by Anne Nesbet
People are not spilt milk, she said to herself as she handed the letter over. People deserve justice.
“Your papa’s from away, now, isn’t he?” said the woman in the post office, looking right over the tops of her glasses at Gusta, who jumped in surprise and nodded.
“We’ll see that gets there safely, then, dear,” said the woman, patting the letter kindly as she whisked it into the basket behind her. It took about three full seconds before Gusta understood that the post office woman assumed Mr. Elmer Smith must be Gusta’s own absent papa.
Which just went to show two things:
1. Everyone knew everything about everybody in a town as small as Springdale, Maine.
2. Nobody knew anything much about anybody, all the same.
Not every injustice and sorrow in this world can be tackled by posting a letter, however. There was, for instance, the case of her missing papa. He believed in taking action to make the world better, but what action could Gusta possibly take that could bring her papa home?
It made her think about that Wish again, even though she knew her papa would not possibly approve.
But still: What if there were such a thing as a real Wish? What if there just happened to be one real Wish left in all the world, and it was the one her sea-captain great-grandfather had misplaced in this very house? Wouldn’t it be logical — whatever her papa might say — for Gusta to keep her eyes peeled for it, just in case?
Gusta made a plan: she would try her best to scout out all the various rooms of the house, starting with the places she could look through without seeming terribly sneaky. It didn’t take long to determine there was no “box on a shelf” in the bedroom she shared with Josie, nor in the parlor downstairs, nor even in the open parts of the kitchen, which she was coming to know pretty well, thanks to all the dishes she and Josie washed and dried. There was nothing that looked like a Wish anywhere.
There was one space that had shelves and boxes in abundant quantity, though, and that was the pantry next to the kitchen. So one quiet evening, when by some rare chance everyone seemed busy elsewhere, Gusta took a great deep breath and tackled the pantry shelves.
She tried to be practical about it: the big flour bins couldn’t have kept a Wish secret for decades, not at the rate the Hoopes Home went through flour. In fact, none of the boxes on the lower shelves seemed very likely, and of course pickle relish jars weren’t boxes at all. But up there on the high shelves, closer to the ceiling, was a line of smaller, older boxes that must have supplies used much more rarely. Gusta quietly hauled in the step stool from the kitchen. If she stretched her arm up very high and was careful not to wobble or fall, she found she could snag a box by its corner and tease it forward until it was half off the shelf and graspable —
“Augusta!”
The box hit the pantry floor and split right open, spilling entirely Wish-less tea leaves every which where.
Gramma Hoopes wasn’t all that tall, especially compared to Gusta on a step stool, but Gusta had never felt as small as she did now, shakily descending from her perch and trying not to step on the spilled tea.
“What in heaven’s name, Augusta?” Speaking of tea, Gramma Hoopes looked pretty much exactly like a tea kettle boiling over, just at that moment. “What are you even thinking of? I thought it must be one of the boys again. But you —”
Then she stopped short, as if she had just had an idea. “Not getting enough dinner, even now, are you?” she said. Her eyes were as pointy as needles.
“So sorry, Gramma Hoopes,” said Gusta under her breath, looking away so she wouldn’t have to face those needles. “I didn’t mean to make a mess.”
She knelt down and tried to brush the loose tea into a tidier heap.
“Oh, leave that now,” said Gramma Hoopes. “You’ll sweep up properly when I’m done talking to you. Shouldn’t have assumed you’d be different than the others, should I? But I guess I figured Gladdy must be doing all right for herself, down in that big city.”
It was the shift in her gramma’s voice that caught Gusta off guard: it had suddenly gone from angry to something else, almost regretful.
Even though she knew her father would be ashamed of her for such cowardice, Gusta couldn’t quite find it in herself to lift her eyes from the floor.
“Well,” said Gramma Hoopes. “Seems I forgot about what cities can be like. Gladdy trying to make do down there without a garden, nothing to can, and surely not an extra dime for beefsteak. What did she feed you on, anyway?”
Gusta looked up. “We had food,” she said. She didn’t mean to be contradictory, but she really was a little confused. Of course, there hadn’t been a lot of food, but that just meant stretching the soup another day. And late that autumn her school had been one of the ones to get those new penny bottles of milk in, and her mother had always been able to find a penny somewhere. She wasn’t as badly off as some kids in her class, that was for sure.
“They’re all hungry when they come here, Lord knows,” said her grandmother. She seemed almost to be talking to herself now, more than to Gusta. “Those Hansen boys! It was like having a pack of rats in the house, the whole first year, the way they’d sneak things out of the pantry, no matter how many potatoes you’d fry up for dinner. Well, now they’ve settled down some, since they see I won’t let them starve. Why did I think things would be different with Gladdy’s girl, just because she’s Gladdy’s, and Gladdy was mine? Augusta!”
That was directed right at Gusta, so she had to look up.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Pshaw,” said her grandmother. “Important thing is, you don’t need to sneak food here. We’re going to build you up and put some flesh on your bones. If your mother weren’t so prideful, she would have sent you up here earlier, I guess. But she’s a Hoopes, and so she’s stubborn, and so am I, and so are you, and so that’s a matched set of us right there.”
She laughed right out loud then, so it seemed like Gusta wasn’t in terrible trouble after all, thank goodness.
“I’m really sorry about spilling the tea leaves,” said Gusta.
“Sweep it up now, and I’ll boil you an egg instead,” said her grandmother. “But no more sneaking food. I don’t like sneaking around. Oh, don’t look like that; I’m not going to wallop you. I believe in punishments that fit the crime.”
Gusta blinked. Of course, Gramma Hoopes didn’t even really know what the crime was, did she? Gramma Hoopes thought Gusta was pilfering food when really she was scouting around for lost Wishes. But that wasn’t something Gusta could very well explain.
“Here’s what you’ll do now, Gusta,” said Gramma Hoopes. “It happens to be egg-cleaning day in this house. So you’ll go down cellar with that boy Laurence and help him clean those eggs. He’s got thirty dozen to pack up by tomorrow, and that brother Clarence of his who’s supposed to do it with him is a slippery rascal — always manages to disappear instead of helping. Thinks I don’t notice, but I most certainly do.”
Gramma Hoopes turned and hollered out into the hall: “Laurence! You’re wanted in here!”
And that was how Gusta ended up getting her introduction to the Kingdom of the Hens.
Should be Queendom, I guess, really,” confided Larry, while he held open the door so Gusta could slip into the warm dusk of the henhouse. “But around here it’s always been called the Kingdom of the Hens. Anyway, pretty fancy for a henhouse, see? Look how clever the nest boxes are.”
While the chickens murmured and rustled in that space of theirs, moving around and commenting quietly to each other, Larry showed her the nest boxes: the opening in front the chicken could use, and the sneaky way you could swing up a little door from the other side of the rows of nest boxes to grab the eggs that were in there.
Boxes! Gusta stopped in her tracks.
“Hey, Larry, have you ever found, well, something that wasn’t an egg in one of these nest boxes?”
Larry thought it over.
“Lik
e a mouse?” he said. “That what you mean?”
“No, no, not mice,” said Gusta. “More like a funny old coin.”
Larry threw back his head and laughed. He had a very nice, friendly sort of laugh.
“Money under one of our hens? I wish!” he said. “That would be easier than cleaning and packing the eggs up to sell them, wouldn’t it? Just skip right to finding money! Gosh! Though I guess money doesn’t fry or scramble as well as a real egg.”
Then he led Gusta down the cellar steps at the rear of the big farmhouse. It turned out that the cellar had quite a few different corners and sections. One whole part was for the storing of everything canned. Gusta couldn’t see much of it but had the dim impressions of different colors glinting on shelves, like a treasury for jar-size jewels. (Jars but no boxes, Gusta noted.)
The part of the cellar where Larry was taking her now was not exactly a treasure cave, however. It was a protected, cool-temperatured place to store up eggs until you had enough to fill one of the “30 dozen” cases and take them into town to sell.
The smell down there was not good.
The thing was, every one of those eggs had to be cleaned, and then tucked into a cardboard tray, and the tray in turn stacked in the big cardboard carton.
“Here you go,” said Larry. He tossed her a scrap of fine sandpaper. “Now we get the poop off these eggs, fast as we can.”
Once the cleaning was under way, the smell was not just not good. It was terrible. You picked an egg up out of a pail, and you polished it with that piece of sandpaper, getting the dirt off. And then the egg went into its carton. And you did that over and over and over, being careful not to clutch too hard, because of course then you had raw egg on your hand as well as chicken poop.
Laurence didn’t seem as bothered by it all, but oh, Gusta could see why everyone else in the house was willing to do just about anything not to end up down here on egg-cleaning duty. Larry moved quickly through his eggs, chattering as he went. He had been a lot quieter upstairs with all the other kids. Maybe he was a little like his chickens and needed an enclosed space to feel safe enough to cackle a little.
“Hey, Gusta, do you remember your mother?” he asked Gusta out of the blue.
“Of course, I do,” said Gusta. “She put me on the bus to come up here.”
“Oh, right. That’s right. Well, you know, I remember mine, too. That’s what’s different between me and Tommy, even though he’s just a year and a bit younger. He doesn’t remember, but sometimes he’ll say he remembers, and then he gets something wrong, so you know he’s just making things up. But I really do.”
“What’s your mother like?” asked Gusta.
“She liked the color blue,” said Larry. Gusta noticed the past tense; a tiny little shiver went through her. “Sometimes she said, ‘Laurence, your hair is not combed one whit.’ And she had very nice, thin fingers, too. I remember all of that very well, from back before she even got sick.”
“Oh,” said Gusta. “I’m sorry. She got sick?”
“She was overwhelmed, I guess,” said Larry. “I heard someone say that to our daddy. I guess that’s pretty bad. She died from overwhelming, when Tommy was still little. And our father couldn’t handle the lot of us, so we ended up here. It’s all right here. I like the chickens, and Tommy likes the cows. And someday our daddy will come back to get us, I think, once we’re all trained up to be more useful. We’re getting more useful as we go. I’m already pretty useful with the chickens, I guess, and Mr. Bill says Donald is almost as helpful as Jay, but I think that’s mostly to poke at Jay.”
“Oh,” said Gusta again. Mr. Bill and Jay were her uncles. It was all a lot to absorb. And she was beginning to feel like chicken poop dust was coating the inside of her nose, so that she hardly knew anymore whether it was better to breathe in or to breathe out.
“Well, that’s that, just about,” said Larry. “Thirty dozen! And you only broke two; that’s pretty good. Clarence always makes sure to break at least half a dozen, so he won’t have to help with the cleaning the next time. That’s not right, is it? When egg money is so good?”
“Not right at all,” said Gusta, feeling the words beginning to trip up and gag in her throat a little. “Not at all.”
But she also thought, very secretly, as she scrambled up the cellar stairs to fresh air again, that even though she disapproved of shirkers and wasters and really of anyone who went to lengths to avoid the work they should be doing, she did, very privately, and in this particular case, understand why Clarence would rather do almost anything than clean those endless stinky eggs.
So, really now, what’s in there?” said Bess. It was a Saturday, and Bess was poking at the funny, curving sides of the old horn case, which was an indescribable hue after all its many decades of existence, a leathery yellow-green-gray. It would have been a hideous color if you saw it on anything else, but for the horn case it was perfect — the old, sturdy, worn color of secrets.
According to Josie, Bess might spend more time at her grandmother’s than at her own house, if you added up all the hours. But that was fine, according to Josie, because Bess was a help with anything that needed another hand.
“She’s a quiet little thing, but a good worker,” Josie liked to say. She had respect for good workers.
At this particular moment, however, all three girls weren’t working at all, because Aunt Marion had said the rest of supper was under control, and they could skedaddle. They had skedaddled upstairs, and now Bess and Josie and Gusta were perched on Gusta’s cot and Josie’s bed, talking.
“That’s my French horn,” said Gusta, and she opened up the case to show them. It was safe to do this because she had moved all the underwear and socks into a tidy box under her cot. Only the beautiful horn was in that case now; her chest expanded with pride as it always did when she looked at it. She took some quick peeks over at Bess and Josie as she opened it to see whether they were appreciating that amazing instrument properly.
“Ohhhh!” said Bess. It was an entirely satisfying reaction. “It looks like — like a car engine almost!”
Gusta blinked in surprise.
“Car engine!” she said.
“I mean, a beautiful car engine.” Bess was whispering and blushing at the same time. It made Gusta’s heart soften right up all over again, to see how much Bess didn’t want to be saying the wrong thing, or any unkind thing. “And not just only an engine, you know, but like it’s combined with one of those big seashells. The kind that’s all twisty and turny.”
“Oh, for the sake of oranges, Bess!” said Josie. “Forget the seashell engine stuff, Gusta. Just play us something. I assume it makes sounds, your — what did you call it again?”
“French horn,” said Bess. “Right, Gusta? Why is it French?”
“It’s not actually French. That’s just its name,” she said. “But the people who made this one didn’t call it a French horn — they called it Waldhorn. That might be a better name. It means ‘forest horn.’ I guess they used to play them in the woods, back in the old days.”
All the while Bess was smiling, and Josie was looking pretty interested, too. Bess stretched out a finger to the bell of the horn, just to feel the cold brassiness of it, and whispered while she did so, “Play a song?”
“You better!” laughed Josie.
Gusta wanted them both to understand how wonderful her horn was. She wanted that so much that her hands were on the verge of actually shaking. But she tried hard to settle down.
She took the horn out, fitted the mouthpiece into the lead pipe, and tucked the little finger of her left hand into the hooked metal tab there, just like a pro. Then she settled her right hand, bent just slightly, into the bell.
It did look something like a machine, a beautiful machine, but in fact to make a French horn sing, you had to work a bit of muscle magic. There were only three metal levers to push on Gusta’s horn, which was probably older than the century and had traveled so far in its life, all the way fro
m Germany to New York (and all up and down the mill towns of New England) and now to Springdale, Maine. Push a lever, and the air went through a different set of winding tubes — but there were all sorts of different notes that each of those pathways could produce, and it was up to you, up to the tension in your lips, to determine which of those notes would emerge.
You had to have a picture in your mind of the note you were aiming for. Your mind had to be singing out that note, for your mouth and lips to know what shapes to take to make it. It was a kind of paradox, her father liked to say: to find a true note, you already had to have found it.
Gusta licked her lips, murmured the “mmmmpit” that got her mouth into shape, and then blew air into the mouthpiece, and the horn sang out a sad, enormous note. She let that note blossom into a hunting call, a call that was way too large for this narrow room.
Bess and Josie applauded.
“Do it again!”
So Gusta did it again. She turned the hunting call into an old German folk song her father had taught her years ago, when she was still pretty little. It felt good to be finding the proper notes, to be shaping the air of the world into music, which is really what you do when you play the horn. Then Gusta started playing the glorious scraps of things it had amused her father to teach her — bits and pieces of what he said was famous music, nothing you’d expect a scrawny kid to be able to play, but only a few measures of anything in particular — and the room began to resonate with the sound, as if it were itself an enormous instrument, a square-cornered bell. Not just the room, but Gusta herself, who was for that wonderful long moment not awkward or out of place or scrawny or extraneous or foolish, but as large and sonorous and deep as the music itself, a glorious brass-voiced version of Gusta.
And then the door flew open, and there on the other side of it, looking highly annoyed, was Gusta’s grandmother, wiping her hands on her apron, and behind Gramma Hoopes, a crowd of blurry faces, all curious.
