WHEN I was sweeping the floor in Father Sloane’s room last year I found a little keychain with a music box in it. It was gold coloured with a little wind-up handle like a watch at the back. I asked Father what it was. He wound it up for me and told me I could play it anytime I wanted to. I put it close to my ear. The music sounded like a tiny harp. Father said it was classical music, but he couldn’t quite remember the name of it.
Every day I used to hurry with the clean-up so I could play the music box. I felt it belonged to me somehow. Like it was telling my story or playing my song. When June came and it was time to go home, Father told me I could have it. I was so happy I kept it in my pocket all the time.
At home I let Benny and Missy listen to it. They liked the music too. We played it over and over and made up stories about it. Maybe the composer made up the tune in honour of a beautiful girl who died, or a boy saw angels who told him to share the tune to heal people all over the world.
Yesterday my mum and dad took us to Moon Ranch where Yay-yah lives. It’s the same place where we look for river mushrooms in the spring under the cottonwood leaves. The big people started to talk in Indian. We couldn’t understand what they were saying so we went outside to play.
As usual we brought the music box. We were close to the woods and we thought up good stories about the little people that Yay-yah says live in holes in the ground. She hears them laughing sometimes when she waters the horses in the evening, just before it gets really dark. She even saw one late one evening, way up in the mountains where she was picking berries. She said it was about three feet tall and really ugly. We thought they would love to get their hands on the music box and listen to that wonderful tune. It would be just the right size for them. We wound it up and put it on an old tree stump so they could hear it.
Not long after that Mum called us into the cabin to have tea. I thought Benny or Missy had the music box, and they thought I had it, but none of us did. When we went out to look for it, it was gone. We looked all over, but we couldn’t find it. Pretty soon my dad said we had to go and we climbed into the back of the truck and drove away. In one way I felt sad to lose my music box, and in another I felt happy because maybe the little people really did like it. Benny asked Missy if she thought the little people took it. Missy asked me what I thought.
“Did either of you take it?” I asked.
“No,” they said.
“Then it might have been the little people,” I said. We smiled all the way home.