The bus hummed with the solid smacking hum of tires on pavement, with the softer buzzing of people talking. In the seat ahead, a child dozed on her mother’s lap. Had she ever leaned that way against her mother, so safe and comfortable? She thought she must have, but couldn’t remember. Her mother would be furious, too. Jenny, Jenny, must you always do things your own way! She moved closer to Grandpa, felt his bony leg next to hers.
Cars raced the highway in packs. She saw license plates from half a dozen states. “Look, there’s one from Arizona,” she said. She and Gail used to make lists of out-of-state license plates.
“I can remember when roads were empty,” Grandpa said. “Stretched for miles, grand and empty. Nearly seventy years ago. Made my way on foot and by thumb through twenty states. I could walk in the middle of the road without fear, not any superhighways then. If a farmer came along, he’d give me a ride in his wagon.”
In Jenny’s mind that trip of Grandpa’s, when he’d been not much older than she, had always had the sound of birds flying. So free and beautiful. Moving down one road, and up another, lifting his face to the rain or the sun, working when he was hungry, sleeping where he could, in fields or barns.
Under the wheels of the bus, the road flew by, a mile quicker than a minute. A day’s walk of seventy years ago passed now in less than half an hour. Outside the bus windows the world raced by. Frozen pictures. A school, white shades half drawn … three squat yellow buses lettered in black, “Rexboro Central Sc” … a cluster of lollipop houses, green, pink, blue … a factory looking like a long stone coffin, dead face turned to the highway … a grocery store, metal sign swinging …
What would her parents do when she didn’t show up for supper? Call Rhoda first. Then other friends. Then the police? She didn’t want them to worry. She’d let them know she was all right, but not yet. Not until Grandpa was safe at the farm. Not until she was sure they couldn’t come and get him, take him to the Home. Her arms got goosepimply. The Home. She didn’t want to think about it. Grandpa wasn’t going there.
A State Police car moved smoothly past the bus. Jenny looked down at it, felt a lump of fear in her stomach. Looking for them? For her and Grandpa? She half expected the siren to wind up, the bus to pull over to the shoulder, the state trooper to board. I’m looking for an old man and a runaway girl …
She forced herself to watch the scenery flashing past. Roads slashing through the countryside … cemetery of white mobile homes … Hughes Mills, a cluster of a dozen houses … gas stations with flags … parking lot crammed with row upon row of glittering cars … towns and villages … Carpenters Falls … Whitesboro … Rochester … Falksburg … Big Rock … houses … stores … factories … Her mind blurred. She leaned back, slept.
Chapter 21
At Hamilton they got out, stretched, looked around. It might have been Alliance. Cars packed tight, dirty streets, boys in jeans and long hair in front of the bus station. Inside the terminal Grandpa had a drink of water, and Jenny bought a bag of hard candies. They used the bathrooms, stretched, got back on the bus.
They settled into their seats, already made homelike with their coats, a newspaper Grandpa had bought, candy wrappers, a crumpled plastic cup. Jenny combed her hair. The driver walked up the aisle, checking tickets. There were little settling sounds all around. The bus humped forward. They passed through tiny villages, sprawling suburbs, cities choked with smoke and soot. The trip took on a dulling sameness, punctuated only by occasional stops for the bathroom and snacks.
As they passed through town after town they dozed in their seats. Between naps Grandpa told Jenny of the fifteen-year-old Carl Pennoyer and the things he’d seen and done on his great trip. “Slept under a schoolhouse,” he said, “with the smell of cats in my nose … saw blacks living in teepees like Indians … worked on a farm picking beans, another farm picking strawberries … I was even bit once by a black widow spider and lived to tell the story.” The world outside was a blur of darkness broken by headlights flashing past on the highway. The night bus was only half full, the lights were dimmed, and all around them people slept. Jenny’s eyes felt heavy as sand; she hoped the bus driver didn’t feel as hypnotized as she by the sighing of the tires, the dimness of the interior, and the soft whoosh! whoosh! whoosh! of cars passing.
When she woke her mouth was gritty and her eyes itched as if someone had thrown dirt into them. She sat up, sighing and blinking. It was nearly dawn. The bus entered a small town, slowed down, and came to a groaning stop in front of a tightly closed store. “New Sayre,” the driver said. His face looked waxy. “New Sayre,” he said again.
“Grandpa.” Jenny shook him. “We’re here. In New Sayre, I mean.”
Chapter 22
The town smelled of manure. It was five o’clock in the morning. After the continual throbbing of the bus, the quietness of New Sayre was almost jarring to their senses.
“Now we walk,” Grandpa said. He flexed his fingers and moved slowly up and down the empty sidewalk, kneading his arms and shoulders, groaning under his breath.
“How far is the farm?” Jenny asked.
“Eight miles. Too early to find anyone to give us a ride.”
Jenny looked around New Sayre curiously. A water pump was set on a concrete base in the middle of four intersecting streets. There were neat clapboard houses … a limestone church … a grocery store advertising local cheese … and a hardware store with bikes, snowmobiles, gas lanterns, and a set of plastic dishes in the window.
They began walking. In moments, they had left the sidewalks behind and were into farm country. They’d walk, Grandpa said, till they came to another church, then a turn-off onto Honeywell Road, past a cemetery, and keep going till they came to Turkey Hill Road.
The sky brightened slowly and a milky blue light spread upward from the horizon. Pockets of fog lay in the low places. Somewhere cows moaned mournfully, and a herdsman called. Otherwise, silence. Everywhere, silence. It was like being in church, Jenny thought, when being in church was just right, perfect.
They passed still houses with the shades drawn, cars parked watchfully near, their windows silvered with moisture. Only the faint sound of their shoes crunching on the road marred the perfect silence. Jenny didn’t even want to talk. She moved easily at Grandpa’s pace, puffing out her breath, looking everywhere, aware of a rising sense of excitement and freshness. The moment when she had thrown herself down on the lawn of the old people’s home in utter, blank despair seemed very far away. Her parents, Pittmann Street, and Valerie and Vince she thought of with a kind of distant generosity. Let them have their apartment and their selfish disregard for Grandpa. What did she care now? She and Grandpa were here, on the way to the farm. They might as well have been in another world, on another planet-she felt that safe, that contented.
In a long green barn, lights showed in every window. “Farmer’s up, milking,” Grandpa said. The silence was punctuated now by the call of a bird, a long clean trill on two notes. Another bird answered. “What bird is that, I wonder?” Jenny said.
“Whitethroat,” Grandpa said.
They passed another house. Lights shone through white curtains. A window was filled with plants. “Folks getting up, the day’s starting,” Grandpa said. A black dog came tearing out from behind the house, barking as if she had a mind to chew them both into little pieces. She followed them down the road. Jenny hopskipped a bit nervously. “Just letting us know who’s boss,” Grandpa said.
At a produce stand a woman in orange pajamas yawned behind the open-air counter. Jenny’s stomach rumbled as they bought bananas, beans, tomatoes, and corn. Jenny tied food into her scarf and stuffed her jacket pockets. Bananas stuck out of Grandpa’s coat pockets. She stripped an ear of corn, threw away the green and the silk, and chewed on it. Grandpa sucked a tomato.
They had walked for nearly an hour when a pickup truck stopped and a man put his head out the window. “You folks want a ride? Just going a few miles down the road, but be glad to give
you a lift.”
Grandpa got in front, while Jenny climbed into the open back, where a boy with slicked-down black hair was sitting on the floor. She sat down across from him. “Hi,” she said. The boy nodded.
The truck jolted forward. “How old are you?” he asked. “I’m twelve,” he went on without waiting for an answer. “Bet you thought I was older. Everyone thinks I’m older.” He raised his voice to be heard over the sound of the motor. “I do whatever I want, drive my father’s tractor, smoke, drink beer.” He took a cigarette from the pocket of his plaid shirt and stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “You want one?” he asked Jenny.
She shook her head.
“You don’t smoke?”
“No.”
“Do you drink beer?”
“No.”
The boy laughed. “Bet you don’t do anything.”
The truck turned in at a farm. A tractor stood in the rutted driveway. A half-filled wire corn crib leaned next to the barn. Jenny and the boy hopped off the back of the truck. “Very much obliged,” Grandpa said, getting out.
“You say you folks are going to Turkey Hill Road?” the farmer asked. He rested his arms on the window of the truck.
Grandpa nodded. “The old Pennoyer place.”
The man screwed his eyes up against the light, thinking.
“Pennoyer place,” he said. “That would be that farm hasn’t been lived on for quite a while.”
“My place,” Grandpa said. “Haven’t been there for years. Plan to take up residence there now.”
“You and the girl?” the farmer said. He looked at his son. “Just you two?” He scratched his cheek as if trying not to laugh. “Going to live there, huh?” And again he scratched his cheek, his face twitching with laughter. “Well,” he said to his son, “you hear something strange and wonderful every day, don’t you?”
Chapter 23
Jenny had expected a sign to announce Turkey Hill Road, but there was only a rutted dirt road nearly hidden by trees.
“Turn here,” Grandpa said.
“This is it?” she said.
Grandpa nodded. “Two more miles.”
The road was uphill. They climbed slowly and steadily; fields opened on both sides, and above them was a great wide sky. Jenny had never seen a sky that looked so pure and blue, so freshly washed. In the hard rocky shoulder of the road, growing things, green things, had pushed through the unpromising earth. “Every living thing wants its bit of space,” Grandpa said. As they moved along, the road became less of a road and more of a path, rutted, rocky, and not easy to walk on.
At the crest, there was another hill to climb. Grandpa was breathing hard and sat down by the side of the road to rest. His hand trembling slightly, he unbuttoned his coat. His face was coated with a faint sheen of perspiration and he coughed several times. Taking his aspirin bottle from his coat pocket, he shook three tablets into his palm and chewed them.
They rested a few minutes and then started up the second hill. Cows jostled around a wagon loaded with green hay. A wave of blackbirds swooped down on a field of corn stubble. “Almost there,” Grandpa said, breathing hard again. A blue jay complained in a voice like rusty metal. “Skereeen! Skreen! Skreen!”
Grandpa pointed to a crabapple tree at the side of the road, its limbs bent over with clusters of small red fruit, and then to a row of tumbled fence posts. “Here’s where my property starts, Jenny. See that field over there, and that hill, and the field beyond that? That’s all Pennoyer land.”
“All of that?” She had seen farms as the family sped past in the car, but she’d had no sense of size. The land Grandpa pointed to was bigger than Jericho Hill Park, where there were always dozens and dozens of people. Here there were only Grandpa and her, the hills, the clean blue sky, and the incredible stillness.
The road leveled, and Jenny wanted to run, but held back for Grandpa. His breathing was hard. They rounded a bend in the road and there, facing them, was a weathered ruin of a barn, silver-sided and sagging into the ground. “That’s my barn,” Grandpa said. “We’re here.” He stopped, his hand to his chest. “We’re here,” he said again.
There was a gaping opening where wooden doors had once slid along metal tracks. Jenny stepped in, sniffing a musty, stale odor. She had an impression of dimness, straw underfoot, patches of sky caught in a crisscross of broken, roofless beams. A thick rope dangled from a beam, coils of rusty barbed wire were everywhere, and so was the pungent sour smell of animals. A narrow wooden ladder leaned against a loft filled with tumbled dirty hay. “We’re here!” Jenny cried. Her voice echoed back to her. She ran to the ladder, grasped a rung, and began climbing.
“Jenny!” Grandpa was in the doorway, outlined against the brightness. “Come down from there. Those rungs may be rotten.”
“All right,” she said, but for a long moment she held on with one hand, leaning out into the space over the barn floor, happy and strong. They were here. They had made it, the two of them together. Grandpa was safe.
Coming out of the barn, they crossed the road to the house. “Oh!” Jenny said in dismay. The house, the lovely farmhouse she’d always imagined, stared at them like the wounded survivor of a long war.
Not one window remained intact, the porch leaned tipsily toward the ground, the splendid pillars were gone, the front door sagged drunkenly on one hinge, and the house was surrounded by litter and debris.
Grandpa drew his hand across his eyes. “Well,” he said. “Well.” His voice was harsh. Jenny tried to take his arm, but he freed himself. He stood in the gaping doorway, the key he had brought useless in his hand. “Let’s go in.”
The front room should have had ivy-printed wallpaper, massive pieces of dignified furniture, crisp white curtains, and a glass-fronted cabinet where Grandpa’s grandma had kept her “gizmos,” little objects of beauty that she admired—seashells, a fan, a painted cup, a glazed flowered vase.
In bewilderment and growing pain Jenny looked around. The room was stripped, bare, destroyed. The floor was ankle-deep in debris, moldering leaves, beer bottles, broken glass, unidentified filth, and grease-stained papers. What remained of the wallpaper hung in long, ugly yellowish strips, and on the bare plaster walls messages were scrawled—“Sybil and Martin” … “Gertie, meet me here” … “If anyone calls, tell ’em I’m dead” … “Tea for two, baby” … And in between the messages, obscene words appeared time and again.
Jenny’s chest began to ache. She was afraid. It was so awful. She saw rocklike animal droppings in the corners. “Let’s try another room, Grandpa.”
He didn’t move. “This was the parlor,” he said. “It was the best room with all my grandmother’s best furniture. It was still here, right up to the time those people were renting ten years ago.” He put out his hands as if seeking support.
“Listen, maybe this is the worst,” Jenny said. “Maybe it’s not all this bad.” She pulled open a door that protested raspingly, and picked her way through more filth. It was mostly the same thing, except that in this room there was a squat coal- and wood-burning stove. It was rusty, the door hung open, and the little windows that should have been covered with isinglass were empty. But the chimney pipe was still intact.
“Grandpa, this room isn’t so bad,” Jenny called. “We’ll clean it up and everything will look a whole lot better. And we have a stove. Come on in, Grandpa.”
Jenny found a stub of a broom in a corner and began sweeping vigorously, pushing the debris into piles, gathering up armfuls, and dumping everything through the empty window to the ground outside. Fairly soon she was filthy, but the floor was cleared, if not clean, and the whole room looked better.
Inside a closet she found a narrow dark staircase that led to the upstairs. Here there was more dirt and ruin; at her approach a bat, squeaking, flew up into a hole in the ceiling. Exploring, Jenny found a rocking chair with a missing rocker, several wooden boxes, and a metal bed frame with wire springs. She dragged all these useful things to the head of th
e stairs, and then one at a time brought them down.
She set the bed near the window in the clean room (“their room,” as she already thought of it) and made Grandpa sit down on the broken rocker.
“Imagine when we get a fire going in the stove,” she said. “It’ll really be cozy.” She kept her voice strong and cheerful. Grandpa, shocked by the condition of the house, had hardly moved for the past few hours. “It’s going to be nice,” she said. “It’s really going to be wonderful, Grandpa.” If she closed her eyes to slits, it seemed as if she could already see them sitting in front of a glowing fire, talking and eating, safe and snug in their own house.
Chapter 24
“Grandpa, where do we get water?” Jenny’s hands and arms were filthy from the clean-up work, and her throat felt parched. The old man, who had been sitting in the lopsided rocker, pointed to the dark, cavelike room that had been, he said, a washing-up room. “It’s spooky,” Jenny said. There were shelves on the walls, covered with layers of dirt and seeds, and a water pump on a rotting platform.
“Cistern is in the cellar,” Grandpa said, following her in. “It gives fresh rainwater the year round.” Jenny pumped the handle vigorously up and down until her arm ached, but the only result was a rusty protest from the mechanism.
“Might be the leathers are dried out,” Grandpa said. “Or might be the cistern is empty.” He opened the cellar door, opposite the washing-up room. “Careful, Grandpa!” Instead of stairs, there was a gaping hole opening into a dank, musty darkness. The stairs were gone. One more step and he would have plunged straight down.
“That’s weird,” Jenny said, holding Grandpa’s arm. “No steps. How did people get down there? Where are the steps?”
“Same place the windows are,” Grandpa said. “Vandals. Kids. Thieves. See something whole and they need to tear it apart. Let go of me.” He stepped back, slammed the door. “Get a rock, Jenny, put it against the door. That’s a dangerous place.”
A Figure of Speech Page 12
