The Daring Escape of Beatrice and Peabody (8 page)

It is heartbreaking to say goodbye to a pig, especially one as fine as Cordelia. She nuzzles your neck and looks you in the eye all soft, like she just knows what you are thinking and she does not like it at all.

I scratch her backside for a long time and rub her neck and itch the places on her head she likes itched so well. I look in her eyes. I do not fib and tell her I will be back soon. I tell her the truth.

‘It is not safe here for Peabody. That’s why we are leaving.’ I pick up the stick Bobby kept for back-scratching and find all her itchy spots. She likes it especially well. She keeps coming back for more.

‘If leaving is a bad idea, I will know it pretty quick and then I will think of another plan.’ I tell Cordelia this in between kisses on her face.

I cut a piece of rope and tie it to Peabody’s collar. We have never run on the road but if we are going to find a home, it’s the only way. Already Peabody is squirming and pulling at the rope because if there’s one thing about him, he does not like getting tied up.

Cordelia is sticking her head through the slats in the
pen, watching. I go over and scratch her one more time and bend down and kiss her on the face. ‘I will find you when I get settled.’ I look her in the eye and feel my tears well up.

At the last minute I tucked a dozen hot dogs in my socks and Pauline’s little notebook in the pocket of my overalls. My heart told me it would not let me leave those pages flopped upside down on the floor of the truck, even if I am never going to read a word. A heart is like that. If you listen, it will give you marching orders.

This is also the reason I climb up the boards of the pen and jump inside and wrap my arms one last time around Cordelia and let her crawl into my lap and nibble my ear. Soon they are all piling on top of me: LaVerne, Vivian and Big Ben, all grunting, all pushing to get to the bits of corn hiding in my pocket. Then I climb out of the pen. I reach back through the fence and give Cordelia one last hug. The only thing that pulls me away is the thought that Ellis will soon be up.

Our travelling show is quiet this early in the morning. Only the crows fighting over specks of popcorn and bits of taffy make any noise. I look past Eldora’s Museum of Mystery to the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Ridee-O and the Ferris wheel.

Without Bobby to say get ready, set, go, Peabody and I just look at each other. I turn and see Cordelia’s sweet piglet face poking through the fence. I know her tail is
wiggling on the other side. My heart throbs. You can only take so many goodbyes in life. So I do the only thing a twelve-year-old girl with love in her heart can do. I go over and lift Cordelia out of the pen and set her on the ground.

‘Ready, Peabody?’ I whisper.

He wags his stumpy tail. That is my answer.

‘Let’s go.’

Peabody shoots out in front, and my little pig follows. I let them take the lead. It is hard to get excited about running when you cannot see the finish line.

I do not have much of a plan except we need a home that will take a girl with a diamond on her face, a
funny-looking
dog with a stumpy tail and a little pig.

We run down the main road past all the big houses with the porches out front and the gingerbread trim that looks like frosting dripping down over everything. Once upon a time I told Pauline a house like that was waiting for us. We just had to find the right one.

Now I make myself watch my feet instead of looking at dreams. A house on the main road would not offer enough protection. I keep looking over my shoulder for Ellis. I would not want to be looking for him all the time.

It is a good thing I brought a pocketful of corn because it is the only thing that keeps Cordelia from running after butterflies. Cars and trucks hurry past, and sometimes they beep because it is not every day you see a girl, a dog with hardly any tail at all and a baby pig all running down Main Street. They slow down and yell at me like I don’t know how to keep my dog and my pig out of the road, and I make sure my hair is tight over my face so they don’t see my diamond.

It is very hard to hold your hair over your face when you are running. I am so out of breath I tell Peabody it is time to walk. A boy hoots out of the window of his truck. Peabody notices a squirrel running and he leaps after him, and it turns out that where Peabody goes, Cordelia wants to go, too, and that’s how we turn onto a smaller road.

The houses are smaller here and everyone has a victory garden with tomatoes big as melons hanging over their fences. I breathe deeply and try and get myself calmed down. There are many flower gardens along this road and that means many bees and Peabody is very interested in their buzzing. He keeps trying to stop and watch them and I pull at him and tell him to get his head out of the clouds and to stop acting just like Cordelia.

We pass three girls playing hopscotch and I am very careful to hold my hair tight and I have to pull Cordelia when they start saying things like ‘Oh, what an
odd-looking
pig,’ and she gets herself all puffed up and wants to stop and be all friendly because she doesn’t know that they are making fun of her. All she hears is the tone of their voices, sugar-sweet, thick as maple syrup.

Each house on the next road is all wrong. One has a yard too small for Peabody to play in, one doesn’t have a shed in the back for Cordelia, another has a lady snipping her roses who says, ‘Shoo, shoo,’ as soon as she sees my little pig.

Just as we turn onto another road I think maybe I see the lady in the orange flappy hat limping ahead, but as we turn a corner she vanishes and I know I am just fooling myself. We start running again and I follow Peabody and Cordelia down another road and I am trying to make sure we are following the general direction of the main road, which I reckon is heading south. Pauline is south.

My chest is heavy and my blood pounds in my head and I want to stop and rest. But I hear Bobby telling me whatever you do, even if you are slow as Christmas, do not stop. Keep going. Press on. That is how you find your second wind. I don’t know why he spent so much time on me. I never got much better at running, even with all the things he taught me.

We turn onto a smaller road, this one with a farm with a cow and a horse in the field. The sun is high in the
sky and I feel my shoulders blister. I am also getting very thirsty. I run so slow I am almost walking. Peabody is all interested in the cow and he stops and so Cordelia stops and she grunts and squeals and the cow looks up wondering what all the noise is about. This house looks pretty wonderful, I think, with a wide porch and roses climbing all over the sides, but then a yellow dog comes shooting out at us, barking his head off, his mouth open and his teeth showing.

‘Bad dog!’ I yell, pulling Peabody into my arms and trying to block Cordelia. The dog leaps and growls and jumps and tries to get Peabody, and then my little pig runs squealing down the road, which may not be the smartest thing because big yellow dogs are faster than little pigs. I run after them yelling, ‘Bad dog!’ in my deepest Bobby voice.

The dog catches Cordelia and they roll around the road, my little pig squealing like it is the end of the world. Peabody is on them in a flash, barking and trying to get his teeth into the dog’s tail. I reach for his collar and pull until I get the dog off Cordelia. He is not taking no for an answer, though, and as soon as I get him off, he snaps at Peabody, over and over, trying to bite at my dog’s little stumpy tail.

I reach into my socks for a hot dog and pull out the whole pile. This catches the dog’s attention. He forgets Peabody and sniffs at the hot dogs. He gulps them, one
after the other, all twelve of them, and as Peabody and I fly down the road looking for Cordelia I think I have never loved hot dogs so much.

We find Cordelia under a row of apple trees. She is rooting around all the ripe fruit on the ground, which is rotting and very sweet-smelling.

There is a big split in her ear, the one that usually stands up the right way, and it is bleeding. ‘Oh, Cordelia.’ I look around for something to wipe up the blood and finally decide on my sock, but when I look up, Cordelia is lying down munching an apple and Peabody is licking her ear.

I collapse under one of the trees after that, because if there is one thing I love, it is apples. I eat the fattest one I can find and I keep going, one after the other, until my belly is full of apples. Peabody is not much interested in fruit, and I have no more hot dogs to give him, so when he is done licking Cordelia’s ear, he snuggles up next to her belly and goes to sleep. Then we all have a little nap, because who wants to run all day anyway?

When I wake up the sun is straight overhead and I have a bellyache from all the apples and the lady in the orange flappy hat is watching me.

I first saw the lady in the flappy hat right after my mama and papa died. We were at the funeral, sitting in a church in Vermont. Pauline was very surprised Ellis let us stop for a funeral. My grandpa was there, too, sitting in the back with his hands crossed over his chest and a scowl on his face. He had loads of money from the gun factory his family owned during the Civil War, Pauline told me. And he had loads of bullets, too, all ready for my papa when he stole my mama away.

‘Your grandpa disowned your mama and he never saw you, as far as I know.’ Pauline said my grandpa had so much money he couldn’t spend it all. She tried to introduce us at the funeral, but he turned away.

Stone angels stood all around the church and were solemn and did not smile and I was afraid. I hid my face in my hands and whimpered. Then an old lady in an orange flappy hat limped up the aisle and sat in the seat in front of us. She turned around and waved. Thin wrinkles outlined her face and when she smiled her cheeks plumped out and she looked very much like a very ripe sweet old apple.

I waved back.

‘Who you waving at?’ Pauline whispered, looking around.

‘The lady.’

‘What lady?’

‘In the hat. Can I have a hat like that?’

Pauline looked all over the place and then pulled me closer. ‘Do you need some water or something? Are you dizzy?’

I checked to be sure. The lady cinched her pink shawl with a big safety pin. She straightened her hat. I waved again.

‘She’s right here. Can’t you see her?’

Pauline looked around again and then got a worried look all over her face. She felt my forehead to see if I had a fever. When I tried to wave again, she pulled my hand down. ‘No more of that,’ she warned me.

At the cemetery there were a lot of gravestones and even more statues and shadows everywhere.

I cried again and buried my face in Pauline. After a while, when the preacher was done with his talk, I saw the lady in the orange flappy hat over by a very tall stone angel, and both she and the angel were waving.

This time I didn’t tell Pauline.

One night when Pauline was snoring and I was trying to sleep, the wind howled and rocked our truck like it was a toy. I thought how we were going to blow away. I
didn’t want to go to heaven and be with my mama and papa and I pulled the bedroll up to my chin and listened as the storm shook our hauling truck like it was a box of candy corn. Then there she was, the lady in the orange flappy hat, opening our purple curtain and peeking into the truck, smiling at me and putting her finger to her lips so I wouldn’t wake Pauline. In the instant it took to check if Pauline’s eyes were closed, the lady vanished.

One day a big black dog showed up when I was off in the woods doing my business and it started barking and baring its teeth and I pulled up my overalls quick and backed up and the dog moved closer and closer and lunged at me and I screamed. In the second before I screamed again, the lady in the orange flappy hat appeared. The dog took one look at her, whimpered and raced off. She held my hand and led me back to Pauline.

When I got older and my diamond got bigger and I started getting teased because folks coming to our travelling show wanted a look-see, the lady in the flappy hat started showing up more often. She came on the bad days, the really bad days when I wanted to make myself invisible. She would appear for just a moment to show me the way out of the crowd and back to our hauling truck, and then she would go.

I didn’t tell Pauline about most of the times the lady in the flappy hat came because it made Pauline so upset. Then Pauline read about imaginary friends in the
McCall’s
she found at Woolworths and she asked me a few questions, but when I told her the truth she didn’t want to hear any more.

I didn’t want to lose Pauline, so I kept the lady in the flappy hat to myself. I didn’t like to keep secrets from Pauline but I couldn’t find any other way around it.

The lady in the orange flappy hat watches us lying under the apple trees, and when I turn away and nudge Peabody to see if he can see her, too, she is gone.

My belly aches something awful and I am very sorry I ate all those apples. I am also very thirsty. Peabody shakes, he is panting so. Cordelia is up on her feet looking for more apples. ‘Come on,’ I say, standing up.

My legs wobble from travelling so far. When we get to the end of the road, another road crooks to the right, and we take that one, and then it bends to the left, and just as it turns right again, I stop short.

‘Well, will you look at that?’ I can hardly breathe.

The three of us stand looking at a house the colour of buttercups, with blueberry shutters and a front porch with rocking chairs still rocking. There is gingerbread trim on all the windows that looks like frosting dripping down. All around the house is a fence with sharp white pickets, because when you live in a house that looks like a birthday cake you do not want folks coming in and bothering you. Of that, I am sure.

There are roses all around – big red roses with plenty
of thorns to keep even more bad things out – and a gate with a heavy latch. It is a house with a lot of protection.

‘Will you look at all those windows and how tall they are?’ I point so Peabody and Cordelia will notice. ‘They are taller than us all put together.’

There is a wide porch, perfect for sleeping outside on a hot summer night, and there is a porch swing, just waiting on a girl to come and lean back and rest her hurting feet. ‘We’ll get water here.’ I reach down and scratch Peabody between the ears. When I look up, the old lady in the orange flappy hat is standing on the porch. Peabody barks.

‘Shush,’ I say, pulling him up next to me and making him sit and be quiet. Cordelia is watching a dragonfly on the fence.

The sun is blinding against all the buttercup paint and I screen my eyes with my hand because now the lady with the flappy hat has brought a friend. This one is taller, with hair the colour of a new silver dollar, and they are both standing under a hanging flowerpot full of pink geraniums. The lady in the orange flappy hat lifts her hand again and waves, but this time the tall one pulls it down.

The glare from the sun bounces off the windows. I narrow my eyes so I can see better. The tall woman disappears right in front of me and then all I can make out is the outline of the orange flappy hat. After a moment, it, too, is gone.