Alice At The Home Front (13 page)

“Aw you know Jimmy, Alice. He’s not going to write. His mom says he’s fine, though. Told her on the phone he’d actually spotted a U-boat and had turned it in. Got kudos for that. My opinion, he’s takin’ an awful risk for a handful of dimes.”

Alice was on the point of telling him about the spy in the black raincoat but then thought better of it. Maybe the cashier had told everybody how she’d called Mrs. Schnitzer a spy, and Moses would say, “What? Ol’ Mrs. Schnitzer a
spy
? Wait’ll Ted hears that one about his aunt.” Alice would be be mortified. Instead, she said, “Okay, Moses. Good to see you again,” and went on her way.

Alice was glad she’d kept quiet. She yawned and rubbed her eyes.

When she opened them, she saw something on the table by the window she had never expected to see again. There was her spotter’s log and beside it the pearly binoculars. Oh thank God for spring! Thank goodness for Mother Nature’s mistake. She giggled. Now she could spot again, and no one would stop her, because finally it was warm enough, and this was a sign Mother would allow it.

“Lovely day, isn’t it, Alice?” Mother called out from the garden when she had finished breakfast.

Alice went over to the bench where Mother was sitting and lay her head on Mother’s shoulder. “Thank you, Mother, for giving me back my book and my glasses.”

Mother slipped her arm around her and gave her a huge hug and a kiss. “I think it will be all right now, if you’re careful.” She stood and walked back into the house. “Come over here, why don’t you, and help me decide what to plant in the victory garden.”

Still in her pajamas, Alice dragged her slippered feet across the floor to the couch. Mother picked up a seed catalogue called “Victory Gardens” and showed it to her.

“Why victory gardens? Suppose all the plants die?” asked Alice. “Then it’ll be a defeated garden.”

“Everything’s called victory these days, because they want you to remember the war effort. Most of the nation’s produce, along with everything else, goes to the boys at the front, so the rest of us have to help out by growing our own vegetables here at home.”

“Is that what you plan to do?”

“Yes, what
we
plan to do.”

“Not me.” Alice’s gray eyes widened. “The last plant I had was a Venus flytrap, and it died because I ran out of flies.”

“Think of life, Alice. Think of something
positive
.” Mother squeezed her forearm with affection.

Alice was reminded of a hit parade song, and she began singing it so Mother could hear: “Ac-cen-tu-ate the positive, e-lim-i-nate the neg-a-tive, something-or-other the affirmative, and don’t mess with Mr. In Between. Know that song, Mother?”

“Yes, I’ve heard it. Go ahead and sing it to your heart’s content. It’ll do you good.” Mother smiled for some reason.

Alice said, “But there’s one big problem you’re going to have to face right off the bat. And I don’t want anything to do with it.” She sat up straight and talked to Mother in a grown-up way.

“What’s that?”

“No digging. Absolutely no digging up that grass. Not for me. I don’t dig. Get a bunch of dogs or something.”

“I’m not so sure I can dig either, Alice. We’ll have to find another way.”

“But if you don’t dig, you’ve got no garden. And all we’ll have in the backyard is grass.”

“Right you are, Alice. We won’t have to do that.” She nodded firmly.

“We won’t? You’ll get somebody to do it? Then it’s not your garden. It’s the gardener’s garden, and he’ll get the victory, not us.”

“Oh, we’ll have plenty of work to do. Don’t worry,” Mother assured her.

“Maybe if we pay him, he won’t share in the victory part of it.”

“Yes, Alice, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll pay him to prepare the garden for us.

Mother brought out the list of vegetables she was going to plant in the garden and handed it to Alice. “Read through these, Alice, and tell me which ones you’d like us to plant.”

Alice read through quickly. “Carrots and white and sweet potatoes.”

“But those are all root vegetables, Alice, you can’t live on those. Choose something healthy and green.”

“Asparagus—maybe. Tomatoes—maybe. Anything else is yucky.”

Mother sighed, “All right. But there will be plenty of other greens—”

Alice got up to leave and called back over her shoulder, “Don’t forget to plant a spaghetti tree.”

Running back to her room with her newly found logbook and binoculars, Alice settled herself down at her desk. She leafed through her logbook and noted the new date. Then she consulted the manual and found she could remember every plane, just as before. She made some notes about the ones she had noticed during the winter without her binoculars and felt relieved that not one enemy plane, as far as she had heard, had crossed the skies. Swell! She was back at work.

* * *

A month or two later, after the first spring crop had appeared, Mother called Alice to come outside where she was working in the new victory garden. Alice sauntered out the back door and joined her. “The garden is growing just beautifully, Alice, even better than I had expected. Except for one thing. We have a mystery on our hands,” she said. “I’ve been noticing a series of holes between the new tomato plants and under the cucumber vines. Look, the holes are causing the new plants to die. Now, I’ve asked Tim—our garden helper—if he knows what kind of animal would do that, since none of the tomatoes, peppers, or cucumbers have been chewed or even touched. He told me that a gopher would have pulled the whole vegetable down into its hole, so it certainly wasn’t a gopher. He thought it might be something larger, although he didn’t say what. Do you know anything about those mysterious holes, Alice?”

“Those holes over there?” Alice pointed vaguely toward the back.

“Yes, you seem to know that there are holes over there.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” said Alice. She’d read “ma’am” in Tom Sawyer. It sounded good to answer with, in case you were in trouble.

“Then do you know what or who made those holes?”

“Yes, Ma’am. I did, Ma’am.”

“Why on earth would you make holes all over the garden? You told me you’d never dig.”

“That’s a good question, Ma’am.”

“Don’t you ‘that’s-a-good-question’ me, young lady. What I want is the answer!”

“It was Mr. Chase’s idea, Ma’am. Gramp’s friend from down the street.”

Mother waved a hand at her. “Stop that ma’am-ing. You’re not a servant. What could Mr. Chase possibly want with you?”

“It was a business matter.”

Mother actually laughed. “Go on,” she said.

“Well, I’d told him about the victory garden when we were waiting in line to pick up the Sunday paper, and he said, ‘A garden, eh?’ And then he told me I could make some good pocket money if I wanted to, not selling the vegetables or anything but just for me alone. ‘It would be real easy, by gum,’ he said. And then he asked me if I was afraid of slimy critters, and I said I loved slimy critters. But curly-haired girls don’t. ‘
They
don’t like ’em,’ I told him. Then he spat some tobacco and said, ‘Worm critters?’ And I said ‘You bet.’ And that’s how it started—digging up worms for a business. For him to go fishing with, and he would give me a penny a worm.”

“Is that so? And did you earn good pocket money?” asked Mother.

Alice thought back on the hour she’d spent digging and shrugged. “Sort of.”

“Well, let me tell you something, Alice.” Mother shook her apron, stamped the garden dirt off her shoes, and sat on the bench. She tapped the bench with her hand for Alice to sit beside her. Alice didn’t want to hear a lecture, but at the same time, she was curious.

“Those worms are more valuable than the time you’ve spent digging them up and the pennies Mr. Chase paid you. Worms play an important part in our garden. They wiggle through the dirt, letting the light and fresh air in. It’s called,
aerating
in grown-up terms. That way the soil stays healthy and not all packed down hard. That’s how the roots can find their way easily to where they have to go. Then our vegetables will grow big and healthy and juicy. You see? ”

Alice nodded.

“Good. Then no more selling our worms?”

“No, Mother,” said Alice. “Our worms.”
They’re our worms,
she realized, imagining them standing at attention under her very feet.

Mother went to put away some tools, and Alice chewed on a strand of hair. She thought about buying the worms back from Mr. Chase, but he’d probably already used them for bait. She hauled Bagheera up on her lap for a consultation. Wouldn’t it be a better idea, she asked the cat, to get Gladys to dig in her garden for worms? She could trade with Alice: five big, fat worms for a small piece of Elsie’s fudge. Then she’d raise the price of worms on Mr. Chase. Two pennies a worm, take it or leave it. “What do you think of that, oh, Meowkins?” she asked, staring back into his green eyes. That seemed like a good idea, but it could get complicated if she had to provide Elsie with the butter and sugar. Alice twisted her mouth. Mother would ask where the ration tickets would be coming from. She shook her head. It was giving her a headache, so she decided to let sleeping worms lie. She hated digging, anyway.

After the first spring crop appeared—much to Alice’s surprise, considering the number of birds that had pecked up the seeds—Gramp asked her to fill up some baskets of zucchini and tomatoes to take to Mrs. Parker’s house. She was going to start canning for the winter. Alice thought,
Why did they use the word
canning
when it meant putting the vegetables in glass jars?
But that’s what you did with the produce from a victory garden. You canned them for the winter, and if it so happened you didn’t like zucchini, they stayed on the shelf until the following winter, and then you threw them out, but you had done your duty. Of course, you could try selling them to Mr. Chase.

Alice was always glad to see Mrs. Parker, because it was she who used to babysit her, taking Alice to her house. She was allowed to do things there that Mother would never permit at home—slide down the banister, eat tons of cookies, and ride on top of Puffy, the sheep dog with the wooly hair.

Alice giggled. Mrs. Parker’s kitchen was as crowded as Alice’s room after a visit from Gladys had left it upside down and messy. There were glass jars piled up in cartons all along the walls, empty ones on one side, filled ones with labels on the other; loads of vegetables, some already washed and peeled in colanders, some still fresh from the earth; a sink full of peelings; and two enormous steaming pots of water on the stove, with glass jars bubbling and knocking around in them. The kitchen table was piled high with dishrags and potholders of various colors, tongs to remove the hot jars, and a pitcher of iced tea, which Mrs. Parker offered as soon as Gramp and Alice stepped through the door.

“No thank you,” Alice said, noticing something not so clean on the rim of the glass.

“Come here, Alice, and let me show you how canning is done,” said Mrs. Parker, after she had thanked Gramp for the vegetables. She showed Alice around and told her what Alice had already guessed at a glance.

“And there on the stove in boiling water is where I sterilize the jars and the tops. The tops are so tightly sealed that no air can enter. That way the veggies’ll keep through the winter.”

Alice nodded. “They should call it jarring,” she said.

“And here is my pride and joy!” Mrs. Parker hugged an ugly, metal pot with a glass lookout on top. “My new pressure cooker! This pressure cooker can cook anything twice as fast as a regular pot! You can see how useful it is when you have a whole lot of produce to cook and can.”

“How can it do that? The pressure cooker, I mean?” asked Alice.

“Why, the top seals on very tight so that the heat builds up inside, causing lots and lots of pressure, and the little knob here in the glass top bounces up and down to show it’s cooking. Then you turn off the heat when it says to, and it’s all done—in no time!”

Alice looked at the cooker and thought about the pressure. The pressure reminded her of a volcano she’d read about called Vesuvius that would explode every once in a while when no one would expect it. People lived on the side of the mountain for years and years and didn’t have the sense to move away. Even while it was asleep, it was dangerous.

She went home and thought about all the good work Mrs. Parker was doing—for Alice’s family as well as for her own—and how the canning allowed the market vegetables to go straight to the troops instead of to the home front.

Alice fed Bagheera, who was eyeing her with one evil green eye, the other closed, because he’d had no breakfast, what with Alice over at Mrs. Parker’s. Then she worked a little in the garden, weeding between the plants and watering them, turning on the hose to a fast dribble, so as to irrigate the tomato plants without drowning them. “I’m gardening!” she said to herself to mark a brand-new experience.

When she had finished, she climbed the stairs to her room, took out the math book, and scowled, remembering there was going to be a test. The word problems didn’t make sense to her, mainly because she didn’t want them to. The stories were boring, that’s why. All about red and green fruit. Why not something about airplane squadrons? “Three squadrons took off at 0600 with X amount of fuel, flying north by northeast at …” Oh, well. Maybe she could get Gladys to show her the answers to the apple problems by drawing the answers on her knees under her desk.

Tossing the book aside, Alice took up her calligraphy brush, mixed a little black ink, and started in on the third page of characters: t’au. But in one bound, Bagheera stepped on the character and made a big black print of his own on the paper.

“Oh, Bagheera!” Alice gave up. “Why do cats always think they can act like humans? I suppose we can call that footprint maow. It doesn’t look so different from the Chinese.”

Mother called her for dinner, but after they had finished, Alice’s eyes kept closing in spite of herself; she was so sleepy. She wasn’t used to gardening. Upstairs, she lay on the bed without even taking her shoes off and stared at a design on the wall through half-closed eyes. It looked like a mountain with a cloud over it, lines running down like cracks. It looked a lot like the painting she’d seen of Vesuvius about to erupt. She stared at it for a while until it got blurry.