A Shiloh Christmas (10 page)

“I just . . . just didn't think it would,” I answer. “But now, I see how it might. . . .” And then I shut up and wait for my punishment.

Dad shakes his head. “I don't know what to say,” he says at last.

I don't know either. Seems like every time I get in real trouble, it's over a dog.

And this time it's caused a second problem. . . . Now I'm going to worry every minute Shiloh's outside that
Judd's dogs will come by and tear into him. Don't know if they've calmed down any or are still half-crazed over the fire.

I lay low that afternoon, doing my homework for math. Still got till the end of the semester to interview Rachel and write her biography, so I put that off once again. Read the other autobiography I've chosen for English. I've already read
Bad Boy
by Walter Dean Myers, not no accident I chose that, I guess, and now I'm reading one by Gary Paulsen.

I help Dara Lynn with her spelling, trying not to do or say anything that will make things worse between me and my folks. Dad telling me that he don't know what to say is almost worse than a punishment, because it don't clear up anything at all.

He spends the afternoon in Sistersville, and when the Jeep pulls in about five o'clock, Judd's pickup is right behind it. Dad comes into the kitchen—Judd waiting there in the doorway.

“Lou, Judd got a sleeping bag from the Red Cross, and he'd like to sleep outside here for a while and see if his dogs don't come back,” Dad says.

Judd shifts his feet uneasily. He looks tired—needs a shave.

“I could stay right out on the porch and be gone when you wake up in the mornings,” he says. “I'll try not to be any trouble.”

“Well . . . of course, Judd! But you're not sleepin' anywhere till I get some dinner in you,” Ma says.

“Thank you, but I had me a big supper down there at the school,” Judd says.

“Listen. We've got an old tent we've used for family camping,” Dad tells him. “Why don't we set that up, and you can leave your things in there while you're at work—not have to be clearing out every morning. At least it would be someplace to stay while you're thinkin' what to do.”

Judd turns that over awhile in his head. “Appreciate it. Thanks.”

I feel bad that the first thought going through my head was that Ma might put me back there in the girls' bedroom and let Judd have our couch. That he's agreed to live in a tent seems to make us all happy.

I put on my jacket and follow them outside—help clear away some brush to make a level spot where we can set up the tent, no tree roots digging through the ground—and I bring Dad's hammer so he can pound in the stakes.

Ma gets together some towels and soap, a jug of
water, a flashlight, a basin . . . I don't know what all . . . and gives them to Judd for his tent. A pillow. A blanket. Dad even finds him a Coleman lantern back in our shed. There's a rickety old outhouse up in the woods, girls won't go in if you paid 'em a hundred dollars, but Judd says it'll do.

“Is Judd going to live here now?” Becky asks. She never liked him much before, and I don't know that she likes him any more now.

“Till he figures out his next step,” says Ma. “He wants to be outdoors so his dogs can find him.”

“Do you think they'll ever come back?” asks Dara Lynn.

“Only thing he's got left, besides his truck. Sure hope so,” says Dad.

And this would be the perfect time for one of my parents to turn to me and say,
Marty, you did a brave thing, rescuing Judd's dogs, even though it was dangerous.

But they don't.

There's no Halloween up here this year. Most times cars drive up full of children, take them from one house to another for trick-or-treats. Sometimes older kids ride up in the back of a pickup, and that's most fun of all.

But this year, with all those burned-out houses across
the creek, and the ones full of smoke on their walls, don't seem like a time for celebrating. So the Lions Club down in Sistersville puts on a Halloween party for kids four to twelve. I don't want to go—it'll just be little kids there—but Ma wants me to keep an eye on the girls. She looks in her ragbag and finds old torn shirts and ripped-out pants for our costumes. Then she stitches a couple patches on them, messes up our hair, and smudges our faces with ash from the potbellied stove in the living room.

“Look at us, Daddy!” Becky crows.

Daddy puts down his magazine. “Why've you got your good clothes on?” he asks.

“Daaaddy!” the girls cry, and he laughs.

He goes to the closet for his jacket and finds a dirty old cap of his. Puts it on my head, and I grin at myself in the mirror. If I find I'm the only one there from middle school, I can just pull the cap half down over my face.

“I'll be back at nine,” Dad says when he drops us off. “If the party's not over, I'll wait.”

There's a pirate man at the door to make sure kids don't sneak back out. They don't want parents dropping their children off for a party, only to find out later they went somewhere else.

I got to say, it's a pretty good party. A clown comes over pulling this great big wagon, and it's got the youngest
kids in it. Becky climbs in, and the clown tells me and Dara Lynn to go have a good time with our friends.

Takes Dara Lynn about five seconds to see some girls from third grade gathered around a fortune-teller. I'm about ready to pull Dad's cap over my face when I see David Howard and Michael Sholt lined up for an eyeball contest. See Fred Niles over there too. We'd all said we weren't coming, but we did.

A zombie leans over this huge pot of intestine-looking stuff, and each contestant has ten seconds to plunge his arms in the guts, searching for eyeballs and pulling them out. We have to compete in groups of five, so we're looking around for someone else to join us.

Sarah Peters comes along, and we yell at her to come over.

“What do I have to do?” she asks, looking down into those cooked noodles.

“Stick your hands in there and look for eyeballs,” Michael tells her.

“Eeeuuu!” she says, and backs away.

But Laura Herndon comes over. “I'll do it!” she says.

So we got us a bum, a vampire, an alien, a Batman, and a cowgirl. David Howard goes first.

I can see in the pot. Noodles are slippery-looking and gooey, and David pulls out a Ping-Pong ball with a
black pupil in the middle, and little red veins painted on the white part. He finds two more.

“Gahhhh!” Fred says, and we laugh.

When it's my turn, I roll up the sleeves of Dad's old shirt and plunge my arms in the pot, fingers spread out, hands feeling around in every direction. Get two eyeballs . . . then four . . . and then the zombie presses the buzzer.

I don't get a prize for this contest, but David and Laura and Sarah and I are off to another one—we choose partners and see how fast we can wrap the other one up like a mummy in toilet paper.

David says he'll be the mummy, and when the whistle blows, I got my roll of paper in one hand and I'm wrapping David's head up so fast you won't believe.

“I have to breathe, dude,” he says, so I leave a little slit for one eye and an open place for his nose and I'm down under his chin wrapping his neck and his left arm. Sure is a waste of toilet paper. On my third roll and then my fourth, and I don't even bother to see what the competition is doing. I get his belly and his butt, his left leg, his right. . . . Then I see I missed his right arm, and I'm up there wrapping and Dara Lynn's out there cheering, and finally the whistle blows and I done it.

We win.

Both David and me get these little pencil boxes that look like a mummy's casket from Egypt, with a painted pharaoh on the front, his arms crossed over his chest, gold on his cheeks and forehead. Cool.

Becky comes by in a little electric car driven by another clown, who toots the horn. They're headed off to the ghost bubble dance, where a ghost blows bubbles and the little kids dance around, try not to let any land on them.

The Lions Club throws a good party, I'll say that, and I'm thinking maybe it's one of the best. I'm over at the refreshment table, a chocolate doughnut in one hand, cider in the other, when Fred Niles says, “Hey, you know who started that fire?”

“Somebody started it?” says David.

“Judd Travers,” says Fred, his mouth full of doughnut.

“What are you talking about?” I say. “He was at work! And his own trailer burned to the ground with all the rest.”

“Just like he did to his pa's house,” says Fred, as though he didn't hear nothing I said.

“How do you know that?” asks David.

“Because somebody saw him fill up a jug of gasoline at the station a few hours before that fire started,” says Fred.

The doughnut in my mouth feels like dirt.

“That don't mean anything,” I say.

“He did it once, he can do it twice,” says Michael Sholt.

And then the witch at the door announces the party's over, telling us all good night, and winks at me with one scaly eye, like she's in on it too.

R
AIN
.

Like the sky opens and lets loose everything it's been saving for the last three months. Too late for people's gardens, though. It runs down the windshield of the school bus, the wipers going
whup
 . . .
whup
 . . . and we have to make a run for it once we get to school. I drop my notebook and have to pick it off the rain-slick driveway, my hair soaking up water like Ma's sponge.

I shake my head hard inside the door, the drops flying every which way.

“Sorry,” I say to Rachel as she goes by, and this time she smiles a little. Maybe she's not so stuck-up. I realize she wasn't at the Halloween party, though. Ruthie neither.

Too bad the rain didn't come one week earlier and
put out the fire, I'm thinking as I walk to my locker. Paper says they're still investigating the cause of it—won't rule out arson yet.

So now we got another kind of fire going—the rumor traveling around that it was Judd who started the blaze, and that moves faster than flames. Fred announcing it there at the party, and again on the bus the next morning, and every kid taking hold of it and carrying it home, means that most every family up where we live and down near Friendly has heard about Judd Travers buying that jug of gasoline. I make up my mind that I'm going to ask Judd about it myself.

In English class, Mr. Kelly's talking about the way authors start their stories. Especially the story of their own selves, and he's sitting on the edge of his desk wearing jeans and the reddest shirt you ever saw, “fire-engine red” I guess you'd call it, which don't help get my mind off the fire.

But he's talking about all the different ways you can start a story about yourself:

“Tell me what you might guess about the person who wrote this,” he says, and reads, “‘My family is American, and has been for generations . . .'”

He waits while we think about it, and Sarah holds up her hand.

“Somebody who thinks this is really important?” she says. “Where your family is from and everything?”

He nods. “All right. Now here's another one: ‘I was born in a house my father built. . . .' Thoughts?”

“Like . . . he's starting from the beginning?” I say.

“Yes. A much simpler, closer focus. But both of these autobiographies were written by presidents of the United States: Ulysses Grant wrote the first one, Richard Nixon the second. Anybody want to read the first line of an autobiography you've chosen?”

Laura reads the first line of
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
: “‘On Friday, June 12, I woke up at six o'clock and no wonder; it was my birthday.'”

“Any thoughts about the way that begins, Laura?”

“She began it not knowing what was going to happen to her family at the end.”