The Great Upending

by Beth Kephart

  Hawk lets the flashlight light beam straight up. It catches floating dust in its yellow stream.

  “You see any people in Book One?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “You see any people in Book Two?”

  “Not except for this page,” I say.

  “These red shoes have gone all over everywhere, and now they’re standing on the edge.” Hawk points again at the last picture. “Last page of Book Two, and the shoes have to choose.”

  “Come on.”

  “What else?”

  Hawk shifts the light. He hardly breathes. I take my time, one finest detail, then the next. The stretch of green, the fields of hay, the tractor chugging—I can hardly see it, but it’s there. The pond, the herd of cows, the peahens—barely the width of a pen tip, not even half the height of a short fingernail. The coop of chickens and a hand collecting eggs—I’m sure that’s what it is. The barn where the goats live and the barn where the people live and the curl of smoke coming from the chimney. The silver silo in the distance.

  “It’s like he was here before he even moved in,” I say. “Like he had this place in mind.”

  “He’s hiding,” Hawk says. “Wouldn’t you? From Ilke?”

  “Watch this,” he says, and he turns. He reaches for something underneath his bed and hands it to me.

  “Take a look,” he says.

  It’s the special delivery envelope with the Saran pulled off. It’s the special delivery envelope with a slit. One major rule in the House of Scholl is that nobody ever butts into anybody’s stuff. Private is private. Those are the rules, even if you’re not family. Even if you’re Ilke Vanderveer, with the crazy shoes and the big Rover that drove all the way down here from Manhattan.

  “You’re going to be in so much—” I tell Hawk.

  “Just look,” he says.

  I look.

  Dear Martin:

  I’ve talked to the publisher. He agrees. If we are to succeed with Roundabouts: Book Three—if we are to give readers the Big Ending that we think our readers need—the shoes will have to disappear. The shoes will have to vanish.

  We need the drama, Martin.

  We need crescendo.

  We need the really big.

  We need you to agree.

  We’ve returned your sketches, with my markups. We’ve created sample spreads of our own—just some sketches, Martin, just some hints of the direction we’d like the story to go. We’ve sent you reams and reams and reams of paper, so that there’ll be no excuses, Martin.

  No more excuses, Martin.

  We can’t miss another publishing season.

  We cannot, quite simply, miss.

  If you have questions, you know where I am. Josie’s on call if you need her.

  I require a reply.

  —Ilke

  Whose Story Is a Story?

  So,” I say, after I’ve read the words twice, after I’ve thought about them. “Ilke has her own version of The Mister’s story.”

  “But shouldn’t he be able to—”

  “Seems to me he should—”

  “Shouldn’t everyone be able to—”

  “I think so. Yeah. I do.”

  I stare out into the night. Try to see the lighthouse from where I am. It’s hard.

  “So he comes here—”

  “To hide,” Hawk says. He stands up too. He stands beside me. He can see what I can’t see. He can figure what I’m thinking.

  “He comes here and the farm is something he loves so much that he starts to draw it. He wants his shoes to take the running leap. He wants—”

  “Less aloneness,” Hawk says. “Less differentness.”

  “We think,” I say. “Anyway.”

  Hawk leans his head against my shoulder like he used to do when we were small, when nobody knew about Marfan, when it was just two kids on a farm, the worries of a farm, and not the extra worries about the facts of me that were still hidden. We hear the spluttering rain through the dark of the night. I watch the window for The Mister. “We’ve got to tell her what we think,” Hawk spurts out. “We’ve got to tell her that The Mister’s shiny shoes need to be The Mister’s shiny shoes.”

  “Those red shoes are not disappearing,” I say. “They can’t. They won’t.” I say the words through a choke in my throat.

  Hawk starts pacing. Back and forth. “But if we tell her what we know, she’ll know we opened up her letter.”

  “She shouldn’t have given you that letter,” I say. “Anyway.”

  Hawk stops pacing. His flashlight beam points to the floor, then bounces up and there we are, in the window glass, looking back at one another.

  “But now we know,” I say. “And now that we know, we have to do something. Mom and Dad would want us to. Do the right thing, that’s what they’d say.”

  “But Mom and Dad,” Hawk says, “don’t know. Mom and Dad can’t.”

  “So it’s up to us,” I say.

  Hawk’s silent.

  “The Mister needs time to make the story he wants,” I say.

  “You can’t buy time,” Hawk says. “If you could, we’d have already done it.”

  I think of Dad at the bank. I think of Mom with her pies. I think of Mom and Dad with their friends and Mom with her talk of selling everything we have so that we can buy what we need for the surgery in Cleveland, the David procedure, which I don’t understand, but I do understand that it would buy me more time. Time, time, time. That’s the thing. For us, and for The Mister.

  I crouch back down to the floor. Hawk crouches too, turns the flashlight off. I think of all the pictures of The Mister that I have in my head. The Mister holding Phooey. The Mister’s shadow after mine. The Mister’s hand in the crisscross of his lines, his hands on the pages, his ideas, his burning smoke.

  “We need to talk to Ilke,” I tell Hawk.

  “Talk to her?”

  “Explain some things but not explain others.”

  In the dark beside me, Hawk thinks. It’s like I can hear his brain on a whirl.

  “We could call her,” he says, throwing his legs out in front of him. “We have her number.”

  “I’m not talking about calling her, Hawk. I’m talking about an in-person face-to-face. I’m talking heart-to-heart persuasion.”

  I feel Hawk turn toward me in the dark. His eyes on the me he can’t see. His jaw in a drop.

  “Nothing’s impossible,” I say. “According to you.”

  “You betting on her coming back?” he says, a whisper, like all of a sudden he’s worried about Mom listening in, or Dad.

  “I’m betting on us going for a visit.”

  “She works in New York City, Sara. New York City.”

  “I know.”

  “You ever been to New York City?”

  “Have you?”

  “You thinking of driving my tractor? Of asking Isaiah for a Spots express? Of stealing Dad’s truck for the day?”

  “Nope.”

  “What, then?”

  “Let me think,” I say. I think. “I’m working,” I say, “on a plan.”

  “Well,” he says.

  “Face-to-face,” I say. “It’s the only way.”

  Outside the rain drips.

  The rain drips.

  The rain drips.

  “We’re going to New York City,” Hawk says.

  “Yeah,” I say. “We are.”

  Hope Is the Plan

  The only sound anywhere is rain. The gulp and the gush and the slurp and the plunk. The wash and the rinse on the windowpanes, the knocking, like someone’s walking, on the roof, and my mind whirls, it whirls, it whirls.

  I am twelve and Hawk is eleven, and this is us, this is now. I am me and he is he and this is our summer, drought season, a burned-down shed and hay that’s missing and banks that will not listen, and The Mister, and the only future is the future you make, and everybody, all the time, is choosing.

  We’re going to New York City.

  Even if the bank
s won’t talk to Dad. Even if there isn’t enough fruit, not enough sugar, not enough crust, not enough people in this whole town or the next three towns for four thousand of Mom’s pies. Even if we can’t cash in on the mysterious reward for the mysterious package that The Mister will not take. Even if. So long as The Mister is here, so long as he stays, so long as he stays, hope is the plan.

  I feel a rumble in the floor, a little shake. The house turns on, the power is back, the yellow juice of electricity flows into lightbulbs, refrigerator, clocks. The dryer beeps like it does when it’s been out of whack.

  Dawn.

  Up the hill, Dad’ll be visiting the cistern. In the goat shed the goats bray, and now, standing at the window, my glasses on, I see the lighthouse blink. I can barely make out the Silver Whale, sitting in the narrow road of mud. I can barely see the red front door, hardly get a glimpse of the round room beyond the third-floor glass. But there is something moving. Something there.

  Someone. Restless. Waiting.

  “Hello, Mister.” I wave.

  “Don’t leave,” I say, my words fogging up my own window glass.

  Don’t leave yet.

  Full Report

  Dad gives us the first report, all of us standing there, in the kitchen—Mom in her pajamas and flip-flops, Hawk in his yellow shirt and jeans, me in a better shirt than the one I’ve been wearing and a pair of denim shorts.

  The pond is as good as a lake, Dad says. The algae has skimmed off to one side, been beaten back by the fallen rain. The ducks are going wild. The lost creek beneath the wooden bridge has shown up again, size of a snake, Dad says, a big one. The pigs are in a full mud roll and the coats of the goats are all matted down from the rain dance they must have done. The cows are licking the rain off the bark of the trees and off the chains by the fence and the birds are so full of talk Dad says he said to tone it down, but the birds didn’t listen, they’re still going at it, full of the scratch and squawk of their songs.

  “Walked the hill,” Dad says, “because the roads are so mud thick, the truck tires did nothing but spin.” Walked the hill at dawn, Dad says, and got up to the cistern quick, and the cistern water is a good eight inches higher than it’s been, that’s his biggest news, and it’ll get higher still once Mom and Hawk and he finish the big pour—gather all the rainwater in all the pails and the barrels and the buckets and the bowls and get it up the hill in wheelbarrows and the truck when the road is dry. They’ll fill that cistern with every delicious inch.

  “The rain has done its work,” Dad says, and Mom smiles, and when she smiles, Hawk smiles, and now I smile, and we’re all pretty goofy with it, forgetting, for this minute, the things on the farm that are waiting on us, the goats, for one thing, the ripe stuff that needs a good pick, the warm eggs, Phooey’s egg, wherever she went and put it, the money we still don’t have, and Dad hasn’t even started breakfast yet and it looks like he might not, like he’s taking the day off from flapjacks, and nobody cares, nobody asks, nobody talks about anything except for the rain.

  “I’m making waffles,” I say. Dad yanks out his beat-up kitchen chair and sits. Mom follows, and Hawk, and all eyes are on me. I open drawers, I open the fridge, I grab what I need: the flour, the milk, the sugar, yesterday’s eggs, the baking powder, the salt, Mom’s best vanilla. The glass bowl and the mixing spoon, the waffle pan.

  “Better be good,” Hawk says.

  “They will be,” I say.

  Touch Back

  Where the mud dries on our skin, we crease. Where it’s still wet and new, we’re slick. We’re out with the animals and the earth and the buckets and the pails doing our chores, and the hours go on, and the sun is coming in. Bright sun in a clean sky. The rear ends of white clouds mirrored back from the face of the pond, in the snake of the creek, in the fat water drops that don’t quite fall from leaves.

  Now Mom’s downstairs making fresh potato pie and outside, on the roof, Hawk is standing at my window, knocking against the middle pane.

  I put Roundabouts: Book One down and roll off the bed—but I’m still following the pair of red shoes around and through and sometimes up in my head. Sometimes, on the winter pages, you don’t see the shoes; you see just the prints they leave behind. Sometimes, in the summer, the shoes are very hard to find, tucked into the dark patches of shade. Sometimes, in the autumn, there’s only the smallest tip of one shining shoe poking out from a pile of leaves, and on a blue-black sea, there is a big fat whale with those red shoes like a hat on its watery head.

  Everywhere the red shoes go, the red shoes are. Everywhere they go, I am. That is the magic I can’t understand: how all this pretty and odd and wild and bright can come from a solitary man. The beauty and the sad of it. The bold and the shy. The funny and the quiet. Everything in the Roundabouts The Mister must have felt or must have seen, somewhere or somehow, even if only in his head.

  What has he felt here?

  What has he seen here?

  What was he looking for when he was following me?

  What does he still need to find?

  The Mister can’t leave until he finds his whole story.

  The Mister can’t leave until he chooses his own story.

  There’s half a million readers waiting.

  There’s Hawk.

  And now there’s me. And he can’t leave with his ending until I know mine, a thought I think, and then I try to unthink it.

  Hawk knuckles the window, impatient. “Come on!” He makes a face and leaves. I climb out toward him, past the buckets of rain that we’ll bring to Dad in a while.

  “Saved by the rain,” Hawk says, kicking his feet out over the edge and helping me down. He hands me his Spyglass so I can see what he means. “Saved by the rain and the mud.”

  “You’re not kidding,” I say. The Mister’s out there behind the wheel of his whale, his tires spitting mud, a crazy spin. The Mister takes his foot off the accelerator. He leaves the engine on, gets out. He walks to the back end of the whale, his shoulders going up and down with his limp. He puts his weight against it, shoves.

  Doesn’t budge an inch, and why would it budge an inch? It rained buckets. The earth is mud.

  “Only way he could get that limo out of here is if we help him,” Hawk says, taking his Spyglass back.

  I give him a look.

  “That’s not the plan,” I remind him.

  “Still hazy on the plan,” Hawk says. He looks at me. Full-on looks at me. His big moon eyes in his pale face, a couple of new summer freckles on his nose. He’s depending on me to figure this out. I’m planning on figuring it out.

  “We need the phone and Mom and Dad out of listening range.”

  “Easy,” Hawk says. “Consider it done.”

  “We need fifty, sixty dollars.”

  “Not so easy.”

  “We need a hanger.”

  “A hanger?”

  “Wire hanger. You know. And we need Isaiah and Spots. First thing tomorrow. Down at the end of the road. Ready to roll.”

  Hawk shakes his head. “Spots isn’t trotting from here to Manhattan, Sara.”

  “That would be a known fact.”

  “So?”

  “What?”

  Hawk looks at me funny, changes his question: “So what time do you want the two of them here?”

  “Sunrise. A little before, would be best.”

  “This afternoon,” Hawk says, “I’ll find Isaiah, tell him we’re drawing on favors again. Sure as I know him, he’ll come.”

  “We’ll get him something from the city.”

  Hawk blinks.

  “You know. Something for thanks.”

  “Don’t need to do that.”

  “It’d be a nice touch.”

  “Focus on the plan, Sara. Focus on the plan.”

  I nod. I study the lighthouse. The silver in the sun. The Mister back inside his borrowed three round rooms. Mud on his boots. Tires in a rut.

  “That cash,” I say, “will be the hardest part.”
>
  “Got me a notion,” Hawk says, a smile spreading across his face, a blush in his cheeks. “Just occurring. Just coming in.” He touches his head with his finger. “Bingo,” he says.

  I hear the peahens in their strut and the ducks on the pond. I hear Verdi tuning up for a big song. I hear Mom downstairs, starting to call for us. Hawk jumps up, to head her off at the pass.

  “Rendezvous,” he tells me. “Midafternoon. The Hispaniola.”

  He looks over his shoulder and lifts his fist. He touches his knuckles to that part of the low sky. I raise my fist to his hand.

  Living Is Living

  Chicken-Pimiento Potato pie. Mom’s best, we all say, ever. She’s left the bandanna off her head and her hair falls free, the strands of gray wrapping a few loose curls. She has put some lip gloss on, a little eye shadow. She wears a white shirt with some fake lace that runs around the collar. It’s like there are five people at the table and one of them is the special guest called Rain. We gather here in its honor.

  Mom cuts the pie into wide slices and serves up seconds. Dad keeps reporting on the farm. Roads still too muddy for the pickup truck, but the tractor working fine. Phooey’s eggs in an old squirrel nest that had fallen from a tree. The cows taking their time with the hay, like they had filled themselves up with rainwater.

  All through lunch, I’m quiet. All through lunch, I’m thinking, fitting the last few pieces of the puzzle together in my head, playing them out straight and playing them out round, imagining the mess I could make or the good I could find, the trouble I’ll start or the hope I can prove.

  Red shoes look good on any feet, doesn’t matter how long or how stretchy.

  Please Be Specific

  Hawk is going to buy us time, and by that I mean he’s put himself in charge of Mom and Dad, who are outside filling the barrels with the rain that fell last night. He’ll keep them busy, he’ll help as he does, and I’ll stay right here and do my thing. This is the plan that we have.