The Summer of the Swans Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen - “Charlie! Charlie!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  A moment of panic ...

  Sara put down the shoes and went back into the hall.

  “Charlie!” She looked into his room again. “Oh, Charlie!” She went out onto the front porch and looked at Charlie’s tent. It had blown down during the night and she could see that he wasn’t there.

  Slowly she walked back through the hall, looking into every room, and then into the kitchen.

  “I can’t find him, Aunt Willie.”

  “What do you mean, you can’t find him?” Aunt Willie, prepared to chide the two children for being late to breakfast, now set the pan of oatmeal down heavily on the table.

  “He’s not in his room, he’s not in the yard, he’s not anywhere.”

  “If this is some kind of a joke—” Aunt Willie began. She brushed past Sara and went into the living room. “Charlie! Where are you, Charlie?” Her voice had begun to rise with the sudden alarm she often felt in connection with Charlie. “Where could he have gone?” Aunt Willie walked into the hall and stood looking in Charlie’s room. She stared at the empty bed. She did not move for a moment as she tried to think of some logical explanation for his absence. “If anything’s happened to that boy ...”

  PUFFIN MODERN CLASSICS

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group,

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  First published in the United States of America by the Viking Press, 1970

  Published by Puffin Books, 1981 Reissued 1996

  This Puffin Modern Classics edition published by Puffin Books,

  a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2004

  Copyright © Betsy Byars, 1970

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE PREVIOUS PUFFIN EDITION AS FOLLOWS: Byars, Betsy Cromer. The summer of the swans.

  Summary: A teenage girl gains new insight into herself and her family when her mentally

  handicapped brother gets lost.

  [1. Mentally handicapped—Fiction. 2. Brothers and sisters—Fiction.]

  I. Coconis, Constantinos. II. Title.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-00689-4

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  Chapter One

  Sara Godfrey was lying on the bed tying a kerchief on the dog, Boysie. “Hold your chin up, Boysie, will you?” she said as she braced herself on one elbow. The dog was old, slept all the time, and he was lying on his side with his eyes closed while she lifted his head and tied the scarf.

  Her sister Wanda was sitting at the dressing table combing her hair. Wanda said, “Why don’t you leave Boysie alone?”

  “There’s nothing else to do,” Sara answered without looking up. “You want to see a show?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “It’s called ‘The Many Faces of Boysie.’ ”

  “Now I know I don’t want to see it.”

  Sara held up the dog with the kerchief neatly tied beneath his chin and said, “The first face of Boysie, proudly presented for your entertainment and amusement, is the Russian Peasant Woman. Taaaaaa-daaaaaa! ”

  “Leave the dog alone.”

  “He likes to be in shows, don’t you, Boysie?” She untied the scarf, refolded it and set it carefully on top of the dog’s head. “And now for the second face of Boysie, we travel halfway around the world to the mysterious East, where we see Boysie the Inscrutable Hindu. Taaaaaaa-daaaaaa!”

  With a sigh Wanda turned and looked at the dog. “That’s pathetic. In people’s age that dog is eighty-four years old.” She shook a can of hair spray and sprayed her hair. “And besides, that’s my good scarf.”

  “Oh, all right.” Sara fell back heavily against the pillow. “I can’t do anything around here.”

  “Well, if it’s going to make you that miserable, I’ll watch the show.”

  “I don’t want to do it any more. It’s no fun now. This place smells like a perfume factory.” She put the scarf over her face and stared up through the thin blue material. Beside her, Boysie lay back down and curled himself into a ball. They lay without moving for a moment and then Sara sat up on the bed and looked down at her long, lanky legs. She said, “I have the biggest feet in my school.”

  “Honestly, Sara, I hope you are not going to start listing all the millions of things wrong with you because I just don’t want to hear it again.”

  “Well, it’s the truth about my feet. One time in Phys Ed the boys started throwing the girls’ sneakers around and Bull Durham got my sneakers and put them on and they fit perfectly! How do you think it feels to wear the same size shoe as Bull Durham?”

  “People don’t notice things like that.”

  “Huh!”

  “No, they don’t. I have perfectly terrible hands—look at my fingers—only I don’t go around all the time saying, ‘Everybody, look at my stubby fingers, I have stubby fingers, everybody,’ to make people notice. You should just ignore things that are wrong with you. The truth is everyone else is so worried about what’s wrong with them that—”

  “It is very difficult to ignore the fact that you have huge feet when Bull Durham is dancing all over the gym in your shoes. They were not stretched the tiniest little bit when he took them off either.”

  “You wear the same size shoe as Jackie Kennedy Onassis if that makes you feel any better.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because one time when she was going into an Indian temple she had to leave her shoes outside and some reporter looked in them to see what size they were.” She leaned close to the mirror and looked at her teeth.

  “Her feet look littler.”

  “That’s because she doesn’t wear orange sneakers.”

  “I like my orange sneakers.” Sara sat on the edge of the bed, slipped her feet into the shoes, and held them up. “What’s wrong with them?”

  “Nothing, except that when you want to hide something, you don’t go painting it orange. I’ve got to go. Frank’s coming.”

  She went out the door and Sara could hear her crossing into the kitchen. Sara lay back on the bed, her head next to Boysie. She looked at the sleeping dog, then covered her face with her hands and began to cry noisily.

  “Oh, Boysie, Boysie, I’m crying,” she wailed. Years ago, when Boysie was a young dog, he could not bear to hear anyone cry. Sara had only to pretend she was crying and Boysie would come running. He would whine and dig at her with his paws and lick her hands until she stopped. Now he lay with his eyes closed.

  “Boysie, I’m crying,” she said again. “I’m really crying
this time. Boysie doesn’t love me.”

  The dog shifted uneasily without opening his eyes.

  “Boysie, Boysie, I’m crying, I’m so sad, Boysie,” she wailed, then stopped and sat up abruptly. “You don’t care about anybody, do you, Boysie? A person could cry herself to death these days and you wouldn’t care.”

  She got up and left the room. In the hall she heard the tapping noise of Boysie’s feet behind her and she said without looking at him, “I don’t want you now, Boysie. Go on back in the bedroom. Go on.” She went a few steps farther and, when he continued to follow her, turned and looked at him. “In case you are confused, Boysie, a dog is supposed to comfort people and run up and nuzzle them and make them feel better. All you want to do is lie on soft things and hide bones in the house because you are too lazy to go outside. Just go on back in the bedroom.”

  She started into the kitchen, still followed by Boysie, who could not bear to be left alone, then heard her aunt and Wanda arguing, changed her mind, and went out onto the porch.

  Behind her, Boysie scratched at the door and she let him out. “Now quit following me.”

  Her brother Charlie was sitting on the top step and Sara sat down beside him. She held out her feet, looked at them, and said, “I like my orange sneakers, don’t you, Charlie?”

  He did not answer. He had been eating a lollipop and the stick had come off and now he was trying to put it back into the red candy. He had been trying for so long that the stick was bent.

  “Here,” she said, “I’ll do it for you.” She put the stick in and handed it to him. “Now be careful with it.”

  She sat without speaking for a moment, then she looked down at her feet and said, “I hate these orange sneakers. I just hate them.” She leaned back against the porch railing so she wouldn’t have to see them and said, “Charlie, I’ll tell you something. This has been the worst summer of my life.”

  She did not know exactly why this was true. She was doing the same things she had done last summer—walk to the Dairy Queen with her friend Mary, baby-sit for Mrs. Hodges, watch television—and yet everything was different. It was as if her life was a huge kaleidoscope, and the kaleidoscope had been turned and now everything was changed. The same stones, shaken, no longer made the same design.

  But it was not only one different design, one change; it was a hundred. She could never be really sure of anything this summer. One moment she was happy, and the next, for no reason, she was miserable. An hour ago she had loved her sneakers; now she detested them.

  “Charlie, I’ll tell you what this awful summer’s been like. You remember when that finky Jim Wilson got you on the seesaw, remember that? And he kept bouncing you up and down and then he’d keep you up in the air for a real long time and then he’d drop you down real sudden, and you couldn’t get off and you thought you never would?

  Up and down, up and down, for the rest of your life? Well, that’s what this summer’s been like for me.”

  He held out the candy and the stick to her.

  “Not again!” She took it from him. “This piece of candy is so gross that I don’t even want to touch it, if you want to know the truth.” She put the stick back in and handed it to him. “Now if it comes off again—and I mean this, Charlie Godfrey—I’m throwing the candy away.”

  Chapter Two

  Charlie looked at the empty sucker stick, reached into his mouth, took out the candy, and held them together in his hand. Sara had said she would throw the candy away if this happened again and so he closed his fist tightly and looked away from her.

  Slowly he began to shuffle his feet back and forth on the step. He had done this so many times over the years that two grooves had been worn into the boards. It was a nervous habit that showed he was concerned about something, and Sara recognized it at once.

  “All right, Charlie,” she said wearily. “Where’s your sucker?”

  He began to shake his head slowly from side to side. His eyes were squeezed shut.

  “I’m not going to take it away from you. I’m going to fix it one more time.”

  He was unwilling to trust her and continued to shake his head. The movement was steady and mechanical, as if it would continue forever, and she watched him for a moment.

  Then, with a sigh, she lifted his hand and attempted to pry his fingers loose. “Honestly, Charlie, you’re holding onto this grubby piece of candy like it was a crown jewel or something. Now, let go.” He opened his eyes and watched while she took the candy from him and put the stick in. The stick was now bent almost double, and she held it out to him carefully.

  “There.”

  He took the sucker and held it without putting it into his mouth, still troubled by the unsteadiness of the bent stick. Sara looked down at her hands and began to pull at a broken fingernail. There was something similar about them in that moment, the same oval face, round brown eyes, brown hair hanging over the forehead, freckles on the nose. Then Charlie glanced up and the illusion was broken.

  Still holding his sucker, he looked across the yard and saw the tent he had made over the clothesline that morning. He had taken an old white blanket out into the yard, hung it over the low clothesline, and then got under it. He had sat there with the blanket blowing against him until Sara came out and said, “Charlie, you have to fasten the ends down, like this. It isn’t a tent if it’s just hanging in the wind.”

  He had thought there was something wrong. He waited beneath the blanket until she came back with some clothespins and hammered them into the hard earth, fastening the edges of the blanket to the ground. “Now, that’s a tent.”

  The tent had pleased him. The warmth of the sun coming through the thin cotton blanket, the shadows of the trees moving overhead had made him drowsy and comfortable and now he wanted to be back in the tent.

  Sara had started talking about the summer again, but he did not listen. He could tell from the tone of her voice that she was not really talking to him at all. He got up slowly and began to walk across the yard toward the tent.

  Sara watched him as he walked, a small figure for his ten years, wearing faded blue jeans and a striped knit shirt that was stretched out of shape. He was holding the sucker in front of him as if it were a candle that might go out at any moment.

  Sara said, “Don’t drop that candy in the grass now or it’s really going to be lost.”

  She watched while he bent, crawled into the tent, and sat down. The sun was behind the tent now and she could see his silhouette. Carefully he put the sucker back into his mouth.

  Then Sara lay back on the hard boards of the porch and looked up at the ceiling.

  Chapter Three

  In the house Wanda and Aunt Willie were still arguing. Sara could hear every word even out on the porch. Aunt Willie, who had been taking care of them since the death of their mother six years ago, was saying loudly, “No, not on a motorcycle. No motorcycle!”

  Sara grimaced. It was not only the loudness of Aunt Willie’s voice that she disliked. It was everything—the way she bossed them, the way she never really listened, the way she never cared what she said. She had once announced loud enough for everyone in Carter’s Drugstore to hear that Sara needed a good dose of magnesia.

  “It isn’t a motorcycle, it’s a motor scooter.” Wanda was speaking patiently, as if to a small child. “They’re practically like bicycles.”

  “No.”

  “All I want to do is to ride one half mile on this perfectly safe motor scooter—”

  “No. It’s absolutely and positively no. No!”

  “Frank is very careful. He has never had even the tiniest accident.”

  No answer.

  “Aunt Willie, it is perfectly safe. He takes his mother to the grocery store on it. Anyway, I am old enough to go without permission and I wish you’d realize it. I am nineteen years old.”

  No answer. Sara knew that Aunt Willie would be standing by the sink shaking her head emphatically from side to side.

  “Aunt Willie, he�
�s going to be here any minute. He’s coming all the way over here just to drive me to the lake to see the swans.”

  “You don’t care that for seeing those swans.”

  “I do too. I love birds.”

  “All right then, those swans have been on the lake three days, and not once have you gone over to see them. Now all of a sudden you have to go, can’t wait one minute to get on this devil motorcycle and see those swans.”

  “For your information, I have been dying to see them, only this is my first chance.” She went out of the kitchen and pulled the swinging door shut behind her. “And I’m going,” she said over her shoulder.

  Wanda came out of the house, slammed the screen door, stepped over Boysie, and sat by Sara on the top step. “She never wants anyone to have any fun.”

  “I know.”

  “She makes me so mad. All I want to do is just ride down to see the swans on Frank’s motor scooter.” She looked at Sara, then broke off and said, “Where did Charlie go?”

  “He’s over there in his tent.”

  “I see him now. I wish Frank would hurry up and get here before Aunt Willie comes out.” She stood, looked down the street, and sat back on the steps. “Did I tell you what that boy in my psychology class last year said about Charlie?”

  Sara straightened. “What boy?”

  “This boy Arnold Hampton, in my psychology class. We were discussing children who—”

  “You mean you talk about Charlie to perfect strangers? To your class? I think that’s awful.” She put her feet into the two grooves worn in the steps by Charlie. “What do you say? ‘Let me tell you all about my retarded brother—it’s so interesting’?” It was the first time in her life that she had used the term “retarded” in connection with her brother, and she looked quickly away from the figure in the white tent. Her face felt suddenly hot and she snapped a leaf from the rhododendron bush by the steps and held it against her forehead.