The Painted Ponies of Partequineus and The Summer of the Kittens (16 page)

Anyway, Mom said the kittens would be fine, that she'd keep an eye on them, and that I should go with Mr. Morris because they were so nice to invite me, and that it was partly because I was so nice to Jimmy, only I didn't like to hear her say that. I don't
try
to be nice to him, especially. We're just friends, that's all.

So they came by about quarter to ten in the van and we drove out to the one-oh-one highway, and Mr. Morris wouldn't tell me and Jimmy where we were going, and we got off at exit fifteen to Berwick, and Mr. Morris took old Route One until we passed a sign that said Waterville, and he turned into - guess what? - an
airport!
  I never even knew it was there.

It's not a big airport like in Halifax, but it's got a runway and hangers and a bunch of little planes sitting around, and we got out and started exploring, and this really nice man with a baseball cap that said “Flying School” on it met us and took us around to all the buildings, and we watched two planes take off. Mr. Morris told him we had an appointment for eleven o'clock, and the man said that the pilot would be a little late because he was on his way back from Fredericton with a passenger who missed his Air Canada flight, and I was wondering what was going on. At about ten after eleven a little white airplane with blue trim came in for a landing, and when it taxied up to the hanger and stopped - see, I know words like “hanger” and “taxi” from helping Jimmy fly his model planes - the pilot got out and helped a man climb down and handed him his briefcase, and the man went inside to call a cab.

“Are you Mr. Morris,” the pilot said to Jimmy's Dad, and when he said he was the pilot looked at me and Jimmy and said, “So this must be Jimmy and Hanna, right? Are you all ready to go?”

Jimmy and I looked at each other in amazement. “Are we gonna go flying?” Jimmy said.

“Of course,” the pilot said, and he was grinning a big grin. “That's what we do here, you know.”

I was so excited I could hardly stand still. The man opened the door to the plane's cabin, and I could see that there were four seats inside. “You and I will get in back,” Mr. Morris said to me, and that confused me a little, 'cause in a car the adults always sit up front, but I climbed in beside him and he helped me fasten my seat belt, and then - Holy cow! - the pilot picked Jimmy right out of his wheelchair like he didn't weigh a thing and put him in the pilot's seat, on top of a cushion that let him sit up high so he could see out the windshield really well, and fastened his seatbelt too.

“This airplane belongs to the flying school,” Mr. Morris told me. “It has dual controls. They use it to teach people to fly.” I looked over the seat back and saw two sawed-off steering wheels, one for each front seat, and all kinds of levers and instruments and stuff, and what I found out later was a two-way radio. The pilot gave us each a set of headphones - “That's so we can hear each other talk over the noise of the engine when we're up in the air,” he said - and then he pushed some buttons and the propeller started to turn. Jimmy turned around in his seat with the biggest grin on his face that I've ever seen.

A couple of minutes later we were out at the end of the runway. I was really scared, 'cause the engine was making a lot of noise and the plane seemed so
small
.  I'd flown in WestJet and Air Canada planes before, and they were huge, but this one was smaller inside than Jimmy's van, and the walls seemed awfully thin. The pilot talked to somebody on the radio, and then he pulled out a knob on the dashboard and said, “Everybody sit back now and enjoy the ride,” and I did, but I could still see what he was doing between the front seats.

The engine went faster and faster and got louder and louder, and all of a sudden we were rolling forward, and we were racing down the runway, and it was bumpy and everything rattled and banged until - wow! - we just leaped off the ground and all the bumping and rattling stopped and we were flying!

Up and up we went, and I forgot to be scared. All the roads and houses and trees got smaller and smaller, and we could see the Bay of Fundy and even Isle Haute out in the middle of the water. The pilot turned the plane around and began to follow the highway, and pretty soon we passed over Kentville and New Minas, and everything on the ground looked really small, and then we were over Wolfville, and the pilot brought the plane down low really quickly, so that my stomach felt kind of queer.

“Look for your house,” Mr. Morris told me, and I tried, but did you know that everything looks really different from the air?

“There's the university,” he said, and I spotted the big residence tower and University Hall with its clock, and the chapel. After that it was easy to find our street, and when the pilot turned around at the end of town and flew back over, I saw Mom and Mrs. Morris standing out on the sidewalk and waving to us. They were really tiny, but I knew it was them. Our roof is light grey, not black like most of the other houses. I never noticed that before.

At the edge of town we crossed over the Cornwallis River and Port Williams, and the plane began to climb again. I noticed that Jimmy wasn't looking out the window any more. The pilot was showing him the instruments and pointing to the knobs and levers that make the plane fly. I looked out the window again and saw we were over some farmers' fields, and they looked really neat and organized, the way they do from way up on the Lookoff on the way to Cape Blomidon, like my grandma's patchwork quilt. We were high enough again to see the bay, all the way out beyond Cape Split, and Mr. Morris pointed and said, “That's New Brunswick over there.”

And I leaned forward to look through the windshield, and that's when I discovered that Jimmy was flying the plane! He had his hands on the wheel and the pilot didn't, and a minute later he turned it just a little and the left wing dipped down and we were turning. We began to follow the shore line, and Jimmy did something that I couldn't see, but it looked to me like the wheel tilted forward, and we began to go down. I was kind of scared, but pretty soon we levelled off, just like his model planes do, and we were close enough to the ground to see foam from the waves breaking on the rocks. There was a fishing weir that looked like a maze in close to the shore, and we flew over a wharf where there were a whole bunch of cars parked and people walking around, and Mr. Morris told me they were tourists who came to eat lobster, and I realized it was lunch time, only I wasn't hungry at all.

I could see the pilot showing Jimmy what to do next, and he pulled out a knob on the dashboard and the engine got noisier, and then we started to climb again, higher and higher until we couldn't see people any more, and the cars looked like tiny toys, and then we turned inland and kept climbing, and you know what? There are lakes all over Nova Scotia! I could see a whole bunch of them, all silver and shining in the sun, not blue like they seem to be from the ground. Jimmy looked back at me over his shoulder. I've never seen him so happy.

And then the pilot and Mr. Morris disappeared. They just sort of faded away, and it was just Jimmy and me way up there all alone in the clouds, except for birds, lots of birds that flew along beside us calling “fee-bee, fee-bee.” Jimmy took my hand and we flew up and up and up to the very roof of Canada, where we could see the cities and the mountains and the Great Lakes and all the way to Vancouver and Hawaii and Japan, and it was like Jimmy and I were the only people in all the world.

I've never been that happy before, not in my whole entire life.

June 30
^th

 

Dear Diary,

Mr. and Mrs. Morris took Jimmy into Halifax this morning, to the Children's Hospital. He has to have another operation. I asked Mom if it was an emergency, and she told me no, that they'd known about it for a couple of weeks, that it was because of Jimmy's hydrocephalus - that's the word I was trying to remember before - that was filling up his head with some kind of fluid and making him sick with headaches and stuff, 'cause it put too much pressure on his brain. He has something in his head called a shunt to let all that liquid drain away, and I guess it wasn't working any more because he had to get a new one.

I asked her if Jimmy knew about having to go to the hospital yesterday when we went flying, and she said he did, but he didn't tell me about it. I guess the plane ride was because he was going to have an operation, and his parents wanted to give him a special treat before he went, just in case he…

I'm going to scratch that out. I don't want to think about that.

Maggie's kittens are three days old today. They're getting really wiggly, and they must eat a ton, 'cause they're always hanging onto Maggie's nipples. They're kind of big now, the nipples I mean, not the kittens, although I think they're getting bigger too, and Mom and I talked about how cats and people are both mammals, which means we can feed our babies milk from our own bodies. The world is amazing, you know? People don't look anything like cats, but we have all the same equipment, eyes and ears and hearts and tongues and even breasts, which I don't have yet but I will soon. I'll need them if I ever have babies of my own.

Jimmy has a fish tank full of guppies. Did I ever tell you that? And sometimes the guppies have babies, too, only when they're born Jimmy has to take them out real quick because the mother fish eats them. Gross! He puts them in another bowl where they'll be safe until they get too big to eat. You wouldn't believe how small they are, only a couple of millimetres long. But Jimmy says they have all the stuff inside them that we do, all the important stuff, anyway, like bones and eyes and a heart and a stomach and muscles to make their fins and tail move. All that in a little fish that you almost can't even see. It's like a miracle.

Jimmy said something really strange once when he was showing me some new guppy babies. He said that life is the cheapest thing there is on earth. I asked him what he meant, and he said that people can buy life in a pet store or even in Wal-Mart for a dollar ninety-eight. They buy fish to take home with them, and most times they don't really know how to take care of them, so after a few days they just die. He looked really sad.

I thought about the baby fish in the bowl, how they wouldn't have anything to eat or clean water or be safe from their mother eating them if Jimmy didn't look after them. Then I thought about Jimmy in his wheelchair, how he's something like the baby guppies, 'cause if somebody doesn't take care of him, he can't do it for himself. That made me sad, too.

Dad doesn't care about the kittens. He came upstairs to look at them the first day, but he didn't say anything and just went away to his den, and he hasn't been back since. He seems kind of sad lately. He's home almost all the time now, but he doesn't talk much, except this morning when I was eating breakfast and he came into the kitchen and sat down. He asked me if I wanted to go to the hardware store with him, that he had to buy a new saw for a project he was planning. I haven't gone anywhere with Dad in a long time, 'cause he stopped asking me when he and Mom started fighting. I should have said yes, I guess, but I didn't, and he went away from the table without eating any breakfast, and Mom kind of looked at me funny, and I said, “What?” She shook her head and went back to what she was doing, and a couple of minutes later I heard the garage door open. I hurried to the back door, but by the time I got there, Dad was already out the driveway and heading for New Minas.

Jimmy's at the hospital. I wonder what's happening to him right now.

July 1
^st

 

Hey, Diary!

Today was Canada Day, and we had a picnic! All three of us! Mom packed a lunch and Dad drove us out to Kingsport and we sat at a wooden table and ate, and after that we bought ice cream cones at the little canteen. The tide was way out, and Dad took me down near the shore line where there's all kinds of shells and stuff, and we even found a live crab. Did you know they can walk sideways?

Mom and Dad were even talking to each other, but not like they were mad, and they tried not to let me see that they were sad, even though I could tell that they were. They didn't talk about anything important, at least not when I could hear them. After we poked around on the beach for a while, we walked up the road to where all the little cottages are built on top of the cliff, and where we could look out over the bay. We kept going until we found a place where the trees grow right up next to the cliff's edge, and there were lots of bushes and stuff, and even yellow wildflowers, only when I looked really close, the flowers were tigers, all yellow and black, and they were looking at me with their big green eyes, and I hung on to Mom's hand real tight on one side, and Dad's hand on the other. The tigers followed us all the way back to the car, and when we got inside and Dad started the engine and pulled out of the parking lot, they were sitting all in a row at the side of the road, watching me.

July 2
^nd

 

Dear Diary,

This was a terrible day. I have to tell you, even though I don't want to.

It started out really well. We had breakfast together, all three of us like we used to, and after that Dad went down to his workshop - to try out his new saw, I guess - and Mom was out working in the garden, and I was watching the kittens. Later on I heard Mom come back in the house, and Dad must have come up from the basement because I heard them talking in the den, not what they were saying, just a word or two once in a while. But then they got louder, and I wandered out in the hall to listen.