She wanted to put her hand on his head or his cheek but she didn’t quite, managed to extend it only halfway. They were together like that, his hand clasping her boot, her hand outstretched, when the dog raised his head suddenly and then, ambling toward them from the rear of the barn, Charlotte said, “Hullo, Dad.”
Ansel stood up abruptly and turned to his daughter. “Hello, Lottie.”
She fixed her eyes on her father. “I wondered if you were ready for supper,” she said slowly, and it was the slowness that held meaning. Aldine wondered if Charlotte had just come in, or if she’d been in the back of the barn all along. It was like the evening when she’d come out for a tarry and then, when she’d had her first good draw, Charlotte, out of nowhere, was there.
“My boot heel came off,” she said to Charlotte, then turned to Mr. Price. “Thank you for fixing it.” It sounded like a lie even though it wasn’t, and that was Charlotte’s fault.
“I’ll go in the house now,” she said, her face hot with shame, both for what she had felt and for what Charlotte seemed to think.
She picked up her books and turned to the barn door. She wanted to run, and had to keep herself from it. All through supper (squirrel again) Charlotte’s cheeks seemed newly pink, her muddy blue eyes bright with a sense of discovery. Mrs. Price said Neva’s cold was the second one this month and that she was going upstairs to tape the windows again.
30
On the Wednesday afternoon leading up to the Winter Entertainment, a work party had been called for setting the stage. It wasn’t much, in Clare’s opinion, mostly just a matter of hanging a curtain. But he and Neva had cooked up the idea of the block and tackle, and that could be something to remember. He bet it would in fact. He hadn’t expected his father to approve, but he did, and Aldine, too, though its purpose was not to be revealed to the general public until the night of the performance. That was the part Clare liked about the plan. The surprise element.
He had come this afternoon to help with the stage-setting, along with his father, and the two younger Josephson girls had stayed after school as well. Neva wanted to be there, but was too sick. This morning she’d lied about not feeling sick just so she could go to school and stay for the work party but her coughing had given her away and so she had been kept home, crying and coughing a gurgly cough and wailing about the unfairness of the world. That was when his father volunteered himself and Clare, as if that would somehow make Neva feel better, which was faulty thinking, in Clare’s opinion, not that he would say so.
At the moment, he was setting a pulley to the schoolroom’s ridge beam, a job that required his perching atop a tall stepladder. The ladder was rickety, so his father stood holding it. Clare was glad he’d been allowed to set the pulley—usually his father wanted to take the lead in such things, especially when women were present, and today Miss McKenna (as Clare thought of her in the schoolhouse) was here, the most important presence of all.
Clare had poked a long heavy screwdriver through the eyebolt and was using it to crank the bolt tight, an aching job that required him to stretch and reach with each turn and though he wanted to stop and rest, he wouldn’t, because he wanted neither his father nor Miss McKenna to see him giving up. He was relieved when one of the Josephson girls needed his father’s help with a knot.
“Just hold still,” his father said to him, and stepped away.
He sat. The whole room seemed different from up here, looking down at his father working at a knotted bag and at Berenice and Melba shaping clumps of wool and pasting them on the curtain that had once hung in Mrs. Wright’s living room, before having been stored in the cellar. Charlotte had shaken off the mouse droppings and washed them and sewed them together for the stage curtain. Charlotte had said she would do that much and by that implied she would do no more. She hadn’t come to the work party, though she could have come easy enough. Emmeline Josephson was absent, too. He’d seen her walking away when they were driving up. Maybe as soon as a female got to a certain age she couldn’t like Aldine, and maybe that was because once a male got to a certain age he couldn’t help but like her. He bet it was all one and the same.
Clare stared at the curtain and the wool, then squinted his eyes. The curtain was supposed to look like a winter sky with snowy clouds but even when squinting, all it looked like was an old curtain, with funny lines of sun-fading and lumps of uncarded wool on top.
His father had brought some wood for the stove so the work party would seem cheerier, and it did seem cheerier for the warmth and also for the fact that Miss McKenna had taken off her long heavy cardigan sweater and now when she stretched and knelt and leaned you could see the smooth contours of her body beneath her long thin dress.
“You falling asleep up there?” Ansel asked mildly when he returned to the ladder, and he could see it gave the boy a start. He’d been watching Aldine.
Clare stood, slid the heavy screwdriver through the eyebolt, and raised both hands to it.
“A few more good turns,” Ansel said, and stood idly holding the ladder and taking things in. The goldfish twirled lazily in its bowl atop Aldine’s desk. Neva’s paper plane trailed Emmeline Josephson’s Flight of the Fancy by the length of only one knot. She wouldn’t catch up, though, he knew, not with so many school days missed.
“It’s not so bad,” Melba said of the old curtain, and Aldine said, “It will do, though, won’t it?”
They were quiet then and the silence spoke volumes, in Clare’s opinion.
Then a voice from behind said, “It’s wonderful!”
Everyone turned and there was Neva, looking shrunken and small in their mother’s winter coat. She held Milly Mandy Molly by her long monkey arm.
“It’s wonderful!” she said again. She stepped forward and couldn’t keep her eyes from the curtain. “They’re the clouds Jack Frost will blow on! It’s the sky he’ll fill with snowflakes!”
Miss McKenna went at once to Nevie, knelt down, and reached her arm around her shoulders. His father drew close, too. “Did you walk?” Berenice asked, and Melba said, “You look all-overish, Neva. Are you frozen through?”
“No, but she is,” Neva said, nodding at her stuffed monkey.
Clare was watching his father put a scoop of coal in the stove when the front door flew open and in walked his mother, looking like a wronged goddess. “There you are,” she said in a tight, cold voice and for one odd moment he thought his mother was talking to Miss McKenna, but she stepped forward and roughly pulled Neva away from Miss McKenna’s embrace. Then she picked up a ruler.
“Hand,” she said.
Neva set the monkey gently to the floor and held out her open hand, but his mother couldn’t do it. She couldn’t strike Neva and she couldn’t forgive her, either. She squeezed out the words one by one. “Never ever ever do that again. Never ever ever do . . .” Neva covered her eyes with her hands but his mother kept saying it until his father stepped forward and wrapped his arm around Neva and said softly, “The girl knows now, Ellie. She knows.”
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