Autumn Street

by Lois Lowry

  "What're you going to do with it?" Please, God, I was thinking, don't let Charles want to be blood brothers with me. Pulling down our pants was enough. I don't want to cut myself with that knife, not even to be blood brothers with Charles.

  "I dunno. We could go up to the woods and stab them turtles."

  "No."

  "Elizabeth, sometime we got to go."

  "No. Maybe sometime. Not yet."

  "Well," said Charles, "we could scare Ferdie Gossett."

  "Who?" Why did Charles know about so many things, so many people, that I didn't know about?

  "You never seen Ferdie Gossett? That crazy guy who walks around town talking to hisself?"

  I shook my head. "I'm not allowed to go away from this block."

  Charles sighed, and we both were silent, thinking. Everything worth stabbing or scaring was too far from Grandfather's house.

  Except Noah Hoffman.

  "Charles," I whispered, "we could scare Noah Hoffman."

  Charles brightened. I was scared, myself, for having thought of it, but pleased that the idea appealed to Charles.

  "Yeah," he said. "First we scare him. Then we stab him."

  I cringed. "Not stab him, Charles. Not kill him."

  "I didn't mean kill him, stupid. Just stab him a little bitty ole wound. Maybe in his leg or something. Remember what he done to that cat?"

  I shuddered. A little bitty ole wound would serve Noah Hoffman right. Charles and I had watched him when he killed the cat. We had done nothing, had not known what to do.

  "You and me, Charles," I said guiltily, "we're really no-account."

  "Yeah," grinned Charles, putting the knife into his pocket. "But Noah Hoffman, he's the no-accountest of all. Let's go look crost the hedge and see what he's doing."

  ***

  Noah and Nathaniel Hoffman, who lived in the house next door to Grandfather's, were twins. They were the only twins I had ever known, and the circumstances of their birth intrigued me in the strange, secret way that birth intrigues all children. "They grew together in their mother's stomach," my own mother had told me, when I had asked how two brothers could both be seven years old at once and why they looked so alike. It had been before my brother's birth; Mama's stomach at the time was so overwhelmingly large with what she assured me was only one baby that I didn't see how it could be possible to have two at once. And Mrs. Hoffman was smaller than Mama had ever been: a tiny, thin woman with the nervous mannerisms of a bird. I looked at her stomach, flat behind her flowered housedress, and pictured Noah and Nathaniel both inside like a wooden key-ring puzzle I had once had: entwined, interlocked, separated by someone who knew the secret.

  As was true of Jess and me, and Charles, there was no father at the Hoffmans' house. There had been one, once. But he had not gone to the war. He had simply disappeared, sometime during the night, while Mrs. Hoffman and the twins were sleeping. Nathaniel told Charles and me that one afternoon when he visited us shyly in Grandfather's yard.

  "Our daddy just went away," he said, "and we didn't ever see him again. He left a note."

  Later, from the hallway's shadows where I frequently hid and listened to grownup conversation, I heard Mama discuss the Hoffmans with my grandparents.

  "I was talking to Margaret Hoffman today," Mama said, "and she told me that she's taking one of the twins to a psychiatrist in Harrisburg."

  Grandmother sniffed. I didn't know what a psychiatrist was, but Grandmother's sniff indicated that it was something tasteless, something in the same category as Baptists, comic books, or lipstick.

  "And the psychiatrist told her," Mama went on, "that the reason Noah is having so many problems is partly because of being a twin, and partly because of the father leaving."

  "Hugo Hoffman was German," said Grandmother meaningfully.

  "Yes, well, that may be. But it must be very difficult for a little boy to have an identical twin brother, and no other male relatives around."

  "The father simply disappeared, at the beginning of the war," said Grandmother. "He was German."

  "I believe he was second generation," said Grandfather quietly from the blue wing chair, "and that there was, ah, another woman involved."

  "German is German," said Grandmother. And sniffed again.

  I told Jessica later what I had heard Mama say. She raised her eyebrows briefly. "I'm not going to play with them anyway," Jess said. "I don't like boys. And especially I don't like Noah."

  "Are you scared of him?"

  "A seven-year-old? Of course not. I just don't like him."

  I was afraid of Noah. So was Charles, though he said he wasn't. But Charles and I had watched Noah kill the cat.

  Noah and Nathaniel looked spookily alike: tall for their age, thin, and blond. But it was easy to tell them apart. Noah never looked at you. His eyes darted back and forth. And he was never still. He moved constantly, tapping his feet, fluttering his fingers. He fell, and never cried; he broke things, and didn't care. He caused bad things to happen.

  I had been in their yard one day in the spring when Noah smashed a rotten log with his fist. It crumbled, revealing swarms of lethargic yellow jackets. Dislodged, they began to hum and move. Some flew toward Noah and attached themselves to his jacket and pants. He ran to the back porch, and called his mother, and Mrs. Hoffman quickly pulled off his clothes and took him inside.

  But he was unstung. I could hear through the open window that he was playing in his room.

  And on the porch, slowly, the yellow jackets came out of his discarded clothes. Nathaniel had been sitting there all along, by the wicker chairs, playing quietly with a train he had made from oatmeal boxes; suddenly he looked up, startled, and began to cry. The bees were on his face.

  The next day Noah announced, in an odd, triumphant fashion, "Look at my brother." Nathaniel's eyes were swollen closed, and he looked like the stretched face on a squeezed balloon. Even distorted as he was, he still looked gentle and puzzled, as always, while Noah taunted and jeered.

  Later, when it was warmer and we could leave our jackets at home, I saw Nathaniel's scar for the first time. It was like a vaccination on his lower arm: perfectly round, deep pink, and formed of concentric circles, smaller and smaller until the center of the scar was just a pink dot.

  "Noah did it," Nathaniel told me, in his soft, questioning voice, when I asked what it was. "He held the cigarette lighter from the car on my arm."

  So there was good reason to be frightened of Noah, even before he killed the cat.

  I didn't go through the hedge into their yard any more by late spring. Nathaniel's scar scared me; but more than that, Noah had begun to seem more and more malevolent as the weather became warmer. If he saw me at the hedge, where I sometimes stood, lonely in Grandfather's yard, he lunged at me without warning, using his mother's clothespole as a lance. Behind him, Mrs. Hoffman's wash would fall and drag ignobly on the hard brown grass.

  But Charles and I were accomplished at hiding. We watched the Hoffman boys often from hidden places in the hedge or along the fence. We saw Noah one evening after supper, alone in his yard, tease the cat, Pixie, until she playfully leapt into his lap. Then we watched as he carefully twisted her neck with his small hands until she was limp. He left her there by his wagon when his mother called him in for his bath.

  We never told anyone. In the morning, when Nathaniel called solemnly through the hedge to me, "Pixie is dead," I called back words of sympathy and felt hate form in a hard knot beside fear. Later Jess, Charles, and I went into Hoffman's yard to attend the funeral of the cat. Noah had dug the grave with his shovel. We all stood at attention while he lowered Pixie in her shoebox casket, covered the grave with earth, and planted a little American flag on the top. Nathaniel held Jess' hand tightly and wept.

  So when Charles found the knife and suggested a little bitty ole wound for Noah Hoffman, it seemed profoundly just to us both. We stood on Grandfather's back porch and watched over the hedge. But the Hoffmans' house was unusually still.
>
  We played in Grandfather's yard all afternoon. Beside the garage we carefully cut a worm in half with the knife. If you cut a worm in half, Charles told me, each half would grow into a whole worm. Ours didn't, though we waited, watching it, for quite a long time. Maybe, we decided, it could only do it underground; so we each buried half a worm.

  Then we built, in the dirt, a racecourse for ants. We each got a cookie from Tatie, scattered cookie crumbs around the dusty oval of our racetrack, and we knelt and munched chocolate chip cookies and watched ants industriously dealing with the crumbs. The sun was fiercely hot. Above the tin roof of the Hoffmans' garage, when we looked through the hedge to their yard, the air seemed to shimmer and move.

  Finally one of the twins came out of the house, carrying a comic book, and sat down on the steps of his back porch.

  Charles fingered his pocket where the knife was. "That him?" he asked me. "That Noah?"

  I looked carefully. The twins' short-trimmed haircuts were identical. They each had freckles across their cheeks. But the boy on the steps was sitting still, only his mouth moving silently as he sounded out words to himself, reading the newest Captain Marvel. His fingers weren't fluttering. His feet were motionless.

  "No," I said. "That's Nathaniel."

  Charles sighed. We waited. But Noah did not appear. Nathaniel came to the end of his comic and read the Charles Atlas advertisement on the back cover.

  "Hi, Nathaniel," I called finally, through the hedge.

  He looked up and smiled. "Hi," he called back. "Noah's sick!"

  "Oh."

  "He has a temperature of a hundred and four."

  "Oh."

  "It went almost to the top of the thermometer," Nathaniel said in an awed voice. "The doctor came last night."

  It was almost startling to hear Nathaniel talk. When Noah was with him in the yard, Nathaniel barely spoke at all.

  "You want to come over and play?" he called.

  "Can Charles come?"

  "Yeah, bring Charles. You can help me feed the ducks."

  The ducks! Charles and I looked at each other with delight.

  The Hoffman twins had been given baby ducks for Easter. My envy had reached heights almost to the point of physical pain when I had stood on the back porch, looked over the hedge, and seen the two tinted ducks—pink and green—waddling in the grass.

  "Outrageous," Grandmother had said, when she saw them. I had nodded mutely. But when Grandmother went inside, I stayed on the porch and watched; and I wanted a bright-colored duck who would follow me, quacking jauntily, with all my heart. I wanted a little duck more than I wanted a kitten, which had already been refused me; certainly more than I wanted a turtle, which would grow massive and flee to lurk in the woods, hungry for flesh; and I would even, given the opportunity, have traded my mother's then-unborn baby for a small, fluffy, garishly dyed creature that would walk on little webbed feet like a wind-up toy, the way the Hoffmans' ducklings did.

  The twins named them Donald and Daisy. They set up an old canvas wading pool, and the ducks floated forlornly on top of the shallow water from the garden hose. They grew larger, louder, more demanding, and less attractive. Their dyed feathers grew out, and were streaked at the ends with pink and green; closer to their bodies, they were thick and white: real duck feathers. I thought them beautiful. I thought their loyalty, as they waddled behind the twins in squat postures of devotion, a heroic, humbling thing.

  But my heart went out to Donald Duck. Donald was Noah's; and my heart went out to him from behind the hedge in throbs of sorrow and despair. Noah had devised a game. He had wanted, from the beginning, to leash Donald, and had tried an old dog collar and leash, but the duck's head was too small. Donald slipped loose from any device that Noah concocted. Noah kicked him, sometimes, in anger and frustration, the way I had often seen him kick Pixie. But Donald was stupid, dependent, and humbly submissive; he refused the collar but followed Noah still, walking flat-footedly behind him around the Hoffmans' yard. A leash on a duck that loyal, it seemed to me, was unnecessary. But Noah kept trying.

  Finally he found a bizarre method that worked. He discovered that if he fed Donald something of which he was particularly fond, like rye bread, and tied a thread around the bread first, Donald would swallow the thread as well. Then Noah; triumphantly holding the other end of the thread, would lead Donald, gagging and choking, around the yard, dragging him faster and faster as the duck tried, on his short legs and clumsy webbed feet, to keep up. Eventually the thread would break. Then Noah would begin tying up the next piece of rye bread.

  Nathaniel timidly pleaded with him to stop. He tried to bribe him with promises of new, unread, unrumpled comic books. For my part, behind the unwieldy and protective hedge, I tried prayer. I cried, silently, watching poor Donald fluttering frantically at the end of the taut, diabolical leash. But Noah continued the game. It made him laugh.

  And now Noah was sick, and Charles and I were invited into the Hoffmans' yard to help feed the ducks. Maybe, I thought, pushing through the hedge happily, prayer works after all.

  Donald waddled into my lap as I sat on the ground, and I fed him little pieces of bread to which I had attached no threaded traps; and he fluttered and settled down and peed warm onto my leg. I felt the stubby grass under me and the sunshine on my face, and I was blissful, knowing that Noah was upstairs with a temperature of a hundred and four.

  "When you think Noah gonna get better?" asked Charles, patting the pink-and-white back of Daisy gingerly. I knew he was thinking of the little knife in his pocket. But the knife didn't matter to me now. I prayed silently that Noah would not get well. Not yet, anyway.

  Nathaniel shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe tomorrow."

  Charles looked gloomy. He had to go home that evening.

  The next day, Noah was worse. I went alone into the Hoffmans' yard where Nathaniel was sitting again on the porch steps.

  "His temperature is a hundred and six," Nathaniel said, with a kind of wonder. "The doctor came again. Noah sees things that aren't there—faces on the ceiling—and my mother had to stay up all night, rubbing him with alcohol.

  "He has pneumonia," Nathaniel added.

  "Noah pneumonia," I repeated dreamily, liking the sound. "Noah pneumonia."

  We got the ducks out of their pen, sat on the grass, and stroked the mottled feathered backs. "Which one do you think can swim faster?" I asked.

  "Daisy," said Nathaniel with satisfaction.

  "I bet Donald can," I said. I was already thinking of Donald as mine. "You want to have a duck race?"

  Mrs. Hoffman appeared on the back porch. She looked tense, tired, and distracted. "Noah's asleep," she said to us. "I have to go to the drugstore to get some more medicine. Is your mother home, Elizabeth?"

  "Yes. She's feeding the baby."

  She stood there indecisively, holding some prescriptions in her hand. Finally she said, "I'll only be gone about fifteen minutes. If you children hear Noah wake up"—she looked up toward his bedroom window, open to the sunshine—"would you go up and give him some sips of ginger ale?"

  Nathaniel and I nodded.

  "Don't let him cry."

  We nodded again. It seemed a crazy injunction, not to let Noah cry. Noah never cried. He made Nathaniel cry. He had made me cry. But Noah never cried.

  "I'll be right back," she said, and disappeared.

  "Let's have a duck race across the wading pool," I said, after she had gone.

  We put the ducks in one at a time, again and again, holding bread to them from the opposite side of the pool and timing their brief swims. The timing was erratic; we had no stopwatch, not even an ordinary wristwatch. We called out numbers from one to ten as they swam. Each of us cheated, speeding the count for our own duck.

  Upstairs, Noah began to cry. We could hear the sound through the open window, through the heat-laden air of the yard.

  I concentrated on the duck race, whispering instructions to Donald—my duck, Donald—as he quacked resdessly besi
de me, waiting for his turn. It occurred to me in some corner of my consciousness that the crying did not sound like Noah.

  Noah's voice had always been deep, uncommonly so for a small boy. Now, his cry was a high, fearful wail, ending in sobs before it took itself upward again to that curious high pitch unlike his voice. It was mingled with unintelligible words: choked, wet, and panicky, that came at the end of the sobs. It was a sequence, a litany: wail, sob, words, and then the wail again.

  "Noah's crying," said Nathaniel nervously. He put his duck, out of turn, into the pool, and began to count loudly, "ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE" as the pink-splotched creature swam to the opposite side.

  "Watch mine," I insisted, and thrust my duck into the water. "ONE TWO THREE..."

  We put our ducks in out of order, forgetting, ignoring all the rules we had made, put them both in together, tearing off scraps of bread, racing back and forth between the low sides of the pool, capturing the ducks, flinging them back in, counting, counting, so that we were reciting the numbers together, louder and louder; and it didn't matter who won, who lost, as long as we didn't hear the sound that came from the window of Noah's room.

  It's not my brother, I found myself thinking.

  And: I hate Noah anyway.

  In the end, Nathaniel and I lay laughing, exhausted from the frenzied counting, on the damp grass, with the ducks fluttering their feathers fastidiously to dry them, and we declared them both winners; and upstairs the crying had stopped.

  It was the next day that Noah died. By then he was in the hospital, taken there during the night. Frightened, I hid in the shadows of Grandfather's house and listened to the grownups talking.

  "The doctor told Margaret Hoffman that nothing could have saved him, he knew that from the night he was delirious and saw the faces on the ceiling," my mother said in a low voice to my grandparents.

  "A tragedy," said Grandfather from the blue wing chair.

  "Dreadful," said Grandmother. "But we must remember, too, that he was a dreadful child."