Pinky Pye (3 page)

"Yes," said Papa.

"Well, it is on fire," said Uncle Bennie happily.

"That's sunset all over the sky," said Rachel. "Not fire."

They were putting busily along, and smoothly, and everyone was enjoying the cool ride. What a relief after the Model-T touring car with its loud bangs and its flat tires and black canvas top that kept flying up unexpectedly. How cozy it was in this little boat! How cool! They could sail on and on and on. Fishermen in large and small boats were coming home, gulls screaming behind them, protesting, quarreling.

"Smell the air!" they said. "Oh, smell it!" The boat ride was a wonderful start to what must be going to be a great and beautiful summer.

It took about a half hour to cross the bay. Then the boat pulled alongside a sturdy dock, and the minute the Pyes stepped off they took in, in one glance, the fact that this place had an unusually inviting feeling to it. Half a dozen small boys were being extremely active and noisy, all leaning over the side of the dock, practically grabbing at the Pyes and their luggage.

"Wagon! Wagon!" they called, each one trying to push in first.

No cars were allowed on this island, nothing on wheels in fact, except bicycles and small boys' express wagons. These small boys ran the only taxicab business there was, hauling people's luggage in their wagons, charging ten cents a load.

"Wagon! Wagon!" they yelled instead of "Taxi! Taxi!" One said, "Smash yer baggage?"

He must be a New York boy,
thought Rachel.
He talks like a boy in an Alger book.

An alert boy of about nine, whose face was covered with a white powder ("For poison ivery," he explained), took their bags and tied them on his excellent long and flat and homemade wagon. (
I'm going to make one just like that,
thought Jerry,
and join the taxi business.
) Naturally, everything would not fit on this one boy's taxi, and in the end, even though it cost sixty cents, Papa had to employ every boy in sight. Besides this, each member of the family had to carry many things.

"Don't lose anything," cautioned Mama, who was half smothered under the pile of coats and sweaters that had been shed, one by one, as they had progressed along the Boston Post Road. All in all, it was quite a long caravan that started down the narrow boardwalk toward the ocean.

Just as there were no vehicles on this island, so there were no streets either. There were very narrow boardwalks instead, and people had to walk single file, Indian fashion. The first boy, with the poison ivy, whose name turned out to be Touhy Tomlinson, said there were six of these lanes crossing the island, which was only a quarter of a mile wide from bay to ocean. And there were three lanes going the long way of the narrow island.

"Do you know where The Eyrie is?" asked Papa.

"Oh, yes," said Touhy, and the caravan proceeded.

Uncle Bennie, being very tired, sat on top of wagon one and tried to count the number of different rides he had had that day. Losing track, he comfortably sucked his thumb and felt in his pocket for a shred of old blanket he called "Bubbah," with which he liked to tickle his nose as he sucked his thumb. "Just nine more days. Just nine more days," he chanted. He was referring to the time left for the pleasure of thumb sucking that he was going to give up on the Fourth of July, which happened also to be his birthday. Sam Doody had said to him, "Who ever heard of a boy of four sucking his thumb?" So of course he had to give it up.

On their way to the little house they saw a great deal of poison ivy. "It is the chief crop here," said Touhy Tomlinson.

Most of the trees were twisted little scrub pines with a few hollies mixed in. Between the cottages, knobby clumps of tall tough grass grew, and over some of the cottages pale pink roses bloomed. All the houses looked inviting.

"You know what this place looks like?" said Rachel. "It looks like a toy village. You know Joey Moffat? He has a toy village, and these houses set out in straight little rows look like his village."

"Well," said Uncle Bennie, who also knew Joey's village, "where's the milk wagon here? And the bakery wagon?" He paused a moment. Then he said, "I wish I was home. I wish I never came. What's that roar?"

"That's the ocean," said Mama. "It's the sound of the surf, and it will put us to sleep every night."

"Not innerested," said Uncle Bennie gloomily.

A short way ahead, on a slight rise so that it was a little higher than the others, Rachel could see a perfect little brown-shingled, weather-beaten cottage. Could it be The Eyrie? It looked like a dollhouse. Many of the houses were like rectangular boxes. But this one had corners and elbows to it as though a room or a porch had been added here or there as an afterthought. Very pale pink roses spread sparsely over the tiny porch roof. The baggage boys slowed up. Everyone got a good view of the front of the cottage.

THE EYRIE, said the sign over the door.

All the Pyes were enchanted, and Uncle Bennie cheered up too. It was a perfect house in which to spend a summer. Stepping inside, almost expecting to discover the three bears in a little house like this, they found, not bears, but other surprises—little alcoves, built-in tables on which to work or eat or study or play Canfield, and one was set for supper.

Someone knocked lightly at the door. Astonished at having a caller when they had just barely arrived, the Pyes all rushed to open it. The caller was Mrs. A. A. Pulie, discoverer of the puffin and owner of the cottage. She had a trowel in her hands.
Been digging clams,
thought Uncle Bennie.

"Ah, Mrs. Pulie?" said Papa.

"Yes," said this sunburned, leathery-faced lady. "And you, of course, are Mr. Pye, the famous ornithologist, Mr. Edgar Pye."

Papa lowered his eyes. He was not accustomed to people knowing, or at least saying, that he was famous. He hardly knew it himself, and it battened him down to have someone come right out like this and say it in front of everybody.

The boys had not yet been paid their dimes, and they were standing by with their poison-ivy faces impassive and unimpressed by fame. Papa paid them and they left. The lady continued.

"It is an honor," she said, "for me to rent my cottage to such a distinguished gentleman. I, too, am a birdaceous creature, birdaceous and boldaceous, both. I imagine this will be a real vacation for you." She laughed gaily. "Few birds here to speak of aside from the terns—the large and the lesser terns."

It sounds like an English lesson,
thought Rachel, wondering if there were a least tern too.

"And the puffin, wherever it is," Mrs. Pulie went on. "Anyway, since you are a noted ornithologist, Mr. Pye, who knows what surprises the birds of our island may have in store for you?" Then she said, "Well, I know you are all tired. And hungry. So I'll go now and leave you alone. I know you will enjoy The Eyrie. I had it built and I have loved it. Now I am building a larger cottage farther down the beach."

Oh,
thought Uncle Bennie.
Digging cellars. Not clams.

"Mrs. Pulie," said Rachel shyly. "Why did you call this cottage The Eyrie?"

"Because this cottage is just a little higher than any other cottage. And because I have always loved words pertaining to birds. I am naming my new cottage The Gullery, you see, like
scullery
only
gullery.
A word I coined."

"Oh," said Rachel.

Mrs. Pulie then explained about the kerosene stove, the fireplace, the icebox—"not to forget to empty the water under it"—her unusual mailbox, and the little alcove under the eaves.

"I've left a few of my things up in the eaves. I hope you don't mind." "Up in the eaves" was the way Mrs. Pulie referred to the dark little alcove high up under the roof of The Eyrie, and from then on that was how the Pyes referred to that important section.

When Mrs. Pulie left, the Pyes busily and happily explored the cottage. There were benches that opened up under windows where toys could be kept. There were a few little spiders in these but not many, and in one they found some toys left by some other child from some other year and a waterstained book about missionaries. Then the door opened again and Mrs. Pulie came back in. "I forgot to tell you," she said. "There's a little window, a sort of round porthole window up in the eaves, which I opened this morning in order to air out the cottage. After a while you better close it so it won't rain in. You have to get up to the eaves either by stepladder from the inside, or by climbing up on the roof of the porch on the outside."

"All right. We'll remember," promised Papa, absently and forgetting about it immediately. After all, he had a great deal on his mind—birds, family, the end of the trip, getting ice in, getting food in, the beds made up. Not only Papa forgot; everyone else forgot, too, about the little porthole window that Mrs. Pulie said to be sure to close.

"Good-bye. Good-bye," they said to her. They liked her and they wished she would not go. In the dim light of the kerosene lamp it seemed lonesome without the lady, to be here on this island in this cottage with the lady gone and the boat gone too, and also the wagon boys; and to have just a handful of cottages that had lights on in them scattered here and there. In Cranbury there was a lighted-up house every minute, and you could hear the trains and trolleys, the sound of voices and the singing of crickets.

Suddenly they became aware of a high and shrill and desperate sound that went on and on without pause. It was not a ringing in the ears as Rachel had first thought.

"Peepers," said Papa. "Just peepers."

"Peepers!" exclaimed Jerry. "There must be a million of them to make all that noise!"

Papa spread out the newspaper he had picked up on the boat. Naturally he didn't have time to read it this minute, but he did want to glance at the headlines. "Why, here's a funny thing," he said. "You remember my friend Hiram Bish, out West? That fellow with the little owl. Well, it says here in the paper that he is on his way east right now with that little owl. He's coming by boat, through the canal, on the SS
Pennsylvania.
Here's a picture of the little owl."

Everyone crowded around Papa. "Newcomer on way to zoo," said the headline. The owl looked very disgruntled in the picture, indignant.

"O-o-oh," murmured Rachel. "Isn't he cute!" She clipped the story out of the paper because she was going to keep a scrapbook of unusual stories about birds this summer, and this would be the first one in it.

After a quick supper of alphabet soup they went to bed. This house was so little they could talk to one another without yelling from one room to the next, right from their beds. Uncle Bennie was sleeping on a cot in Rachel's little room because, of all the Pyes, he was the fondest of her. His pet, the dead locust, was in its box under his cot. "Sleep," Uncle Bennie said to it. Jerry was sleeping on a cot on the small glass-enclosed porch off the living room. Papa and Mama were in the other bedroom. Ginger was allowed to sleep where he always slept, and this, of course, was on Jerry's feet. Gracie slept where she wanted, and this was on Mama's feet.

A gull, out late, came screaming by. "Oh, remind me," said Papa, "to close that little window up in the eaves tomorrow."

"All right," said Mama. She yawned sleepily. "We certainly don't want any bats or things flying in there."

One by one, to the music of the surf and the peepers, they all fell asleep.

On the first morning of the Pyes' stay on Fire Island, they waked up in the wonderful way they were going to wake up practically every morning there—sun shining brightly through the windows on the ocean side, waves booming and breaking down below, gulls screaming over on the bay side about the fish business.

First, before breakfast even, the children decided to do some exploring. Probably Mama would not let them go swimming, for it was an old rule of the Pye household that no one could go in swimming until the Fourth of July. However, since they were not in Cranbury, since they were here in new territory, Jerry and Rachel decided to test the old Fourth-of-July rule. "May we go in swimming?" they said to Mama.

The same old rule did prevail. "No," said Mama. "Not today. Not until the Fourth of July."

"But it's hot," they said.

"Not that hot," said Mama. She wetted her finger like an Indian or a Boy Scout and held it up to the wind. "See, there's a wind," she said. "Besides, Papa or I must be with you when you swim in the ocean. You may swim in the bay without us. Not Uncle Bennie; but you may."

The children didn't really care. It was wonderful here. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. They bet it never rained here. They rolled down the high dune to the beach. "Smell it!" they kept exclaiming as they trudged along. And, "Hey, taste your arm!" They tasted their arms, and their arms tasted like the salt sea. They hadn't even been in swimming and still they tasted like the sea. Uncle Bennie's thumb would taste better than ever, and it would be doubly hard for him to give up sucking it forevermore on the Fourth of July.

"I don't care," he muttered to himself. "I give up my thumb and I go swimming instead. That's fair, isn't it?"

They climbed back up the dune, not the easy way by the wooden stairs, but the hard way, up the slippery sand dune. They walked along the top of the dune and watched the ocean come rolling, roaring in down below. A ship was on the horizon. Papa had said they would be able to see the great ocean liners in the distance, the
Mauretania
or the
Minnetonka.
The children thought they might see the very boat on which Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Bish were, at this very moment, traveling with their little owl, their final destination being the Washington zoo. They didn't know that this would be a little off the course of boats from the West Coast. They hadn't been here very long and didn't know everything yet.

"Why, it's as though we've been here forever. We even know people," said Rachel. "There's Mrs. Pulie. There she goes."

"I know it," said Jerry. "See those boys over there? I know them all."

These were the wagon boys on their way to meet the morning boat and to hang around the wharf. "Hi!" they yelled to Jerry.