And Condors Danced (15 page)

As Carly and Mavis climbed up to sit on the stump of the old eucalyptus tree, Will Harding, who was on the near side of the lavatory along with Luther Purdy, was just throwing the ball. “Andy over,” he shouted, and tossed the ball up over the roof, and then he and Luther got ready to run. If anyone on the other team caught the ball before it hit the ground they would come dashing around the corner in a moment to try to hit Luther or Will. And, sure enough, someone did. The someone was Henry Quigley Babcock.

Skidding around the corner in a cloud of dust, Henry fired the ball at Luther, who happened to be nearest, and caught him right in the middle of the back.

“Gotcha!” Henry yelled, jumping up and down and shaking his fists. “Gotcha, Purdy.”

Luther shuffled toward him, rubbing his back. “Blame it, Henry,” he muttered with his face screwed up as if he were about to cry. “That hurt. Why do you have to throw so durned hard?”

As Henry Babcock strutted back toward his side of the outhouse dragging Luther with him, Carly started telling Mavis to pretend to be talking so Henry would think they hadn’t noticed him clobbering Luther.

“What’ll we talk about?” Mavis said, looking nervous.

“Anything,” Carly said. “Recite nursery rhymes if you can’t think of anything else.”

So Mavis said, “Mary had a little lamb,” in a self-conscious voice, and Carly made an astonished face as if she’d just heard something shocking, and answered, “Really? Well—have you heard that three little kittens lost their you-know-whats?” And Mavis laughed and said, “And you’ll never guess what old Humpty Dumpty sat on.” But by then Henry had disappeared back behind the outhouse, so they quit reciting and watched to see if Will would catch the ball when it came back over the roof. But at that very moment Matt Kelly rode into the schoolyard on Rosemary.

T
HE MINUTE CARLY
heard the quick little trotting hooves, she jumped down off the stump and ran. She wanted to talk to Matt before he saw Henry, and to remind him to keep his mouth shut about the firecrackers and the Olympic Hotel. Matt said he hadn’t forgotten but didn’t see why they still had to keep mum.

“I told you,” Carly said, walking along beside Rosemary as Matt led her to the horse shed, tied her up, and poured oats into the manger. “I told you, if we accuse him now, Henry’ll just deny it, and we really don’t have any proof yet. He’ll just say his grandpa was paying Elmer for something else. And if we keep mum and hang around Henry a lot—you, that is—that’s your job, and if you ask questions that get him started bragging like he always does, sooner or later he’s going to spill the beans.”

Matt looked doubtful. “Why is it my job?” he asked.

Carly was amazed. “Well, I can’t hang around Henry, for heaven’s sake. I’m a girl.”

“Well, you’re hanging around me,” Matt said. “What’s the difference?”

“The difference is…” Carly said. “The difference is that I hate Henry Babcock.”

Matt grinned a smart-alecky grin. “You don’t hate me, then?” he asked.

Carly glared. “Not yet,” she said. “Not yet, Matthew Kelly, but you keep acting so smart-alecky I’ll get around to it for certain.” Then she ran back to Mavis and the eucalyptus stump.

All the rest of the day, as school took up and Mr. Alderson, who taught fifth through eighth grade, gave his annual first-day-of-school speech, and everyone got a new desk and books and pens and pencils and got caught up on the news of the long summer during recesses and lunch hour, Carly kept one eye on Matt and Henry. Two or three times she saw Matt talking to Henry Babcock, but not for very long, and each time, afterward, he caught her eye and gave his head a tiny shake. It looked as if it wasn’t going to be easy. Henry undoubtedly would have to run out of other things to brag about before he would take the risk of boasting about how he had been the one to throw the firecrackers at the Presbyterian float. Carly was prepared to wait.

When Carly ran down the schoolhouse steps that afternoon, Lila and Venus and the road cart were waiting by the gate. Carly was surprised, because she was to go to Greenwood after school and Lila usually said she could walk that far. Once in a while in wintertime when they got to use Prince, Lila would agree to take Carly to Greenwood, or even on a quick trip into town. But Lila would never agree to go anywhere extra during harvest time when Venus was the only draft animal that could be spared for the drive to school.

“I’m coming, Lila,“ Carly called as she jumped the last three steps and ran down the path. Outside the gate she stopped briefly to say, “Hello, Venus. Hello, old Broomstick-Venus.” She rubbed the old jenny’s soft nose and jerked her hand away as the cantankerous animal lifted her long upper lip and threatened to bite. Venus’s good ear was flat back and the tendons on the sides of her long face quivered angrily. Carly giggled. Holding her face as close as was prudent, she crooned, “Sweet old Broomstick. Sweet old ornery Broomstick.”

“For heaven’s sake, Carly. Get in!” Lila said, and Carly skipped around the cart and climbed up. But when Lila flipped the reins and said, “Gee up,” Venus balked.

“Oh, no!” Lila said. “
Oh
,
no
!” and she went on clucking and flipping the reins even though she should have known that Venus never paid any attention to that kind of thing. Once Venus began a balk, there was never anything that did any good accept “the chain.”

“I’ll get it,” Carly said, and she reached down under the seat, while Lila looked all around and then slumped down as if she were trying to hide.

“The chain” was several links of logging chain attached to a short pole. Of course no civilized person would ever hit a mule with a logging chain, but someone in Venus’s long and shady past had apparently done just that, and it had made a deep impression on her. So when the stubborn old jenny went into a balk, there was nothing to do but get out the chain and shake it sharply over her back. At the very first rattle Venus would point her good ear forward and take off at a trot.

Carly thought Venus and her chain was funny, but Lila said it was mortifying. And Lila also said that Venus knew how embarrassing it was and that was why she always balked in the most public places. Lila was probably right. Venus was certainly smart enough, and mean enough, to enjoy mortifying people. So “the chain” was shaken while Lila cringed with embarrassment, Venus cocked her ear and lurched forward, and they were off and away.

All the way down Third and Arnold streets Carly asked questions and Lila answered—when she felt like it. Carly loved hearing about high school. She loved hearing about the interesting subjects that were studied there, such as civics and ethics and elocution, and she was even more fascinated by the student body, so mysteriously grown, within her own memory, from scrubby, gangly eighth graders to young ladies with high-piled hair and floor-sweeping skirts and young gentlemen with blue-tinged jaws and high celluloid collars. Lila answered three or four questions before she complained that she was tired of talking and would Carly please just sit there and keep her mouth shut. So Carly kept still, at least until Lila started to turn to the left on Hamilton Road.

“Wait,” Carly said then, “I’m spending the night at Greenwood.”

“You are?” Lila said. “Why didn’t you tell me? I wouldn’t have stopped for you.”

“I know. I wondered why you did. I thought Nellie must have told you. She told me that Aunt M. had asked Father if I could.”

Lila was angrily starting to pull Venus around when Carly said, “Never mind. I’ll just walk from here.” Putting both hands on the edge of the cart, she vaulted to the ground, and a moment later she was walking down Hamilton Road toward Greenwood.

Spending the night with Aunt M. and Woo Ying was a treat that Carly always looked forward to. Her old room, the large upstairs bedroom with the bay window that looked out over the garden, had not been changed at all since she stopped living with Aunt M. when she was not quite five years old. The Jenny Lind spool bed was still covered by the quilt appliquéd with pink rabbits, and in the corner the tiny cradle in which she had slept as a newborn was full of her baby toys.

Once when Mavis was visiting at Greenwood, she’d said it still looked like a nursery, and Aunt M, must have overheard, because afterward she suggested doing the room over so it would be more suitable for a young lady. Right at first Carly had agreed, but when it came right down to making changes, she’d found she didn’t want to. Even though she seldom got to sleep there anymore, she liked thinking of the room being there, always just the same. She liked knowing it was just the way it had been when she lived there with Aunt M. and Woo Ying.

Dinner that night at Greenwood was roast chicken with almond stuffing, and there was apple tart for dessert. They ate in the kitchen so Woo Ying could eat with them, but the table was set with Aunt M.’s best linen napkins and the good china and silver, and right in the center there was such a huge bouquet of roses that you had to stand up to see the person sitting across from you. When Aunt M. saw the table, she looked surprised.

“Why are we using the company things?” she asked. Woo Ying grinned and said, “For celebrate. For very happy celebrate.”

For just an instant Carly wondered if she’d forgotten a birthday or a holiday. “What celebration?” she asked. “What are we celebrating, Aunt M.?”

She halfway stood up to see over the roses and got a glimpse of Aunt M. frowning at Woo Ying and giving her head a tiny shake. Aunt M. looked down then at her plate, avoiding Carly’s eyes, and for a brief moment a shadow like the ghostly wisps of a dissolving nightmare drifted through Carly’s mind. It didn’t seem reasonable to feel threatened by a celebration, however secret, but there’d been something unreadable and worrisome in Aunt M.’s face.

But Aunt M. smiled then and said, “Who knows? Who knows what a crazy old Chinaman will take it into his head to celebrate on a perfectly ordinary third of September? Maybe it’s the kitchen god’s birthday or some other nonsense.”

She changed the subject then and started telling all about Abner and Elsie Stone’s new motorcar that had been parked down by the train station that morning when she’d gone by on her way in to the library. It was called a Chadwick Six, or some such silly name, Aunt M. said, and it had kerosene lamps out in front so it could actually be driven at night. “Not that I’d be caught dead in one of those contraptions after dark,” she said. “They’re bad enough in the daytime, chugging and bouncing all over the place and sending all the horses into fits. Even my sensible Chloe, who hasn’t spooked at anything since she was a filly.”

Carly liked motorcars, and she was pleased to hear that the Stones had one, which made four now in Santa Luisa, unless there was one she hadn’t heard about, which wasn’t at all likely.

Woo Ying liked motorcars, too, and he was always trying to get Aunt M. to say they’d buy one, as soon as times got better. “Woo Ying drive,” he would say, sitting down and working his hands and feet like crazy, as if there were a whole battery of wheels and rudders and levers and pedals in front of him. “Woo Ying drive and Auntie M. and missy sit in back with hats tied on so not fly away when go very fast.”

All the time Aunt M. was telling about the new motorcar, Carly watched Woo Ying, hoping he’d start doing his driving demonstration, but he seemed to have other things on his mind. While Aunt M. went on and on about nearly every motorcar she’d ever seen, Woo Ying only smiled in a secretive way and nodded his head knowingly whenever Carly caught his eye.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL
much later in the evening, when Carly was getting ready for bed in her old room, that she actually found out what Woo Ying had been celebrating when he set the kitchen table with the company china. She’d taken off her school dress—an old one of Lila’s that had been up in the attic for four or five years waiting for her to grow into it—and was pouring some water into the basin on the dry sink when Aunt M. knocked on the door and came in. She was carrying a beautiful new summery nightgown of soft fine cotton printed with tiny blue forget-me-nots.

“Saw this on sale when I was in Finley’s the other day,” she said, “and it looked to be about your size.” She sat down in the rocking chair then and chatted about one thing and another while Carly finished washing and got into the new gown. After a while she seemed to have run out of things to say, but she stayed where she was. It wasn’t until Carly climbed into bed that she pulled the chair closer and said, “Carly, child. I don’t know how you’re going to feel about this, but your father has asked me if you could stay here at Greenwood this fall.”

Carly stared at her aunt in astonishment. “Stay here? You mean all the time? Every day?”

“Well, during the week, at least. He said you might want to go out to the ranch on Saturdays and stay the night and then come back here after church on Sundays.”

Carly opened her mouth once or twice and closed it again and then gave up on talking while a strange combination of emotions and ideas flopped around inside her head like a coopful of hysterical chickens. First of all there was delight. Not the kind of delight she might have felt when she was five and still crying herself to sleep in her dim little bedroom at the ranch house because she was lonely for Aunt M. and Woo Ying and her beautiful sunny room at Greenwood. If Mama and Father had changed their minds and let her go back to Greenwood then, her delight would have been as pure and deep as the snowdrifts in Maine.

But now there were other things to think about, like how much she’d miss out on, and how much she wouldn’t be a part of, or perhaps even hear about, if she no longer lived at the ranch house. Like watching Lila and wondering about her and Johnny and their beautiful tragic love, and Arthur’s exciting adventures, and the things Charles built for her, and the stories Mama told and the ones Father read on winter evenings, and Nellie’s lemon cake and the way she kissed the top of Carly’s head when she wanted to make up after she’d been cross.

So there was sadness mixed with the delight, and resentment that what was happening couldn’t have happened five years sooner, if it had to happen at all. And there was pain, too, a vague shifting ache that she couldn’t quite catch up with, and wasn’t sure she wanted to. But most of all there was one word that got louder and louder inside her head, until it came out in a small breathy voice. The word was “Why?”