The Well-Wishers Page 7

  "If you wanted to be friends with us, why not say so in the first place?" It was a new idea to me that somebody like Dicky LeBaron might feel left out of things. I'd always thought people like Dicky wanted to be out of things so they could jeer at them. It was a new idea to me that maybe they didn't have any choice.

  "Forget it," he said shortly. "We got no time for conversation. We got to look out for that little girl. Gimme a leg up."

  I tried, but my ankle wouldn't bear my weight, let alone his.

  "It's no use," he said, after a second. "Even if I could reach, I couldn't move that chest, not from here. I couldn't get any purchase. Let's see your foot."

  By now we were getting used to the darkness. There was a little grating up near the ceiling that was too small for squeezing through, but it did let in a feeble glimmer, enough for Dicky to take a look at my ankle.

  "Whew," he said, when he saw it. But he tore strips off his shirttail and bound it up. When he'd finished, it still hurt, but I could stand, and even hobble a little.

  The grating let in sound from outside, too, and what I heard now was a familiar crashing and swishing and a high childish prattle, coming nearer. And I knew it was just as I'd feared, and Gordy and Deborah were arriving at the secret house first.

  "Look out! Keep away!" I called, but it was too late.

  There was a cry of triumph from the fiendish high school boys and a cry of surprise and alarm from Gordy and Deborah, followed by a thud of blows and a scrobbling sound.

  And then there was silence.

  Dicky and I looked at each other. Of course we knew the two high school boys weren't really deep-dyed kidnappers and it was all just a game to them, but Deborah was little and wouldn't understand and would be terrified.

  "I've got to get out there," Dicky muttered.

  He ran round exploring the dark passages and bumping into things, with me limping after. The house has a cellar door, the slanting kind little kids like to slide down, but when Dicky tried it, it wouldn't budge.

  "Somebody's piled rocks on it," he said.

  And I knew the humiliation of poetic justice, because I was the one who'd done that in my idle folly, plotting my trap for Dicky. But I will never tell him.

  But then Dicky found where the chimney comes down into the cellar, and there was a hole in one side of it where the smoke pipe from the old furnace must have joined on, in olden days. We stood looking at it.

  "Do you suppose?" I wondered.

  "I kind of think maybe," he said.

  "Chimney sweeps used to do it," I said. "Like Tom in The Water Babies.""

  "Who?" he said. But he didn't stay for an answer. He took off one of his motorcycle boots and started knocking at the brickwork with it. He is proud of those motorcycle boots, too, but he was getting this one all scuffed and dusty. One or two bricks did come away, but it was slow work.

  "Darn that magic," I said. "You'd think at least it could loosen the mortar!"

  "What do you mean, magic?" said Dicky. And while he worked, I told him about the well. But he wouldn't believe a word of it.

  "I bet," he said. "Some magic! About as magic as that old ghost you were telling me about!"

  It is funny about some people. Dicky believed in his rabbit's foot and black cats and not walking under ladders, but real magic was a closed book to him. And I didn't have time to convince him just then because the hole in the chimney was getting big enough to try crawling into; so I boosted him up. It was a tight fit. His shoulders were the worst.

  But he stretched his arms high and tried to find a hold inside the flue, and I pushed his feet from beneath. Inch by inch he began to worm his way upward.

  "How is it?" I called.

  "I'm getting there," he said. But he complained that he was rubbing off pounds of him on the way. Then later he called down that his front part had reached where the flue from the parlor fireplace joined the chimney and it was roomier now. "Only something's blocking the way, up above," he said. After that I couldn't hear him anymore.

  But I heard something else, and it chilled my blood. Stealthy footsteps sounded in the hall overhead, and a furtive whisper.

  "Psst," it said. "Anybody there?"

  "No, nobody," came a second whisper. "Where'll we put the ransom note?"

  Just then one of Dicky's feet must have slipped. Because a whole lot of soot came down the chimney onto me. And some must have fallen in the parlor fireplace, too, because I heard the boy called Smoko call out, "Cheesit! There is a ghost!"

  But Stinker was made of sterner stuff.

  "That's no ghost," he said. "That's somebody up the chimney. It's that squirt of a Dicky. He'll get away and ruin everything. Whaddaya say we climb up on the roof and mom him when he comes out?"

  I heard the front door bang and then I heard feet on the roof shingles. I tried to call a warning up the flue to Dicky, but I knew he would never hear. There was too much of him between his ears and me.

  It is awful to know horrible things are happening and have to wait and not do a thing about them. And it is even worse when the horrible things are all your fault in the first place. All I could do was hobble over near the grating in the wall and stand under it and listen. And while I listened, in my mind I begged the well to forget that other wish I'd made about getting even with Dicky and do something.

  Or if the well had had its fill of me, and I'd be the last to blame it if it had, maybe there was some magic still left over in the secret house, and it would help.

  And I guess the house heard me.

  Because the next thing / heard was Stinker's voice. "I see his head," he said. "No, it's not. It's something blocking the way. I've got a grip on it, though."

  The instant after that I heard a yell and the sound of someone falling off a roof. And then the sound of someone tumbling after, and more yells and running feet. It seems to me now I heard a buzzing sound, too, but Dicky says I couldn't have. And James says that is argumentum post facto, which is Latin, and a common phenomenon, which is just James showing off.

  All I know is that I waited in wondering darkness for what seemed like hours, and then at last I heard steps in the hall and someone pushed the chest away. It was Dicky, and he was laughing. And when he told me what had happened, I knew the magic in the house had answered my prayer.

  What he was laughing at was the sight that had greeted him when he finally emerged on the roof.

  What he had seen was Stinker and Smoko running down the hill and yelling and jumping and beating at themselves while around and upon them a cloud of hornets nibblingly preyed.

  Because the thing in the chimney had been the hornets' ancestral home, and Stinker had pulled it right out. And if that wasn't the house answering my prayer and producing magic right out of itself at just the right time, I'd like to know what it was! I couldn't convince Dicky about that, though. He said it was just hornet nature.

  Dicky had a few random stings from some hornet homebodies that were still clinging to the old neighborhood when he passed by, but otherwise he was unharmed, save for scraped places and soot. He handed down a chair for me to stand on and helped me out of the cellar and out onto the stoop. A distant yelling was all that remained of Stinker and Smoko, and now it died on the breeze.

  "Good riddance," said Dicky.

  "I thought you liked them," I said.

  "Not much," he said. "They didn't like me much either. They just wanted somebody to order around, mostly. I guess at first it made me feel big, going around with a couple of big wheels. Then I guess it got to be a habit. Now I guess maybe I broke it."

  For the first time he smiled at me, sort of a sheepish grin, and I smiled back. Then we remembered Deborah, and we stopped smiling and started searching.

  The first thing we heard was a guggling noise, and the first thing we found was poor Gordy, scrob-bled and gagged and tied to a tree. A bruise on his cheek bore witness that his spirit had been willing, no matter how otherwise the flesh.

  And the spirit was still in
him, because when I got him untied he thought at first Dicky was one of the kidnap gang and started for him with both fists.

  Dicky held him off with one hand, his arms harmlesssly windmilling, while I explained to him and soothed him. And just as he was getting calmer, Laura and James and Kip came plodding up the hill together and the boys thought Dicky was beating Gordy up and jumped on him, and there were more windmilling arms that I had to limp through and untangle before I could start explaining all over again.

  "I told you so" were the words of Laura when she learned how my adventure had panned out. And when she heard about Deborah, her righteous fury knew no bounds.

  "If anything's happened to my little sister," she said to me, "I'll never forgive you."

  I felt guiltier than ever, but Dicky spoke up. " I don't think they'd actually hurt her. And they couldn't have taken her far. They didn't have time."

  So then all five of us began scouring the woods to find where the hapless victim lay helplessly stashed.

  It was Dicky who heard a murmuring drone, and he signaled to us, and we came up and all of us found her together. The luckless kidnappers had tied her hand and foot and left her in a hollow tree. She seemed quite happy there, playing one of her mysterious games and talking to herself.

  "I am a baby squirrel," she was saying. "Soon mother squirrel will come and feed me nuts."

  We untied her and plied her with questions and felt her all over for broken bones while she squirmed and giggled with utter ticklishness.

  "Were the bad boys mean to you?" said Laura. "Did they scare you?"

  Deborah considered. "No," she said finally. "They were quite nice." She is too young to have any taste, as yet. But Laura smothered her with sisterly hugs, all the same.

  "You poor thing, it must have been awful."

  Deborah freed herself. "I liked it," she said. "I was a baby squirrel."

  The boys and Laura still seemed suspicious of Dicky, even after I'd told them all he had done, and Dicky was standoffish with them. But he and Deborah got along fine. She took his hand and talked to him about baby squirrels all the way home. Dicky had once trained one as a pet; so they had a lot in common.

  But James gave me a meaningful look as the others started down the hill, and I waited with him and we brought up the end of the procession.

  "What about this Dicky?" he said.

  "What about him?" I said.

  "Well, gee." James looked troubled. "I guess he behaved better than you'd expect, but look at the way he's always been before! Do we have to have him be one of us now?"

  "I don't know about you," I told him. "He's my friend from now on."

  "Well, sure," pursued James, "but how much of a one? Gordy's worked out fine, but if we keep reforming hopeless characters and adding them on, that well's going to get awfully crowded."

  "You make me sick," I said. "How can people with disadvantages ever improve if the people with the advantages keep shutting them out?"

  "That's so," James admitted. "But gee, the way he looks! Maybe if he'd do something about that jacket and those boots?"

  James can be awfully stuffy at times. But when we got to the red house, he behaved very well. He went up to Dicky and held out his hand. "That was a good job you did today," he said. "I hope from now on you'll feel free to stop by and see us anytime."

  Dicky was busy spitting on his scuffed motorcycle boot and trying to polish it. "That's all right," he said. "Don't mention it." But he shook hands with James, and with Kip, too.

  Gordy was hanging back and looking awkward, the way he so easily can. Dicky went up to him.

  "I guess I've been kind of rough on you sometimes in school, kid," he said. "No hard feelings?"

  "Sure. Gee. No!" Gordy beamed with his usual forgiving toothiness.

  And then Laura, ever warmhearted and carried away by the emotion of the moment, started telling Dicky all about the well and the magic and the secret meetings and the Well-Wishers' Club, and invited him to join.

  But James needn't have worried about that. Because Dicky listened to it all politely. And then he shook his head.

  "I guess not," he said. "No offense meant, but it sounds kind of childish to me. Thanks all the same. I'd better be moseying along now."

  He ducked his head at the others and chucked Deborah under the chin. Then he winked at me and grinned.

  "So long, kid," he said. "I'll be seeing you."

  And he flicked a speck of dust from his motorcycle jacket and went swaggering up the road.

  Six pairs of eyes followed him. And everybody seemed to like him better suddenly, now that he'd turned down our generous offer.

  "You're right," said James to me. "He's not a bad kid."

  "And even if he won't join the club," said Laura, "if we're ever working on a big important wish, I think he'll be useful to have handy. I think he'll help us if we ask him."

  "Sure he will," I said. And it turned out we were right.

  Because it turned out that there was and we did. And he did. But what the important wish turned out to be, and what we did about it, is another story.

  And the beginning of that story belongs to Kip.

  5. Kip Carries On

  This is Kip telling the story now. The reason this part of it belongs to me is that I was the only one of us in church that Sunday.

  Not that James and Laura and Deborah don't usually come, but that morning their father had forgotten to set the alarm clock. That would have been a mere nothing to me. I can always make myself wake up exactly when I want to. I do it by concentrating before I go to sleep.

  But James and Laura have never been able to work that trick. I think they let other thoughts creep in, which you must never do.

  As for Gordy, his mother makes him go to a different church, a big rich one in the village.

  But the rest of us like the little old-fashioned country church nearby better, at least Laura and James and Deborah and I do. Lydia says she doesn't need organized religion, and that a person can pray anywhere. This is true, I know, because I have prayed in some peculiar places, like the time I was painting the house and nearly fell off the roof. But for me, church helps.

  So there I was that Sunday morning, not thinking anything but church thoughts, and certainly not about the magic or expecting an adventure to begin. And then Mr. Chenoweth, our minister, came to that part of the service when he makes announcements.

  Only today he didn't talk about the vestrymen's meeting or the choir or the Young People's Club. He took off his spectacles and looked at the congregation. Then he said, "What I have to tell you today is not church business. Or perhaps it is."

  And he went on to say that he had heard of a family that was about to move into the neighborhood. "I think some of you may know the one I mean," he said. And he gave the congregation another long look.

  I don't remember his exact words after that. But what they amounted to was that some people apparently didn't want this family to move in. They didn't want it so much that they were getting up a petition about it. Mr. Chenoweth did not say why.

  But he said, "This does not seem to me to be Christian behavior. So I myself have drawn up a statement welcoming these new arrivals to our coramunity. Those who wish to sign it with me may do so after the service. Or it will be in my study at the rectory at any time. And now let us join in singing the One Hundred and Thirty-third Psalm."

  If you do not know that psalm, it is the one that begins, "Behold hoW good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity."

  And then Mr. Chenoweth preached a sermon on the text, "Love thy neighbor." I thought he said some pretty good things. But all the time he was saying them, there was a buzzing undertone of people talking to each other, which is something I would know better than to do during a sermon. And yet it was grown-ups who were doing it.

  After church Mr. Chenoweth was waiting by the door, the way he always is, except that today there was a little desk there, too, with a paper on it. Some people wer
e already lined up, waiting to sign the paper, and my father and mother got in line and told me to go wait in the car and see if Alice, our dog, was all right.

  I knew that was just an excuse. Because Alice was sure to be fine. She would be perfectly happy sitting in a car for a week if she thought somebody would take her for a ride at the end of it. But I walked to the car all the same, and found her peacefully sleeping, the way I knew I would. Then I came back and waited by the church door and watched the people.

  Some of them were joining the line to sign the paper, but there were a lot more who stalked right out without even speaking to Mr. Chenoweth. Some of these gathered in a knot in front of the church, and I couldn't help overhearing what they were saying.

  "Doesn't know his place," one lady sniffed, tossing her head. "He's entitled to his own opinion, but...!"

  "You're right, Adele," said another. "And to bring it up in a church service, too! I think it's time we changed to the other church, with the people who count!"

  "Or changed ministers!" said the first lady.

  "We're going to have a fight on our hands, Harry," one man was saying.

  "What if we do?" said his friend. "It's for the good of the neighborhood. Once one gets in they'll all come. We have to draw the line."

  But nobody said what was wrong with the new family, or what line it was that had to be drawn.

  I asked my parents about it on the way home, but I couldn't get anything out of them, either.

  "I don't want to discuss it," my mother said. "It makes me too angry." But the minute we were in the house she was on the phone, telling James and Laura's mother all about it, only mysteriously; so I couldn't glean a single fact.

  Parents can be maddening at times. Though mine are quite nice, as a rule.

  Something was in the air and I wanted to get at the bottom of it. So I changed out of my church clothes and walked down Silvermine Road to the red house.

  Laura and Lydia and Deborah and James were already assembled in the front yard, and I told them about Mr. Chenoweth and what they'd missed by missing church. In the middle of it Gordy's mother's limousine drove up and Gordy jumped out, followed by the sound of his mother's voice telling him to be careful of his Sunday suit. The things that boy has to put up with! So then I had to start over again.