Today when I was grumbling about being stuck on Grand Manan, Sophie said, “Here’s what Bompie told me. It’s not where you’re going that’s important—it’s how you get there.”
“Well, we’re not getting anywhere, are we?” I said.
“Sure we are!” she said. “We’re on this amazing island. We’ve been lobstering and we’re going clamming. This is part of the trip! We are wanderers!”
I can’t figure her out. She can take the smallest thing—like a lobster pot, for instance, and get right up close to it and have a million questions about it and then she wants to draw it and touch it and smell it, and you’d think she’d been locked up in a cage her whole life and had just been let out and was discovering all these amazing things in the world.
To tell you the truth, I didn’t think lobsters or lobster pots were all that amazing until Sophie got so excited about them. She kept going on and on about how she might be a lobster fisherman or maybe she’d build boats. You listen to her talk and then you start thinking maybe that would be a neat life.
And then you listen to Brian, who says it would be an awful life in the winter and what if you didn’t catch anything or what if you built a boat and it sank?
I get mixed up in my head when I listen to the two of them.
I am starting to think something else, too. I think Sophie’s afraid of the water. It’s just a feeling I have.
Brian’s still badgering Sophie. When we were clamming, she said that when she’d once been clamming with Bompie, they’d found the clams with their toes, not with a rake. So Brian says, “That’s a lie. You never went clamming with Bompie.”
“Did so,” Sophie said.
“Did not,” Brian said.
“Did so,” Sophie said.
We got to use a phone last night. That was weird. Dad called Mom and barked at her a bit before handing the phone over to me. In her little voice, she said, “Cody? Cody, honey? You can change your mind if you want. You can come home.”
“Why would I want to do that?” I said. I didn’t intend it to sound mean, but I think that’s how she took it because she started sniffling. “Look, Mom,” I said. “It’s fine. We’re all fine. Dad sleeps a lot, so he’s not on my case so much lately.”
That wasn’t exactly the truth, but she doesn’t like to hear the truth. I keep wondering why my dad invited me on this trip in the first place. He could have come on his own and he’d have a whole month or more away from me. No aggravation!
Here’s one good thing about being stranded on land right now: no blah-blah-blah lessons from Brian.
But Sophie did tell us another Bompie story when we were out clamming. It went like this:
When Bompie was about my age, he lived near the Ohio River, at a place where the river was very deep and a mile wide. Running across the river was a train track, and it was only for trains and there were warnings all over the place about how people shouldn’t step one foot on it because there was no way to get off if a train was coming.
One day Bompie wanted to get across that river. He wanted to get over to the other side real bad. It was windy and rainy and he didn’t want to walk two miles down to the pedestrian bridge. So he started across the train tracks.
You should hear Sophie tell this story. You feel as if you’re there with Bompie, looking down at that river, with the wind blowing in your face and the rain slithering down the back of your neck and inside your shirt.
So Bompie is walk, walk, walking across this bridge and he gets to the middle, and guess what he hears? Well, I guessed what he was going to hear the minute Sophie said that he was going to walk on that train track. He heard the train. Sophie described that train rumbling off in the distance, and you could feel the vibrations on the track and see Bompie looking back, knowing that train was going to come looming around the bend any minute.
He was in the middle of the bridge. He started to run toward the far side, telling himself “Giddy-up, giddy-up!” but the rocks on the side of the tracks were slippery and he was having a hard time keeping his balance and he couldn’t giddy-up. And the rumbling got louder and louder and he could feel those vibrations and then there it was, the big black engine bursting around that bend and aiming for that trestle bridge.
Bompie knew he wasn’t going to make it to the other side in time. He crawled up on the ledge and squeezed through the steel supports and dangled over the side of the bridge. The water was a long, long, long way down, swirling and brown and muddy.
And the train, loud and rumbling, came surging toward him, and he let go and down, down, down he fell into the swirling water.
Sophie stopped then and looked at each of us.
“Well?” we all asked. “Well? What happened next?”
“Oh, it was a terrible struggle,” Sophie said. “Bompie was upside down in that deep muddy swirling river. He figured his time was up.”
“Well?” we asked. “And then what?”
So she told how Bompie finally spluttered to the surface, and he was so happy to see the sky that he lay there floating on his back, crying and laughing all at the same time, and the current was sweeping him down the river, and he floated there and watched the train go by and finally he turned over and swam like a madman, he swam and swam and swam, and he made it to shore.
And when he got home, his father gave him a whipping for getting his clothes wet and muddy, and his mother gave him some apple pie.
When she finished telling this story, Brian said, “I thought you said Bompie grew up in England.”
“I didn’t say that,” Sophie said. “I said he was born in England. He left there when he was very young. Five, I think.”
“Huh!” Brian said.
“Don’t you know anything about your own grandfather?” Sophie said.