A Home for Goddesses and Dogs

by Leslie Connor

  Ah-ha! I’d had a sense that the Gerber farm was over this hill. I squinted into the distance. The house and barn looked like toys from a train set. That watery crack I’d been tracing was the creek that ran behind Gwen and Florry’s place. Raya began to move us forward again. It wasn’t long before I saw that we were about to merge with a set of parallel tracks in the snow—the kind made by a pair of fat skis, just like Aunt Brat’s.

  We were rejoining her trail. I glanced down at the Gerber farm again. I flashed on Aunt Brat’s woolen snowflake socks. I remembered the dry weeds—no. Hay! That was hay! That’s what she’d brought home—stuck to her socks and her skirt hem. It hit me:

  Aunt Brat skis to the Gerber farm. . . .

  I took an inward breath.

  She knows the goats are there . . . she must . . .

  I could practically hear my brain locking pieces into place. At the same time I felt the kind of weight that comes from realizing that you’ve made a discovery that somebody didn’t want you to make—even if you still aren’t sure what it is.

  “Hey, you guys? You guys!” I blurted. Raya and Sari stopped. Both turned to look at me. I huffed and puffed a bit. “This has been so great. But I’m thinking I should head back.” I jabbed my thumb over my shoulder. “I’m tired.” I grinned apologetically. “Would you mind?”

  “Oh, sure!” came the answer. My two friends planted their poles and turned themselves around.

  “You’ve been sick,” Sari said. “You shouldn’t overdo it. Besides, I’m getting tired too,” she admitted.

  “Glad you spoke up before we got any farther out,” Raya said. “Much as I like you both, I don’t want to carry you piggyback.”

  That made Sari snort. “Oh my gosh,” she said. “Could you imagine us kicking you in the sides with our snowshoes? Giddy-up, Raya!” They laughed as I let them go by me.

  I looked over my shoulder at those ski tracks. They sketched a perfect path to the Gerber place.

  There was no doubt in my mind: my Aunt Brat, who didn’t like secrets, was keeping one of her own.

  39

  Oatmeal Cookies with Raisins

  Sometimes stepping along will click your thoughts right into place. I puzzled over my hunch that Aunt Brat was spending time at the Gerber farm.

  Gwen had said the injured goats had been entrusted to her; she was providing shelter and some of the care. Someone else was bearing the expense. Could Aunt Brat be that someone? And what about the way Florry Gerber had so earnestly insisted that she knew my “mutha”? Did she think my aunt was my mother? There were times my aunt looked like my mother, and people had said that I looked like Mom. So was that what Florry saw? A family resemblance?

  Meanwhile, I wondered if Raya and Sari were putting together the things that I was putting together. Maybe not. They were busy talking about school and our upcoming test on the major battles of the Civil War.

  “Ugh,” I called up to them, “I missed all the review days last week.”

  “The main part will be an essay—open book and open notes,” Sari said. That was good news for me.

  Neither of them said anything when the ski path took us right to the spot where we’d stepped off to go uphill earlier. We stayed low this time and retraced our tracks—and Aunt Brat’s—all the way back to the bottom step of the front porch, where Aunt Brat swung the door open.

  “Welcome back, girls!” she said, her face in a beautiful, natural smile. I rested, leaning on my poles, catching my breath. I tried to stop thinking everything I’d been thinking.

  Guffer squeezed past Aunt Brat and bounded off the steps. He paced a circle around Raya and Sari as they unbuckled their snowshoes and shook them off their feet. He wagged his tail slightly and let out that nervous woof-woof that totally marked him as a chicken-dog. My friends took his behavior in stride, but Aunt Brat frowned.

  “He’s so harassing,” she said apologetically. She called to the dog, but he wouldn’t give it up.

  “Guffer! Come!” I was firm.

  He started toward me with his ears flipping down, brush tail swinging. I squatted down to receive him, only to discover that my legs were jelly. I groaned and fell back onto my butt. Guff kept coming until he had me pinned on my back with one snowshoe foot swaying in the air. There was a lot of laughing in the yard.

  You might not think it possible to feel good with seventy pounds of dog stepping on your gut and stuffing a wet nose into your ear. But I did. I was his person. I rolled up to sitting and scrubbed his ruff in my hands, gave his big blond body a hug.

  “So listen . . . ,” Aunt Brat said. “I just assembled the ingredients for a big batch of oatmeal-raisin cookies. Anybody interested?”

  My jaw must have hung. My favorite snow-day cookie!

  “I love to bake.” Sari rubbed her mittens together.

  “And I love it when Sari bakes,” said Raya.

  For the first time, they were going to come inside and stay awhile. I collected my wobbly legs underneath me and climbed the porch steps. I stopped to gather an armload of firewood. Raya did the same and Sari held the door for us. Guffer pressed his way in and headed to the water bowl. We stacked the wood on the hearth.

  I soaked up the scene. There was something so easy, so right, about watching my friends peel off their boots and jackets in the front hall and something so everyday about Guffer coming to inspect their empty footwear. Now, Raya had her eye on the woodstove, and I almost predicted the next words out of her mouth.

  “Hey, Bratches,” she said, “can I clean out your ash pan?”

  Aunt Brat looked a little surprised. “Oh, done this morning, thanks anyway,” she said.

  “How about I throw some kindling on these coals?” Raya bent down to peer into the firebox.

  “You should just say yes,” Sari said as she shuffled in her socks up to the kitchen table. “Raya has to have stuff to do.”

  “That’s true. And if you don’t tell me what I can do, I sometimes start messing with things you don’t want me to touch,” Raya added.

  “She does,” said Sari, gently.

  Aunt Brat shot me a grin. “Oh. Well, sure then,” she said. “It’s always a good time to stoke the fire in this drafty old house.”

  “Also . . . ,” said Sari, who was already holding up a measuring cup full of sugar and looking slightly cross-eyed as she checked the line, “Raya is avoiding having to bake. I always try to pester her into it.”

  “That’s true too. I like to crack the eggs. Then I’m all good,” said Raya.

  Aunt Brat let out a short burst of a laugh. “Well,” she said, “we have a lot of self-awareness in the room today. So healthy!” I peeled the wrappers off three sticks of butter and dropped them into the bowl with the white and brown sugars.

  “I’ll cream!” Sari revved up the mixer.

  Over the whir of the machine, I kept catching Aunt Brat’s eye. I wondered if she could hear me thinking thoughts at her as she measured baking soda and salt.

  I know you go to the Gerber farm. . . .

  Whir-whir-whir.

  It’s the goats, isn’t it? You’re doing something . . . and it’s good. . . .

  Whir-whir.

  If you want to tell me . . .

  Raya showed up to crack the eggs. (She nudged me away from the bowl.) Sari kept the mixer running. I checked the recipe and measured out two cups of oats.

  “And the raisins,” Sari said above the whirring.

  Ah yes, the raisins. I picked up the red-and-yellow box. I drew my thumbs across the tiny picture of the Sun-Maid with her red bonnet and basket of grapes. Ten, or maybe eleven, years had passed since I’d first declared that this was my mother on the box. It struck me: Sun-Maid raisins were not going away. I’d find my mother’s likeness on the boxes again and again for years to come—

  Especially on snow days, Mom. . . .

  I smiled to myself.

  I measured out a cup and a half, which left not one raisin in that box. Sari shut down the mixer and
used a big spoon to fold the oats and raisins into the cookie dough.

  I took the empty raisin box and folded all the flaps inward. I stood it up at the center of the table with support from the honey jar and the pepper mill. The Sun-Maid had a way of watching over things. I looked up and saw Sari Winkle give me a tiny nod.

  Before long, the house smelled of cinnamon, sugar, and warm oats. While we waited for the first cookies, we threw together a lunch from leftovers (we were hike hungry) and heated water for tea.

  Aunt Brat pulled Soonie’s dog bed over beside her chair because Soonie always liked to be close. The old greyhound lowered her skinny bones down and closed her eyes. Guffer settled under the table near my feet. I massaged his skull with my sock-covered toe. He leaned in.

  “So, did you like snowshoeing?” Aunt Brat asked.

  “Actually, I loved it,” I said. “A lot.”

  “And you almost didn’t even try it!” Raya could not help exclaiming.

  “I know. But walking on top of the snow was so cool. And climbing the hill, and working up a sweat—I loved it.”

  “You can use those poles and snowshoes for the rest of the winter if you want,” Raya said.

  “Can I really?” I imagined going out on my own—maybe taking Guffer if I could train him to go along peacefully.

  “Absolutely,” said Raya. She grabbed the raisin box and spun it on one finger. She set it on the table in front of her. She flicked it with her index finger and thumb and made it hop forward a few inches.

  “Ohhh . . . here we go,” Sari mumbled, and she was right. It turned out that this flicking must be tried again and again. The box gained height and distance each time, knocking into condiments and finally flying right up under Sari’s chin, where it hit with a pop, then landed.

  “Oomph!” Sari touched her chin. “Okay, Raya. Easy.” She rolled her eyes. She gently slid the box back to the center of the table. Raya picked it up again.

  Aunt Brat smiled behind her mug of tea. How funny for her, I thought, sitting at a table with thirteen-year-olds.

  “You know what, Lyddie, if you like snowshoeing, you should try my skis,” Aunt Brat said. “Add a little speed, if you dare.” She pumped an eyebrow at me. “This is the place for it. One of the best things about Chelmsford is the open land.”

  “Oh! Oh! And just wait until you get a load of this place during snowmelt.” Raya talked fast, eyes wide. “Oh man! We get acre-wide puddles, and the river rises right across Old Fordham Road.” Her enthusiasm went into her next flick on that raisin box. The Sun-Maid went spinning way up over the center of the table. Aunt Brat flinched. I put my hands over my tea mug. Sari shot up. She grabbed that box right out of the air—practically a magic trick. Raya cheered. “Aww, Sari! Awesome!” She held out her hand to take the box back, but Sari held it close to her chest.

  “Not a chance, Raya! No more hockey pucking this thing around.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because,” said Sari. “You’re going to spill something or break something, and besides, Lydia wants the box.” Then she turned to me and said softly, “Don’t you?”

  “S-sort of.” I tried to say it with a shrug. How does one admit to her friends that she wants a raisin box? But I didn’t have to say a word. Sari set the box close beside me.

  “Aw, you should have said so!” Raya told me. “I was going for a field goal—as in, football.”

  “Whatever,” said Sari. “In four more minutes you’ll forget all about it because you’ll be burning your mouth on a hot cookie.”

  Raya rubbed her hands together. “Can’t wait.”

  The smell of cooling cookies brought Elloroy out of his suite. He sat with us, coddling a mug of tea. He dunked his cookies without mentioning his impending death. His magnified eyes surveyed the room. “Isn’t this nice?” he said. “All you astonishingly young people at our table. Hasn’t happened for years.” He leaned toward me. “And now, it’s every day.”

  “When did you come here?” Sari asked. Well, there was a question.

  “Born here. In the room upstairs,” he said, pointing a finger to the ceiling below the room I slept in. “Kept warm in a cradle beside the chimney,” he added. “Of course, I left. Went to war. Went to school. Taught school.”

  I was surprised by all of this and ashamed that I had never asked. I guess I was thinking that Elloroy was rather private, slipping into his own end of the house the way he did. I guess I thought he didn’t want to be bothered. Not true. “But you came back,” I said, and he nodded.

  “My mother asked me to come home. My turn to run the farm, she said, or at least try. So I did and that went well. I always liked a little dirt under my nails.”

  “I love getting dirty,” Raya said.

  Elloroy grinned and went on. “But eventually I stopped planting. Things changed. Too hard for me alone, and too hard to find help. Last bit of business I did here was twenty-some-odd years ago. Boarded a few horses, but it dwindled and I let it.” He gave a shrug. “Time to rest the land.”

  “And your bones,” Aunt Brat added.

  “Brat and Eileen help me with that part—the resting of the bones. And now Lydia too. They’ve got this place oiled,” he said.

  “I would have worked for you,” Raya said. “Heck, I’ll work for you now. You want to grow something again? Want to board horses?”

  I thought of Eileen’s herd of goats—the tragedy of that. If they hadn’t been killed on the highway, the barns on this land would be full right now.

  “Raya, you still have to go to school,” Sari reminded her gently.

  Elloroy chuckled. “It’s enough for me to have you all at this table.” He patted the oaken surface with his big flat hand. Aunt Brat smiled at him over her shoulder.

  It was late afternoon when Aunt Brat and the dogs and I walked Raya and Sari to the bottom of Pinnacle Hill, rather than ask their moms to brave the driveway; it could be slippery. We said warm hellos. We handed waxed-paper bags full of oatmeal-raisin cookies in through the car windows. As they pulled away we waved—excessively. This was my bus stop, after all, and that’s what the women of Pinnacle Hill Farm did in this spot, every weekday morning: they waved.

  I felt teamed with Aunt Brat in this small, but somehow great, moment of seeing friends off. Finding friends had been one of the surprises—something I hadn’t thought to think about. Then again, why would I, in the midst of my mother dying? As we climbed home with the dogs, I gave a grunt. “Aunt Brat, my legs are so sore from snowshoeing!”

  “Tapped a new set of muscles, did you?” She grinned in the dusk.

  “Thank you for hosting. For the cookies and all,” I said.

  “So much fun!” she answered.

  “And hey, how great that Guffer didn’t jump up and swipe a scratch into their cars, just now.” I jabbed a thumb back toward the bus stop.

  “He was on excellent behavior,” she agreed.

  Less than a minute later, the telltale knock and rattle of Eileen’s truck alerted us to her arrival on the road below. Aunt Brat and I ushered each other and the dogs to one bank of the drive to let her by. Guffer wagged and hopped. I spoke to him softly and kept him close. Eileen made eye contact, then gunned the engine for the climb. Her round, smiling face was at the open driver’s-side window, both hands on the wheel, as she sailed by. “Huh-haw!” she called. “No place like home!”

  Aunt Brat and I laughed. Then we coughed on the exhaust. “Oh, peew-ewy!” said Aunt Brat.

  “Thank you, Eileen!” I sputtered, and giggled. I bumped shoulders with my aunt while we both fanned our noses. We waited, then loosed the dogs to let them run up to Eileen, who would without a doubt be waiting beside her truck to catch them in her arms.

  40

  A Place to Put a Foot

  There it is, Mom . . . a beginning . . . the House of the Sun-Maid Raisin Lady.

  I would not have called it art. Not yet. But I was making something. Well, altering something—namely, that raisin box. Mom�
��s favorite crafting magazine had devoted a page in every issue to “altered art” sent in by readers. Mom used to argue with that title. She’d say, “It’s not art that has been altered. It’s altering something until it becomes art.” (We’d altered photographs into goddess art.) Then she’d add, “Whatever it is, I love it.”

  I sat in my room with my back against Elloroy’s bricks. I had my art box and a mix of scavenged papers fanned out before me and a glue bottle resting on its side to keep the glop near the tip. I glued a triangle of cardboard to the top of the box so that the Sun-Maid had a roof above her head. From there, I took off, closing my eyes every so often as I tried to remember the house my mother had loved.

  What else was there, Mom? Give me a hint. . . .

  She would have told me exactness did not matter. She’d often sat in the big picture window—really in it. So I built a square-paned frame around the Sun-Maid and glued it down. I remembered shutters on that window, so I cut a pair from striped paper. I snipped leaves and flowers from an old garden catalog and layered them so that they “grew” like a flower garden right up to the sill of the window. I broke the border with a cluster of orange flowerpots at the corner of the house. I lost one pot on a Guffer breeze when he pushed his way into my room. That gave me the idea to add a spill of potting soil. Keeping it real.

  I was in such a good mood I didn’t mind when the dog chose to flop down right on top of all my paper scraps. I patted him. I reached under him. I kept cutting and gluing. Every so often, I’d stop creating to scratch the dog’s brow with one hand and hold the House of the Sun-Maid Raisin Lady up in the other. It was lopsided, in the very best way. But it needed something more—something unexpected. I rummaged through my buttons and charms, and the thing that found my fingers was the weathered old dog tag.

  “Cici Hoover,” I whispered. “She never called back.” I told this to Guffer. “We didn’t need her,” I said. “You’re a good dog. Most of the time.” I rolled the tag over in my gluey fingers. “Well, Guff, if ever there was something unexpected in my life, I guess it’s you. I was not a dog person,” I told him, “but I fell for you.” I threaded the tag onto a piece of floss and tied it to the House of the Sun-Maid Raisin Lady.