Wanderville

by Wendy McClure

  “Buddy,” Jack said, his voice soft but clear, “it already is.”

  17.

  The Liberation of Merchandise

  Jack read the sign again in the morning sun: WHITMORE MERCANTILE. It hung over the front porch of a batten-and-boarded building on Front Street.

  They had just devised their plan for “liberating” goods. Jack and Alexander would go in first. Then, a moment later, Frances.

  “Ready?” Alexander asked the group.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” Jack said, his hands shoved into his pockets to keep from fidgeting. He couldn’t help but wonder what he’d be putting in those pockets in just a few moments.

  “Wait, what about me?” Harold asked at the very last moment. “What’s my job?”

  Alexander looked at Frances. “I figured he could stand guard outside the store.”

  “Outside by himself?” Frances asked.

  “I can do it,” Harold protested.

  “You have to stand in one place,” Frances told him. She turned to Alexander. “Sometimes he hasn’t the patience,” she said. The truth was, she hated to let Harold out of her sight at all. Once she’d had him wait on a corner in the Bowery while she dashed across the street to buy them apples, and by the time she’d returned, he’d ventured halfway up the stairs to the elevated train in an attempt to make friends with a pigeon.

  “I think Harold understands that it’s a big job,” Alexander said. “And he’s going to have to learn to fend for himself one of these days. Cross the street on his own and all that.”

  “I’m brave!” Harold insisted. “Just like Alezzander. He’s not scared of anything. Right?”

  Frances gazed expectantly at Alexander, waiting for him to respond. He had the same look about him that he’d had the day before in the stable, when he was talking about the sheriff.

  “Right, Alezzander?” Harold asked again.

  “Right,” Alexander said. “Nothing to worry about! Really, Frances, Harold will be fine.”

  “If you say so,” Frances said finally.

  She stood with Harold in front of the mercantile while Jack and Alex went inside, her stomach feeling ice cold.

  “Stay right here. If you see the Pratcherds or the sheriff, come in and tell us,” she whispered to Harold, hoping her voice didn’t sound too shaky. She gave his shoulder a squeeze. “Wait right here for Mother, Freddy,” she said in a much louder voice. “I’m going in the store for just a spell.”

  The storekeeper sighed. “May I be of assistance, son?” His bored voice made it clear that he would not be of much assistance at all.

  Jack scratched his head. “Uh . . . what kind of sweets are those red ones?” He pointed to some dusty-looking hard candies in a jar by the counter.

  “That would be sarsaparilla,” said the man, who couldn’t be bothered to put down his newspaper.

  “Oh,” said Jack. “Do you have . . .” His voice trailed off as he tried to think. Alexander had disappeared into the dim back of the store, down an aisle lined with barrels and piles of grain sacks and a rack of brooms. The plan was for Frances and Jack to work the front of the store, while Alexander took care of the dry goods. He was hoping to smuggle out a whole sack of cornmeal under his coat.

  Meanwhile, Frances was standing near a high counter pretending to admire a display of tinned beans stacked in a pyramid formation. Jack couldn’t tell whether she’d nabbed anything yet.

  The store fellow seemed to hardly care that Jack hadn’t finished his question, but he persisted. “Do you have . . . other kinds of sarsaparilla?” Jack asked.

  “What kinds?” muttered the man, who still hadn’t put down his paper.

  “Hmm, I don’t know,” said Jack. “Maybe . . . green sarsaparilla?”

  The man just shook his head and kept reading. The man seemed dedicated to ignoring Jack now, which wasn’t quite the plan, since Jack was supposed to be distracting him. Either way, the fellow paid no attention to him. Or to Frances—who, Jack noticed, was presently tucking a packet of oyster crackers into her coat pocket.

  She caught his glance and smiled, a wild look in her eye. She might not have approved of Alexander’s notions about “donations,” but she sure looked like she was having fun now. As she stepped closer, he could see the handles of three spoons sticking out the top of one of her high-buttoned shoes.

  “Pleasant day, isn’t it?” she said to Jack.

  He nodded and took a deep breath and headed toward the middle of the store. That was his signal to start “liberating” goods.

  As he stood contemplating a row of canned beans, he could hear Frances behind him trying to distract the storekeeper now that they’d switched roles. “Pardon me, mister, but do you have any calico patterns with sprigs on them?” she asked.

  “Eh, they’ve all got sprigs,” the man grumbled.

  Jack’s fingers closed around the first tin, and he whisked it into his pocket. Simple. He couldn’t believe how simple. He turned and saw Alexander watching him from the back, making just the slightest nod in his direction. Jack felt a strange soaring that was not unlike swinging down from the high branch on the rope swing.

  Jack reached out again and again and took.

  Nothing was happening, Harold thought. Nobody was coming. What could he do? He could cross the street, he thought. In fact, Alexander had said that he, Harold, was going to have to learn to cross the street by himself. Yes, Harold thought, he could do that now. There was nobody coming, after all.

  Harold wished that it wasn’t such an easy street to cross, to be honest; he was really old enough, and if he’d been in New York, he would have crossed much busier streets, with all kinds of carriages going by. This street was boring, Harold thought as he went right across.

  He saw a building with a sign that said LIVERY. He wasn’t sure what that was, but it sounded pretty close to lively, which was something this street could definitely stand to be more of. But when he got to the building, all he saw were horses. So then he walked until he got to the corner, and then he decided to turn the corner.

  He heard a voice calling to him. A lady’s voice. “Little boy? Is everything all right?”

  Harold turned and saw a woman on the porch of a yellow house. She seemed kind and vaguely familiar, with a round face and a pretty watch on a chain around her neck. She was holding a pitcher of something to drink, and there was a table all set with a pie on it.

  “You look thirsty,” she said. “Can I pour you some lemonade?”

  Harold nodded. Never had something been so welcome.

  The lemonade was sweet and cold and delicious, of course, but he realized that the welcome feeling was because he’d seen the lady before. He remembered her watch. She was from the train! The nice lady, not the one with the SCARE badge.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  Frances said he should tell strangers his name was Freddy. But this lady wasn’t really a stranger. “Harold,” he said.

  The lady furrowed her brow. “How old are you, Harold? And how did you . . . get here?”

  It suddenly occurred to Harold that if he recognized her, then she might recognize him. Uh-oh.

  “Was it on a train?” she asked gently.

  “Um, I don’t know,” he said. He took another sip of lemonade.

  And then the door to the yellow house opened and the lady’s husband came out. He had a long mustache like a frown.

  “Where are your parents?” the man asked Harold.

  But Harold wouldn’t answer. He was looking at something on the man’s shirt. At first, the thing reminded Harold of Christmas because it was a star, a shiny one with five points, and so it seemed kind of jolly. But then he remembered what it meant when a man had a shiny star badge on his shirt.

  It meant sheriff.

  18.

  What Happened to Harold
<
br />   You can get ham in a can! Jack couldn’t believe it. And now he had three cans in his coat pocket. Plus two tins of beans and some Diamond brand matches stuffed in the top of his shoe. The soaring feeling continued as Jack stepped out of the store. It was sort of like the days he’d get paid at the factory, when he’d always get an itch to go spend it. This was like scratching the itch, only better. He couldn’t wait to talk to Frances, because he was sure she had the feeling, too.

  But instead she looked frantic. “Where’s Harold?” she whispered. “He’s not here!” She paced up and down the sidewalk in front of the store. By the time Alexander came out from the store, Frances was pale and Jack was uneasy.

  “He’s not here!” she said again.

  “Maybe he just wandered down the street,” Alexander said, trying to keep his voice calm. He tried to keep pace with Frances as she strode along the sidewalk. “You said that sometimes he just doesn’t stay still, so he could have—”

  Frances stopped short and grabbed Alexander’s arm. “Look,” she whispered. “Oh, no.”

  There, across the street, was the Pratcherds’ black wagon.

  Jack caught up with Alexander and Frances, but he stopped, too, when he saw the wagon.

  “Do you think . . . ?” he asked Frances.

  Her eyes were big and anguished. “We have to see,” she whispered. She darted behind a nearby horse-cart. The two boys followed her, and then they all crept slowly around it to get a closer look across the street.

  Alexander looked first and took a sharp, quick breath. Jack and Frances peered around next and saw why: There was Mrs. Pratcherd, talking to the sheriff and another woman.

  “Mrs. Routh,” Jack whispered under his breath. The woman from the train—the one who wasn’t cruel. But she was married to the sheriff. And she would recognize him and Frances. And Harold, too, wherever he was.

  Frances grabbed his sleeve as she took another step beyond the cart they were hiding behind, and another. She was still trying to get a closer look at the wagon, which had no windows, except for one in the back. . . .

  And that was where they saw Harold. He saw them, too, and he pressed his palms against the glass. Help, he mouthed, his eyes wide.

  Frances clasped a hand to her mouth, but a sound still escaped: a hoarse, desperate shriek.

  Jack seemed to feel his own blood rushing cold and swift as Mrs. Pratcherd glanced up. And Mrs. Routh saw them, too, and then the sheriff, who looked Jack in the eye and then gazed right past him to Alexander. The sheriff’s face was hard as he stepped in their direction.

  He heard Alexander behind him. “Run!”

  Frances didn’t move for a second.

  “Come on!” Jack said. He grabbed a handful of her coat and yanked it.

  “Harold . . . ,” she gasped as she began to stagger into a run.

  “We’ll be no good to him if we’re caught. Come on!” The last thing Jack wanted was for Frances to wind up in that wagon, too. He couldn’t let anyone else disappear.

  Then they were off, following Alexander through the alleys, with the sheriff behind them.

  When they crossed the bridge this time, Jack saw Alexander head straight into the woods instead of clambering down the creek bank, and he managed to catch Frances’s arm and pull her toward the detour.

  “Where are we going?” she cried.

  “Following Alexander into the woods,” Jack managed to say, though he was nearly out of breath. “If we went along the creek—”

  Frances suddenly understood. “We’d be leading the sheriff right to Wanderville,” she finished.

  Taking the woods was the longer route, but it was easier to lose the sheriff there. The three ran so hard their breathing was ragged. Once, when they stopped to gasp a mouthful of air, they could hear Sheriff Routh crashing through the leaves behind them.

  “We’ve got to keep running,” Jack said, panting hard.

  He again picked up the pace, the heavy cans in his pockets knocking against his rib cage.

  Suddenly, he had an idea.

  He stopped midrun and put a finger to his lips. Then he turned and threw one of the heavy cans as far as he could into the woods in another direction from the one they were headed. After a moment he threw the second can. They could hear the first one thud and roll through the leaves. The second one hit a small branch with a loud crack.

  For a moment nothing happened. And then they heard the sheriff’s clumsy footfalls head in the direction where Jack had thrown the cans.

  “He thinks we went that way,” Jack whispered.

  The three walked as quietly as they could until they found a branch of the creek and crouched down out of sight against the bank.

  Alexander’s shoulders slumped in relief. “We lost him,” he said. “We—”

  “Shh!” Frances said. “Listen.”

  It was the sheriff’s voice, far away but still in the woods. A thin echo rang with each word.

  “I know you can hear me,” he called. “I’ll get you soon enough!”

  They didn’t hear the voice after that. But they had every reason to believe the words were true.

  19.

  Only Three Return

  When they returned to Wanderville, nobody wanted to talk about what had happened.

  Alexander went straight to his tree perch near the rope swing. Jack grabbed the hatchet and went over to the campfire, and Frances sat on the courthouse log staring intently at the rows of rocks her little brother had lined up.

  Jack picked up the flint and began to work on it with the hatchet. They had matches for lighting a fire, of course, but he needed to occupy himself and he was glad to have a reason to hit hard things against each other. His brain felt hot, and he could hear a dull roar in his mind. He couldn’t save Harold and he couldn’t save Daniel and he couldn’t control the fire, but maybe if he kept hitting flint on steel, something would happen. When he nicked his thumb on the hatchet, he hardly felt it.

  Tchitch! Tchitch! went the sound of the flint.

  Why doesn’t Jack just use the stupid matches he swiped? Frances wondered. To her the Tchitch! Tchitch! sounded like an endless reprimand, one she deserved to hear. She couldn’t believe she’d let Harold get caught. Or that she’d let herself get carried away. She knew she should have stayed outside the mercantile, held Harold’s hand instead of snatching up things with her own.

  She pulled the stolen things out of her pockets and shoe tops and tossed them on the ground. Crumpled parcels of crackers. Bent cheap spoons. It hadn’t been worth it.

  Tchitch! Tchitch! Tchitch!

  Jack was sweating from his efforts. Nearly ten minutes now and the hatchet had made only a tiny spark that barely managed to singe the tinder. Tchitch! All Jack wanted was for one thing to turn out right today. Tchitch! Tchitch!

  He hit the flint harder and harder.

  “Jack.” Alexander had come over to the campfire. “Let me do it, all right?”

  Jack sighed and set the hatchet down.

  “Don’t bother,” Frances muttered just loud enough for the boys to hear.

  “What?” said Alexander.

  “I said don’t bother!” she shouted suddenly. She was on her feet now, marching over to Alexander. “Don’t act like you can fix things! You’ve ruined everything!”

  Alexander straightened and glared at Frances. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s your fault Harold got caught!” she said, circling him. “It was your idea to let him stand guard! We should never have stayed here.”

  “Well, why didn’t you offer to stand guard?” Alexander fired back. “Since you were the one who was so high-minded about not stealing . . .”

  Frances tried to lunge at Alexander, but Jack stepped in her path.

  “Quit it now!” Jack yelled. “Both of you! There’s no changing what happ
ened! Go saw your timber if all you’re going to do is blame each other.”

  Frances stepped back from Jack with a shove, but she seemed to calm down a little. “I just want to get my little brother back,” she said.

  “All right. So what do we do now?” Jack asked. He and Frances looked over at Alexander.

  “What we do now is . . . ,” Alexander began. He paused and took a deep breath. “Well, we can’t go back to Whitmore, because the sheriff will find us. And we can’t go to the ranch, because Mrs. Pratcherd saw us. And, well, I mean, there really aren’t enough of us for a rescue party. . . .”

  Frances raised her eyebrows. “There aren’t?”

  “Just think about all the cowboy stories where they round up a posse, which is at least twenty cowboys.” Alexander was talking very quickly now. “When we get more kids here in Wanderville, then we can—”

  “What?” Frances cried. “This isn’t some cowboy story! This is my little brother we’re taking about!”

  “I know,” Alexander said. “I just . . .”

  “You just give up, right?” Frances shouted. “You act like you’re so brave when you talk about defending this place, but when something real happens—something bad—you just shrug? You think we should just wait until someone else shows up and hope that they’ll help us?”

  “Don’t forget that I helped you,” Alexander said, looking at both Frances and Jack. “You never would have made it out here on your own if it hadn’t been for me.” His eyes met Frances’s and he stared hard until she looked down. “You know that’s the truth!”

  “That’s not the point,” Jack said. “You said the other night that we were all together here. Here in Wanderville.”

  Frances nodded. “Our home,” she said.

  Alexander said nothing for a minute. He walked over to the sitting log and shoved it with his foot.