by Anne Nesbet
Josie had a voice so sweet that it could make any old song sound pretty good. She had the gift. And it is never wise to underestimate either a French horn or a jar of dried beans.
Gusta’s horn sounded different out here in the woods than it had ever sounded indoors. It sounded like it might be able to send its music a very long distance — like messages carried by the most powerful of pigeons.
If she played a truly beautiful note, she liked to think — an absolutely most perfect note — it might travel very far indeed. Maybe as far as Canada. Maybe as far as the war. Maybe it would never stop traveling, until, as powerful as a wish, it bumped into the one it had been sent after.
The next pigeon expedition went in an entirely different direction from Holly Hill, and that was thanks to Georges Thibodeau.
It was his obsession with airplanes that caused all the trouble.
Apparently he had spent the days since that Saturday when Gusta walked over Holly Hill thinking and thinking about pigeons and airplanes, and those two thoughts had twined into one larger plan that he pitched to Gusta during the noon recess.
“Hey, Gusta,” said Georges. “How’s Mr. Bertmann’s pigeon camera coming along?”
Gusta thought about that one particular workbench in the corner of Mr. Bertmann’s room, the surface covered with tiny little lenses and screwdrivers and ends of wire.
“It’s not quite ready, not yet,” she said. She felt a certain loyalty toward Mr. Bertmann and his experiments, so she didn’t want to say that it was hard to imagine that camera would ever be ready.
“Oh,” said Georges. His disappointment silenced him for a few seconds, but not longer than that.
“I was thinking of things it would be interesting to see,” he said. “I mean, to see from a pigeon camera’s point of view. Like airplanes. But we could go anyway. Want to take a look at the new airfield on the other side of town? We could carry a pigeon over that way, right? The pigeons need to practice wearing their camera harness, don’t they, even if the camera isn’t ready yet? That’s what you said before.”
In the end his sheer stubborn enthusiasm wore Gusta down, and she found herself walking on past the high school, with Georges carrying the pigeon cage on her right side. Inside the travel cage today was Mabel, who kept standing up and turning a couple of steps to the left or right as they went, as if she were just slightly unsettled in some way.
“It’s all right, Mabel,” said Gusta. “We’re going somewhere new. A labyrinth in the air for you!”
They had to walk to the airfield and then all the way to the other side of it, too, so that Mabel would cross over the airplanes on her way home. And then after all that walk, in fact there were only three planes. They climbed a little hill on the far side and looked at the landing strip there, the way this field had been carved out of the woods on one side and tucked up next to someone’s pasture on the other side.
“Pretty wonderful, isn’t it?” said Georges happily. “An airport out here?”
Airplanes were probably incapable of disappointing Georges, even when there were only three of them.
“I guess so,” said Gusta. She was lying: what she saw was a raw stretch of clearing, a newly paved landing strip, a tractor busily grading more land on the far side, and those three small airplanes. It didn’t strike her as “wonderful,” exactly. And the breeze was kicking up and getting chilly again. She was worried about Mabel becoming confused in the wind.
“Shall we let her go?” said Gusta. “Here, I’ll tuck her into her harness.”
When all the tiny buckles had been buckled, Gusta had a generous inspiration.
“Here,” she said, holding Mabel out to Georges. “Why don’t you let her go? You just say ‘Mabel, fly on home!’ and give her a little toss into the air — there, like that! Yes!”
Georges made the happy sound of someone who has just become a part of the great unfolding history of pigeon photography.
“Wow!” he said, watching Mabel head out over the airfield and homeward. “Wow! Look at her go! I can’t wait until she’s carrying an actual, real camera.”
Gusta clapped her hands, too. She was extremely proud of those pigeons. It was downright exhilarating to watch them fly.
Then an awful, awful sound interrupted their happy celebration: a voice, scandalous and displeased and (oh, no!) familiar.
“Georges? Gusta? What in heaven’s name are you two doing?”
It was Molly Gowen, breathless from some combination of surprise, suspicion, and having just clambered up the slope to the top of this hillock.
“What are you doing here?” said Georges, who seemed to find it hard to maintain a baseline level of calm politeness around Molly Gowen. “We’re on a walk, and admiring the new airfield. That’s a Curtiss-Wright trainer down there, a CW-12.”
“It is?” said Molly, furrowing her brow. “How do you know that, anyway?”
“Can’t I just be someone who likes planes?” said Georges.
Gusta thought she’d better intervene before these two slipped right into another round of the Dairy Wars, Airfield Edition.
“Hello there, Molly,” she said. “Do you like airplanes, too?”
“Not particularly,” said Molly. “I’m here because my brother’s on the grading crew over there, and we’re giving him a ride home in the truck. You know this is potentially a sensitive military site, right? I don’t think they want foreigner types hanging out watching them work or anything.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Georges. “I AM NOT A FOREIGNER, Molly Gowen!”
“Well, that’s what you say. Thibodeau sounds pretty foreign to me. And what about her?” said Molly, rudely gesturing at Gusta with her pointed chin. “I keep saying, what kind of name is Neubronner? I hear rumors —”
“RUMORS!” said Georges. “What kind of RUMORS?”
“Never mind,” said Gusta, but she could tell it was too late now. Molly and Georges were glaring at each other.
“I’ve heard Augusta Neubronner spends a lot of time hanging around with that Mr. Bertmann person,” said Molly. “Don’t you, Gusta? And he’s German, for sure. Plenty suspicious, the way he walks around town pretending to be an innocent old loon, but actually carting his stupid, dirty birds everywhere — and what’s that there, anyway?”
She was pointing at Mabel’s empty cage, and she looked genuinely taken aback.
“That’s Mabel’s travel cage,” said Gusta. “Mabel’s a pigeon. She is a very clean pigeon, by the way.”
“That cage is empty,” said Molly.
“That’s because Mabel’s flying home,” said Gusta. “She’ll get there faster than we will.”
“She’s not stupid, either,” said Georges, and Gusta felt two things at once: warm gratitude for his defense of Mabel, who was so truly such a fine pigeon — and also the dread one feels when watching someone go a little too far. “She’s a brave explorer, and someday she is going to be able to take actual photographs, so I guess she’s about as smart as any pigeon ever was, and probably smarter than — OH, NEVER MIND.”
Silence fell on that hill for a moment. The breeze reached through Gusta’s hair and tickled her scalp.
“Are you telling me that a gang of foreigners is using specially trained pigeons to spy on our new Springdale airfield?” asked Molly.
It was so absurd that they gaped at her, which of course she took as confirmation.
“Well!” said Molly. “Well! Wait until I tell them about this!”
Who was this them, wondered Gusta, feeling somewhat sick to her stomach. How had things managed to go so wrong?
“You go right ahead, Molly Gowen,” said Georges. “You go on and shout about it up and down Main Street, if that’s what you want. Everybody in Springdale knows who the Thibodeaus are. We are the SPRINGDALE DAIRY! WE were milking cows before Sharp’s Ridge even had its first barn. And Gusta’s a Hoopes. You know that perfectly well. So just stop going on and on about foreigners.”
Molly look
ed like she would gladly have swatted him, but she shook her fist in his direction instead.
“You think about it yourself, Georges Thibodeau! You shouldn’t be messing around airfields without any business being there. And you two really shouldn’t be sending German pigeons up in the air to spy, because if you’re not foreigners yourselves, you almost are, and if you’re Americans, you’re acting pretty treasonous, I’d say. And I’d think anyone in Springdale would rather drink loyal, American, Sharp’s Ridge milk than whatever questionable foreign milk you Thibodeaus produce —”
“Come on, Georges,” said Gusta. “It’s getting cold. Let’s go. There’s no point getting into a fight. Molly, you’re taking this all wrong. The pigeon is just flying, not spying.”
Danger, danger, her head was telling her. Her heart was pounding, and her feet just wanted to get away from those terrible, angry words.
“You’re not getting away with this, you two!” said Molly to their backs, as they scrambled away from her down the little hill. “I’m watching you, and everybody’s going to be watching you when I tell them what you’ve been up to. You wait and see.”
They walked away, letting that angry voice of hers bounce off their backs like hail: Molly Gowen was a human-shaped bout of bad weather.
“Oof,” said Georges eventually, when they were already quite far away. “Ouch.”
And there really didn’t seem to be anything much better than that to say.
Gusta spent the rest of that week braced inwardly for some terrible thing to happen — for Molly’s them to arrive at the classroom door, maybe, with uniforms on and dark glasses where their human eyes should be, and holding out handcuffs to clap on the wrists of the fifth grade’s almost-foreign spies — but although Molly sent her quite a number of narrow-eyed, frowning glances, uniformed men did not appear, not Tuesday, not Wednesday, not Thursday, not even Friday.
That Friday Mr. Bertmann sent Gusta home with a pigeon again, and Bess joined them on Elm Street, and the arrival home of two honorary orphans and a pigeon gave Josie ambitious ideas.
“Oh, girls, let’s take ourselves out of here!” said Josie, taking her apron off. “Another round of music in the woods! We’ll take Delphine, too, Miss Marion — don’t you fret.”
The days were getting longer. It was truly spring, however chilly the air might mostly be. There would be time enough to get out past the cemetery, play a few songs, let Delphine run around a bit where it wouldn’t bother Gramma Hoopes at all, and come home for a slightly late supper. They didn’t even have to beg and plead, once Josie had laid out the plan that way. Aunt Marion said, “Oh, yes, please — go, take her, go!”
Josie (with her ukulele), Gusta (with the horn bumping along on one side and Mabel’s little travel cage on the other), Bess (with bean jar), and Delphine padding alongside, darting away for a moment and returning (“Chase me!”) all convulsed in giggles: four children, several instruments, and a pigeon.
“Parade!” said Delphine, and who could really deny it?
Who knew? Someday maybe there would be actual, real parades in which the Honorary Orphan Band would be striding along, making music.
Because the surprising thing was, they were already sounding better. Almost even . . . good. Josie was so clever with her hands and had such a good ear that she could find a strum on the ukulele that sounded good with whatever note from Bess or from Gusta needed a strum.
And shy Bess added two kinds of magic: the rhythm of the bean jar, keeping them all on track, and then at the oddest little pause-y moments in any song, she might even throw in some kind of whistled bird warble, and that was “good as biscuits,” said Josie.
Inspired by biscuits, they sang a round of “Angeline the Baker,” which sounds about a million times better than you’d think with a French horn kind of pretending to be a high-voiced tuba doing oompahs and a ukulele pretending to be a guitar and a jar of dried beans just bravely being itself, and occasional bird whistles.
Says she can’t do hard work
because she is not stout!
She bakes her biscuits every day,
and pours the coffee out!
Angeline the baker,
Angeline I know
Should have married
Angeline just twenty years ago!
They filled the whole woods with that wild music, and Delphine darted around the edges, chuckling and hollering.
“Your poor pigeon!” said Bess, because they had gotten so loud, and so they paused to send Mabel flying home.
“Where’d you learn all this music, anyway, Gusta?” said Josie.
“Well,” said Gusta, remembering the men from the union coming through their house, sometimes with their battered guitars. “The people my father worked with, they all knew a lot of songs.”
So Gusta taught them all “Hard Times in the Mill,” which is almost as catchy as “Angeline the Baker,” but a good bit less silly, if you listen to what the words are actually saying:
Ain’t it enough to break your heart,
Have to work all day, and at night it’s dark,
It’s hard times in the mill my love,
Hard times in the mill.
“Well, that’s a true enough song,” said Bess.
And then they tried “Casey Jones, the Brave Engineer,” because Josie liked a song that told a story. And then they played around with a song that would be their very own, and that was pretty fun, too.
“We’re going to give those Kendall Mills Band fellows a run for their money for sure, this year!” said Josie. “Ribbons and glory are on their way, girls!” And when Josie believed something, that was a parade you could hardly help joining.
“We should play for my papa someday soon,” said Bess. “I bet he’d like to hear us.”
Oh! Gusta’s heart gave a little twist in her chest. All the papas, with all their troubles! If she had only found that Wish — but she hadn’t.
“Chase me!” called out Delphine from up the little path a way.
“No chasing,” said Josie firmly. “You come on back here now, Delphine.”
And Delphine just giggled and ran on into the woods. “Chase, chase, chase!”
“Delphine!”
Any of the boys would have rather been eaten up by lake leeches than face a truly displeased Josie, but from the scruffy trees came the thin ripple of laughter, already sounding surprisingly far away, as if Delphine were changing into a forest creature, an escaping bird, as she danced away.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” said Josie, and the three of them dropped their instruments and coats in a heap around the empty pigeon cage and went loping off after her.
You would think they would have had that child in hand again in about ten seconds, but Delphine somehow managed not to be found.
At first they were annoyed and amused, and then after a couple of minutes, Gusta found herself feeling very faintly worried.
They split up as they went up the hill, calling out her name: “Delphine! Delphine!”
But there was only the woods, everywhere the woods — and no laughing child.
Maybe she really had turned into a tree, like the poor girls sometimes did in the old Greek myths?
Gusta paused for a moment and listened hard to the woods, but she couldn’t hear a trailing giggle anywhere. Nobody was saying, “Chase me!”
Just Josie and Bess, calling that name: “Delphine! Delphine!”
Gusta’s heart went thwomp and fell into a hole: inside her everything froze for an instant, became still, and terrified, and dark.
How was it possible? How could a child manage to vanish, right there practically before their eyes?
Delphine!” Gusta called out, up the slope of the hill. “Delphine, can you hear us? Oh, please, just say something!”
And, farther away now, she could hear Josie and Bess calling, too.
Where could Delphine have gotten to?
As long as she could hear the others calling, she was pretty sure she herself
would not get lost. But she tried to peer closely at the trees and rocks as she went past them, just in case, so she could pick out the strange-shaped ones as markers.
Suddenly she found that she was on a twisted part of the hill, an old, unfamiliar, primeval stretch of woods, facing a rough wall of rock that rose up among all those trees like the gates of an ancient city.
Very much like gates: there was a gap in that rock. And from beyond that gap, as if from very far away, some small person was clicking her tongue and whispering, “Hellooo?”
“Delphine!” Gusta said, and she nearly sobbed with relief when she said it. “Are you in there?”
And quick as a snake, Gusta sidled her way into the dark gap of the rocks.
“Hi! Hi!” Delphine was saying in a small clear echoing voice. “Found the cellar!”
In fact, it sounded just exactly like she really was in a cellar.
“Delphine, you stand still now, wherever you’ve gotten to!” Gusta said to her, trying to sound as stern as Josie. “I’m coming!”
And she pushed her way deeper into the cleft, feeling ahead into the darkness for a small person.
The cleft spilled her suddenly into a space she could not see, but could feel opening up all around her.
“Delphine?” she said very quietly, and the sound of that word ran all around that space.
“It’s the cellar!” said Delphine from right next to her, and the sound of her words also traveled across the blackness of that space and back again.
“I know it feels like a cellar in here,” Gusta said to Delphine. “But I think — I think this must actually be a cave.”
Something rustled above their heads.
She grabbed for Delphine in the dark, found her hand.
“We’re going back out now. Hush.”
Gusta pulled Delphine backward, back the way they had come in, but she did notice her eyes were beginning to adjust to the darkness. It wasn’t absolutely pitch-black in here, not really. No. There was some light filtering in from the crack in the rocks behind them. And another crack up ahead and to the right letting just enough light in that really this cave place was not the pit of blackness she had first thought it was. It was a place of shadows and whispering sounds — and a thousand dark leaves hanging from the rock ceiling. Only of course those weren’t leaves at all. . . .
