The Well-Wishers Page 9

  We do not see a great deal of Alice, as a general rule. She has a wonderful secret life of her own with rabbits and things, and runs round the woods all day attending to this. But once in a while she comes across one of us in the course of her wanderings, and then she is overjoyed and quite willing to walk along with me, or Mom, or Pop as the case may be, for a while, before returning to her personal concerns.

  She walked along with me now, and our feet turned up Silvermine Road, in the opposite direction from the red house. I wasn't noticing particularly where I was going, but of course I was thinking about the new family and that must have guided my footsteps unbeknownst, because the next thing I knew I was staring at the house that I'd been told was the one the family was planning to move into.

  It was (and is) a roomy white house of the kind that is called a saltbox, not really an old house but a good imitation of one, sitting at an angle to the road under some fine tall oak trees. It looked pleasant and peaceful and as though a family could be very happy in it, though the grounds were neglected. The lawn needed cutting and the backyard was tall with weeds. But beyond that was quite a good woods.

  I stood there looking at the house and thinking about the problem and marveling at man's inhumanity to man, as the poem by Robert Burns that we had to learn at school puts it, when suddenly Alice began to bay and charged round the house and plunged through the weeds and into the woods, and I knew a rabbit must be passing by. Not that Alice has ever caught a rabbit, but she lives in hope that she will.

  I went after her, not because I expected anything to happen, but just for something to do.

  The weeds behind the house were just tall, ugly weeds, but then came a belt of big trees with a sort of opening in the middle that might have been a path or a road once but now it was all choked with brushwood. I pushed through this for a while and then I came out into a clearing. And when I saw that clearing I forgot about Alice and just stood there looking.

  I am not one to go mooning on about nature, but my mother belongs to the Garden Club and her rock garden is just about her life work; so naturally I can't help knowing a little bit about plants and bushes. And even in October that clearing was something to see.

  There were lots of dark purple wild asters leaning around the way they do, and bittersweet vines full of berries were twining up all the trees. And at the far end of the clearing a big bush of the kind that is called burning bush, or sometimes wahoo, with all its leaves crimson enough' to be burning, all right, was standing all by itself, as if it were in charge of the whole show.

  These are all wild plants and could have come there by accident. But as I looked around, I saw other things, snowberry bushes with their little white marbles, and a forsythia, not all yellow and frothy like scrambled eggs the way it Would be in spring, but still I would know a forsythia any time of the year.

  And when I looked closer, I saw little green points showing under it that I recognized as the leaves grape hyacinths push up in the fall. And I knew there must have been an old garden here once.

  Just at that moment Alice suddenly came running back toward me, and then stopped and looked behind her. Her tail was between her legs and her ears were flat to her head and the fur at the back of her neck was rising, and she seemed to be looking at something that wasn't there.

  It is funny how sometimes you don't notice it when magic begins to show. I don't think I thought of the well or our wish in that minute at all. Because Alice often acts like that. She behaved that very same way the first morning she met Lydia's grandmother, old Mrs. Green. Still, that morning was the beginning of our very first magic adventure that first summer. So it all adds up, when you look back.

  But I didn't start looking back till later. Right now I was just idly curious enough to push on and see what Alice was staring at.

  Beyond the burning bush I came on a big hole in the ground and a tumbled heap of fieldstones and old rotted boards with poison ivy growing over them, and I realized there must have been a house there once, back in the olden days.

  And that seemed to be all.

  But magic can start working in your mind whether you know it's there or not. And as I went back to the road, I began thinking of the garden that was still partly growing long after the old house had joined the dust of centuries.

  And it was then that I had my idea.

  Because what could be a better housewarming present than the beginning of a garden?

  Kind words and good wishes are all very well, but their echo dies on the empty air. And Lady Baltimore cakes are tasty, but their taste is the thing of a moment. But a garden, if it's well made, will last longer than a man and go on and on to time immemorial, probably, when you consider seeds and what they can do in even one year.

  So that if we took the new family presents of plants and shrubs, it would be a good turn and a symbol, too. It would mean not only that we were glad they were there, but that we wanted them to stay on forever, and their descendants after them.

  I could hardly wait to tell the others my idea and see what they thought of it, but right now it was getting toward suppertime; so I raced Alice home and got on the telephone and called a conference for that night, at my house.

  And after dinner there we all sat assembled, James and Laura and their parents and mine, and Lydia and Gordy. Even Lydia's grandmother put in an appearance, though she hardly ever goes out socially. And Deborah had been allowed to stay up and come along.

  It was quite an audience to have to talk in front of, but I told my plan as quickly and simply as I could. When I'd finished, there was a silence, but not the critical-sounding kind.

  "I could get the Garden Club to work on it," my mother said then dreamily. "It would make a wonderful fall project."

  "Now, Margaret," said my father quickly, "leave your ladies out of this. They may be all right for getting the flowers and stuff together. But I think the children ought to do the whole presentation. They're the best weapon we have."

  "We could take houseplants, too," said Laura, "so they'll have flowers indoors this winter."

  "And clean up their yard for them," said James, "as a surprise."

  "We can tell all the Well-Wishers," said Gordy. "They'll prob'ly all want to send things over."

  "And we can get there at a half-past two on Saturday," said Lydia, "before the people on the other side have time to deliver their nasty old letter."

  "Good idea," said James's father. "The sight of you ought to shame them."

  "If anything could," said Lydia's grandmother.

  I didn't say anything. But I knew the feeling of justified pride. Because I am not usually the one who thinks up the important, exciting ideas.

  Not that I was taking all the credit for this one. It is the well and the magic that keep the good turns going, we know that. But always one of us has to be smart enough to interpret the magic and justify the ways of the well to man, and usually it is James or Laura or Lydia who does this, and Gordy and I follow along.

  For the next two days we were busy. While Laura and Lydia went around spreading the news, James and Gordy and I spent most of our time at the new family's house.

  First we got a fire permit from Town Hall and cut down the weeds in the backyard and burned them. Then we raked leaves into a big pile for a compost heap, which is what every young garden needs most. And then I took our power mower over, and we mowed the whole lawn.

  After that I had another idea. And we borrowed Pop's chainsaw and cut down brushwood and opened up the pathway to the clearing; so that from the back of the house you could see between the trees all the way to the purple asters and the red of the burning bush. By the time we'd finished with that job we were really tired, but the place looked keen.

  And now it was Friday night and the important day loomed. The response from the Weil-Wishers and our other friends and our parents' friends and Mr. Chenoweth's congregation had been terrific. Everyone had promised to send or bring something.

  And Saturday morning the f
loral offerings started to arrive, at our house because it's nearest to the new family's. And besides, this was my adventure.

  There were seedlings and packages of seed and pots of flowers and baskets of flowers till our hall and living room looked like a plant nursery.

  As the day wore on contributors began arriving in person.

  Miss Isabella King drove up in her one-hoss shay with Mr. Hiram Bundy beside her, bringing slips from the rose called Silver Moon that grows all over her old silver mine. Mr. Bundy had already donated a thousand daffodil bulbs (and we had already planted them with aching backs under the oak trees on the new family's lawn).

  The long-lost heir's father appeared in a sports car with rare orchids from his movie-starish wife's greenhouse. Mr. Adam Appledore arrived in a truck with six young apple trees from his condemned orchard. Madame Salvini, who was with him, brought a record she had made of the "Flower Duet" from Madame Butterfly, taking both parts.

  Miss Wilson turned up with Sylvia and an African violet that she had helped Sylvia grow herself from a leaf cutting.

  Mrs. Witherspoon asserted her neutrality by remaining away, but she sent her chauffeur with a potted palm for Gordy's sake.

  As for the cake-baking lady, she had already made her Lady Baltimore cake before she heard our floral plans, but she added some frosting daisies on top to tone in with the general idea.

  Of all our friends and relations, I'm not sure which made the most spectacular entrance, Doctor Emma Lovely or Dicky LeBaron.

  Doctor Emma came trudging down the road looking more wild-haired and windswept than usual, and draped with a collection of vines and branches and muddy roots and stems that might have been a witch's last year's castaways, but were probably the rarest of native wildflowers.

  And while we were talking to her, Dicky LeBaron came up to the front door carrying the biggest pot of store chrysanthemums I had ever seen, that he must have bought with his own money.

  "Gee, you shouldn't have spent all that," I said, for I was pretty sure he couldn't afford it.

  "Stay cool, dad," he said. "In this case I got special reasons."

  Our parents had formed a transportation committee to collect all the kids who had signed our petition at school, and now cars started arriving and discharging passengers till there wasn't a parking place to be found on either side of the street from our house all the way to the new family's. And that whole stretch of Silvermine Road began to look more like a Sunday School picnic than anything else as children of all ages milled about, cheering each new car and each new bouquet as they appeared.

  Laura and Lydia tried to urge the madding crowd into parade formation, two by two with the smallest in front and everyone carrying something in bloom or at least green. But they had trouble keeping the younger children in line until Dicky LeBaron noticed this and gave a whistle.

  Right away the gang of tough little kids that follows him around came running up, and Dicky detailed them to keep order. They turned out to be good at this, though not overgentle.

  We had kept the whole idea of the flower shower a secret from the enemy, or tried to, but something must have leaked out, because long before three o'clock some of the anti-new-people people began driving along Silvermine Road, looking for places to leave their cars and not finding any. You could tell them by their self-satisfied expressions.

  And Doctor Lovely and Lydia's grandmother, who had established themselves in our tower room with Doctor Lovely's bird-watching field glasses, reported that the Smugs, as we had begun to call these people from a book my mother was reading at the, time, were parking beyond the new family's house and forming their procession up there.

  I took time out for a look through the field glasses,

  myself. I could see the new family's house as plain as plain. I saw the moving van leave, and then the father of the new family came out and stood on his lawn and gave his house a proud, loving, owner-like look. And then I saw him stare around curiously at the activity that was going on, all up and down the road, and I thought how surprised he must be at finding such a citified traffic jam out in the middle of the country. But little did he know!

  Then as I watched he went inside again, and I decided it was now, or never, if we still hoped to be the earliest to arrive. So I ran downstairs and gave the order to start, and the procession got underway.

  I had to admit the littlest kids looked cute, carrying their child's-size flowerpots. But it was not my idea to have them start singing "Home, Sweet Home." That was Laura. I would never have allowed anything so mawkish. Still, maybe it wasn't a bad plan. Because there is something about the sound of infant voices raised in sugary song that can soothe the most intolerant breast. Apparently.

  For I was walking along by the front of the procession, carrying a particularly fierce-looking rubber plant, and I saw and heard exactly what happened.

  Just as we came abreast of the gate to the new family's front yard, about ten or twelve of the Smugs arrived from the opposite direction. I was too excited to count, but I saw their stuffy expressions and the letter in the hand of their leader.

  But the children ignored them, as I'd told them to do, and went right on marching and warbling in their childish purity (and more off-key than Madame Salvini). And suddenly the leader of the Smugs stopped and cleared his throat and I heard him say, "Now that it's time, I can't do it, Harry. Not in front of those kids. It sticks in my craw."

  "Maybe it wasn't such a good idea in the first place, Fred," said his friend.

  And the opposition wavered and fell back and left the field in shamefaced surrender, or at least the respectable part of it did, and we marched by them and through the gate and up the front walk.

  But all was not yet won.

  For at that moment, from beyond the faltering Smugs, about a dozen rowdyish high school boys surged forward. Probably they had just come along to look on and jeer, but now they saw their chance. And when I recognized Stinker and Smoko among them, I was ready for the worst.

  Because I could see that from their point of view the crowd of us, carrying our girlish flowers and singing our girlish song, must look like all that was sissy, not to say asinine, and a fit prey for the slings and arrows of the multitude.

  Then, right while I was thinking this, I heard a whistle.

  Dicky LeBaron must have seen Stinker and Smoko and their friends at the same moment I did. And at his whistle his gang of tough little kids came up on the run. I had been annoyed with them before for not carrying any of the trees or bushes and just tagging along at the end of the procession, but I realized now that Dicky must have foreseen trouble right from the start.

  And just as if they'd rehearsed it, Dicky and his followers linked themselves together in a human chain between the kids in the procession and the menacing high school boys, and stood there with their heels dug in, glaring toughly and daring the world to attack.

  I saw Stinker's and Smoko's hands go to their pockets and come out with rocks in them. And I saw the new people peering in a scared way from their front windows.

  And then, just as I was sure big trouble was coming, a wonderful thing happened.

  Because it turned out that the rumor that had spread to the high school had reached the good kids as well as the gang of bullies. And now they acted accordingly.

  Before a rock could cleave the air, two stalwart youths appeared, one on each side of Stinker, and pinioned his arms. And the same thing happened to Smoko and the rest of that whole crowd. And their pointless rocks fell helpless to the ground.

  Leading the rescue party was the big smiling boy called Tom Corkery, and when I saw him, my pride and relief knew no bounds.

  Tom Corkery is captain of the high school baseball team and president of the student council and just about everybody's hero for miles around, and to think that he had bothered to interfere and save the day made me feel as though my adventure were pretty important. And to crown it all, he came over to me afterwards.

  "This was a good ide
a of yours, Willoughby," he told me, Willoughby being my last name.

  "Thanks, Corkery, you were a big help," I said. And we shook hands.

  And that just about made my day.

  And the hapless bullies were hustled away, that they could nothing common do or mean upon that memorable scene, as the poet says.

  With them out of the way and no further rifts to mar life's lute, as Laura put it, we proceeded as I had planned.

  We placed the rosebushes arid dwarf evergreens around the lawn and the hardy perennials in the empty flower beds, as if they were already growing there. We grouped the apple trees to one side like a miniature orchard and massed the potted plants on the front steps.

  When we'd finished, it looked pretty elegant, if I do say it myself, and just like a page out of Better Homes and Gardens. And the new family came out on the porch and stood looking around with expressions of wonder and delight.

  And when Deborah saw the family, she realized for the first time why it was that the Smugs had tried to keep them from moving in.

  Her voice rang out loud and clear. "Oh," she said, "is that all it was?"

  "Yes," I told her, "that's all it was."

  "Why, how perfectly silly!" said Deborah.

  "Yes, wasn't it?" I said.

  And I went up to the father of the family and made my best dancing-school bow. "Welcome to Silvermine Road," I told him.

  "Thank you," he said. And we shook hands.

  I will draw a veil over the scene that followed.

  Because the mother of the family turned out to have thoughts that did not lie too deep for tears, and she cried buckets for sheer joy, and Laura joined in happily, and the youngest of the family's three children was a mere baby and when it saw the flowers it waved its arms and cooed, and we all felt sort of icky and yet noble, and if my own eyes seemed to be perspiring there for a second, why dwell on it now?