The Well-Wishers

by Edward Eager

  There was a sound of a breath being caught and held and everyone looked at Laura. She had gone perfectly white. "What?" she said. But it did not sound like her voice talking.

  "Gordy's fixed the well," repeated Deborah. "He went right up to it and told it what."

  "Oh," said Laura.

  Maybe I should explain right here that usually my sister Laura is the most decent and reasonable of all of us, but on the subject of the well she is different. Sometimes you would think it was her own special private property. Maybe that is because she is the one who started the wishes working in the first place.

  She turned to Gordy. "All right, Gordy Witherspoon," she said. "What have you done now?"

  Personally I consider "What have you done now?"" a perfectly awful question. If anybody said, "What have you done now?" to me, it would make me think of all the things I had done before and I would know they had all been bad and this new thing was the worst, and that everybody hated me and I might as well go out in the garden and eat worms. But Gordy did not seem to mind.

  "Oh nothing," he said. "I just tossed a wish down."

  "He wrote it all out," said Deborah proudly, "on the back of my spelling paper. I got a hundred. And a gold star." Only nobody was listening because we were all watching Laura.

  But "What did the wish say?" was all she asked. It was the way she said it that counted.

  "Oh, nothing," Gordy said again. "I don't remember. Yes I do, too. I told it, 'Get going, or else. This means you.'"

  For a minute I thought Laura was going to hit him.

  I decided it was time to speak up. "Let's not get excited," I started to say. "Maybe that was a little crude."

  "Crude?" Laura interrupted. "Crude? It just doesn't show even the first ruminants of good taste, that's all!"

  "OK," I said. "Maybe it doesn't. But that's still not a crime or anything. Gordy didn't know about the oath. He was just trying to please Deborah. And we've all been ruder than that to the well in our day."

  "That's different," said Laura. "The magic belongs to us. It doesn't to him." She turned on Gordy again. "You've just ruined everything utterly and completely, Gordy Witherspoon, and I hope you're satisfied." And then she said words I never expected to hear from a sister of mine. "You always were a buttinski and a pest and we never wanted you around in the first place, and now you can just go on home and never come back!"

  This was too much for me. "Here, wait a minute," I said, getting up and coming between them.

  And even Kip, who is usually too lazy and easy-going to move, uncurled himself from the floor and went and put an arm round Gordy's shoulder, though we all hate sloppiness and what the books call "demonstrations of affection."

  Because while it is perfectly true that we have roughed Gordy, up once in a while when he needed it, and Kip did give him a bloody nose one day (though he got a black eye for it), and one other time when Gordy was really awful I may have put him across my knee and spanked him, just once or twice to help him grow up; still, neither of us would ever have spoken to a fellow human being like that. Sticks and stones may break your bones, but names and plain truths and meanness can go much deeper and cut you to the quick. We know this, and Laura knows it, too, when she is in her right mind.

  But sometimes I think that Gordy does not have any quick. For he went right on smiling. Though maybe his voice did sound a little higher and more bleating than usual.

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to butt in. I just thought it was time somebody did something, and you were afraid to. And Deborah wanted the wishes to start over, so I thought why not try?"

  There's one thing you can say for Gordy, he is spunky. I was sure that word "afraid" would be the last straw that would send Laura through the needle's eye into utter frenzy. But maybe she thought she had said enough already. For she didn't answer a word, but turned and went into the cold, dark, empty house, as if she wanted to be by herself. Gordy hesitated a minute, and then he went in after her. He certainly has spunk, all right.

  Of course it would have been tactful, and better manners, to have left them to settle it on their own. But manners have never stopped Deborah. She followed Gordy right in. After that, the rest of us were too curious to be behindhand.

  And besides, I wasn't sure it was safe for Gordy to be alone with Laura, in the mood she was in.

  But when we came into the secret house's tiny parlor, Laura wasn't doing a thing, just standing with her back to the room, looking down at the desk in one corner (the desk that was such a big part of our adventure the summer before) and fiddling with the key, moving it back and forth in the lock. Gordy went right up to her and took her by the shoulders and turned her round. He held out his hand.

  "I'm sorry, honest," he said. "I guess I just don't know any better."

  Nobody could have said it straighter. When I thought of what Laura had just said to him, I thought it was pretty big. And Deborah ran right up to Gordy and put her arm around his waist, which is as high up on him as she can reach.

  Laura was looking at the floor. But what we could see of her face wasn't white anymore. It was red. She hesitated. And then I'm glad to say she took Gordy's hand, kind of grabbing at it and dropping it right away, but not as if she didn't like him. More as if she didn't like herself.

  "I'm sorry, too," she said.

  "Oh, that's all right," Gordy said.

  "I didn't really mean all that," she said.

  "Sure. Of course you didn't," Gordy said.

  "It'd be awful if I did. The magic's supposed to be for doing good turns. It'd be awful if just thinking about it could make me say a thing like that and mean it."

  "But you didn't mean it," Gordy said.

  "That's right, I didn't. It's just that..." Her voice trailed off and I thought it was time for me to step in again.

  "What Laura means," I said, "is that she was forgetting you don't know about magic, much, yet. She was forgetting you just came in at the end of it, last summer. You see, magic has rules, the same as anything else. If you talk to it the way you did and begin ordering it around, there's no telling what it might do. If the well starts up again now, and if it's angry and goes wrong, it'll be your fault and you'll just have to bear the brunt and take the consequences."

  Laura stamped her foot. "No, silly! That's not what I meant at all!"

  "Isn't it?" I said. But I was pleased.

  "No, it isn't." And now she sounded like the old Laura again. "We can't blame Gordy. He didn't know. If it goes wrong, we're all in it together, naturally. But if everything's all right and it turns out to be a good adventure, I think he ought to be in charge of the whole thing. Because he had the courage to really speak up to the well and get it going."

  That shows you what kind of girl my sister is. Particularly when everyone knew she had had dibs on the first wish right along.

  It was Gordy's face that was red now. "Aw no, you ought to be the one. Honest, I'd rather."

  Laura shook her head. "This is the only way it'd be fair."

  "How do you mean, be in charge?" Gordy said cautiously. "You'd all be along, wouldn't you? You'd be in the adventure, too? It wouldn't be any fun, otherwise."

  "Oh sure, we'd all be along," Laura told him. "If the magic starts, we'll be there and help out any way we can. But you'll be the one to make the decisions."

  Everybody else nodded. Personally I thought it was giving Gordy a lot of rope. Still, maybe it would turn out to be just what he needed to make a man of him. So I nodded, too.

  Gordy looked awed. "Gee," he said. "I don't know if I'm up to it."

  "Sure you are," said Laura.

  "Sure you are," repeated Deborah.

  Gordy looked down at her. They smiled at each other. Then he grinned at the rest of us. "All right." he said. "I'll try."

  There was a silence.

  And then, in the silence, we all heard a knock at the front door.

  Everybody looked at everybody else. And there wasn't a doubt in anybody's mind that the mag
ic was beginning again right now.

  Because nobody ever knocks at the door of the secret house.

  Our parents and our friends and relations know that it is secret, and that is its charm, and they wouldn't dream of ever coming near it and disturbing us. And besides it's too hard a walk for most parents, through the woods and all uphill. Or downhill, if you come from behind. If we're at the secret house and a friend or a relation wants us, he stays at the foot of the hill, by the road, and rings. We have a system, made of wires and pulleys and an old cowbell.

  So if somebody had come knocking at our front door on this cold September afternoon, with the sun going down and everything getting dark, it stood to reason that only the magic could have sent him.

  The knock came again.

  Laura grinned at Gordy. "It's all yours," she said.

  Gordy gulped. "Gee," he said. Then he went into the hall and opened the front door.

  And now it's his turn to tell what happened next.

  2. Gordy Tries

  This is Gordy telling the story now.

  I went into the hall and opened the front door, but I was not as calm as that makes me sound. I was scared.

  I am really scared a lot of the time. Not just of spooky, mysterious knockings on doors, but of ordinary things like meeting people and wondering what they will think of me. That's why I say loud dumb things sometimes, to cover up how scared I am. I can hear exactly how loud and dumb they are, right while I'm saying them. But it is too late then.

  I try never to let James and Kip and Laura and Lydia see how scared I am, though. They would despise me if they knew. They aren't scared of anything. So I went into the hall and opened the front door.

  But when I saw the figure that was standing there, I almost shut it again. And Deborah, who was following me, took one look at the figure, and screamed out "Witches!" and ran back into the parlor.

  "Eh?" said the figure in the doorway, leaning forward and cupping its ear with one hand. "What was that?"

  "Oh, nothing," I said. "How do you do?" I added. That was all I could think of. And then I probably just stood there with my mouth hanging open. I know I do that sometimes.

  The figure was female, but that's about all you could say for it. I have heard some people claim that Lydia's grandmother, old Mrs. Green the artist, goes around looking like a witch. All I can say is, compared with this old lady, Lydia's grandmother is Marlene Dietrich.

  This old lady was all huddled into a long black cloak, and her straggly white hair was coming half down and blowing in the wind. To make her all the more witchlike, her gnarly knotty hands were full of leafy branches and plant stalks and long pieces of vine that trailed down to the ground. She wore big horn-rimmed spectacles and her nose was long and thin and her fingers were long and thin, and when she grinned, it was exactly like a crocodile.

  She grinned now. And she pointed one of her long thin fingers straight at me.

  "Young man," she said in a cracked voice, "I seem to have lost my way. Can you direct me to Hopeful Hill?"

  At these words my heart sank. And I was sure I had started the magic and it was cross as two sticks about it, and I was doomed.

  To know why, you would have to know about Hopeful Hill.

  It is on our road, and some people say it is a crazy house and call it Hopeless Hill. This is not true. Not exactly.

  It is a place where unhappy people come for the experts to make them hopeful again. The way they make them hopeful is mainly by sending them walking up and down the road all day long, and getting in the way of the traffic. Sometimes crude kids yell at them from car windows, "Get outa the way, loonies," and things like that. Once long ago I used to do this. But that is one of the things about me that I hope James and Laura and the others will never know.

  I would not do a thing like that now, of course. I know now that the people at Hopeful Hill are not loonies, but just people who need hopeful talking to. And exercise, apparently.

  So just because this old lady wanted to go there was no reason for me to be scared of her, any more than I should be scared because she looked like a witch. There are no such things as witches, and there is nobody dangerous at Hopeful Hill, either. Or so they say.

  All the same, if the well were insulted, and furious, it could easily send a witch after me, or an escaped maniac, or both. Couldn't it?

  All this was going through my mind when the old lady suddenly dug me in the ribs with her bony finger. I jumped.

  But "Cat got your tongue, boy?" was all she said.

  Of course I could perfectly well have given her directions for Hopeful Hill and gone in and shut the door. That is what I started to do.

  But then I remembered that the magic is supposed to be made up of doing good turns, and that this was supposed to be my adventure and the others were counting on me.

  I knew they hadn't wanted me along in the first place that day. I knew Lydia didn't have to go to the dentist. And that was really why I'd made the wish on the well, because I was feeling left out. And when Laura was so nice about that, and forgave me, I couldn't let her down now. If the magic had gone wrong, I'd just have to bear whatever brunt there was.

  So I said, "I'll come with you and show you."

  "Don't let me disturb your party of pleasure," said the old lady. I guess she could see the others peeking from the parlor window.

  But I said, "I was just leaving. It's right on my way home. Just a second till I get us a light." And I reached for the pocket flashlight I always carry, for it was really twilight now.

  "Lead on, Diogenes," said the old lady. I do not know why she called me that. "I can see in the dark, myself," she added. Somehow this did not make me feel any better about her.

  But I just said, "Take my arm, ma'am," and she took it with her skinny claw. If I were good with words, like James, I would probably say that her icy grasp seared my flesh. But it didn't. It just felt like a skinny claw.

  As we started down the slope, I looked back and saw the others in a huddle in the doorway, looking out after us. And when we'd gone a little farther, I could hear them coming along stealthily behind. That made me feel better. So long as they were there, nothing could go very wrong. If anything happened, they'd know what to do about it. They always do. That's what's so wonderful about them.

  I would not want them to read some of the things I have written about them in this chapter so far. I admire them so much, things keep slipping out.

  I would not want them to read some of the things I have said about myself, either. I'll have to come back and take those parts out, later, but I can't stop now. It's going to be hard enough to tell this story, and worry about sentence errors and errors of taste and getting all the way to the end, without stopping to make changes. Stories are not a thing I am good at. Miss Wilson says I just don't have the gift. She says I should learn to stick to the point. I'll try to do that from now on.

  It turned out the old lady didn't need my arm going down the hill at all. She was spry. Most of the time she was hustling me along. Except that she kept stopping, and I guess she could see in the dark, because what she stopped for was to pull up more plants and pieces of vine.

  Every time she did this she would talk to herself. What she said didn't sound like English, and at first I thought she was speaking mumbo-jumbo spells and gathering evil herbs for her witch's brew. Either that, or she was really crazy and was muttering insane gibberish. But when I stopped being scared long enough to listen, I decided she was just saying the names of plants.

  This was interesting. Because you can't grow up in the country without knowing a lot of plants, but you don't always know their names. We got into conversation about this and she pointed out the different ones. Prince's pine I knew, but I didn't know pokeweed or pipsissewa. But this old lady knew just about every plant in that woods.

  By the time we got down the hill to the road I was pretty sure she wasn't a witch. Just a poor slightly touched old lady, probably, who had wandered astray. But it did se
em too bad that such an active, cheerful old lady should be touched, even slightly.

  So I said, "Would you like to talk about your problem?" Just wanting to be friendly, and make small talk.

  "My problem?" She sounded surprised.

  "Yes. What it is that you're hopeless about. Or have they got you feeling hopeful again by now?"

  She began to laugh. But not in a bloodcurdling way at all. And then she told me that she wasn't at Hopeful Hill as a patient. She was one of the doctors, a psychologist she called it. (I had to stop writing this story and go ask James how to spell that word.)

  Her job was being a psychologist, but her hobby was nature; so one of the things she did to make people hopeful again was teach them all about plants. And about birds, too.

  And then we really began to get along. Because birds have always interested me a lot, for some reason. Only I don't have much chance to talk about them, because most kids seem to think caring about birds is queer. At that last boarding school I went to, that I hated, they called me Birdland, and broke all my Audubon Society records. After that I learned to keep birds to myself. I have never once mentioned them to James and Kip and the others, for fear of what they might think.

  But this old lady did not seem to think being interested in birds was queer at all. She hadn't seen a winter wren yet that fall, but I had. And she couldn't imitate the black-throated green warbler worth a darn. I can. But she showed me where there was a pileated woodpecker's nest, just a few yards off my own road.

  By the time we came to the private drive that leads to Hopeful Hill, I was really sorry to be saying good-bye. And I almost think maybe she was, too, because she kept her hand on my arm.

  "I wonder," she said. "You were asking about my problem. It happens that I do have one. Her name is Sylvia. It occurs to me that you might be able to help me with her."

  And she went on to tell me about a little girl patient of hers who was a tragic case.

  "You see," she said, "Sylvia lost both her parents, suddenly, in an accident. And it was a terrible shock."

  "I know," I said. Because something like that happened to me once, a long time ago.