It was Willy who told Mark.
Afterward he came into the kitchen where the Melendy children were sitting. They looked at him with scared, solemn faces.
“Now you stop lookin’ like that,” Willy commanded. “The end of the world ain’t come. These things sometimes happen and you might’s well know about ’em. It’s Mark you gotta think about now. Oren was a rascal, and a villain, and a meanhearted sneak; but remember he was all the folks the poor kid had; I s’pose he got used to him the way a person gets used to chronic appendicitis, or boils, or any other hardship. He feels pretty lost right now, I guess.”
“Where is he? Mark?” Rush asked.
“Leave him alone for a while. He’s out back somewheres.”
“Where will he go now? He hasn’t anybody to live with,” Mona said.
“Why can’t he live with us?” cried Randy. “He could have the cupola, and he could teach us all to walk on our hands!”
“I’d take him fishing a lot,” contributed Oliver, like an uncle. “It would help him take his mind off things.” Mona couldn’t help giving him a hug, which he instantly ducked out of.
“I know what I’m going to do,” Rush decided. “I’m going to call Father long-distance, right now.”
“To Washington, D. C.?” said Oliver incredulously.
“Well, I’m glad you thought of it,” Willy said. “I was gointa suggest that myself; only wouldn’t it be better to wait till tonight? You’d be more likely to catch him then.”
“No, we’ll do it now,” decided Mona. “We’ll take a chance.”
They all went into the living room followed by Isaac and John Doe.
Rush lifted the receiver of the telephone.
“Hello, Miss Lederer. [Miss Lederer was the Carthage day operator.] This is Rush Melendy. I’d like to speak to my father in Washington, D. C.”
They could all hear Miss Lederer’s crisp, clicking little voice in the telephone. “Washington, D. C.! Do you know how much that costs?”
“Money is no object,” replied Rush, like a prince of the blood.
“Does your papa know you’re calling long-distance, Rush?”
“It’s my father I’m trying to reach, Miss Lederer. Martin Melendy, Hotel Beauregard, Washington.”
“We-e-ll.” The little machine-voice sounded reluctant. “But the night rates are cheaper.”
“This is urgent, Miss Lederer,” Rush said.
By a miracle Father was at the hotel! Rush poured out his story from beginning to end. Father and Miss Lederer listened attentively.
“Keep him there, by all means! Keep him till I get up there next week. Then we’ll see.”
“Oh, you’re swell, Father! I knew you’d say that—”
“I don’t like to think of you being there alone. I’m so tied up here I can’t possibly get away before next week. I’d better wire Cuffy to come home.”
“Oh, no, Father! Please don’t bother her. Willy’s here, and we’re pretty old now. Mona and I are anyway. We’ve got more sense than we used to have.”
“We’re getting old, too,” said Oliver, and looked at Randy. “Aren’t we?”
“Well, all right, Rush,” Father said, at last. “I suppose you are growing up. I suppose you ought to be able to handle this situation. And you’ve got Willy, of course. Be good to the boy Mark; I know you will. Keep him company, don’t let him worry. Tell him I’ll look out for him when I come up. Now let me speak to Willy.”
Willy took hold of the receiver as if it were a stick of dynamite. He had to clear his throat twice before he could speak.
“H’lo, Mr. Melendy,” he croaked. “H’are you?”
The children listened to Willy tell the story of the fire all over again. They listened while he explained that he and Herb Joyner were looking after Oren’s livestock for the present. They listened while he reported on their own behavior and state of health.
“Randy has a kind of little cold, Mr. Melendy. And Oliver don’t go to bed early the way he oughta. He stalls, Mr. Melendy, something awful.”
Oliver looked startled and guilty.
“Rush has been real good, and so have Mona and Randy. They’re gettin’ so they cook fine. Mark don’t eat nothin’, though, but I guess it’s the shock. Lorna Doone’s pretty good, though she got inta the corn last week and ate enough to bloat her. I mended the fence up back by the woods, and I’m buildin’ a real good chicken house. Garden’s okay: lotsa fresh vegetables and the corn’s commencin’. Better come home soon, sir, we all miss you. All right, Mr. Melendy. You bet. Just a minute—”
Willy turned toward them and whispered (why no one knew), “He wants to say hello to each of you.”
Mona was first. She gave him a list of all the things she had learned how to cook, told him about the play she was writing and the book she was reading, and the way the Scarlett O’Hara morning-glories were beginning to bloom.
Randy was next. She spent her time begging Father to come soon and telling him how they missed him. At the end she said, “Could you please bring me a pair of ballet shoes, size two? Pink satin?”
“Silly,” said Rush, “there aren’t any ballet dancers in Washington that I ever heard of. Just senators and congressmen, and they all wear congress gaiters, and very few of them wear size two.”
Oliver shouted into the telephone, “HELLO, FATHER! THIS IS OLIVER. WHAT? YES. WHAT? OH. WELL, G’BYE.”
Oliver hadn’t talked on the telephone very often.
Rush finished the call, said good-bye again. Just as he said good-bye Miss Lederer chimed in, “Shall I send the bill to your home, Mr. Melendy? Or do you wish the charges reversed?”
Rush hung up. Father’s voice without Father made him homesick for him. He looked at the others.
“Tough not having any folks at all,” he said. “Come on, let’s go find Mark.”
They went outdoors. It was a beautiful day, sunny, with a wind blowing; but instead of bursting out with leaps and shouts, the Melendys came slowly, quietly. When they saw Mark standing beside the pool, with his back turned, instead of hailing him raucously and galloping across the grass, they approached deliberately, almost reluctantly. They were uncomfortable and full of pity and strange feelings. They didn’t know what to say.
Mark said it for them. He turned around suddenly and smiled.
“I bet none of you can make a pebble skip five times across the pool.”
Of course none of them could. In the first place, the pool was too small; in the second place, they couldn’t make a stone skip five times even on an ocean. But they fell to trying eagerly; relieved, comfortable, noisy once more.
They had their own ways of showing him their good will. They made him take the first turn. They applauded passionately when he skipped a stone three times; and Oliver collected flat pebbles for his ammunition.
“What’s your favorite thing to eat in the whole world?” Mona asked him suddenly.
“I dunno. Strawberry shortcake, I guess. I had some once when we were over to Carthage getting the reaper mended.”
Mona’s face fell. The time for strawberries was long over. Then she thought of something. “Did you ever taste blackberry shortcake? [Mona had never tasted it, either.] It’s even better.”
Randy said, “What’s your favorite color, Mark?”
“Green is.”
“Well, you know what? I’m going to knit you a green sweater. A good warm one.”
“Gee, that would be wonderful. But I don’t want you to bother.”
“Yes,” said Randy. “Green. With a neck and everything.”
This was no mean contribution. Randy hated to knit and did it badly. She had never knitted anything except staggering, uncertain scarves, and the prospect of a whole sweater, with a front and a back and a neck, seemed as tortuous and difficult an undertaking as a journey through the labyrinth of the Minotaur.
“By Christmas it ought to be ready,” Randy said, and couldn’t help sighing. “Anyway, sometime before spring.”
“Gee, that would be wonderful.”
“Wait till you see it first,” cautioned Rush. “It’ll probably have three sleeves.”
At lunchtime Oliver pressed upon Mark a seventeen-foot catfish line that Mr. Titus had given him: the pride of his heart. After lunch Mona went off in the direction of the blackberries with a basket in her hand, and Randy went to Carthage on her bike, allowance in her pocket, to buy green knitting yarn.
“Let’s go for a hike,” Rush said to Mark. “Someplace we’ve never been before. Someplace stiff like Powder Hill. Or let’s take a long ride. Mona’d lend you her bike.”
“I oughta go over t’ the farm and see about things. He’d be awful mad if he knew I was loafing this way.”
“Oh, come on. Willy’s gone over to do your chores for you. Said he’d be glad to do ’em for the next few days. And Herb Joyner’s going to milk.”
“Well.” Mark looked at Rush. “Gee, I never did ride a bicycle.”
“I’ll teach you then! Come on, we’ll have a lesson now. You’ll find out that it’s like milking; not as easy as it looks!”
Riding a bicycle was not the only thing that Mark was interested in learning. He drank up new experiences like a thirsty weed. He was intoxicated by the Melendys’ books, and sat hour after hour on the floor of the Office, surrounded with crooked columns of books that he had taken from the cases. Bowed over a volume, cheek in his hand, there was no sound from him except the frequent, dry turning of a page.
“This is a swell one. This is a good story,” he’d say, lifting his head at last, and looking at the others with eyes still glazed by distance, still focused on the landscape of another world. “This boy, Tom Sawyer, he gets lost in a cave—”
Tom Sawyer, Robin Hood, Mowgli, Riki-Tiki-Tavi, Uncas, Long John Silver, all of them were new to Mark. Even the girls’ books interested him: Eight Cousins and Castle Blair and Sara Crewe, even the old outgrown fairy tales with their colored pictures: Water Babies, Hans Andersen, The Land of Oz, the hundreds of satisfactory legends concerning the simple lad who wins the princess; the thoroughly punished stepmother who dances in red-hot shoes, the witches, and godmothers, and emperors, and ogres.
Music fascinated him. Rush was astonished and gratified at such an audience. Mark would sit beside him on the piano bench by the hour; gazing at the hieroglyphics on the music book which were so skillfully translated by Rush’s fingers.
“Play that one again,” he’d say. “I like that one fine.”
He liked them all; even the old chestnuts that caused the rest of the family to dash screaming from the room. And because they were new to Mark they became new to Rush too, and he loved them again as he had in the beginning.
But of all the new experiences the one which Mark learned most eagerly was the simple one of living in a family. At night when he went to bed in his windy tower he knew that there were other people near at hand, friendly and kind. He knew that when he woke in the morning there would be sun at the windows, a humming of voices in the house, a sound of water running, a smell of bacon cooking; and a day ahead that was full of jokes, discoveries, work, play, and conversation: full of new things to learn which he had never known or heard of. And he would leap out of bed as if there were not a moment to lose.
Under his ribs the hard, cold, fist-shaped thing that had hidden there for years became smaller, less and less, as if it were melting away, and in its place something grew and opened like the expanding leaves of a plant. Something warm and comfortable that tickled his ribs as it grew, and made him want to laugh a lot and be happy, and to see other people laugh.