Ruby Holler

  SHARON CREECH

  Ruby

  Holler

  Dedication

  For the “J” Team:

  Joanna Cotler

  Justin Chanda

  Jessica Shulsinger

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1 The Silver Bird

  2 The Boxton Creek Home

  3 Ruby Holler

  4 Mush

  5 Thinking Corners

  6 The Opportunity

  7 Doubts

  8 Hansel and Gretel

  9 The God

  10 The Egg

  11 The Grump

  12 Work

  13 Gravy

  14 Wood

  15 Conversations in the Night

  16 The Axe

  17 The Rocker

  18 The Trepids

  19 Understone Funds

  20 Through the Holler

  21 Lost and Found

  22 A Trip to Boxton

  23 Ready

  24 Tiller and Sairy

  25 The Holler at Night

  26 Shack Talk

  27 Trials

  28 Mrs. Trepid

  29 Decisions

  30 Nightmares

  31 Medicine

  32 Paddling and Hiking

  33 Z’s Report

  34 Bearings

  35 Stiff

  36 A Long Chain

  37 Word Pictures

  38 Surveying

  39 The Worrywarts

  40 Babies in the Box

  41 Shopping

  42 Dorkhead

  43 Loops

  44 Progress

  45 The Rock

  46 Stones in the Holler

  47 Running

  48 More Shopping

  49 Underwater

  50 The Feeling

  51 Z

  52 The One-Log Raft

  53 The Dunces

  54 Slow Motion

  55 On the Road

  56 On the River

  57 The Soggy Heart

  58 Preparations

  59 Investments

  60 Hospital Talk

  61 Mr. Trepid’s Adventure

  62 Jewels

  63 Mission-Accomplished Cake

  64 Appraisals

  65 Conversations in the Night

  66 Dreams

  Excerpt from The Great Unexpected

  Prologue

  1 A Body Falls from a Tree

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  Back Ads

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER 1

  THE SILVER BIRD

  Dallas leaned far out of the window, his eyes fixed on a bird flying lazily in the distance. Sun slanted through the clouds above, as if a spotlight were aimed on the bird.

  A silver bird, Dallas thought. A magical silver bird.

  The bird turned suddenly, veering south over the small town of Boxton, toward the faded yellow building and the window from which Dallas leaned. Dallas stretched his arm out. “Here!” he called. “Over here!”

  The bird swooped toward him and then rose up over the building, high, high into the air, over the alley and the train tracks and the dried-up creek. Dallas watched it rise on the air currents over one brown hill and then another, until it disappeared.

  He tried to follow it in his mind. He imagined it flying on until it spied a narrow green valley, a scooped-out basin with a creek looping and winding its way through the center. He pictured it swooping down from the sky into this basin in the hills, to this place where cool breezes drifted through the trees, and where the creek was so clear that every stone on its bottom was visible.

  Maybe the silver bird had flown home.

  “Get out of that window!” a voice shouted from below. “No leaning out of windows!”

  Dallas leaned a little farther out and called down to Mr. Trepid. “Did you see that silver bird?”

  “Get out of that window, or you’re going to join your sister down here pulling weeds,” Mr. Trepid threatened.

  Dallas spotted his sister, Florida, inching her way along the sidewalk, wrenching clumps of weeds and grass and dirt from the ground.

  “Putrid weeds,” Florida snarled, heaving a clod of dirt over her shoulder.

  Dallas watched as the clod landed on Mr. Trepid’s back and as the man scuttled over to Florida and whacked her on the head. Dallas wished the silver bird would return and snare Mr. Trepid and carry him high up over the town and then drop him, splat, in the middle.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE BOXTON CREEK HOME

  Boxton was a tired town, a neglected place that looked as if it was in danger of collapsing in on itself. A tangle of old homes and shacks clustered around small stores and buildings that had seen better days. One of these buildings was the Boxton Creek Home for Children, a ramshackle house that tilted toward the train tracks and hills beyond. In this building lived the bungling managers, Mr. and Mrs. Trepid; their assistant, Morgan; and thirteen children, ranging in age from six months to thirteen years.

  The two oldest children in the Boxton Creek Home were twins, Dallas and Florida. They were tall for their age, dark-haired and dark-eyed, with sturdy frames and a rough-edged and unkempt look about them. Dallas was the quieter of the two and the one more inclined to daydreaming, while Florida was loud and squirmy, with her mouth full of words bursting out, and her face full of expression, flashing from surprise to disgust in an instant.

  The managers of the Home, Mr. and Mrs. Trepid, were middle-aged, cranky and tired, and growing stiff and cold as winter-bound trees. They believed in rules, and their rules were posted on doorways and in hallways and above each child’s bed. There were general rules and kitchen rules, bathroom rules and stairway rules, basement rules and outside rules, upstairs rules and downstairs rules, clothing rules, washing rules, cleaning rules, rules upon rules upon rules.

  “If we didn’t have rules,” Mr. Trepid liked to say,“everything would be chaos.”

  “If we didn’t have rules,” his wife would say, “these children would eat us alive.”

  Since Dallas and Florida had lived in the Boxton Creek Home longer than any of the other children there, they knew all the rules. They also knew the punishments for disobeying the rules, and they knew them well, because they had broken every rule in the Boxton Creek Home. Many times.

  “How can we live every day of our lives without running or shouting or throwing or talking or dropping or spilling?” Dallas had once asked Mr. Trepid.

  “Thinking Corner. Two hours,” was Mr. Trepid’s reply.

  As he sat in the dark corner of the basement, Dallas imagined a broad field rimmed with trees, and in that imaginary field he ran and shouted and threw sticks and mud, and when he was tired, he lay down in the green grass and felt himself getting smaller and smaller until he was a little baby lying in the grass, and someone with a sweet face leaned down and wrapped him in a white blanket.

  When Florida was caught breaking one of the rules, she was more likely to argue and, as a result, to earn extra punishments. She could not sit still, could not walk when her feet wanted to run, and so on a fairly regular basis, she’d be running down the hall and Mrs. Trepid’s long skinny arm would dart out from a doorway, snare Florida, and lead her to the nearest copy of The Rules.

  “What does that say?” Mrs. Trepid demanded.

  Florida squinted at the sign. “‘No stupid running.’”

  “It does not say that,” Mrs. Trepid said, urging Florida’s face closer to the sign. “Read it again.”

  “No stinking stupid running.”

  “Down to the basement. Two hours in the Thinking Corner.”

  “That’s stupid.”

&nb
sp; “Followed by two hours of floor scrubbing.”

  “Putrid.”

  “Followed by two hours of weed pulling.”

  Dallas and Florida had racked up hundreds of hours in the Thinking Corner, the damp, dark, cobwebbed corner of the basement. They had worn the scratchy I’ve Been Bad shirts, shoveled manure, crawled across acres of fields pulling weeds. They had also peeled potatoes, scrubbed pots and floors, washed windows, and hauled boxes and broken furniture.

  “Good hard thinking and good hard work never hurt anybody,” Mr. Trepid would say. Mr. Trepid, who was a short, squat man with an awkward walk like a crab scuttling across the ocean floor, did not particularly like thinking or working himself, but he firmly believed that these were good things for children.

  The Home was a misfit operation, lost over the years in a larger system. Funds dribbled in, but social workers no longer came to check on the children; health workers and building inspectors no longer came to inspect the building. There was no longer a doctor on staff, or secretarial help. It was run solely by the Trepids, with the help of their overworked assistant, Morgan, who referred to herself as Chief Gopher.

  Still, the Boxton Creek Home was as much a home as Dallas and Florida knew. On the front of the building, faded yellow paint curled in strips, like peeling skin. Behind the main building, a string of smaller cubes had been added in a crooked path out the back. Dallas thought it looked like a string of mismatched boxcars laid end to end, and Florida thought it looked like a dragon, with its huge mouth at the front door, waiting to swallow up children who entered it.

  When children first came to the Boxton Creek Home, they stayed in one of the bigger rooms in front. But gradually, as the months and years went by, if they’d not been placed elsewhere, they were shunted farther and farther back, to the dark, low-ceilinged, airless rooms at the tail of the house.

  “Rotation,” Mr. Trepid called it. “Rotation!”

  Children came and went. Some were taken in by foster families or adopted. A few ran away but were inevitably returned. One died in his bed, whispering, “Who am I? Who am I?” And although Mr. and Mrs. Trepid had tried their best to move Dallas and Florida out (or rather, as Mrs. Trepid explained it to them, “to find you a lovely home”), the twins were always brought back to the big front door by exasperated adults.

  “Trouble twins,” these exasperated adults would say. “Nothing but trouble.”

  In turn, Dallas and Florida had come to think of most adults as trouble grown-ups, for that had been their experience, that most grown-ups they’d encountered were short-tempered, impatient, and quick to punish. They had no way of knowing that there were foster parents and adopting parents who were kind and loving and generous and forgiving. In the narrow world of Dallas and Florida, an adult was someone to escape.

  Over the years, Dallas and Florida had been squeezed toward the back of the Boxton Creek Home until they’d come to the end of it, where two cubicles huddled side by side. In each was a narrow, lumpy bed, a slim dresser rammed up close to the bed, and a closet. A single bare bulb dangled from each ceiling.

  At night, Dallas and Florida listened to the wail of freight trains making their way through Boxton and on to … to where? To other places, far and wide. To beautiful places. Peaceful ones. Friendly ones.

  Dallas and Florida had a plan. They would not be in the Boxton Creek Home forever. They were going to jump on the night freight train and ride out of town. Soon.

  CHAPTER 3

  RUBY HOLLER

  Twenty miles from Boxton was Ruby Holler, a lush, green hidden valley with only two cabins nestled in its depths. The cabin at the far end was inhabited by a man who lived on his own and who kept to himself. In the cabin in the middle of the holler lived a sixty-year-old man and his wife.

  One warm morning in June, the man and his wife sat on their porch swing.

  “Same old view,” the man grumbled. “Same old sagging porch. Same old creaky swing.”

  “You’re pretty grouchy this morning,” said his wife.

  “I’m tired of hauling water and chopping wood.”

  “Do you think people are right, then?” his wife asked. “Should we move? Get a condo somewhere? Have electricity and heat and a washing machine and one of those air conditioner things?”

  Her husband nodded. “And a television, maybe. And a garage with one of those automatic doors.”

  “That sure would be different,” his wife said.

  “It sure would,” the man agreed.

  A small gray bird swooped down from the sky and landed on the porch railing. It cocked its head at the couple, as if it were listening to them.

  CHAPTER 4

  MUSH

  Dallas and Florida sat at their usual places in the far corner of the narrow dining room in the Boxton Creek Home. They were not allowed to sit on the long benches with the other children, because the Trepids didn’t want the other children to learn any bad habits from Florida and Dallas. The Trepids would have preferred Dallas and Florida to be meek and cowed, like the others.

  Florida poked at the mush on her plate. “Do you think there’s any real food in this glop?”

  “Might be,” Dallas said. “I think I spy a piece of meat stuff.” He tentatively stabbed the chunk of meat, imagining that it was steak, the juiciest, best steak in the world.

  “Well, I think it’s chopped-up cardboard,” Florida said, “and ground tree bark with a dash of hog’s blood thrown in for color.”

  She caught the eye of the new girl on the end of the long bench and waved at her.

  “Uh-oh,” Dallas said, as he spotted Mr. Trepid slipping up behind Florida.

  “Ow,” Florida said. “What’re you whacking my head for?”

  “Keep your hands to yourself,” Mr. Trepid ordered.

  Dallas stared at Mr. Trepid ’s gold tooth. He imagined himself as a dentist, removing that gold tooth, pocketing it, and refitting Mr. Trepid with something else, maybe something red, maybe plastic, shaped like a fang.

  “My hands are to myself,” Florida told Mr. Trepid. “Look, see how they’re attached to my arms. Quit whacking me on the head.”

  “I will quit whacking you on the head when you put your hands in your lap, where they’re supposed to be.”

  Florida placed her hands in her lap, and when Mr. Trepid moved away, Dallas said, “How are you going to eat, with your hands in your lap?”

  Florida leaned forward and lapped at the mush with her tongue.

  Mr. Trepid returned in a flash.

  “My hands are in my lap.”

  “Eat with your fork,” Mr. Trepid ordered.

  “Well, how am I supposed to do that if my hands are in my lap?” Florida said.

  Dallas was eyeing his plate, trying not to move a muscle. If he laughed, Mr. Trepid would smack him.

  The new girl was staring at Florida and Mr. Trepid. “Does he do that to everybody?” she whispered to the boy next to her.

  The boy looked terrified. With one hand, he covered his mouth, and with the other, he gestured at the rules posted on the wall. The first rule in the dining room was No Talking.

  At seven thirty, the buzzer sounded. Dallas washed the last pan and tossed it on the shelf. “To the palace,” he said.

  Florida raced down the hall. “To the grimy dark dungeon of the decrepit palace.”

  “Quit that running. Quit that shouting,” Mrs. Trepid yelled. “Get in your rooms.”

  Down the hall they ran, zipping in and out of other children’s rooms. The other children laughed at Dallas and Florida, but quickly closed their doors after they’d passed. Laughing at Dallas and Florida was a serious offense, in the eyes of the Trepids.

  Once inside their rooms, Dallas and Florida each pried up a loose floorboard and deposited their takings from the kitchen: one nearly whole piece of bread and one raw potato each. It was always good to know that there was something under the boards, something to stave off hunger in the night.

  Later that night, Fl
orida tossed and turned. She dreamed about the Hoppers and then woke up, mad at herself for letting the Hoppers into her dreams and now into her waking thoughts.

  She and Dallas were five years old when they were sent to the Hoppers. For the first few days, they thought they’d landed in heaven. They had their own room, and every day the Hoppers gave them a new toy. But then Mrs. Hopper started getting headaches and kept asking them to be quiet and not to touch things. Dallas and Florida tried to be quiet and they tried not to touch things, but sometimes they forgot.

  One day, Florida picked up a ten-dollar bill that was lying on the kitchen counter. She was studying the pictures on it when Mr. Hopper snatched it from her and slapped her arm. “Don’t you ever steal from me, you hear?”

  He looked very mean, way up there glaring down at her. Her insides felt jumbled and queasy.

  She started noticing little piles of money everywhere. A pile of bills on the kitchen table. A few more on the bookcase. A jar full of quarters. She wasn’t ever going to touch their money, ever.

  One day, she came downstairs and saw Dallas sitting on the living room floor, with the jar of quarters in front of him. His hand was dipped way inside and he was swirling the quarters around.