The Root Cellar

by Janet Lunn

  Rose peered anxiously into the dark and the rain. She was more afraid than ever that something was about to go wrong.

  “Please, Will,” she said, “let’s go now. It’s all right for you and Susan. You’re home. But it isn’t all right for me. Please.”

  Will took one look at her frightened face. “Okay. We’ll go. It’s only a mile and a quarter. Susan, you stay here. I’ll go up the road with Rose. You come along in the morning when the rain ain’t so fierce.”

  “I’m coming,” said Susan. “Rose come along with me every step of the way to find you and I aim to come along with Rose.”

  Rose smiled gratefully at Susan, but Jake Pierson shook his head warningly at them.

  “Bad night,” he said. “Black as the inside of a cat and wet as Niagara.”

  Jake Pierson was right. It was black. There were no shapes of houses or barns to guide them. With Will in the lead they put their heads down against the onrushing wind and the stinging rain and marched along as fast as they could, their boots full of water, their clothes heavy and clinging.

  I wish I had my jeans, thought Rose. She pulled the long skirt away from her legs, rolled it up around her waist, and held it there.

  “I hear the creek.” Will’s voice was raised against the wind, but it sounded relieved. “I know where we are now, just about to our bridge.” They went on about twenty paces when Rose heard a thrashing around as if someone had fallen. Will swore, then he shouted, “Stop! Don’t come on, the bridge’s washed out!” Susan grabbed her hand and they stopped.

  “You all right, Will?” cried Susan.

  “Yep,” came Will’s voice as he suddenly loomed over them. “But I don’t know how we’re going to get across that water without we can even see. I don’t remember the creek ever flooding like this. There’s no sign of the bridge at all, not one stick. She’s gone and the water’s like a millrace. It’s up higher than my waist and rushing so fast it pulled me right over. Standing in it, I couldn’t tell which way was east nor which was west. It’s only by your voices I knew to come this way. We’re going to have to go back. There ain’t no other way we can get to the house and the root cellar except over the creek—and that’s too dangerous.”

  “I’m not going back.” Rose was desperate. “You go. I’m not going. I can swim. I’ll get across. I have to!”

  “We ain’t leaving you,” said Susan.

  “Wait here then,” said Will. “I’ll try again.”

  “Let me come.”

  “Nope.”

  Rose waited. Over the sounds of the wind and the rain she heard Will splashing. In a few moments, he was back.

  “It’d be up over your head and you couldn’t ever swim. If you climb on my back and hang on tight, I think I can get you across.”

  Will squatted down and Rose hitched up her wet skirts again and climbed up to sit on his back.

  “Hang on tight,” he shouted. Will slipped and stumbled across the rocky creek bed, the wind and rain pushing against him. Rose clung desperately around his neck. Once they nearly fell, but his feet found the other side and he knelt down to let Rose off to clamber up the slippery bank while he went back to get Susan.

  It seemed to Rose that she was waiting forever. When they reached her side, she took their hands and together they fought the wind. It was a walk that would have taken three minutes on a calm day. It took them twenty—an agony of time for Rose. She couldn’t tell when they had reached the front yard of the Morrissays’ house.

  But Will could. “Here we are,” he said. There was quiet jubilation in his voice.

  They turned into the yard and inched their way around to the back, feeling for the back porch, the stone walk, and the root cellar.

  “I think I found the creek,” said Will. “My foot’s struck water.” He stumbled and let go of Rose’s and Susan’s hands to right himself.

  “No, it ain’t. This here’s the creek.” Susan was down on her hands and knees. “I can feel the old hawthorn tree and I know the creek goes in this direction from it.”

  “So what’ve I got my foot in?” demanded Will irritably.

  “It’s the root cellar,” cried Rose. “It’s the root cellar, and it’s full of water.” And she grabbed Will’s hand, put her foot forward, nearly fell, pulled back, put her foot forward more cautiously, and felt around until she found a step.

  “It is the root cellar!” she gasped. Without another word, without really thinking about what she was doing, her feet groped for the slippery steps. She held her nose and pushed herself down under the muddy water, grabbing at vines and weeds with her hands, until her feet found the floor. She stood there for as long as she could hold her breath, grasping at the edge of the steps for something to cling to. Then she rose to the surface. “Oh, please,” she thought desperately, “let it happen.”

  It was still dark, still pouring rain, the wind was still howling. It hadn’t worked. She was not home.

  Her disappointment was so intense she nearly fainted. She climbed up from the last step and reached out for Will or Susan for support.

  “Will?” she said faintly. “Susan?”

  “Is that you, Rose?” It was Sam’s voice. “Where are you? You shouldn’t stay out in a storm like this. It’s awful.”

  “It is an awful storm, Sam,” said Rose shakily. “But I’m all right now.”

  Home

  Rose stood in front of the fire, her teeth chattering, her heart thumping, streams of muddy water dripping from Louisa Jerue’s green-and-white striped dress.

  Sam stared at her. “How come you’ve got on that funny dress? And you’re purple with cold.”

  “I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you.”

  “I might.”

  “Do you want to hear?”

  “Sure. Do you want some tea or something?”

  “Yes! And a grilled cheese sandwich and a bath. What time is it?”

  “Eight o’clock.”

  “Is it today Aunt Nan had the accident?”

  “Yes, today.” Sam’s eyebrows went up.

  “Today!” The word sounded like a sigh as Rose trailed upstairs in her dripping clothes. Twenty minutes later, warm and dry in her pajamas and bathrobe, she sat at the kitchen table drinking tea and eating sandwiches while Grimalkin purred in her lap. She told Sam all that had happened. “And Sam,” she finished, “while I was in that station in New York I saw you. You were in the kitchen playing Will’s song.”

  “But I did that!” Sam was incredulous. “I did that a little while ago before the twins went to bed. They were grizzling so I sat them down and I played that song, and I hate to say it because it makes it look as if I really believe your story, but in my mind I saw your face and you were scared, so I was sort of playing for you to hear.”

  “I was glad.”

  “I don’t know.” Sam scratched his head. “It sounds crazy but you look different. You really look as if you’ve been out in the sun for weeks and”—he grinned—“you don’t look as much as if you’d like to throw things at everybody. You’re different.”

  “I am,” said Rose. “I know I am. Sam, does your mother hate me?”

  “Hate you?”

  “Because of the accident and because I was so mean.”

  “I don’t think my mother ever hates people. She gets mad. She says a lot of things but it doesn’t last long. It’s not like hating people.”

  “Can I go see her?”

  “Why not?”

  Nervously Rose knocked on the open door of Aunt Nan’s bedroom. Uncle Bob was reading aloud from a novel. He looked up, obviously relieved to be interrupted.

  “Come in, come in.” He put down his book. “I’ll go make some tea and leave you two to gab.” He left the room quietly.

  Rose did not want him to go. She did not want to be left alone with Aunt Nan. She felt so different from the angry little girl who had written the letter to Aunt Millicent. She couldn’t think of anything to say. And for once, it seemed, Aunt Nan ha
d nothing to say either.

  Finally Rose blurted out, “I am sorry about the accident and the letter.”

  “I don’t think it was altogether your fault.” Aunt Nan smiled ruefully. “I think I had something to do with it too, Rose. I was foolish and unkind.”

  “I shouldn’t have written the letter.”

  “I shouldn’t have made you feel so unwelcome.”

  “But you didn’t!”

  “It’s all right, Rose.” Aunt Nan put out her hand. Rose went over to the bed and shook the outstretched hand. Aunt Nan held it tightly for a moment. She smiled. “I hope now we’re going to take time to get to know each other.”

  “Yes, please.”

  They said goodnight and Rose went upstairs to bed, and to sleep at once. She was wakened in the night by a loud crash. Everyone except Aunt Nan—who kept calling, “What happened? What happened?”—ran to the windows to see what it was. George got the flashlight and went out to the back porch. “Wow!” he yelled, running back into the house. “There’s a huge tree down, back there, and the rain has turned to ice and it’s really amazing! You know, if the length of that tree is any indication of—”

  “Not now, George,” said Sam.

  “Thank God it didn’t hit the house,” said Uncle Bob.

  “Hi, Rose. Where did you go?” asked the twins.

  “Out,” said Rose. She took their hands and led them upstairs to bed.

  The storm had stopped by morning. The front yard was littered with branches that had come down in the night. At the back the creek was roaring and the trees were sheathed in ice, glittering in the bright sun, creaking in the slight breeze.

  Rose looked down from her window. The big old maple had fallen from the other side of the creek across the glade, coming to rest not two feet from the back of the house. In its path it had knocked down bushes and uprooted several small trees. Among them was the little thorn tree. The root cellar was completely washed out. It was just a large hole filled with dirty, icy water. Its doors had been smashed by the falling tree. Rose stared down at the devastation in stunned silence. Then she raced downstairs and outside in her pajamas and bare feet. She slipped and slid and crawled over the huge icy trunk of the old maple to reach the little thorn tree. She knelt down beside it, and tenderly, as though it had been a person, she tried to lift it. It was impossible. It was lying with its branches across what had been the cellar, its roots sticking out in a tangle in all directions like the hair of some giant wild man. She felt as though a part of herself had been wrenched from her.

  “I can’t ever go back,” she whispered.

  Sam’s voice behind her asked, “Is that your tree?”

  “Yes.” Rose clenched her fists so tightly that her nails made deep red marks in her palms. “I didn’t even say good-bye,” she said dully. “I didn’t say anything. I just went.”

  Sam didn’t speak, but they went back into the house together. Rose went to wash Louisa’s dress—as much with tears as with water. “I never thought I’d never see them again,” she mourned, but even as the words formed she knew that she had known. At the back of her mind she had known all the way home from Washington. “I wish I’d said good-bye,” she whispered sadly.

  That day Uncle Bob organized the house and Rose had no time for grieving. He rearranged the pots and pans in the kitchen. He started a master grocery list so that he would not have to figure out a new one every time he went to the store. He made a work list so that everyone would know exactly what his, or her—he looked meaningfully at Rose—job was without being told. As Sam said sometime later in the day, “He’d organize our dreams if he could find out what they were.” And all the time Uncle Bob was making lists at the kitchen table, Aunt Nan was shouting orders from the bedroom. Finally, Uncle Bob rebelled. “Your job,” he pronounced, “is to lie still and sleep and rest. The house is outside your jurisdiction from now until the baby’s born. Understand?”

  “Yes,” said Aunt Nan meekly.

  But in the following week, everyone was surprised to discover that Aunt Nan, despite her apparent disorder, had been running things in a regulated fashion, and there was a good deal of argument and confusion despite Uncle Bob’s lists.

  Rose stayed out of the arguments. She went to school. She did the things beside her name on the lists. She told stories to the twins and she tried valiantly to spend her days in the present while dreams of the past filled her nights. She dreamed of coal dust and trains, of tramping the roads, of Peter Maas and Augustus Delfinney. She dreamed of pale soldiers and rows of hospital beds. She dreamed of Will and Susan—always of Susan. She missed her sorely. She could not bring herself to make friends at school, not yet.

  One afternoon she got a pencil and paper and went into Aunt Nan’s bedroom. “Would you like me to write down your book for you?”

  Aunt Nan’s face broke out in a broad smile. She told Rose where to find the chapters and notes. At first they were both self-conscious about the work, but as the afternoon progressed they began to get used to each other. Aunt Nan did most of the talking—about the book at first, but afterward about the baby to come, about the boys and Uncle Bob, and about Christmas, which was only two weeks away.

  “How I hate being in bed with Christmas coming.” She sighed impatiently. “Dr. Best says I’m to be allowed in a wheelchair for Christmas dinner, but I can’t do a thing to get it all ready. And the kitchen in this house is such a perfect Christmas kitchen. I love Christmas. Well, this year we’re having a baby for Christmas even if it isn’t due until January. And getting this book done is a wonderful present. I have to thank you for that, Rose.”

  Privately Rose thought the story, which was called Polly Learns to Ride, was silly, and sometimes, unbeknownst to Aunt Nan, she changed a few lines.

  One afternoon, when she read out what they had written the day before, Aunt Nan said, “I like the way that scene goes. I don’t even remember writing it.”

  “I put that in.”

  “You did what!” Aunt Nan nearly jumped out of bed. “Don’t you dare rewrite my story!”

  Rose went white. “Well, it’s better. You said so yourself.”

  They glared at each other angrily. Then, to Rose’s consternation, Aunt Nan’s eyes filled with tears.

  Rose was stunned. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

  “It’s just that you’re so like your father.” Aunt Nan shook her head. “How angry he used to make me! I’d make something, and if it wasn’t just the way he thought it should be, he’d change it. ‘Well, it’s better this way, Nan,’ he’d say. He was just as prickly and difficult as you are.”

  And as you, Rose thought to herself, and almost laughed out loud with sudden delight. She did not tell Aunt Nan she had once thought she had come from another world, without having had a mother or father, but she thought about it a lot over the next few days. And about what Will had said in the orchard about belonging. The words “as prickly and difficult as you are” had somehow brought her into Aunt Nan’s family.

  “And it’s Christmas,” she remembered. “They love Christmas here. I wish I could find something truly amazing to do for Christmas.”

  The Christmas Kitchen

  One afternoon, about a week before Christmas, Rose was alone in the kitchen. She was sitting in the old rocking-chair by the window thinking that Aunt Nan was right: with its low ceiling, its wooden walls, and its old fireplace, the kitchen looked like a picture on a Christmas card. She was wondering idly how many people had cooked their Christmas dinners in the fireplace, when an eddy of wind came down the chimney and curled itself around the charred ends of wood in the grate. It stirred up a tiny flame. The flame took on a shadow which became a bigger flame and, in seconds, there was a roaring fire from two steadily burning logs. A huge black pot hung over them and out of the pot steam was rising, carrying the most delicious spicy odors out into the room.

  Little by little, as if in a magic show, the room changed. Along the back wall, instead of Aunt Nan’s moder
n range, there was an old-fashioned black wood stove. Pots were hanging from hooks on the walls, and onions and dried apples and chunks of bacon were suspended from the ceiling. A tall Welsh dresser, with blue and white plates arrayed on its shelves, stood beside the front door, and there was a long, scrubbed wooden table in the middle of the room. Then Susan appeared, humming to herself as she rolled out dough with a large, wooden rolling-pin.

  Rose sprang from her chair. The scene faded and she was alone again, the little eddy of wind stirring the ashes in the cold grate. She slumped back into her chair.

  “Susan,” she whispered, “it’s true. Being a person is very hard.” And she heard, like an echo in her head, “That’s so, Rose,” and could not help smiling.

  With a sigh, she went over and made a fire in the fireplace and then began to set the table, the image of Susan bright in her mind. An idea was forming.

  At dinner she announced that she was going to make an old-fashioned Christmas dinner, as her present to the whole family.

  “Can you cook?” the twins asked.

  “Of course,” she said. She knew how to cook sausages, mashed potatoes, French toast, and cabbage salad. On the rare occasions when her grandmother and she had been in their apartment in New York, if her grandmother had gone out on the maid’s night out, Rose had been allowed to make dinner for herself. She had learned how to make the meals she liked best. She didn’t think cooking anything could be all that difficult. After all, she reasoned, I learned to be a blacksmith and nothing in the world could be harder than that.

  George was outraged, Uncle Bob was dubious, Aunt Nan thought it was a fine idea.

  “Why don’t you go down and talk to old Tom Bother? I’ll bet he can remember old-fashioned Christmases. And ask him to come and share it with us.”

  Rose did not think Old Tom’s memory would go back far enough for what she needed. So she asked him if he had a cookbook from his mother.

  Old Tom climbed up to his attic, rummaged around, and came down with two—his mother’s and his grandmother’s.