All the King's Horses

by Laura C Stevenson

  Mom nodded, and we started across the playground, with Colin, Grandpa and me in the lead, and Mr Crewes and Mom next, and the cops last, keeping everybody else from following. After we had taken a few steps, I saw I should have tried to get us into a different order, because Mom asked Mr Crewes if he knew how Colin was doing, and Mr Crewes told her the school had been trying to get in touch with her about him. There was nothing Colin or I could do, either, because Grandpa seemed to have understood he was going to ride in the police car, and he walked towards it so fast that we got there way ahead of them. When they caught up, I could see from Mom’s face that Mr Crewes had told her a lot.

  ‘So if it’s OK with you and Colin,’ he was saying, ‘he and I will talk to Mr Beeker and Mr Stegeth today after school, and I think they’ll let Colin work with me, on condition that there be no more … er, disruptions in the future.’

  ‘Wow!’ exploded Colin. ‘You mean, I could be in your class instead of in that old—’

  ‘– We’ll have to see, Colin,’ cut in Mr Crewes. ‘And we’ll have to have a chat about the conditions.’ He turned to Mom again. ‘He’ll miss the bus, but don’t worry. I’ll drive him home.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mom. Then she turned to us. ‘Why didn’t you two tell me what was wrong? We could have had all this resolved two weeks ago.’

  Colin nudged me, which wasn’t fair, because it was his problem. ‘Well,’ I said, looking down, ‘we thought you had enough to cope with at home.’

  ‘Home?’ said Grandpa, tapping Mom’s arm. ‘Now?’

  ‘Take him home,’ said Mr Crewes. ‘He’s had a long morning, and it will take me a couple of days to work things out. Could I stop by Friday and tell you what we’ve arranged?’

  ‘That would be wonderful,’ said Mom. ‘Come by around eight.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to it,’ he said. Then he turned to Colin and me. ‘We’d better get back inside, you guys, or somebody will give us a detention.’

  Mom gave us both a big hug, so I knew everything was OK; then we hurried back across the empty playground with Mr Crewes. Inside, he gave us passes and hurried off to his class.

  ‘Boy oh boy,’ said Colin as we started up the steps together. ‘Is he ever a prince!’

  ‘I’ll say,’ I said. ‘Colin, when Joe was clowning … did you, um, see anything funny?’

  ‘Funny is the last word I’d use for a creep like Joe,’ he said.

  ‘No, I mean funny peculiar. Like fae—’

  ‘Shhh!’ he hissed. ‘Not here. They might not like it.’

  ‘It’s not against the rules to talk in the halls…’ I began, but then I realized what ‘They’ he meant. ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Later.’

  He nodded. ‘Right after dinner. I was going to show you something connected with Them, anyway. Just you wait – you’ll drop your teeth.’

  I SPENT THE rest of the school day wondering what Colin had to show me, but when he got home, which he didn’t until the 5:15 was long gone, he obviously had other things on his mind. Good things: he was so bouncy that he almost dropped the plates when he helped me set the table. After supper was finally all served and we’d said grace, Mom smiled.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘aren’t you going to tell us what happened?’

  ‘Sure am!’ said Colin enthusiastically. ‘We went to see Mr Beeker and Mr Stegeth, and … well, see, ever since I got to Wheelock, Mr Stegeth’s been giving me easy math problems. I told and told him he was wasting my time, but he never listened, so I quit doing them. Just a sec – I’m starved.’ He cut his potato in half and stuffed one of the pieces into his mouth.

  ‘I see,’ said Mom dryly. ‘And I don’t suppose it occurred to you, Mr Einstein, that your intellectual objection to the easy problems made Mr Stegeth think you couldn’t do them?’

  ‘That’s what Mr Crewes said,’ mumbled Colin through the potato. ‘Only nicely. Then he told Mr Stegeth and Mr Beeker he could “demonstrate my competence” – and he started giving me mental arithmetic problems. First they were pretty easy, but they got tougher, like counting backwards from a hundred by sevens, or multiplying four-digit numbers by twelve.’

  ‘And they were wowed, right?’ I said, trying not to sound jealous. Having a math whiz for a brother is a pain.

  ‘You should have seen them!’ he said, gulping down the second half of his potato and starting in on his sausage. ‘Their eyes looked like saucers! Finally, Mr Beeker said he’d talk to Mr Crewes tomorrow. So I think I’ll be able to switch, and that’s neat, because Mr Crewes went to MIT, like Dad. I know, because he told me when I asked. That means he’s a real scientist, not just a teacher—’

  ‘Bad boy!’ said Grandpa suddenly, thumping his hand on the table.

  ‘Now, Dad,’ said Mom soothingly, ‘I know Colin isn’t minding his manners, but he’s excited, and I think just this once—’

  ‘Bad boy,’ insisted Grandpa. ‘I teach him!’

  We all stared at each other; then something clicked in my mind. ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘This morning, when Grandpa visited the school, some of the boys were teasing him, and when Colin tried to stop them, he got Colin mixed up with them, or something, and he—’

  ‘– Right!’ said Grandpa, glaring at Colin. ‘Horsewhip.’

  Mom put her hand on Grandpa’s. ‘Dad, Sarah’s saying you got mixed up. Colin didn’t like what the bad boys were saying, and he was telling them to stop. That’s good, not bad.’

  ‘But you’re dead right about those boys, Grandpa,’ said Colin. ‘They’re jerks, and—’

  ‘Quiet!’ shouted Grandpa.

  Mom threw Colin a look that meant he had better do what Grandpa said, so he shut up and we finished dinner without talking at all. Mom tried to get Colin to talk about Mr Crewes while we did the dishes, but he wouldn’t, and when we were done, he went up to his room and closed the door. So much for whatever he’d been going to tell me about Them.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ sighed Mom. ‘And he was so happy.’

  I nodded. ‘I sure hope Grandpa doesn’t keep on mixing him up with Joe and those guys.’

  ‘Oh, no! He won’t do that!’ said Mom in the voice she used to make it seem as if everything were all right. Colin and I hated that voice, because of course we knew everything wasn’t all right, but all of a sudden, I realized why she used it. She was scared.

  After I went to bed, I lay in the dark a long time, wondering if that could possibly be true, because Mom just wasn’t the sort of person who got scared. After Dad died, she’d run the family all by herself, including working; all our Maple Street friends’ moms had thought that was very brave. Personally, I thought it was braver of her to give up her job when Grandpa couldn’t be left alone any more; that scared Colin and me, because we knew her not being able to work made us poor, and we were afraid she’d run out of money altogether, like the warehouse people, before we got old enough to get jobs. But Mom was just as brave about not working as she’d been about working.

  We also knew Mom was unscarable because of a trunk we’d found in Grandpa’s attic when we were moving him out of his cottage. When we’d opened it to see if the stuff inside it was worth keeping, we’d practically fallen over, because it was filled with big-time trophies and ribbons Mom had won, and pictures of her taking mammoth jumps at Madison Square Garden. We didn’t dare mention it, though of course we were dying to know more, because there was this … space, I guess you could call it … between Mom and Grandpa, and we’d figured out long ago that it had something to do with the fact that Mom didn’t ride any more – at all, ever – though you couldn’t talk to either her or Grandpa long without realizing she’d been really good once. But that trunk just shouted how tough Mom was, because she couldn’t possibly have been that good and then quit without running into Grandpa’s Irish, and we’d never met anybody brave enough to stand up to that.

  ‘You know what?’ I said to Colin on the way to the bus stop the next morning. ‘Mom’s afraid Grandpa is going to get worse and worse.’
>
  He stared at me. ‘She said that?’

  ‘Nope. But last night when I said I hoped Grandpa wouldn’t keep on confusing you with Joe and his gang, she looked worried; and this morning, when you came down, she was watching the two of you every minute until he gave you his usual hug; then she looked better.’

  ‘You mean, she thought he wasn’t going to be able to recognize me ever again?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘He wouldn’t do that! He just couldn’t!’

  ‘That’s what I said to myself. But then I thought, he’s forgotten just about everything else. Why not us?’

  ‘Criminy!’ He sat down on his binder, and I sat next to him, gathering my skirt around my knees. Neither of us said anything for quite a while.

  ‘Think we could get to Faerie if we went to the Ring by ourselves?’ he asked finally.

  ‘I don’t know. I sort of thought we could only get there with one of Them.’ I pulled my knees a little closer; it was awfully cold. ‘Besides, we don’t really know he’s in Faerie.’

  ‘The heck we don’t! Hob and Lob had instructions to take us somewhere else while that Seer was dreaming, right? That means They don’t want us to go to Faerie; and Grandpa has to be the reason.’

  ‘Well, maybe,’ I said. ‘But I wish we had more evidence about what’s going on. What were you going to tell me last night?’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ He fished a milk penny out of his pocket. ‘Watch this.’ He flipped the penny, slapping it on the back of his left wrist after he caught it. Heads, heads, heads, heads …

  ‘Hang on,’ I said, ‘let me see that penny.’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, handing it to me. I looked at it; it was a perfectly ordinary penny.

  I took a penny out of my pencil-case. ‘Try it with this one.’

  He grinned and started to flip it. Heads, heads, heads, heads …

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m impressed. Tell me how you do it.’

  ‘I’m not doing it. They are.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Well, I don’t, really, but the thing is, it only works on this side of the train tracks.’

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘No, let me show you. We’ve got time, if we do it fast enough.’

  We raced across the tracks, and he started to flip. Heads, tails, tails, heads.

  ‘That’s unreal,’ I said.

  ‘It’s more than that,’ he said. ‘It’s proof.’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘That They have special power in the area between the highway and the tracks, not just in the Ring. Remember the day Mom was bandaging my hand and you were listening? I only told her about renters leaving the house after a week, but there’s more. Joe said the house was haunted and nobody had rented it for three years.’

  I stared at him. ‘Holy tomato! And you think it was Them?’

  ‘Who else could it be?’

  ‘But They haven’t driven us out!’

  ‘That’s because of Grandpa, dumbbell! It’s all connected, somehow.’

  I thought it over. ‘I guess it’s got to be, but I don’t see how.’

  The bus came around the corner, and we ran to get our stuff.

  ‘You know,’ he said suddenly. ‘We’re never going to get those faeries to give us Grandpa back by ourselves. The whole thing is just too complicated. We need help.’

  ‘Sure we do. But who would help us?’

  ‘Mr Crewes.’

  ‘Don’t be a moron; he’s a scientist.’

  ‘So am I, and I believe in faeries. And look, when he was driving me home, he said even if I wasn’t in his class, he was always around, and if things got tough, I should call on him for help.’

  ‘That’s really great of him,’ I said, ‘but he probably just meant—’

  The bus stopped, and the door flopped open; Colin smiled at me as he swung in. ‘I’ll tell him tomorrow night when he comes over.’

  I wasn’t sure that was such a hot idea, but I was glad Colin had cheered up, so I didn’t argue. Not that I could have said much on the bus anyway.

  When the doorbell rang the next night, Colin raced to answer it, and he brought Mr Crewes into the living room as if he were a king. Grandpa was pacing around in his usual circle; when he saw Mr Crewes, he looked puzzled.

  ‘Don’t live here,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Mr Crewes, smiling. ‘I don’t live here. I’m just visiting. But I like your house.’ He looked at the staircase. ‘That’s a magnificent stained-glass window.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, sidling up next to Grandpa. ‘We like it, too. Won’t you sit down? Mom will be right here. And I’ll get you a cup of coffee if you want.’

  He sat down on the sofa. ‘That would be great.’

  I took Grandpa’s hand. ‘Come on, let’s go get some coffee and cookies.’

  ‘Cookies,’ he said. And he followed me, just the way I’d hoped.

  When we got back to the living room, Mom was downstairs, looking very pretty in a dress she hadn’t worn for a long time, and she and Colin were talking with Mr Crewes. Grandpa put the cookies on the coffee table, but when he and I sat down, he kept staring at Mr Crewes.

  Suddenly, his face lit up. ‘Boyfriend?’ he asked Mom.

  Mom turned bright red. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘He’s a teacher, and he’s here to talk about the kids’ school.’

  But Grandpa just chuckled, and he kept mumbling ‘boyfriend … good, good’ to himself, which made it hard to talk. Finally, Mr Crewes smiled at Mom and leaned forward.

  ‘You know, Mr O’Brien,’ he said, ‘my dad used to take me to Madison Square Garden to watch the showjumping, and I was thrilled. Now I’m wondering if any of those horses were ones you’d trained.’

  Grandpa looked confused, so I chipped in. ‘Sure, you trained horses for the Garden, Grandpa. Remember Easy Does It?’

  ‘Easy Does It,’ he said, smiling. ‘Good girl, good girl.’

  ‘She certainly was,’ said Mom, who was more or less the right colour by now. ‘Don’t you have a picture of her?’

  ‘Picture,’ said Grandpa, glancing at the stairs.

  I saw what Mom wanted us to do. ‘Come on, Grandpa, let’s go find it,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Colin. ‘We’ll help you.’

  Grandpa stared at Colin and started to frown. I thought Oh no! It’s going to happen again! but I said quickly, ‘Easy Does It was a great horse! Let’s go find her pictures.’

  ‘Easy Does It,’ said Grandpa. And he followed us up the stairs and into the room Mom had made into a kind of office for him.

  Colin looked over the shelves of trophies, horse books, and albums. ‘Which is the album with Easy Does It’s pictures, Grandpa?’

  Grandpa pulled out an album. It wasn’t the right album, but neither of us said so; we just sat on either side of him on the old leather couch that had always been in his cottage and chatted with him about the horses in the pictures and newspaper clippings. After we got to the end, I took down another album and gave it to him; he began to look at it, humming the way he did when he was interested in something. We looked at each other and tiptoed out of the room.

  When we got downstairs, Mr Crewes smiled at Colin. ‘I’ve just been telling your mom that Mr Beeker has decided to put you in my class.’

  ‘Wow!’ said Colin. ‘Can we do physics? Can we do algebra?’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Crewes, ‘there are thirty other students in the class who require my attention, but I think we can work something out. Miss Baker said you can spend time in the library on your own, if you want.’ He smiled. ‘She likes you; she worked hard on our collection of fairy tales, and you’re the first person who has checked any of them out for a long time.’

  ‘Fairy tales?’ said Mom in a strange sort of voice.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Colin uncomfortably. ‘I wanted to …’

  ‘Mom,’ I said, ‘do you think maybe you should check on Grandpa?’

  ‘I guess I’d be
tter,’ she said. ‘I’ll get us some more coffee while I’m up.’

  Colin didn’t even wait until she was all the way up the stairs; he plopped down next to Mr Crewes on the sofa and started in. ‘About those fairy tales I checked out. It was research. See, Sarah and I know something about Grandpa that no-one else does. It’s hard to explain, because … well … not everybody believes in what we know, but we thought you were the kind of person who would understand.’

  ‘I’ll certainly try,’ said Mr Crewes. And you could tell he meant it.

  ‘OK. Do you know what a changeling is?’

  He blinked. ‘Er … more or less.’

  ‘Well, Sarah and I think that’s what our grandfather is. Not our real Grandpa, of course. Just the man you met tonight and on the playground.’

  Mr Crewes put down his coffee cup. ‘That’s an interesting hypothesis, Colin, but—’

  ‘I know it sounds funny,’ said Colin. ‘But what if we could prove there was something strange about this house – something that let the faeries take Grandpa and leave somebody with us? Then would you believe us?’

  I wanted to say, hey, that’s not right – he was sick before we came, so if he’s a changeling, it’s not the house that’s done it, but Mr Crewes gave me a look that told me to let Colin go on. And to Colin he said, ‘It would have to be very convincing proof.’

  ‘It is,’ said Colin. He stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a penny. ‘See, if I flip this anywhere between the railroad tracks and Route 495, it … well, watch.’ He started flipping; Mr Crewes and I leaned forward. Heads, heads, heads, heads, tails … He stopped, staring. Then he flipped it once more. Tails.

  He gulped and looked up at Mr Crewes. ‘I’ve done it day after day ever since I first noticed something was weird, and it’s been heads every time.’

  Mr Crewes raised his eyebrows. ‘That defies all the laws of probability.’

  ‘It’s true, though,’ I said. ‘Honest! We did it at the bus stop yesterday, and it came down heads over and over. We both saw it – he isn’t just making it up.’