The Thanksgiving Treasure (9 page)

“Yes,” she said. “I think I'd better.”

Chapter Twelve

The three of us drove out to the Rehnquist farm, and I asked them to wait while I got something from the house. I went in and walked over to my drawing of Mr. Rehnquist, which was still hanging on the wall. I was pretty sure he wouldn't have minded if I kept it, and I took it down. I looked around the room one last time, and tried to fix it all in my mind so I could remember the good things about him, as Grandma had said. I went out then, and asked Dad to hold the picture for me while I went into the barn to get Treasure.

I could hear Dad and Grandma talking quietly outside as I saddled Treasure.

“James,” said Grandma, “don't sell the horse.”

“Don't you start on me, Mother. You know as well as I do we can't keep a horse.”

“Maybe we could keep it in Haskell's barn,” she said. “He wouldn't charge much.”

“What's it going to eat? Table scraps?”

“I could manage to save a little out of the household money,” said Grandma.

“If you can manage to save out of the household money, put it toward the coal bill.”

“Well,” said Grandma with a sigh, “I suppose you're right. I guess it's not the horse itself that matters, it's that she knows he left it to her—something of his. She began to love that old man, James.”

“Really?” asked Dad, sounding surprised.

“Yes, I think she did,” said Grandma. “You don't know your own daughter, James. She's got a lot of love to give.”

Dad was silent for a while then, and I went on putting the tack on Treasure. I talked to her softly as I worked, and she would look at me now and then as though she were really trying hard to understand what I said.

“Mr. Rehnquist isn't here any more,” I said to her. “And I'm going to take you to a new place for a while, where I can take good care of you. He wanted you to be with me, so it's all right.

“They were going to let you go up for auction,” I told her. “And who knows what might have happened? Anybody could buy you at an auction! Someone who doesn't know anything about horses, or someone who wouldn't understand you. At least now I can have something to say about who buys you.” She looked at me blankly, and I wished there were some way I could explain to her why she wasn't going to see her two best friends any more.

“Maybe we can sell you to somebody who lives nearby. Then I can come and visit you. Won't that be great?” I didn't even believe that myself. “Well, at least I'll make sure it's somebody who'll give you a good home.” I hugged her around the neck, and she nuzzled me. I couldn't bear the idea of selling her.

When I had finished with the tack, I led her out of the barn. I didn't get on her, because I didn't know if Dad would let me ride her or not. He was leaning on the truck, staring up at Rehnquist's house and looking thoughtful.

When I came toward him, he came over and looked down at me, and patted Treasure on the nose.

“Would you like to ride her home, Addie?” he asked.

I didn't know how to thank him, so I just nodded.

Dad gave me a leg up on the horse and patted my hand. I think he knew then that Mr. Rehnquist really had been a friend of mine and that I was feeling both sad and happy at that moment, riding Treasure away from her old home for the last time. I trotted along behind the pickup, and we went slowly home.

Epilogue

My dad never did sell Treasure. He talked about it a lot, but he kept putting it off. He said we might as well use the $234 Mr. Rehnquist had left him to take care of the horse, because he sure didn't want to use that old goat's money on himself. Then, on my next birthday, he gave me a pair of cowboy boots, and I knew that Treasure was really mine.

I did become an artist, and I even got to Paris, but by that time, Grandma was gone. Whenever I'd see something and think, “If only Grandma were here,” I'd remember what she'd said about making her happy, and I knew that Clear River had been enough for her.

And now, not a Thanksgiving goes by that I don't think of that funny dinner in old Walter Rehnquist's kitchen, and how his friendship brought us all closer together and taught me what Thanksgiving really means.

Turn the page to continue reading from The Addie Mills Stories

Chapter One

Since it was Easter vacation time and I didn't have to go to school that morning, I didn't really have any reason to get up. But I got up anyway, because around our house if you didn't get up, there had to be some reason. Only sick or dying or slothful people stayed in bed late. Since neither Dad nor Grandma nor I would even think of committing the sin of sloth, staying in bed late at our house meant you were probably at death's door. Then you had to eat milk toast and get mentholatum up your nose and iodine down your throat and a thermometer under your tongue until you realized that getting up early was a terrific idea after all. That's why I always got up early even when I didn't have to.

Besides, I liked eating breakfast when Dad and Grandma were at the table too. My mother had died more than eleven years ago, just after I was born, and Grandma had come to live with Dad and me then. Grandma was in her seventies and short and wrinkled. Anybody who didn't know better might have thought to look at her that she was a frail old lady. Dad and I knew better. Grandma was a powerful, energetic little bundle. She was the first one up in the morning and the last one to bed at night, and she outworked a lot of my friends' mothers who were half her age. She had such strong hands she could put the lid on a pickle jar too tight for even my father to remove it.

Grandma didn't just keep house either. She had the biggest and best vegetable garden in the neighborhood and more flowers and fruit trees than anybody in town. She did more sewing and baking and canning than anyone else and still found time to sit and read for an hour or two every day. Her favorite books were her Bible and her dictionary, and she kept them right by her rocking chair in the living room so she could look things up at any time. She loved helping me with my vocabulary and spelling lessons, and we would always give each other the word tests in the
Reader's Digest
when the new issue arrived.

Grandma was reading at the table that morning and so was Dad, so there wasn't much conversation. It was Thursday, the day the little town paper, the
Clear River Clarion
came out, and they were both busy catching up on the local news. Actually there was never anything in the
Clarion
that everybody in town hadn't already known for days, but somehow seeing it down in black and white made it seem more important.

While they read, I silently finished my oatmeal with raisins and apples cut up in it. Then I got some eggs out of the refrigerator. Using one of Grandma's hatpins, I poked holes in both ends of the eggshells and blew the raw egg out into a bowl. I had been doing this for weeks to get eggshells to decorate for Easter, and so we had been having a lot of scrambled eggs lately.

I never believed in doing one thing at a time because it seemed wasteful, so while I was huffing and puffing into the eggshells, I decided to read the back of Dad's section of the paper. It wasn't easy, with my glasses sliding down my nose and my pigtails swinging precariously close to the bowl of raw egg. I pushed the bowl of egg closer to Dad and gave a particularly hard puff. The egg slurped noisily out into the bowl as I leaned in closer to his paper. He suddenly whipped the paper up over his head and looked right into my face, which by that time was practically over his bowl of oatmeal.

“Will you get your face out of my lap, Addie?” he said, irritated. Then he looked down at the bowl of raw egg. “And don't do that mess at the table … it's disgusting.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled. I seemed to have a talent for irritating Dad. I didn't intend to, but it usually worked out that way. I knew we liked each other, but he wasn't very good at showing it, and some of that seemed to rub off on me when he and I were together. Most of the time it was a friendly battle, though.

Dad was tall and slender, and his dark hair was just beginning to gray at the temples. He had a plain Midwestern face that always reminded me of those tight-lipped cowboys in the movies. Though he was easily annoyed by me, we had some good times together, and I was slowly learning how to hold my own with him.

I leaned in close to his paper again, and he looked over at me.

“I don't know what's so important in this rag of a paper that you can't wait till I'm finished,” he said.

“I wanna see if there's anything in it about our Easter Style Show contest.”

“What's that?” he asked.

“Oh, Dad! I told you about it a million times! All the sixth grade girls are designing original fashion creations for the 4-H Club.”

“Fashion creations!” he said, sounding disgusted. “I thought you were making dresses.”

“Oh, Dad! You know what I mean! And we're having a contest to see who does the best one. We're going to model them at the Women's Club luncheon next week, and they'll pick the winner.”

“Oh, well,” he said sarcastically. “Big news like that wouldn't be in the town paper … that's probably on the front page of the
Omaha World Herald!
”

“Very funny!” I said, looking disgusted. The
Omaha World Herald
was Nebraska's biggest newspaper, and we read it every day, even though it never seemed to report anything about the people in Clear River.

“You going to school looking like that?” Dad asked, eyeing my old jeans.

I didn't care much for dressing up, but I was not allowed to wear jeans to school. “Dad!” I said. “It's Easter vacation! I don't have to go to school for two whole weeks!”

“Well, I'll be!” Grandma interrupted from behind her paper.

“What?” I asked.

“The paper says Constance Gunderson is back here from New York,” said Grandma. “Says she attended her mother's funeral in Omaha and is out here in Clear River to sell the family home.”

“Huh!” snorted Dad. “She'll never unload that white elephant. Must have twenty rooms in the joint. Nobody could afford to heat it in the winter.”

I figured I knew everybody in Clear River, but this was all new to me. “Is that the big house on Elm Street, the empty one? Who's Constance Gunderson? What does she do in New York?” I asked.

“What are you, the district attorney?” said Dad.

“Well, who is she?” I asked impatiently.

“She's Constance Payne, the actress,” said Grandma. “That's her stage name. I guess she didn't like Gunderson for acting.”

“I never saw her in any movies, did I?” I asked.

“She's never been in any,” said Dad.

“She's on the stage,” Grandma said. “She does those Broadway things.”

“You mean real, live theater stuff?” I asked, fascinated.

“Yeah,” said Dad, sounding unimpressed. “Probably Shakespeare and all that highbrow stuff. Don't know why anybody would want to sit through that after a hard day's work.”

I was about to go on with my cross-examination when my best friend Carla Mae knocked on the door. Carla Mae lived next door, and she was my age. She had a knack of showing up at our house just at mealtime. This amused my grandmother, who loved to feed everybody, but annoyed my father, who thought it was a conspiracy to cost him more money—the thing he worried about most. The truth was that Carla Mae just liked to eat. She would have a meal at home and then drop over and have another one with us. She was beginning to look a bit on the chubby side.

I opened the door and yanked her inside in a hurry, so I wouldn't miss any of the talk about Constance Payne.

“Kid! Wait'll you hear what I just heard!” I hissed at her.

“What?”

“Constance Payne, the Broadway actress, is coming to Clear River!”

“Who?” she asked, looking confused.

“Already had breakfast, Carla Mae?” Grandma interrupted.

“Yeah, but I could stand some oatmeal, I guess.”

“I thought so,” Grandma smiled. Dad gave an irritated little grunt from behind his paper.

I shoved Carla Mae into a chair, and Grandma plopped a bowl of oatmeal down in front of her.

“Who's Constance Payne?” Carla Mae asked, “I never heard of her.”

“That's what I'm trying to find out!” I said impatiently, and continued with my barrage of questions to Dad and Grandma.

We learned that the Gundersons had been one of the few wealthy families in Clear River and that they hadn't socialized much with other folks in town. Constance was only a couple of years younger than Dad, and they had attended high school together. Then she had gone East to an exclusive women's college and to England to study drama and had gone on the stage in New York.

She was beginning to sound very glamorous to me. Grandma said that Constance had come back to Clear River only once before, when her father had died some years ago. After that her mother had lived on alone in the old family house, a huge Victorian monstrosity that was on the edge of town. Then Mrs. Gunderson had taken ill and was moved to an Omaha nursing home where she had died a week ago. There had been no notice of her Omaha funeral in the paper, so nobody from Clear River had attended. Now it seemed that Constance Payne was in our town between engagements and would be selling the house, never to return.