The Children's Crusade

by Ann Packer

  Ryan found his mother alone at the kitchen table, thumb and forefinger pinching the handle on a coffee cup. She had her back to the door, and he was very quiet as he approached her. He stopped just behind her chair and waited. Then he moved forward and made his badger approach her for a big surprise kiss.

  “Oh, good grief,” she cried, scraping the chair away from the table and waving her hands near her face. “What are you doing?”

  He brought the badger back to his chest.

  “Ryan, what? What?”

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Oh, I see,” she said. “Hi. Hi!” She leaned toward him and grinned a horrible jack-o’-lantern grin. “My God, this day. Where have you been? Where are the rest of them? Your father has a meningitis case. He’s hours behind schedule.”

  She pushed her hair away from her face, and Ryan thought about how sometimes he did that for her: if they were sitting together on the couch he might get on his knees and turn his fingers into a comb and do her hair. She liked a lot of combing when he did that. More combing than tying, though he’d recently learned how to tighten a rubber band on something—twist, wrap, twist, wrap—and he had made her some good ponytails. Her hair was dark brown—the same color as Robert’s, a little darker than Rebecca’s—and wavy.

  She took Badger and made him kiss Ryan. “It’s okay, baby,” she said. “I’m sorry.” She held Badger near his eyes. “He’s thirsty. He’ll drink those tears. Are you thirsty, baby?” She increased Badger’s pressure on Ryan’s face, and he understood that he should hold Badger steady while she got him some water. She returned to the table, pulled him onto her lap, and held the glass while he drank. Badger listened to Ryan’s heartbeat and said it sounded very good and healthy.

  “I’m sorry about before,” she said, “with the cookies. We’ll make some together another time, okay? Chocolate chip—you don’t even like this kind very much.” She was about to ask him not to tell Bill how she’d yelled, but Bill had told her she shouldn’t do that kind of thing. And with four kids, he was bound to find out anyway.

  She pushed away from the table. “How’s the children’s bathroom?”

  Ryan thought of James peeing into the sink. “Okay,” he said, meaning I want to protect you, and not understanding, as he would in a few years, that there were times to postpone bad news and times to hurry it, and this was a time to hurry it.

  “Where is everyone?” she said. “What’s James doing?”

  Ryan found James and took him outside. The lawn had been freshly mowed, and Ryan took off his shoes and wiggled his toes in the grass. The blades tickled his feet, and he thought of barefoot time at his school, which started with sitting and ended with dancing. He took hold of James’s hands and swayed back and forth, but James got excited and began running in circles, fast and then faster.

  “We all fall down,” James shouted, and he pulled Ryan to the grass, where they lay together in a heap, panting. James’s face was pink and sweaty, his hair stuck to his head in damp strands. Suddenly his smile disappeared, and he stared at Ryan with giant, wounded eyes. “We fall down!” he said mournfully. “When is Dada?”

  “Dada will come home, James. We didn’t hurt ourselves.”

  Tears spilled from James’s eyes.

  “You want Mama?”

  “Dada takin’ me on my twike,” James said. “Down the hill.”

  Their father taught them to ride their bicycles on the driveway, up by the house where it was flat, but to really practice you had to go down to the village, or even to Menlo Park.

  “My wed twike,” James added.

  “What’s your favorite color?” Ryan said.

  “Wed!”

  “What color are your shoes?”

  James waved a foot in Ryan’s face. “Wed!”

  “That’s right,” Ryan said. “You like red the best. And I like blue the best.” But as soon as he said this, he thought of the other colors, the green of the grass today, and the white of his milk, and the dark orange he’d chosen for his new blanket. All the colors together helped each other be the best. He lay back on the grass. He would never say that grayish brown was his favorite color, but that was Badger’s color and it was the right one for Badger.

  High in the sky, the sun shone down on them. It shone on the roof of the house, heating the kitchen even hotter than the oven had. But it didn’t shine on the shed.

  Robert had gone down there again. He had decided that the table part of the old patio furniture set might be very helpful and that it would be fun to surprise his father by getting it out of the shed and bringing it up to the house. His father and his mother. She wouldn’t mind—she might even appreciate it—because it was only the cushions of the furniture set that she didn’t like.

  He’d looked in the kitchen but couldn’t find the key. And he still couldn’t find it on the foundation. He felt all along the front, crawling on all fours, bits of leaves and dirt embedding themselves in his hands and knees. Nothing. He heard the sound of his father’s car laboring up the steep part of the road and turning in to the driveway, and he ran up the spur waving just as the car, a four-year-old white Plymouth Valiant, roared past him. (“More my style,” his father had said when he bought the car, “than the Barracuda.”)

  “Dad!” Robert yelled, and through the back window he saw his father’s head tilt up—a look into the rearview mirror—and the brake lights flashed red.

  Robert ran. The car door swung open, and his father stepped out and gave Robert a giant wave. “Welcoming committee,” he called. He brought his palm to the back of his neck, a customary gesture that accentuated how tall and skinny he was, elbow triangling away from his head like the point of a signal flag.

  “How’d you get here so early?” Robert said as he reached the car. He was panting lightly. “What time is it?” Asking the question, he realized he was no longer wearing his watch.

  “Well, there’s a complicated answer to that,” his father said.

  Robert’s heart pounded, his absent watch leading the assault but followed closely by the uphill run and a fear, materializing by the moment, that his father would be going out again. “You haven’t gone to the clinic yet?”

  “I’ve been, but I have to go back. There are four patients left from this morning and six more when we reopen.”

  Robert thought he’d left the watch in his room—he must have—but he needed to get back to the house and check. “But why?”

  “I had an emergency.”

  The word “emergency” was familiar enough—it was an everyday word—but with his own emergency developing Robert let a small whimper escape, and his father squatted so he was looking up into Robert’s eyes.

  “It’s okay, son,” he said. “We have an infant with meningitis. It’s serious, but we’re treating him with antibiotics and I’m optimistic.”

  “What about us?” Robert cried, and he was so ashamed that he took off down the hill again, knowing he was humiliating himself further but unable to stop.

  Bill drove the rest of the way up to the house. The three other children crowded around him as soon as he was out of the car, James hugging his leg, Ryan leaning against his hip, Rebecca resting her head on his stomach. Usually when he came home they were inside, and they tackled him on the entry hall floor and worked him over as if he were a giant slab of clay. Greeting him outside, they settled for extra volume.

  “Do you need help with the ice, Dad?” Rebecca said. “I moved the bench, I put it by the kitchen. That’s right, isn’t it, Dad? Isn’t that what we do?”

  “Yes, it is, Rebeck,” he said, “but I don’t have the ice yet. I’m going to see if your mother needs any help.”

  The children followed him to the bedroom hallway, where Ryan smelled Lysol and remembered the lie he’d told his mother about the bathroom.

  And there she was, hair covered by a shower cap,
a giant sponge in one yellow-gloved hand.

  “Oh, dear,” their father said.

  She scowled. “You can say that again!”

  “We’re closed for lunch. Thought I’d see what I could do for half an hour. Chopping? Mopping?”

  “Hoppin’!” James shouted, and he marched his feet up and down.

  “James,” Bill said, and he reached down and lifted James in his arms.

  “Get them some lunch, would you?” Penny said irritably. “Someone peed in here!”

  Bill carried James to the kitchen with Rebecca and Ryan following. “I suppose,” he said, “it might be better not to ask who peed in the bathroom.”

  It took Rebecca a moment to get it, but then she burst out laughing. How dare someone pee in the bathroom! Ryan laughed, too, unconvincingly. She wished Robert were there, because he would have been cracking up, and the two of them might have started knocking into each other and ended up on the floor laughing their heads off.

  “It was James,” Ryan said.

  “James!” their father said. “Lunchtime!”

  Mornings when he wasn’t at the hospital, he did assembly-line lunch making, bread in pairs, slap on a slice of meat, slap on a slice of cheese, swipe on the mayo, and the children lined up to receive the sandwiches and wrapped them up themselves, in waxed paper he’d previously torn from the roll, each piece coming off with a satisfying rip against the tiny metal teeth of the box.

  Now they all dove in. He found paper plates, and they took their food outside and crowded onto the bench, their father in the middle, Rebecca on one side, Ryan on the other, and James standing facing his father with his plate on his father’s lap.

  “Where’s Robert?” Ryan said.

  “I’m sure he’s working,” their father said, and this seemed right.

  Rebecca finished quickly and went back inside. This made room for Ryan’s badger to take a seat on the bench. “James was going to play with his dog today,” Ryan said, and James looked up at their father with peanut butter ringing his lips.

  “I’m goin’ on my twike,” he said. “Down the hill.”

  “Ah, James,” their father said. “Your trike.”

  Ryan stopped eating. He had a feeling he knew what was going to happen.

  “Down the hill,” James said again.

  “Oh, dear,” their father said, smiling sadly at James. “That will have to wait for another day.”

  Ryan recovered Badger and took his paper plate into the house. James’s screams were not as hard to hear when he was on the other side of a door, even a screen door. Leaving the kitchen, he heard his mother in her bedroom, and he crept past her open door to his room. There was James’s dog, on the floor again. He set his badger on his bed and put the two of them face-to-face. “Dog,” said the badger. “Badger,” said the dog. “Mmm mmm mmmm,” they said to each other, kissing. Ryan felt sorry for Dog, but he couldn’t take care of him and do a good job with Badger. He needed to find a way to help James take care of Dog. Ever since Dog’s collar got lost, James had ignored him. He wondered if Rebecca might have a ribbon that would be a good collar. Ryan sat on his bed, bringing both animals onto his lap. He held their paws together, and they swayed the way he and James had earlier, back and forth, back and forth. He held their bodies together, and they danced.

  Back outside, James was on the ground having a tantrum. He hit his fists against the concrete and pounded his feet, and Bill watched him.

  “James,” Bill said.

  James looked up. “My twike,” he whimpered, getting to his knees.

  “Oh, I know,” Bill said. “I know. Now can you stand up?”

  James stood.

  “We’ll go another time. All right?”

  James nodded, using his palm to wipe the tears from his face.

  Bill lifted him onto his lap, facing the grass, and began bouncing him, ba-bump, ba-bump, ba-bump. He said:

  James James

  Morrison Morrison

  Weatherby George Dupree

  Took great

  Care of his Mother,

  Though he was only three.

  James James

  Said to his Mother,

  “Mother,” he said, said he;

  “You must never go down

  to the end of the town

  if you don’t go down with me.”

  “You must never go down,” James said.

  “You must never go down,” his father said, “to the end of the town if you don’t go down with me.” On the final “me” he gave James an extra bump, and James slid off his lap and ran onto the grass, where he sped around in circles until he fell, dizzy, onto the ground.

  “To work,” Bill said, getting to his feet.

  • • •

  All afternoon the children avoided their mother: moving from room to room, or from indoors to outdoors, a step or two ahead of her. They joined together occasionally, all except Robert, but they didn’t gather again until their father returned. By then it was late afternoon; when they stood on the driveway, their shadows stretched from their feet nearly to the house. Robert’s stomach hurt most when he stood up straight, so he walked bent over at the waist, hobbling like an old man. Their father had eight bags of ice, and they each took one from the trunk of his car and carried it to the deep freeze in the garage—each except James, who ran from one sibling to another, touching the bags of ice and yipping with something that wasn’t quite shock and wasn’t quite laughter.

  “I think baths might be in order,” their father said. “Or showers, as the case may be,” he added, giving Robert a look that acknowledged his seniority.

  Normally this would have pleased Robert, but he was too worried to smile or even nod. The others dashed toward the laundry room door, conscious of an earlier dictum of their mother’s that they avoid the other entrances to the house for the rest of the afternoon, since she had “done” them already and didn’t want to have to “do” them again. Robert trudged after them.

  His watch was gone. He had been everywhere, retraced every step from his room to the piano to the spur; he had searched and searched, bent over examining every inch of the house and every inch of the ground. And now he was bent over again, not searching but shuffling in pain.

  In his room, he looked in his desk again, just in case he was wrong in remembering that he had already looked there, but to no avail. With no choice but to search outside a fourth time, he left his room and headed back to the laundry room, almost literally bumping into his father as he came in.

  “Line for the tub?” his father said.

  “What?”

  “There’s hot water to go around. I’ll bathe James and call you when we’re finished.”

  “Okay.”

  With Robert gone, Bill took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was 4:55 and the party started at 6:00. Early in the summer he’d suggested they have the party on a Saturday this year, so he could help more, but Penny had insisted that it was a weekday kind of party—that a Saturday party was a different sort of thing and would change the guests’ expectations and her ability to deliver.

  He found the children’s bathroom door closed and tapped at it. “Is that you in there, Rebeck?”

  “Dad, can you come in?”

  He opened the door and poked his head in. Rebecca was in the tub, slouched so that the ends of her braids skimmed the water. With her left forefinger she was stroking her right palm, which was a little red and raw from her work with the bench.

  “Can you pass me the good-smelling soap?” she said.

  Penny had cleaned, leaving the countertop sparkling and fresh hand towels on the rack, but there was no soap in sight.

  “I’m not sure where . . .”

  “Maybe the medicine cabinet?”

  He opened the cabinet only to have three bars of so
ap and a glass bottle of cough medicine come tumbling out.

  “Oh, oops, whoops,” he said, slapping at the soaps but slowing the bottle enough that it landed gently and didn’t break. “Now which of these is the good-smelling one?”

  Rebecca grinned.

  “Ah, you want me to smell them.” He brought a plain white bar to his nose, then a yellow bar of Dial, and then a pink bar that smelled of strawberries and chemicals.

  “Don’t mistake it for an ice cream,” he said, handing her the pink one.

  She watched him from under her dark eyebrows and brought the bar close to her lips.

  “How was your day?” he said, easing himself onto the closed toilet seat.

  She dipped the soap in the water and rubbed it between her palms. She thought of telling him about not getting to help, but she didn’t want to make him sad. She rubbed the soap harder, but it didn’t get sudsy; there was only a little foam, large-bubbled and unsatisfying. She was a bit sorry she’d asked for the strawberry, which wouldn’t be the most mature thing for her to smell like. She didn’t like it when adults spoke to her as if she were a little girl. Or a little girl—she hated it when people were talking to the boys and then changed their voices when they started talking to her. She brought one foot up out of the water and rubbed it with the soap.

  “Hot,” she said at last.

  “A hot day. That could be a good day, I suppose.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “You aren’t a heat-loving girl.”

  “I’m a comfort-loving girl,” she said, “who tolerates heat.”

  “Rebeck, it’s good to be home.” Leaning against the toilet tank, Bill felt the hours of work drain from his body.

  “How many people are coming?” Rebecca asked, setting the soap in the soap holder.

  “Looks like about sixty.”

  “Good thing it won’t rain!”

  “That’s right.”

  “No, that’s what you always say! You say, ‘Good thing it won’t rain,’ and Mom says, ‘You don’t know it won’t,’ and you say it’s never rained in late July since you came to California.”