Chapter 9
I eased Molly’s front gate open.
The gate should have squeeeaaaked like Dracula’s coffin directly before he jumps out and spreads his bat wings and suction-fangs you right in the neck—only it didn’t. I guess Molly Winter wasn’t Dracula—or else she’d found the time to oil up that gate.
“Are you going to stand there all day or come on in?”
It was Molly, of course.
“You and your granddad sure made a mess out here,” Molly said. “The pumpkin patch is nearly ruined.”
I felt bad about that.
“Your granddad was always a few pea pods short of a tuna casserole,” Molly said, shaking her head sadly. “But I thought you would know better.”
“That’s not true,” I argued. “Granddad Angus has an imagination, is all. What in the world would a librarian know about imagination?”
Molly just laughed.
“Imagination, eh? I guess that’s one word for it. He always was a deep one,” she argued back.
I was supposed to be polite. After all, I had been the one who had wrecked her garden, stolen her clothesline pole, and knocked down her fence.
“I’ve got a garden to dig,” I said, because it was safer than arguing with her.
I took the shovel that she handed me and went out back to the garden.
The pumpkins were a total write-off. She’d need a new clothesline pole. I’d need Granddad’s help to fix the fence, too. So I settled for scooping up the pumpkins and dumping them in the compost heap.
When I was tired of shovelling, I watched a fat earthworm twisting and wriggling deeper and deeper into the fresh-turned dirt. I had the funny feeling that my answer was down there, buried in the darkness—the whole sea monster, buried with the worms and bugs. I was thinking about sea monsters and looking at that worm when Molly came up behind me and touched the back of my neck.
I only jumped a little.
“Come on,” she said. “You’ve worked hard enough. I’ve mixed some lemonade.”
The lemonade tasted pretty good, as I sat and sipped on Molly’s front porch swing.
“You’re scared of leaving Deeper Harbour, aren’t you?” Molly asked.
Scared?
“Yes,” I said. “I’m scared.”
I sipped a bit more lemonade.
“It’s just dirt,” Molly finally said. “That’s all Deeper Harbour is, just the same as Ottawa. Just think of yourself as being like that worm digging in the dirt. He doesn’t know what’s down there so he digs just deep enough to see where he is supposed to be next.”
“You’re telling me that Ottawa is a hole?”
I knew that already, deep down inside.
“I’m telling you that Ottawa is nothing more than a city built on Deeper Harbour dirt. It’s all connected—the dirt your roots grew up in and the dirt you’re moving towards. The wind blows and the seed travels and something new will grow out of something old.”
I nodded like I understood what she was trying to tell me.
“You can’t hang on to dirt,” Molly said. “All you can carry is memories and stories and dreams.”
Old folks say some awfully foolish things.
“Sip on that lemonade,” Molly told me. “It’s sweet, isn’t it? It tastes of sunshine and rain and puckered kisses. Yet the lemons that were squeezed to make that lemonade grew up in dirt and manure and were fed on sunshine and rain and whatever the worm left behind.”
I looked at her like she had suddenly begun speaking in Swahili.
“It takes all kinds of weather to make a good glass of lemonade,” Molly went on. “It takes dirt and manure and worms. You’ll find something sweet in Ottawa, I guarantee, no matter how hard it feels to uproot.”
Enough was enough.
“I could have stayed at home and watched Oprah if I’d wanted to hear a sugar-coated sermon,” I said. “You don’t have a clue what I’m going through.”
“I’m afraid I do, Roland McTavish.”
“How’s that?”
She drew in a long, deep sigh that sounded a little like the waves sliding away from the rocks.
“I have to leave my home too,” Molly said. “Or else it’s leaving me.”
I looked around at her house and yard.
“Don’t you own this?”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. This isn’t my home. This is just where I live. My home is in that school library and they’re closing it down.”
“They’re closing the library?” I asked.
“They’re closing the whole school,” she said. “They’re busing the students to a school in Yarmouth.”
Then she stood up and walked back into the house, leaving the glass of lemonade, half-finished, on the porch. Which was where I left my glass, half-finished, when I got up to walk home. Mom must have known about the school closing. She’s the mayor. That must have been one of the reasons she decided to move to Ottawa.
I had to do something.
I had to save this town.
I spat once.
It tasted of lemonade and dirt.