Blossom Promise Page 6

  Beside him Junior was running sideways. “What are you going to do, Pap?”

  “Help Vern,” Pap gasped.

  The cries were getting louder. Pap knew now that they were coming from the creek. At the crest of the hill, he paused, with one hand over his heart, one hand shielding his eyes from the afternoon sun.

  He saw nothing. He turned and ran for the barn. He knew that if Vern was out in the middle of the creek, he might need to be pulled in. Pap wanted a rope in his hand.

  Pap’s ropes were coiled in loops in a wooden box just inside the barn door. No one ever bothered Pap’s ropes, so they were always where Pap could get them. Even when Junior or Vern desperately needed rope, as they often did, they never took Pap’s.

  Pap rushed into the barn. Birds flew out, startled from their perches. Pap never saw them.

  He grabbed his longest rope, the ninety-foot one he used for “Around the World.” With the rope in one hand, Pap ran toward the swollen creek.

  With his other hand, he clutched his heart, trying to keep it from jumping out of his chest.

  He stood on the bank, heart thudding unevenly like an old overworked machine. He ignored the pain as he uncoiled his rope.

  “Pap—”

  “Out of my way, Junior.”

  With one deft shake of his hand, the noose twirled at Pap’s side. The rope turned easily, but the rest of Pap’s body was tight, tense. His chin jutted out stiffly in his old sagging face.

  “It’s two voices,” Junior said, listening. “Michael must be with Vern. They must have fallen into the creek together. You’ll have to rope both of them, Pap.”

  “Oh, Lord, here they are,” Pap gasped. He had been waiting for it, but still it was a shock.

  The raft swept around the bend, obviously at the mercy of the strong current. It was low in the water now. The boys were at the back, desperately kicking, trying to push the raft toward the shore.

  “Get ready, Pap,” Junior said.

  Pap didn’t answer. He said “Lord, help me” as the raft hit a ripple in the current. The front tipped up, and the back dipped even lower in the water.

  “Hold on!” Pap yelled. Under his breath he said, “They’re going to drown before they get to me.”

  “Just don’t miss,” Junior advised.

  Pap waded into the muddy water. At his side, the rope twirled evenly, effortlessly. Junior ran up the creek toward the raft, beckoning it to shore.

  “Over this way,” he shouted. “Over here.”

  Pap waded deeper into the water. He would have his best shot at roping the boys when they got to the bend in the creek. The loop of rope was twirling at shoulder height now so it wouldn’t touch the water.

  All week long, while the creek had been rising, Pap had been watching it from a rocking chair on the porch. Pap knew that the raft would probably spin around at least once before sweeping around the turn. Pap had watched logs and trash get caught there in an eddy all week.

  He got set. He edged farther out into the creek. The muddy water filled his high-topped shoes, splashed on his swollen knees. He took another step. The water rushed around his thighs.

  “I’ll get you at the fishing hole,” he called to the boys.

  He didn’t know whether they could hear him or not. Both of them were yelling their heads off.

  “The fishing hole!” Pap pointed to the inner curve of the creek where he and Vern had fished so often. “Get ready!”

  Vern nodded. He freed one hand and waved it to show he heard. He was ready.

  Pap wound the rope around his head. The loop grew bigger. The rope was whizzing now, a long powerful curl of rope.

  “Help me, Lord,” Pap said.

  At the exact moment that the raft paused in the bend of the creek, caught in the current, Pap let the rope out across the water in a long graceful arc.

  It was a perfect throw. The boys watched it come. It was the most beautiful thing Junior had ever seen in his life, an absolutely perfect throw. Both Vern and Michael put up a hand, and both of them caught the rope at the same time.

  “You got them! You did it! You got them!” Junior cried. He was dancing with pleasure. “You did it, Pap!”

  And then, in that moment of triumph, a terrible thing happened. Pap let go of his end of the rope. He clutched his chest with both hands and stumbled up the bank.

  Junior cried, “Pap!”

  Junior was too stunned to move.

  “Pap!”

  Pap didn’t answer. He grabbed a tree for support. He leaned there for a long moment. His body was suddenly stiff, bowed backward in an arch.

  And then Pap let go. His body twisted around the trunk of the tree like an old vine. Then he lay over the roots and didn’t move.

  Junior didn’t move either.

  Behind him the raft swept around the bend and out of sight, with Pap’s rope trailing uselessly behind.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Fourth Postcard

  Maggie was in room 104 of the Bar None Motel. She was alone, sitting at the desk. For thirty minutes she had been trying to write four postcards.

  She had gotten these postcards when she and her mom first checked into the motel, but she had waited to write them until after the rodeo. That way she could tell everybody how good the Wrangler Riders had been.

  “I know how you’ll start them,” her mom had said, teasing her. “Today was the best day of my life. I was wonderful!”

  “Oh, Mom,” Maggie had said, but she did like the first part. “Today was the best day of my life.”

  The four cards were lined in front of her on the desk. All were glorified views of the Bar None Motel. The blue pool looked Olympic size. The tables around it had umbrellas. There were enough flowers to open a nursery.

  Maggie had started all four of her cards, but not the way she had planned. This had been the best day of her life, but it had also been the worst. Therefore, all she had written so far were Dear Vern, Dear Pap, Dear Junior, and Dear Ralphie.

  “You won’t mind eating by yourself, will you, shug,” her mother had said. She had been in the bathroom, at the mirror, painting her eyelids green.

  “You can run right across the street to Bojangle’s or next door to the Bar-B-Q Barn. You still have some money left from that five I gave you this afternoon, don’t you?”

  “Yes, but why can’t we have supper together?”

  “I promised the girls I’d eat with them.”

  “The girls?”

  “The girls and whoever else wants to join us, I guess. Maggie, you know how rodeo people like to get together.” She poked her head out of the bathroom to give Maggie a disappointed look. One eyelid was green, the other plain. “I never thought you would want me to miss a good time.”

  “Mom, we could have a good time together. We could go to a movie.”

  Her mom stepped back into the bathroom. When she was out of sight she called, “It’s already settled. Cody Gray’s picking me up.” She stepped into Maggie’s view with both eyelids green.

  A horn honked twice outside the door. “There he is.” She hesitated, then said, “Maggie, come on out and congratulate him.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Please, shug, I want you two to get to know each other.”

  “No, Mom.”

  “You sure have gotten hard to get along with.” She gave Maggie a disappointed look, and then she opened the motel door and broke into a smile.

  Maggie crossed quickly to the window. She yanked aside the drape to watch her mother getting into the silver convertible.

  In one motion, Vicki Blossom opened the car door, slid in, and hugged Cody Gray so hard she knocked his hat off his head. Maggie couldn’t hear what Cody said because the motel air conditioner clicked on at that exact moment, but it made them both laugh.

  Her mother looked up then, still laughing, and pointed to Maggie in the window. She waved. Maggie whipped the drapes shut.

  Ever since they’d driven off, Maggie had been tryi
ng to write postcards. Once again she shifted them around on the desk. This time Ralphie’s ended up in front of her. That was good. She needed Ralphie’s special magic tonight.

  Ralphie was her best friend. Ralphie could—he had proved this again and again—do anything. His specialty, he’d once said, was the impossible. She would have given anything in the world to have Ralphie walk in the motel door.

  I wonder if I could call him, she thought. I wouldn’t say anything about my mom, I’d just—

  With a sigh she began to write.

  I wish you could have been at the rodeo. You’re good luck. I never fall when you’re watching. Well, I didn’t fall today, but I did have a little bad luck. Mom says I can stay next week too, but I may come on home on the bus.

  She hesitated, vaguely dissatisfied with what she had written. She wanted to do it over. The trouble was, she had already written the names on the other cards. Well, it would have to do.

  She read the message again. Then she thought about whether she should sign it “Love, Maggie” or “Your friend, Maggie.” Finally she figured out that if she added one more line, the postcard would be full and she wouldn’t have to commit herself.

  “See you soon,” she wrote, “Maggie Blossom.” Now, for some reason, she was even more dissatisfied. Maybe I could squeeze the word “love” in right there, she thought. She did squeeze it in, but now the card was ruined. The word “love” stood out. She had written it small, but for some reason it had turned out to be the biggest word on the whole card.

  She looked at the remaining cards, and then she did what she had felt like doing from the first, swept them all into the trashcan. She threw down her pen. She put her head in her hands.

  Maggie was more unsettled than she had ever been in her life. Maggie hated her mother.

  For a long time Maggie had never understood how anybody could dislike their parents. She had thought kids at school who claimed they did were just exaggerating. She could never hate her mother. Her mother was like a wonderful older sister.

  Maggie lifted her head. Her eyes were slits in her sunburned face.

  “She ruined everything,” she said aloud. “This could have been the best day of my entire life, and she ruined it!”

  She got up abruptly and began to pace.

  “Why did she have to ruin everything?” she asked again. “She’s disgusting. She really makes me sick.” Maggie walked around the bed.

  “And Cody Gray is disgusting too in that stupid big-time Cadillac!”

  She came to the wall and stopped. She had never noticed before how small this motel room was. And there was nothing to do. You could write postcards or go out and swim in the scummy pool with a lot of drunk cowboys. That was it.

  You could watch TV. She walked to the set and jabbed the On button.

  The wheel of fortune was spinning. “Disgusting,” Maggie said. “Greedy, disgusting people!”

  She began walking around the motel room like an animal in a zoo cage—around the bed to the bathroom, back around the bed to the desk, around the bed to the bathroom …

  She was going around the bed for the fourteenth time when the phone rang.

  CHAPTER 17

  By Snake Creek’s Rushing Waters

  “Pap! Pap! Wake up!”

  Junior was on his knees beside Pap. He was shivering. His hands were tucked under his arms.

  “Pap! Talk to me. Tell me what to do. Pap, wake up! Please!”

  Pap had not moved a muscle since he fell. Junior had known when Pap wilted around the tree in that terrible way that Pap was in trouble, so much trouble that for a long time Junior had not been able to move either.

  It had taken him five long minutes to get up the courage to go to Pap. He still had not touched him.

  Slowly he stretched out one trembling hand. He tugged Pap’s sleeve.

  “Pap?”

  There was no answer. Junior took a pinch of Pap’s shirt and shook the cloth. “Are you all right?”

  No answer.

  Junior twisted his fingers into Pap’s overall straps. He shook the straps. They moved back and forth on Pap’s solid back.

  “What can I do to help? What can I do? Listen to me, Pap. I’ll do anything you want me to do. Just tell me.”

  When Pap still didn’t answer, Junior started to cry.

  “You want me to go for help or what? I don’t know what to do.”

  He shook the overall straps harder.

  “Answer me!”

  Junior yanked the straps as hard as if he were pulling reins. Pap came away from the tree trunk then. He rolled over onto his back. His arm fell loosely across Junior’s knees. His mouth fell open. He unseeing eyes looked up at Junior’s face.

  Junior screamed. He covered his face with both hands. Blindly, he stumbled to his feet.

  Hands over his eyes, he backed away. He lifted his hands and peeked under his fingers to see where he was. The ground looked unfamiliar, farther away than it should have been.

  He felt so strange that he put his hands on his head. His head felt light, as if it were rising, as if it weren’t attached to his body anymore. Maybe that was why the ground was so far away. His head was rising like a balloon.

  “Somebody, please help me,” he mumbled. “Somebody, please help me.”

  His legs kept carrying him backward over the distant ground until he felt the chilling waters of Snake Creek on his bare ankles. He looked down in surprise.

  He wept into his trembling hands.

  “Something terrible’s happened to Pap and Vern’s gone and I’m all by myself and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do. I just don’t know what to do.”

  He turned from side to side, wagging his head in a hopeless animal movement, beating on his forehead with his fists, trying to make his brain give him an answer.

  He could hardly breathe at all now.

  “What am I going to do,” he moaned, “oh, what am I going to do?”

  He threw back his head, opened his eyes, and looked at the blinding blue sky. He was now gasping for breath. Each breath seemed his last. One more breath, and he would stumble up the hill, like Pap, and fall lifeless around the nearest tree.

  The prospect was so real and so terrifying that Junior screamed.

  He started to run. He ran up the hill, blindly, his arms flailing in the air. At the top of the hill, he stopped. He twisted from one side to the other. His eyes were wild.

  Nothing looked familiar—not the house he had lived in all his life, not the barn, the trees.

  He swirled around. Suddenly danger was everywhere, hiding, waiting to jump out. If you looked away for a second—like if you looked at your brother, then danger would strike your grandfather. If you looked away again, it might get you.

  Junior heard a new noise, a shout. It was his own name, but Junior didn’t even recognize that.

  He turned. He felt dizzy. He put his hands to his head again, holding it in place. His eyes flickered wildly over the creek, the path, the sky.

  And then, at last, Junior saw something he knew, one familiar thing. It was the most beautiful sight of Junior’s life.

  There, coming over the hill, swinging her crook—and with the sun behind her, shining like something off a Sunday school paper—was Mad Mary.

  She was hurrying toward him, holding out her arms.

  “Junior!” she cried again.

  Mary’s ragged sleeves waved a welcome, and with a strangled cry Junior ran toward them.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Snake Creek Crash

  “Tree! There’s a tree!” Michael screamed as they swept around a bend in the creek.

  Ever since that terrible moment when they had caught the rope, thinking they were safe, and then watched Pap stumble up the creek bank and collapse, Michael and Vern had been silent. They had been in a state of shock.

  Anyway, there had been no hope of anyone hearing their cries for help. The fields they passed were empty. There were no houses. It was a struggle n
ow just to keep their heads above water.

  The boards they had nailed down with such care had come loose. Most of the upper deck had been swept away. The mast had snapped off when they hit the bridge. They were now clinging to the logs. Neither of the boys thought of these logs as the Queen. The Queen was dead.

  Vern’s head snapped up when Michael yelled, “Tree!” He whipped his hair from his eyes.

  Ahead, a large oak tree lay across the creek. It was an old tree, its trunk was three feet thick. The high water had eroded the soil around its rotting roots, and that morning the oak had ended its ninety years of life by toppling across the muddy water.

  At first the sight of the tree filled Vern with dread. It was like the bridge, only they would not be able to duck under.

  Then he heard Michael yell, “Grab it!”

  Michael and Vern began kicking their feet, aiming for the trunk of the tree. Their hands were out, palms up, like beggars.

  When their fingers touched the first leaves, they grabbed so hard, so desperately, the water was whipped into foam. Twigs snapped. Leaves tore off in their hands.

  “I got one,” Vern cried finally as his fingers curled around the first solid limb he had found. He was deep in the tree now. He couldn’t even see Michael. He began to pull himself, hand over hand, along the limb toward the shore.

  There was a scary moment as he felt the logs sweep out from under him, another scary moment when his body kept floating with the current. For a moment he was on his back, looking up into the branches.

  Then, deep in the leaves he saw a branch large enough to bear his weight. He scissor-kicked hard. He reached up. His hand grasped the wood. Then, wrapping his legs around the branch, he pulled himself out of the water. The limb sagged a little beneath his weight, but he knew he was safe.

  “Michael, did you make it?” He waited with his heart in his throat for the answer.

  “I’m here.”

  “Pull yourself over where I am.”

  “I can’t see you.”

  “I’m on a limb.”

  Michael’s head came into view below. “I see you,” Vern cried. “Come on up. I’ll move over and make room.”