Thirteenth Child

by Patricia C. Wrede

  Rennie rolled her eyes, and went on trying to get a proper story out of them. I could see it was no use, but Rennie never could let go of a thing once she’d decided on it. She spent the rest of the evening working at them and getting crosser and crosser, to no purpose.

  Three days later, they had the official welcome-home celebration. Dr. McNeil gave a dandy speech, all about the importance of exploration and great discoveries, and following in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark. That last wasn’t right, strictly speaking, because Lewis and Clark went up the Grand Bow River in boats from just north of St. Louis, while Dr. McNeil went straight west from Mill City in wagons, so you couldn’t really say he followed Lewis and Clark. But it sure sounded good.

  Dr. McNeil talked a lot about the trouble the expedition had encountered, and the two men who’d died. Then he introduced all eleven of the men who were left. The very last one was Brant Wilson, wearing his squared-off hat with the crow feather so everyone there knew him for a Rationalist straight off. Not too many people had known that there was a Rationalist on the expedition, so there was some puzzled murmuring in the crowd.

  Dr. McNeil said in front of everyone that Brant was a hero, and that if it hadn’t been for him, they’d have lost more than just the two men. Everyone cheered, even the people who’d been too far back to hear, and that was the end of the speech and the start of the picnic. After the picnic, there was stick ball and other games, and then dancing and fireworks in the evening.

  There was a crowd around every member of the expedition the whole time, because everyone wanted to know more about what had happened to them. Most of the folks had no business asking but curiosity and wanting to be first with a good tale, Mama said. They didn’t get what they wanted, though. Dr. McNeil and the Settlement Office had agreed in advance to do a series of broadsheets with the whole story laid out neatly in order, and no one on the expedition was to talk about what had happened beforehand, so as to keep wild rumors from starting.

  It didn’t work very well. Maybe there weren’t quite so many rumors as there might have been, but there were plenty of them, and they were plenty wild. They kept circulating even after the broadsheets came out, and some still get told to this day.

  We got the real story straight from Dr. McNeil, the day after the celebration. He and Brant came to see Papa, and naturally ended up in the front parlor having biscuits and jam and talking to the whole family. The very first thing the boys wanted to know was what really happened.

  “I heard you saved the whole party from a nest of sunbugs!” Jack said.

  “I heard you wrestled a spectral bear that caught you bathing in the river!” Robbie put in.

  Brant rolled his eyes and groaned. “Don’t be daft,” he told them. “Do I look like I can wrestle bears?”

  “Boys,” Mama said in a warning tone. “You know these gentlemen aren’t supposed to talk about what happened until the official account is published.”

  Robbie and Jack and Lan all looked over at her and then sat back in their seats, scowling. Nan and Allie and Rennie had been leaning forward, too, though not as eagerly, and they straightened up quick, hoping Mama hadn’t noticed. Dr. McNeil laughed. “It’s not so strict a ruling as all that, Mrs. Rothmer,” he said. “In fact, I think there’s more harm being done by letting these tall tales run wild.”

  “You shouldn’t have made me out a hero,” Brant said to Dr. McNeil. “Anybody could have shot those pests.”

  “Perhaps, though I don’t think many men would have kept their heads under the circumstances,” Dr. McNeil said. “But you were the man who did, and it saved the expedition.”

  “If you don’t intend to tell the whole story, you had better stop now,” Papa said, smiling.

  “If he didn’t intend to tell the whole story, he never should have begun,” Mama said sternly, but there was a hint of a curl to her lips, so all of us knew she didn’t quite mean how she sounded.

  “That is the whole story,” Brant said.

  Lan gave Brant a sidelong look. “What kind of pests were they?” he asked. “The ones you shot?”

  Dr. McNeil laughed again. “That’s the thing in a nutshell,” he said. “They were swarming weasels. Our campsite was nearly on top of one of their burrows, and naturally they picked the exit closest to us to come boiling out of. The spells we’d cast weren’t intended for such numbers or such close range, and there wasn’t time to cast more powerful ones. Fortunately, Wilson here kept his head and had his revolver handy.”

  “You shot a whole swarm of those weasels with just a revolver?” Jack said, plainly awed.

  “No, I shot the two leaders,” Brant told him. “As soon as they were dead, the swarm fell apart and the other weasels dove back underground. That was all.”

  “Leaders?” Papa said.

  “Exactly,” Dr. McNeil said, nodding. “Nobody has ever gotten such a close look at a weasel swarm and survived—nobody with the training or the sense to observe the way they work. Wilson not only saw that the swarm had a center, but he was able to pick out the critical pair and shoot them before we were overrun. If he hadn’t, we’d all have been eaten alive.”

  Rennie, Allie, and Nan shuddered. “How brave!” Rennie said.

  Nan nodded agreement and added, “How did you know?”

  “My mother keeps bees,” Brant said. “The swarming weasels were moving around the leaders the way a swarm of bees moves around their queen, and I thought it looked familiar, that’s all. Then, when I realized what it reminded me of, I looked for the center. The two leaders were larger than the others, and had lighter coats. So I shot them. It was just luck that it didn’t send the whole swarm into a frenzy instead of making it fall apart.”

  “You had the brains to see what was happening, the sense to have worn a loaded revolver, the skill to hit what you aimed at, and the nerve to stand and shoot when the first dozen swarming weasels were within a yard of your feet,” Dr. McNeil said firmly. He looked at Papa and shook his head. “I’ve offered him a permanent position at least a dozen times, but he won’t take it.”

  “I’m much obliged to you, Dr. McNeil,” Brant said, “but I’m going with my uncle to found a new settlement as soon as he gets an allotment from the Homestead and Settlement Office. After this, I don’t see how they can continue to insist that we have to have a settlement magician.”

  “Well, if you change your mind, the offer will remain open,” Dr. McNeil said, and went back to talking about the expedition. He didn’t tell as many stories as the boys wanted; mostly, he talked about the things they’d seen, like striped antelope and a new species of saber cat they’d named a chisel lynx, and something he called a chameleon tortoise that used magic to look like rocks when there was danger near. Nan and Allie left after a while, but the boys stayed until the biscuits and jam ran out, and Rennie and I stayed right up until Dr. McNeil and Brant said their farewells.

  I dreamed that night of saber cats and mammoths and insects like tiny flying stars, and when I woke I thought for just an instant that I was in a tent on the endless plains instead of in my bed at home. I couldn’t help wishing Dr. McNeil had brought back more of the strange animals he’d found, so I could get a look at them for myself.

  Maybe, I thought, he’d go on another expedition someday, and catch more creatures, and I could see them then.

  CHAPTER 12

  THAT WHOLE SUMMER, IT SEEMED LIKE ALL ANYBODY COULD TALK about was the McNeil expedition and how it turned out. Every man who’d been along got treated like something special and then some. It got so none of them could poke a nose out of doors without a whole gaggle of “expedition ladies”—upper school girls and young single ladies—following them around, giggling and flirting and fussing over them. Mama said such behavior was a disgrace, so she wasn’t pleased to find that Nan and Rennie had been joining in. She gave them both a tongue-lashing and extra chores for a week, which pretty much stopped them going out after the expeditioners. But it didn’t keep them from making cow ey
es at Brant when he stopped by to visit Papa.

  Brant visited a good deal, talking with Papa about the settlement his uncle was going to build and planning how to handle the wildlife without magic. At first it seemed just dreaming, but after dithering for nearly half the summer, the Settlement Office finally offered the Rationalists an allotment after all. The place the Settlement Office picked was a failed site about two days’ hard ride from the river, where a settlement group had collapsed three years before.

  Some of the Rationalists weren’t too happy when they heard what the Settlement Office was proposing, because the previous settlement had used spells to keep the wildlife out. Brant said that was silly. What with all the magical animals and plants and insects on the Great Plains and on west, there wasn’t a place that hadn’t ever had something magic about it. That first settlement was gone, along with their spells. Even their buildings had mostly collapsed, and their fields had gone back to weeds and wild.

  By the time Brant and the ones who thought like him got the others talked around, it was too late in the year for the whole group to set out. Some of the men went ahead to lay out the compound they’d all be living in later. The buildings had to be a lot sturdier than the ones in a normal settlement, and they were going to take a lot longer to put up, all because the Rationalists wouldn’t use magic. So Brant said it was just as well they had the extra time.

  The expedition ladies made quite a to-do when the Rationalist settler group left. They threw a going-away party for Brant that was near as big as the welcome-home celebration for the whole expedition. Rennie and Nan helped with that, too. They said it was to wish the men well; Mama said it was an excuse for more foolishness, and gave them extra chores again.

  “I wish him well, I do indeed,” Mama said the day after Brant and the others set out, when Rennie and Nan complained. “But I don’t see that making the poor man dance half the night away is any help or encouragement to him, especially when he has a hard day’s work ahead of him.”

  “You don’t understand,” Rennie said.

  “I understand quite well enough for any reasonable person,” Mama told her. “Which is plainly more than you’d like me to.”

  Rennie didn’t quite dare to answer back, but she looked a whole book and a couple of extra chapters.

  “It’s just as well that young man’s going to be gone this winter,” Mama said. “He’s a dangerous fellow.”

  “Mama! How can you say that?” Nan burst out.

  “It’s quite true,” Papa said. “Brant’s an idealist, and he’s competent. There are few more dangerous combinations in this world.”

  Mama glanced at Nan and Rennie, then nodded. I got the distinct impression that she hadn’t meant it the way Papa said.

  “Brant isn’t dangerous!” Rennie cried. “He’s a hero—everybody says so!”

  “Heroes are even more dangerous than idealists,” Papa said.

  “Don’t tease the child, Daniel,” Mama said. “Rennie, while you are working at the mending, think on this: No one has ever yet said just who Brant might be a danger to. A barnyard cat is a powerful danger to mice, but none whatsoever to the farmer.”

  Rennie gave a sullen nod, and Mama turned away, satisfied. I was still watching Rennie, and it seemed to me that she was paying less attention to what Mama had said than to working out whether it came out a compliment or an insult to Brant.

  I wasn’t sure whether to be glad or sorry over Nan and Rennie’s punishment. Rennie especially. The way she’d been acting all summer, shirking her work to hang about when Brant came to see Papa and then slipping off to gossip with the expedition ladies, it was plain to anyone with sense that she’d get a comeuppance sooner more than later. Also, I was pleased to get help with the mending for a time; not one of the boys seemed able to get through three days that summer without tearing a shirt, and the only pants in the house that still had knees were their Sunday best and Papa’s. Even with Allie and me hard at it, we couldn’t keep up.

  On the other hand, Rennie could sulk and pout and pine worse than anyone, and she knew how to make everyone around her just as miserable as she made out she was herself. Mrs. Callahan told Mrs. Sevenstones once that Rennie acted more like a spoiled child of five than a grown woman of nearly twenty, and it just showed you that even the best families had a black sheep somewhere. Mrs. Sevenstones said she rather thought Robbie was the black sheep, but that was just because her son had bought two of Robbie’s fake steam dragons that spring.

  Rennie pined a bit after Brant left, though not where Mama could see her. It didn’t last long, because less than a week after Brant left, we got a letter from our older sister Diane. Not that we hadn’t been getting letters all along from the ones who’d stayed back East, but this one was different. It was four pages long, both sides—but Papa summed it all up in just one sentence.

  “It seems Diane has found the position she’s dreamed of and the man of her dreams, both at once,” he said as he handed Mama the letter.

  “What? What?” all the rest of us asked.

  “Your sister Diane wishes to be married,” Papa told us. “And she has a chair with the New Bristol Traveling Orchestra.”

  Everyone crowded around Mama, trying to get a look at the letter. Finally, she read it out to us, though usually when a letter came from one of the ones back East, we passed it around so we could all read it for ourselves. Mama might as well have done things the usual way, I thought. Papa had said all the real news; the rest of the letter was a lot of oh-how-wonderful, mostly about John Brearsly, the man Diane had gone and got herself engaged to, but some about the job as well. She’d sent along a short note from Mr. Brearsly, formally asking Papa for her hand, but it was plain as day from her part that they’d settled it between them already.

  John Brearsly was third trumpet with the New Bristol Traveling Orchestra. Diane had been one of their substitute violinists for the past two years, and he’d encouraged her to try for the permanent position when it came open. Mama looked less and less happy as she read through the letter, and when she finished, she looked at Papa.

  “I can’t pretend I like it,” she said, and sighed. “She is still so young.”

  “Diane is twenty-three,” Papa pointed out. “You were five years younger than that when you married me.”

  Mama turned pink. “I didn’t mean—Daniel, don’t tease! This is serious. We don’t know anything about this young man.”

  “I should hope it was serious,” Papa said. “As for the young man, I expect we’ll hear more than we want to, one way and another, from Sharl and Julie at least, and probably from my sisters, as soon as Diane tells them the news. Maybe even from the boys. It’s not as if she has no family nearby to look out for her interests.”

  “That’s true.” Mama looked more cheerful. “Still, I wish she’d chosen someone with a more reliable income. A musician’s life is so uncertain.”

  “But Diane was going to be a musician already, even before she met Mr. Brearsly!” Allie said.

  “That’s precisely why I wish she’d found a husband with a steadier position,” Mama said, sighing again. “I want my children to choose their partners wisely in temperament and moral character, but also in material considerations. Life can be bitterly hard for someone who mistakes her choice.”

  Allie looked as puzzled as I felt, but she didn’t say anything because Rennie poked her and mouthed “later” behind her hand. So I followed them when they went off together after everyone finished marveling over Diane’s news, and that was how I found out about my aunt Amelia.

  She’d been Mama’s sister, Rennie said. She’d fallen in love with a poor young man and had run off and married him over her parents’ objections. Afterward, our grandfather had forbidden anyone to even speak of her ever again. According to Rennie, that hadn’t mattered to Aunt Amelia. She’d been happy with her poor husband and her hard life, Rennie said, until she took ill and died for lack of money for a doctor. Rennie plainly thought it was a most ro
mantic story, but she said that Aunt Amelia had been Mama’s favorite sister, and that accounted for Mama having such strong feelings on the subject of picking a marriage partner.

  I thought Rennie was maybe partly right, but not altogether right. I’d heard Rennie and her friends talking sometimes, and the older girls at school, and sometimes even Mama and the ladies from church. It seemed to me that all mothers worried a fair piece about their children getting a good start in life, and the more children they had, the more they worried about every last one of them. Maybe having seen things go all wrong for her sister had made Mama more worried than some, but I thought that having fourteen of us to see launched was just as likely to be what was giving her fits.

  Over the next few weeks, we got more letters, and Mama was a bit reassured. Most of the aunts said that Mr. Brearsly was a fine young man, though they liked his profession as little as Mama did. Sharl and Julie wrote, too, and even our oldest brother, Frank. And of course there were lots of letters from Diane herself.

  Diane had evidently been thinking about her wedding for some time, and she didn’t much like the notion of coming out to Mill City to be married, when she didn’t know anyone here but us. She wanted us to come back East, every last one of us, so she could be married in Helvan Shores with all her family and friends. She proposed that most of us come home a month or so early, to visit and help with the wedding preparations. Papa would stay until the end of school, and they’d have the ceremony as soon as he arrived.

  The plan seemed to suit everyone. Papa said it was very considerate of Diane to think of his students. Mama was pleased that she’d have a month to give Mr. Brearsly a looking-over for herself. The younger boys were glad to get out of a month of day school, though Mama told them we’d all still have lessons, which damped their enthusiasm some. The girls were excited about the wedding plans, and chattered about dresses and linens and wedding presents like an entire flock of blue jays.