Wednesday was a beautiful day. The kind of day that is so clear that there is a blue edge to everything. The sun shining on the breakfast table turned the honey into such dazzling gold that one could hardly look at it. It even tasted golden. It tasted of summertime and sun and clover. It was a lovely thing to eat.
Mona kept yawning and staring out the window. She had a rose stuck in her hair, and it looked pretty.
“This is a special day,” she said. “People ought to use it only for doing special things. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going up into the tree house and write a play; and after that I’m going to bake an angel cake without anyone helping me, and after that—well, I’ll probably wash my hair.”
“Building up to an anticlimax, all right,” said Rush. “Randy and I really are going to do something special but it’s a secret. What are you going to do, Oliver?”
“Fish,” replied Oliver, scraping his egg.
“Need you ask?” Mona said. “He hasn’t done anything else for the last ten days. But I suppose fishing is still the most important thing he knows about.”
After breakfast Randy and Rush made a picnic lunch. Rush’s sandwiches were massive untidy things, drippy with mayonnaise, and with pieces of lettuce hanging out like fringe, but Randy always preferred them to her own. They stuffed hard-boiled eggs, and took some milk in a thermos bottle. More than enough of everything for three people.
They rode recklessly down the road on their bicycles. The morning-lighted valley streamed past them, glittering, blazing with dew, alive with the sound of birds. Rush coasted down a hill with his arms folded and his feet on the handlebars; heaven knows why he didn’t break his neck. Randy did nothing so dangerous; she had her mind on the picnic lunch in her basket. She was singing at the top of her lungs:
“Speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing
Over the sea to Skye!”
Oh, what a day! Randy had the feeling that if she just concentrated and pumped hard enough, her bicycle would take off, leave the earth entirely, and go soaring up into that dazzling sky. All too soon they came to Oren Meeker’s crooked mailbox. It was in shadow; the trees hung still above the road, and suddenly they heard no birds.
Randy got off her bicycle. “It’s kind of scary,” she said, just as she had the first time they went up this road.
“Maybe it’s because we know what kind of person lives here,” Rush said.
They were quiet, wheeling their bikes up the hilly road. Wet timothy slapped against their overalled legs, and their sneakers were dark with dew, and sprinkled with grass pollen.
“I hope he’s gone,” Randy remarked nervously.
“Mental telepathy,” said Rush. “I was just hoping the same thing.”
“Maybe we ought to kind of hide in the bushes for a little while,” suggested Randy, in a cowardly way. “One of us could go and reconnoiter.” Rush gave her a cold, sideways look. “You mean I could go and reconnoiter. Thank you, no. Don’t be a sissy, Miranda.”
“Why, I’m not being a sissy,” said Randy untruthfully. “I’m only being, you know, practical.”
But it was all right, after all. They came up over the hill at last, and there lay Meeker’s farm, desolate as ever, with no one in sight except Mark, who was cutting down yellow dock with a sickle.
As before, the great dogs sprang up from nowhere, and came flying toward them, all teeth and matted fur. Randy cowered behind Rush, who, if he did not cower, at least shielded himself behind his bike.
Mark shouted at the dogs, and they gave up the chase reluctantly; still sniffing at the Melendys and growling soft, crooning growls low down in their throats.
“Gee, I was afraid maybe you couldn’t come,” said Mark, flinging down the sickle and coming toward them smiling with delight.
“Has—uh—has Mr. Meeker gone?” Randy couldn’t help asking.
“Oh, sure, ’bout an hour ago he went. Don’t you worry; he won’t be home till after dark.”
“My sister is something of a sissy,” Rush explained. “She’s okay in other ways, though.”
“What would you folks like to do first?” asked Mark, falling easily into the role of host.
“Arrowheads!” said Rush.
“Quarry!” said Randy.
“Why not both?” offered Mark. “You kids got your bathing suits?”
“Certainly,” said Randy. “Right in my handlebar basket under the lunch. Lunch for all of us,” she added hastily.
“You didn’t need to bother about me.” Mark looked proud. “Some days I don’t even bother to eat dinner at all. I forget about it.”
“Well, you shouldn’t. Not while you’re growing,” said Randy severely.
“Listen to Grandma,” jeered Rush. “The voice of experience!”
“She’s probably right,” said Mark peaceably. “Come on, let’s get going.”
They followed him past the decrepit barn with its odorous pigpen, up through a lean pasture with thistles sticking out of it, and then under a fence and into the woods on the hillside. As they climbed, the undergrowth became more and more matted and difficult. Blackberry canes and prickly ash were bound together with wild grapevines, clematis, and bittersweet. Fallen trees lay in ambush, their branches lifted like antlers. If the three children hadn’t been wearing blue jeans their legs would have been scratched and torn to ribbons.
They did not talk much, the going was too difficult; they panted, and struggled, and ripped their way through the wilderness. Randy kept getting her hair caught on thorns, and Rush had a tear in his shirt.
Moths came fluttering up into the light, and so, unfortunately, did large, famished mosquitoes. But the children didn’t mind any of it, there were so many interesting things to see: a wasp’s nest like a big silver pear, a tree stump trimmed with fungus the color of tangerine peel. They saw a live walking stick, and some tiny orange lizards (efts, Mark said), and an owl sitting dazed on a branch. Between the damp, shaded roots of the trees there were mosses: cup moss and sealing wax; and on the boulders flat lichens were pressed in faded gray rosettes. They saw red toadstools, and yellow, and speckled, and flocks of little silver ones all crowded together. In the middle of a small clearing stood a solitary, exquisite white one, with a lining of palest pink.
“That’s an amanita,” Mark said almost in a whisper. “The destroying angel, they call it. One bite of that and you die in agony.”
“Gee whiz,” said Randy.
“You know a lot about things in the woods. Names and all,” said Rush. “I wish you’d teach me some of them.”
Mark was pleased. “I bet I don’t pronounce ’em right, though. Sometimes when we go to Carthage I get a chance to go to the liberry; and Miss Schmidlapp, our teacher in school, told us about some of these things, and Oren’s wife taught me a lot. But I still don’t know more than a tiny little bit.”
Finally they came out of the woods.
Just below the crest of the hill there was a barren stratum of sandstone, pitted with cliff swallows’ caves, holes and pockmarks.
“Look out for snakes,” Mark said. “There’s rattlers around here.” Seeing Randy’s face, he added hastily, “But they’re only puny ones, and awful shy besides.”
Nevertheless Randy, and even Rush, stepped a little gingerly for the next five or ten minutes. After that they forgot about snakes.
The sandstone pockets were fascinating to explore. In some they found tiny paw prints, gnawed chokecherry pits, every evidence of small housekeeping but no sight of the housekeepers. In others, the highest ones, there were swallows’ nests, many of them empty, since it was late in the season, but a few occupied by wide-mouthed fledglings or groups of eggs. Above, in the bright air, the parent swallows swooped in knife-sharp arcs and cried in fury and alarm.
“Let’s leave the poor things alone,” Mark said. “The arrowheads I found were mostly down below this cliff. Down among the loose rocks and sand that have chipped off during the years.”
The spare grass was dry and scratchy there, and sandburs grew among the rubble. The mounting sun became stronger; it beat against the rocks. Drops of sweat rolled down Randy’s forehead and dropped off, but she didn’t mind. Poking with a stick among the pebbles and rocks she was as happy as an old gypsy on a trash heap.
And it was Randy who found the first arrowhead. The only one that day.
In a pleasant daze of heat and mild fatigue, she had been moving slowly along, not even poking, droning a tune without any words, and thinking about the sandwiches in the lunch basket. And suddenly there it was. Just lying there between the vervain flowers, sharp and definite as though printed on the rock. Randy had the feeling that she had been looking at it for several seconds without seeing it, and for a moment, now, she just stared at it without saying anything. Had she discovered a pigeonblood ruby, an amulet in the shape of Osiris, the diamond ring of an Infanta, she could not have been more stunned with joy.
When she spoke it was very quietly.
“I found one. I found an arrowhead. Gee whiz.”
“Good for you!” said Mark.
“Swell!” said Rush.
They hurried over to see. There it lay in the palm of her hand, clear-cut and shining. It felt cool against her skin, and in the sunlight it glittered like sugar.
“White flint, and a beauty,” Mark said. “A good-sized one, too.”
“Golly, that’s neat, Ran.” Rush was nearly as pleased as she. “Come on, kids, let’s see if we can’t find some more.”
He and Mark returned to their poking and prodding, but not Randy. She did not wish to cloud the moment by further searching. Two arrowheads would have been less perfect than one. She sat on a patch of ground that was free from sandburs and looked at her treasure. She gazed at it glittering on the palm of her hand. She tried it against the blue denim of her overalled leg; it looked fine there, too. Then she placed it on the ground, glanced away, turned back again casually, pretending to see it for the first time. The shock of delight was nearly as good as the first.
She tried to imagine the Indian who had carved this pointed stone to tip his arrow. She pictured him first as an old chief, with a face like a dried apricot, a full war bonnet, a feather cloak, and a name like Great Laughing Paw. She could see him, too, as a redskin boy of about Rush’s age, with dark, long hair and white teeth. A future chief. The Hiawatha type. But the picture she preferred was that of a maiden, a beautiful creature of about twelve, dressed entirely in white doeskin, with a single white feather in her hair. Little Birch Bark, or Lone Swan, something like that: an adventurous spirit who refused to sit at home weaving and cooking with the other squaws; who wandered, instead, white as a wraith by the edge of the lake at night, carrying her bow and arrow and singing a strange, haunting melody— At this point Randy sighed. It would be a poor huntress, for heaven’s sake, who stalked her prey singing at the top of her lungs; besides, there wasn’t any lake for miles around. Randy was shamefacedly aware that Little Birch Bark’s place was on the cover of sheet music, or on a drugstore calendar, and not in the history of this valley.
“What kind of Indians lived around here, Mark?” she called.
“The tough ones. The Iroquois. They’re s’posed to have had a battle here in this valley a long time ago. That’s how come all the arrowheads.”
Great Laughing Paw, Hiawatha, and Little Birch Bark all melted away forever. Instead, a newcomer emerged in Randy’s mind: a stranger with a savage, hawk-nosed face and paint-striped cheeks. Someone who wore only a loin-cloth and moccasins, and whose hair stood up in a narrow crescent over his cropped skull. She could imagine him moving through the woods, all in one piece like an animal, noiseless, intent, never aimless. She could not imagine him smiling. Randy looked at the arrowhead with new respect. She was glad that this was all she need ever know of its creator.
“I’m hot,” said Rush, hurling himself down on the ground, and at once hurling himself upright again with a bellow that would have done credit to the bloodiest Iroquois. “Jeepers! Sandburs!” He came limping over to Randy and stood pathetically while she picked them out of his trouser legs and sneakers.
“Burs I could do without,” said he. “Also gravel roads when I’m barefoot. Also thistles (except that they look okay); also stinging jellyfish, beetles, splinters, and all hot-tasting things like horseradish. Quick, Ran, you name some things you could do without. No deep thoughts, you know, just troublesome everyday things you don’t like.”
“Arithmetic,” said Randy, like a shot. “And cucumbers, and taking ticks off dogs, and washing dishes, and having snarls combed out of my hair, and being sick at my stomach, and starch in the collars of my dresses, and—shall I go on?”
“No, it’s Mark’s turn. Quick, Mark, don’t think first, just say ’em.”
“Well—uh. Weeds like quack grass and pussley. Spreading manure. Getting up before it’s light on winter mornings. Hens. Mosquitoes. Oren.”
There was a little silence. Mark looked embarrassed. “Well, I just did like you said: said ’em without thinking.”
“Is he so awful to you?” asked Randy at last.
“Meaner’n a rattlesnake,” said Mark, and then laughed. He didn’t want to talk about it anymore. “What do you say we go to the quarry now? A swim might be nice.”
“Yes, and then lunch,” Randy said, rejoicing that they had brought such a big one.
They plowed along the ridge another mile and then down the other side through a shoulder-high jungle of hazel bushes; up another hillside and there they were.
The quarry had steep walls of rough marble, and held within them was a pool, a little pond, deep, brimming with pure spring water. It was dark and smooth and clear, like a shield made of obsidian, and it held upon its surface a distinct picture of all that surrounded and framed it: sky with a cloud in it, the black juniper clusters, arched spears of birch, three children looking down.
“Deep,” Rush said.
“You bet. Thirty feet, they say. Cold, too.”
“Boy, I can hardly wait to get in it!”
The boys disappeared behind a rock, and Randy found some juniper bushes for a dressing room: very scratchy.
“It seems a shame to mess it up,” Randy remarked, looking at the motionless pool, when they had emerged in their bathing suits.
Rush took the first dive. For a split second he could see himself, reflected in the flawless surface, arched in space; blue sky behind him. Not a bad dive, Rush complimented himself before he struck. In that instant all thought was gone. Nothing remained but the breathless upward struggle through liquid ice. He came out like the cork of a champagne bottle and clawed himself onto the bank.
“Ho-ly cat!”
“Cold?” inquired Randy.
“Cold! Holy cat!” was all Rush could say.
“Spring water, that’s why,” Mark explained. “When you go in the second time it won’t feel so bad, and the third time is always swell.”
Randy belonged to the toe-dipping, squealing school. She went through this performance for quite a long time, and only the disgusted comments of her brother Rush forced her to go in at all.
“You’re acting like one of those old-time bathing beauties,” he said. “You ought to be wearing stockings and carrying a parasol.”
“Rush, you’re a beast. I’m not like that at all!” With this Randy plunged inelegantly; holding onto her nose and stepping out into space as desperately as a man walking the plank.
The third time, as Mark had prophesied, was the best. They no longer felt paralyzed. They felt warm, exhilarated, endowed with superhuman strength. They yelped, splashed, tumbled, and ducked.
Randy had never been so far beyond her depth before. She swam straight across the pool full of power and daring. As she swam she encountered an occasional floating leaf; an occasional struggling fly or beetle. Each fly or beetle she rescued and set upon a leaf boat to dry his soaked wings and legs. It gave her a feeling of virtue to do this. She could imagine all heaven looking down upon her and approving. Notice Miranda Melendy; she is a kind, generous girl. The smallest insect is not too unimportant to receive her charitable attention. She ought to be rewarded. Randy thought of the arrowhead complacently, probably that in itself was a reward. She swam back again with a smile of sweet unselfishness; a misty radiance about her bathing-capped head.
“Why do you swim with your head way out like that?” inquired Rush, who was sitting on a ledge. “You’re even swimming like an old-time bathing beauty. And why are you grinning that goonish way?”
Randy grabbed her brother’s ankle and yanked him in again. Naturally Rush ducked her. Naturally she ducked Rush. Naturally Rush—and so on and so on. Heaven ceased to contemplate Miranda Melendy and went about its business, and Randy’s halo fell off and was lost in thirty feet of water.
They sat side by side on a ledge with only their feet in the water and watched their goose flesh subside.
“I feel as if there’s ginger ale instead of blood in my veins,” said Rush. “And, oh, brother, am I hungry.”
Mark looked away absentmindedly as if he felt it would be wrong to admit that he was hungry when he had nothing to contribute. Nevertheless, they had little difficulty in coaxing him to eat three of Rush’s noble sandwiches, two stuffed eggs, an orange, and numberless cookies.
Afterward they just sat and scorched in the sun for a while. Then they swam again. It was even colder now, for the pool’s surface was in shadow. Without the sunlight it looked deeper, more somber, more dangerous.
Mark took them home by a different route. It was just as tangled as the last, and just as interesting. He introduced them to the taste of sassafras and black birch twigs; and to the various fragrances of pennyroyal, and bee balm, and prickly ash.
“My nose feels very well exercised,” Randy said. “It’s learned a lot in the last half hour.”
They came to a clearing.
“Here,” said Mark, “this is what I wanted to show you.”
Square blocks of stone lay cluttered on the ground, half buried in weeds, and from their midst rose a stout brick chimney with a fireplace in it, and close by, leaning toward the chimney, grew a lilac bush, almost a tree, tall, unkempt, with dead branches showing among its heart-shaped leaves.
“A house,” said Randy wonderingly. “Here in this wild place, a house, or the shell of one.”
“Whose was it?” Rush wanted to know.
“Who can tell? It fell to pieces, or burned up, years and years ago. Maybe fifty, maybe a hundred.”
Maybe fifty, maybe a hundred.
There were flowers in the tangle of undergrowth and scattered stones: small patches of white and faded pink.
“Look,” cried Randy. “Phlox! All gone small and puny because of weeds, but still growing!”
“Yes, and the lilac bush comes out in spring,” Mark told her. “You can smell it way down at the foot of the hill; and the lilies of the valley have spread all back through the woods. You can see their leaves.… And look, those are apple trees, see? Mostly dead wood, and the apples are kind of small, but they sure taste good.”
He showed them a mourning dove’s nest in the lilac bush, and swifts’ nests, made of mud, inside the chimney. He showed them the two deep doorways, one for entrance, one for escape, belonging to the woodchuck who was the present tenant of the house. He showed them the well, and they leaned over the stone rim and looked down into it and saw the still water far below, like black ink in a bottle, and the dark reflection of their three heads, and the thick fur of green moss clinging to the stones. Rush dropped a pebble in, and they waited, without breathing, for the splash, the little, hollow, echoing, empty plop.
“It has a special sound,” Randy said. “As if it was saying that this is the first pebble anyone has dropped into it in a hundred years!”
Mark did not tell her that he himself had dropped dozens of pebbles into that well and that they always made the same sound.
“I love this place,” said Randy. “Let’s all come up here for a picnic sometime. Maybe when the apples are ripe.”
After that they went home. Mark had to hurry because it was almost milking time, and he had other neglected chores to take care of before Oren came home.
“It’s been a perfect day,” Randy said, pressing her hand against the arrowhead in her pocket. “Can we come again next Wednesday?”
“You bet your life,” said Mark wholeheartedly, and looking very happy.
As they coasted down the road to home Rush said, “I think he’s a swell guy, don’t you?”
And Randy replied, “Next to you and Oliver he’s the nicest boy I ever saw. And he’s the only one I ever saw that could walk on his hands and knew the names of toadstools.”
It was good to be home again; they felt as if they had been gone for days. Mona looked beautiful, and knew it. Her freshly washed hair lay in a cloud about her shoulders, and in honor of this she had put on her only long dress; the one she had worn to her first dance in the spring, and in her hair, of all things, she had fastened a whole strawberry plant, leaves, fruit, blossoms.
“Why not the roots, too?” Oliver wanted to know, when they all sat down to supper. And Rush said, “This year the Sub Deb or Junior Miss will wear fruit in her hair. Next year she will wear vegetables: kohlrabi, a wreath of Brussels sprouts, or a single full-blown parsnip. The year after that—”
But Mona wouldn’t rise to the bait. She just laughed. She knew exactly how becoming the strawberries were, and shook her head a little to make them dangle against her cheek.
Randy just stared at her, forgetting to wipe the milk from her upper lip, and earnestly hoping with all her heart that someday when she was old like Mona she would be half as pretty. That would be a nice wish to have granted, thought Randy, remembering heaven. But after supper, playing Any Over with Rush and Oliver and Willy, she decided that she would rather be granted the ability to throw a ball like a boy.
When she went to her room that night the first thing she saw was the arrowhead shining under the lamp on her bedside table. She took it up in her hand and thought of the day, the wonderful day with Mark and Rush: the woods, the lost house, the marble quarry pool, the cliff swallows. She knew that she would always remember it.
She got into bed feeling a little uncomfortable about the way she’d been instructing heaven how to reward her. Why, it had been giving her the best it had to give the whole day long.
And an arrowhead thrown in.
