"Wha'?"
"You know, Elliot. I've told you about them. They're just like buggies, but they don't need a horse."
"How dey go?"
"Magic," I said.
"Oh." It was explanation enough. "Wha' I do when dey come?"
I was getting impatient to be rid of him, so I said the first thing that came into my mind. "Catch 'em."
He nodded importantly. "'kay, Robbie."
"Here," I said, shaking two pennies into his hand. "Buy yourself a couple of fireballs to suck while you wait."
"Sank you, Robbie. You good braver." I think he might have hugged me if I hadn't ducked. "Why you goin' get aw dress' up?"
"I have to get dressed in case, you know, just in case they come here."
He looked totally confused, so I began to talk faster. "See, when you catch the bad guys for Pa—boy, he'll be proud, he'll say what a hero you've be
en—after you catch 'em, you have to bring 'em up here for me to identify, to make sure they the ones that really helped that feller—you know—the feller they took to Tyler."
He nodded his big head seriously. I was relieved he didn't have the sense to ask me how he was supposed to make them come up to the manse. "I wouldn't want those villains to find me lying here in my nightshirt, now would I?"
He giggled.
"Hey! You better get going."
I had to sit down twice even before I came to pull my stockings up and buckle my stupid knickers. Crikey, but I'll be glad when Ma admits I'm man enough to wear long pants on Sundays. When I leaned down to tie the laces of my shoes, my head spun around so fast, I had to bring my foot up to the bed to get the job done.
Just dressing myself had exhausted me, but I couldn't go puny now. I stood up and held still until the spinning stopped. At the door I had a glimpse of myself in the kitchen mirror. The dratted bandage. I tried on my Sunday cap, but it sat on the top of my bound-up head like a rabbit on a snowdrift. On the porch I grabbed Pa's gardening hat off a peg. It would have to do.
I cannot adequately describe the horrors of that walk. I tried to pretend I was a prisoner, just released from Andersonville Prison after the Great War, making my way home to Vermont. My mind was telling my body to run, but my poor body was crying to lie down and die. Somehow I made it down School Street to West Hill Road, pausing to lean against the Martins' stone wall to catch my breath, praying that none of the neighbor ladies had stayed home from sewing circle. That was all I needed—some nosy woman to come running out to force me back home to bed. Or, worse yet, Rachel Martin to spy me in the state I was in.
When I finally got down the slope to Main Street, I was seen. But it was only a couple of the stonecutters taking a smoke outside the sheds. They stared at me, especially at my strange headgear, but I knew they wouldn't interfere.
It was ten miles from there. When I was young and healthy, I'd done it in under three hours. That day I was slower than a wounded veteran in the Fourth of July parade.
I tried not to remember how far I had to go. Didn't those veterans walk home from way down South somewhere? I kept telling myself just to keep one foot in front of the other, not to think of the distance, just to keep going down the road.
I kept remembering those wounded soldiers. How had they kept marching hour after hour? They sang, didn't they? I tried a chorus of "John Brown's Body," but "moldering in the grave" brought to mind that they'd hanged John Brown. It didn't seem lucky to sing about a man who had ended up on the gallows.
During the third verse of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" I heard a great commotion. My first thought was that it was all happening inside my head, that something like a charge of the black powder they use up at the quarry was going off inside my skull. I grabbed my head between both hands, hoping against hope to keep it from exploding right there in the middle of the Tyler road. Then I heard a honk like that of a giant goose right on my rump. Bad head or not, I jumped, I tell you, high as a hound after a treed coon.
"Get out of the middle of the road, you young fool! Do you want to be run down?"
The thing that had stopped just short of my rear end was a bright red motorcar. This motorcar made the one I'd seen in Tyler look like a toy. It was huge—with lanterns, black leather seats, one behind the other—and it had a wheel to steer with. A man, his face almost as red as the motorcar, was at the wheel. Beside him sat a woman, beautiful as an angel, in a huge hat with netting tied over it and under her chin.
I didn't move an inch. I guess I did look like some kind of fool standing there staring, my mouth wider than a granite quarry. A motorcar! There'd never been a motorcar on this road since the blinking things got themselves invented. I couldn't do anything but just stand there and gape. It was the most beautiful machine I had ever laid my eyes on, growling like it was raring to leap up and pounce on the road.
The driver was getting more impatient by the second. "Move, I say. Move."
"Oh, Oliver," said the woman. "He's just a boy. He's probably never seen a motorcar before."
I had, but I wasn't about to argue. I moved, though, to let them pass. "Excuse me," I said.
The machine began to roar and move forward, but as it did so, a figure popped up from the back, waving both arms. "Robbie! Robbie! I catch 'em!"