by Rosa Jordan
“Bah is right,” Kate said to Mom in a hard, unforgiving voice. “You prejudged the Wilsons all over the place. That’s why you never got to know them. Now you’re mad because we did and they’re our friends.”
Mom collapsed on the hay as if Kate had punched her in the stomach. “Katie, oh Katie,” she whispered. “There’s so much you don’t understand.”
Of course. That was what grown-ups always said when they couldn’t convince you of something, and you couldn’t argue because you didn’t know what they were talking about. Kate leaned against the wall of the shed with her arms folded, feeling weak and all yelled-out. Even though she had already fed Sugar at milking time, she put some more grain in her feed box, just to let the goat know that she hadn’t been yelling at her.
Mom didn’t speak again for a long time, but sat there watching Sugar eat the grain. When she finally did speak, her voice wavered, small and unsure. “What if I drive you girls to town and wait while you deliver the candy?”
Kate sighed. She knew Ruby didn’t want to do it that way and she didn’t want to do it that way either—not now.
“No, Mom! Don’t you see? It’s our thing. I had this idea about the goat cart and we’ve done all this work to fix it up. All we needed was something to line it with and it was going to be so nice! We’d go to town and everybody would love it. We’d be like … like a little one-goat circus. People would laugh and buy our candy and … and now you want to spoil the whole thing!”
Mom had nothing to say to that. Sugar must have decided the fight was over, because she folded her legs and lay back down. Kate flopped down in the hay next to her. She wondered if, when she ran away from home, she’d be able to take Sugar with her.
Finally Mom spoke quietly from somewhere on the other side of Sugar. “Would you like to look in my sewing box and see if there’s a scrap big enough to line the cart?”
Kate didn’t answer right away. Some fabric to line the cart didn’t mean Mom was going to allow her to go to town with Ruby.
“I don’t have anything to wear anyway,” Kate said, and waited to see how Mom would respond. If she made any suggestions, it would mean she had decided to let Kate go after all.
Mom sighed. “You must have something. Or maybe I do. Come on. Let’s take a look.”
Mom held out her hand but Kate didn’t take it. Instead, she brushed the hay off the seat of her shorts and followed Mom into the house.
When they came into the kitchen Justin was just finishing the dishes, which made Kate feel guilty. This was the second time he had done dishes when it was her turn. It occurred to her that Justin had been a lot more cheerful lately. Maybe it was because Booker had given him some hope, or maybe it was because he was doing better in some of his classes. The last day before Christmas break, she’d heard the boys on the bus teasing him, calling him Einstein because he’d gotten such a good grade on Mr. Jackson’s math exam.
“I’ll take your turn tomorrow night,” Kate said to him as she went by. “And the night after.”
Justin looked over his shoulder and grinned. “Good deal,” he said.
Kate followed Mom down the hall. Mom’s bedroom was small and crowded. Besides the double bed, she had her sewing machine in there and a big cedar chest full of sewing scraps.
Kate didn’t go in. She stood in the doorway. If Mom thought she could bribe her with a piece of material for the goat cart, she was wrong.
“What am I going to wear?” Kate asked.
Mom walked over to her closet. She pushed past the dresses she usually wore to church, reached way into the back, and came out with a white skirt. “It’ll be a little long on you,” Mom said. “But you know how to hem. If you’ll hem it and maybe set the button over a little, you can wear it.” She tossed the skirt to Kate, then opened the lid of the cedar chest and started taking out pieces of fabric.
Most of them were small, left over from something else. Mom didn’t do much sewing now because she didn’t have time. But she used to make all sorts of things—dresses for herself and Kate, shirts and shorts for the boys, even swimsuits. When Kate was little, Mom had used the smaller scraps to make clothes for Kate’s dolls. Other girls thought it was a big deal if their doll had one extra outfit, but Kate’s Christmas doll, no matter what kind it was, always came with an entire wardrobe, everything from cowgirl outfits to party dresses. Of course Kate didn’t play with dolls anymore; she had given most of them away. Now Kate hardly noticed the bits of cloth that Mom once would have used to create pretty doll clothes. All Kate wanted now was a piece of fabric big enough to cover the inside of the goat cart.
Not until she got to the bottom of the cedar chest did she find a big piece. It was plain brown. “I guess this’ll have to do,” Kate muttered. But as she picked up the brown cloth, she saw that it wasn’t the last piece. There at the very bottom was a swath of red velvet.
“Ohhh!” Kate dove into the chest after the velvet. “Look at this!”
Mom took the material from her. A dreamy look came into her eyes. “I’d forgotten all about that. I bought it to make myself a Christmas dress two, no, it was three years ago, when I thought Dad was coming back from California.” She smiled in a sad way. “He never noticed anything I wore unless it was red.”
“Why didn’t you use it?” Kate asked, trying to imagine Mom wearing a red velvet dress instead of her usual blue jeans and blue work shirt.
“He didn’t come.”
“Why not?”
Mom stood there rubbing her hand over and over the fabric. Kate could tell she was remembering Dad.
“I guess he found the life he wanted out there.”
“What life?” Kate asked a question that had been on her mind for a long time. “What was wrong with us?”
“It wasn’t us. It was—well, your dad always wanted to be a race car mechanic. That was his dream. He had this friend out in California who offered to get him on at the Ontario track. It was just part-time at first, and he was staying with his buddy, so naturally it wouldn’t have worked for us to go out there then. Afterwards he got full time work and even got his own pit crew. But they travel, you know, one super speedway to the next.”
“He didn’t want us along?” Kate asked. She started slowly refolding the scraps and arranging them back in the cedar chest. “Couldn’t he at least have come home between races?”
“It wasn’t only him,” Mom said. “I didn’t want that kind of life, traveling from city to city, with my children constantly changing schools. Or a husband who only dropped in now and then.”
“Oh,” Kate said. In that moment, staring down at bits of fabric left over from clothes Mom had made for them through the years, she knew it was true what Mom had said out in the goat pen, about there being a lot of things she didn’t understand.
“Maybe that’s another reason the Wilsons and I were never close,” Mom said. “They were having a lot of trouble with Ruby there for awhile, and you’re right—even though you were little then, I was afraid she’d be a bad influence. I never even asked her to baby-sit for us.”
Mom looked down at the red velvet. Her face was kind of pink and she sounded embarrassed. “Later, when your dad left, I figured everybody including the Wilsons were talking, probably blaming me. People around here are pretty hard on divorced women, you know. They may not know why things didn’t work out, but they all think they do.”
Mom held the red velvet up against her body and looked at her reflection in the mirror. Kate looked at the reflection, too. Mom’s long blonde hair had a nice shine to it. Mom would look pretty in a red velvet dress, Kate thought.
“Why don’t you make yourself a dress out of it anyhow?” she asked.
“Sure,” Mom said bitterly. “The cows would love it.” She folded the material and added, “If I was going to make something for myself now, I’d pick a color I like.”
She dropped the red velvet into Kate’s lap. “It’s yours,” she said.
19
Chipar Reve
nge
Kate sat in the window seat hemming the white skirt. Since there was no school during this week leading up to Christmas, Justin had gone over to the dairy with Mom to give her a hand. Ruby had asked Kate to keep an eye on Luther while she went Christmas shopping with her parents. Kate could see Luther now, messing around with Chip near the duck pen. Chip was holding a large rusty can. He reached into it and handed Luther what looked like an egg. It wasn’t time to gather the eggs, though. And anyway, why hadn’t he used the basket? Kate frowned. Why were they were playing with the eggs instead of bringing them into the house?
Then Kate remembered that when she had walked past the duck pen yesterday, she had gotten a whiff of a very bad smell. Once, Chip had collected four or five rotten eggs and hidden them in his room. Fortunately Mom had confiscated them before he could smuggle them onto the school bus. Maybe Chip was collecting rotten eggs again, although she couldn’t imagine what for. It would serve him right if one broke and the smell got all over him. If that happened Mom wouldn’t even let him in the house to bathe. She’d make him wash outside in cold water from the garden hose.
Kate went back to sewing. And worrying. What if the bank people showed before Christmas and forced them to move out of the house? Where would they go? To an apartment in town? Kate had tried to bring the subject up with Mom. “That’s for me to worry about, Kate—not you kids,” Mom had said in a sharp voice. “I told you we’ll manage!” But if Mom actually believed that, how come she’d looked so unsure?
Justin acted less worried than before; he seemed to think that even if they did move they might not have to change schools. But for Kate, the issue wasn’t changing schools. She couldn’t see that changing schools would make that much difference. For her, the worry was moving, period.
That was Chip’s worry, too. One afternoon when Kate was on her way out to milk Sugar she’d heard Chip in the duck house talking to the ducks, which wasn’t that unusual. But this time he was telling them that if any bank people came to get them, he’d help them hide in the tall grass down by the ditch. Kate had actually thought of trying to hide Sugar, but when she mentioned it to Justin he said she was crazy. He said one day the bank guys would show up—maybe when they were at school or before they got up in the morning or even in the middle of the night. They’d have a truck and would start loading things up. He said the bank guys would bring along the sheriff to make sure nobody tried any funny stuff, because it was the law that when you got too far behind on payments everything you had belonged to whoever you owed the money to.
At first Kate thought Justin was just teasing her, but he said it was the truth. That’s how she remembered seeing it on TV, too—trucks pulling up at a farm and all the livestock being loaded while the family stood around crying. Kate glanced out the window again, but the boys were gone. The gate to Sugar’s pen stood open, and she was gone, too. “Oh, no, not again,” Kate muttered. She laid the skirt aside and went to find Sugar.
She called the boys, and then Sugar, but got no answer. Kate walked out to Lost Goat Lane and looked in the direction of the Wilsons’, but all she saw was an empty road. She glanced in the other direction. To her surprise, she saw the tail end of Sugar just disappearing down the bank on the other side of the highway. As far as Kate knew, Sugar had never gone anywhere near the highway before.
By the time Kate got to the highway, Sugar was out of sight. At first she couldn’t tell which way the goat went. But the minute Kate saw the trail that led through the tall grass, a whole lot of questions were answered at once. Kate knew Sugar had gone down that trail, and she knew exactly why: Sugar was following the boys. Chip and Luther had taken that same trail, the trail that led to the big canal!
Kate didn’t have to wonder why the boys went that way. Everything—Chip’s disappearances, the grass stains on his T-shirt, the can of rotten eggs—fit together. Why hadn’t she figured it out sooner?
She was out of breath when she reached the canal, the part of the canal that circled past the big tree they used to lie under on hot days last summer. Far down the canal she saw Chip and Luther crouched on the bank. Below them lay the alligators, sleeping half-buried in the mud. The alligators were farther from the water than usual, probably because the canal was running so high.
Each boy had an egg in his hand. Before Kate could open her mouth to yell, they flung the eggs. Luther’s throw was too hard. His egg sailed past the alligators and hit a tree. Chip’s egg landed right in front of the big gator. All of the alligators were awake in a flash. The big one immediately looked in the direction the eggs had come from. Chip and Luther should have run, but they didn’t. Instead, they reached into the can for more eggs.
“Stop!” Kate screamed. But Chip and Luther didn’t hear her because they were suddenly screaming, too. Then Kate saw what they saw: Sugar, trotting down the bank to the water’s edge. The goat waded out into the canal until her fat belly touched the water and then lowered her head to drink.
Chip plunged down the bank toward Sugar just the way he had plunged into the canal to try to save Go-Boy. The two small alligators churned the mud with their short legs, and in seconds splashed into the water and disappeared. Kate was already running, running faster than she had ever run in her life, and knowing, even as she ran, that she was too late.
Up on the bank, the big alligator stood high on his stubby legs, turning his snout first toward Luther, then toward Chip, like he was trying to decide which one to charge. Luther was the closest. Chip, down below, was yelling at Sugar to get out of the water. The yelling must have scared Sugar, because instead of following Chip, she backed away from him, into deeper water.
Kate, running for all she was worth, could hear the big alligator’s grunting noise as he swung his head from side to side. Luther took aim and let fly with another duck egg. It hit the alligator right on the head. Splat! The rotten insides of the egg ran in yellow rivulets down his big ugly nose and dripped off the end of his top fangs.
Luther dropped the duck-egg can and slid down the bank to help Chip. Both of them grabbed Sugar’s collar and pulled for all they were worth. They were dragging her out of the water when the big gator made his move. He hurtled toward them, his mouth wide open.
Kate was just above them. “Chip!” she screamed, and fell, woomp! hard on her stomach. Kate had no breath in her lungs, but she stretched out her arms toward them. Chip grabbed one hand. Luther grabbed the other. They pulled themselves up the slippery bank, dragging Sugar behind them. The big gator slid by just inches behind Sugar’s back feet and hit the water with a splash that sent drops up into Kate’s eyes. Kate’s arms felt as if they were coming out of their sockets, but she didn’t let go until both boys and the goat were up on the grass beside her.
For a minute they huddled there, breathing hard. Then Chip got his breath back and started sobbing. “He almost got Sugar.”
“Almost got you, too!” Kate was shaking with terror, even though they were now out of danger. She pulled a clump of saw grass and started scraping some of the mud off him.
“Tie your shoes,” she said. The laces of his mud-covered sneakers had come undone. While he was tying one, she tied the other. Seeing how little his foot was, and imagining what would’ve happened if that old gator had gotten hold of it, Kate almost started crying, too. But she was too mad to cry.
“Please don’t tell Mom!” Chip begged between sobs that were working their way down to sniffles.
Luther put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t tell my mama either. Please?”
“Of course I’m going to tell!” Kate yelled. “You think I want you to keep sneaking down here till that big gator eats both of you? I’m going to tell and I hope you both get grounded for the rest of your lives!”
Luther’s eyes grew wide and Kate could see that he was very scared, either because he thought he might get grounded for life or because it was just sinking in that he or Chip or Sugar or all three of them actually could have been eaten by an alligator.
&
nbsp; “I knew alligators were good swimmers,” Luther said in a small voice. “But I didn’t know they could move so fast on land. They just lie there in the mud like logs, and their legs are really short. Right, Chip?”
Chip nodded. He was very pale.
“Gators are very fast,” Kate said. “They’ve grabbed people right here in Florida. When a gator sees something splashing in the water, the gator doesn’t think, ‘There’s a dog’ or ‘There’s a boy.’ The gator thinks, ‘There’s lunch!’ If you don’t want some big gator to think you’re lunch, then you better stay away from places where he lives.”
Chip looked up at Kate. “But I had to,” he said stubbornly. “I couldn’t let him get away with what he did to Go-Boy.” Kate gazed down at his little mud-smeared face. She didn’t know whether she wanted to hug him because he was safe or hit him because he had done something so stupid.
“Didn’t what happened to Go-Boy teach you anything, Chip? Why do you think Mom didn’t want us coming here? And we promised her we wouldn’t!”
“We won’t come here again,” Luther said. “Will we, Chip?”
“No,” Chip agreed, “Not till—”
“Never!” Kate shrieked. “You almost got killed. Promise me you will never come here again!”
“Not till we’re twenty years old,” Chip said. “If you promise not to tell.”
“All right,” Kate said. “But if you ever come anywhere near this canal again, I swear I will drown you myself.”
Chip put his arm around Sugar’s neck and looked down the bank toward the canal. There was nothing to see now except still black water with a few eggshells floating on top. “It’s okay,” he said to the goat. “We ran him off.”
“You bet!” Luther said. “I splatted him good!”
“I only got in one throw,” Chip said sadly. “Missed him completely.”
Luther punched Chip on the shoulder. “Yours landed in front of him. I bet he got a good whiff! And he slid right through it. It smeared all over his belly!” Luther rubbed his own belly gleefully.
