The Children's Crusade

by Ann Packer

  “Mom?” This was Robert, from outside the open door. “Who are you talking to?”

  Something clicked onto the dresser top, and it occurred to Ryan that she’d been brushing her hair. He brought Badger to his mouth and let his lips brush Badger’s fur.

  “No one,” his mother said. “Where’s James?” This was the moment when she would say, in a loud happy voice, “And where’s Ryan?” Ryan was so sure of this he needed to pee. But she didn’t say anything more, and when someone spoke it was Robert.

  “I took his diaper off. It was soaked.”

  “Well, I don’t want him running around naked, I’ve got way too much to do today. You’ll have to get him dressed.” And then Ryan heard her steps and knew she’d left the room.

  The door creaked a little more. “Good hiding place,” Robert said.

  Ryan pulled the covers from his head and looked at his brother.

  Robert was wearing his fake nice face. “What? It is.” He crossed the room and opened the curtains. The room appeared, the teak bed and dressers, the huge picture of their land as it had been before the house was built. It was a painting that almost looked like a photograph, painted by an artist hired by their father a long time ago. This artist was extremely good at trees. He wasn’t as good at colors—the greens were gray greens and the browns were gray browns, and the sky was a whiter blue than in real life. But the tree trunks, the branches, the leaves—these were perfect. Sometimes, when their father had gone into the bedroom to change, one or another of the children would track him down and find him sitting on the end of the bed, just looking at the painting.

  Robert stared at Ryan, lying there with his dumb badger. It took everything he had to say, “You can come help me with James if you want. You can do his shirt.” He had his hands on his hips, and his cheeks were red.

  “Does your stomach hurt?” Ryan said.

  “Not very much. Does yours?”

  “No.”

  They went to find James, who was, predictably enough, standing on the counter in the children’s bathroom peeing into the sink.

  “James, no!” Robert said.

  James turned to face the older boys and sprayed them both—Robert on the neck and Ryan in the hair.

  “James, no!” they both said.

  Laughing, dribbling pee, James swiveled around and got down on his knees and felt with his feet for the closed toilet cover. He took off running. He had white-blond hair and a pudgy pink behind, and thighs that were as big around as Ryan’s.

  “James,” Robert yelled, and halfway down the hallway James stopped and turned. His face wild with glee, he began to run back, and Robert planted himself so James had no choice but to run into the room he and Ryan shared. “Block the door,” Robert shouted.

  Ryan darted into the doorway. James was jumping on the bed now, and Robert pushed past Ryan into the room and tried to kick the door closed, almost hitting Ryan in the process.

  “James,” Robert said, “stop jumping! We’re going to help Mommy, but you need to get dressed first.” His voice was gruff, and James jumped faster, his hair flapping against his ears.

  “James,” Ryan said in a sweet voice. He moved to the bed and held out his hands. “Come to Nye-nee.”

  “James!” Robert said, and then, softer, “Remember the cookie factory?”

  James turned his back on his brothers and jumped, and the bed creaked, and through the window he saw Rebecca standing outside under the oak tree, balancing on one foot with the other held way behind her, toes pointed, arms up over her head as if she were going to dive.

  “Beck,” he cried.

  “Beck will play with you,” Robert said, “but first you need to get dressed.” He lunged at James, and Ryan grabbed an arm, and together they got James flat on the bed.

  “Here,” Ryan said, “you can hold Badger,” but James rolled to his side and grabbed his own stuffed animal, a small brown-and-white dog that he had more or less abandoned, though Ryan put it on James’s bed whenever he found it lying on the floor or in the closet.

  “Are you going to take care of Dog today?” Ryan said. “You can find him a new collar, or we could make one.”

  “Get clothes,” Robert said, “I’ll hold him,” and though Ryan knew that there was no need, that James would be still now, he went to the dresser while Robert kept his hands on James’s shoulders.

  They called Rebecca to come inside. In the kitchen, they told their mother they were ready to help, but she was busy chopping nuts and sent them away. A little later they tried again, but she was busy washing parsley and sent them away. They waited half an hour and tried again, then twenty more minutes and tried again.

  “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I have way too much work to stop and show you how to help. Go play, all right?”

  The children left the kitchen, the three R’s downcast while James dashed ahead of them with a three-year-old’s talent for easily abandoning dubious goals. “Chase me,” he called, but when he arrived at his room and turned around, his siblings were taking their time, too frustrated for their usual indulgence.

  Back in the kitchen, Penny was sorry—she knew she was disappointing them—but she really did have too much to do to be able to stop and explain the little jobs they could manage. She hadn’t been thinking straight at dinner last night, agreeing to let them help. Bill had encouraged them, and she’d gotten swept up in their excitement, which generally seemed manageable when he was around and overwhelming when he wasn’t. There was so much to do today, she needed to just put her head down and work. And the truth was she wanted to do it herself.

  The other truth was she didn’t want to do it at all. She was plagued by conundrums like this. A few days earlier she’d seen a picture in a magazine of a smiling woman wearing a little white apron decorated with the same red roosters as the ones on her own dish towels. Oh, how Penny hated that woman! And oh, how she wanted to be her! Even more, she wanted to be a woman she’d seen in another magazine, dressed in a sleeveless black dress and holding a martini. She’d cut out both pictures and taped them into a notebook where she kept articles she clipped from the newspaper about, as the headlines put it, “the social scene.” When Bill asked why she clipped these articles, she shrugged and turned her back on him, a gesture she’d inaugurated early in their marriage that was as unsuccessful now as it always had been. Rather than make him try harder, it made him give up.

  All morning, the children sensed their mother’s tension and were tense themselves. They tried to play Sorry, but James refused to follow the rules and hopped his yellow piece around willy-nilly, jumping over the other pieces or knocking them off the board. They tried to play Tinker Toys, but James kept initiating duels with the wooden sticks.

  Toward noon they went outside and sat under the oak tree. They figured she’d be getting to the cookies soon. The older two sent Ryan to check, and he came back and said yes, she had the big bowl out. They went around the back of the house so she wouldn’t see them through the kitchen window, then stopped before they reached the sliding door. The sun was high, and there was no shade. They began to sweat. They heard the clack of one pan of cookies going into the oven, followed by the rattling of another as she began to drop balls of dough onto it. Robert and Rebecca exchanged a nod, and the four of them stormed in.

  “Now we can help, right?”

  “Can we roll the dough?”

  “We’ll wash our hands. James, come on, we need to wash our hands.”

  “We roll it in little balls, right?”

  “Can we have one bite of dough? Just one small bite?”

  “No,” Penny said. “I’m sorry, no. I have too much to do.”

  “But it’s the cookies!”

  “What did I say?”

  At the sound of her raised voice the children fell silent. Worse, they fell away from one another; in spirit they did. Ea
ch was alone and disappointed. Robert thought that if it weren’t for the younger boys, he’d be allowed to help. Rebecca thought the same. They both believed themselves to possess special maturity.

  They watched. She ripped pieces of dough from the giant hunk in her bowl, rolled them between her palms until they were smooth and slick, and plunked them haphazardly on cookie sheets. Rip, roll, plunk; rip, roll, plunk. Rebecca thought it would make more sense to set them in straight lines—she thought you could get more on each sheet that way—but she didn’t say so.

  Then a faint smell of smoke came from the oven. “Oh, no!” Penny cried, yanking open the door and grabbing a pot holder. From where they stood, the children could see that the first batch of cookies was burned. Not black, but a fairly dark brown. “Damn it!” Penny shouted as she yanked the pan from the oven and dropped it on the stovetop. “Damn it all!”

  Their father didn’t like the word “damn,” so naturally each of the children thought of him: Robert remembered the stomachache he had to report, Rebecca recalled her father’s promise to help her invite a friend to come play, Ryan thought of the praise he’d received from his father on the care he was giving Badger, and James simply wailed the two syllables that formed the heart of his emotional life: “Dada.”

  “Of course!” Penny exclaimed. “Who else? All of you, out! Now!” And then—regretful and reaching for kindness but ending up with its poor relation, charity—she took her spatula, freed the cookies from the pan, and said, “Here, take these. They won’t be terrible. Just take them and go.”

  Robert gathered the burned cookies in a paper towel and led the way to the front door. Rebecca’s hair hung in front of her shoulders in two long, thin braids, and for some reason he thought of how he used to sit on her—she would be lying on her stomach—and hold the braids like reins, nudging her sides with his knees and yelling, “Go, horsie.”

  They sat together under the oak tree, James settling with his legs in their customary W, a contortionist with dirty knees. Ryan reached for one of the cookies and took a nibble. “It’s not bad. It kind of tastes like toast.”

  “I don’t want a burned cookie,” Rebecca said. She hesitated and then grabbed one and threw it into the bushes. This made Robert mad, the fact that she’d thought of it first, and he threw one cookie after another down the long driveway, leaving only a few for his younger brothers. He kicked the cookies into the bushes, then continued down the hill, the driveway twisting near the end so that when he reached the road, the house was no longer visible. For something to do, he opened the mailbox, but of course it was empty; it was far too early for the mail. He felt faintly ridiculous even though no one could see him. Toward the end of the school year, when Mr. Gleason ignored the breaking of small rules, Robert had left the room while everyone was supposed to stay seated and work on math problems, and he’d gone into the cloakroom (his cover story being that he’d left his eraser in his jacket pocket) and quickly transferred the contents of his lunch box into Valerie Pinckney’s lunch box and vice versa. Then, at lunch, he had watched with increasing dismay as she proceeded to eat his ham sandwich and savor his brownie without so much as a tiny wrinkle of confusion disturbing her pretty face. He felt the same kind of silly now as he had then.

  He started the climb back to the house, but instead of continuing up the driveway he veered to the left, down what his father called the spur. A narrower branch of the driveway, the spur sloped through a dense cover of trees and stopped at a storage shed that was several years older than the house and had been built by Robert’s father on a month of Sundays when Robert was a baby. “A month of Sundays” was just an expression, but as a very young child Robert had imagined a special month that was all Sundays, an anomaly of the calendar not unlike the one every fourth year that gave February twenty-nine days. Robert had imagined that he and his mother had come, too, on the special Sundays of that special month, perhaps sitting on a blanket while his father worked, and he’d been very disappointed to learn, from a passing remark of his mother’s, that they’d been left at home in San Francisco.

  The shed was small, about eight by ten feet, a rough wooden structure with a door held closed by a padlock. Inside was a set of patio furniture his mother no longer liked and a rowboat not quite old enough to have lost all its blue paint. The boat was an impulse purchase of his father’s, bought in a junk shop because it reminded him of a boat he’d used as a boy, on a pond in Michigan.

  The key to the padlock was kept in a drawer in the kitchen, but all at once Robert remembered there was a spare key hidden in a gap between the foundation and the base of one of the walls. He knew this with the strange conviction one has about things learned in dreams: it was absolute fact shrouded in mystery. How did he know it? Why would there be a key hidden in such an unlikely place? He had no idea.

  But he wanted to see the rowboat. They’d never once used it, not in two years. “Someday,” was his father’s insufficient answer to the question of when they might put it in water. Crouching at the door, Robert felt with his fingers for a gap between the foundation and the wall. Nothing. He slid his fingers sideways. Still nothing. It was a little creepy, not knowing what might be lurking there, what soft bug or moldy leaf, so he changed his mind about the whole thing and headed up to the house.

  His brothers and sister had disappeared, and he lay down under the oak tree. There were so many branches it was like being in a room. Robert remembered Mr. Gleason showing the class slides of his trip to France, where he’d been inside a church that didn’t have normal walls or a ceiling but instead a vast network of oak beams like an overturned sailing ship with its framing exposed. Mr. Gleason had brought out a box of balsa wood sticks and some glue, and they’d had a lesson on engineering. He was the only teacher who used science in English lessons and social studies in math lessons and made it so you didn’t even notice you were learning. A great example was the way he took a unit on the human body and ended up teaching the class a history lesson about “the four humors,” which was basically a big mistake doctors had made about how the body worked. In ancient Greece and Rome, doctors thought the body was filled with four substances—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood—and that all diseases resulted from having an imbalance of the humors.

  Robert told his father about the humors, partly to show him how smart Mr. Gleason was and partly to make sure he knew about them, and his father said that even though the theory was long discredited, it wasn’t as outlandish as most people thought, because when blood was drawn and left to sit in a transparent container such as a glass vial, you ended up with four different layers, from a dark clot at the bottom to a yellow serum at the top. It was easy to understand how, in very early medicine, the observation of those layers might have given rise to all kinds of speculation and theorizing. He asked Robert if Mr. Gleason had shared with the class the idea that each humor was associated with a certain type of personality—black bile with the melancholic type, yellow bile with the choleric type, blood with the sanguine, and phlegm with the phlegmatic, a word that made Robert snort with laughter until he realized his father wasn’t kidding and it was a real word. It meant rational, calm, unemotional. Choleric meant angry or bad-tempered. Sanguine meant courageous and hopeful, and melancholic meant sad. “I guess I’m sanguine,” Robert’s father had said in answer to Robert’s question, “though your mother might say I’m phlegmatic.” Robert found it interesting that there seemed to be two good types and two bad types, and his father was both of the good types while his mother—well, at least sometimes she was both of the bad.

  “What is Rebecca?” he said, avoiding the question he really wanted to ask.

  “Oh, Rebecca is sanguine,” his father said. “She is definitely sanguine.”

  Lying under the tree, Robert squeezed his eyes shut as tightly as he could, and when he opened them bright spots fluttered in his vision. He waited for the world to become normal again. Above the branches of t
he oak tree, the sky was a harsh, crystalline blue. He thought it was probably about one o’clock, and then he remembered his watch, a gift from his father for his tenth birthday—a special gift for him because he was the oldest. It was a gift his father had received from his own grandfather, and his mother’s reaction had been confusing, almost as if she thought his father should have given the watch to her.

  It was in Robert’s desk. He entered the house through the laundry room and slipped into his room unnoticed. He fastened the leather strap around his wrist, though it was too big on even the tightest hole. It was only 12:20. Hours more until his father would be home.

  Through the window he saw Rebecca dragging a wooden bench away from the garage, and his anger at her intensified. He’d forgotten that they always put the wooden bench outside the kitchen so people would have a place to set an empty glass or plate if they happened to step outside for a little air. Now she would get all the credit. It was possible she’d even been assigned the job by their mother, and he couldn’t decide if that would make it better or worse.

  Out under the hot sun, Rebecca dragged the bench and rested, dragged it and rested. In fact, she’d had the idea on her own, and it was turning out to be not such a good one. The bench was incredibly heavy. She heard the phone ring in the house, and as she listened to the muffled sound of her mother’s voice she realized it was her father calling. Though she couldn’t hear words, she knew her mother was complaining about being home alone with the children and the party preparations, and Rebecca could almost fill in the gaps in her mother’s speech with the sound of her father’s calm, reassuring voice. “Your dad is like a mom,” one of Rebecca’s friends said once on a Saturday when her father was home with a houseful of kids while her mother was out shopping. Robert had a friend over that day, too, and their father helped them make Popsicles with lemonade and made sure everyone got a turn with Rebecca’s new pogo stick.