The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [49]
There they were, on a milk crate beside Jed’s bed, along with a bunch of empty beer cans. Pa must have been here earlier tonight drowning his sorrows with the cuckoos!
The candles soon filled the little room with flickering light, and we saw the birds all popping out and singing. Grum reached up carefully to remove a clock from the Sheetrock wall.
I remembered when we’d put up those walls, Jed and me and Pa, the day after Jed got the idea to move out there with Grum’s clocks. Until then, the play castle had just had bare stone walls. The clocks needed a flat surface to hang on, and a new layer of insulation in between would keep the room warm in winter.
Pa whistled and told growing-up-in-the-gore stories as he showed me and Jed how to spread the Sheetrock mud over the seams and sand it down smooth. That day was the last time I remembered seeing those two in the same room for more than ten minutes without getting at each other’s throats.
Now picturing Pa all pathetic in the mud with Jed’s cat made me feel bad for him. He blamed himself for Jed running away. We all blamed Pa. But maybe we were all wrong. That note Jed had left in the caves made me wonder. I wished I could figure out the truth. But first, quiet the birds.
When Grum took down the first clock, its cuckoo stopped singing, but the others kept at it. Grum inspected the clock front and back, then put it back on the wall. The cuckoo started popping in and out again.
Barbie took another clock down. The cuckoo stopped. She put the clock back and the bird resumed its cuckoo business.
I gave it a try—same thing. On off, on off, on off. It was pretty cool. I wasn’t minding the noise so much now.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, enough of that!” Ma started taking the clocks down and piling them on the bed. We all helped. The room gradually grew quiet. Outside the cat meowed.
Grum wagged her head like a pendulum itself. “I don’t understand,” she said. “This cuckoo madness isn’t even possible.”
“It has to be possible,” I said. “It’s happening.”
“Maybe Pa did something to jam the clocks?” suggested Barbie. “Like he used to when he was a kid.”
“Except in reverse,” I said.
Grum continued shaking her head. “Even Craig couldn’t cause this chaos. Pendulums work because of gravity. They follow predictable rules. The clocks should sound the hour, and that’s it—and then only if the weights on the chains have been reset. None of these clocks have been wound up!”
“Okay, that’s eerie,” Ma said. “But they’re quiet now. What do you say we go back to bed and figure this out tomorrow?”
Grum nodded. “It’s been a long day.”
She didn’t know the half of it.
On our way past Pa, Barbie said, “Shouldn’t we bring him inside?”
Ma looked at him with an expression alternating between pity and anger, but leaning toward pity. Stepping toward him she said, “Sebby, he’s heavy. You’ll have to help me.” Man, he looked ridiculous lying there with his arms flopped out to the sides like a cheerleader.
“No!” Grum said sharply. “You told Craig what needed to be said, Claire, and now what he needs from you is tough love. Leave him be. He’s made his own bed, let him lie in it.”
“A water bed,” I almost said, but Grum wouldn’t have appreciated me joking when she was being serious.
At that the rest of us went to lie in our soft, comfortable beds.
The next morning I woke up before Barney. My back was killing me. Plus I needed to use the bathroom. And since I had to go downstairs anyway, I figured I’d put on what was left of my sneakers and drop by Zensylvania to corner Jed. During the cuckoo snafu I’d forgotten that plan, but now it was the first thing on my mind. After a bowl of Cheerios.
I was tipping the bowl to drink the thick sugar milk out of it when I noticed the trail of dried mud across the linoleum. The mud tracked into the living room and stopped at the top of a head. Pa’s.
Someone had dragged him in after all, his feet pointing toward the couch. He lay sprawled face-up in the same posture we’d seen