Then There Were Five (2 page)

Rush had to laugh at that.

By noon, however, the dam looked something like a dam, and the pool was beginning to fill up. “Another couple of days—” Rush said.

“What about lunch?” inquired Oliver practically. He was feeling the justified hunger pangs of a day laborer.

“Oh, lunch!” Rush was cross. “That's the trouble with life. You get to work on an idea, or a piece of music, or—or a dam, or something. All concentrated and working right, and then suddenly at an arbitrary time you have to stop and eat food. Chew and swallow, chew and swallow, three times a day! It's a silly habit.”

“Trouble with you is you're hungry,” said Mona tranquilly. “And you're cross because you know you'll have to wash off all that mud before Cuffy lets you in the house.”

“What's an arbitrary time?” asked Oliver.

“Lunchtime, I guess he means,” Randy told him. “Oh, look, here comes Cuffy! And I think—yes, how swell—she
has
got our lunch with her!”

Good old Cuffy! They watched her coming toward them, white and fat and round, like a pigeon on the lawn. She had a basket and a thermos bottle. When they flung themselves upon her in gratitude and greed she brushed them aside.

“Go on with you!” she scolded, pretending to be annoyed. “I just wanted to keep your muddy tracks out of the house.”

But the Melendys knew that that was only partly true. Cuffy believed in a little pleasant spoiling blended with discipline. She had been taking care of them so long that in many ways they felt as if she were their mother, whom they had lost a long time before. Or more like a very special grandmother, perhaps, since she was white-haired and roly-poly.

“Cuffy, you come and eat with us,” said Oliver, pushing his dirty paw into her clean, pink one.

“No, no, my lamb. I'm going to mop myself into a corner of the kitchen and have a cup of tea. And don't one of you
dare
come in until it's dry!”

The children sat on the grass with their bare muddy legs stretched out before them in the sunshine. The brook sang and tinkled in the shade. Across the lawn, all smothered in vines and sheltered by Norway spruce trees, stood their house; the strange house that they lived in and that they loved. It was a square old building, with quantities of ornamental iron trimming, a mansard roof, and a fancy little cupola, like a frosted cake, perched on top of it. The Four-Story Mistake, the house was called, because years ago when it was built the architect had made a mistake and left off a story. The Melendys had only moved into it in the fall, but they did not like to believe that they had ever lived anywhere else. There were still surprises that it could give them, though. Now that June was here the old ragged-looking vine over the kitchen door had suddenly become a cascade of little yellow roses that smelled like tea. The grass in the orchard was full of tiny wild strawberries, hot from the sun and sweet as honey, and in the spruce tree outside Rush's window an oriole had built its nest, a silver purse full of gold.

“All summer!” said Rush, with his mouth full. “Think of it. All summer long.”

“All summer what?” Mona wanted to know.

“Just all summer,” Rush said happily. “I mean this is only the beginning of it. Dams and swimming and the garden and picnics and hot days and all. Oh, boy.”

“Sometimes it will rain. And sometimes we'll get stomachaches. And sometimes Cuffy will be cross,” said Oliver realistically.

Rush laughed. “A pessimist at seven.”

“Eight,” said Oliver. “Almost. I get a birthday pretty soon. What's a pessimist?”

By the end of the afternoon the dam was finished. Randy looked at it in consternation.

“But now there's no waterfall!” she cried. “I didn't think about there being no waterfall. Just that little trickle. I miss the noise.”

“Silly, that's the point,” said Rush. “Cut off the waterfall and up comes the pool. When it gets high enough it'll slop over the top again. And look how swell it will be for swimming.”

“Well, I guess so.” Randy was doubtful.

“Will it be full enough tomorrow when we wake up?” said Oliver.

“Nope. Not tomorrow, and not the day after. But maybe the day after
that.
”

More than two days. Oliver felt it might as well have been a month. He had supposed the pool would fill right up like a bathtub. He was disgusted.

They had worked hard. The dam was twice as thick as necessary, and it zigzagged like the Great Wall of China; but it was strong and well-constructed. They were pleased with their work, even though it was now finished and they were muddy and would have to take baths. To her collection of wounds Randy had added a gash on the shin.

“How did you get away without knocking one of your teeth out?” Rush said. “Overlook it?”

“Randy puts her whole soul into her work,” Mona defended her sister.

“Okay. Just so long as she doesn't put her front teeth into it, too.”

“He jests at scars that never felt a wound,” remarked Mona gloomily. She was fond of quoting Shakespeare. But in the next moment she ruined the effect by breaking into a gallop and shouting over her shoulder at Randy, “First dibs on the bathtub!”

She almost crashed into Willy Sloper coming around the corner of the house. He had changed from his customary overalls to his blue serge suit. “How many of you folks want to drive to the train with me to meet your papa?”

All of them did, even the dogs. They left no doubt in Willy's mind about that.

“Well, hurry up 'n' git tidy then. I can't take you to town all muddy like that. I just cleaned off the carriage this afternoon.”

He certainly had. Half an hour later when they were all in the surrey the odor of cleaning fluid was almost asphyxiating.

“Nobody light a match,” cautioned Rush unnecessarily. “We'd explode like a block buster.”

“If you hang your head over the side it's not so bad,” said Randy, who was less in than out of the carriage. As for Mona, she was holding a heavily perfumed handkerchief up to her nose and rolling her eyes above it like one of those fainting heroines in an old-fashioned novel.

Oliver was sitting beside Willy in the front seat. “I don't see why you mind it,” he said stolidly to the three in the back. “I think it's a nice smell.” He gave a loud relishing sniff to prove it. “M-m-m. Good.”

Willy smiled at him. “You're my pal, aintcha? Anyways it'll wear off in time.”

“Well, it looks just lovely, Willy, anyway,” Mona said. “It never looked so nice.”

Willy was pleased. “Ought to. Besides cleanin' them seats I brushed it all out with the whisk broom. And I took and put Vaseline on the dashboard to kind of limber it up, and then I shined it up good with black shoe polish—”

“Ah, that explains the peculiar bouquet,” remarked Rush, breathing deeply. “I thought it couldn't be just only cleaning fluid.”

“—And notice the fringe?” continued Willy, ignoring him.

“Why, it's all untangled.”

“Combed it,” said Willy. “Combed it right out, just as tender as if it was a baby's hair.”

“Lorna Doone looks nice, too,” Randy said. The dappled horse had roses stuck in the bridle above her ears. From the front, with her long eyelashes and comblike blinkers she resembled a very homely Spanish señorita, but from the side and back the effect was both spirited and dressy.

“Father will be pleased,” Mona said happily. For of course all this grandeur was for Father. He had not been home for two whole weeks.

“Maybe he can stay all the time now, like he used to,” Randy said hopefully. “Maybe he won't even have to go and lecture anymore.”

“Fat chance,” said Rush, “with the war going on. Probably he'll have to be away even more.”

And that is exactly what was to happen. After the joyful confusion of arrival, the hugs, the shouts, the bits of news that couldn't wait; after Father had had his hat knocked off and brushed and put on again, and his briefcase and suitcase wrested away from him; after he had shaken hands with Willy, and admired the surrey, and patted Lorna Doone and given her a lump of train sugar (“Don't let Washington hear about this,” said Father); after they were all packed in the surrey and Braxton lay far behind, and the green country meadows lapped the road edge in green waves, Randy asked the question.

“Will you have to go away anymore, Father? Say you won't! Say you'll stay here now with us all the time!”

Father pulled one of Randy's curls.

“I wish I could.”

“Well, why can't you? You used to.”

“Used-to doesn't mean anything anymore, Randy. The used-to world is all cut away from us now; floating away in the distance like a balloon or a bubble. It isn't real any longer. Perhaps it's a good thing that it's gone. I hope so.”

Oliver, like a small retriever, nosed out the fact that lay beneath these words.

“You mean you're going to have to go away again?”

Father nodded. “I'm going to have to go away again. And stay longer.”

Randy sat up. “Are you going to be a soldier?”

Father laughed. “Unfortunately I'm too old. And too decidedly a father. I have to keep busy getting worms for my young.”

“Why can't you dig them up at home?” pleaded Randy.

“Because I'm going to dig them up in Washington in a large government-owned bird sanctuary.”

“Gosh!” Rush said. “Have you got a government job?”

“That's right. A fascinating one, too.”

“Doing what?”

“Secret,” said Father complacently. “So secret that I even have to guard against talking to myself.”

“How often can you come home?” said Mona.

“A weekend now and then. And perhaps two weeks in August.”

This was gloomy news. They contemplated it resentfully. “You might just as well be a soldier after all,” sighed Randy.

“Yes, and that way you'd at least get a medal,” said Oliver.

But it was so wonderful to have him with them even for a short time; and the day was so perfect, the country so downy with the new summer, that they couldn't be sad for long.

As they turned in at the gate of the Four-Story Mistake, Rush said, “We have a surprise for you. We made it today.”

“Let's save it for last though,” said Mona.

And as always when Father returned they led him about the place on a tour of inspection.

First they went to the vegetable garden.

“I killed those,” said Oliver with bloodthirsty satisfaction, pointing to a huge pile of dead weeds.

“The best type of killing one can do,” Father approved.

He was made to look at the onions and remark upon how tall they'd grown; and the carrots, the beets, the tomato plants.

“Look at the peas,” said Mona. “They really have little beginnings of pods on them. And the lettuce has stopped looking like a ruffle. You can tell it's lettuce now.”

“And see the corn,” Oliver pointed out. “I don't pull it up for quack grass anymore; and the radishes are getting too big already. But something keeps eating the cabbages.”

“I hope it eats them all before they get a chance to ripen,” observed Rush darkly. “And I've already spoken to a couple of caterpillars I know about the broccoli.”

“Sulphur and iron,” said Mona in exactly Cuffy's voice. “Growing children need lots of sulphur and iron.”

“I'd rather eat them in their mineral state,” Rush said.

Then they took Father to look at the raspberry bushes (another summer surprise produced by the Four-Story Mistake), and then to see the rose moss, but it was all closed up, and the delphiniums, just coming out, that Mona had planted.

“I love delphinium buds,” Randy said. “They're exactly like big blue tadpoles.”

The Canterbury bells were just beginning too, but the columbine and bleeding hearts were nearly over. Soon there would be hollyhocks and phlox.

They took him to see Persephone, the goat, and her new kid; and Willy's white chickens that he kept behind the stable, and last of all they took him down to see the dam.

Father was overwhelmed.

“What a piece of engineering,” he cried. “So strong and so—so big. It would take the Johnstown flood to break it open. How long did it take you to do it?”

“Just all day,” Rush told him modestly. “But of course there were four of us working on it.”

“When I come up next time I'll enjoy swimming in it. Before this the water in the deepest part came only to my collarbone.”

As they stood contemplating it, Father silent in admiration and the rest of them silent in the pride of creation, there was a piercing blast from the front door of the house. It was Cuffy blowing the police whistle, and it meant that supper was ready.

Randy danced across the lawn ahead of Father. “Look, I can walk on my toes. Almost! And in sneakers, too. When can I have a pair of real toe shoes, do you think?”

Mona's arm was linked through Father's and Oliver was hanging onto his other hand. Rush walked beside them and everybody was talking at once. Isaac and John Doe circled around them madly barking and scuffling; showing Father what big, serious dogs they had become. A delicious fragrance of food floated from the kitchen windows.

“Wait till you hear my new piece,” Rush was saying. “It's a Schumann Novelette and, boy, is it tough!”

Mona said, “I know the whole of
Macbeth
by heart now. All the parts. I'll do it all for you after supper if you like.”

Oliver said, “Did you see the President in Washington, Father? Did you get to shake his hand? Did you talk to him?”

And Randy, circling among the circling dogs, flitting and soaring like a moth, kept calling the same question:

“Do you think I could have some toe shoes pretty soon, Father? Real toe shoes, pink satin ones, with satin ribbons? Do you think I can, Father? Do you? Honestly, do you?”