Together Apart Page 11

  Sadie popped out of the throne like a kernel of corn from a sizzling skillet. Mr. Tinka played a frenzied flurry. The girls, heads bowed, dropped to their knees.

  Dru, wearing a long hooded cape made of silky black cloth, stomped into the scene. She stomped a circle around the stage, then plopped herself in the chair not at all gracefully.

  "Wild Wind has tuckered herself out," Hannah then said. "All night she has been blowing sickness across the land. In the morning, many of the peasant children will awake with scratchy throats and rattling coughs."

  Dru raised a hand to her mouth, as if to stifle a yawn, then hiccupped.

  "Oh, my, Wild Wind, in hiccupping, has inhaled the sickness into her own lungs."

  Dru sneezed, then, pointing from Imogene to Gertrude to Sadie, she wheezed out a string of demands. "Bring me my slippers, my shawl—get me handkerchiefs and the bottle of Doctor Marvel's Miracle Medicinal Elixir."

  The girls trooped off, then returned one by one. When the slippers were on Dru's feet and the shawl draped over her shoulders, Dru trumpeted her nose into one of the handkerchiefs, then pretended to swig the elixir. She wiped her mouth on her sleeve, then hiccupped. She coughed and sneezed, then rammed her hands deep into her pockets. Out came a blizzard of wind-spoiled things—tree twigs and crushed leaves, feathers and robins' egg shells, and a battered peasant's cap (belonging to yours truly). Dru dove in her pockets one more time and dragged out a rattle of keys, which she tossed to Inga. "Bring my sister to me, and be quick about it. And the rest of you, clean up this mess."

  Mr. Tinka played busy music while the girls tidied up the floor around the throne.

  Hannah stepped forward. All heads, including mine, swiveled in her direction. "The castle guard makes her way down and into the dark, dank dungeon, where Fair Wind is imprisoned. Fair Wind greets the guard with her usual cheery smile. When the guard turns the key in the lock and swings open the barred door, Fair Wind fairly floats up the stairs."

  Shortly, Inga showed herself at the side curtain again, marched over to Dru, handed her the keys, and then said, "Enter Fair Wind."

  Clarice, wearing the same kind of cape as Dru, only colored sky blue, butterfly-danced into the scene. She flittered a circle around the throne, then knelt before Dru and took up her hand. "The castle guard tells me you are feeling poorly, sister. Shall I help you to your bed?"

  Dru made a move to shove Clarice away but was set upon by a coughing spell. When the spell passed, she said, "If I leave you in charge, you can breathe a breeze now and again, but you must promise to do nothing more."

  Clarice's back was to the audience, so everyone saw how she reached around and crossed her fingers. "I promise."

  After that, Dru made no fuss. Steadying herself on Clarice's arm, she left the scene. The working girls, grinning like it was the last day of school, joined hands and began to skip a circle around the throne. Mr. Tinka's music grinned, too.

  When Clarice returned, the girls gathered around her. "Wild Wind has blown sickness into the air," Gertrude said.

  "Oh, dear. That will never do." Clarice stepped to the front edge of the stage then and, a hand at her brow like a soldiers salute, she leaned from side to side like she was looking out across the land. She shook her head the way people do when they see a sorry sight, then said back over her shoulder, "I'd be ever so pleased if one of you could fetch my basket of magic snow."

  You'd have thought the girls were fetching a pot of gold the way they galloped off stage, elbows flying. When they came back, all had at least one hand on the basket, which made them mighty clumsy, which accounted for some laughs in the audience. Clarice rested the basket on her hip, then tossed scissored bits of paper high in the air. Mr. Tinka plucked the fiddle strings ever so lightly, which was his way of making the music of falling snow. When her basket was half empty, Clarice glided toward the door I'd hung in the footed frame. She waved, stepped through, then closed the door behind her. Eliza closed the curtain.

  All eyes on Hannah again, she said, "All night, while Wild Wind snorted and snored in her bed, Fair Wind stayed at her work, turning the sickness Wild Wind had scattered into harmless, crystalline snow. So delighted is she that she doesn't return to the castle until the snow, pretty as velvety icing on a cake, has piled up a foot deep all across the land."

  Hannah ducked behind the curtain then, and Mr. Tinka played a screechy note. Off stage Eliza banged pot lids together, three times and thunderously. Also off stage, Dru shouted, "Sister. I take a little nap and you undo all my hard work. Tricked me into thinking I was at death's door so you ... so you ... so you could please the sniveling, ungrateful peasants. I'll put a stop to your funny business, as soon as you bring me my shoes."

  "But sister, you have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed," Clarice said. "You should not go out when you are so cross."

  "I'll go where I want, when I want, thank you very much. Now get me my shoes!"

  Behind the curtain there was groaning and moaning, stomping, shuffling, and surly sighing.

  When the curtain opened, Dru started in spinning around the stage like a drunken twister. Clarice, head lowered, stood off to one side, and the servant girls, down on their knees, cowered and quaked. Dru spun to a stop, dug in her pocket for the keys, and then tossed them to Inga. "Lock her up, and don't give her any supper."

  "Promise me you won't do anything foolish," Clarice pleaded as Inga led her away.

  "Promises, shromishes," Dru spat back, then rubbed her hands together in an fiendish way and slunk toward the door. Before going out, Dru turned and said, "I'll show you who rules this land," then laughed a breathy, evil laugh.

  The servant girls rushed to the window. "Oh, my," Cass said, pointing, "see there, see how the air sparks."

  "And see how the thermometer plummets," added Gertrude.

  Mary wrung her hands. "I've never seen Wild Wind this angry."

  Mr. Tinka played then, music that was harsh and rasping and loud. Blizzard music. Inga slipped back on stage.

  The girls were still standing at the window, still wringing their hands, when there came a knock at the door. They huddled together like they were trying to decide what to do.

  Then came another, louder, door-wobbling knock.

  Still the girls huddled.

  And then a third knock, loud enough to wake the dead.

  The girls shoved Inga toward the door, where she asked, "Friend or foe?"

  "I come as a friend. Please, will you give me shelter from the storm?"

  "Oh, no, we mustn't. If we break the rules Wild Wind will have our heads," Inga answered.

  "Wrong rules are meant to be broken. Perhaps, if I could have a word with Fair Wind?"

  "Fair Wind is locked away in the dungeon, and Wild Wind has the key," Sadie hollered.

  Inga, looking kind of sheepish, reached into her pocket, and out came the dungeon keys. "Wild Wind left before I could return them," she said. "Do I dare free Fair Wind without her permission?"

  The girls huddled again. "Wild Wind will eat us for her supper," one said.

  "Or burn us at the stake."

  "Maybe, but maybe not. If she was rid of us, who would clean up her messes?"

  "Please," came the voice.

  "Let's take a vote," Inga said. "All in favor of freeing Fair Wind from the dungeon raise your right hand."

  Imogene's hand was the first to shoot up, followed by Mary's, and then, one by one, all hands were raised, and Inga ducked behind the side curtain.

  "Fair Wind will be here shortly," Sadie said to the door.

  There wasn't an answer.

  Cass pressed her ear to the wood. "Maybe she got tired of waiting and left."

  Gertrude pretended to chew her fingernails, then said, "Or maybe she froze to death."

  Sadie lifted the latch just as Clarice breezed on stage. "Yes, by all means, open the door."

  Scissored snow, thrown by Eliza, blew in right along with Hannah.

  "It's bad, then?" Clarice ask
ed.

  "Yes, very bad. The worst I've ever seen. Wild Wind has blown up a blizzard, and it has hit like a fist. There is no north. No south, east, or west, only Wild Wind. Wild Wind and her foul breath, pummeling the peasants, sucking up the flames from their fires, ripping the roofs from their cottages. If I hadn't seen your light, if you hadn't opened your door to me, I would surely have been lost."

  "Can she stay?" Cass asked.

  "Yes, of course. She can stay until the storm passes," Clarice answered.

  Then came another knock at the door. Clarice opened it, and standing there was none other than Rusty Farley, saying, "I thought I was lost until I saw the light." The working girls giggled into their hands, and then, after smoothing their aprons and plumping their hair, dragged Rusty by his arms and shoved him into the wing chair. He tried to get up, but they shoved him back down, then, leaving Inga behind to guard him, the other girls shot off in all directions. They soon returned, carrying shawls and slippers.

  Hannah and Clarice were talking quietly to each other, and the girls were fussing over Rusty, when there came a third knock at the door—Mary's fiancé, saying, "I thought I was lost until I saw the light." Mary wasted no time tugging him to the far side of the stage. Doc Goodmans was the next knock, followed by Eliza's.

  While the girls cocooned the new arrivals in blankets and shawls, Hannah and Clarice took center stage. "Wild Wind has gone too far. Isn't there something you can do?" Hannah asked.

  "I'm sorry, but it would take a dozen of me to stop Wild Wind."

  Hannah turned, raised an index finger, and counted heads. "If we all made believe, harder than ever before, could we become like you, if only for a little while?"

  Clarice scrunched her brow. "Perhaps, but you would need to learn my magic dance."

  "Please, will you teach us?"

  "I could, but there is one who is a better teacher than I, the one who taught me to dance when I was very young. Shall I call her?"

  "Yes, please do," Hannah answered.

  Clarice squeezed her eyes shut like she was wishing hard, and Rosa tiptoed onto the stage. Clarice did one of those girlish curtsies, then said, "I'm so glad you've come. Please, might you be willing to teach my friends the dance?"

  Rosa looked from one to the other of the folks on stage, like she was sizing them up, then grinned and nodded, and right away the blankets and shawls came off and everyone shuffled themselves into two lines. Hannah hid herself behind the biggest person on stage—Doc Goodman.

  "Do as I do," Rosa said.

  And that's what they did. When Rosa stepped a foot forward then back—the cast stepped a foot forward and back. When Rosa, one arm raised, dipped at the waist—they raised and they dipped, and so on and so forth until everyone had gotten the hang of the moves Rosa had built into the dance.

  This part of the play had been rehearsed only once because it had taken so long to convince the fellows that they wouldn't become the laughing stock of the county. Rusty's dancing was on the clumsy side, but even if I'd been out there leaning against the wall instead of standing on a chair in the dark, I wouldn't have snickered, because I was too busy scowling. The only reason a fellow, any fellow, me included, would have agreed to get up there on that stage, risk making himself out to be a fool, would be to win a girl's heart.

  I was still scowling when music as sweet as clover honey started oozing from Mr. Tinka's fiddle. It was mighty hard to hold my scowl after that, and darned near impossible once Rosa started in dancing like she'd done the night I'd been stuck up the tree. She wove in and out, dipped and twirled.

  A couple of times Doc Goodman dipped left when he should have dipped right, letting me see more of Hannah than a foot or an arm. The look on her face, the one she always got when she was thinking extra hard, told me Hannah wasn't play-acting. She was making believe that the dance could stop the wind for real.

  The dancing went on for a few minutes, and then there came a final knock at the door. Inga glided over, opened it, and then froze—solid as an iced-over cornstalk. Everyone on stage froze in whatever position they'd been in. Mr. Tinka, too, elbow high, cut short in the middle of an upward stroke.

  Dru, gasping dramatically, made her grand entrance. Staggering this way and that like she'd drunk too much whisky, she aimed for center stage. Once she got there, which took a while, she put a hand to throat, wheezed, "I can't breathe," and then collapsed to the floor, slow and liquid as a spring thaw.

  And then something happened that wasn't in any of the rehearsals I'd spied on. The curtain jerked, jerked, jerked shut. I didn't have an inkling who'd yanked the rope so hard and fast like that. Not Eliza—she was on stage. Everyone in the play was on stage. Whoever it was didn't know squat about pulleys. One more jerk and the whole thing would have come crashing down and Hannah's play would have been sunk.

  Whispers then, and footsteps. Folks shifting in their chairs. Voices, garbled but angry, and none too soon drowned out by Mr. Tinka's furious and ear-splitting fiddle.

  The curtain opened then, careful like, and the people on the stage started in dancing again. Everyone except Hannah, Dru, and Eliza. They were nowhere in sight.

  Hannah

  HIDDEN BEHIND DOC GOODMAN AS I WAS, AND CAUGHT UP IN making believe that a dance could truly stop the wind, the curtain was halfway closed before it attracted my attention, though things moved quickly after that. Dru's mother marched on stage, grabbed Dru's arm, yanked her to her feet, and then marched her off. Dru must have been stunned, because she didn't protest or try to pull away. Eliza dashed after them. I leaned close to Rosa's ear and whispered, "Keep dancing."

  As I reached for the rope to reopen the curtains, Mr. Tinka, dear Mr. Tinka, without a cue from me, began to play. Loud enough, I hoped, to muffle the quarrel that was brewing in the laundry.

  The quarrel had moved outdoors by the time I'd made my way through the laundry and joined Eliza in the darkened kitchen. We listened at the door, which they'd left ajar.

  "Please, Mother, I'm the star of the play, and it can't go on without me."

  "Being the star in a working girls' play is like being the smartest dunce."

  "That's not true. It's a good play. My friend Hannah wrote it."

  "And I suppose the next thing you're going to tell me is that that thieving, harmonica-playing stable boy composed the score."

  My stomach knotted.

  "What ... what do mean?" Dru asked.

  "I mean I know Eliza Moore has been hiding a criminal here all summer. I paid your fathers handyman a dollar to come here last night, and he told me he heard harmonica music. It wasn't until a short time ago that I remembered the sheriff was searching for a boy who played the harmonica. If the sheriff weren't over in the next county on some kind of business, that boy would be locked up by now, Eliza Moore right along with him, and the abomination you call the resting room would be shut down. As for you, young lady, I've already sent a telegram of inquiry to Miss Pritchard's Finishing School in Boston."

  For a moment, the only voice I heard was the one screaming in my head. Convince her that she's wrong, that Isaac isn't a thief, that the resting room does only good. Do it now, Dru, before it's too late. Now, Dru!

  "Please, Mother, if I come with you, promise never to set foot in here again, will you promise not to send me away? Please, I'm begging you." Dru's voice was as small and childlike as Megan's.

  I turned and walked toward the sounds of Mr. Tinka's fiddle. Eliza close behind, I passed through the kitchen, the laundry, and onto the stage. On seeing me, Mr. Tinka lowered his bow and Rosa stepped aside. I looked up to the transom and said, "We the peasants of this flat-as-a-flapjack prairie land have no more to fear from Wild Wind tonight. In coming together, joining with Fair Wind in her dance, we have stolen the wind from her sails, silenced her › roar.

  I turned to the cast then and, skipping ahead two pages in the script, said, "Let the celebration begin."

  Relief blossomed on the working girls' faces and from the string
s of Mr. Tinka's fiddle. The dancing began—this time in pairs, a rollicking two-step. Mary danced with her fiancé, Clarice, with Doc Goodman (until Eliza cut in), and the working girls each took Rusty for a grinning spin.

  ***

  Soon, and as planned, the music slowed and hushed—the cue for Clarice to escort the peasant guests, one by one, to the door. She bid each the same farewell. "Go, make your roofs strong, plant many trees, and always keep a candle burning at each of your windows so the lost might find their way home."

  I was the last to leave, closing the door behind me. I turned down the wick on the gaslight to the right of the stage, Eliza, the one to the left, and the working girls were thrown into near darkness. Forming a half circle behind Clarice, the girls drew candles from their apron pockets. Clarice struck a match, touched it to her candle's wick, then said, "We dedicate this play to those who did not find shelter from Wild Wind in the blizzard of January twelve, Eighteen Hundred and Eighty Eight. We'd like especially to honor those who were lost here in Prairie County."

  The room grew deathly quiet as Clarice lit Inga's candle from her own. Inga stepped forward. "Katie Cathcart, age six, the daughter of Guy and Elizabeth Cathcart, lost at Harmony School."

  Inga stepped back, lit Mary's candle, and then Mary stepped forward. "Jon Barnett, age eight, the son of Joseph and lone Barnett, lost at Harmony School."

  And then Sadie. "Jacob Barnett, age ten, the son of Joseph and lone Barnett, lost at Harmony School."

  My brothers' names, spoken clear and loud, was the one selfish thing I carried over from the first play to the second. It was my gift to them, my way of taking them out of hiding. Since the funeral, their names had been spoken only in whispers. Whispers tell secrets, dole out shame. Jon and Jacob had done nothing shameful. They deserved to have their names shouted from the rooftops, not hidden away in some cold, dark, sad place in our thoughts and hearts.