by Maria Parr
But when Grandpa and Auntie Granny finally sat down, Uncle Tor took out his lighter again.
“Don’t light it,” Lena said quickly.
Everyone looked at her in surprise, but before we could protest any more, Uncle Tor had set it alight. I saw Lena stop breathing for a moment. She was gathering strength for a gigantic scream: the sort of scream that only Lena can produce. I just managed to put my hands over my ears before it came.
“PUT IT OUT!” she howled.
The flames were dancing up the side of the bonfire toward our big round sun.
“Mom, it’s your fox! It’s your fox that’s inside the sun. Put it out!”
Minda was the first to react. As fast as lightning, she emptied a can of sausages and filled it with seawater. Then it was as if everyone woke up. We emptied all the cans and boxes we could find and tripped over one another on our way to and from the water’s edge. Dad pointed and gave orders and tried to get us to form a line. He’s a member of the volunteer fire brigade in our area. But it wasn’t much use. The flames were eating their way up.
“Oh no, oh no,” I groaned quietly, no longer daring to look at the bonfire.
We eventually realized that we couldn’t douse it. The bonfire was raging.
“It’s no use!” shouted Uncle Tor, throwing his arms out.
Just as he said that and all hope seemed lost, we heard someone starting the tractor. It was still up in the field with a spreader full of manure. Grandpa had gotten in and was reversing toward us at a furious speed.
“Out of the way!” he yelled from the window, trying to keep the veil out of his eyes.
Mom gave a shriek. That was all she could do before the bride turned the muck-spreader on full power, at just the right distance from the bonfire.
For a short, bizarre moment, the sky turned brown. I remember thinking, There’s no way this can be happening! Everyone bent over with their hands above their heads. Then the cow pies came raining down. Every single one of us was sprayed with muck from head to toe. It was no use running. We couldn’t see or hear anything other than flying muck.
When it finally stopped, it was as if all the sounds in the world were gone. Everyone, all the people from Mathildewick Cove, just stood there. Not an inch of our bodies was free of cow muck. In my whole life I will never, ever forget it.
The tractor door opened slowly. Grandpa carefully lifted his dazzling white dress up a little and tiptoed neatly through the muck toward us.
“Oh, well,” he said, and nodded at the bonfire.
There was not a flame to be seen. The bonfire and our decoration were just as covered in manure as we were.
“Thank you, Grandpa,” I said quietly.
The day after, we went to Sunday school, Lena and I. We took Krølla with us.
It had rained that night, so there were lots of puddles on the road. Krølla had her rain boots on the wrong feet and had to be dragged along the uphill stretches.
“Thank goodness she’s not my sister,” said Lena every time she had to wait for us, but I knew that she didn’t mean it deep inside. Krølla is as good as gold. Actually, her full name is as strange as mine. Konstanse Lillefine or something. I can’t really remember.
At Sunday school, we learned about Noah’s Ark. Noah was a man who lived several thousand years ago in another country. He built a big boat called the Ark on top of a mountain. It was God who had said that Noah should build his boat on top of the mountain. It was going to start to rain in a major way, God said. The whole earth would become an ocean. Noah had to gather a male and a female of all the animals that existed and take them aboard the Ark before the rain started; otherwise they would drown. People thought that it was very strange of Noah to put those animals in a boat on top of a mountain, but Noah didn’t care. When he’d finished, it began to rain. First the water covered the fields and the roads, then it flooded over the treetops and houses, and eventually it rose all the way up to the mountain where Noah and the Ark were. The water lifted the big boat up from the mountaintop. Noah sailed around in the Ark with his family and the animals for several weeks. The terrible thing was that anyone who wasn’t aboard the Ark drowned. God also thought that was sad, so afterward he made a rainbow and promised that he would never again pour so much rain down at once.
When we were walking home in the sunshine, Lena said, “Ark is a pretty stupid name for a boat. That Noah could’ve thought up a better one.”
“Who says it was Noah who thought up the name?” I said, jumping over a large puddle.
“Who was it, then?” asked Lena, jumping over an even larger puddle. “Did they make a mistake in the Bible?”
“They didn’t make mistakes in the Bible, did they?” I said, getting ready to jump over the largest puddle of all. I landed in the middle of it.
“Maybe they hadn’t invented all the letters of the alphabet yet,” said Lena after the splash. “Since it was donkey’s years ago.”
While I was emptying the water out of my and Krølla’s boots, I asked Lena if she had a better name for the boat. Lena didn’t answer right away. I thought she wasn’t going to come up with anything, but then: “Shark.”
Noah’s Shark.
Everyone here in Norway knows that a shark (or sjark, as we spell it) is a kind of fishing boat. An ark is something else, like that big chest in Indiana Jones. Lena gave a resigned sigh, thinking of the people who had written the Bible so carelessly.
“Shark boats aren’t exactly very big,” I said.
Lena shook her head. “Well, that’s why the dinosaurs died out, Trille. They drowned. Noah didn’t have space for them.”
It was at that very moment, while I was imagining how Noah would have pushed and struggled trying to get a Tyrannosaurus rex aboard, that I had my brilliant idea: “Lena, why don’t we try it with a shark? Let’s see how many animals we have room for!”
There was nothing Lena would rather spend her Sunday doing than precisely that.
Uncle Tor has a beautiful big shark boat that he uses every day except Sunday. He is easily angered, Uncle Tor, especially by Lena and me. But shark boats aren’t just scattered around everywhere. You have to be content with whichever one you can find, even if it’s Tor’s, said Lena. Would Noah have worried about a slightly difficult uncle when the whole world was at stake? We dropped Krølla off with Dad and ran on.
Uncle Tor lives in the third, and last, house in Mathildewick Cove, right down by the sea. That Sunday he had gone to the movies in town. The shark boat was there, bobbing by the jetty. All we had to do was climb aboard and put down the gangplank. I’d done it before because I’d been out fishing on it once. We put on life jackets, and suddenly that made us feel better about taking a shark boat without asking. For a moment we also discussed taking our bike helmets, but we decided not to.
There are quite a lot of different animals in Mathildewick Cove. Some small ones and some big ones. First we carried down the two rabbits that live outside Grandpa’s kitchen window. They’re called February and March. It was impossible to get them to stay still on deck, but when we gave them an armful of dandelion leaves, they calmed down. Afterward, we went into the chicken run behind our hay barn and took one of the hens, Number Four to be precise, and our rooster. The rooster made a terrible racket. For a moment we were sure that Mom would hear us, but I think the radio must have been on inside. The sheep are up the mountain in the summer, so we had to make do with our only goat. She’s the same age as Magnus and has a difficult temperament, as Auntie Granny says. When the stupid goat came aboard the boat, she ate all the rabbits’ dandelions, so we had to pick some more. After that, we searched all over Mathildewick Cove for our two cats but could only find Festus.
“He’s so fat he can count as two,” said Lena, putting him down in the sun by the boat’s cabin.
Our life jackets had become loose from all that carrying. We tightened them up properly, fetched as many empty jam jars as we could carry from the pantry, then started on the insects. W
e managed to catch two bumblebees, two worms, two snails, two aphids, two spiders, and two beetles. Six jars’ worth altogether. Hours had passed by the time we’d finished. We were hungry and our backs ached. One of the bumblebees had even stung Lena when she tried to find out if it was a boy bee or a girl bee.
“We’re never going to finish,” she said, rubbing furiously at the sting.
I looked at all the animals lying nicely in the sun on the deck. I had never seen animals on a boat before. Maybe they’d spent their whole lives wishing that they could have a boat ride. That was a beautiful thought.
But there was still room for more.
Lena looked at me earnestly.
“Trille, it’s time we got a cow.”
Uncle Tor has heifers. Heifers are adolescent cattle that are a little more restless than ordinary cattle and have slightly smaller udders. They were put out to graze above my uncle’s house. Everything we need belongs to Uncle Tor, I thought, wishing that we had our own cattle. He was going to be mad. My knees were shaking, and I showed Lena.
“You’ve got to do something about those knees of yours, Trille!” she said.
Lena thought that Tor would understand. After all, we couldn’t keep on wearing ourselves out with insects all day. We had to have an animal that took up some space. I wasn’t so sure Uncle Tor would understand, but I didn’t say anything.
We stood for a while looking at the grazing heifers, then chose the one that looked the biggest and best behaved.
“Come on, Miss Moo,” said Lena, carefully taking hold of the collar around the heifer’s neck.
And she did. She followed us down to the jetty without the slightest commotion. It was like leading a very big and well-behaved dog.
“Now it’s going to be full!” said Lena, satisfied.
My knees calmed down. Lena and I had done the same as Noah. We had filled a shark boat with animals. All we had left to do was get this heifer on board.
But in the middle of the gangplank, with the heifer in front of us, we suddenly discovered that the goat was eating the curtains in the cabin. Lena let out a furious scream, and from that moment everything went wrong. . . .
The heifer was so scared by Lena’s scream that she jumped a few feet up in the air and leaped onto the boat with a crash. She mooed madly into the sky and kicked out in all directions. The cat and the rabbits began to scurry everywhere. Number Four and the rooster flew up and down, clucking and crowing. The goat looked around in surprise and pooped on the deck. And as if that wasn’t enough, the heifer slipped on the goat’s droppings and kicked the window with the half-eaten curtain, smashing it. Everything was a complete mess of feathers and dung and dandelions and rabbits.
Lena and I stood there, our arms hanging by our sides, just staring. In the end, the heifer jumped into the water with a majestic splash.
Then along came Uncle Tor. Luckily for the heifer. Unluckily for us.
“What the heck is all this mayhem?” he shouted, so loudly that I’m sure they heard him in Colombia.
“We learned it at Sunday school!” shrieked Lena.
The heifer was thrashing around in the water like a little brown motorboat. She must have been afraid of water. Uncle Tor said nothing. He jumped up into the boat and made a lasso out of a rope that was lying there.
He’s no cowboy, my uncle, and he had to throw the lasso many times before he got the loop around the heifer’s neck. When he finally pulled her ashore, he was wet and foaming with rage.
“You hooligans!” he roared.
I was relieved that he had to stay exactly where he was, holding the heifer.
“Trille Danielsen Yttergård! Lena Lid! If either of you so much as sets foot on my property in the next six months, I will bash your heads right down into your stomachs!” he snarled, waving us away so forcefully that his arm almost fell off his shoulder.
We ran for all we were worth, flinging ourselves down behind Krølla’s playhouse. For a while I lay on my back in despair. Eventually Lena said, “If you had your head in your stomach, then you could still see through your belly button.”
Parents always spot when you’ve done something wrong. It was the same this time. It’s like they’ve got built-in radar. Mom and Dad and Lena’s mom dragged us straight into our kitchen and demanded to be told what we had been up to. We didn’t even have a chance to take off our life jackets.
There was nothing to do but spill the beans and explain everything. When we had finished, the three parents sat there wide-eyed, just looking at us. There was a deathly hush. Lena sighed like she does in math class—a weak, faltering sigh. I drummed my fingers on my life jacket, so at least they would notice that we had remembered to wear them.
“Now I’ve herd everything,” said Dad at last, trying to hide a smile under his mustache.
Mom looked at him sternly. It was no time for jokes in her view.
“Are you two completely out of your minds?” she asked.
I didn’t know what to answer, so I just nodded. Even I could see that things had gone a little too far this time.
“You’ll have to go down there, say you’re sorry, and bring the animals back up,” Lena’s mom said firmly.
“I think Tor would prefer not to see us,” mumbled Lena.
But it was no use. Dad strode down in his wooden shoes, dragging us with him. In spite of everything, I was glad that he was going with us. Uncle Tor is his little brother. It helps to remember that on days like this.
“You are totally nuts, Trille!” shouted Magnus from the attic as we went outside. I acted as if I hadn’t heard him.
“Now might have been a good time to wear our bicycle helmets,” I muttered to Lena.
There was no rainbow in the sky that day, even though Lena and I had filled an entire shark boat with animals. But it didn’t rain either. It was OK in the end. Uncle Tor’s girlfriend was visiting, and she’s fond of children, even ones like Lena and me. Uncle Tor couldn’t stay really angry as long as she was there.
“We will never borrow your boat or your heifer again without asking,” said Lena.
“And we’ll pay for the broken window,” I promised.
Lena looked at me and coughed.
“When we can afford it,” I added.
Afterward, Uncle Tor’s girlfriend gave us apple pie and custard.
By the time we had put the animals back where they belonged, the grass was covered with dew. Lena whistled quietly.
“You know which things rhyme, Trille?”
I shook my head.
“Miss Moo and poo!” She grinned.
Then she ran laughing through the hole in the hedge. I heard her slam her front door shut. She always does that. She slams it so hard it can be heard all over Mathildewick Cove.
That’s just what she’s like, Lena Lid.
The next day, Dad began his summer project. He has one every year. The project is generally something large and difficult to build, and it’s always Mom who decides what that is. This year, Mom had decided that we should have a stone wall above the paved part of our yard. Lena was delighted. She loves balancing on walls.
“Please make it high and narrow,” she ordered.
Dad grunted from between the stones. He doesn’t like his summer projects. He would rather sit on the porch drinking coffee. We hadn’t been standing there watching him laying stones for long before he asked us to run far, far away and play.
When we had run through the hedge into Lena’s yard and gone up to her wall, I asked, “Hey, Lena, why don’t you have a dad?” and then quickly tried to cover up the question with a nervous cough.
“I do have a dad,” Lena answered.
She held her arms straight out as she walked backward, balancing on the wall. I watched her worn-out sneakers move farther and farther away.
“Where is he, then?”
Lena said she didn’t know. He’d run off before she was born.
“He ran off?” I asked in dismay.
“Can’t
you hear?” Lena looked at me, irritated. Then she burst out, “What use are they, anyway?”
I didn’t really know what to answer. Do they need a use?
“They build things,” I suggested. “Walls and so on.”
Lena had a wall.
“And then they can . . . um . . .”
I’d never thought properly about what use my dad was. To get ideas, I stretched up onto my toes and peeked over the hedge. Dad was standing there muttering about his summer project, red in the face. It wasn’t too easy to come up with exactly what use he was.
“They eat boiled cabbage,” I said in the end.
Neither Lena nor I like boiled cabbage. It tastes like slime. Unfortunately we have a whole field of cabbages in Mathildewick Cove. Both my mom and Lena’s mom say that cabbage is something we should eat, for our own good. But Dad doesn’t say so. He eats my cabbage. I just heave the green glob over onto his plate when Mom’s looking the other way.
I could see that Lena didn’t think that was such a silly suggestion. She had a good view of Dad and his summer project from up there on the wall. She stood on one foot for a long while, studying him thoroughly.
“Hm,” she said eventually, jumping down.
Later in the day, we went to the general store to buy the things that Magnus had forgotten. Lena’s mom works there. She was in the middle of counting cans of sweet corn when we arrived.
“Hi!” she called out.
“Hi,” I said.
Lena just lifted her hand and waved.
When we came back out, we stopped to read the ads stuck on the door, like we always do. Today there was an extra-big one. We leaned down closer.
Lena read the card over and over.
“Do you want a dog?” I asked.
“No, but surely it must be possible to do something similar for dads too?”
Magnus had once told Lena and me about personal ads. They’re the kind of ads you put in the newspaper when you want to find a boyfriend or girlfriend. Lena had thought a bit about it, she told me. When it came to this dad thing, would it be possible to write an ad like that for a dad? There was just one disadvantage: you never knew who might be reading the paper. It could be gangsters or principals or whoever. So it was better to put up her ad at the general store, where she knew who would be shopping.
