Spiderweb for Two - A Melendy Maze (6 page)

Opal Owl struck Oliver as immensely funny; so funny, in fact, that he found it necessary to lie down on the kitchen linoleum and thrash with his heels in an excess of mirth. “Opal Ow-owl!” he yelled. “Opal Owl! Oh, gosh, oh, gee, what about Diamond Turkey, for instance? What about Emerald Eagle?”

“You're being terribly silly,” said Randy with quiet dignity. “Sometimes I forget how young you still are. Now look, you're all wet, you've rolled right into a puddle of Isaac's bath water, and you're going to smell terribly of flea soap.”

Oliver arose, somewhat sobered, and Randy got the mop and removed the puddle. But there was nothing she could do about the living-room carpet which bore large damp traces of Isaac's attempts to dry himself. Isaac himself was discovered, somewhat disheveled, under the desk in Father's study. After Randy had hauled him out, she took him to the back porch to brush and comb him. All the time her mind was busy with thoughts of the clue: locations, and the names of birds and jewels. Evidently Oliver was similarly occupied, for now and then he called down to her from the Office window.

“There's a family named Gull in Carthage,” he shouted. “Gloria Gull is in my class. Maybe she had an ancestor with a jewel name.”

“Ask her tomorrow,” shouted Randy in reply. “Or no, don't. Suppose she didn't? She'd think you were crazy. We'd better just look in the graveyard.”

Silence. Then Oliver's voice.

“Should we go look now?”

“Oh, it'll be dark too soon, and I have stacks of homework. We'll look tomorrow.”

Another silence; then another shout.

“Herron! Mark's our brother, now, and called Melendy; but his name
was
Herron before we adopted him and that's a bird's name, too.”

“Spelled differently, but I don't suppose it matters,” yelled Randy. “Only his family didn't come from around here.”

Cuffy arrived at that moment. She had walked home from the village where she had gone to have a cup of tea with Mrs. Ed Wheelwright and obtain a recipe for jelly doughnuts.

“My lands, what's all this hollering about?” was her first remark. “I could hear you clear up on the highway, bellowing like cattle on a prairie. Lost cattle bellowing.”

“Could you hear what we were saying?” asked Randy.

“No, just the tone of voice.”

“That's good, though it wasn't anything wrong. We just shouted because Oliver was busy in the Office and I was busy down here and we had things to tell each other. Look, isn't Isaac beautiful?”

“Yes, he is,” said Cuffy warmly. “You've done a real good job.” She took off her shoes and sighed. “Oh, my feet. That's a long walk when you're stout like I am. I'll be glad to get to heaven and be given wings.”

“Don't you talk that way!” scolded Randy. “You have to live just as long as we do, Cuffy, and help take care of all our children. You rest there, now, and I'll go up and get your slippers.”

Cuffy sat where she was, smiling contentedly. They're turning out real nice, she thought; they're lovely children, all of 'em. I never really worried.

Nevertheless she was rather puzzled when Oliver and Randy for the next two days spent the hours after school in the Carthage cemetery, arriving home a little late for supper; and she was something more than puzzled on Saturday when they requested a picnic lunch and announced that they were going to Braxton “to spend the day in the graveyard.”

“I can't understand why you're all of a sudden so taken up with tombstones,” grumbled Cuffy. “I declare I wonder if it's healthy.”

“It's research we're doing, Cuff,” said Randy. “The inscriptions on old tombstones are very interesting; some of the Carthage ones go back to seventeen thirty. When people have been dead as long as they have, you don't think of them as real at all; more like people in a book, invented people. Some of them had pretty names.”

“Some of them had funny ones,” said Oliver. “Gideon Wallop, for instance. Gottlieb Fusswinkel.”

“Oh, you're making them up,” scoffed Cuffy.

“No, honest I'm not! I can show them to you, both of them, in Carthage cemetery. Simeon Snail, too.”

“But there are pretty ones as well,” insisted Randy. “Araminta Carew, for instance: she died when she was seventeen, in eighteen hundred and six. And Sophronisba Stellway.
She
lived to be a hundred.”

“Some of the poems on them, though, gee!” said Oliver. “‘Smile not, oh, passer-by, beware! The next opening sepulchre may yawn for thee,'” he quoted, shivering comfortably.

The truth was that the young Melendys were acquiring a taste for old cemeteries. There was something very peaceful, they thought, about the quiet places; the tilted stones patched with lichens, standing in a bee-humming tangle of myrtle and wild asters. It was pleasant to walk between the stones, tracing the half-eroded names, the epitaphs, some beautiful, some sadly funny, some grotesque. Pleasant as it was, however, they had not, so far, found the due they sought. Plenty of jewel names, yes: Pearls and Rubys and Opals galore. Plenty of bird names, too; Finch and Wren and Crane and Quayle and even Raven. But not one combination of jewel and bird together.

The Braxton cemetery also failed to solve the riddle, and it was not nearly such a pleasant place to wander, being far too grand and modern and well-groomed. The monuments were glossy and severe, the grass more like a stiff plush rug than grass, and the flowers were planted in such uncompromising designs that they did not seem live flowers at all, but imitations made of crepe paper and buckram. The children found themselves whispering, and tiptoeing along the perfect paths.

“It's like a field full of big stone furniture,” said Oliver. “It hasn't anything to do with people.”

“And the trees, too,” Randy said. “All they've got is weeping willows and those purple beech trees, such mournful, serious trees.
I
wouldn't like it here.”

It was a large place, and they were conscientious in their search; in the end they came away depressed and tired.

“I'm almost ready to give up,” said Randy. “I don't ever want to see another grave.”

“Me, either,” sighed Oliver. “I don't think I ever want to be buried even.”

“My mind's all seething with names and dates. When I close my eyes tonight I know I'll see nothing but letters carved on tombstones. Honestly, it's—it's gloomy.”

They rode along in silence, slowly. The wind was against them all the way.

“Randy!” cried Oliver suddenly. “I bet I know where it is! Why didn't we think of it sooner! They didn't mean for it to be so hard—”

“But where? Tell me!” demanded Randy.

“Why, you know, that little old, old graveyard up near the hill on the place where Mark used to live? The one where there used to be a church that got struck by lightning?”

“That's where Mona and I got lilies of the valley last spring; they grow wild there. I bet that's it!” cried Randy. “Oliver, you're a genius. Only we'll have to wait till tomorrow. It's late, and anyway I couldn't face another today.”

“Well, the clue
said
step toward the sunrise, or something like that, remember. We'll get up early and go on our bikes.”

It seemed a fine idea at the time; less splendid in the somber dark of five o'clock next morning. Randy had slept with the kitchen alarm clock under her pillow so that it would be muffled when it rang, and stifled quickly. Its hearty tick came pounding right through the pillow into her ear, but it did not keep her awake as long as she had supposed that it would; not more than seven minutes at the most. Its morning peal was something else, however, and brought her out of sleep with a shout of panic; she quickly shut it off and went to rouse Oliver as stealthily as overwhelming drowsiness permitted. It took some time for Oliver to begin cooperating. All he would say was the word “no,” spoken firmly, and he kept rolling himself up in his blankets again as often as she unrolled him.

“Then I'm going alone,” said Randy at last, in desperation.

That brought him out of bed; grumbling and stumbling and reluctant, but on his way nonetheless, and soon they were out of doors in the chill dim morning, riding bicycles still wet with hoarfrost, down the shadowed road.

“Morning's never any good till after breakfast,” said Oliver.

“My teeth are chattering; are yours?” said Randy. “Why did they decide on sunrise, do you suppose? Why not sunset?”

Oliver did not answer. They rode without speaking. Every farmhouse they passed was silent, but from the barns there issued a tinkle and a clank, and the roosters everywhere were crowing.

“I don't see how they always know what time it is,” said Oliver. “I don't see why they
care
so much.”

A band of palest light lay in the east; the morning star, fresh as a raindrop, sparkled in the sky, and the first breeze of the day moved in the trees and shook the papery tatters of the corn shocks. The world was brushed with a spiderweb of frost.

Tipped on a hillside, closed in its low crumbled wall, lay the forgotten churchyard. It was half overgrown; some of the headstones had fallen flat and been lashed to the earth with brambles and bindweed; others slanted sideways or leaned together, their tops just clear of the gone-to-seed goldenrod tassels and pods of Queen Anne's lace curled up like nests for hummingbirds. An apple tree had taken root there, long ago. It leaned above the wall and dropped its leaves and apples on the earth.

In the growing light Oliver and Randy were at work; parting the vines and brambles, reading the forgotten, ancient names.

“Henrietta Ponsonby, Nathaniel Ponsonby. Lucretia Vane, Jared Vane, Octavius Elisha Vane. Darius Todworthy … Poor Darius, he's all alone, there's not another Todworthy in sight.”

The east was brightening, was topaz-colored, and a little school of clouds swam in the sky above, bright as goldfishes.

“The time is going, we must hurry,” whispered Randy. The hour, the place, both caused her to whisper, and when Oliver came upon the stone that stood alone beneath the apple tree, it was in a whisper that he called his sister.

“Here it is. I've found it.”

Randy came and stood beside him.

“‘Garnet Swann,'” she read aloud. “‘Beloved wife of Jared Swann.' Yes, Oliver, you've found the place at last, and look, she's been asleep three quarters of a century.”

Now the sun edged upward, red as a rose, benevolent, allowing mortal eyes to view it. Later it would blind them. The valley was bathed in a pink light, the hills were clear and dark. Frost turned to dew and sparkled on the grass.

“We must walk toward it. Now,” said Randy.

With ritual steps they marched slowly through the wet tall weeds and briars, looking up and down. They came to the wall; they found nothing.

“If we just knew what to look for,” said Oliver in a worried voice. “Do you think it means for us to go over the wall? We don't know how
far
east.”

“I don't think so, let's go back and start again,” said Randy, so they went back to the stone marked Garnet Swann and walked again toward the sunrise. This time, when they came to the wall, they examined it carefully. It was very old, and grey-green lichens were stuck flat against the stones. One lichen, larger than the rest and growing just inside the wall, under a jutting stone, looked rather strange. No wonder, either, since closer inspection showed that it was held in place, most unnaturally, by strips of Scotch tape.

“Aha!” said Randy quietly, detaching it.

“What will they think of next!” exclaimed Oliver, sounding so exactly like Cuffy that Randy burst out laughing.

Underneath it, of course, was the folded clue; somewhat lichen-stained and dented by irregularities in the stone against which it had been pressed—how long?—but still quite legible.

“It's in poetry again, of course,” said Randy. “This is what it says:

“Well done! Now leave the sleeping acre to its peace.

    
The sun is risen; let it light the road.

    
Named for an emperor, in my abode,

The fourth imprisoned clue awaits release:

    
Beneath, the hours tell their names and go.

    
Above, a voice was silenced long ago.”

“They get tougher,” said Oliver at last. “I don't know
what
they're talking about now.”

“We'll work it out though,” said Randy, success having gone to her head. “I'm not going to be a dancer when I grow up, or an artist either. I'm going to be a counter-espionage agent. You can be one, too; Melendy and Melendy, Counterspies. We'll have it on the door like that. We'll have to wear disguises all the time: beards for you and all kinds of queer-shaped mustaches, and I will dye my hair a different color every week and learn to speak with an accent.”

Oliver did not think highly of this flight of fancy. He ignored it.

“Brother, I'm hungry,” he said. “Hunting clues makes you awful hungry.”

They pushed through the wet tangle, soaked to the knees, to where their bicycles lay beside the road. The melted hoarfrost flashed from every blade and stem; the old tree dropped an apple and a handful of leaves.

“I wouldn't mind being buried here,” said Randy. “Right out in the country with cows and birds around and lots of space.”

“Better than that big stone furniture store in Braxton,” Oliver agreed. “It's kind of nice here, kind of cozy.”

Their bikes flew like the wind, down the hills, around the curves. From every house came hot, sharp smells of bacon and coffee and toast. Randy and Oliver, hungry as wolves and happy as larks, sang at the tops of their lungs all the way home.

Their house smelled of breakfast, too. It was a welcome sight, always: square, broad, comfortable, with its mansard roof and little cupola set like a cap on the very top. They loved that house, all of them. It still lay in the early-morning shadow of the hill behind it. The spruce trees were grave ornaments, and the iron deer on the front lawn seemed animals transfixed; all was silent and motionless. But in the next second the kitchen door burst open and the dogs, Isaac and John Doe, shot out, wild with the delight of morning; barking and whirling and skidding and stopping short to sniff. When they saw Oliver and Randy they came careening toward them with their ears flying and their eyes rolling. “Why didn't you take us with you?” they demanded, in barks, and Cuffy in the doorway said, “My lands! Where
was
you? I was just going up to wake you!”