The Hole in the Wall - Lisa Rowe Fraustino [8]
Inside the cave I made shelves out of rocks and boards. I brought over some blankets, snacks, comics, and some of my rock collection (not the little pebbles I liked to hold in my hand to help me stop thinking at night and fall asleep).
It took me weeks, but when I was done I had myself a little palace. The Hole in the Wall.
After math detention that Thursday when strange things started happening in the henhouse, I saw another strange thing at my oasis. The water bubbling up from the spring was all colorful and foamy. Not a pretty sight. Well, the colors might have been pretty in a rainbow, say, or on a T-shirt. In spring water, not so much. I sure hoped the squirrels weren’t drinking it.
I grabbed a handful of raisins from the stash I kept inside and munched on them while I read my comics. The raisins had dried out so much I couldn’t chew them with my sore twelve-year-molars, so I just swallowed them whole. Normally I would have washed them down with a swig from the spring, but not today. That rainbow water scared me.
3
You’d think when a kid gets home from a long day of school torture, the first thing he should hear is, “Hiyuh! I missed ya! How was your day? Want some milk and cookies?” No. I get, “Hey, you boy. Didn’t you see the lawn mower?”
Yeah, Pa. I almost tripped over it on the way in. It was parked in front of the doorstep. Give me a break. I just walked five miles up and down Kettle Ridge for all you know, and now you expect me to mow those little tufts of moss poking out of the mud? The green stuff that grew in our yard A.O. couldn’t rightly be called a lawn, but we’d been having warm weather for March and whatever the green stuff was, it was growing.
“Can’t I at least have a snack first?” Without waiting for an answer I grabbed a handful of stale Oreos from the cupboard.
“Have some of Odum’s M&M’s,” the Shish called from upstairs. Where I’m sure she was already doing her homework.
Har-de-har-har. Odum’s M&M’s were the mold and mildew that crept up from the basement into all our walls, floors, and ceilings ever since the strip mining began in the gore. The winding gray curlicue patterns the stains left would have been kind of cool if you didn’t know what caused them. The basement of this old house had already been a little tilty, but now it seemed to be sinking like it was built on quicksand instead of solid rock. Every wall in the house had huge cracks, the tile had come off the bathroom floor, and the grout pulled away from the edges of the sink and bathtub so often that Ma just kept the grout squirter behind the toilet with the plunger and the scrub brush. During one long wet spell, mold even formed on coats hanging in the closet.
“It’s a wonder mold doesn’t grow on Pa,” was another thing Jed used to say.
No sooner had I stuffed the last Oreo in my cheek and started to mow the lawn than a pang of pain went through my toe. I’d stepped on a sharp rock again, right where my bones had worn through the bottoms of my sneakers. If Ma had a penny for every time she worried about money, she wouldn’t have anything to worry about. I’d decided to wait until my toes poked through the front to let her notice I needed new sneakers. Being broke rotted.
As if that weren’t bad enough, after the next step I took, the lawn mower went ZZZZING and conked out. “Worthless rocky land!” Which I learned from Pa. He used to swear all the time at those blankety-blank machine bustin’ rocks until one day he gave up trying to roto-till a garden plot for Ma and instead started digging up every fieldstone in sight. He laid them all out in the yard like a jigsaw puzzle to see what he could make out of them, and I helped. When we were done a few weeks later, we had our play castle and a smooth mowing lawn. Until the runoff from ORC started churning up rocks from