The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [47]
“Barbie, wake up, honey.”
“Where’s Pa!” Actual words. She was awake now.
“He’s not here. Don’t worry, it was just a dream,” Ma soothed. “You can go back to sleep.”
Maybe she could, but now I couldn’t. I lay there thinking about everything: Celery, the other chickens, the secret tunnel, Pa, Boots Odum, Jed. Especially Jed. How did he know about the cookie dough? He must still be around Kokadjo! And why did he warn me? He didn’t give me a chance to tell him I’d heaved. Was I still in danger? Should I still get off the property, like he said? Maybe spend the night at the Hole in the Wall? But if our property was dangerous, the gore probably wasn’t any safer. Maybe I should sneak into one of the outbuildings up at the commune. There were plenty of places to hide up there.
And then I realized. Of course! The answer had been right under my nose the whole time. Or right next door. Zensylvania. Where if you sat in the right tree with a pair of binoculars on a clear day, you could see in our kitchen window. That’s where Jed must be. And as soon as I knew everyone had fallen back to sleep, I was going to ride my bike up there and find him.
14
I would have gone to find Jed right then if it hadn’t been for Grum’s cuckoos. They all chose that moment to go off, the one in her bedroom and all of them out in Jed’s castle. Everyone in the house was so startled, we added screams to the noise. Good thing Pa wasn’t there.
We waited a minute for the cuckoos to get past the hour and quiet down, but it was a minute without end. Grum’s bed creaked and the light showed under her door. She was up fiddling with the cuckoo in her room. It stopped, but the ones in Jed’s castle kept going and going.
“Someone’s been fooling with those clocks again!” Grum called.
“Not it,” I said.
“Me neither,” Barbie said.
Grum knew that me and Barbie used to have fun playing with the cuckoos when Jed first moved out to the castle. We’d set the pendulums all out of sync, and after a while they’d all sing together. “Like magic,” Barbie said.
“No, they synchronize because their motions send perturbations through the walls,” Jed said. I asked him if that was anything like ESP, and he said he wouldn’t be surprised if the same theory applied, but he meant that they vibrated themselves into unison. I sure missed listening to Jed. But with any luck I’d be hearing his voice again real soon.
“Sebby,” Ma called in a groggy voice, “go do something about that racket.”
And then I had a thought that scared the idea of going to Zensylvania straight out of my head. “Ma, what if someone’s out there?”
The light in her room came on. She appeared in the doorway tying her robe, her hair sticking out all over and night cream splotched on her face. “Seb, where’s your baseball bat?”
“Uh . . . Yankee Stadium?” Which in my imagination was located across the road in a certain cave where Babe Ruth hung out with outfielders from another galaxy.
“Never mind.” Ma went back in her room and emerged with Pa’s hunting rifle. “You kids stay here with Grum. Lock yourselves in her room till I get back.”
Grum appeared in her doorway looking skeptical. “Claire, is that thing loaded?”
“Well, I, ah, don’t know,” Ma admitted. She didn’t like guns. She didn’t even know how to use one.
“Find me some bullets, then. I’m going with you.” Grum held her hand out for the gun. She was a good shot. When she lived in the gore she used to pick squirrels off the bird feeder from her bedroom window.
“Sweet,” I said, jumping down from the bunk. “I’m going too. Ow!” Upon landing a sharp pain ran up through my backbone.
“Next time use the ladder,” Ma said, handing Grum the bullets.
“I’m not staying here alone,” Barbie said. The two of us helped Grum into her shoes, then held her loose-skinned arms as she picked her way down the stairs. Usually Grum only did the stairs once in the morning and once at night because they were hard on her knees.
She