Ruby Holler Read online

  “Dallas, Florida, could you please come down here?”

  “See?” Florida said. “I bet they’re going to put us to work now. We’re probably going to have to dig a well or something.”

  Downstairs, Sairy and Tiller had laid the table with a yellow tablecloth. Spread across it was a sliced ham, warm applesauce sprinkled with cinnamon, hot corn bread, and green beans. Four places were set.

  It’s a feast, Dallas thought. For kings and queens and very important people.

  “You having company? We have to go outside now?” Florida said.

  “This is for us,” Sairy said. “For the four of us. Two of us and two of you.”

  Florida turned to Dallas. “See?” she whispered. “Hansel and Gretel. Don’t eat too much.”

  That night, Dallas fell asleep quickly and was dreaming about his favorite place: a sandy patch of earth beneath a leafy tree, with a curtain of branches dipping down all around him. It was not a place he’d ever seen, except in his dreams.

  “Dallas,” Florida called, waking him. “Don’t you get too comfy. Tomorrow is probably when we find out the yuck part of this.”

  Florida felt crabby and unsettled, as if it were her responsibility to stay on the alert. Dallas was falling under the spell of all those trees and hills, so she was going to have to be extraready. She didn’t trust this idyllic-looking place or that old couple either.

  “Dallas,” she said, waking him again. “Even if this was a paradise—which it is probably not—and even if you wanted to stay here forever, it’s not going to happen. Those people are going to get mad at us before you know it, and they’ll have us back with the putrid Trepids before you can blink. So I say we just plan on getting that night train as soon as possible, you hear me?”

  “Mm-hm,” Dallas mumbled, rolling over and returning to his tree shelter dream.

  Florida tossed and turned and eventually dreamed about lizards and rats chasing her through the woods. She was running, running toward something in the distance, but she didn’t know what it was she was running toward, and she didn’t know why she was carrying a scrunched-up cardboard box in her hands. All she knew was that she couldn’t drop the box.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE GOD

  Tiller was peering into the mirror beside the bed. “I don’t look sixty years old, do I?” he said.

  “Of course you don’t,” Sairy said.

  He smoothed his hair with his hand. “And I’m still relatively handsome?” he asked.

  “Of course you are.”

  “You know that lady who was down here last month to buy some of our carvings? That New York lady?”

  “I remember.”

  “You know what she said? She said I was a god!”

  Sairy patted Vaseline on her hands and blew out their candle. “And you believed her, you old coot,” Sairy whispered.

  Tiller glanced toward the window, at the leafy branch tapping against the panes. We should send those kids back, he thought. Sairy should come with me down the river to the Rutabago, and then I should go with her, searching for that stupid bird in Kangadoon. Maybe I’ll suggest that to Sairy in the morning. Maybe I will.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE EGG

  Dallas was in the cabin kitchen peering at framed photographs on the wall. They were like puzzles. Something in each picture matched something else in that picture, and then something in that picture matched something in a whole different picture.

  In the first photograph he examined, the men seemed to have identical noses, long and thin, and they all stood with their arms loosely folded and their heads cocked to one side. Then in the picture next to that one, there were two plump women with that same nose, standing that same way.

  Sometimes at school, when parents would meet their children at the end of the day, Dallas was startled to see how much some of the children looked like their parents. He’d look at a boy and his father standing together and think, So that’s what that father looked like when he was little, and that’s what the boy will look like when he grows up.

  “How do we know who we are?” he’d asked Florida. “How will we know what we’ll be?”

  “We’re trouble twins now and we’ll be trouble twins when we get old,” she said.

  “But what will we look like? What do you think we’ll be doing?”

  “We might be big and clumsy and stupid like we are now,” she said, “or maybe we’ll get some brains and turn into geniuses or something. How the crawly crud should I know?”

  Florida felt uneasy when Dallas asked these questions. She felt as if they had no control over what they were or where they were going or what they might become.

  “What if our mother was a big ugly mean person?” she said. “Would you want to know that? Would you want to know that you might turn into a big ugly mean person like her?”

  “She wasn’t big or ugly or mean,” Dallas said. “She was wispy, like a princess, and she was extremely smart, and she could do just about anything—she could paint and she could sing like nobody you’ve ever heard in your life and—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Florida said. “As if you knew.”

  The screen door banged behind Florida as she entered the cabin. “Dallas, look here, look what I found.” In her hand was an egg, pale blue with tiny black-and-white speckles. “Little bird egg, don’t you think?” she said.

  Dallas tapped at it. “Hold it up to the light. See if you can see anything in there.”

  Florida held it in front of the window. “Can’t see anything except a sort of dark blobby thing. Let’s keep it, Dallas. Let’s hatch it.” She raced up to the loft and put it gently under her pillow. Then she lifted the pillow and shook the egg. If I could just peek inside, she thought. She scraped one end with her fingernail. Then she cradled the egg in her hand, warming it. She squeezed it a little.

  Crack.

  Gooey stuff oozed out of the shell.

  “I didn’t mean it,” she said.

  A vague little memory popped into her head. She was little, maybe three? Sitting on someone’s kitchen floor. Smashing eggs. One by one: smash, smash, smash. All that lovely yellow goo. And there was a jar of peanut butter, too. She could see her chubby little hand spreading it into the cracks of the wooden floor. The peanut butter was smooth and dark and slid into the cracks in the floor.

  Slap, slap, slap. Someone slapping her arm. “I didn’t mean it,” Florida whimpered. Someone screaming at her. Slap, slap, slap. Stinging on her arm and face.

  Who was that slapping person? Florida wondered. One of those trouble grown-ups? One of those people who sent me and Dallas back, as if we were clothing that didn’t fit?

  In the cabin loft, she stared at the broken egg in her hand, and with one mighty toss, she hurled it against the wall. As the goo oozed slowly downward, she grabbed the pillow from her bed and flung it at the goo, and then she snatched the pillows from the other beds and threw them, one by one, against the wall.

  “Putrid egg,” she said.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE GRUMP

  Tiller still thought that Sairy—and not the kid—should come with him on the river trip, but he hadn’t been able to find a way to suggest that yet.

  Sairy had greeted him in the morning with a kiss on his cheek. “It’s so nice having those kids here, don’t you think?” She was beaming and bustling around the cabin in a way he hadn’t seen in a long time. “So much energy!” she said. “It’s contagious.”

  “Mmph,” Tiller grumbled.

  “What’s eating you?” she said, removing a tray of hot biscuits from the stove.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, quit being Mr. Grump. See if those kids are up yet. After breakfast, you and Florida can get started fixing up your dream boat for your river trip. She’s been feeling a bit grumpy, too, so you two ought to get along swell.”

  Well, he thought, maybe the kid could help me fix the boat, and then when it’s fixed, I’ll tell Sairy that she ought to com
e with me on the river. The kids could go back to Boxton.

  CHAPTER 12

  WORK

  Tiller and Florida were in the barn. “This here’s the boat,” Tiller said. “It’s in kind of sad shape, I admit. My father and I built it over forty years ago. It’s mostly a canoe, see? With this specially tailored back end, so’s we can hook a motor on it.” Tiller removed a tarp from the center of the boat. “Those seats need redoing, and that trim, and there’s a couple of leaks, and it needs a fair amount of sanding and varnishing.”

  “Wait a minute,” Florida said. “So I’ve got to rebuild this boat we’re going down the river in?”

  “We. We’re going to fix up this rickety heap. You and me.”

  “How many hundreds of years is it going to take to fix this thing?” Florida asked. “I never rebuilt a boat before.”

  “Well, I have. And it won’t take years or even months. We’re going to do it in two weeks.”

  “Two weeks? Are you in control of your brains? Oh, I get it. I’ve got to be out here day and night, hammering and sawing.” So, she thought, this is the yuck part. That settles it. We’re getting on that train tonight.

  “You only have to work when you want,” Tiller said. “You get tired or bored, you stop. How much do you think you should get—per hour?”

  “How much what?” Florida asked. “How much water?”

  “Earnings. How much money per hour?”

  “You mean to tell me you’re going to pay me to work? Like in money?”

  “Seems only fitting,” Tiller said. “How much an hour?”

  Florida looked the old man up and down. He was dressed in worn overalls, his boots were scuffed, and the shoelaces broken and knotted. “Fifty cents?” she said.

  “Fifty cents? An hour?”

  “Well, shoot, I don’t know how much,” Florida said. “Ten cents? A nickel?”

  Tiller glanced toward Sairy and Dallas on the porch. “Sairy thinks maybe five dollars would be about right,” he said.

  “An hour?” Florida said. “You mean like you’d give me five dollars for every hour I worked? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Well, squeeze my brains! I’ll be out here day and night. I won’t even stop to eat. Five dollars an hour?” She couldn’t wait to tell Dallas. In one afternoon, she’d have enough money for the two of them to hop on that night train and get out of town.

  Sairy spread books across the porch table and handed Dallas a pencil and a pad of paper. “Okay, honey,” Sairy said. “We’re going to start our lists. We’re going to need some equipment for our trip to Kangadoon.”

  “What sort of equipment?” Dallas asked.

  “Well, it says here we’re going to need backpacks and binoculars—”

  “Where do you get stuff like that? The Salvation Army?”

  Sairy leaned forward. “I was sort of hankering for new stuff.”

  “You mean like you go in a store and you buy it—new? Nobody’s used it before?”

  “That’s what I mean. Does that sound too extravagant?”

  “You’re talking brand-new stuff? For both of us?”

  “That’s right,” Sairy said.

  New stuff. Dallas couldn’t believe it. He’d never had anything new before. Well, maybe once when he and Florida were little. They’d been sent to the Hoppers, who gave them new toys, but when the twins were sent back to the Home, the Hoppers kept the toys.

  He tried to imagine new stuff, shiny and clean, with that new-stuff smell. He could almost see, in his hands, new binoculars, and he could see himself up in a tree, scanning the horizon.

  CHAPTER 13

  GRAVY

  When Tiller had paid Florida twenty dollars for the first afternoon’s work, she rushed up to the loft to show Dallas. “We could leave now,” she said. “Tonight.”

  Dallas reached under his mattress and held out another twenty dollars. “Look at this. I got paid, too. It’s a bundle—we’re rich.” He laid out all the money on the bed, smoothing the bills. “You still think they’re a couple of lunatics?”

  “To give away this kind of money?” she said. “To a couple of kids? Yep, definitely lunatics.”

  Dallas stared at the money, smoothing it and rearranging it and holding it up to the light. He thought of all the food it might buy: delicious food, sweet food, juicy and fresh food, not the bland, tasteless meals they always had at the Home.

  “So are we really leaving tonight?” Florida said. “Are we really catching that night train?”

  From down below Sairy called, “Dallas? Florida?”

  “Is that chicken I smell?” Dallas asked.

  Florida leaned over the railing. “Yep. Dumplings, too.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Dallas said. “If we got this much in one day, think how much we’d get in two days. You think we ought to stay one more day?”

  Florida watched Sairy down below. “Homemade dumplings, Dallas.” Florida slipped her money under the mattress. “I don’t see where another day with these here lunatics would hurt too much.”

  “Yeah,” Dallas said. “What’s another day going to hurt? We’ve been waiting on that freight train for thirteen years.”

  After dinner, Tiller was grumpy. “That old well, that old bucket. Wish we had plumbing.”

  “I like that old well,” Dallas said. “Want me to get the water? Show me how.”

  Outside, Tiller said, “Nothing much to it. Just hook this here rope to the handle, careful-like, and then you lower it down.”

  Dallas leaned over the well and peered down. “Kinda scary black down there,” he said. He looped the rope to the bucket handle and tossed the bucket over the edge.

  “Wait—” Tiller said, but it was too late, and the bucket had come loose from the rope, and they heard it splosh in the water below.

  “Bucket jumped off the rope,” Dallas said. “Got another bucket?”

  “On the porch,” Tiller said, “but we’re going to have to figure out how to get that other bucket out. Don’t want it rotting in the water.” He was weary. I’m too old to be teaching kids how to do stuff, he thought. I did this all before with my own kids. “Never mind,” he told Dallas. “I’ll do it myself.”

  “Well, what about that wood?” Dallas said. “You could show me how to chop it. I’d like to use that axe. It’d be just like Paul Bunyan.”

  Tiller had an image of Dallas wildly swinging the axe, maybe chopping off his foot. “Maybe tomorrow,” Tiller said.

  “How about that lantern then? Want to show me how to light that thing? It’s so cool that you don’t have real lights and stuff. It’s like pioneers.”

  Tiller envisioned Dallas knocking over the lantern, setting the whole cabin on fire. “Maybe tomorrow,” Tiller said.

  “Uh-huh,” Dallas mumbled, as if he didn’t believe Tiller. Dallas kicked at a rock near his feet, and then he turned and ran toward the creek.

  Sairy stepped off the porch. “Tiller, what are you doing? That boy just wants to learn how to do stuff. What’s the matter with you lately?”

  “I don’t know,” Tiller said. “I’m feeling crotchety. I want those blasted kids to leave and for us to get back to our life, and why don’t you come on the river with me, and then I’ll go with you in search of that bird thing in Kangadoon?”

  Sairy placed her hand on Tiller’s shoulder. “Look, Mr. Crotchety, I don’t really have any desire to paddle my arms off, and you don’t have any desire whatsoever to go bird searching with me. Admit it. And I know it’s not easy for you, suddenly having kids in the house again, but I think we ought to give it a few more days, see how things work out. Now, go inside and eat some cake and quit being so grumbly.” She patted his cheek. “And maybe you’d better give some of that cake to Florida, too.”

  The next morning, in the barn, Tiller said, “Florida, you have a … a … way with wood.”

  “A bad way, right?” Florida asked. “I mucked it up, didn’t
I?”

  “No,” he said. “I meant that you seem to have a certain idea about how you want to do that trim. It’s not how I’d do it, but—”

  “I knew it. It’s stupid.”

  “Not stupid, just different.” He’d had to restrain himself from redoing the parts she’d already done. She hammered nails so hard that the wood was dented and bashed. The varnish dripped in globs down the side.

  “I gopped up that first piece though,” Florida said. “Remember?”

  “Mm,” Tiller said.

  “And what about that can of varnish?” she said. “The one I spilled? I don’t think any master goes around spilling goop and then stepping in it and then getting it in her hair and then—”

  “You know what I did once?” Tiller said. “My daddy told me to paint the barn. Red paint. Very bright red paint. And this old mangy cat kept crawling around my legs, getting in my way, and so I just dabbed a little red paint on its ears, and then it went bonkers and scratched my arm up one side and down the other, and then I dipped that brush back in the paint and flung a whole gob of it at that cat, but the cat got out of the way, and instead I splattered the chicken, and the chicken came after me, pecking and pecking, and I dipped my brush back in and went after the chicken, but the chicken got away and instead I hit the pig and then—well, you get the picture? Pretty soon the whole barnyard was splattered with red paint, and all of the animals were in a frenzy, and my pa came out wanting to know what the devil was going on and—”

  “I bet you got a hiding,” Florida said. “I bet you got whupped up one side and down the other.”

  “Well, no,” Tiller said. “That wasn’t my pa’s way.”

  “It wasn’t? You mean he didn’t tear you limb from limb and throw you down in the spidery cellar?”

  “Nope. What he did was sit there on the fence, with a piece of straw in his mouth, and he said, ‘I seen a red cat running through the yard. You see that?’