Horns & Wrinkles (4 page)

"Hear tell we've got another horn in the family."

"What do you mean, another one?" I asked.

"First things first, young lady," warned my mother, who wasn't about to let Grandpa B sidetrack her. "Just what have you and Duke been up to now?"

So I told them, and since they all knew Duke, they were mostly satisfied that I couldn't have done much differently, except maybe not worry so much about Lottie. Parts of what I told them lifted some eyebrows, though none that belonged to my sisters. They were too busy acting bored to lift anything but a sigh. That's a stage they're stuck in, except when I bring home some poor starving frog or beetle or garter snake. The way my sisters dance then, you'd think the house was on fire. They're dead set against boarders and always accuse me of trying to be the son that Dad never had. I don't know about that, but I do know that reptiles and amphibians seem to understand me way better than my sisters do.

Anyway, as soon as I'd finished, everyone's eyes shifted to Grandpa, wanting to hear about the other horn in our family.

"This going to be an Uncle Floyd story?" my dad asked, which meant that he'd probably heard it before but never mentioned it because of my mom, who doesn't approve of river stories.

"Thereabouts," Grandpa admitted. "Might have a rock troll or two in it."

Then nothing got said for a bit as Grandpa got his facts straight. He was a knobby old guy in his eighties, prone to coughing fits, felt hats, and getting lost. While waiting, I couldn't spy a neighborhood kid moving, or feel a breeze shuffling, or hear a clock ticking. The whole world seemed to be hanging on what he had to say.

"So?" Mom prodded at last. "Uncle Floyd?"

"Yup," Grandpa B said. "The one who was the younger brother of you girls' Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Huntington. Actually, Huntington had a horn for a bit too."

Everyone exchanged looks, the way we always did during Grandpa B's stories.

"Was that before or after his lumber mill went bust?" Dad calmly asked.

"Oh, before. Right after him and Floyd got run out of Missouri for their bullying."

"Bullying?" I said.

"You didn't think Duke was the only one of those in the family, did you?"

"And the horns?" Dad prompted.

"Those happened the first winter they were up here. They'd chopped a hole in the river ice to scrub up some and the next thing they knew..."

"Horns," I said, filling in the blank.

"Yup. They both had 'em, and they were growing every now and then too."

"When they bullied someone," I guessed.

"Chances are," Grandpa B agreed. "And then one day in late March, or maybe it was early April, just about the time when the ice was going out, they heard a real ruckus down to the river. Huntington dashed down there and found a pretty young lady trapped on an ice floe with a flock of sheep. They were floating away from shore, farther and farther every second, with no hope of ever getting ashore, not unless someone came to their rescue."

"Couldn't she swim?" Lillie asked, astonished.

"Not a stroke. And particularly not in the river. Back then folks thought the river just sucked you right under. Today it's lots calmer."

"Did they go to her rescue?" I asked.

"Certainly did. Huntington nearly drowned himself doing it. He could hardly swim a lick himself, but somehow or other, he got that young lady and all her flock ashore. Cold as that water was, he was blue as a jay by the time he was done. But when he climbed out of the river, he'd shed his horn and had his own handsome Bridgewater nose back."

"He'd done an act of genuine kindness," I whispered to myself.

No one was paying much attention to me, though. They were waiting for Grandpa to finish the story. He knew it too. You could tell by the way his shoelaces all of a sudden needed retying, and then his pocket watch needed winding, and then he got to working on his neck, where he always got a kink whenever you tried to hurry him along.

"All right," Mom complained, tapping a foot, "what about this Uncle Floyd? What happened to him? You said it was his story too."

"Oh, he stayed on shore, calling Huntington coarse names," Grandpa B said.

"So he didn't lose his horn?"

"Not that day. I think it even grew a little. There was a lamb or two that went missing around suppertime."

"Did he ever lose his horn?" Fran asked.

"Don't know," Grandpa confessed, putting a hand over his heart to show that he was telling us exactly what he'd been told himself, without any of his famous add-ons. "He disappeared about a week later, never to be seen again. He went down to the river one night, to fetch a bucket of water, and never came back."

"Are you sure about that?" Dad asked.

"Heard that part on good faith from the young lady that Huntington saved."

"How'd you ever get a chance to ask her such a question?" Mom was eyeing Grandpa suspiciously.

"Well, she turned out to be my Great-Grandmother Nettie—great-great-great to you girls—who lived to a very ripe old age and had a talk with me when I was a sprout."

"What was she like?" Lillie wanted to know.

"Pretty as you, and kindly."

"So what happened to Floyd?" I said.

"Rock trolls," Grandpa B reported with a satisfied nod.

"Don't you think," Mom asked, "that it's far more likely that he somehow fell into the river and drowned?"

"Along this stretch of river?" Grandpa scoffed. "Why, who knows what might have happened, but I can tell you this much for sure: old Huntington never saw his brother again, even though he more than once offered to give away everything he owned if it would bring Floyd back. I think he felt kind of to blame, him being the eldest and all."

Grandpa looked about to launch into further details, but a station wagon whipped up in front of our house without cutting its headlights. A sour-looking Dr. E. O. Moneybaker struggled out the passenger door. One-shot, who'd been driving, tried to lend the doctor a hand but got waved off.

Once I explained who they were, everyone stampeded down to meet them.

"Bad pictures," Dr. Moneybaker barked, waving a grainy print under the streetlight beside our sidewalk. "We're trying to find Duke so we can take another batch."

"Isn't he home?" my mother asked.

"Not at the moment," the doctor groused, dabbing at his forehead with a folded hanky, "though his folks are. I'm afraid there's been a small accident."

"How small?" Grandpa called out. Aunt Phyllis was his youngest child.

"It appears," the doctor said, blinking at us through his thick eyeglasses, "that Duke's parents have been turned to stone."

There was a general all-round gasp.

"Stone?" Grandpa B fumed, pushing his way up front. "What kind of stone?"

"Does it matter?"

"And you call yourself a doctor?" Grandpa B snapped. "Gangway! There might still be time to save 'em."

Grandpa always shed about seventy years whenever anything rivery was going on, so he got to Duke's front door first. Without knocking he barged in, declaring, "It's me."

Right behind Grandpa came Dad, still in his pajamas, who called out, "Phyllis?"

The rest of us crowded in behind Grandpa and Dad, none too brave. So far as I knew, no one in our family had ever been turned to stone before.

When Dr. E. O. Moneybaker and One-shot arrived, the doctor announced, "They're in the kitchen."

Everyone flocked to the back of the house, straining not to touch anything on the way. The rooms were so still and watchful that there had to be a spell at work somewhere. In the living room, the old-fashioned mantel clock was still ticking, but its hands kept bouncing off 8:28, as if some hidden wall were keeping them from reaching the next minute.

We all squeezed into the kitchen, where the empty purple leash was lying on the floor and the back door was hanging wide open. There was no sign of Duke. His parents were facing each other across the breakfast nook, still as the bowl of plastic fruit between them. They were stone statues, all right, yellowish sandstone of the kind that shows up here and there along the river. Kids loved to scratch their names and the year into the stuff.

Uncle Norm had been zapped while patting Aunt Phyllis's hand. He was a large kindly man who had never met a dog who didn't want to lick him. At the moment, he was sitting with his mouth hanging opening, looking as though he were saying famous last words.

Aunt Phyllis's head was tilted slightly forward, as if petrified in the middle of a woeful nod yes. Crouching at their feet, just as solid as they were, was Duff, the family spaniel. That explained why we hadn't been bowled over and licked clean as a spoon when we stepped through the front door.

Then I noticed something about Aunt Phyllis.

"What's that?" I said, pointing.

One of Aunt Phyllis's cheeks was moist. As we watched, a tear gathered at the corner of her stone eye and seeped downward.

"We're not too late," Grandpa called out, twice as loud as necessary. "But we'll need some river water to save 'em."

"How much river water?" Dad asked.

"Fill this," Grandpa said, grabbing Uncle Norm's silver thermos off the kitchen counter. "And quick. Don't spare the horses."

Duke lived just seven blocks from the river, but it seemed to be taking Dad most of forever to get back. Finally, Tessa couldn't take it any longer.

"Grandpa, what happened to Aunty and Unc?" she asked.

"River trolls."

"You don't know that," Mom protested.

"Sure do," Grandpa replied. "Your second cousin Alfie had a run-in with some of 'em down to Five Creeks. They turned him into stone just like this."

"River trolls?" Dr. E. O. Moneybaker snorted. "This is the first I've heard of them being involved. All the old wives' tales blame this kind of nonsense on rock trolls."

Grandpa scoffed, saying, "Haven't you ever heard the saying 'River trolls use rocks and rock trolls use river'?"

"Well, of course I have," the doctor crabbed, "but as a man of science, I'm not convinced it means anything."

"And I suppose you think these two people here haven't been turned to stone either," Grandpa said, resting his case.

The doctor worked his jaw up and down plenty without thinking of a comeback to that. Finally, he turned away from Grandpa and snapped at One-shot, "More pictures."

"They won't turn out any better than the ones of the kid," One-shot predicted, but he started clicking close-ups and side shots. Meanwhile, Dr. Moneybaker was tugging on a pair of surgical gloves lifted from a pocket, sliding his eyeglasses on top of his head, and leaning over Aunt Phyllis.

"Those gloves won't protect you any," Grandpa warned. "Not with stone this fresh. It's got to sit for years before it's safe to touch stone such as this."

"Don't interrupt," the doctor grumbled.

"Gloves didn't help Cousin Ernie," Grandpa said.

"Who's Cousin Ernie?" I asked.

"Cousin Alfie's brother."

"Cousin Alfie being the one turned to stone down to Five Creeks?" asked Dr. Moneybaker, who'd stopped leaning toward the breakfast nook.

"Yup," Grandpa nodded. "And Cousin Ernie couldn't stop himself from touching Alfie, just to make sure he'd really been turned to stone. 'Course, he got turned to stone too, the instant he touched Alfie. And even though he had sense enough to put on a pair of leather gloves before he went touching anything."

"And how, pray tell," the doctor said, "did they turn him to stone?"

"Wouldn't know," Grandpa cheerfully admitted. "Do I look like some kind of river troll to you?"

"Dad," my mom spliced in, using her be-nice tone, "who told you this story?"

"Got it straight from the horse's mouth," Grandpa said. "Alfie and Ernie told it to me, and anyone else who cared to listen. Not many did."

"So they didn't stay stone?" I asked.

"At least somebody's listening," Grandpa declared, pleased. "Ernie no more than touched Alfie and got sha-zammed to stone, than someone came up behind them and pushed them both into the river. Soon as they hit the water they got turned back to flesh and bone. My personal opinion? The river water saved them."