The Root Cellar (8 page)

Seconds later, feeling foolish, she went back up the steps—and out into the cold autumn evening of the Henrys’ back yard.

Will

R
ose was heartsick. It was like being back in prison, finding herself in the Henrys’ cold autumn back yard. Frantically she ran back into the root cellar and out again, once, twice, a dozen times. It was always the same. In a rage of disappointment she made her way through the bushes and into the house where Jimmy (or Brian) said, “Our mother’s been looking all over for you. Where did you go?”

“Shut up!” said Rose. She had never said that to anyone. She said it again: “shut up.” She gave the cat a shove with her foot and stamped upstairs.

“It’s time for dinner,” Brian (or Jimmy) called after her in hurt tones, and she realized with a start that it was the same evening it had been when she had found the root cellar and gone into Will’s and Susan’s world. She could hardly bear it. She sat down to dinner in silence
and a confusion of bitter thoughts.

Monday she started school. The school bus came at quarter to eight and stopped along the road to pick up noisy, curious children who kept turning to stare at her where she sat in the last seat. The school smelled of chalk and old running shoes. She was sure the teacher’s “We’re glad to have you with us, Rose. I hope you’ll be happy here,” was insincere. She did not want anything to do with the children in her class, and she hated the playground where everyone pushed and shoved and chased each other. Several girls came and spoke to her. She drew her head down into the high neck of her sweater like a turtle and answered “yes,” “no,” or “I don’t know” to all their questions. She was afraid of them, even Alice, the gentle albino girl with the thick glasses.

A couple of weeks went by. At school, Alice and Margery, who sat next to Rose, and Margery’s friend Gail all tried making friends, but Rose did not want their friendship, and they left her alone. At home, Aunt Nan in her casual, chattering fashion, Uncle Bob and George in their own ways, began to take her for granted. Even Sam, although he was not gracious about it, seemed to have accepted her. He once tried to share part of a chocolate bar with her on the bus. But Rose would have nothing to do with Sam. The memory of his cruel words
was too sharp. She made no effort to be especially friendly with any of them, although she did give in to the twins’ pleading to tell them a story. She told them about a princess who could not get back to her own country, and she made it so sad that they cried.

Even Uncle Bob, who was not very good at noticing people, said to Aunt Nan one evening in Rose’s hearing, “Do you suppose we insulted that child in some way?” Aunt Nan said she didn’t think so, that they would just have to be patient because Rose was probably missing her grandmother.

But it was not her grandmother; it was Will and Susan and a whole lost world.

“I spent just one day there,” she lamented, over and over. “One day and now I can’t go back!”

Every day after school, while the boys wrangled in the kitchen, she went out to the glade and down the rotted steps into the root cellar. It was always the same. The first time was a shock. Instead of the sturdy inside door that had been there the first time, there was a door as rotten and full of holes as the outside ones and it was hanging by a badly rusted hinge. Inside there were no shelves, no crockery jars. There were only cobwebs and dust and, in one corner, a dead rat. Rose jumped back in horror and fled up the steps, dropping the doors
behind her with so much noise she was sure she must have been heard from the house. After that she was quiet, even secretive, and in spite of the dead rat, she still went every day, hoping, praying for whatever magic had been at work that first day. The puzzle of it occupied all her thoughts. She searched her memory for every detail of that day, every move she had made, and could find no clue.

She walked up and down the road all the way around the end of the bay. There were tall reeds there where the water had been high in 1862. Nothing looked as it had looked on the night she had walked away from the Morrissays’. The modern road was dirt, but it was wide enough for cars to pass each other, and on either side there were just fields, no high bushes and trees.

October became November. Some days the creek had ice along its edges and the little hawthorn tree was almost bent double by the wind. Winter came in, bleak and gray, to the island. The low, rolling countryside looked bare and vulnerable. Rose had never been so unhappy in her life.

One afternoon, as she sat at the back of the school bus, she felt as if she could not stand another moment of screaming, fighting kids, and when Jim and Phil Heaton from down the road got off the bus, she got off, too. The twins
called anxiously after her, “Rose, Rose, where are you going?” The Heaton boys looked at her curiously, but she paid no attention to any of them. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jacket, kicked angrily at a stone that lay in her path, and started walking. It was very cold, but the day was bright. A few white clouds were whipping across the sky like sailboats in a race. Leaves were swirling up from the ground.

“You want to come along over here and give a hand, youngster?” Rose started. She had been so engrossed in her own thoughts that she hadn’t noticed she had stopped by a house. It had an iron fence around it, and an old man was standing by the gate with a length of stout wire in his hand.

“Here,” he said again. He was thin and stooped, with a small tuft of white hair on top of his long face. His eyes were blue—like Will’s eyes, Rose thought—and they had smile wrinkles at the corners. His face was kind and his manner easy. Rose went over to him.

“You just hold up the gate so as I can tie it up with this here wire,” he said. She held while the old man wound the length of wire around the gate and post so that the gate hung evenly and level with the fence. Only then did she look at her surroundings. The big old house, covered with gray stucco, looked somehow familiar, its yard full of trees and surrounded by the iron fence.

“You like my house?” The old man smiled. “How about coming in and having a cup of tea with me?”

Rose went with him. Inside, the big, comfortable kitchen was pleasant and warm. The late afternoon sunlight streamed in through a long window at the back and settled on an old couch along one wall. The floor was covered with worn linoleum, and the walls were hung with calendars and yellowed newspaper clippings. A kettle was steaming on a big, black wood stove.

“Sit you down,” said the old man, “sit you down. My name’s Tom Bother, but you call me Old Tom. Everyone does. That’s to tell me from Young Tom, though he moved over to Soup Harbour twenty years ago. Nobody here but me any more. You must be the young lady who’s come to live up to Henrys’ place. I ain’t been up there for two, three weeks but I knowed you was coming. I do a bit of work for Mr. Henry now and then.”

“How do you do? I’m Rose Larkin.”

“That’s a nice name,” said Old Tom. As he talked he was making tea and putting out buttered corn meal muffins.

“Have one,” he offered. “I won prizes with my muffins, though it grates on some of the women round here to know it.”

Rose perched on the edge of the couch and listened to Old Tom. He said he was eighty-one
years old and had always lived in the same house. “In fact,” he said, “Bothers has lived here since 1802 when we built the first cabin in the woods. We come up from the States after we was kicked out, when we wouldn’t fight the king in the American Revolution in 1776. We come up along with the Collivers, the Heatons, ’n Morrissays, ’n Yardleys, ’n Andersons. Collivers built the mill and so that’s how Collivers’ Corners got named after ’em. Yardleys had the smithy, and Andersons, Morrissays, and Heatons and us was just farmers, clearing the woods and trying to make do and we been here ever since and never budged—hardly a one of us. My grandfather used to tell me about it. He got it from his grandfather who was a little feller when they all come.”

Rose heard him talking on but she wasn’t really listening. Morrissays. Old Tom knew Morrissays. And he knew Heatons and Yardleys. Will had talked about Heatons and Yardleys.

“Do you know Heatons and Yardleys and … and Morrissays?” she asked eagerly.

Old Tom laughed. “Well I
guess
so, they’re my neighbors,” he said. “Well, most of ’em is. There ain’t Morrissays around nowadays. The last one died a few years back. The old lady lived—Morrissays always lived—in that house you live in.”

Rose almost said, “I know,” but she didn’t. She didn’t want him to think she was crazy. It made her feel strange hearing him say that Mrs. Morrissay had died. Her Mrs. Morrissay was so very much alive. She ate her corn muffin in silence, wanting to ask more, not sure how to phrase her questions so that they made sense.

“Well,” she said, brushing the crumbs from her lap neatly into her hand, “I have to go now.”

“Thank you for your help, young lady,” said Old Tom. He put his hand briefly on her head. “Come visit with me again. I take kindly to visitors.”

She promised she would. Outside she turned to close the gate carefully after her, and her mouth fell open in surprise—because she recognized the house she had sat across the road from all night after she had left Will and Susan. “Bothers’ house,” Susan had said. Of course. But it was different. It wasn’t just the new gray stucco. The shadows were different. The shadows during that long frightening night had seemed as permanent as the house. It came as a surprise to see their long slanting shapes in the late afternoon sun.

She had a sudden electrifying idea. She began to run. She no longer noticed the cold. She was hot with excitement. She ran until she reached the root cellar. Breathlessly she flopped down on the crackling leaves and studied the closed doors.
The shadow of the hawthorn tree fell across them parallel to the opening between them.

“Where was it the day I went to Will and Susan’s?” whispered Rose. “Where was it?” She closed her eyes, trying to remember. In her mind she saw the doors revealed by her feet scuffing the leaves away, the trees and bushes making patterns and shadows over them. “Yes,” she murmured, “yes, it was! It was in the middle. Exactly in the middle.” She opened her eyes. The hawthorn’s shadow was to the left of the opening, not more than an inch. She waited, her fists clenched anxiously. Had it just been or was it coming? She did not move; her eyes were riveted to the opening.

Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the shadow moved toward the crack. Rose held her breath, her body tense as a runner’s waiting for the starting flag. Then, when the shadow fell just where the hook-and-eye latches met, she pulled open the doors, ran down into the root cellar, and came up beside the little garden in the Morrissays’ backyard.

She sat down beside the creek, letting out long breaths of relief. The chickens were pecking in the garden; the sheep and Pearly the cow were grazing beyond the creek. Only the sound of Pearly’s bell tinkling as she moved and the chirping of robins in the trees broke the stillness of the warm afternoon. She hurried down past
the creek to the bay, then back up to the orchard looking for Will or Susan. She realized as she approached that the apple trees were not in bloom as they had been last time. They weren’t even in leaf.

“Time must be strange here, or at least not the same as ours,” she decided.

As she walked through the budding trees in the orchard, she felt again the magic of that other day. A squirrel scurried out onto a branch at the sound of her approach, and she felt the peacefulness of it all settle over her once again. She heard voices coming toward her. One of them was a deep male voice. In a sudden panic, lest she be discovered by strangers, she hid behind the nearest tree. Within seconds the voices were almost beside her. Then whoever it was stopped.

“And don’t you dare breathe a single word of what I told you to Ma or I’ll cast a spell on you, Susan Anderson. There’s ways and ways of casting spells and you know it because it was your own gran who told us, and some of ’em you can do from far away and I’ll do ’em for certain sure if you tell.”

Rose peered out from behind her tree. It was Susan and Will, a taller, older Will with a deep cracking voice, like George’s. He was over six feet tall now and his straw-white hair had darkened to a deep gold color. Susan was
different, too. She was taller than Rose and looked older. Rose was horrified. How old were they? How much time had gone by?

“She ain’t to know,” said Will fiercely.

“But Will,” Susan clasped and unclasped her hands nervously in front of her. “If you run away it’ll kill your ma. It truly will. She says there’s a curse on your family.”

“I know what Ma says. Don’t she say it every morning of my life? I can’t hardly stand to be around. It’s like living with the dead, living here. Why don’t she go home to Oswego? My aunts are jolly folks and so are my cousins. She only come here to marry Pa. Her folks don’t belong here and I don’t belong here neither. I’m going to take myself back there, and Steve and me we’re going to join up. They been asking for recruits again and we’re—”

“Will Morrissay! You’re never going to do that!” gasped Susan. Will clapped his hands over Susan’s mouth. “Shut up! I never meant to tell that! Now you got to promise silence. Silence! Because I don’t want no one hereabouts to know where I gone. And if you don’t promise I’m going to break both your arms and throw you in the bay. Do you hear?”