by Phoebe Stone
I was lying on the couch in the living room at the time. I was watching TV and I never took my eyes off that show. And the officer never even thought to ask me anything. After all, I was just a kid and what do kids know anyway?
About our discovery reports, Conrad and I left Quentin Duster to write the story about finding the plane and Tiny Bailey in the woods. By the end of the year, Conrad and I had made other discoveries that we chose to write about instead. Quentin wrote his discovery report during study hall, spending all of one hour on the written part, and what I saw of it looked pretty dumb.
I do not know what Conrad’s discovery paper was about. But I do know that the teacher was very pleased with it. She called it “a personal discovery about human nature,” and she had nothing but praise for whatever it was Conrad had written.
For my part I chose to write about discovering that the abandoned house that I loved, where I spent time, where I did all my thinking and writing of my poems, turned out to belong to one of the first ninety-nine women airplane pilots in our country, one of the flying Ninety-Nines. I wrote in my report that I had always felt a kind of kinship with whoever had lived in that house and that I hoped I could grow up to be something like Vera Bailey. I wrote that she was for me kind of an unseen guide, like Sacagawea, or almost like a secret mother to me, someone who might be more like me than my own mama.
My sister Melinda and I became friends that spring through all that happened, and we spent the summer going together to all the Martha Nottingham Cake Mix parties. Melinda did all the bookkeeping and I did all the presenting and Mama didn’t have to do anything except sit there watching everybody throwing orders at us.
But change was in the air. You could feel it all that summer when the wind went through the poplar trees along the river. You could hear it in the red-winged blackbirds calling in the long grassy fields around our house and in the crows cawing high up in the tops of the elm trees. Yes, things were changing.
By the end of the summer Bailey’s Hardware closed its doors for good. Nobody came in and bought anything for most of the summer except for Granddaddy. He spent all kinds of money on things we didn’t need and he stored all the stuff in a closet, till Mama found out about it and put an end to it.
Conrad and I went into Bailey’s Hardware one afternoon, on one of the last days before they closed. A lot of the things were already boxed up and taken away. There weren’t any bins of nails. The lights were bright. The store didn’t have that dark oily mysterious smell, that smell that meant plans for summer projects, plans for painting an old fence, plans for wallpapering a back room with a big washtub full of sweet-smelling paste. Most everything was cleared away, making room for the bank that was taking its place, a bank with an automatic teller with a drive-through window where you wouldn’t even have to get out of your car to do your banking.
Conrad and I were poking around at the back of the store where Fred Bailey was throwing things out in big Dumpsters. Conrad was looking around and noticed one of the Dumpsters was filled to the brim with old tulip bulbs, five thousand at least. “Those are no good. They’re dried out,” said Fred Bailey. “I had to throw them all away. I bought too many of them. I can’t sell them ’cause they’re old and won’t grow.”
“Mind if we take them?” said Conrad.
“Be my guest,” said Fred Bailey, “but I assure you they won’t grow.”
Conrad and Quentin and I spent a whole day hauling those tulip bulbs away in a wagon, and we got it into our minds to plant those tulip bulbs just for the heck of it in the field across the road from the old house.
Conrad and Quentin and I spent two weeks planting those five thousand bulbs. We used a pick and we drove a little hole and stuck in a bulb. Made a little hole, put in a bulb. Little hole, then a bulb, till we had tucked all five thousand of them into the ground. And then we forgot about it.
There were other things going on. Seventh grade was starting that fall and we had to learn how to change classes every hour when the bell rang. During that year I grew taller just like a long-legged colt, my mama said. My hair grew down to my shoulders. Mama had to buy me a whole new wardrobe.
Just after Christmas, Melinda showed Granddaddy my poems and he insisted I send some in to the Shenandoah Gazette, which I did, and at the end of seventh grade, I had three poems printed in the paper with my name on them.
I think it was the week Granddaddy’s senior citizens’ bowling team made it to the state level that Frank Bailey landed a job at Big Box Home and Hardware in the fishing department. Granddaddy went over to visit him there now and again. Then they could often be seen together driving the forklift down the wide aisles at high speed, screeching around corners with great precision, coming close to huge piles of boxes but never knocking them over. “Your granddaddy capitulates,” said Mama to me one day. “He adjusts. He’s a survivor. He’ll probably outlive us all, Jessie Lou,” she said, wiping the table clean one more time.
Near the end of seventh grade in the spring, Conrad and I took a walk over the road along the Cabanash River toward Bailey’s field. We could see the old house as we came to the peak in the hill, the silvery lonely-looking house with the wind hovering all around it.
“My granddaddy says in spite of it all, life is still something beautiful,” I said.
“Guess he’s right about that,” said Conrad, smiling at me.
Then we looked over toward the field across the road. We hadn’t thought about it till now. We just plain forgot about it. But then we started running. We ran and we ran and we ran, till we got to the field along the road. There we saw five thousand green shoots and buds coming up all over the field. Every tulip was going to bloom.
And not more than one week later, they did indeed bloom. That field was an enormous brilliant carpet of bright red tulips, a carpet that stretched from the rolling high rise all the way to the edge of the woods. Five thousand flowers blooming. A whole field of blazing bright red tulips.
Very special thanks to Rachel Griffiths who worked on this book with me. If you are lucky enough to have Rachel steering and cheering for you, you are lucky indeed. Special thanks to Arthur Levine for his insightful dead-center suggestions and direction. Love and thank you to dear Ethan and Kristy who read the book aloud to each other. (And Kristy’s mom too.) Thank you to Yvette and Bob for their help and to my mother who listened over the telephone. And thank you to my husband, David, who is always there in the middle of the night when I am full of doubt.
Phoebe Stone’s first novel, All the Blue Moons at the Wallace Hotel, was hailed as “haunting and poetic” by The New York Times. The Boston Globe said of her second novel, Sonata #1 for Riley Red, “literature doesn’t get much better than this.” Her third novel, Deep Down Popular, received a starred review from Booklist. Phoebe lives in Middlebury, Vermont.
Felicity’s glamorous parents don’t tell her anything when they drop her off at the Bathburn house in Maine. They don’t tell her why Uncle Gideon acts so strangely. They don’t tell her why Derek, the only other kid in the house, refuses to come out of his room. Worst of all, Felicity’s parents don’t tell her where they are going, and they won’t say when they’ll return.
And then the letters start coming, in slim blue envelopes marked PAR AVION. Felicity is sure they’re from her parents, but if so, why are they in code? Will Felicity discover just what the Bathburns are hiding? Can one person heal an entire family — all while in the throes of her first big crush? It’s a tall order for a small girl, but Felicity is determined to crack the Romeo and Juliet code.
Copyright © 2008 by Phoebe Stone. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc.
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