Blossoms and the Green Phantom

by Betsy Byars

  Mud heard the word bath, and he slipped under the porch. He kept his body low so he would not call attention to himself. He hid behind the steps in his misery hole. He waited.

  The usual procedure was that Pap would say the word bath, then call Mud and remove his bandanna. Mud hated to have his bandanna removed. It gave him an unprotected feeling. But this time Pap headed down to the creek with Dump under one arm. Mud crawled out to see what was happening.

  Vern had the bucket with the soap and towels in it. “Junior,” Vern called, “are you coming?”

  Junior had insisted on washing his half of the dog himself. “Five minutes,” he pleaded from the kitchen.

  “Well, hurry. I’ve got to go to Michael’s.”

  “I’m hurrying as fast as I can.”

  Junior was sitting at the kitchen table, smiling at the refrigerator. Five minutes before, he had been smiling at the sink, then at the stove. Junior shook himself. He looked down at the sheet of paper in front of him and forced his face to be serious.

  He smiled again. He couldn’t help it. Every time he thought about the Phantom, he smiled.

  As long as Junior lived, he would never forget that night last week, when the Phantom had very quietly, very naturally, taken its place in the sky and begun its circle around the world. When he thought of it, he had even begun to hear background music—violins mostly, but also there were some flutes in it too.

  All week he had followed in his mind the global orbit of the Phantom. He had imagined it over the burning Sahara, over the white icy Arctic, over the Atlantic, the Pacific, Russia, China.

  Junior stopped smiling at the sheet of paper. He made himself look serious. He had to finish this. He had to.

  He read the words to himself. “I want to win a trip around the world for my entire family because—”

  That was the same place where his mind always stopped working. It was as if his mind had heard a bell ringing and rushed out to recess. He knocked on his forehead to activate his brain.

  “I want to win a trip around the world for my entire family because—”

  The reason he did want to win was hard to put into words. Last week, at the peak of his Phantom success, he had realized how much he loved his family. He loved them so much that he wanted to do something for them as nice as they had done for him.

  And what could be better than winning a trip for them, the same trip that the Phantom was now making? Junior was going to win a trip around the world for his family. He would write the winning sentence today, and then he would save it until a contest came along, and then he would copy the sentence onto the blank.

  He bent over his paper. He was absolutely determined. His mouth was a straight line in his round face.

  “I want to win a trip around the world for my entire family because—”

  He lifted his head in sudden thought.

  Maggie had said something that made sense one time. It was when Junior and Ralphie had been in the hospital, and Ralphie had asked Maggie why they broke into the city jail, why they didn’t just walk in like anybody else.

  And Maggie had looked at Ralphie like he didn’t have good sense. “We Blossoms,” she said, “have never been just anybody.”

  “Junior, you coming?” Vern called.

  “Yes, don’t let my half get wet!”

  “Well, hurry!”

  “I am hurrying!”

  He bent over his paper. He clicked his ballpoint pen open. He began to write.

  He smiled. Maggie and their mom might be on the rodeo circuit next summer, but the rest of them—Vern and Pap and he and Mud and Dump—would very definitely be going around the world.

  “I want to win a trip around the world for my entire family because we Blossoms have never been just anybody.” He paused for a moment because, as usual, he wanted to add his own personal touch. Again he smiled. He changed his period to a comma and added, “and we never will be either.”

  Junior put an exclamation point and laid down his pen. He was finished at last. He folded the sheet of paper, put it in his shirt pocket, and patted it. Then he got up and ran for the door.

  “I’m coming!” he cried.

  Chatting It Up

  A Holiday House Reader’s Guide

  All about the Blossoms in …

  The Blossoms and the Green Phantom

  and more!

  Discussion Questions

  An Interview with Betsy Byars

  Discussion Questions

  1. Junior has failed at two inventions, and this time he intends to succeed with a new invention called the Green Phantom. Why does he get a patriotic feeling every time he looks at it?

  2. It’s quite clear that Junior wants people to be interested in his secret invention. Discuss the efforts he makes to get them interested. Why is he upset when he is ignored?

  3. Pap and Junior seem to share a tendency toward getting into unusual predicaments. Compare and contrast Pap’s night in the Dumpster to Junior’s night with Mad Mary in The Blossoms Meet the Vulture Lady.

  4. Describe Vern’s friendship with Michael. Why doesn’t Vern want Michael to meet his family?

  5. Michael and Ralphie love to come to the Blossom house. Why are they so intrigued with the Blossoms?

  6. Explain Junior’s reaction when his mother says to Maggie, “Oh, love, your dad would be so proud of you” (p. 27). Why is Junior so convinced that his father would be ashamed of him?

  7. Junior feels that every single Blossom is a success but him. Discuss the successes of each Blossom. How might Junior’s creativity be viewed a success?

  8. Explain the power of the “Blossom promise.” Why is Junior so excited to be on the receiving end of a Blossom promise?

  9. Vicki Blossom is furious when Maggie, Vern, and Ralphie leave Junior on the roof of old man Benson’s chicken house. Why does her fury surprise the children? Suggest ways the children could have helped Junior get down from the roof. Explain why staying behind to help would show courage and loyalty.

  10. Pap is finally rescued by the police. Why is Pap so worried that he will look foolish to people? He says that not wanting to look foolish is a Blossom trait. Debate whether this trait has been inherited by Maggie, Vern, and Junior.

  Prepared by Pat Scales, retired school librarian and independent consultant, Greenville, South Carolina.

  An Interview with Betsy Byars

  Junior was born to be an inventor. And since you are a writer, you are too! What else did you get the inventing gene for?

  When I was growing up, I liked to make my own clothes. Some of them really were inventions. I sewed fast, without patterns and with great hope and determination; and that’s approximately the same way I write.

  Pap and Junior get into lots of unusual predicaments. What was the most remarkable predicament you were ever in?

  My most remarkable predicament was finding myself an author. It had been easy to be a writer. I wrote whenever I could, wherever I was, and on whatever I could find. Nobody wanted to meet me—certainly not editors. I didn’t have to become an AUTHOR until I won the Newbery Medal. Having to act like an author was a remarkable predicament.

  Was Junior getting stuck on the roof based on anything you’d experienced?

  I get stuck all the time when I’m writing. I get to the point where I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I’ve tried hitting myself on the forehead and saying, “Think, Betsy, think!” It doesn’t work. Here’s what works. I say, “Oh, well, I’ll just play some computer games.” I start playing and I get really involved and I’m about to win—and wouldn’t you know it—I think what’s going to happen next and have to go back to my writing.

  A Biography of Betsy Byars

  Betsy Byars (b. 1928) is an award-winning author of more than sixty books for children and young adults, including The Summer of the Swans (1970), which earned the prestigious Newbery Medal. Byars also received the National Book Award for The Night Swimmers (1980) and an Edgar Award for Wanted . . . Mud B
lossom (1991), among many other accolades. Her books have been translated into nineteen languages and she has fans all over the world.

  Byars was born Betsy Cromer in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her father, George, was a manager at a cotton mill and her mother, Nan, was a homemaker. As a child, Betsy showed no strong interest in writing but had a deep love of animals and sense of adventure. She and her friends ran a backyard zoo that starred “trained cicadas,” box turtles, leeches, and other animals they found in nearby woods. She also claims to have ridden the world’s first skateboard, after neighborhood kids took the wheels off a roller skate and nailed them to a plank of wood.

  After high school, Byars began studying mathematics at Furman University, but she soon switched to English and transferred to Queens College in Charlotte, where she began writing. She also met Edward Ford Byars, an engineering graduate student from Clemson University, whom she would marry after she graduated in 1950.

  Between 1951 and 1956 Byars had three daughters—Laurie, Betsy, and Nan. While raising her family, Byars began submitting stories to magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post and Look. Her success in publishing warm, funny stories in national magazines led her to consider writing a book. Her son, Guy, was born in 1959, the same year she finished her first manuscript. After several rejections, Clementine (1962), a children’s story about a dragon made out of a sock, was published.

  Following Clementine, Byars released a string of popular children’s and young adult titles including The Summer of the Swans, which earned her the Newbery Medal. She continued to build on her early success through the following decades with award-winning titles such as The Eighteenth Emergency (1973), The Night Swimmers, the popular Bingo Brown series, and the Blossom Family series. Many of Byars’s stories describe children and young adults with quirky families who are trying to find their own way in the world. Others address problems young people have with school, bullies, romance, or the loss of close family members. Byars has also collaborated with daughters Betsy and Laurie on children’s titles such as My Dog, My Hero (2000).

  Aside from writing, Byars continues to live adventurously. Her husband, Ed, has been a pilot since his student days, and Byars obtained her own pilot’s license in 1983. The couple lives on an airstrip in Seneca, South Carolina. Their home is built over a hangar and the two pilots can taxi out and take off almost from their front yard.

  Byars (bottom left) at age five, with her mother and her older sister, Nancy.

  A teenage Byars (left) and her sister, Nancy, on the dock of their father’s boat, which he named NanaBet for Betsy and Nancy.

  Byars at age twenty, hanging out with friends at Queens College in 1948.

  Byars and her new husband, Ed, coming up the aisle on their wedding day in June 1950.

  Byars and Ed with their daughters Laurie and Betsy in 1955. The family lived for two years in one of these barracks apartments while Ed got a degree at the University of Illinois and Byars started writing.

  Byars with her children Nan and Guy, circa 1958.

  Byars with Ed and their four children in Marfa, Texas, in July 1968. The whole family gathered to cheer for Ed, who was flying in a ten-day national contest.

  Byars at the Newbery Award dinner in 1971, where she won the Newbery Medal for The Summer of the Swans.

  Byars with Laurie, Betsy, Nan, Guy, and Ed at her daughter Betsy’s wedding on December 17, 1977.

  Byars in 1983 in South Carolina with her Yellow Bird, the plane in which she got her pilot’s license.

  Byars and her husband in their J-3 Cub, which they flew from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific coast in March 1987, just like the characters in Byars’s novel Coast to Coast.

  Byars speaking at Waterstone’s Booksellers in Newcastle, England, in the late 1990s.

  Byars and Ed in front of their house in Seneca, South Carolina, where they have lived since the mid-1990s.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Blossom Family Series

  CHAPTER 1

  The Paper Bag

  Junior was packing a paper bag. He wished he had a suitcase to pack, but he didn’t and so he was putting just as much care into packing his paper bag. Junior was going to spend the night with Mad Mary.

  In the bottom of the bag, neatly folded, was a pair of his mom’s pajamas. Junior had to roll the pants legs up to keep from tripping over them, but it was the only nice pair of pajamas in the Blossom family.

  On top of the pajamas was a Big Ben pad of paper and a pencil, in case he needed to do some writing. On top of that was his toothbrush, the family toothpaste, Maggie’s comb, and a small broken mirror. On top of that was an extra pair of socks, his inch-long harmonica and two Snickers bars, one for him and one for Mary. Junior could tell which was which because he had already taken a bite out of his.

  Junior stared at the contents for a moment and then, satisfied, he folded the top of the bag down neatly.

  “I’m ready,” he called happily.

  Junior had been looking forward to spending the night in Mad Mary’s cave ever since the day he got to know her. Her cave was the most wonderful place Junior had ever been. It seemed to him like a museum display of cave life—full of strange plants, strange books, strange furniture, strange foods.

  The best thing about the cave, to Junior, were the vultures that roosted above it. There was something about watching the huge birds making effortless circles in the morning sky that gave Junior a splendid, lighter-than-air feeling. It was such a special feeling that Junior wanted to know the name of it. He was looking forward to the day that particular feeling appeared in one of his spelling lists at school. He knew exactly how he would use the word in a sentence.

  “When I see vultures in the sky,” he would write, “I feel———.”

  Mad Mary had come personally to the Blossom farm to invite Junior. She had stood with one worn boot propped on the steps—she hadn’t entered a house in seven years—and she yelled, “Junior!”

  No one in the world sounded like Mad Mary. As the sound of her voice boomed through the house, Junior burst through the screen door.

  “Junior,” she said when he had calmed down, “I thought you were coming to spend the night.”

  “I was! I am!” he cried.

  “When?”

  “I don’t know!” He turned to his grandfather in the doorway. “When, Pap? Saturday? Can I go this Saturday?”

  “Saturday’s fine,” Pap had said.

  “You’ll bring him, Alec?”

  “Nobody has to bring me, I’ll—”

  “I’ll bring him.”

  “I’ll be watching for you,” Mary said. With a brisk nod, she had turned and disappeared into the woods.

  But Saturday it had been raining, and it was still raining the next Saturday. The Catawba River crested on Sunday, and still it kept raining. Now Alderson County had had fourteen straight days of rain—a state record—and the whole county was flooded.

  Every night “News at Eleven” showed pictures of residents riding down the county streets in boats instead of cars. Even Brian Williams, at 6:30, had called it the worst flood in the state’s history.

  Junior had begged to go that second Saturday despite the rain. “Why not?” he whined. “I was in her cave before when it rained.”

  “No, Junior,” Pap said.

  “I can take an umbrella.”

  “No.”

  “And wear boots.”

  “No!”

  “If you don’t want to take me, I’ll go by myself. I know the way. I could get there blindfolded.”

  “Maybe you could, Junior, but when the valley gets underwater, there’s lots of things you don’t see. You step in what you think’s a little puddle and it turns out to be a ten-foot hole. When the flood’s over—”

  “Pleeeeeease.”

  “Junior, your mom left me in charge—you heard her. The last thing she said was for you to mind me. So when I say no, it’s no. And I say, ‘No!’”

  Now at last t
he rain had stopped. The sun was out. The mist that hung over the flooded fields had burned off. People were out without umbrellas. The forecast was sunny and mild.

  Normally Junior would be outside in the sunshine doing what everyone else in the county was doing—enjoying the flood. However, he had been wanting to go to Mary’s for so long he couldn’t get his mind on anything else.

  “I’m ready,” he called again.

  He went through the living room and onto the front porch. “Paaaaap!” he called. Pap had promised to walk him to Mad Mary’s right after lunch.

  “Paaaaap!” Junior called again.

  He could see that Pap’s truck was still down by the creek, rammed sideways against an oak tree. At one point in the flooding, Pap had tried to drive the truck down the hill. The truck had slithered down the muddy slope like a sidewinder. If it hadn’t rammed into the oak tree, it would have washed downstream.

  Junior knew Pap had probably walked up the creek to admire the flooding. “But it’s just water,” Junior said to himself. “Why does it take so long to look at water?”

  He sat on the steps and slumped dejectedly over his paper bag. “How can a plain old flood make him forget I was going to Mary’s? Tell me that. How?” he asked the empty yard.

  Junior felt water seep from the wet steps through his jeans, chilling his skin. He didn’t care. He just wanted Pap to come home. He wanted to go!

  He looked at his watch. It said, as it always did, 3:05. Junior thought it could be even later than that.

  If Pap didn’t get back soon, he wouldn’t get to Mary’s in time for supper. Mary would think he wasn’t coming. She would eat without him. All the varmint stew would be gone.