The Well-Wishers

by Edward Eager

  "Hadn't you better wait for the others?" I said. "They go in for that kind of thing more."

  "No," said Deborah, "they've all got meetings. And anyway, they'd want to give advice and show me how, and it's my turn! I want to do it my way. But you're different. I can show you."

  "Oh, dandy," I said. But of course I had to give in and humor her in her infant ignorance. "Well, all right, but make it snappy."

  Only instead she made a big deal of it, putting me through all sorts of motions and making me repeat all sorts of dopey words after her, because she

  said this was such an important wish she wanted to make sure it didn't go wrong.

  "O well," I found myself saying. "0 well, please help us help Hannibal to be good and get along with people and not be unhappy." And then she made me kneel down to the well and knock my head on the ground three times.

  I felt ridiculous, because what if one of my gang passed by and saw? It would be risking my whole reputation. And then when I looked up I felt more ridiculous still, because somebody was seeing.

  But I felt relieved, too, because the person looking at us was Hannibal.

  But he was a different Hannibal from when I'd seen him last. His clothes were torn and dusty and his face was scratched by brambles, and he was panting as if he'd run all the Tareath out of him.

  All the anger seemed to have gone out of him, too. And now that it had gone out, there was room for other feelings, and the greatest of these right now seemed to be curiosity. Because he was staring over the fence at us with big round eyes.

  When he spoke, his voice was hoarse with dry-throatedness. "What you doing?" he said.

  "Wishing," said Deborah, "on this well."

  "Is that well magic?" said Hannibal, looking more round-eyed than ever.

  "Yes," said Deborah, "it is."

  "What you wishing?" said Hannibal, after a minute.

  "We were wishing," said Deborah, "that the well would make you be good, and learn to get along with people."

  I was afraid when he heard that, Hannibal might go wild again and start pushing everybody handy. I'll admit that's what I might have felt like doing if I were Hannibal' and anybody said that to me.

  But it seemed as though Deborah's wish must have already come true. About Hannibal's being good, I mean. Because he didn't say anything for a long time. When he did speak, it was in a small, ashamed-sounding voice.

  "Can I wish, too?" he said.

  "Sure," said Deborah.

  Slowly and with dragging feet Hannibal came through the gate and up to the well. He looked at it, and then he leaned over and stared down it and muttered something. I don't think he meant us to hear what it was.

  But I did hear.

  What he said was, "I wish I were like other people."

  I'll admit that when I heard that, my throat felt scratchy and as if I wanted to swallow. And for the second time that day I squatted down by Hannibal. I didn't worry about being butted in the stomach again, either.

  "Look, kid," I said, "you don't want to wish a thing like that. You ought to be proud to be you. Why, you're the only one of you there is, just the way I'm the only one of me. There'll never be another person exactly like you ever again, anywhere in the world. So be yourself, dad, and like it!"

  Hannibal stood looking at his feet and kicking the edge of the wellhead. "/ like it all right," he said finally, "but they don't. If I'm myself, they won't want to play with me."

  "They'll play with you all right," I said grimly. "They'll play with you or talk to me!"

  Deborah nudged me and shook her head. And I saw that she was right again, and there had been enough crossness and fighting talk.

  "You're all tired and dusty," she said to Hannibal. "Don't you want to come inside and wash your face and have a drink of water?"

  "Me?" said Hannibal. He looked down at himself. "I tore my pants," he added in a surprised voice. "My mom'11 kill me."

  "Maybe my mother can darn it," said Deborah.

  "Would she?" said Hannibal, as if he didn't believe it.

  "Let's go and ask," said Deborah. And she gave him her hand and they went into the house.

  I stood looking after them. And suddenly I blew my nose. And then I remembered I was late for playing Kick the Can with the guys, and I got on my bike and rode away.

  But the next day when I monitored at recess, I paid particular attention to what was happening over in the first-grade section of the playground.

  It certainly looked as if Hannibal's wish had come true. There he was playing, just like the others. You wouldn't think he had ever felt different at all. And nobody seemed to be holding yesterday against him one bit.

  Of course I heard later that Miss Silloway had lectured the class, after sending Hannibal out of the way on the pretense of a note to Mrs. Van Nest, and told the kids that Hannibal's first day had been hard on him and they should give him a second chance. And Deborah had specially asked all her friends to be nice to him, too.

  Still, I'd say it would take more than that to make Hannibal suddenly fit in as well as he suddenly seemed to. I'd even say it would take magic.

  And yet he hadn't stopped being himself, either. Because when I went near enough to make out the words, I heard him say, "If you think this teacher is strict, you ought to see ours on Lenox Avenue in New York City!"

  And later on when he was in the middle of a game, he yelled out, "We don't play Prisoner's Base that way in New York City; we play it this way!"

  I gave him a wink as I passed by. "How's yourself, dad?" I said.

  "Okay, dad," said Hannibal. "How's yours?"

  I have made Deborah and Hannibal promise never to let on to James and Laura and Lydia and Kip and Gordy how I wished on the well that day. And I must remember to cross out that part of the story before any one of them ever sees it.

  Because I have always sworn to them that I don't believe a word of the magic, and I would no sooner go back on that than I would stop wearing my black leather jacket and my motorcycle boots. It is all part of the way I am, and if people don't like it, they can just lump it. A man has to be himself.

  All the same, it is good to be a little bit like other people once in a while; at least, the other people that you like.

  And so I am secretly glad that I have come part way round toward believing in the magic.

  After all, if it weren't for something or other, I wouldn't even know Lydia and Deborah and the others. I'd still be moseying around with those drips Stinker and Smoko. And Hannibal wouldn't even have moved in, or if he had, he'd still be all miserable and fighting with everybody.

  And what but magic could do all that?

  So I guess I do believe in it, or sort of halfway. More or less. When I think about it.

  But I will never tell.

  7. James Joins In

  I'm pretty sure I don't have to tell you who's writing this chapter.

  Because all I can say is, who's left?

  After all, if the magic were starting to comb the highways and byways looking for customers, it was time it remembered me, wasn't it?

  Which is by way of saying that we all know about Dicky LeBaron's getting in on that last wish. Deborah tried, but she never can keep a secret.

  If you ask me, Deborah's adventure was just about as good a turn to Dicky as it was to anyone else. He has improved a lot since. By seeing his own problems in the mirror of Hannibal, you might say. And by making friends with the well, as Laura puts it, instead of being so proud and superior and lone-wolfish about it.

  We haven't let on that we know. About his giving in to the magic, I mean. He still sneers about it in public, and we don't say a word. And he still wears that awful jacket and those boots, and comes swaggering over every so often and spends his afternoons with us maybe every day for a week. And then suddenly he isn't there, and stays away for ages, as if we didn't mean a thing in his young life.

  It is his way of preserving his dignity, I think. And that is all right with us. But sometime
s we have to laugh.

  I would be the last to be jealous of Dicky LeBaron in any way.

  I'll admit, though, that I felt sort of put out when I heard that the magic had welcomed him to its adventurous toils while I still hadn't had my turn. I realized the well was probably teaching me that I'm no more impprtant than anyone else, even if I am the leader, usually. But still. There is such a thing as justice, isn't there?

  But as time wore on, and October's bright blue weather gave way to November and bare trees and gray rain, I began to wonder if the magic had forgotten and were going to leave me out altogether.

  And another thing happened. As the magic we'd already had slid farther and farther into the past, it began to seem less and less magical. To me, at least. To me it began to seem as though every single thing that had happened could have been accomplished by just goodness and thoughtfulness alone, without any well or any Hagar Gryce, either. And that was a discouraging idea.

  Why, the summer before we'd at least seen a ghost, even if we weren't sure afterward we really had.

  I began to hope that when and if the magic did remember me, it would do it in a really magic-like way and settle the question in my mind once and for all. And then it could forever afterward hold its peace.

  And one night after supper I sneaked out in the yard all by myself and told all this to the well.

  As to whether it heard or not, let the reader be the judge.

  The Saturday after that dawned fair and cold. I forget who suggested that we take a long bike ride, but everybody agreed that it was just the weather for it, and we started out right after lunch.

  Deborah was conspicuous by her absence. Dicky LeBaron had stopped by, and he and she were busy writing up the chapter of their adventure.

  We headed north, which is always more adventurous. South just leads to civilization and the sun in your eyes. But north means hills and pinewoods and the end of suburbs and the beginning of real country, and tracking rivers to their source.

  We have already done this with our own river. The first time we tried was way back in the summer, on the day we found the long-lost heir.

  Since then we have done it hundreds of times, and we know now that our river comes tumbling down out of the reservoir, which is like the biggest and bluest of lakes, and we have discussed how maddening it must be to live on the lake's edge, as some do, and yet not be able to swim in it for fear of polluting the water company.

  But today we went past the long-lost heir's house and beyond the reservoir, into undiscovered country.

  "This is keen," said Kip, sniffing the high hilly air. The land all around us was wild and untrammeled, haunted by birch and laurel and, with only a house or two every now and then to mar its utter north-woodsiness.

  Then, in the middle of nowhere, we came on a fork in the road and a signpost. The arrow pointing one way read, "To Bald Hill." The other said, "Journey's End Road."

  There is always something mysterious and romantic about a lonely signpost, with its promise of strangeness round the corner. Think of all the signposts in the Oz books alone and where they have led the fortunate reader!

  And this one proved no exception to the rule.

  "Which way'll we try?" said Gordy.

  I was for Bald Hill myself. It sounded rugged and pioneerish, and like a place where you might meet Uncas, the last of the Mohicans. But the girls were curious about Journey's End Road and the kind of people who would choose to live on a road with a name like that.

  "Did you ever hear of anything so utterly feeble?" said Lydia. "As though a person were perfectly ready to settle down and never have a single thing happen to him again!"

  "Prob'ly sweet little old couples in little old cottages who're tired of it all," agreed Laura.

  "Waiting for life's sunset with a tear in the eye of them and a smile in the heart of them." Kip giggled.

  We had walked our bicycles down the road a little way as we talked. Now as we rounded a bend and saw the one house that seemed to be all of Journey's End Road, we broke off and stared.

  What we were looking at was no cottage.

  We had seen rich mansions before, but they were mainly either like the heir's house, all modern and glass and pink stucco, or like Mrs. Witherspoon's, with pillars and pergolas and porte co-cheres.

  This house was simply and to put it mildly a castle.

  There were towers and battlements and buttresses. There was a moat with what looked like swans sailing on it, though when we came closer, these proved to be geese. There were tall turret windows with balconies under them, all just like a page out of Sir Walter Scott, as Lydia said.

  "Or a picture in a fairy-tale book!" breathed Laura.

  And suddenly I remembered my wish on the well that the magic would come to me in a magic-like guise.

  Then, even as I remembered and even as we watched, a figure stepped from one of the tower windows onto the adjoining balcony. The figure was female and its dress was blue. Waving blond hair framed its enviable face. It stood scanning the horizon.

  "It is like a fairy tale! 'Sister Anne, sister Anne, what do you see?'" murmured Laura, entranced.

  What the girl on the balcony saw at that moment was us. She waved a lily-white hand and her voice rang on the breeze.

  "You, there! Boy!" were her words.

  There were three of us who were boys, and Gordy and Kip and I all started forward, and then stopped and looked at each other.

  "No, you. The good-looking one," said the girl.

  It is the mere truth that I am taller than Kip and not so toothy as Gordy. But only a fatuous boob would answer to a remark like that. I swear I didn't move an inch. It was the others who pushed me.

  Then, as I stumbled forward, staring up at the girl on the balcony and feeling my face get red, I knew that the well had not only granted my wish. It had done something more.

  So far as girls were concerned, up till then they had always seemed more or less just human beings to me. If incomprehensible at times. And Laura and Lydia are not even too bad to look at.

  But till that moment I had never understood what all the shouting was for in the love parts of stories and movies. Nor what all the poets were talking about, either.

  But now, as I met the blue-eyed gaze of the yellow-haired girl on the balcony, something new happened. My head suddenly felt light, and my insides seemed to go all soft and warm, like melted ice cream. And I knew I would never be the same mindless boy, laughing in my happy carefree ignorant childishness again. I knew the magic had brought me to the parting of the ways where brook and river meet, and that I had become a man.

  Words failed me.

  "Hello," I managed to gasp out. "Were you talking to me?"

  "Yes," said the yellow-haired girl. "I was. Help me down from here. I'm locked in."

  "Princesses locked in towers!" cried Laura enthusiastically. "I knew this was going to be an adventure! Is a wicked ogre holding you prisoner? Does he beat you and feed you on bread and water?"

  "Why, yes," said the yellow-haired girl. "That's exactly what he does!" And then she clasped her hands and looked straight at me. "Save me, gallant knight!" she cried. "Take me with you on your noble steed before the wicked ogre returns!"

  Of course I knew it couldn't be like that, not really. There are no wicked ogres in this part of Connecticut. Still, I had wished for the magic to be really magic-like, hadn't I? And the well could have imported one, couldn't it? Maybe in a modern version.

  "All right," I said.

  But as I studied the castle, I wasn't sure how I was going to do it. Roses wreathed the stones of the tower romantically, but their stems looked frail for climbing, and thorny besides. And the girl's hair, while ample and suitably golden, was not of Rapunzel length.

  "Just a minute," I said. "I'll think of something."

  "There's a ladder in the barn," said the girl, rather impatiently, I thought. "Hurry!"

  I ran for the barn. Kip and Gordy ran, too, which I thought rather pushing o
f them at the time. But I was glad of their help when I saw how big and heavy the ladder was. Together we managed to get it braced against the tower, and they held it while I climbed.

  The long willowy tangly canes of the roses kept nodding picturesquely in my way, and their thorns were every bit as sharp as I had thought they would be. But I reached the balcony safely, if not unscathed.

  Of course the proper way to rescue a Princess in a tower is to carry her down. But this particular Princess did not seem to want to be carried.

  "I can climb by myself, silly," she said. "I'll go first and you steady the ladder."

  It was awkward, scrooching to one side and sort of hanging in space while the beauteous maiden went past me, and I wondered how the fellows in the fairy tales managed that kind of thing gracefully. It was then that I tore the seat of my blue jeans on a particularly large thorn, too.

  But the fair damsel proved nimble, and two seconds later she was poised lightly on terra firma. I jumped down the rest of the way and landed beside her.

  Now that we were on the same level, I was surprised at what a big girl she turned out to be, nearly a head taller than I was. But that didn't make her any less beautiful. It just made me more humbly and devotedly her slave than ever.

  And after all, Napoleon was a small man!

  "There," said the girl, dusting off her diaphanous draperies. "Now then. I've got to get into town. Quick!"

  "A matter of life and death, I suppose?" said Laura delightedly.

  "Why, yes," said the girl. "That's exactly what it is. I've got to get the important papers to the police before the gang of international spies gets back."

  It seemed to me she had switched stories in the middle of the stream, but I didn't worry much about that at the time. I guess maybe I wasn't thinking very clearly about anything just then. All I wanted to do was lay my heart at her feet, and anything else I happened to have handy that she might care to trample on.

  But all I could offer at the moment was my noble steed, or in other words the handlebars of my bike.

  "Hop on," I said. And she did, and we started back in the direction of town.