Edie thought about Mr. Fawkes. He wasn’t God—that had been a crazy idea—but he must somehow have some connection with Him. How else could he know so much? All he had done was give her the things and say: “If you’re sleeping out, you’ll need these.”

  “But—” began Edie.

  “That anxious young man at Mount Harbor,” he said, “knows you are safe.”

  “Oh, thanks,” said Edie.

  “That’s the path behind you,” said Mr. Fawkes. “Wait for the tide in the morning.”

  “Oh, thanks,” said Edie, “oh, thanks for everything.”

  Her thanks were so big she didn’t know how to say them. She had been almost afraid she had been going to fling herself at his feet, so she had had to turn quickly and hurry away. Now even if it hadn’t been so dark, she couldn’t have seen very well because of the light that kept on shining inside her. She made her feet find the way, and when the dory glimmered dimly ahead, it was another triumph.

  She spent the night close to the prow in a scooped-out hollow she dug in the sand, hanging the mosquito netting from the peak of her crossed oars, which she propped against the boat’s sides. It was almost comfortable, and who cared if it got a bit wet underneath as the tide rose. On top were a million stars and on either side the noises of a sea cove—just the lap of water, the whisper of trees, and the buzz of mosquitoes outside the net. Ha, ha, thought Edie, as she was going to sleep. The smell of scrub pine and bayberry blended marvelously with citronella. She wondered half dreaming if she could now stay at Millard’s Cove forever. Robinson Crusoe had had much less to get himself started with.

  In the morning that sort of dream was all gone of course. In spite of the stars last night the morning was pale—she was pale and tired herself—and she thought that probably as Aunt Louise’s boatman sometimes said, there was weather coming. There was enough of it here already to make quite a stiff breeze. She only stopped to eat her left-over fruit and crackers and to fold the netting carefully and put it under a rock with a corner showing so that whatever Fawkes came looking at Millard’s Cove could find it. And she took a reef in the dory’s mainsail. Then she had to face a problem that had been at the back of her mind all along. Was she going to be strong enough to push the boat back into the water? She hardly dared begin trying, and when she did, she realized that her suspicions had been right. She might as well try to move a skyscraper. She should have known this well enough and taken precautions. Now she would either have to stay here until she was ignominiously rescued by her family, or go and ask help from Mr. Fawkes who had trusted her to take care of herself. She couldn’t do it; she simply couldn’t do it. How did other people get boats into the water? She sat down on the sand biting her wrist and looking at the boat angrily. As she asked herself once more, she saw a picture of the P.D.Q. coming out of Aunt Louise’s boathouse on rollers. If she could get the oars under the stern, the dory might slide. It worked. By putting all her weight on the very end of the prow, the boat lifted and moved just enough to settle down on the oar. Then she made some furious dashes down the beach. Luckily the slope at the water side was a little steeper and the wet sand helped. By the time it was raining hard the dory was floating and she could begin to load, and by that time too the tide was going slack. She pushed off dripping and breathless while it still had just enough strength to creep her out into the bay, and there instantly the stiff breeze caught her and she had to head straight for the middle of the rising whitecaps in order to make her next tack back toward home.

  “The sail of my life,” she kept saying to herself, “this is going to be the sail of my life.”

  She saw at once that the cove had made her miscalculate the wind entirely. It was not at all the kind of day for any dory to be out, and she wished with all her might that she weighed as much as fat Mrs. Johnson.

  She made her weight do as much as it could by sitting so far out on the weather rail that she was almost in the water, but it was not enough and the dory kept shipping it in on the lee. It scared her to see the floor boards beginning to move a little; they were certainly nearly afloat. She came about as soon as she could and found it was no better on the other tack. Phithers! Although it kept her off her point and would take longer to get there, she finally loosened the jib and let it go. The dory came up. Not enough though, and it was pounding into the whitecaps and showering her with spray so that she was opening and shutting her mouth like a fish. What do I do now? she thought. I can’t even see. Spill the wind, something inside her said. I’ve got to spill the wind. Just as things seemed so bad that the boat might go over, she let go the sheet and it righted. Between the harder gusts she pulled the sheet in again. She didn’t even know it when her hands began to bleed, but she thought it took endless time to make the next tack. The dory seemed to bounce like a cork, and all the time was shipping water. This sloshed when the boat leaned and put the weight in the wrong place. She would have liked to bail but did not dare leave her place on the rail. She was just able to come about for her next tack. If she could make it for another few hundred yards, she would be in quieter water and could then shoot for the narrows, but it was the worst few hundred yards of all. Twice the gusts came so sharply and unexpectedly she was almost over, and the dory would not lift n
ow as it had at first. It was sodden with water.

  When she thought that one more gust would swamp her, the wind let up and she found herself wallowing in a kind of calm. The sudden coming to an even keel almost threw her backwards overboard. She had to pull herself back by the tiller, and she flopped onto her knees thinking the world must be coming to an end. Then she heard a purring noise behind her. She looked round and up and up and up a broad white wall. Heavens! It was the Government cutter standing off her weather quarter gently churning and purring and cutting off the wind. There was a man on the bridge with a megaphone. When he saw that she saw him, he called to her.

  “Ship ahoy—stand by—we’re putting off a boat to get you.”

  “Oh no,” said Edie, but he couldn’t hear. “NO!” she yelled at the top of her lungs. “NO!!” All she wanted was time to bail, and she grabbed her can that was floating above the floor boards and began to toss water over the side, letting the dory bounce.

  They sent a man down from the bridge to tell her she needn’t worry and to keep calm. She kept on bailing without answering. What was the use? When she heard the rattling of tackle, however, she picked up a floor board and in spite of its open spaces simply scooped water over the side. The next time she looked, the bow of the cutter was even with the dory and the bridge was just above her. She cupped her hands. “Don’t do it,” she yelled as loud as she could. “I’m all right. DON’T DO IT.” She had a chance to get a lot more water out as the chains rattled some more, dropping the boat. Just then she felt a little wind. She sprang back to the rail, picking up the sheet on the way and grabbing the jib as well. The cutter was falling back just enough to let the wind catch the forward sail, and the dory leaned to it at once and started going. There were all sorts of noises from the cutter, but Edie could not pay attention. She was again at sea and everything was the same as before except that the dory was alive again and would do what she wanted, and in one more minute she could make her tack and head for the narrows.

  “Thanks,” she yelled down the wind as she scudded under the cutter’s bow. “Thanks a lot just the same.”