Storm Horse

by Nick Garlick

  FLIP HAD KNOWN his dad was a thief. But it had taken him a long time to realize it, even though the boxes had been around for as long as he could remember.

  They’d appeared every few months or so, stacked up in the kitchen of their apartment. Flip had looked in them once and found dozens of new shirts. Another time he’d found transistor radios and watches. A third time it had been bottles of whiskey and gin and rum. When he’d asked what they were doing there, his dad had always given him the same answer.

  “Oh, I’m just keeping them for a friend. He’ll come and get them soon.”

  And until he was eight, Flip had believed him, because when he came home from school or got up the next day, the boxes would be gone. Always. He went on believing his dad until he met Willem Veen.

  Willem Veen led the school’s meanest gang. They loved strolling through the corridors, pushing kids to one side, knocking books out of their hands, and helping themselves to sweets or toys or anything else they liked the look of.

  Anytime anybody ever resisted, or complained, or tried to fight back, Willem would always yell the same thing: “You can’t hit me! My dad’s a policeman! You hit me and he’ll arrest you!”

  And because everyone had seen Willem’s dad in his uniform, and seen how tall and menacing he looked, they were only too ready to believe the threat. Flip certainly believed it and did his best to stay out of Willem’s way. Unfortunately for him, Willem had other ideas. One day he trapped Flip in a corner of the schoolyard and jabbed a finger in his face.

  “My dad knows about your dad,” he sneered. “He says your dad’s a thief!”

  Flip hadn’t the slightest idea what Willem was talking about and he said so. Willem repeated his accusation. Flip tried to ignore him and walk away, but Willem’s gang had arrived by then and surrounded him. So Flip got angry.

  “Well, if he is a thief,” he demanded, “why doesn’t your dad arrest him?”

  “Because the police are gathering evidence,” Willem said. “That’s what the police do. If you weren’t an idiot, you’d know that!”

  “I’m not an idiot,” Flip shouted, pushing him away. “But you’re a liar!”

  Willem knocked him to the ground. He knocked him to the ground when they had the same argument the following week. And in the weeks after that. Then one day he knocked him to the ground and stood on Flip’s hands. He was wearing heavy boots that cut deep into Flip’s knuckles and made them bleed.

  They were still bleeding when he went home, and both his mom and his dad were there to see it. When they asked what had happened, Flip told them.

  His mom rounded instantly on her husband. “Those wretched boxes!” she shouted. “Now your son’s getting hurt because of them!”

  Flip’s dad didn’t answer her. And he didn’t look shocked. Instead he looked angry. “What did you say about them?” he demanded.

  The expression on his face made Flip step back in surprise. “About what?” he asked.

  “About the boxes! What did you say about the boxes?”

  “Nothing.” Flip didn’t understand what was going on.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” Flip said. “I didn’t say a word.”

  “Good!” his dad snapped. His voice was hard and cold. “And you never will, you hear? You will never, ever say one word about those boxes! Do you hear me?”

  Then he grabbed his jacket and stormed out of the apartment. He didn’t come back until the next morning.

  Flip’s mother cleaned the cuts on his hands, put bandages on them, and took him out for an ice cream. They sat on a bench beside a canal and watched the ducks paddle up to beg for crumbs from the wafers. Eventually, Flip asked if what Willem Veen had said about his dad was true.

  His mom sighed sadly. “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

  “But he could go to prison,” Flip said. “If he’s caught.”

  “I know,” his mom said. “And I’ve tried to get him to stop, but he won’t. He doesn’t want to.” She stared down into the water. “But now you’ve been hurt, perhaps he’ll change his mind.”

  “Will you ask him again?” Flip didn’t want his dad to go to prison, but he didn’t want to go on getting bullied at school either.

  “Yes,” his mom said. “I will.”

  “Do you promise?” Flip asked.

  His mom smiled and drew a cross in the air with her finger. Then she drew a circle around the cross. Flip smiled, because that was their private sign, and whenever either of them made it, they always did what they’d promised. Whether it was going to bed on time, cooking something special for supper, doing homework, or going out to the movies, the cross in the circle always meant it would happen.

  Flip’s mom did ask. But it didn’t make any difference. The boxes kept appearing. One night, Flip lay in bed listening to his parents arguing and heard his mom threaten to leave. She said she’d run away from Amsterdam and take Flip with her. His dad laughed and said she wouldn’t because she didn’t have any money.

  “Oh yes, I do!” she shot back. “And if you’re not careful, I’ll use it!”

  His dad was quiet after that, and for the next couple of weeks, the boxes stopped appearing. Flip felt happier. His mom even started to cheer up. It looked as though her request had worked. Then one afternoon, Flip came home to find her sitting in the kitchen, crying. He asked her what was wrong.

  “He took my money,” she sobbed. “All the money I’d ever saved in my life. He found it and took it. And now I’ve got nothing!”

  “Who?” Flip asked, even though he knew what the answer would be.

  “Me!” yelled his father, stomping into the kitchen. He pointed a finger at his wife. “I said you’d never leave me. And now I’ve made certain you won’t! And don’t think you can ever hide anything from me again. Got it?”

  Two weeks later, Flip’s mom left.

  She went without any warning. When Flip went to school, she was at home. When he came back, she wasn’t. He found his dad sitting at the kitchen table, looking at a letter.

  “Your mother’s gone,” he said when Flip asked him what it said. “She’s left us.” He was so angry he could hardly get the words out of his mouth.

  “Why?” Flip asked.

  The only answer his dad gave was to rip the piece of paper into scraps and flush them away down the toilet. He went out without another word, leaving Flip on his own.

  Which turned out to be a good thing, because it meant that when Flip found the letter under his pillow at bedtime, his dad wasn’t there to tear that up too.

  My dear darling Flip, it said.

  I know this is a terrible thing I’m doing, and it makes me sadder than I’d ever thought I could feel. But I’m going away so I can make enough money to look after us both. I’ve found a job and it’s going to pay me a lot. But they won’t hire me if I have my son with me. And I have to stay away so I can be sure I keep everything I earn. I have to be sure it won’t get stolen again. But believe me—when I’ve saved up what we need, I’m going to come back and get you.

  I don’t know when that will be, but it will be one day.

  I will come back for you.

  I WILL COME BACK!

  Mom

  At the bottom of the letter was a little cross in a little circle, and when Flip saw that, he didn’t feel quite so bad anymore because he knew his mom would keep her word and return. He put the letter in the envelope and hid the envelope under the mattress.

  And then he waited.

  Months became a year. One year became two. The second year became the third. She sent postcards in the first few months, although Flip never managed to read them because his dad tore them up and threw them away the moment they arrived. Then they stopped for good, and all Flip had to remind him of her was the letter she’d written. When it grew dangerously worn and faded from being looked at so many times, he folded it in quarters and slid it between two thin sheets of cardboard to protect it.

  By then, of course, he kne
w every word in it by heart and could recite it to himself in silence. But he guarded it as though it were the most valuable treasure in the world, because it was the last thing his mom had ever given him, and he had vowed never, ever to let it disappear.

  As for his dad, he just went on stealing. Piles of new boxes would appear almost every week, to be collected by threatening-looking men who talked only in whispers. Sometimes the police came, but they never found anything, even though they searched the entire apartment. That was something his dad was good at: making sure they never did.

  Then one day the police came, and they weren’t looking for boxes.

  It was Wednesday, July 6, 1966.

  It was Flip’s twelfth birthday.

  The knock on the door woke him up at three o’clock in the morning. Two policemen were standing in the hall. They wanted to know whether Teun Bor lived there, and when Flip said yes, that was his father, they got a funny look on their faces and asked if they could come in.

  One of them then produced a waterlogged wallet from his pocket, cleared his throat, and asked Flip if he recognized it. Flip did. It was his dad’s. Then the policeman said that just after midnight, someone had stolen a car and driven off the road into the Brewers’ Canal. Because of the dark, no one had been able to get to it in time and stop the man inside from drowning.

  “But that’s my dad’s wallet,” Flip said.

  The policeman cleared his throat a second time. “I know,” he said. “It was in the pocket of the man who drowned. Your father’s dead, son.”

  FLIP WAS PLUNGED straight into farm life the very first morning after his arrival.

  His uncle and aunt owned six fields. On five of them they kept chickens, a small herd of dairy cattle, and a large flock of sheep. The eggs the chickens laid were sold in the village shop. The milk the cows produced and the wool the sheep grew went to businesses over on the mainland.

  Every morning at dawn, Uncle Andries brought the cows into the barn for milking. When he led them back to their field, he told Flip that it would be his job to clean the stalls they’d stood in and take the manure out to a pile behind the barn. When he’d finished that, his next task was to help Renske collect the eggs the chickens had laid, clean them, and stack them in cardboard boxes. After that, it was weeding time.

  The sixth field was a vegetable garden. It lay at the back of the house and was packed with rows of potatoes and runner beans, onions and cabbages, and tomatoes growing on sticks against the wall in a little greenhouse beside the back door. In between the vegetables, Aunt Elly had planted bright clumps of dahlias and African violets and snapdragons to help ward off insects.

  But flowers didn’t stop weeds. They had to be removed by hand. And because the garden was so big, and because weeds grew with abandon in the warm summer heat, it was a job that kept Flip and his aunt and Renske busy until late each afternoon.

  It didn’t take Flip long to learn that shoveling manure, collecting and cleaning eggs, and then digging and scraping with a long-handled wooden hoe was hard work. He’d never done anything like it before in his life, and when he stopped at the end of the first day, he was so exhausted he barely had the strength to eat supper. As soon as he finished, he stumbled over to the barn and up the stairs to his room and fell asleep the moment he stretched out in bed.

  It was the same the next day. And the days after that. But Flip persevered, and by the beginning of the second week, he’d begun to get the hang of things.

  He learned that the trick to shoveling manure without getting it all over his shoes and pants was to collect just a small lump on the fork—not a huge one that fell apart the second he lifted it up. The best way to collect eggs without the chickens pecking his fingers to bits was to cup their heads and necks lightly with one hand, then reach under them for the eggs with the other. And when it came to the vegetable plot, he realized he had to slide the blade of the hoe right down under the root of the weed. That way, with a single flick the whole thing came out and not just the top. He also discovered that he had to break up the earth around each plant so it didn’t flatten out and form a hard crust that pushed away water. Broken earth sucked up every drop that fell on it.

  As tired as it made him, he did all this without complaining because he was convinced he wouldn’t be doing it for long. He was certain that one day—one day soon—a letter would arrive to tell him that his mother had been found and would be coming to get him. He knew the police were looking for her. They’d told him so after his dad died and before Uncle Andries had arrived in Amsterdam. Yet every afternoon, when Aunt Elly walked into the village to collect the mail—the village was so small, there wasn’t any need for a postman—she never returned with a letter containing any news for Flip.

  One day she saw him watching and asked him what he was waiting for. He was too embarrassed to answer. He thought she’d think he was rude and ungrateful. She insisted, though, so he told her. Much to his astonishment, she took him into the kitchen, sat him down, poured him a glass of fresh buttermilk, cut him a huge slice of apple pie, and said, “Of course you want to leave. You want to be with your mom. If I was in your shoes, I would too.”

  Flip didn’t know what to say. “You’re not angry?” he managed at last.

  If he’d said the same thing to his dad, that he wanted to leave, then his dad would have been furious. And called him ungrateful. And sent him to bed.

  Aunt Elly just smiled and put a scoop of fresh cream on the apple pie. “I’m impressed,” she said.

  “Impressed?”

  “I most certainly am,” she said. “Your father dies. You don’t know where your mom is. You come to a strange island to live with people you’ve never met before and you have to get up early and go to work on a farm. Yet you don’t complain. You don’t refuse to help. I can think of children on this island who don’t work half as hard as you and they’ve lived here all their lives. I’m very impressed.”

  “But what if I go?” Flip asked.

  “It won’t change the fact that you’ve done yourself proud while you’ve been here.”

  It had been ages since anybody had paid Flip a compliment. Years, in fact. It made him like Aunt Elly even more than he had the day he’d met her. And that night, for the first time since he’d arrived on the island, he realized there was something else he liked about it: living in the barn.

  He liked the rich sweet smell of the hay and the straw, and the lingering odor of the cattle. He liked his room’s dry warmth and silence. Back in Amsterdam, the walls of the apartment had all sported damp patches and it had never, ever been quiet—the sound of footsteps on the pavement outside and the rumble of passing trams had seen to that. And on Mossum he didn’t have to worry about strange men knocking on the door to collect boxes at all hours. In the barn, he realized, he felt safe.

  Even if he was never entirely alone.

  Whenever he looked out of his window in the evenings, the girl with the pale hair would be standing on the far side of the road. She’d be standing still, with her teddy bear clutched in her hand, staring at the barn. The moment she saw Flip looking at her, though, she’d spin around and run away. She’d always run away.

  So one day he asked Aunt Elly who she was.

  “Nobody knows,” she said.

  “Doesn’t she live on Mossum?” he asked.

  His aunt shook her head. “Not all the time. She just came here for the summer, with her mother. They’re living out in a cottage in the dunes. They’ve been here for two months now.”

  “What are they doing?”

  “A long vacation, I think,” Aunt Elly said. “The mother comes into the village to do her shopping, but she doesn’t talk much to anyone. I know her name’s Mrs. Elberg, but that’s all I know. As far as I can tell, the only people she talks to are the shopkeepers, and then it’s only to say what she wants to buy. Which is more than you can say for her daughter. She never talks at all.”

  “Never?” Flip asked.

  Aunt Elly shook
her head. “Not one word. People see her everywhere. In the fields. On the beach. Down at the harbor. But the moment you say anything to her, or look at her, she just runs away. Ever since she got here, that’s all she’s done. Run away.”

  “She’s like a ghost,” Flip said, remembering the way she’d vanished on his very first night. “She’s a ghost girl.”

  Aunt Elly smiled sadly. “Well, that’s a good name for her, poor thing. That’s just what she is: a ghost. I can’t imagine what happened to make her like that.”

  And from that moment on, that’s what she became to Flip: the Ghost Girl.

  He had absolutely no idea that the very next day, she was going to change his life forever.

  IT WAS SATURDAY, and once Flip had cleaned the cow stalls and collected the eggs, Aunt Elly called him into the kitchen and handed him a ten-cent coin. Renske got five cents. When Renske asked why Flip got more pocket money than her, her mother said it was because he was older, and it was the end of his second week on the island.

  “You’ve done nothing but work since you arrived,” she said, turning to face him. “I let you do it because I thought it would help take your mind off what happened to your father. But now it’s time you had a break. It’s time you saw a little more of Mossum. There’s a lot more to it than tidying manure piles and weeding. So the rest of the day is for you.”

  And the next thing Flip knew, Aunt Elly was guiding him out through the door and telling him all he had to do was be back by lunchtime. As he stood on the porch, wondering where to go, he heard Renske explaining that Flip had lived on the farm for two weeks and she’d lived there for seven years, so if anybody should get more pocket money, it should be her.

  Flip wandered along toward the village. He’d seen it just the once, when he arrived, and then only briefly, so this time he paid more attention. Renske had already told him about the number of cars, so their absence wasn’t a surprise, but what did surprise him was the television antennas. There weren’t any. On any of the houses.

  Then there were the shops. Mossum didn’t have a supermarket. All it had were strange little shops with everything for sale stacked up on shelves behind a high wood or glass counter, so that you had to ask for what you wanted. They even had old-fashioned weighing scales he’d only ever seen before in books.