And Condors Danced (16 page)

“Why?” Aunt M. repeated, somehow filling that one word with so much sympathy and concern that it made an unwelcome flood of self-pity and grief well up in Carly’s throat and eyes. Fortunately the tears made her angry, angry to be so silly as to cry over having to live at Greenwood, and she swallowed hard and waited for the anger to burn away the tears before she said, “Yes,
why
did they decide now that I should live here when they were so sure I shouldn’t when I was five?”

Aunt M.’s head tilted and her eyes drifted away for a moment before she brought them back to Carly’s face. “I think you know—you must know—why they wanted you to live with them. After all, you are their child, and it was only natural for them to want you with them. The only strange part was that you had been left here with a childless old woman and a crazy Chinaman for so many years, and it would never have happened if your mother hadn’t been so very ill for so long. But then when she seemed to be a little stronger, and when Nellie had gotten old enough to help care for you, it was to be expected that they would want you with them.”

“But why did they change their minds now?”

Aunt M.’s eyes went quickly down to her hands, folded now in the skirt of her blue poplin. Without lifting them she began to talk, and her voice was different, more wavering and uncertain. “I’m not entirely sure except that perhaps your father feels that there’s no one to supervise you adequately just now at the ranch, what with your mother’s bad spell last month, and how long it seems to be taking her to get her strength back this time. I think your father feels you’re at an age when you need more attention than either your mother or Nellie can give you just now, and—”

“Anyway,” Carly interrupted, “you know I’m happy about it. You know I’m as happy as—as happy as anything—to be able to stay here with you and Woo Ying. It’s just that I couldn’t help wondering—”

“Yes, yes. I know.” Aunt M. reached over and patted Carly’s hand. She was gathering her skirt to stand up when Carly said, “Aunt M. There’s something else. Something that happened at school today that I want to talk to you about. Something Emma Hawkins said about Father, and the rest of us too.”

Aunt M. sat back down. “The Hawkinses, is it?” she said, and suddenly her voice was back to normal, as crisp and crackly as overdone bacon. “What has that gaggle of geese been cackling about now?”

Carly couldn’t help giggling. “I don’t think geese cackle,” she said. “But anyway—Emma got her dander up for some reason this morning while we were waiting for Mr. Alderson, and she started saying a bunch of things about the Hartwicks, like—well, first off she said that Mr. Quigley wouldn’t have kept you out of the water company for so long if Father hadn’t been so cussed.”

Aunt M. listened quietly without interrupting, and Carly went on telling all the things Emma had mentioned, trying to keep it light and smiley, as if it didn’t really matter what the Hawkinses said, since the whole family were downright famous for their spiteful backbiting. But by the time she’d finished she wasn’t smiling anymore, and the angry burn was back in her eyes and cheeks just as it had been that morning.

“Well,” Aunt M. said. “Well, now. I hope you didn’t dignify such nonsense by arguing about it.”

“No,” Carly said. “I didn’t. Mavis and I just got up and went down by the lavatory to watch the boys playing andy over.”

“Good for you. Exactly what you should have done.”

“It’s not—you don’t think—I mean—it’s not true, is it?”

“Of course not. Not the way Emma meant it, at least. There may be a grain or two of truth mixed up in it somewhere, but not enough to worry about.”

“Like what grains of truth?” Carly asked.

Aunt M. sighed. She smoothed down her skirt and examined her wrinkly old hands and sighed again. “Well,” she said at last, “I think we’d have to admit that Ezra Hartwick is not the easiest man in the world to get along with.”

Carly nodded, and Aunt M. nodded back and went on moving her head up and down for quite a while.

“Not without some reason,” she said at last. “I’d be the first to say that Ezra’s not had an easy time of it. Getting along with ordinary people never’s been easy for him, and that’s a fact. It’s hard to say just why. He was such a bright boy. Just fifteen when I left Maine to marry Edward, but already the talk of two counties for his sharp mind and studious ways. I wasn’t surprised a bit when he won the scholarship and went off to study in Boston. But somehow, things never went well for him after he came back home.”

“He married Mama,” Carly said. “Mama was the prettiest girl in the county and she could have married dozens of people, but she picked Father. That was one good thing that happened after he came home.”

Aunt M. nodded very slowly. “Did he tell you that?”

“No. Mama did,” Carly said.

“I see. Well, yes, your mama is a very beautiful woman. There’s no doubt about that. And she’d been the adored and pampered only child of the wealthiest family in town. But then her father died suddenly and it turned out he’d gambled on some bad investments and most of the family’s money was gone. But still, when Anna and Ezra were married, the future must have looked very bright to them. He’d just accepted the position of principal of the high school and it looked like they’d a fine life ahead of them, but somehow things didn’t go well. There were misunderstandings with the school board and some of the parents, and at last he lost the principalship. And he was too proud to accept the teaching position that he’d been offered instead.”

“And that’s when you wrote to ask him to come here.”

“Yes. And I’ve often wondered if things wouldn’t have been better for everyone if I hadn’t. I sometimes think it was selfish of me. Tearing Ezra and Anna and their five little ones away from the life they knew. And however many problems Ezra might have had as an educator, he was at least better prepared for that type of work than he was for managing a ranch in California. Your father is a very brilliant and well-educated man and it’s hard for him to deal with people who are…well, like the Hawkinses, for instance. I’m afraid that Ezra just doesn’t have it in him to be patient with people who are so proud of their own ignorance.”

“But I was wondering if maybe Emma was right when she said that Mr. Quigley wouldn’t have kept you out of the company if Father hadn’t been so…cussed.”

Aunt M. snorted. “Well, now. I don’t know about that. Don’t forget I had a little set-to with Alfred myself, first time he came pettifogging around here with his ‘generous’ offer for Edward’s land.”

Carly grinned. “I know. I’ve heard all about it from Woo Ying.”

They both laughed and said “Aiiii!” in perfect unison. Carly, however, didn’t laugh for long. “But you get into set-to’s with people all the time, and the next thing you know everybody’s laughing and forgetting all about it. I don’t know…”

What she didn’t know was why it wasn’t that way with her father. Anyone who’d been in a set-to with Ezra Hartwick didn’t forget about it, and they didn’t laugh about it either.

Aunt M. sighed and shook her head. She got up slowly with her hand on her back and went to the bay window. She looked out into the deepening night for several minutes before she came back to stand at the foot of Carly’s bed. “I just wonder sometimes if they’d been better off to have stayed in Maine. There’s been times, in the past, when I almost wished I hadn’t asked them to come.”

“But they didn’t just come because you needed them. They wanted to come to California. Father says he came because he thought the climate would be good for Mama,” Carly said.

“And your mother?”

“She says she came because Father needed a new start.”

“Ummm!” Aunt M. said. “And, of course, no one could have known that poor little Peter was going to die, or that your mother would be so ill and—”

“Aunt M.,” Carly interrupted, “Emma said that everyone says that Mama’s illness is all in her head. Do you think that’s true?”

Aunt M. made the harrumphing noise that meant she was really angry. “And that just takes the cake,” she snapped. “Just about breaks Tildy Hawkins’s record for stupid remarks—and that’s going some, because she’s certainly set records before in that department. Never in all my life—”

“Aunt M.,” Carly broke in. “It wasn’t Tildy who said it. It was Emma.”

“I know, Carly. But you can be sure it came from her mother. It’s not the kind of thing a child, particularly a dull-witted little thing like Emma, would think up on her own. No, it was Tildy, all right. It sounds just like her. Did I ever tell you about the time that Tildy Hawkins misunderstood something the parson said and went around telling people…”

She had told it before, so after a moment Carly stopped listening. When Aunt M.’s story was over, she asked, “Then it’s not true?”

Aunt M. didn’t answer for a moment. When she did, her voice was very slow and soft. “No, child. I’m afraid it’s not.”

It was just at that moment that Carly remembered to ask about something very important. “Tiger!” she said suddenly. “What about Tiger—may he live here too?”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” Aunt M. said. “I don’t see any reason why not.” Then she came around the bed and kissed Carly good night, pulled the blankets up around her shoulders, told her not to read too long, and went out of the room. She needn’t have bothered mentioning the reading. Carly didn’t read at all that night, and for quite a long time it seemed as if she might not be going to sleep either. For what seemed like hours and hours she lay wide awake, staring into the darkness, thinking and wondering and asking herself long, complicated questions that had no answers and no endings.

Some of the questions had to do with the things Emma had said, and some of them had to do with the fact that she would now be returning to live at Greenwood. It was while she was thinking about living again at Greenwood, asking herself why it had happened and what it would be like now that she was eleven years old and used to being on the ranch with the rest of the Hartwicks, that she suddenly remembered about Woo Ying and his mysterious celebration.

Of course—that was it. Woo Ying had known that she was coming back to live at Greenwood and he hadn’t understood that Aunt M. didn’t want it mentioned until later. Thinking about the good china and linen and the huge bouquet that he had arranged for his “very happy celebrate” made her smile, and the smile turned into a yawn that made her jaws pop. It seemed like only a few minutes later that she was waking up and it was morning and the sunlight was streaming in the bay windows of her old room at Greenwood.

E
VERYTHING HAPPENED QUICKLY
after that. Within a few days most of Carly’s clothing and personal belongings, including her books and journals and costumes, and of course Tiger, had been moved to Greenwood. Charles had even managed to get Tiger’s doghouse into the buckboard and then set up again in a lovely spot under the drooping fronds of the huge old palm tree that grew beside Aunt M.’s barn.

Tiger seemed pleased when the doghouse arrived. He watched with obvious approval as Charles got it off the wagon and, with Woo Ying’s help, moved it into place. As soon as the job was finished he went inside, sniffed around, and lay down briefly as if testing to see if it still felt right. But as it turned out, he didn’t use it nearly as much as he had on the ranch. At Greenwood, for the first time in his life, Tiger became an indoor dog—a lawful and legitimate indoor dog, without the need to be tiptoed upstairs in the dead of night.

It began on the very first night he was there. Since Charles hadn’t yet delivered the doghouse, Aunt M. told Carly to fix Tiger a bed in the tack room. The tack room, cozy and tidy and smelling pleasantly of horses and saddle leather, was one of Carly’s favorite places, but Tiger didn’t seem to feel the same way. Even though she made him a comfortable bed from an old saddle blanket, he gave her one of his most accusing stares, with his head dropped low and his eyes rolled up under twitching eyebrows. And not long afterward he began to complain. After he’d barked and whined for about an hour, Aunt M. told Carly to “go get that silly creature and bring him into the house.”

Carly was surprised. Up until then she’d just naturally supposed that the Greenwood rules about the proper place for animals would be the same as they were at the ranch house.

“Mama doesn’t like animals in the house,” she told Aunt M. “I thought you probably didn’t either.”

“Your mama’s absolutely right,” Aunt M. said, scratching Tiger under his whiskery chin. “No animals in any house of mine, ever. But of course that doesn’t include present company. It’s perfectly obvious that Tiger is only dog on the outside. Anybody with half an eye could see that this gentleman is a lot more human than many of the two-legged creatures I’ve known in my day. Isn’t that right, Mr. Tiger?”

Tiger rolled his eyes delightedly and wagged his tail so hard it seemed to be going in a circle.

Of course Woo Ying didn’t approve. “Greenwood not animal house,” he said, shaking his head and pursing his lips. “Woo Ying not keep house for animal. You want live with animal, why not bringing also Chloe and Dolly-cow. Also chickens. If Greenwood animal house, why not bringing all animals?”

At least that’s what Woo Ying said on the first day, and not just once either. As a matter of fact he said it regularly three or four times an hour and he and Aunt M. had several shouting matches about it, and Aunt M. finally yelled that if he mentioned Chloe and Dolly one more time he could just go out and live in the cowshed himself. And Woo Ying said all right he would. Right after dinner he would go out and live in the cowshed. He didn’t, though, and by the second or third day he was patting Tiger’s head when he thought no one was looking, and slipping him chicken tails and ham trimmings.

That first week at Greenwood went quickly. Carly continued to see Lila briefly on the way to school. It hadn’t been easy to talk Lila into stopping by for her. It was true, just as Lila said, that the grammar school was a very short walk from Greenwood, but Carly had other reasons for wanting the morning ride in the Hartwick road cart.

“So I won’t be so homesick,” Carly told Lila. “So I can at least see you and Venus every day and hear all the news from the ranch and everything.”